The Star of Bethlehem, a UFO, fabrication, or astronomical computation?
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/star-of-bethlehem-stopping-comet
The fixed date of December 25th when the Christians mark the birth on Earth of the son of God stands as a bit of an anomaly in these deep winter weeks in the northern hemisphere, although taken to its logical conclusion, the outcome is very clear.
Helios at Winter Solstice has an overarching logic. Incrementally the Light from the Sun moves down the horizon, rising and setting lower and lower in east and west until that deep place of pause around the 21st, given as 3:03pm GMT this year in clock accuracy, and laid out by the priests of olde as in the evidence at Newgrange where the newborn Light of the World enters the small portal above the entrance at the turn again from Tropic of Capricorn on its way up to the Tropic of Cancer. We know now that the tilt of Earth on its axis produces this effect but Light is light, and life within the atmosphere depends on it, and which is why in times past the reality of food supplies, frozen winters, circadian rhythms, and the survival of a small society depended on knowing ‘the time of the year.’
In pre written calendar times the knowledge of passing of time during the dark months would be very useful, and it was known, as Newgrange demonstrates, and the work of Prof. Alex Thom has measured. Prof. Thom, 1894-1985 grew up in 55′-56’N and although his extensive work was roundly put aside by the growing scientific disciplines and specialisms and sub divisions, his work has been proved, and back in those days, life on Earth was in 3d. Not on a digital screen, but from one place and one place only on Earth, in a landscape, with the vast arc of the starry sky overhead. With his son, Dr. Archie Thom, and Dr Euan MacKie, another independent worker therefore able to observe natural facts, their body of written work of astroarchaeology stands as a comprehensive and systematic portrayal of the comprehensive and systematic activity of Neolithic societies in ancient Briton and western Atlantic seaboard. What is astroarchaeology? In a nutshell it could be said to be the societal functioning in alignment with Earth, Helios, Selene, and the brightest stars in the sky at that time.
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2009.00368.x https://theorkneynews.scot/2024/12/29/book-review-walking-in-all-of-the-squares-alexander-thom-engineer-and-archaeoastronomer/
https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781784918330
Prof. Thom, Dr Euan MacKie, 1936-2020 and down to the present day of Duncan Lunan continuing the work https://www.duncanlunan.com/thestonesandthestars.asp
With the geographer’s eye and knowledge again, Robin Heath – Bluestone Magic, Temple in the Hills (Bluestone Press) in 2016, right into the big scientific data era, shows how humans marked out their calendar, as did all human societies over Earth as the available Light of the Sun moved from the tilt of the Earth, and some still do. Robin Heath –https://www.skyscript.co.uk/moonheath.html – speaks of what all native societies practice, because there is nothing else. T
he Hebrew calendar in the ancient Middle East marked festival days from lunar and solar correlations, making it not an exact ‘modern calendar’ day, just as the first Full Moon of the new Lunar cycle in Anglo-Saxon pagan was known as the Wolf Moon, from the sound of wolves calling in the cold, then icy, nights. And beyond the Anglo-Saxons, Germanic Yule and Scandinavian Jol, fortunately for them less interrupted societal practices and still active participation with Odin and Freya and the pantheon of gods and godesses and alignment with the true facts of Sol and Earth, enter the Jul Blot in accordance with the dying and rebirth of the Light. Drinking and feasting and sacrificing, it is in the rising again of the Light of the World.
Yule now put, especially among us pagan folk, as the 21st December being keen to reinstate something of societal stability based on reality in the ‘UK’ is not Celtic but fully Germanic and Norse, and is not the date of 21st December. That is the Winter Solstice itself. With the traumatic history of Britain from Christian belief, it is relative and not intended as actually wrong, merely the best that we can do under difficult circumstances of the last 1,500 years. Constantine’s 336 CE declaring Christianity the official state religion required a festival day, in true pagan practice, and the allocation of 25th of December as the birth of Jesus Christ can be read as a, or the, major departure from the real facts of humans upon the Earth. The evidence shows Constantine acted from political expediency for all the reasons that study of that period open up, but from western society on a mass of spinning rock in space, the fixing of a son of a god in the sky born in a manger on December 25th puts the Son of the Christian god and the Sun, Helios, Sol, An Ghrian, which is the fundamental fact of existence on Earth in direct conflict. At first, and for several 100s of years, the Christian festival on December 25th merged in with the traditional Roman feast of Sol Invictus, given by Aurelian in 274 CE as the official Roman cult, the Unconquered Sun, because no human can conquer the Sun, and the fun of Saturnalia, merged in with the Jewish month of Kislev. The eastern Mediterranean peoples were Greeks, Jews, Romans, with the centres of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Ephesus. We here in Britain were definitely still barbarians in that time. Study of the switch from the Sun to the Son tends to stay within history and not theology, for the reason of this fundamental and unreconcilable belief in facts. Belief in the Son leads away from Earth into a place so unconnected with Earth that it is hard to see in 2025 nearly 2026 how folks can still hold such beliefs, but they do. Belief in the Sun, in the inevitable moving down the horizon into winter months, the portal of Winter Circle of stars, magnitude one stars, bright and clear, of Capella, Aldebaran, Rigel, Sirius, Procyon, and Pollux, with Orion clear in the middle, and the vast history of human societies into the portal, down, and out into the reborn Light, as one human gets incrementally older and passes on into spirit, and new humans are born, but always contained within the majestic facts of Earth and Sol, Earth and Sky.