The Big Dipper ("the Plough" in the UK), plays a central role in Chinese astrology, as it does, interestingly enough, in the Chinese folk art of feng shui. In Kwan Lau's Feng Shui for Today, I saw an illustration depicting the relationship of the Big Dipper to the North Star (Polaris) at the four seasons. My drawing (left) is based on that illustration.

Do you see what I see?

The more I study prehistory, the more evidence I see for a prehistoric, cross-cultural, cultivated relationship between humanity and "the heavens," namely the moon, planets and stars. We know that many cultures had complex astronomical calendars and observatories, from the Zoroastrians to the Mayans. There is physical evidence that moon records were kept in stone as far back as 300,000 years ago.

The human-star relationship has a lot to tell us about our ancestors, human and hominid. The Big Dipper may have something to tell us about our Northern European ancestors.

Research is accumulating to show that bi-directional transcontinental travel happened across Eurasia, that the great oceans were crossed at various latitudes, and that humans were moving all over this planet during prehistoric times, the oceans apparently more populated with islands near the equator before the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. When global warming happened then, massive ice melt made water levels rise several hundred feet planet-wide, burying islands (wholly or in part), people and their habitats and disrupting a worldwide pyramid-building culture with pyramidal observatories built at specific points around the globe in exact geometric relationships with various stars and constellations. Furthermore, we know that these were integral pieces of a cosmic clock that used the planet's rotation and relationship with the stars to keep time -- the time of minutes, hours, and millennia. All of this happened in the period most of us dismiss as "prehistory."

The Mayan Calendar, the Neolithic henges and the Calendar of Coligny are records of these relationships left for us to study and puzzle over, signs from the past of highly observant and analytical human activity and thought. When I saw the illustration in Lau's book, I recognized in it what might be the source of a symbol left carved in stone across Eurasia by our ancestors -- a sign or symbol so corrupted by misuse in 20th century "Western Europe" that we can't bear to name it or look at it.

Run your mouse over the two copies the Big Dipper/Polaris map below.

Here are two more composites: the first of a tetraskele based on a Greek symbol and the second of a sketch of Brigid's Cross from the Irish Celts. The tetraskele and Brigid's Cross each are considered to be signs of the four seasons.

To my way of seeing, these various symbols are variations on a theme, originating in antiquity -- the symbol for a heavenly Big Dipper/Polaris timekeeper called in Sanskrit a swastika ("to be good").

By playing around with these images, I'm trying both to see how they relate to each other, and also to lessen the impact of a once-sacred sign that was (mis)used by such horrible nationalism and acts of human terror in the 20th century.

According to Symbols.com, the swastika and related signs (among them tetraskeles and triskeles) are traditionally associated with migration. Clearly, the positions of the Big Dipper and the North Star in the night sky would have been of utmost importance to migrating people, especially as they foretold the equinoxes and solstices. As I learned in my research on Tara, humans, and our pre-human ancestors before us, have been migrating and using the stars as guides for hundreds of thousands of years.

Long before this symbol was politicized, militarized, perverted and turned on the diagonal (right) as a symbol of Hitler and Nazism, it was cut into stone in diverse places by diverse cultures, clearly carrying information of great import to human activity.

Most of us who've looked beyond Nazism know that the swastika is a symbol of the sun. Let's look a little deeper. According to Symbols.com, "(its) spectrum of meaning is centered around power, energy, and migration. It is closely associated with (the tetrasele and the triskele [left) and, thus with tribal migrations." We also learn that "it was used by most of the ancient cultures of Eurasia."

The swastika is a very old ideogram. The first such signs preserved to our days were found in the Euphrates-Tigris valley, and in some areas of the Indus valley. They seem to be more than 3,000 years old. Yet it was not until around the year 1000 B.C. that the swastika became a commonly used sign, first maybe in ancient Troy in the north west of today's Turkey.

According to Qimancy (a page on a Feng Shui site) this seasonal alignment of the Big Dipper around Polaris was already being used in the Neolithic to decorate a Chinese tomb (6,000 years old according to other sources), dating the graphic use of this heavenly phenomenon further back than Symbols.com suggests.

More from Symbols.com:

The swastika was used well before the birth of Christ in China, India, Japan, and Southern Europe.

and

In India according to d'Alviella, the word swastika is composed by the Sanskrit su = good, and asti = to be, with the suffix ka. The arms of the Indian swastika were angled in a clockwise direction (from the center).
The sign was common among the Hittites (in what is now Turkey), and in Greece from around 700 B.C., where it was freely used in decorations on ceramic pots, vases, coins, and buildings in the antiquity.
In the rest of Europe swastikas and swastika-like structures were used by the Celts.

Connecting the concept of migration with the swastika as a symbol of the relationship of the Big Dipper to true north (Polaris, the Pole or North Star), makes sense of this symbol in a new way for me. It also connects our tribal ancestors in their migrations all over Eurasia, from the British Isles at the westernmost point, to China and Japan in the east.

The authors at Symbols.com suggest that Western use of this symbol began to wane early in the Common Era, when the Celtic culture was marginalized to the point of cultural extinction, and when the growing Christian movement and Roman Church disfavored its association with the Buddha in eastern Eurasia and "its widespread use in ancient Greece, a pagan society..." in southern Eurasia.

Today in the United States we have vague notions of the great landmass on the other side of the world from us. One of our largest sources of confusion dates from the nineteenth century, when chroniclers began to use language that suggested that Europe was a continent all to itself and separate from other continental areas like Russia and China and India/the subcontinent. It was easy enough to accept these false geospatial distortions because of the strongly-defined political borders separating people on a landmass that was otherwise shared, common lands to the people who migrated in many directions over this expansive landmass in earlier times.

God/desses associated with the Big Dipper

• Artemis (Diana) -- note the prominence of the Big Dipper in Asian religion; does this point to an Asian origin for Artemis?
• the tree nymph Adrasteia
• (Callisto is associated with the Big Bear/Ursa Major, of which the Big Dipper constitutes the hindquarters and tail. She's also associated with Artemis.)
• "This constellation was seen as the goddess Tou Mu, who was said to rescue ship wreaked (sic) and drowning sailors." (Star Lore Directory)
• Seven Macaw, Mayan god (Gods/Goddesses of Astronomy)
• "Myoken is a Bosatsu or Bodhisattva of Big Dipper or the divinized Big Dipper (Sudrsti in Skt). In ancient days, navigators relied on the Big Dipper like a compass, whereby navigators, merchants and those who gained profits by sea transportation began to worship the Big Dipper as the god, or Bodhisattva of safe voyage, calling it Myoken Bosatsu. " (Ryukoji)
• Seven star god of Korean Taoism (Korea's Buddhist Temples)

Star Lore:

The stars that make up the Big Dipper are seven in number, and follow the Greek alphabet, making them easy to remember. Thus, apart from alpha Ursae Majoris, the Dipper's bowl is made up of beta, gamma, and delta, then epsilon, zeta, and eta finish the asterism.

This particular asterism has also a long history, seen in many cultures as a chariot or wagon. (Burnham, as one would expect, has a thorough discussion on this aspect of the constellation.)

The seven are not moving in the same direction, and over time the asterism will dissolve. In fact, it is only the last 50,000 years or so that a discernible "dipper" has formed. As the stars move their separate ways, the shape will more and more become plough-like, with the pointer star (alpha Ursae Majoris) moving in front of the rest, and somewhat south of its present position. (Ursa Major, The Constellations)

Names of Constellations:

Many cultures have had named constellations: the Chinese, for example. But because modern astronomy arose out of the Western tradition, the names now used internationally have Western roots. A number of constellations are mentioned in Homer (9th century bce), and Greek references are frequent by the 6th century bce, but the names appear to have come from even older cultures along the Euphrates River, possibly by way of the Phoenicians.

Drawing on the work of the astronomer Eudoxus, sometime around 270 bce a poet named Aratus wrote a long poem called Phenomena, in which he described 44 constellations and told their stories. This work was extremely popular in classical times. No less an author than Cicero translated it into Latin. To this day, most books that tell the stories of the constellations are retellings of Aratus.

Ptolemy listed 48 constellations and their locations in his He Mathematike Syntaxis (2nd century ad). Medieval Europeans knew this work as the Almagest, its translation into Arabic. Most of the constellation names given in the Almagest are still in use. (Constellations, Sizes)

Constellations have been documented in many different forms, such as pottery, coins, and other items dating back to 4000 B.C. The Greek poet Aratus of Soli gave a verse description of 44 constellations in his Phaenomena. The Greek astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy, in his Almagest, described 48 constellations, of which 47 are known today by the same name. (Constellations, Starshine)