Dante and the early astronomers . s, and the moon is ambiguousonce, but quite explicable. Taking the allusions ina simple popular sense, as he seems to intend us to do,assuming that the signs and the constellations of thezodiac are identical, and that the moon, which at firstis opposite the sun, traverses about 13° in the zodiacdaily, and loses about an hour of time more or less,there is very little difiiculty in following him. It isquite enough to know that the sun is somewhere inAries throughout, and that the moon is therefore inLibra at the beginning. But if we wish to know a little more ac
Dante and the early astronomers . s, and the moon is ambiguousonce, but quite explicable. Taking the allusions ina simple popular sense, as he seems to intend us to do,assuming that the signs and the constellations of thezodiac are identical, and that the moon, which at firstis opposite the sun, traverses about 13° in the zodiacdaily, and loses about an hour of time more or less,there is very little difiiculty in following him. It isquite enough to know that the sun is somewhere inAries throughout, and that the moon is therefore inLibra at the beginning. But if we wish to know a little more accurately thepositions of sun and moon among the stars, we mustcarefully compare the passages bearing on this differ so much that while some thinkthe suns annual motion is ignored, and it is assumedto be at the equinox all the time, others maintain thatit was at the equinox on the first day and moved onthrough Aries at the rate of about one degree a day(as it should do, since there are 365 days in a year 402. Celestiale Fig. 51. The rising sun at the Spring Equinox. posmoys of sun, moon, & planets. 403 and 360° in tlie circumference of the sphere); ^ whileothers again say that it was merely somewhere inAries from the beofinnino-. What are the actual indications of its position ? Noone questions that it was in Aries throughout theVision, for this is often indicated, sometimes directly,as in Inf. i. 38-40, sometimes by mentioning Taurus asthe sign following the sun,^ or Pisces as the sign pre-ceding.^ There are four detailed descriptions :—• (1) On the first morning, the sun rose among thosestars which were with him at the Creation.* As wehave seen, this may mean merely some point in Aries,or the first point of Aries, at which the sun wasthought to have been placed when created. (2) On the seventh day it rose near a point wherethree crosses are formed by the intersection of fourcircles.^ One naturally thinks of the horizon as one ofthe
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