Food for thought

[LEDO]

Actually heaven was both the sky and the afterlife. Rulers became stars and common souls became part of the Milky Way which the ancients correctly deduced was a group of stars. Meteors were seen as souls coming to earth to enter the body. The heavens had gates. Souls would enter via Cancer and leave via Capricorn.

The symbol for judgement was the scale. It is the constellation of Libra. It is where souls were weighed to sell if they could enter heaven. It is also harvest time when crops are weighed.

Interesting stuff, where did you get that info from.

BTW, have you pieced the story togther yet?

You can use any concordance for the Hebrew stuff. The fcosmic olklore comes from Allen's "Star Names Their Lore and Meaning." I quote heavily from it in my own soon to published work since its copyright has expired. The book is also considered to be one of the best on the topic. Ann Wright has a constellation web site which quotes him extensively also.

The souls being weighed is standard Egyptian Book of the Dead stuff.

Yeh I got the soul weighing, but have never once in my life studied astrology, the last piece of the jigsaw.

I take it you can get Allen's book on project gutenberg, right?

It is available online for most part of it (see here)
There's a huge disclaimer in the opening remarks however:
"The three principal shortcomings of the book are that it is not as systematic as the subject deserves, sometimes a downright jumble of ancient languages and afterthoughts and digressions and backtracking; that the astronomy predates Palomar and the Hubble telescope, radar and quasars, by decades and decades and is best taken lightly, as a window into the late 19c rather than into the stuff of the Universe; and, most seriously, that the sources are condensed, for the most part uncited, and — worst of all — trusted."

The trouble is (as with most mythical tales) there's not one ultimate source for such clarifications. It's a mixed up thing running throug all kinds of ages and cultures.

The idea that 'heaven' has a double meaning (i.e. the sky and afterlife) is indeed interesting and it seems to mean that our ancestors wouldn't agree with us that it has double meaning. To them it was one and the same. This is in accordance with genesis and the word 'heaven' througout the bible. This means that biased christian bible interpreters would have to leave out the meaning of the word that clearly is denied by modern science. To claim that after your death you really go up in the sky nowadays is plain silly.

The book is solid for folklore information. It was written before scientific dating. Hence you will get incorrect statement that certain temples and civilizations are 10,000 years old. These are to be discounted. I don't let a few incorrect statements ruin the enormity of his work.