Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Real Cycles, Divisions Of Time, Have Been
Gradually Transformed Into Divisions Of Space; But The Generality Of
The Physical Phenomena
Of the risings seems to prove that the zodiac
which has been transmitted to us by the Greeks, and which,
By the
precession of the equinoxes, becomes an historical monument of high
antiquity, may have taken birth far from Thebes, and from the sacred
valley of the Nile. In the zodiacs of the New World - in the Mexican,
for instance, of which we discover the vestiges in the signs of the
days, and the periodical series which they compose - there are also
signs of rain and of inundation corresponding to the Chou (Rat) of the
Chinese* and Thibetan cycle of Tse, and to the Fishes and Aquarius of
the dodecatemorion. (* The figure of water itself is often substituted
for that of the Rat (Arvicola) in the Tartar zodiac. The Rat takes the
place of Aquarius. Gaubil, Obs. Mathem. volume 3 page 33.) These two
Mexican signs are Water (Atl) and Cipactli, the sea-monster furnished
with a horn. This animal is at once the Antelope-fish of the Hindoos,
the Capricorn of our zodiac, the Deucalion of the Greeks, and the Noah
(Coxcox) of the Azteks.* (* Coxcox bears also the denomination of
Teo-Cipactli, in which the root god or divine is added to the name of
the sign Cipactli. It is the man of the Fourth Age; who, at the fourth
destruction of the world (the last renovation of nature), saved
himself with his wife, and reached the mountain of Colhuacan.
According to the commentator Germanicus, Deucalion was placed in
Aquarius; but the three signs of the Fishes, Aquarius and Capricorn
(the Antelope-fish) were heretofore intimately linked together.
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