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Updated: June 18, 2025
Only noting as we pass, how, thus early, we may see that the progress of exact science was not only towards an increasing number of previsions, but towards previsions more accurately quantitative how, in astronomy, the recurring period of the moon's motions was by and by more correctly ascertained to be nineteen years, or two hundred and thirty-five lunations; how Callipus further corrected this Metonic cycle, by leaving out a day at the end of every seventy-six years; and how these successive advances implied a longer continued registry of observations, and the co-ordination of a greater number of facts let us go on to inquire how geometrical astronomy took its rise.
From this came the theory of the development of metals in its womb under the influence of the planets, the pregnant earth spontaneously producing gold and silver from baser things after a definite number of lunations. Already, however, in the doctrine of the transmutation of metals, it was perceived that to Nature the lapse of time is nothing to man it is everything.
As to eclipses, once looked upon with superstitious awe, their true causes had not only been assigned, but their periodicities so well ascertained that predictions of their occurrence could be made. The Babylonians had thus long known that after a cycle of 223 lunations the eclipses of the moon return. The mechanism of the phases of that satellite was clearly understood.
That learned man who reciteth it to Brahmanas during the sacred lunations, becometh cleansed of all sins, and, not caring for heaven as it were, attaineth to a union with Brahma.
In the Mahabharata, however, causal forms are frequently used without causal meaning. This sloka is omitted in many editions, though it is certainly genuine. I have rendered it very freely, as otherwise it would be unintelligible. The fact is, three lunations twice meeting together in course of the same lunar fortnight is very rare.
Hours and days, or lunations and months, have no true or philosophic relation to the origin, or duration, or periods of return belonging to great events, or revolutionary agencies, or vast national crimes; but the normal period and duration of all acts whatever, the time of their emergence, of their agency, or their reagency, fall into harmony with the secret proportions of a heavenly scale, when they belong by mere necessity of their own internal constitution to the vital though hidden motions that are at work in their own life and manifestation.
It consists of 235 lunations, and in that time the pole of the moon's orbit revolves just once round the pole of the ecliptic, and for this reason the eclipses in one cycle are repeated with very slight modification in the next cycle, and so on for many centuries.
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