The slow conical wobble of the earth’s rotation axis, which drags the equinox points backwards through the zodiac and completes a circuit in about 25,772 years. Hipparchus is credited with the discovery in the second century BC, from comparing his own star positions against older records. The motion shifts the equinoctial sunrise by one degree roughly every 72 years, which is where the figures 72, 2,160 for a full sign, and a rounded 25,920 for the whole cycle come from. In Hamlet’s Mill (1969) Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend argued that those numbers are embedded deliberately in myth worldwide, a technical vocabulary carried in story after the science behind it was lost. The book was not well received by the fields it drew on: Edmund Leach wrote that its scholarship was old-fashioned as early as 1870, and Jaan Puhvel allowed it flashes of insight while declining to treat it as serious scholarship on the problem of myth. The astronomy is textbook. The mythological reading is not.
Connections
Orion Correlation Theory · Tiahuanaco · Graham Hancock · Hamlet’s Mill