Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard

56 Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard

Here’s a simple mnemonic (memory trick) with

which you can memorize all those names in order by

their first initials COSDC.PTJC.PEOMPPR. Say,

“Camels Often Sit Down Clumsily. Perhaps Their

Joints Creak. Possibly Early Oiling Might Prevent

Permanent Rheumatism.” That is: Cambrian, Ordovi-

cian, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous; Permian,

Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous; Paleocene, Eocene,

Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Recent.

Learn this and you will certainly impress your sci-

ence teachers!

Each of these ages is distinguished from those

before and after by a change in Gaea’s layers of rock,

as if they are chapters in a book. And the fossils in

each layer are also quite distinct. You can go to a place

like the Grand Canyon, where many millions of years

of these layers have been cut through and exposed in

the cliff faces, and you can see that they are clearly

separate. Something happened at the end of each age

that brought that age and its life forms to an end. Take

a look over the chart, and notice the duration of each

of those ages. There is a definite cycle here, averag-

ing 37 million years for each age.

As our solar system orbits the center of the gal-

axy in a 200-million-year circle dance, the journey

takes us up and down through the galaxy’s equatorial

dust plane about every 37 million years. Many scien-

tists are now considering that this may be the factor

behind the cycle of mass extinctions that have oc-

curred just about that often throughout the history of

life on Earth. Perhaps the dust disturbs the outer shells

of debris surrounding our solar system in the form of

the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, dislodging com-

ets and asteroids and sending them plunging through

the orbits of the inner worlds—and sometimes crash-

ing into ours.

Historical Eras (various durations)

As with the history of life, human history has also

been divided into eras, primarily based on the types

of materials used for making tools and weapons. Gen-

erally speaking, since the appearance of modern “Cro-

Magnon” humans, these eras are described as follows,

although there is often some overlap between them.

It is important to note, however, that the existence of

these eras does not mean that everyone in the world

moves from one to the next at the same time; there

remain a few cultures in the world even today who

are still living pretty much in the Stone Age!

Zodiacal Aeons (2,167 years)

While the historical eras listed above follow a

linear rather than cyclic pattern, some of them can be

overlaid approximately with the Astrological Ages,

corresponding to the 12 signs of the Zodiac. These

astrological ages or “Aeons” are based on the preces-

sion of the equinoxes (equinox means “equal night”).

The equinoxes are the two times a year (March 21

and Sept. 21) when the day and night are equal in

length. But more precisely, the equinoxes are the

imaginary points in the heavens where the extension

of the Earth’s equator (called the celestial equator)

intersects the plane of the ecliptic (also called simply

“the ecliptic”: the equator of the solar system, and

apparent path of the Sun against the constellations of

the Zodiac). The Earth’s axis of rotation (a line going

straight through the poles) is inclined at an angle of

23½ degrees from the ecliptic, which is why we have

seasons, as each hemisphere (North and South) in turn

faces more towards the Sun or away from it.

These two planes (the celestial equator and the

ecliptic) intersect at two points. These are the Vernal

(Spring) and Autumnal (Fall) Equinoxes (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Ecliptic and the Celestial Equator

showing the Vernal (A) and Autumnal (B) Equinoxes

When the ancient Babylonians devised the Zo-

diacal calendar in the 2nd millennium BCE, they used

the heliacal rising of Aries on the Vernal Equinox to

mark the beginning of the year. “Heliacal rising” is

the rising of a constellation just before the Sun. How-

ever, Aries no longer rises with the Sun on the Vernal

Equinox due to the precession of the equinoxes.

The precession of the equinoxes, also known as

the Platonic Year, is an apparent westward movement

of the equinoxes caused by the slow wobbling of the

Earth’s polar axis. Just like a spinning top wobbles

when it slows down, so does the Earth. It rotates on

its own axis, but at the same time the axis describes a

slow circle in the sky. This circle has a radius of 23½°

and takes 26,000 years to complete.

Today the North Pole points to the star Polaris;

in 12,000 years it will point to Vega in the constella-

tion Lyra (Figure 2).

Historical Era / Materials Time Period Duration

Plastics, Silicon, Synthetics (Space) 1950 -future 50+ yrs.

Age of Steel (Roman/Christian Era) 50 BCE-1950 CE 2,000 yrs.

Iron Age (Classical Era) 1500-50 BCE 1,450 yrs.

Bronze Age (“Golden Age”) 3000-1500 1,500 yrs.

Copper Age (City Building) 5000-3000 2,000 yrs.

Neolithic (new stone) (farming) 8500-5000 3,500 yrs.

Upper Paleolithic (Ice Age) 40,000-8500 30,000 yrs.

23½°

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