Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered what the ancients were thinking when they identified patterns that look nothing like what they are named for?
There are thousands of stars visible to the naked eye and human beings have spent thousands of years reaching toward these stars for a better understanding of life on earth. Through all of this there are only 88 officially recognized constellations in the sky, 48 of which are holdovers from ancient times. But who made them up, and why?
The concept of the zodiac ~ the circle of 12 regions of stars that are most familiar to us by their corresponding horoscope names ~ originated with the Babylonians about 4000 BC.
After the Babylonians a few familiar constellations showed up in Homer's "Odyssey" around the eighth century BC, and then several centuries later the absolute bible of all things astronomy came along. This was Claudius Ptolemy's "Almagest", published in 150 A.D. In it, Ptolemy identified 48 constellations, and these 48 dominated the star scene for centuries.
But here's the trick to understanding these ancient constellations: The regions of the sky they identified were not named for what they looked like, but for what was streaming toward the human being from these specific regions of the sky.
The belief was that every human being comes as a soul-spirit being from a star, and the constellations were named according to what the human being received from the stars as they traveled toward their life on earth. So for instance, the region of Aries was called the "ram" not because it looked like a ram, but because a ram uses its head, and this was the region of the sky where the forces for the human head came from.
More than that, according to the teaching of the ancient philosopher Plato in his writing "Timaeus", not only did every human being come from a star, but after life on earth, every human being would then return to their associate star, to spend what Plato described as a blessed and suitable existence.