[thaumasiotes]

> Saturn being the sixth planet from the sun it has historically been associated with the hexagon within occult symbolism since well before humans could have verified such a storm exists.

By who? There can't be a traditional association for the obvious reason that, until fairly recently, there were only 5 planets and there was no way to know which of them were how far from the Sun.

[adrian_b]

In Antiquity the planets were believed to move around the Earth, not the Sun, so they estimated the distances from the planets to the Earth.

While there was no way to estimate a numeric distance, they have correctly estimated which planets are closer and which are more distant, based on their angular speed on the sky.

So it was always correctly believed that Saturn is the farthest from the Earth, because it has the slowest angular speed, followed by Jupiter, then by Mars.

It was believed that there are 7 special celestial bodies, adding the Sun and the Moon.

However I am not aware of any association between Saturn and the number 6.

Saturn and Jupiter became associated with black lead (i.e. lead) and white lead (i.e. tin), because Saturn is less bright and it moves slower on the sky than Jupiter, like the lead is less bright and also heavier than the tin.

[mannykannot]

That's a good point, especially as the Earth was regarded as the center of the universe. Ptolemy apparently had to put Mercury and Venus inside of the Sun's orbit [1] (note that if you replace 'inside of the Sun's orbit' with 'between the Earth and the Sun', you get a proposition that holds then and now! Ptolemy had to deal with the fact that Mercury and Venus do not stray far from the Sun.)

Nevertheless, in that model, Saturn ends up as the outermost heavenly body, other than the stars, presumably because it has the longest period. Even so, it does not count as the sixth unless you include either the Sun or Moon, but not both.

[1]http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/more_stuff/Ap...

[sdenton4]

Wikipedia puts discovery of the first six planets under 'prehistoric.'

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_discovery_of_Sol...

[adrian_b]

In that Wikipedia article, "prehistorically" is improperly used.

"Prehistoric" means before the appearance of written records, which means before the 3rd millenium BC (when there are many Egyptian and Sumerian/Akkadian written records).

There is no evidence that the planets (i.e. excluding the Sun, Earth and Moon) were known prehistorically.

The evidence is actually that 4 planets, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, have been discovered, as correctly written in the Wikipedia article, only in the 2nd millennium BC, in Babylonia. That is a historical time not prehistorical.

The only planet known in prehistory was Venus, because it is much brighter than any star, so its movement on the sky is obvious, but it was known as 2 distinct stars, the Morning Star and the Evening Star.

Only very late it became understood that there is actually a unique celestial body that appears in 2 forms.

This discovery was made in Sumer, probably in the 3rd millenium BC, or maybe as early as the 4th millenium BC. (This Sumerian discovery is reflected in the legend of Inanna, who descends in the underworld, then she returns to the heavens, like the Evening Star disappears and then returns as the Morning Star).

This knowledge has propagated to other places only very slowly.

For example Homer mentions some stars and constellations and also both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, but there is not the slightest hint that he or the other Greeks of the 8th century BC might have known that those 2 "stars" are in fact the same body.

[sdenton4]

Yeah, the use of 'prehistory' seems not great in this context; there's a fundamental problem of how we would know which bodies were known prior to the existence of a writing system.

But there are a number of things that make these very discoverable: They are visible with the naked eye, all lie in the ecliptic plane, and behave a bit strangely if you watch them over time. Mars is a bit red, and absolutely stands out... And of course Venus can't be ignored. Once you've noticed Venus and Mars, finding the others is a matter of looking a bit harder.

Using stars for navigation or for measuring the passage of time involves observing them consistently, which leads one to notice 'odd' things. So I wouldn't at all be surprised if the planets were known in, say, prehistoric Polynesian cultures... The appearance of mathematical astronomy in Babylonia tells us that the movement of celestial bodies is approximately the first scientific knowledge a civilization will bother to write down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_astronomy#Old_Babyl...

[thaumasiotes]

> The appearance of mathematical astronomy in Babylonia tells us that the movement of celestial bodies is approximately the first scientific knowledge a civilization will bother to write down.

In fact, we know (from ruins) that the Chinese were practicing astronomy at a time well before our first written records of them.

It is a certainty that the planets were known to all prehistoric cultures; I don't know what adrian_b is thinking.

[adrian_b]

There exists no evidence whatsoever that any prehistoric culture was aware about the existence of planets.

Of course they would have noticed Jupiter and Mars when they are brighter than the stars, as extra stars in known constellations, but there is no evidence that anyone realized that the extra bright star seen once in a certain constellation is the same with the extra bright star seen next year in another constellation.

Because it was not yet understood that the planet sightings are the same bodies that just move on the sky, they were thought as stars that appear or disappear randomly.

Like I have said, not even Venus, the brightest body on the sky after the Sun and Moon, was recognized as a single star, but it was believed to be 2 different stars until 6000 years ago in Sumer and until as late as 2600 years ago in Europe.

Noticing a bright star on the sky is not the same with knowing its nature.

The next 4 planets after Venus have been discovered in Babylonia because they began to make written continuous records with the positions of the stars during many years.

Only then, after comparing the written records accumulated after many years, it was realized that the planets are not stars that appear and disappear randomly, but they move in continuous trajectories on the sky, with definite speeds and if you know their position at some time you can predict their future position at another time, because they never stray from their path.

So only after the Babylonian discoveries it became understood that the stars are divided in fixed stars, wandering stars a.k.a. planets, which have predictable trajectories, and the comets, which are the only stars that appear and disappear randomly.

[thaumasiotes]

With all due respect, you have no idea what you're talking about, and you're asking us to believe things that cannot possibly be true.

Some cultures remained prehistoric much later than others. Here's some evidence from one of them:

> what information we do have tells us that [Australian] Aboriginal people were close observers of planets and their motions, noting the relative brightness of the planets, their motions along the ecliptic, retrograde motion, the relationship between Venus and its proximity to the Sun, Venus’ connection to the Sun through zodiacal light, and the synodic cycle of Venus, particularly as it transitions from the Evening Star to the Morning Star.

> Indigenous cultures around the world, particularly the many hundreds that exist in Australia, maintain complex astronomical knowledge systems that link the positions and motions of celestial objects and to navigation, calendars, subsistence, and social applications

> The Sun, Moon, and visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) were known to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These cultures paid careful attention to the motions of solar system bodies through careful observation, which was recorded and passed to successive generations through oral tradition and material culture. Aboriginal and Islander people distinguished planets from the background stars, noted their changing positions in the sky, their changing positions relative to each other, their proximity to each other along the zodiac of the ecliptic, and their dynamic relationship to the Sun and Moon.

( https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1806/1806.02462.pdf )

All cultures observe the sky closely, and all of them identify the planets, which are one of the most interesting -- and obvious -- phenomena in the sky.

Show me the Sumerian astronomical records that describe Jupiter as being two different objects.

[macksd]

I thought we weren't able to chart their orbits and thus know their orderings until the last few centuries. I'm sure we recognized them as being brighter than stars, visible as more than points of light, with non-sidereal motion, and we gave them names. But I don't think we knew Saturn was 6th "prehistorically".

[sdenton4]

Here's some more fun reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos

"... an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe, with the Earth revolving around the Sun once a year and rotating about its axis once a day. He was influenced by the concept presented by Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 – 385 BC) of a fire at the center of the universe, but Aristarchus identified the "central fire" with the Sun and he put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun.[2]"

The ancients were smarter than we think, usually.

[irrational]

Wouldn’t they be able to know/guess based on the fact that it took longer to orbit the sun than Jupiter?

[thaumasiotes]

> Wikipedia puts discovery of the first six planets under 'prehistoric.'

Wikipedia is counting the Earth as a planet.

[ryantgtg]

You are being too rational. There is, of course, an explanation for why people knew of the hexagon in ancient times:

> Some theorists believe in the very distant past the planets were arranged much differently. This would have been back in the Golden Age, when shit was good and Saturn wasn’t pissed off from hearing that prophecy yet. Supposedly this was when Atlantis thrived and Saturn hung stationary in the sky directly overhead. This theory comes from the people over at the Thunderbolts Project, who have also proposed many other radical new ideas such as the universe being electric and Saturn being a second sun. The theory that we live in a binary star system has correlations with the Nazi’s belief in a Black Sun.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ce7vue/the_satu...

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/about/syn/

[ryantgtg]

I see now that your comment was mostly about the order of the planets. Not about how people hundreds of years ago knew there was a hexagon on the planet.