When I checked it mentioned St. Thomas Aquinas but the example was the crossing of the Red Sea.

It could actually be used to understand the deeper reasons behind simply stated facts but I should not continue to digress you from Ophiucus.

Regards

Matt

PS I must have been engaged watching the flickering images on the cave wall as I missed this. http://www.skyscript.co.uk/allegory.html

I did a little more digging about Ophiuchus, and he does seem to have been pretty important--the figure representing this constellation in the Dendera zodiac appears to be Ra (or Re, &c.), the sun-god Some of his attributes were later assimilated to Horus.

A line drawing of this figure appears in Gavin White's excellent article at http://solaria-publications.com/a_new_i ... era_zodiac . Scorpio and Sagittarius appear in the outer circle, upper left, with "Ophiuchus" just inside (north) of them.

On line drawings that I viewed at a larger scale, the figure appears to have a hawk's head and a man's body. The figure is seated on a stylized throne--on Ra's stylized barque. This was the boat the sun used to traverse the heavens. On his head the figure has a sun-disk fronted by a uraeus, or cobra. In his hand the figure holds a was-staff: a long staff with a tilted head (perhaps representing a stylized animal) and a two-pronged fork at the base. At the opposite side of the zodiac from the Ophiuchus figure, we see Orion--the Egyptian Osiris--also carrying a was-staff.

The cobra was a symbol of authority in ancient Egypt, and no one except the pharoah could wear it as part of a head-dress. A few gods were also depicted with it.

The explanation of the particular form of the was-staff is unclear. Initially it was also a sign of godhead or human authority. One theory that makes sense in terms of the subsequent cultural history of this constellation is that the double-prong was helpful in dispatching poisonous snakes. (Cf. the bronze serpent staff of Moses--from Egypt, and the serpent staff of Aesclepias.)

While the god Ra was not always depicted in a seated position, it is interesting in the Dendera context, because a standing Ophiuchus might well run into Scorpio. Indeed, some early modern depictions of Ophiuchus show him in a semi-crouching position, so as to solve the problem of how to truncate his legs. (Aratus in Phaenomena actually describes Ophiuchus as treading on the scorpion.)

The story of Ra's and the soul's journey in The Book of the Dead (I have the E. A. Wallis Budge 1895 reprint) involves an ongoing emnity between Ra and a huge reptile (Apep or Apef), either a snake or a crocodile. The arch-enemy can usually be identified as the constellation Hydra (south of Virgo) or perhaps Draco but the connection between Ra and the arch-enemy serpent is intriguing for a constellation that would be later known as the Serpent Holder (Aratus) or Serpentarius.

What really intrigued me was the Egyptian parallel (a) concern to preserve bodies of the deceased, and (b) the belief that the dead assimilated to Ra. To Budge (p. cxxviii-ix) snakes and worms harmed the mummies in a kind of ecological sense that they would literally ingest dead bodies; but also in a religious sense as "the foe against whom the Sun-god fought." So the serpent becomes an emblem of moral evil, at the same time that the Egyptians portrayed dead people killing snakes. Each Egyptian, apparently would after death partake of Ra's cosmic struggle between good (Ra) and evil (the serpent.)

The proximaty of Ra to the scales of Libra looks much like depictions of Osirus judging the dead.

If we think of the hawk-headed man as Horus, then we still have the metaphor of the sun as the "eye of Horus." He was also a crocodile slayer.

This whole esoteric meaning of the Dendera symbol for Ophiuchus is probably much more profound in the Egyptian religion than I have been able to describe it, but it would seem that an Egyptian looking at the Dendara zodiac would know the Ra story sufficiently that the snake battle would have gone without saying...or depicting. And with the sun god definitely in the picture, it would seem this constellation was part of their ecliptic, even though it is not in the outermost ring of the zodiac.

One thing, too, about the Greek myths about the constellations is that they tended to rewrite earlier material more in keeping with their own culture. So the Ra meaning could easily have been lost amidst tales of the miraculous healer Aesclepius.

Then for anyone interested in sky maps of other cultures, the Gundestrup (Gundstrup) cauldron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundestrup_cauldron of the first century BC seems to portray a Gaulish Ophiuchus as the "horned man" of Celtic lore. (The workmanship and discovery location are not Gaulish, but the figures seem to be, so the work was possibly comissioned.) This seated horned man figure holds up a large snake. The horned man figure was generally a ruler of winter, while the summer was ruled by a goddess.

One book linking the cauldron to cultural astronomy is Gregory A. Cloutier, The Lost Zodiac of the Druids. Title aside, it does seem that the cauldron depicted constellations in terms of gods known from Celtic textual sources like the Mabinogion.