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Fairer far than any starFairer far than any star

2005-06-02 - 9:19 a.m.
I have to teach a four hour class to a group of pagans as part of my third degree.

Hmmm...group of pagans. I wonder what the collective term for a group of pagans is? We have a business of ferrets; a murder of crows; a pride of lions.

If a class starts at 1:00pm, most pagans will arrive 5 minutes after the class finishes. Usually there is also one individual who turns up two hours early while you're in the shower, one that arrives at the right time on the wrong day, and another that arrives at the right time on the right day but at the wrong place.
This is because of a thing called Pagan Standard Time.

I digress.

I have to teach a class to a Lateness of Pagans.

One of the things I was thinking of doing was a class on figuring out where you are in the world with nothing but a watch, a stick, a toilet roll, a protractor, a piece of string with a rock on the end and some sticky backed plastic.
On the one hand, it isn't that hard. Particularly the latitude bit.

Longitude is the bugger, which is probably why it took until the 18th century for us to have any reasonably accurate way of knowing how far east or west we were.

On the other hand, I don't know yet if I can do it. I mean I can figure it out, but can I explain it to other people in an enjoyable way?

The second part of this course would be determining the approximate position of the Moon in the zodiac given only the position of the sun, and the moon phase.

The third part would be working out someone's ascendant (The sign rising in the sky when they were born) with only their date and time of birth.
The fourth (and these are in no particular order) is figuring out where north is, armed only with the planet Earth.

This last one might be a problem since most pagans are not from around here.

Two and three are not that bad. Latitude is not that bad.
Longitude is a bitch.

For those of you that are curious about all this, take a look at these links:

Where in the World am I?
Why does the moon have phases
Phases of the Moon

Take a look and let me know whether you think this stuff is too hard to grasp.

Ho hum...

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