Groundhog Day is a minor holiday with astronomical connections. You notice how the days are staying brighter and for longer in the evening, perhaps you even feel more energetic and invigorated. Ancient peoples who lived and died at the whim of a cruel nature certainly noticed, and made rituals based on their observations. We still celebrate their origins, but its good to know why.

Most of the observations of Cross Quarter days have vanished, except for Groundhog Day on February 2, the midpoint between the Winter Solstice of Dec. 21-22 and the Spring Equinox of March 21-22. German immigrants in the Pennsylvania Dutch ("Duetsche") region imported the celebration with them. Since everybody likes a party we American mutts -- mixed with everybody and everything and darn proud of it -- clasped it to our bosom, much like what's happening to Kwanzaa, St. Patrick's Day and Cinco De Mayo.

TV stations gather without fail every year to see if the various large rodents such as Pennsylvania's Punxatawny Phil see their shadows, without even delving into the real reasons why the Sun’s angle and the shadows are such a big deal in the first place!

This is a direct link to the just completed celebration of the Solstice, or the Christmas and Yuletide rituals. They are based on the life-giving Sun's return to the Northern hemisphere, and the hopeful breaking of winter's icy grip.

There are four astronomical CROSS QUARTER DAY days, although the other two aren't celebrated much. May Day is one; the one between the September Equinox and the Winter Solstice is the basis for the old Pagan European New Year. WALPURGIS NIGHT is Oct. 31, All Hallow's Eve, or now corrupted to Hallowe'en. That continued Pagan holiday received an article of its own, at
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The memory of "MIDSUMMER'S NIGHTS EVE" much like Brotha playwright William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" about the days after the Solstice / Christmas holiday that lead to January 6 and Michaelmas, or the EPIPHANY as the Catholics called it, would be even more distant except for the popularity of his plays of the 1600s. The subtleties of which are even better enjoyed in their original Swahili.

The four Equinoxes and Solstices that chart the Sun’s progress and determine the seasons on our sorta rounded globe were further divided, with May 1st the marker between March 21 and the Summer Solstice on June 21. The peasants were all for that too, as they had more time off from tilling and hoeing the land.

It is known that the early Church tried in vain to get the populace to stop celebrating these old Pagan holidays and ways with little success. When they instituted their own competing holidays it only doubled the off days for the peasants, and that was all good!

Then, they hit upon the one idea that worked, but it would take centuries: the Catholic church just put the holidays right on top of the old Pagan ones, knowing that they would in time whither away and the original meanings become lost to the hearts and minds of humanity. This is the reason there are so many different symbols for the Easter and Christmas holidays, from the patchwork of nations and Pagan societies from the lands that were converted from the British Isles to the Middle East.

There is a connection to Easter of the May Pole celebration. Remember as kids during Easter when you thought it was odd for the mixture of rabbits and eggs? Rabbits didn't lay eggs; we were only kids but we were pretty sure of that. Then we dismissed it, grew up, taught our own kids about the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, that Lee Harvey Oswald Killed President John F. Kennedy, and moved on with our lives.

I actually had a family of groundhogs near the south-facing some property I rented for a few years, which was a stroke of luck for a Star Hustler. I only had to look out of my south-facing kitchen window on Feb. 2 to see if the scampering squirrels on steroids noticed their shadows, which is only of passing interest to an amateur astronomer/Stargazer.

I also know groundhogs have such bad eyesight -- and hearing -- that whatever it is that people think groundhogs see doesn’t count for very much. The “six weeks more of Winter” doesn’t mean much to us here in Wisconsin, where we’d be only too happy to have only six more weeks of below-freezing temperatures and snowstorms that aren’t unknown in early May!

Writing so much science fact, astronomy and history means less time for my Science Fiction, such as my three-parter epic on the Final Solution Genocide Contingency Plan finally enacted against the African Descended who have gathered for a Last Stand in Africa, where a fleet of spaceships are being feverishly constructed. Continued attacks, even after self-imposed Segregation after the few survivors leaving America and Europe necessitates our mass escape from planet Terra to the outer Asteroid Belt.

After mining the asteroids and converting atmospheres from the outer Gas Planets an attempt is to make a desperate jump to the stars beyond, because we can’t even share a solar system in peace, or at least they won’t let us. I’m working on it, that was the first and middle parts. But I digress.

Another Cross Quarter celebration that is still hanging on is the annual May Day celebrations that are mostly in Europe, after being softened from the ancient practice of having village maidens parade butte-naked around a giant phallus, hoping to be made a fertile wife for the young men of the nearby villages in a sort of debutante exposition. It was also hoped that the sexual power of Creation would be transmuted into the land, so it too would give birth in the form of a mighty harvest. This was also seen in some African tribal rituals. Young women walk around with their breasts open to be seen and judged, but after marriage the no-longer Maidens cover up.

Children were substituted in our times, and would gather ‘round the Maypole with streams of ribbons leading back to the now G-rated pole. Quite lost are the origins of the holiday, which was the whole point of suppression.

The once big-time pagan holiday of May Day has since been appropriated by workers groups and Socialists in Europe such as the Green Party to agitate for whatever, with their fellow travelers having antigovernment celebrations on this side of the Atlantic.

The beginning of the year was originally set by custom after the date when the days started being longer than the nights. This is just past the Spring Equinox, when the day and night are now of equal length. It took a while for this to be apparent in the Northern Hemisphere, so the custom became April First, about 7 or 8 days or so after the Equinox of what we now call March 22. (This is also why the Winter Solstice celebration is December 25 and not the 21st or 22nd).

The Roman Empire fell from within and after continued southern attacks from CARTHAGE, or northern Africa, near about where modern day Tunisia and Libya; as well as northern Barbarian attacks from the Germanic tribes of Saxony. The Saxons invaded the old Angle-land, or England, and became the ANGLO-SAXONS, but that’s another article for the big pile.

But one thing the Romans left of abiding usefulness is a fairly cohesive calendar, which only needs a bit of tweaking every four years or so. When the new calendar was instituted by the Holy Roman Church a couple of new months were kept that were added at the beginning of the year and the middle for a couple of emperors, which threw off the neat Ten Month calendar.

But it worked out better this way anyway, unlike trying to squeeze in 365 days for 360 degrees, which already was tried by the BABYLONIANS who had a thing about circles. Twelve months can be divided by 2,3,4,5,6,8,10, and 12. Not so for a Ten Month Calendar, which had to have many holidays to make the weeks come out straight, and a strong central authority to enforce universal compliance, which the Romans were and could.

Until their final fall in 476 CE, when they tired of the ceaseless barbarian onslaughts and relocated the Roman empire's capital East to CONSTANTINOPLE, the opening of the Bosporas Sea, now Istanbul by the Caspian Sea in present day Turkey. This also meant the establishment of another competing church, the EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCH, but that's another article. We're up to about a book's worth now I think.

As an aside, and a foreshadowing of an upcoming article, this calls into question the idea that there is INTELLIGENT DESIGN. A designer could have easily made planets have circular rather than elliptical orbits, and a 25 hour day, and a bunch of other nice things to have, like knees that don't give us problems, or avocado pits that aren't quite so large. But I digress.

This now meant that the date of the New Year had to be moved from the Spring Equinox time. It was relocated to the month of JANUS, who was a Greco-Roman god who had two faces. This was apropos, because he could look forward and backward, as the month of January does, back to the end of the year and the beginning of the new one.

But there were holdovers who refused to give up their old ways, and they continued to celebrate the Old New Year of April First. They were ridiculed by the more modern people, and so they were called “APRIL FOOLS.”

Friday the 13th was last month. Whoooo! There is a famed horror film series by the name; media outlets keep Friday the 13th stories on file so they can pull them out and run them every year like clockwork. There was a story about a town off Route 66 in Arizona that finally changed their 666 designation so they wouldn’t be called the Devil’s Highway anymore. But what’s in a number?

Numbers and such have always been an interesting diversion, including wordplay such as anagrams which play a part in Dan Brown’s “DaVinci Code.” Being a writer of course I have an affinity for words and puzzles, but as I get older and I would hope wiser, I have rediscovered the Joy of Math that so vexed me in my youth to the point I had to enroll in what was called by cruel youngsters “Dummy Math Class.”

But numbers have a greater history and utility especially in unearthing Black history because they don’t change through languages, which is why scientists searching for evidence of alien civilizations look for math communications because there’d be little hope of translating another language from a different star system.

It was thousands of years before they could translate Northeast African hieroglyphics! And that only because the famed Rosetta Stone found in the mid-1800s had four or five languages from an important royal edict of the Ptolemiac era that gave them the key to unlock the works of the greatest examples of graffiti in the known world, because they wrote and carved on everything; the Egyptians, fortunately, were worse than a bunch of six year olds with crayons near a white wall. Graffiti was what they were all about. That and the concepts of Duality, and Resurrection. That's for another article, around Easter.

Those ancient Northeast Africans -- you call them by their Greek name of “Egyptians” -- knew a great deal of math. In fact, their word for “balance” or Rightness In Life was MA’AT, which is where the word Mathematics comes from, by the way.

In Egyptian hieroglyphics its shown by the scale, where men’s hearts are measured to see if they go to the afterlife or to the Underworld. If the latter then that big dog, the jackal Anubis would gobble up their heart. The scale is used in our courthouses, where Lady Justice with her blindfold holds the scales of Justice. Later on in another example of cultural transmission, the Greeks and Romans would borrow the dog for their three-headed Cerberus who guards the gates of Hades Underworld.

So Math is the Universal Language. But there are some numbers that are considered sinister, even dangerous. So much so is this ingrained even in our enlightened modern times that some buildings don’t have a publicly accessible 13th floor, with some using them for utility for heating/cooling and ventilation machinery. Rooms in hotels that would be numbered 13 are sometimes for cleaning supplies for maids and staff, with rooms going from 12A to 14, and other nonsense such as that.

But people take Numerology so seriously that they change their names as singer, onetime “Star Search” host and longtime occultist Diane Warwick did. For years the Starsearch host and performer who wrote the song "Deja Vu" added an “E” to the end of her name starting in the 1970s to bring the sum of her name in line with numerological theory, which counts the letters in your name and purports to figure out your destiny. They even have numbers for colours!

I’m a pretty open minded fella, but I consider Numerology to have even less credence than Astrology, and that’s hard to do. Now, before you say “but Brotha Science, aren’t you an Amateur Astronomer?” That is so, but there is no connection between that exercise and Astrology except for the fact that both look up into the nighttime skies. Just as planets lined up or being in different star formations cannot affect life on Terra, the arrangement of numbers has no impact on us unless we choose them to be so.

That being said there is a historical connection even a Biblical one to numerology. The Hebrew Kabalists had a great love of numbers and their interaction, and its being formed into Kabalah Lite for Hollywood actors and celebrities such as Madonna and Britney Spears, since Buddhism evidently has played out among the fickle.

Newspapers and such also trot out annually the story of what was the Star of Bethlehem, since there was no such star, hasn’t been, and nobody else in the world seemed to have seen it. It was an Astrological Conjunction, stars and planetary arrangements that foretold of a great happening. So the star was not a visible star at all. Remember this when around Christmas time when they bring out that tired old Three Wise Men/Three Kings following the star of Bethlehem” story yet again.

And as I asked in the story about the new Pope B-16, what happened to all the loot and Bling Bling they brought to honour Baby Jesus? Frankincense and myrrh was some valuable stuff, let alone all the gemstones. His family, although it is not historically supported that they were "poor," still could have used it since Yeshua wasn’t an only child.

This ancient beginning is also why there is no original connection of the Easter holiday to Christianity at all. If it was based on an actual event the date would be set, like the Fourth of July or Valentines Day. Or England's Guy Fawlkes Day. The Cruci Fiction would have been a date that was marked, and easily determined since it occurred under the jurisdiction of the Roman Empire.

Like the Nazi regime or the Spanish Conquistadors, tyrannical empires are notorious for their record keeping. Pontius Pilate’s people would have noted the occurrence, such as the work detail that was needed in an occupied land with other rabble rousers who would pop up from time to time, to be smacked down. And surely this included the Hebrew sages who chronicled everything such as whom begat whom, although they didn’t much care for the mouthy heretic who was stirring up the people and threatening their rule, even under the heavy boot of Roman occupation.

In the hands of school children are aspects of mathematical knowledge that the ancients would give the rest of their lives to spend a day with. In fact I just might write -- or maybe you’ll do it -- a story about a Time Traveler who loses his simple calculator while on a trip back to an ancient peoples such as the Egyptians. When he gets back to his future time, or maybe our time, he either finds the planet devastated, or a Golden Age. I haven’t decided yet. Have you?

-- Numerical implications are used by Dan Brown in “The DaVinci Code” as well as the upcoming movie. Number and word play are used extensively in Brown’s book, which has sold 30 million copies just in hardcover, with a movie in production for 2006 co-starring Tom Hanks and “Mummy Returns” cutie Rachel Weisz. Popular culture is going a bit math crazy it would seem. Better jump on board before this pendulum swings back again.

• -- There was a play which is touring and came to be staged in Milwaukee, and has since been made into a movie called “Proof” about the daughter of a world-class mathematician who is seeking to solve one of the longest vexing problems in math. She is instrumental in his work but her contributions, like Mozart’s talented sister, goes unsung. Her massive intellect does not prevent her from being a woman, with desires and interconnections.

• -- In “Rainman” with Tom Cruise as a playboy luxury car seller discovers he has an older brother portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, raised since birth in a care home because he is Autistic. But he has a savant’s affinity for numbers, and can memorize long strings, and correlate them.

So Cruise does what anybody with sense would do: he takes his brother to Las Vegas to the high stakes card games! Although casinos prohibit card-counting which takes away from the House edge because you could compute the probabilities remaining and cash out, it wouldn’t work against a true prodigy as played by Dustin Hoffman to whom these things are second nature!

• -- In the black and white independent movie “Pi” directed and acted in by Aronofsky, a math prodigy is funded by some Jewish Kabalists who are using his homemade juiced-up super computer in his NYC tenement apartment to devine all the names of Yahweh, which would end all existence! Meanwhile, another group wants him to develop a formula that would allow them to manipulate the multi-trillion dollar New York Stock Exchange.

Every day on the steps when they encounter each other leaving in and out of the building, a little Asian girl asks him the multiplicand of two four digit numbers. He hesitates just a second and thrills her with the correct answer, which she already has written down.

-- There is even a current broadcast TV show, on of all places what was called a “Vast Wasteland,” called “Numb3rs” where mathematics is an integral part, so to speak. The sum of the plotlines are the use of statistics and probability as the brother of a police detective uses math to help him crack hard cases.

I knew I’d live long enough that I’d see a time when Nerds, like the Meek, would inherit the Earth. Having Bill Gates as the richest and biggest nerd on the planet as an icon wasn’t nearly enough for us. I mean Them.

Prime numbers have long been of interest to people throughout history. There are good reasons for this. People noticed that three, the Trinity, is the basic unit of the Family: Man, Woman, and Child. (No matter what the "Brokeback Brothers" and Others think).

This is also the building blocks for the tribe, society, and civilization. While we in our society think of the Primacy of the Individual, Nature does not ratify our narrow minded emphasis.

And while we may toy with asinine concepts such as “Homosexual Rights” (!?) Nature only has a dead end planned leading to the scrap heap of history for any society who ventures too far down that path, which was one of the lessons of the story of the twin cities Sodom and Gomorra, and the declines of the Roman and Greek empires.

Those ancient Northeast Africans, whose peoples came from much further south by the Nubian Kushite lands just north of Ethiopia now largely covered by the waters of the Aswan Dam, had forgotten more about math than any other society or civilization had ever known. They used its mysteries as useful shortcuts to help them build some rather large structures that you may have heard about.

Because the yearly flooding Nile would destroy any signs, posts or landmarks, the property lines would be messed up and therefore mess up people’s money. Can’t have that! So they needed a measuring system that would exist independent of nature, and they found it in math, particularly Geometry, or literally translated “Earth Measuring.”

They noticed that every time the Nile flooded in their Spring time, the southern star Sirius would rise. Now Egypt is closer to the Equator, so their stars are higher up than what we see, unless you’re on the southern tip of Florida, or in Hawai’i.

In the spring, Sirius is especially prominent, like a diamond in the crisp air. So now they had a time key to warn them, and as noted in Sun Tzu's classic The Art of War "Forewarned is Forearmed." But what about a permanent marker that would stay year after year to keep things straight?

If someone would get on that hill over there and sight over, they could mark off distances, and save the values. If they used two hills, with mirrors or white and red striped poles they could use Triangulation! Since an Equilateral Triangle has all sides equal in length and angle, if they could get a triangle measure on a hill it would be safe. Three hills and thus a Square (1 side being the Observer) would be lots better, but that’s harder to do.

Of course messing around with Triangles eventually translated to its three dimensional version, which is a Pyramid. Circles, triangles, squares, polygons and their manipulations and interactions could now be manipulated on tables and on papyrus in small scale instead of building a structure first. It would be a small step from this to manipulating math in the mind itself using abstract symbols, which is where the Geometry created by Black Africans evolved to what was later termed "Al-Gebra" by the invading Arabs, which is where we get the name ALGEBRA

Would that the unfortunate architect of the “Bent Pyramid,” had made use of better math. He was the taskmaster of the obviously defective pyramid out of the 70 or so worthy of the name in Northeast Africa from Tunisia to Sudan to Ethiopia . One of the sides is longer, and was curved back sharply to fit in! The Pharaoh of the time was most PO’ed big time. Reportedly, the story says the incompetent architect’s body holds up the dysfunctional rounded curve as his contribution for his mistake. There are some architects today who should share his fate, but the law would disapprove.

I use this Bent Pyramid as an example for those deluded racist knuckle heads -- who we call “Pyramidiots” -- who insist that only space faring aliens with AntiGravity beams could have built the Pyramids, which they used as resting pads as seen in the movies "The 5th Element" and "Star Gate." Really. Well, I’ve been inside the Pyramids, and those were some dumb-ass aliens if they did!

(See the Inside Story pictures at Pyramids at Gizeh)

These were creations of a just-past Stone Age people who used lots of backbreaking labour, time and their smarts; no Aliens need apply! And those who think that people with dark skin with hair as lamb’s wool can’t create grand structures really need to check yourself before you wreck yourself!

But being ripped off for the credit they are due is nothing new to the Kemetans, another name for the inhabitants of Northeast Africa.

There is an ancient device they had to pick out the Prime Numbers under 100. Its called the Sieve of Eratosthenes, but it like so many works of Africa were appropriated by Europeans and invading Arabs from the East who placed their names on the discoveries of others, then denigrated the inventors. But I digress:

So the ancients knew that certain odd numbers had properties. They went on, knowing 11 was a Prime as well. Then they encountered 13, another Prime. This had historical connections. The Last Supper depicted in Christian paintings had 13 people, Yeshua and his 12 disciples. (There is a Disembodied Arm on the left side of the DaVinci painting that is really weird!).

Friday the 13, and Triskidelaphobia is not well-known outside of Eurocentric cultures. Natalie Portman’s character in “Where the Heart Is” didn’t care two snaps for the number thirteen. In the film, the former child actress in "The Professional" who portrayed Queen Padme Amidala in the first three “Star Wars” had a fear of the number 5. Nothing good came from it. She even had an accident in aisle five of the Wal-Mart she’s been hiding out and living in for months.

Some Africans consider the number 13 to be lucky. In fact, in the Seventies there was a counter-culture holiday known as “Black Friday” where the Africentrists, artisans, poets, musicians and Black Panthers would gather and celebrate, and talk about how they were going to stick it to The Man.

Now, the rare day is used as an excuse to temporarily halt The Struggle in all its eternally indeterminatedness, and instead the now Gray Panthers gather about, recite poetry, emote and eat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Of greater interest is what are called Transcendental Numbers. The handling of numbers such as the mysterious ratio of any circle’s radius divided into its diameter equals Pi, or 3.14159. This is so mysterious and like the nature of c, the Speed of Light is a Universal Constant that it was used in the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan book version of “Contact” but not the movie one, as a way of seeing into the mind of the Supreme Being.

It thus re-joined Science and Religion from the schism after the 1600s when discoveries showed the utter nonsense of Biblical pronouncements, such as the Sun going around the Earth, ( “Sun, stand thou still!”) and it being a mere 6,200 years old. In the book, Science in its way proved the existence of God by delving into numbers such as the tripwire we call Pi, where like the aliens in “2001 a Space Oddessy,” the All had hidden the proof Her presence until we were ready and able to encounter it and handle it. But in our history there are some people who can’t handle the truth.

There are numbers that are non-terminating after being divided. Legend has it that when a member of the famed Greek math academy in Athens rushed into a temple room shouting about how he’d discovered Irrational Numbers. It is said that he was slain on the spot, lest such heretical knowledge escape and its flaws infect the pure math they so loved!

It works with even and odd numbers. For instance, 5 divided by 3 yields a non-terminating number, 1.666666 . Its a weird one too, that is connected to what the Greeks -- there they go again-- called the Aureum Modem, or the Golden Mean. Basically its the formula for Beauty, and the ratio is repeating so often in the works of humanity and those of nature that something spooky is going on! And I don’t mean the 666s either. Even in the Bible it doesn’t say that’s the actual number of the Beast, its the number that is its value. Read deeper.

Pi is a special class of Transcendental numbers called Non-Terminating, Non Repeating. There isn’t any kind of a pattern in Pi’s long, long number line -- so far as we know. Some of us like to see how many digits we can memorize Pi back to. I can now only do what you’ve seen above, but I achieved 15 digits for awhile. I was bored one evening.

The basis for the book “Contact” by the late Carl (“Billions”) Sagan and Ann Druyan is that there is a pattern in Pi, but its really really really far up the line, can only be accessed by super computers and patience, and reads like the Encyclopedia Galactica with the wisdom of the Divine cracked open for our fevered reading, where all our questions would now find answers!

So on the Friday the 13ths to come, there is nothing to be feared from numbers no matter what the Numerologists say. Numbers are your friends, and they can teach you a lot if you are willing to learn.

They also noticed that three times three, or that prime number cubed led to 9, which is the same number of months for a woman to bring forth a creation of her own.

“So, there you have it,” they reasoned.

“Doesn’t this show that women are directly connected to the Divine One?!”

Indeed, the oldest representations of tribal peoples always depicted women as Divinities, such as prehistoric carvings in what is now Russia to the 68 or so Black Madonnas from Spain to Russia, until this evolving and competing CULT OF MARY was dethroned by male hierarchies when the early Christian church was being set up.

In particular was the misogynistic vehemence of the Catholic Church, which chased down, sequestered and burned all those who looked to the Cult of Mary which threatened their power. Sometimes artifacts such as the too well-hidden Dead Sea Scrolls pop up showing that under Gnosticism, a Greek word referring to Those in the Knowledge, women were much greater involved in the establishment of early Christianity.

This is the basis for Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code,” about the search for the Holy Grail which is not a large cup for holding Last Supper wine, which doesn’t even appear in DaVinci’s strange painting by the way, but is God’s universal repository which is the Wo-Man, through which She creates Humanity, or the earthbound mortal versions of the Divine.