When the Pole is Lost… Sail On!

As we advance through the lunar mansions, and as we find new constellations south of the celestial equator, we are given specific advice by Ibn Mājid. “When the Pole Star is lost, the Two Calves (al-Farqadān, in Ursa Minor) can be used. Then when you lose these two in southern regions, make use of al-Jūn and al-‘Anāq (ε and ζ of Ursa Major) to do your work and make your calculations.” We are still relying on the circumpolar stars so far, but further south we must, and “When the Plough disappears, this is the beginning of darkness.”

“The Darkness,” al-Zulumāt (in fact a plural, “the darknesses”, tenebrae) became over the centuries a customary expression for the open ocean, and at some point in particular for the Atlantic, al-Bahr al-zulumat. But it was at its origin a term full of Qur’anic resonance, and it was not limited to water navigation, since “It is He Who maketh the stars for you, that ye may thereby have guidance through the dark (zulumāt) of land and sea” (6:97).

We will find indications for further south navigation in the next sections and chapters of the Fawā’id, but it is remarkable here how the stellar frame of reference changes in such direct relation to the latitude, and how despite moving into deeper waters and unfamiliar skies, we are still within a clearly defined geographical area where pre-modern Arab navigation took place. Shores from the Red Sea, through the Arabian Sea and eastwards to the South China Sea, and as far south as Madagascar were all part of the tightly-knit network of commercial and countless cultural exchanges going back for many centuries.

The intense human activity and the vast area of this maritime expanse is part of the fascination of Ibn Mājid’s works, which as we have mentioned represent the common heritage of generations of many and very different peoples. It is mostly in this cultural sense that it does make sense to speak historically of the Indian Ocean as a “Mediterranean,” a larger and more diverse Mare Nostrum which even included, as we would put it today, “going into the unknown.” [JA]

Forms and Information in the Sky

In one of our previous posts we had mentioned the Book on the Forms of Stars (Kitāb suwar al-kawākib), the influential 10th century stellar catalogue and atlas by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi. We just touched upon another mention of it in the Fawā’id, and it is a good occasion to dig a little deeper into the crucial terminology.

Ibn Mājid complains that the books with illustrations (tasāwīr) do not quite give the correct shape of the Lion. About the ancient Arab megaconstellation of the Lion, we shall only refer again to the Two Deserts One Sky website. Now, the word for “illustration” derives from the same triliteral root as the word for “constellation”, “shape”, “image”. Three letters: s-w-r, combined in many ways, with suffixes and prefixes added in usual ways. They also give tasawwur, “imagination” (the faculty of forming in your mind), or musawwir, the “shaper” or “sculptor” which is one of the Islamic names of God—the Latin dator formarum, giver of forms.

This word “form” has a terribly shifty history in our European languages, reflecting in good measure the Semitic complexity just glimpsed at. One of the early meanings of Latin informatio, our “information”, is to provide a shape from inside by giving transcendental forms to bodies. This is why theologians would say that God informs beings, in a very particular use of the word. When I put my ideas into words, I am in-forming my speech. We inform the night sky with shapes, or do we really?

The Latin forma, just as Portuguese fôrma and Spanish horma, means the mould (Arabic qālab) from which a cast or an imprint is produced. It was essentially the same with Greek τύπος typos, the model, type or archetype, and in this sigillary image we find a key element of the concept, the inversion or alternation of actualisations. Patterns are inverted when cast or stamped or printed.

Escher liked to explore these paradoxes of cause-effect alternation.

At every level, from metaphysics (if we speak of archetypes “above heaven”), to epistemology (subject-object-subject-object), to theology or psychology (see image), to the kitchen (if we speak of baking with moulds), we find this alternation. In Arabic it is called taqālib, a sort of flipping, the ontological negative-positive alternation, and the human organ to really comprehend its meaning is not necessarily the intellect (‘aql) or any faculty related to vision, but the heart (al-qalb), which is related to rhythm. Et mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou. [JA]

Razor’s Edge Precision in Transmision

We are so used to having international standard measures, printing machinery, and recording devices, that we lose sight of how many practical complications did arise when they did not exist. If you have a navigation instrument, which makes the difference between landfall and shipwreck, or the recipe for a medicine, which becomes deadly poison in an overdose, how do you ensure a fail-safe transmission of the necessary knowledge? The answer is simple: you only rely on direct transmission, “by word of mouth,” viva voce. Learning by the eye and by the hand has no substitute in practical arts. Nonetheless, those who know are driven to write ever-imperfect, intrinsecally flawed, or simply hopeful and well-meaning instructions for later generations.

In the context of Indian Ocean navigation, as mentioned last week, we know that it was not simply about an instrument or a set of instruments, but that a sophisticated system of combined and counterchecked observations came into play with the methods transmitted from pilot to pilot—also, symbolically, “from father to son,” as we had found earlier in Ibn Mājid. Last week we found in the Fawā’id a passing detail on the accurate usage of the altitude measuring instrument, the khashbah or “piece of wood” called kamāl in some specialised literature.

“When positioning the wood to make your measure, there must be a thread’s width between the wood and the star you are measuring, and also a thread, fine as a knife’s edge, between the wood and the horizon.”

Immediately after that, Ibn Majid dedicates a few lines to explaining the “intellectual” (‘aqlī) nature of early nautical science, which comes from “the time of the prophets.” The astrolabe comes up as a token of those times, and its invention is attributed to Lāb, son of Idrīs, the archaic and enigmatic prophet, originator of the crafts and identified with Enoch and with Hermes Trismegistus. Ibn Mājid dares not criticise this prophetic knowledge, but the import of his text is clear, and partly explicit: a person needs to have arrived safely ashore many times, and to have faced disaster, before engaging in any pompous discourse about nautical matters. Caveat nauta!

The Lion’s Sneeze (al-Nathrah)

The eighth lunar mansion, according to Ibn Mājid’s count, is yet another one of the parts of the ancient Arab constellation called the Lion, al-Asad. This Lion was so big that it provided material for about eight lunar mansions. It has been dissected and studied in detail by our colleagues at Two Deserts: One Sky, who call it a megaconstellation which “roared from January to May.”

The mansion we are reading about now, al-Nathrah is formed by stars so dimly visible, that they were compared to the droplets of a sneeze. They include, notably, what we call the Beehive Cluster (aka Praesepe, or M44), located at the heart of our constellation of Cancer. M44 was noted in European astronomy since Late Antiquity as nebulosa in pectore Cancri, “a misty thing on the chest of the Crab,” until Galileo resolved it and described it in his Nuncius Sidereus as as cluster of “more than forty small stars.” In China it has long had associations with ghosts and the underworld.

This is yet another example of how stars of lesser visibility can be used for navigation thanks to a sophisticated system of correlations and counterchecks. The nautical practice involves assiduously checking the celestial angles and the culmination points of certain stars, and it is extremely similar to the astrological use of paranatellonta (“the ones rising in combination,“ from παρανατέλλω). It required great experience and knowledge, and in turn it endowed the pilots with a remarkable degree of accuracy. This is why Ibn Mājid decries the vagueness of those pilots who said, “oh, it is just a trifle of an eighth of a finger’s difference!“ When a difference of an eighth of a (nautical) “finger” means a difference of twenty miles in your landfall, it can mean a difference between life and a shipwreck! [JA]