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]