Wipe Out; Learn; Repeat

Some of the lunar mansions, as we have seen before, are of no practical use, but only useful theoretically. That is, quite paradoxically, shiny objects in the sky which are important in spite of their invisibility. They are useful as “placeholders”, like the contours of a glass, perhaps, which are important as limits and containers.

Speaking of one such mansion, al-Na‘a’im, no. 21, Ibn Majid speculates of someone who might have devised a new personal method to use them for navigation, a method which then disappeared (yandarisu) after the inventor’s death, and he concludes: “There isn’t any good in altitude measures that are not put to use.” Let us dwell on the triliteral root (d-r-s) used for the “disappearance” of knowledge, because it combines two apparently opposite meanings of “erasing” and “learning”, and in so doing it illustrates key aspects of knowledge transmission. For example: dars means both “a lesson” and “effacement”—the image is that of the wind blowing signs on the sand, or a teacher wiping out a blackboard.

Like with a glass, where emptiness is a pre-condition of fullness, it seems that a certain kind of erasure is a prerequisite of learning. Science, understood as an accumulation of knowledge through the ages, is built on ignorance, we could say, and not only as an initial mythical tabula rasa, but as ever ascending and ubiquitous instances of unknowing. One apt image for this is the unknown sign, the x in an equation, “what is sought” (al-matlūb), in Arabic.

Another image is the vastness of space, which attracts the explorers and provokes their quests, time and again over the centuries. Two aspects of unknowing: the disappearance due to a break in the transmission is like a vacuum, sterile, an extinguished fire; while the burning “ignorance”, the open question, the “hope” for lands of legend, is an ever-receding horizon, like a plenum and a “matrix of all possibilities.” [JA]

Star-Magical Charm of Scorpio

Reading about the eighteenth lunar mansion, al-Qalb, “The Heart” (of Scorpio), we find once again, but concentrated in one single little passage, several of the themes, the literary and cosmological threads that make the Fawā’id so illuminating and appealing.

On the theme of celestial complementarity, of ever-paired rising and descending stars, which is crucial for the navigational use of the skies, we first find some verses. As earlier in the book, the relations between heavenly bodies are used as pattern and subject of love poetry:

I came across her, when the wind,
Blew on her cheek a curl like the heart of Scorpio.
I asked her for a kiss when we were together,
And she hid from me with a heart of scorpion.

This is presented in the context of Aldebaran (“the eye of the Bull”), just mentioned as the diametrical opposite of this Heart (Antares), and of how both stars are alike in their ill-omened character. But it is Ibn Mājid’s own commentary which brings everything into play: “This poem belongs to permitted magic for love and magnetic attraction of the innermost hearts of men, because of its power, its subtlety, its symbolism, and its correspondence.”

Scorpius (al-‘aqrab) in the sky; a lock of hair (‘aqrab) as a loving memento.

The image of the magically charged lock of hair runs from antiquity in the Song of Songs through to St John of the Cross, and globally across cultures. To write these lines you need a peculiar knowledge of celestial mechanics, to be sure, but also of seemingly unrelated disciplines like prosody, lexicology, astrology, magic, and a keen sense of the concretely human. As Ibn Mājid likes to repeat, nautical knowledge is far from exclusively theoretical, and if anything, it is above all an experiential knowledge.

Traditional navigation skills, in the way they have been preserved by Indian Ocean nautical literature—be it in Arabic or any of the languages of Gujarat, or the Konkan and Malabar coasts—consists of a very synthetic, and not merely systematic, but organic, understanding of man’s situation in the cosmos. Early modern pilots in Ibn Mājid’s lineage were heirs of a tradition beyond our trite dichotomies of humanities vs. science, or arts vs. technology—it was all more roundly human, and for that, so much more enjoyable and rewarding! [JA]

“The Clouds” and Stellar Fraternity

Just a brief note this week, prompted by a passing remark by Louis Massignon in his article about the Magellanic Clouds, “Les nuages de Magellan et leur découverte par les arabes”. Apart from their astronomical interest, these two galaxies, called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), are especially notable for being about 20 degrees from the South Celestial Pole, and as such of great aid to navigation. Even more, their current and historical position bears echoes of an even greater archaic importance, for around 1000BC they were almost on the Pole.

Unknown to Ptolemy, these Two Clouds (al-Sahābatān) were first mentioned in writing by al-Sūfī in the 10th century, and as such they were known to Ibn Mājid, and a common fixture of Indian Ocean navigation. The Celestial Pole can be located at the vertex of an equilateral triangle based on them (or alternatively a larger triangle based on Canopus and Achernar)—see the illustration below, where the Pole is approximately within the blue circle, and the two faint Clouds show on the centre right.

View from Mossel Bay, South Africa, 3 February 1488,
around the time that Bartolomeu Dias first rounded the Cape.

Massignon comments on the warmth of the relation of southern hemisphere nations to the Two Clouds, comparing it to the relation with the Pleiades, and observing: “it is fraternal respect rather than worship.”

The word “government”, we tend to forget, is not directly related to force and to the “might is right” delusion, or to other delusions of imperial grandeur, but to the Greek root kubernao, “to steer”, “to pilot” on the authority of knowledge. That we can benefit from our elder siblings in the sky, all those guiding lights, and to do so fraternally, like a passenger approached a pilot in the middle of the night on board a ship, to have a chat and learn… this is a reassuring thought in stormy times, and as good pilots know, some times are stormier than others. [JA]