Heavenly Bodies and Their Accidents

As we continue our weekly readings of Sulayman al-Mahri’s Mir’at al-salak (Mirror of Travellers; see our previous post), wondering about the relation between cosmography and geography and navigation, as in one of the recent RUTTER Blog posts, we have come across an interesting live example of “saving the phenomena”, straight from the 16th-century Arabian Peninsula.

The context is Ptolemaic through-and-through, with al-Mahrī explaining in Chapter 5 what relates to the “accidents” of the planets in their courses. He takes a while to describe the mechanics of planetary movement, dwelling on the details of retrogradation which were so fundamental to the whole Ptolemaic edifice. So we need to brush up conscientiously on our pre-modern astronomy terms in Arabic, the epicycles, deferents, with their apogees and perigees, to follow carefully the exposition. But then, after a thorough explanation, we come across the following,

Now, it is obvious that the heavenly bodies bring to completion the circular movement inside their orb without experiencing any alteration that touches on the orb. For their movement is neither faster nor slower, nor do they go backwards on their path, or halt their movement in the actual fact itself (nafs al-amr). But all this has to do with the relation between our vision (hasab ru’yatinā) and the composition of the movements (tarkīb al-harakāt).

While it has become commonplace to cite Aristotle on the matter of “saving the phenomena”, it is well known that from the earliest times of Greek philosophy there was a tension between the perfect motion of the spheres—cf. Timaeus, “time is the moving image of eternity”—and the perceived irregularity of the astronomical phenomena. Most notable and seminal are the Platonic passages in Timaeus, Epinomis and the Laws, but for example, and more directly astronomical, here is Geminus of Rhodes (1st century BC),

The Pythagoreans, who were the first to apply themselves to investigations of this kind, assumed the movements of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets to be circular and uniform. They would not admit, with reference to things divine and eternal, any disorder such as would make them move at one time more swiftly, at one time more slowly, and at another time stand still.

Ptolemy (Almagest III, 1 and XIII, 2) is very clear about preserving as much as possible the simplicity of the models (Gr. hypotheseis), and the Middle Ages saw countless back and forth arguments on this matter, which might be said to be a conversation, at times heated!, between cosmology and cosmography, what we know to be de iure, and what we perceive to be de facto. It is all a series of disputationes maybe, lively and truly philosophical. How remarkable, then, that an unassuming Yemeni pilot of the 16th century, man of praxis and adventure, should join the conversation, echoing in his clear, matter-of-fact discourse, the arguments of so many centuries before him—from Pythagoras to al-Mahrī, just a blink of a scientific eye! [JA]

Circles and Stars Between Cosmology and Cosmography

The recently-opened Lisbon exhibition “The Emperor’s Gift: Circles of Knowledge” brings to light a recently-discovered 19th-century Arabic manuscript, a (literally) dizzying and (literally) encyclopaedic collection of circular diagrams and tables covering all the topics between heaven and earth. In fact, this Gulbenkian manuscript, called in Arabic Tuhfat al-Khaqan: Dawa’ir al-‘Ulum wa-Jadawil al-Ruqum (The Emperor’s Gift: Circles of the Sciences and Tables of the Numerals), is organized thematically in a way that reminds us of medieval encyclopaedias, notably from Ming China, following the tripartite arrangement of Heaven–Earth–Man (Tian–Di–Ren) or, roughly, cosmogony/cosmology–geography–beliefs/psychology.

The manuscript is literally dizzying because the convoluted paths of minuscule lettering force the reader to turn the head or turn the text in many ways to be able to follow: you actually have to “get your head round it”! And it is literally encyclopaedic because the great part of its contents is about transmitting a teaching (Gr. paideia) in a circular format (Gr. enkyklon): “a teaching in circles” is as literal a rendering of the Greek enkyklopaideia as we can get. This makes us think a lot about the conceptual and visual power of the circle.

Mirza Muhammad al-Akhbari, Tuhfat al-khaqan, 19th-c. MCG manuscript, fols. 2v-3r.

And in turn (how else?), from our particular RUTTER angle, thinking of navigation, orientation, windroses, and rhumb diagrams, we realise that this exhibition is at heart about one of the fundamental questions in philosophy of science: that of mathematical realism, in a Pythagorean and Galilean way, revived in our days by the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH). The question, succinctly put, is, how can we explain that material reality be so adequately described by mathematical formulas and geometrical diagrams?

Sundial, courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan.

Even only grazing this topic, needless to say, exceeds the scope of these brief lines, but let us suggest that a useful answer may be related, once again, to the Great Triad (三才 sancai) of Chinese cosmology, to a certain essential correspondence, a very familiar je ne sais quoi shared by Heaven, Earth and Man, that is, the physical order of the world beyond the earth, the order of our planet, and the properties of our mental apparatus, our consciousness. The key underlying “forms” to study, consider, and contemplate, are three: orthogonality (the grid), concentricity and radiality. This manuscript, and the extremely suggestive Gulbenkian exhibition are at once evocative, aesthetically delightful, and seriously provocative in the best philosophical way. They are welcome in every way in our times of sound bites and attention-stealing technology. [J. Acevedo]

Cosmic Navigation and Cosmic Pilots

As we embark on a new academic year with our Arabic reading group, we start more in earnest to tackle the pages of Sulayman al-Mahri’s Mir’at al-salak li-kurat al-aflak (Mirror of Travellers into the Heavenly Spheres), a primer of astronomy for the education of maritime pilots in the early 15th century. Not so much of a primer really, but more like an intermediate-level handbook of cosmography.

The first pages tell us about the order of the heavenly orbs, how the universe is conceived as… an onion (that’s my image, not al-Mahri’s!), or more elegantly, as a compound of concentric spheres, within each of which move the planets or other heavenly bodies. It all starts from the centre of the earth, with the description of the elemental spheres wrapped around it: water, air, fire. This cosmology is of course in all its basics an Aristotelian cosmology, found in numerous accounts over most of ancient and medieval Eurasia. Latin versions abound, including some beautifully illustrated.

Gautier de Metz, 13th century.

Approximately at the same time that al-Mahri was writing his works, Iberian nautical science was being revolutionised by the incorporation of astronomical precision techniques to the extensive tried and tested savoir-faire of the pilots. Long-distance oceanic navigation elicited, or rather forced, technoscientific developments which brought its practitioners to new levels of skill. And yet, East or West, either in Atlantic or Indian Ocean waters, there is the lingering question: Did they really need to know about the system of the cosmos in order to take a ship from A to B? And if they did not need to know those cosmic subtleties, why did they keep learning them? Why would such a practical pilot as al-Mahri, who wrote excruciatingly detailed route descriptions, care to elaborate so much on what was practically philosophical knowledge? Was it just didactic inertia, a superstitious repetition of old doctrines?

The answer is most likely “No, they did not need to know,” just as a mechanic fixing a carburetor does not need to know the laws of physics, or a butcher the details of embryology. A more interesting question may be asked, though, especially in our times, when all the cosmology and astronomy of the nautical sciences has been encapsulated in little devices which use satellite geo-positioning technology, like GPS. The question, and we are only left to ponder, is How did that knowledge impact their navigation? Did it have any practical influence, or was it just a matter of “depth”, of ”taste” (sapere, saber, dhawq) added to the mental framework of the pilots? Next time you meet a 15th-century pilot, we know what to ask him! [JA]

Infirmities of Time

As a new Gregorian year sets in, and as we start a new year of Arabic readings, this week’s passage of Ibn Mājid’s Fawā’id could not be more appropriate for a good reflection on the passing of time.

In one of his trademark digressions from the hard technical details of his craft, Ibn Mājid launches into a lengthy poem lamenting the swift passage of time, speaking of lovers in the night, turtledoves, wine and stringed instruments—all the usual imagery of medieval Arabic love poetry—“pierced by dawn and by the muezzin’s voice as if by an arrow.” All this, remember, at the end of a lengthy chapter on sailing seasons, and on the calendrical accuracy and traditional knowledge needed to travel safely across the Indian Ocean. And then comes his reflection after the poem,

“It may be that the monsoon (sailing season) too is afflicted by time with some illness which our minds cannot begin to grasp. Because it is said that every year the season comes later by a quarter of a day of the sphere.”

Layla Visits Majnun in the Palm Grove, page from a 16th-c. manuscript (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

This ingenious return from the romance of the previous verses to the chapter’s subject matter gives us concrete scientific indications and also a cosmological subtlety.

The scientific indication has to do with the specific solar calendar used by the Arab pilots at the time. It is known that it was a variation of the Yazdgerdi calendar, itself a development of the Zoroastrian calendar, but it is hard to pin down exactly which variant. Here it seems clear that it was a calendar of 365 days without any adjustment for the extra quarter of a day (the tropical year has roughly 365 days and a quarter), and this explains the fact that the seasonal dates were shifting, one day every four years—a known feature of some of the early Persian calendars.

The subtlety has to do with the Arabic word ‘illah, translated here as “illness” and often meaning also a “cause”. Suffice to say that the three semi-vowels central to Arabic writing are called hurūf al-‘ilal, “causal letters” or “letters of infirmity”, corresponding to the Hebrew “mothers of the reading” (imot qeri’ah/matres lectionis)—by being “weak”, like “accidents” of the consonantal fabric, they make articulation possible; they are the efficient causes of articulation.

In this particular case, the infirmity is the ever-uneasy discrepancy between solar days and the solar year (why, oh why can’t the sun return to the equinoctial point in an exact number of days!?). But through this “weakness” in the astronomical fabric, how many changes are set in motion, and how much science has developed!

Ibn Mājid’s point is a sort of poignant physico-lyrical subtlety: the order of the world is full of such little ”cracks”, “weak spots” which are as discreet doors to the forces of causality. They are happy accidents, hotspots for discovery, invention, but also turning points away from every stability, and so unhappy and sad from the point of view of the contented lovers.

As we start a new year, here is to many happy accidents of invention and discovery to our readers and colleagues. Kullu ‘am wa antum bi-khayr! [JA]

Arab Tridua: Three-Day “Weeks” in Arabia

This post is about a rather neglected aspect of time division in early Arabia. In his Fawā’id (IV, 7) Ibn Mājid explains: “Every month is divided in ten parts of three days each, and each part has its name.” Then he lists the ten triads or, more specifically, tridua: Ghurar, Nufal, Tusa‘, ‘Ushar, Buhr, Bīd, Durā‘, Muhāq, Hanādis, Ziyād, Surar. Most of the names are straightforward in meaning, relating to the appearance of the moon or to the date count, and the word “three” is implicit. For example, “The three of Tusa‘” (al-thalāth al-tusa‘) means something like “the three [days] of the ninth”, because this triad ends on the ninth day of the lunar month. Al-thalāth al-bīd means “the three of whiteness”, because they are near the full moon.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that the above list actually contains eleven tridua, not just ten. This means to reflect the garbled textual condition in which Ibn Mājid’s list reached his readers in the 15th century, with obvious ingrained misspellings and interpolations. The earlier references I can find for these names are Ibn Wādih al-Ya‘qūbī (9th century) and al-Bīrūnī (11th century), who give slightly different lists. In comparison to them, Ibn Mājid’s does look like the outcome of centuries of Chinese whispers.

Now, al-Bīrūnī explains first that the names are derived “from the distinctness revealed by the state and the curvature of the moon,” and shortly after that they are “taken from the faces of the moon and its curvature.” This is what I find warrants a thought on our concept of “week”. Our weeks derive in part from a division of the lunar cycle in quarters.

Let us leave aside for now the numerological relevance of the division in three, seven or ten, which we have discussed previously. We can see how the beautiful continuum of the lunation allows for as many divisions as our powers of observation allow us to determine distinct—hence nameable—units. How many nights do we need to appreciate each clearly distinct aspect of the moon?

Nama-rupa, in the Sanskrit philosophical terminology, “name-form”: mutually dependent and inseparable aspects of every phenomenon, everything that appears to then vanish “under the Sun.” The gentle and ever-so-fleeting light of the moon is perhaps the phenomenon par excellence, now there, now vanished… What is left to us, puny sublunary creatures is to wield our power to name, and thus, by naming, to create scientia, the knowability and the knowledge, a “possession for ever.” [JA]

The Spacetime of Early Modern Navigation

As we continue to read chapter 4 of the Fawā’id, about the nautical rhumbs, and as we go through detailed descriptions of time and distance measurements, we come across technical concepts which in their practicalities bring us, once again, to reflect on some of the principles of our modern technoscience.

The distance unit in early modern Arab navigation was the zām (pl. azwām). The technical concept is the taraffā or tirfa, called by early Portuguese explorers the “Rule of the Leagues” (regimento das leguas), the function between the distance travelled, the latitude progress, and the azimuth of the destination: e.g. if you travel straight up north, it takes you one hour to shift your position by one degree northwards, but if you travel towards the north-east, it will take you longer to advance that same degree northwards. A nice image of this concept is given by the triangle below, where A is the point of origin, and the latitude difference between A and B would be one degree. Simply put: the AB diagonal path takes longer to reach the same parallel.

Now, how to measure the advance without any points of reference on the flat surface of the ocean? The key point is: time is a function of movement. Something has to move for there to be a sign of time, because, as ordinary language teaches us: “time passes”, and we speak about “a space” or “an extension” of time, and we ask “how long?” as if we were speaking of a stretch of a road or a piece of string.

The solution: look up from the surface of the ocean and into the sky, where the positions and the continuous movement of the heavenly bodies show us directions and show us time. This relation between movement and time brings to mind Plato’s formulation: “time is the moving image of eternity” (Timaeus 37d). A sundial illustrates this too, being somehow “a moving shadow of eternity”. The passing stars were the necessary reference, and so, one of the definitions of zām reads, “the distance it takes to raise the Pole Star by one eighth of a finger if the ship sails due north”.

Sundial, courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan.

Fundamental coexistence of space and time, and strikingly obvious continuity of their dimensions… What to make, in this light, of the complexities of the space-time formalism of contemporary physics, with their illustrious history and mathematical refinements? Is this yet another case of “nothing new under the sun”? The word itself, spacetime, goes perfectly well with the medieval perception of navigators—the consubstantiality of space and time was immediately obvious. Perhaps it is just a matter of continuing to deepen the dialogue, the centuries-old conversation between the depths of metaphysical speculation and the frontlines of physical enquiry. Time will tell. [JA]

Signs on the Horizons

One of the best known Qur’anic verses related to navigation is 41:35, “We shall show them Our signs upon the horizons and within themselves, until it be clear to them that He is the Real” (the change of grammatical person: “Our signs"/“He is”, is a typical Qur’anic figure (iltifāt), as if emphasizing that the “person” is always the One and Only).

As we have seen in recent posts, and as is made obvious in the design of the wind rose, the nautical rhumbs establish a direct relation between the central subject, i.e. the pilot or the vessel itself, and the peripheral object deployed in 360 degrees of possibility, divided in a conventional number of directions, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. Seen on the two-dimensional pattern, as seen from a stationary position, the horizon is the utmost limit, the non plus ultra. The natural state of the landlubber is this beyond-less confinement, where the signs on the horizon are informative, recreational, interesting, even fascinating.

But there are the travellers, those who move on. And there are the astronomers, the true astrologers who have intimate knowledge of the movement of the cosmos, of the law of movement, whereby mighty lights rise from the horizon, run their course, and set, inexorably.

For such pilots and knowers of the spheres, the signs are an existential reality, a living knowledge: “beyond” and “self” merged, the horizons are not a limit, but a stage of the journey—onward they sail, guided without error by the stars whose love is in their heart. For them, in their journey Home, the horizons from within themselves reverberate encircling one another, circle upon circle upon circle… [JA]

Nautical Melothesia

Melothesia is not a word you encounter every day at the supermarket, and yet it names an idea that never ceased to accompany civilization until the advent of our modernity. Straight from the Greek μελοθεσία, the “assignment of parts” or the “apportioning of limbs”, it refers to the vital correspondence between the parts of the human body and the divisions of the sky; it is the immemorial macrocosm-microcosm doctrine, and one of the applications of the Emerald Tablet’s famous opening sentence: “As above, so below.” There are famous images about it across cultures, most known to us as one or other kind of “Zodiac Man” image, the homo signorum.

One of the best known depictions of melothesia,
from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 15th c.

Melothesia was not limited to correspondence of the body with the duodecimal solar zodiac signs. There was also a nakshatra-purusha in Indian tradition, the “Lunar Stations Man”, i.e. based on the lunar zodiac division of 27/28 divisions; and other cultures had analogous correspondences based on different divisions.

27 lunar stations on the body of Vishnu.

Melothesia was generally associated with medicine, martial arts, music… but in early modern Arab navigation we also have a fascinating analogue and a true nautical melothesia based on the division of the horizon in 32 rhumbs. The basic practice, details of which we will be reading about during the coming weeks, is that the ship, instead of the body, is virtually divided in 32 “directions” projected from the compass card, as if the wind rose were projected around the ship’s deck. For example, if we assign the north to the bow, then the stern will correspond to the south. This way, the parts of the vessel are mapped onto the directions, and by focusing on a part of the vessel, a certain destination will be reached.

This strictly practical application of the immemorial macrocosm-microcosm doctrine illustrates the better-known astrological and alchemical doctrines making them more concretely understandable. In fact, it seems to echo the astrological adage: “character is destiny,” which then, put in navigation terms, might be: “The disposition of your rhumbs will determine your destination.” Destiny–Destination, perhaps just one among many pairs of crucial terms of ancient cosmologies which are illuminated by an unbiased study of medieval technoscience. [JA]

The Ever-Unseen Scientific Certainty

We had had occasion, with one of the lunar mansions, to discuss the paradoxical importance of weaker stars and asterisms. Now, last week our reading had to do with the importance of the two poles (qutbayn) and their related stars: Polaris (al-Jāh) in the first place, but mentioning also Errai (γ Cephei) and, near the South Pole, the Magellanic Clouds. Ibn Mājid gives several ways of ascertaining the location of the poles using combinations of pointers, and then he observes,

The Pole is not with a given star, but it is a black space between east and west, which is ascertained with the astrolabe and the lodestone.

He goes on about this idea, and somewhere else in the text he says the Pole “is not clothed” or “wrapped” with any star. This fact is of course at the basis of the crucial technical concept of Polar Star calibration (bāshī), which was so important in Indian Ocean nautical sources; the need to know exactly the relation between Polaris and the Pole at any given time.

It is almost a truism to speak of the immobility of the centre of motion, like a wheel hub—it is after all the Aristotelian motor immobilis—and it is a given of any axis of movement. But this immobility does not require the invisibility of the axis, that it be somehow “imperceptible”, only within grasp of the mind’s eye, through reasoning and contemplation. This is exactly like the nature of all the celestial circles in an armillary sphere. It might be tempting to call them “figments of the imagination”, when in reality they are truths recognized by the imaginative faculty.

How many certain routes traced, and how many bright and prominent events accurately anticipated, all on the basis of these invisible polar certainties! Beyond simplistic stereotypes of “science vs intuition”, and beyond the media-fed storyline of science as the summit of exactitude, it is strikingly obvious here, as in other similar instances, that science has always been not only at ease with uncertainty and with opaqueness, but rooted in it. The scientist, like a sailor in the night, is at home with indetermination, again and again. Good to remember in these uncharted times, and quite in line with Hesse’s verse,

Wahrlich, keiner ist weise,
Der nicht das Dunkel kennt.
“Truly, no one is wise
Who does not know darkness.”
[JA]

Between Heaven and a Vast Place

Just a pause for thought as we prepare to start a new chapter of the Fawā’id. Last week we completed the longest chapter, on the twenty-eight lunar stations (manāzil al-qamar), and now we move on to a chapter on the thirty-two stellar rhumbs (akhnān). We shall soon have occasion to go into more detail regarding the rhumbs, but for now it may be useful to consider the connections between the two topics.

The path of the lunar stations goes roughly along the inclined red line. The 32 stellar rhumbs are laid out on the horizontal of the equator, one rhumb each 11 1/4°.

The system of lunar stations is—schematically—an equal division of the sky. The system of stellar rhumbs is an equal division of the entire circle of the horizon, based—schematically—on the rising points of a set of sixteen stars. In theory, their rising points and their diametrical opposites define the compass points. Interestingly, in the Mediterranean, the same division of thirty-two compass points was “based” on the winds, and there were quite complex names of the winds!

So we have one “vertical”, or at least celestial, positioning system, and one horizontal system. Between them, as if availing himself of the possibilities of this conjunction, is the master pilot, a tiny dot with his vessel in the middle of the ocean: so small and insignificant, and yet, thanks to his knowledge (scientia), in command of the situation, following an invisible path through the deep water. Stay tuned for many more details over the coming weeks, digging into the facets and subtleties of the knowledge and practice of the stellar rhumbs. [JA]

Sewing Paterns in the Sky

In the beginning of this journey through Kitāb al-Fawā’id, we dedicated one of our very first posts to the idea of mimesis. We were reading about navigation history in the first fā’idah, and about how Noah’s ark resembled the Big Dipper. Now, nearly two chapters later, this same idea reappears in relation to the 26th and 27th lunar mansions, al-far‘ān.

In ancient Bedouin tradition, the stars of the great square of Pegasus were imagined to be the upper open end of a well bucket, from which water would be poured. Seen in the night sky, its shape resembles a square where two parallel sides—one southern, the other northern—are the two lunar mansions called al-far‘ān.

However, neither Ibn Mājid nor Indian craftsmanship considered the four stars to form a perfect square. In fact, the difference between the lengths of the southern and northern sides was a crucial one, for it was the pattern upon which were cut the leech (al-dāmān) and the luff (al-jūsh) of a ship’s sail. Following Ibn Mājid, in Indian traditional craft, such a proportional resemblance was no coincidence. The cutting of the sails (tafsīl) was taken directly from the relative positions of these stars—that is, from the lines imagined in al-far‘ān or the great square of Pegasus. [IB]

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]

The Interplay of the Two Zodiacs

As we continue reading through al-‘Awwā’, Ibn Mājid tells us about the positions of the lunar mansions in the solar zodiac. “At the time of Alexander,” the first northern and southern mansions were al-Sharatān and al-Ghafr respectively—what this means is that, around the fourth century BC, al-Sharatān was the first mansion to be seen rising after the vernal equinox; and Al-Ghafr the first after the autumn equinox—“but they are different in our time, in respect to the zodiac.”

Unlike the mansions of the moon, which correspond to stars visible in the night sky, the solar zodiac was determined by the tropical year. The Babylonian system inherited by the Greeks divided the zodiac into twelve equal divisions of 30 degrees, starting near αβ Arietis, on which the equinoctial sun rose around the year 400 BC.

Aries rising with the sun in Baghdad,
21 March, year 401 BC (Stellarium rendition).

Nowadays, the zodiac is divided in the same way: the sun is said to be in Aries after the vernal equinox, to be in Taurus after 30 degrees, in Gemini after 60, and so on. However, due to the Earth’s axis movement (the precession movement), the equinoctial points have been slowly shifting to the west in relation to the stars in the background. Even though Aries conventionally begins after the spring equinox, the constellation actually seen rising at that period is Pisces. At the time of Ibn Mājid, “when the sun or the moon descend in al-Sharatān (αβ Arietis), only six degrees of Aries remain there, and all of al-Butayn (εδρ Arietis) is within Taurus.” The lunar zodiac remained throughout a sidereal system, and this is one of the reasons why it had, and still may have, very practical usages for navigation. [IB]

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]

Shapes and Letters in the Sky

The sixth lunar station brought with it a mention of an early classic by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (d.986), the Book on the Shapes of Stars (Kitāb suwar al-kawākib), a harmonization between Ptolemaic and Arab lore, adding to the Greek heritage, and describing in detail forty-eight asterisms. The word sūrah (sing. of suwar) is commonly used to refer to a constellation: a shape, an image in the sky. It is also one of the common words used to translate the Platonic forms or ideas, the suwar aflātūniyyah. There is in this shared term more than a hint at the fundamental cognitive status of those shapes in the sky: it is a visual/aesthetic equivalent of their having a name by which we know them.

In late antiquity, constellations were also called stoicheia, the Greek word which meant at once “letters” and “elements”, and thus the zodiac was, accordingly, a circle of twelve celestial letters. In the picture above we can see Taurus in an illustration of al-Sufi’s work. The shape of the Bull may not be there when we look at the night sky, but the stars are articulated in a particular way to make it visible, to realise it. In the picture below, a sample from digital font design, we can see how letters are articulated along and around “control points”, to reveal the shapes we are intimately familiar with.

Iconology of the sky, whereby asterisms are readable as letters, conveyors of logos; and iconography of the alphabet, whereby letters are contemplated as images, objects of beauty. Inseparable mysteries of mimesis and language, of representation and meaning, and at the heart of both, the essence of craft (ars) and every technique: articulation—that oh-so-simple joining of the dots. [JA]

The Perilous Strait: al-Dayqah

Last week we came to touch on a subtle point of astrological theory: the transition between signs of contrasting qualities. The Pleiades, as readers of this blog now know, are beneficial par excellence, just as the following mansion, Aldebaran, is well known as an unlucky place. The question naturally arises: How does the transition between these antithetic stations play out?

There is an intervening area (furjah) between the two which is called al-Dayqah, “the narrows”, “the constriction”, for “whoever does anything when the moon is in this area, his actions will be constricted (dāqa).”

There are many examples in world mythology and scripture of similar precarious intermediary states, of the fragility of an interregnum, like the Symplegades for the Argonauts, and in particular the strait and risky transitions of birth and death, the intermediary human states par excellence, famously called bardo in the Tibetan tradition. In Islamic tradition there is a recurrent avoidance of what is called the furaju shaytān, the “gaps of the devil” which are the empty spaces between the ranks of people praying at mosques, which must always be filled, i.e. no perilous empty spaces must remain.

Trying to understand the negative character of this narrow band of heaven (for why should it be negative, and not simply neutral instead?), to make sense of this quality, I wonder if we might use as a ready comparison, even if painful, the predicament faced by most of the world at this very moment. As we try to navigate our liminal period between the end of a pandemic wave and an uncertain immediate future, we may ask: at what point in the cycle of joy and sorrow are we? Is this the perilous prelude of a new birth? In any case, and from a pilot’s point of view, the right attitude is the same Ibn Majid recommends: observe the heavens carefully and all the signs around you, watch over your cargo and your passengers, and sail ahead with caution… [JA]

Lunar Mansions Across Civilizations

This week, by popular demand, we are expanding on last week’s cryptic and passing mention of the Indian and Chinese systems of lunar mansions. It is actually quite a remarkable fact in the history of science that this division of the ecliptic based on the sidereal month (not the synodic month of 29.5 days, but the time it takes the moon to orbit once around the earth with respect to the stars, i.e. 27.3 days) was and remained always relatively foreign to the highly syncretic Western astronomical system.

The 28 “mansions”, “way stations”, or “inns” were from very ancient times an integral part of Indian, Chinese, and Arab cultures (where they were called respectively nakshatra, xiu, and manzil) with a plethora of correspondences and an interrelated history that are yet to be fully probed and clarified.

What makes them urgently interesting for so many disciplines is that in the course of time they became essential to countless aspects of their related cultures, including, in our particular field of study, the art of navigation. They were crucial in timekeeping, astrology, magic, geomancy, agriculture, even to the point that personal names derived from the nakshatras are still common in India. In Arabic, their being 28 in number (sometimes in India 27 were counted) made them match the number of the letters of the alphabet, which gave rise to an “alphastronomical” view of the heavens.

Technically, this circle of twenty-eight asterisms includes variable numbers of more or less notable stars grouped around and along the ecliptic. They frequently overlap with stars of our solar zodiac, and quite often the yogataras or “determinative” stars of a given station are well-known in our astronomical tradition, like Aldebaran or Antares. They were often used in pairs of opposite ascending and descending asterisms (Arabic anwa’), which would be memorized and recited by sailors even until recent years, thus ensuring and furthering their practical usefulness, and they corresponded to a rich mythology.

The supernatural figures associated with the 28 xiu in the Jade Box Scriptures
(see Exploring Ancient Skies, 2005).

The great antiquity of the system seems established by comparing precessional changes with the fact that the original series started with Krittika, the Pleiades—it must have developed around 2400 BC. And so, this week, as we start reading Ibn Majid on “the most auspicious” of them all, the mansion of the Pleiades (Arabic al-Thurayya, whence the familiar name Soraya), we will not only be dealing with 15th century Arab nautical astronomy, but touching directly on a very ancient and far-reaching doctrine. [JA]

The Strong Place of the Weak

This week’s reading brought us to the second lunar mansion, al-Butayn, an inconspicuous group of stars towards the end of Aries. The name is a diminutive, “the little belly”, in the familiar vocalic pattern of many Arabic diminutives and terms of endearment, especially feminines like Zubayda, Sumaya, Ruqaya, and others. It is so unremarkable that Ibn Mājid explains it is hardly useful for navigation, but that it has nonetheless a referential value, and that it was made a mansion in the sky out of necessity, not for orientation—that “it is useful through its name in the count of the mansions; not because of its observation” (yuntafa‘u bi-ismihi fī al-‘adad wa-lā bi-ru’yatihi).

It is easy, and perhaps even appropriate, to dismiss al-Butayn quickly. Its barely visible stars of fifth magnitude surely do not warrant much coverage, and in fact the section devoted to them is the shortest of all the mansions. But we should still pause and make sure we do not overlook their role and their importance.

The circle of heaven is divided in roughly equal parts according to the regularity of its movement and the “mathematical” (i.e. “dialogically intelligible”) need of human observers; there can be no gaps in the count. Regardless of whether you divide the ecliptic in 12, 24 or 28, you cannot have a gap. And we need to name each part in order to understand, comprehend, and employ them; they cannot remain nameless. Al-Butayn is, accordingly and strictly speaking, just as necessary as the other mansions, in spite of its relative obscurity. It may not be bright and eye-catching, but with its name and its position it is a part of heaven—an indispensable element in the circular alphabet of the signs.

Its specific function and its power lie precisely in its subdued qualities, and in this case the sister traditions of India and China are highly instructive: the corresponding Indian nakshatra (Bharani) and Chinese xiù (Tian Yin,“the Heavenly Yin”) relate unequivocally to a restrained intimate aspect of femininity, to the womb—the fragile yet indispensable night of our origins.

As always and everywhere, ignoring the influence of al-Butayn and its gently determining influence might have imperiled our projects, bringing far reaching and catastrophic consequences. Let it be hereby acknowledged as it deserves, and our future readings be preserved! [JA]

The Spherical Wisdom of the Turner

As we plough on, degree by degree, through the details of the lunar mansions, which means coming to terms with the subtleties related to the intersection of synodic and tropical moon cycles, Ibn Mājid throws us yet another unexpected glimpse into a comprehensive cosmological vision underpinning the science of navigation—as every other medieval artisanship: “Understand this wisdom, only comparable to what is effected by the one who makes the spheres turn” (dawwār al-adwār).

All the rotating precision which makes orientation possible is thus devolved to its ultimate cause, the prime mover who, like a turner or a potter (a traditional Biblical image), keeps giving shape to the universe through the motion of a cosmic lathe—or revolving in his divine mind the archetypal ideas.

Astronomicum Caesareum, 16th century

It is little wonder that the ups and downs of sublunary existence are under the sway of a wheel, Fortune’s, which at times is like a tornado, and at times an immovable mover like the Ka‘bah (one of whose epithets is, precisely, dawwār). Same idea in India with the King of the World, the chakravartin, “through whom the wheel is moving” or “he who controls by means of a wheel.”

The Arabic divine name of al-Dawwār is quite uncommon in Islamic sources, but it’s all about the tornator—tornado and turner at once—qui tornavit coelum et terram, et sphaerica solis et lunae cunctarumque corpora stellarum torno suo, “who with his lathe turns heaven and earth, and the sphaeric bodies of sun, moon and all other stars”—or more concisely and familiarly: amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle. [JA]