Canopus: Gentle Celestial Key

Known in Arabic as Suhayl, Canopus is the second-brightest star in the night sky, second only to Sirius, and it has a cultural importance which it would be hard to exaggerate. In Islamic civilisation in particular, it is notable because the major axis of the Kaaba is aligned with its rising point.

As we read on through the nautical rhumbs, Suhayl has a prominent place, forming part of a diametrical pair which is closest to the poles. Suhayl would be practically a South Pole indicator, while its complementary opposites (al-Na‘sh, the Plough) would be North Pole indicators. Ibn Mājid explains: “Young and old among the people of the desert and the people of the sea, everyone knows Suhayl by sight.” And he adds: “Nothing is better than Suhayl to take altitude measures among what has been set in motion by the Turner of the Spheres (Tornator Caelorum, al-Dawwār). Southern peoples use it to unlock the routes to all of India and Arabia.”

Finding the South Pole,
approx. below the word “Cross” in the image,
between Canopus, Achernar and the Cross.

It is remarkable that the name Suhayl, a star of such mighty practical importance, should mean literally “the little easy-going one”. As a diminutive of sahl, it has a range of related meanings, all familiar names of gentleness. As we had seen with the Pleiades (Thurayyā, Soraya, Zorayda?), Suhayl has also the discreet yet pervasive distinction of being used as a personal given name; it is a common male name not only in Arabic, but in Urdu, Persian and Turkish as well.

This archaic, indeed pre-Islamic, custom of using star names for children makes you wonder about similar practices across cultures. Apart from Spanish Sol and Luna, Sun and Moon, which are used as girls’ names (in Arabic, Shams is for men while Qamar is for women), I can only recall literary characters like Lyra Belacqua (His Dark Materials) and Sirius Black and his family of Harry Potter’s characters. I wonder if our readers can tell us about other people named after celestial bodies? Not sure Arthur would count… Any Betelgeuses or Achernars you are acquainted with!? [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]

Masters of One Language

Speaking of poetry, Ibn Mājid regaled us last week with a demanding passage in verse, though certainly not technical this time. It was a poem introduced as a “a riddle” (lughz), and purportedly about how nobility is related to elevation—we are still on a mainly astronomical section of the book, you see. It had some of the signature boasting of the author: “My name is like the radiant sun to which you entrust the direction of your way,” and yet it also played on quite a different level.

At the end of the cryptic verses, Ibn Mājid gives a hint and also issues a stern caveat: “This riddle is about that name which can only be understood by him who reads it with morphological knowledge, for it contains a fine point of language on the name Ahmad.” The hint about this name is welcome, because it is certainly not apparent in the text! and it has a double meaning: Ahmad is Ibn Mājid’s first name, but it is also recognised immediately by Muslims as an inner name of the Prophet, based on the same three letters h-m-d, from which derives Muhammad.

Ottoman calligraphy: between the names of God and Muhammad, the name Ahmad takes shape.

The caveat given is precious: it points to the fundamental need for thorough training in one canonical language. A pilot and a sailor of the 15th century could boast of his grammatical subtlety because mastery of a classical language was a given in a normal education.

Perhaps in our days we have reached a nadir of linguistic proficiency in academia, when the question of the need to learn languages other than one’s own is even asked. At all times and everywhere (like still in most of the world today), the rule was to move at ease between languages, because the living contact with ancient sources guaranteed a direct and profound experience of “grammar.” Even today, unlettered peasants in India can recite Vedic verses in Sanskrit, like Arab nomads the Qur’an or any Chinese villager Confucius’ Analects—so the anomaly is ours, and the relevant questions are Eliot’s questions: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” [JA]

Be Practical: Learn Your Poems!

Once again, starting from a minimal astronomical excuse, Ibn Mājid takes us on a major literary digression about Arabic proverbs, including the horrible story of the poor milkmaid—well above the content rating allowed to our younger blog readers… and in any case bringing us again to the serious question of audience: who were these “Commentaries” written for? what for?

It is obvious that if you are a pilot in need of directions and practical nautical references, you won’t have time to read the lengthy excursus fancied by Ibn Mājid. You need straightforward data, concrete information to arrive safely to your harbour. In that case, what you need is to read Ibn Mājid’s poems.

In an interesting reversal of our contemporary views, this early nautical literature, or at least Ibn Mājid as its preeminent representative, used verse as the preferred medium for strictly technical contents. If you wanted to use metaphors and all the panoply of belletristic effects, and to ramble on in stories and anecdotes, then write prose. If, on the contrary, you wanted to convey highly technical and indeed vitally precise information, then write poems!

Still in our days, some old pilots on the shores of the Red Sea and the Gulf do remember their nautical verses for this or that orientation detail. It is a striking survival of a medieval and ancient tradition of “artisanal poetry”, of which the famous pre-Christian example is Aratus’ astronomical Phaenomena. It is also a testimony to the discreet relation between “music” in a broad sense and scientific and technological endeavours.

Einstein and Planck at the piano.

We can picture the old sea dogs, retired at home after a lifetime of sailing, and now enjoying the crazy stories told by Ibn Mājid. They had all their music of science and skill inside their minds, and now they could sit back and enjoy the Fawā’id. [JA]

The Ancient Giant

Going through the fifth lunar station, al-Haq‘ah, we are once again reminded of the baffling historical complexity of the division of the sky, and brought back to more conceptual issues. The name of the station itself means a hair whorl, one among the eighteen types classified by Arabic lexicographers to speak of horses, and it is, apparently, of not much consequence. But then Ibn Majid himself half equates it with “The Giant” (al-Jabbār, Orion), treading in general a blurry line of identification of constellations or asterisms in this area of the sky, between our Gemini and Orion.

As Michelle Adams has explained in her fascinating blog, the customary Arabic name for Gemini, al-Jawzā’, is already witness to a very ancient history of astronomical lore, going back perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. 

Our astronomy is the shreds remaining from an awe-inspiring variety of “takes” on the night skies around the world. Our crucial epistemic need for setting stellar boundaries and naming the stars, as commented here recently, is merely our new attempt at “knowing” those haunting bright objects by which we guide our ways, and it is based on layer upon layer of half-forgotten lore.

Ibn Majid explains that this asterism was worshipped fī qadīm al-zamān, “from ancient times”, a phrase used in Arabic to introduce the no-time of children’s stories: kān yā mā kān fī qadīm al-zamān… “Once upon a time in a past beyond reckoning…”, and perhaps this is as unsurprising as it should be. For in the basic stargazing which underlies the building of astronomy we have such humbling examples, every time, on every corner of heaven, of how the origins of science hark back to a dim horizon, a twilight, the ever-gushing common spring of mythos and episteme. [JA]

Saudosas Plêiades

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?”, God asks of Job in order to put him in his place. The Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters, or the Jaguar, the Cabrillas, or many of the other names they are known by, are a constant in human culture from the earliest times. They guided Odysseus through the seas, and were mentioned by Hesiod; they were used for the orientation of sacred buildings from Teotihuacan to the Callanish Stones in the Outer Hebrides; and they were known and cherished, sometimes as the mythic heavenly original home, among New Zealand Maoris and Australian aborigines, in Micronesia, among the Colombian Kogi, the Mayan and all over the Andes.

With such a trajectory, it is little wonder they have not only been the staple of astronomical lore and all its applications, but also of literature, as a testimony to the human need to look at the stars and to relate them to human life and its joys and miseries. If any asterism is witness to the deep-seated love of the stars in humankind, it must be the Seven Sisters. Sappho evoked them from her night loneliness, and this week Ibn Majid regaled us with several examples from the Arabian lands, for there, too, the Pleiades favoured love and abundance.

“They are like a flag and like a bridle and, because of their faint glimmer, they are like the wind passing through, and like unto the trembling earrings of a young woman torn by the pain of separation… and they glitter like a cup passing round a fire from hand to hand.”

Stars of saudade—the untranslatable Portuguese term for a nostalgia that does not belong to the past, because it is out of time, right in the middle of the heart. [JA]