Ostriches? What Ostriches!?

The early Arabic sky has some ostriches running through it: one of the lunar stations of early Bedouin astronomy is called The Ostriches (al-Na‘ā’im), and two of the brightest stars in the sky, Fomalhaut (α PisA) and Hadar (β Centauri), are also called “ostriches”, zilmān. We have been reading about these ostriches for long months now and, busy with astronomical and nautical details, we missed the question obvious to any contemporary reader: what ostriches in Arabia?

It is a historically well-known fact that we humans, as cultural and mythical beings, always project on the night sky our lives, including both what surrounds us everyday and what informs our minds. This is how the Greeks had the Ship Argo and their deities and fabled animals above, while in Patagonia they had rheas in the sky, and in Australia emus. Of course, you could say that if the Greeks had a winged horse, the Arab bedouins could very well have had their ostriches and an ice cream cart too, but… is there something missing?

An old picture, and an ancient mosaic from Petra.

As it turns out—and this is the beauty of how uranography and astronomy intertwine with very down-to-earth disciplines across the natural sciences—there were ostriches in Asia Minor and Arabia, but they were hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th century. The Arabian ostrich (Struthio camelus syriacus) was very close genetically to its North-African cousins, and it had an important place in the culture of the Middle East since prehistoric times, but alas, it could not survive the arrival of firearms and motor vehicles.

While they remain undisturbed in the night sky, though, they help us on several fronts. They bring to mind the frailty of life on this sublunar place, and they can make us wonder at how we relate to the configuration of the night sky: while we obviously project parts of our lives on those glittering lights, what do we receive from them? What is the quid pro quo we have with the stars? What does their “life” project on earth? As readers of this blog will remember, there are very early and strong arguments to say that every systematic, controlled, “mathematical” way of pursuing knowledge here below derives from the observation of those ostriches and their celestial companions. There seems to be, in a very strict etymological sense, a dialogue between the stars and men: logos going through between high and low and low and high, for the advancement of science. [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]

The African Colleagues

A passing commentary by Ibn Mājid last week draws my attention to some aspects of his relation to Africa: “According to the ancients, this mansion (he is referring to Sa‘d al-su‘ūd, mansion 24) is found within the sign of Capricorn, but the people of Zanj (roughly what we know as the Swahili coast) consider that, as of the date of this book, it belongs in Aquarius.”

The intensity and historical importance of the maritime traffic between the west coast of India, the Arabian Peninsula, and the east coast of Africa, has been the subject of much international research, and it has elicited from medieval legends to modern soap operas shared across cultural and national boundaries. This sort of Oceanic triangle, comprising the historical areas of the Arabian Sea and the Sea of Zanj, bears testimony archaeologically, linguistically, religiously, economically and in other domains to perennial cultural exchange. So this is not new, and recent scholarship keeps stretching the historical boundaries of this fascinating record.

A second takeaway from our initial citation is the reference to those Zanji astronomers whom he obviously considered as interlocutors, or who were at least into the details of the overlapping between solar and lunar zodiacs. This amounts to saying they had an interest in both theoretical and practical astronomy, including awareness of precessional shifts. It is an enticing testimony to the collegial relations across the waters, and to the state of astronomical study on the Swahili Coast during the 15th century.

Finally, note the ring of immediacy and adventure when he implies that his book is informed by contemporaneous scientific dialogue between Africa and Arabia, and naturally Persia, Gujarat, Malabar… It makes you wonder to what extent our many new exciting initiatives of Indian Ocean Studies are simply picking up the torch, restarting a tradition of generous exchange which became dormant only a few centuries ago. [JA]

Glimpses of Another Astronomy

One of the most powerful recurring impressions, as we read further the Arabic nautical classics of the late 15th and early 16th century, is that they are mirrors or prisms through which we can half discern a very different way of approaching astronomy. It is as if Ibn Mājid and Sulaymān al-Mahrī are themselves manāzil, waystations, and also milestones on the transmission path from a remote and now barely discernible past, and as if they allow us glimpses into an altogether non-Western view and science of the heavens.

Speaking of one of the altitude measures taken in combination with the 23rd mansion, Ibn Mājid explains: “This measuring is reliable and well-known within the lore of substitutions (tabādul) and graduation (tadrīj) of the sky… no other is better known in reliability and usefulness.” These “substitutions“ refer to one of the aspects of the complex observational techniques whereby most points along the ecliptic, and pretty much everywhere through the heavens, are used in combination with other places, regardless of their brightness, because it is a fine-tuned web of relations, calibrated through centuries in a transnational decentralised endeavour.

In fact, and quite remarkably, whereas it seems that European celestial navigation started developing in earnest thanks to national state-sponsored action, the equivalent acquisition of knowledge took place from the Pacific to the Arabian Sea in an organic way, over many boundaries and centuries. This contrast has to do in part with the specific requirements of Mediterranean navigation, but it is nonetheless impressive to find, from Polynesia to Madagascar, from Guangzhou to Aden, such similar traditions of astronavigation, including stellar rhumbs and the use of the 27 or 28 lunar mansions.

In the case of Arab pilots, which we are studying, this astronomical lore was integrated in various degrees with a pre-existing, or perhaps rather overlapping, body of mythical knowledge which brought the stars in direct relation to everyday life in countless ways. Similar integrations can be observed in Indian and Far Eastern astronomical literature, as layer upon historical layer of celestial knowledge blended into an ever enriched tapestry. No small part of the reward in studying premodern nautical literature lies in realising how many different astronomies can be derived from the same stars—as if an archaic science haunts us, silently winking an eye at us from an immemorial past. [JA]

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 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]

How Many Do We Need?

We have once again come across a mention of al-Sufi’s Book on the Shapes of Stars (Kitāb suwar al-kawākib, 10th century), considered by many as the the most important update on Ptolemy’s enormously influential Almagest (originally entitled Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις; the Syntaxis Mathematica, 2nd century).

The fascinating history of this relation has been explored time and again from many angles. Briefly, as regards uranography—the “cataloguing of stars” contained in books 7 and 8 of the Almagest—al-Sufi was the pivotal figure who revised the Alexandrian material and prepared it for further developments, culminating with Tycho Brahe’s Rudolphine Tables (1627).

Now, coming to our nautical context: when Ibn Mājid mentions al-Sufi, he invariably adds “and his forty-eight constellations,” a number which seems to go back to Ptolemy. Studying the lunar mansions has made palpable how arbitrary the division of the ecliptic is: you have a rotating circle dotted with shiny specks, you introduce some boundaries and project your lines. You can have 28 mansions or 12 signs or 36 decans or even 144 dodecatemoria. The division in 36 is easy to understand if we think of the rationale of the Babylonian “Three Stars Each” catalogues: for each twelfth of the ecliptic you select one equatorial, one southern and one northern star or asterism, so you cover a wider area and thus give more parameters for orientation (we are not going to waste all those stars!).

In a very useful summary of Ibn Mājid’s uranography, Ibrahim Khoury speaks of 24 major stars used in Indian Ocean navigation. Why 24? and why 48? These figures might be a Greek alphabetic reminiscence: the Greek alphabet has 24 letters, and using this number meant you were speaking of “the alpha and omega” of the stars, the “heavenly ABC.” It meant it was enough, that no other element was needed. I suspect some earlier source for this, perhaps Hipparchus… but the abiding and concrete question is how many stars do we really need to find our way. Right now, dear reader, when it is dark, how many stars in the sky do you need to know in order to find your way home? [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]

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]

The Forelegs of the Lion

In ancient Arabian tradition, the constellation of the lion (al-Asad) was depicted in the night sky with two forelegs, al-Dhirā‘ān. It was greater than the zodiac lion familiar to the modern observer, for one of its legs was placed on Gemini (α and β, Castor and Pollux) and the other was on Canis Minor (Procyon and Gomeisa). Taken together—Ibn Mājid tells us—these four stars form the seventh lunar mansion: al-Dhirā‘ān. 

Where navigation is concerned, the knowledge of a lunar mansion also entails the knowledge of possible combinations between its elements and other stars or asterisms. This is so because the alignment between certain stars could indicate not only a specific course or time, but also—and perhaps most importantly—the altitude of the polar star and, thus, the latitude.

Beginning to read Ibn Mājid’s introduction to al-Dhirā‘ān, we readers are immediately apprised of its connection with the Two Vultures (Vega and Altair). Each Leg of the lion is said to rise nearly at the same place where each Vulture rises, but they are located on opposite sides of the sky. This way, by the time Vega is rising on one end, the lion’s leg in Gemini is setting on the other. Eventually, both asterisms are seen leveled just above the horizon—a signal to every pilot (mu‘allim, “the one who knows”) indicating that the polar star is then at its minimum height. [IB]

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 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]

Names of Knowing

Wrapping up the chapter on the Pleiades, speaking of their fame and importance, Ibn Mājid reports a remarkable couple of verses which he calls “the best I have ever heard on this matter”:

We are the Pleiades and Orion, we are Arcturus, and Spica and Betelgeuse,
While you are the contemptible stars, seen in the sky and yet unknown.

It is certainy striking that some of the brightest stars in the sky speak and boast about their status, but let us focus instead on the underlying epistemological subtlety.

What appears to make the lesser stars unknown, and perhaps even unknowable (lā tu‘lam), is their lack of name; the Pleiades and the others boast because they have proper names. In fact, even today most stars do not have proper names, and are simply called by a Greek letter and their constellation, e.g. Alpha Centauri. We can ask ourselves, what difference does it make in the way we know them?

In our times, the greatest example of a nomenclature enabling knowledge is perhaps Linnaeus’ binomial system, which in a way was a systematic and comprehensive baptismal rite, in the footsteps of Adam who named things in Paradise: it is just a human trait, and this is why some have spoken of man as homo nominator. Linnaeus himself quoted a remarkable legal maxim:

Nomina si nescis perit cognitio rerum.
If you ignore the names, the knowledge of things perishes.

The Animal Kingdom, 
from Linnaeus’ 1735 Systema Naturae.

Arabic ‘ilm (as in tu‘lam above), Greek episteme, Latin cognitio—names of knowledge; names of a knowledge that depends on names. But as craftsmen and mystics show through the ages, there is another “tacit” knowledge, the trade secrets closer to taste, saber, sapere, dhawq, and more related to the senses and movement in general: an embodied skill proper to art and ecstasy, like Greek gnosis and Arabic ma‘rifa. To a certain extent, the two can thrive without each other, but the burning longing is always there, among scientists, technicians, artists and mystics, for the realization of knowledge, when understanding is embodied and the secrets are illuminated. [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]