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]

A Planet-Less Nautical Astronomy

From the RUTTER crew conversations logbook, preserved for posterity: We have been wondering at the early modern pilots of the Indian Ocean, who famously used complex combinations of stars to navigate by night—a catalogue of about 150 celestial bodies was in their treatises— but, and here’s the question, without ever even bothering to mention the planets. By this I mean the five known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The same planets without which Ptolemy’s astronomy would have been reduced to nothing, and the same planets without which astrology would have been unimaginable.

The reason for this absence is obvious, and it is a nice etymological lesson. A planet, as is well known, means in the original Greek a “wanderer”, a “vagabond”. Now, if you are going to depend on guidance through the night and through the vast expanse of the ocean, you cannot rely on something changeable. You need fixed, unchanging points of reference, and this is exactly what was provided by the night sky, those wanderers excepted.

How bright they are, and unflickering! We have just been witnessing in Lisbon the approach and conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, every day, in the sunset sky, very impressive. And yet for all their steady light, they are not good for navigation: one day they are here, next day there, one day going straight, next day retrograding… They are strong, but fickle. The importance that they have in the astrological view of the cosmos is quite indicative of the variable state of the world: matters of the world and we are not ruled by stars, which would make us constant, but by those wandering bright lights.

Photo: Jorge Rodrigues da Silva

The lack of importance that the planets have in navigation is, in turn, quite indicative of the nature of this craft, and of how special is the state of being at sea and being in transit to a destination: there is peril, and there is the urgency to reach a place, and so all the variable concerns of the pilot are subordinate to accomplishing his task, as Ibn Mājid says, “going and returning with the passengers and the cargo safe.” [JA]

Knowledge Weaponized

Towards the end of chapter 6 of his Fawā’id, after going over the complexities of various kinds of routes and course-plotting options, Ibn Mājid explains:

I have made distinctions (farraqtu), because the different skills (‘ulūm, “sciences”) are like weapons: sometimes you need a bow and sometimes a sword, sometimes a spear and sometimes an ax or a dagger, and yet, for all this, you may never be dispensed of using a knife.

The explicit point seems to be that every skill, as a subdiscipline of knowledge, has its own irreplaceable and particular application, and that it is necessary to have a rounded preparation, because, as he puts it later, borrowing a saying from Imam ‘Ali: “man is the enemy of anything he is ignorant of,” or rather, given the context, “man is at war with everything he is ignorant of” (al-insān ‘aduww mā jahilahu). That is (and we must put it in the context of piloting a ship through the ocean and having to land safely thousands of miles away), everything we ignore is a hostile prompt to catastrophic failure. And the obvious way to be prepared, or armed, is to acquire the panoply of knowledge required by our respective field.

The bodhisattva Kuan Yin, armed against ignorance (Wellcome Collection).

The implicit point is in that initial “making distinctions”, associated to terms like farq, “distinction, discrimination, severance”, and furqān, an epithet of the Qur’an meaning “a criterion”. As it happens, this root-meaning of division and discernment is exactly the same of the English-Germanic skill, and also of Latin scientia. The suggestion that science and skill have a common origin in discernment/dissection should give us pause now, as it would be better developed in another post.

So now, instead, going back to the image of waging war against ignorance, we can see how the mighty ancient saying is so much better when applied in science than in politics: Divide et impera! or in Arabic, Farriq tasud!, discern and you shall rule. [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]

If You Are Patient…

Speaking of celestial rhumbs, Ibn Mājid is constantly going back to fine points of astronomical observations, how one star is “fettered” to another and how each one pertains to a rich interplay of positions. “Look at it when it is rising, then what is at the zenith and four fingers to the north at the same level. Then look at it when it is culminating, and check what is level with it and what is setting and rising at the same time…” and so on and so forth to a point of baffling complexity. It was the business of the pilots, who watched through the night and recognised the different configurations, as is encapsulated in the following advice:

If you persevere from its rising to its setting, from the beginning to the end of the night, you will see how all the configurations of its altitude measurements take shape through the sky.

Shapes seen in the sky by more than thirty different civilizations.
Design by Eleanor Lutz.

We had had occasion to comment on this “figurative” view of the stars, including its artisanal aspects and some of its more abstract associations. What is peculiar here is the emphasis on the prolonged observation to get “the full picture”, the direct relation between the tenacity of the practitioner and the access to the whole of the material, as it where.

In a few words we get a vivid and timeless picture of the Indian Ocean pilot’s discipline: watching through the night, patiently, registering the manyfold complexity that made wayfinding possible. I wonder to what extent this applies to the proficiency in other arts and techniques: the relentless attention, watching while everyone else sleeps, absorbing those guiding, principial forms—in the end, this is as good an image as it gets of what “in-formation“ used to mean; not just being exposed to data, but imbibing knowledge through the night with diligent eyes, to find a way. [JA]

Black and White Waters at Sea

One of the abiding question marks as we study the Indian Ocean nautical texts is that practically all their wayfinding lore, all their sophisticated, awe-inspiring system of astronavigation depends on darkness—specifically on the absence of daylight. No wonder that one of the recurrent pieces of advice of Ibn Mājid to aspiring pilots is that “they shall sleep very little at night.” It is as if the astronomical skill of the pilots required them to live by night, because it was by night, in darkness, that they found their guidance and their certainty. One wonders at some reports in European nautical literature, about pilots who habitually slept by day to be awake at night.

Drawing clarity from darkness and coming to life in the dead of night are motives of inversion which are common to other nocturnal professions; they speak of an inversion of normality related to a special kind of knowledge. Noblesse oblige, in the case of the pilots, meant that they could no longer live like ordinary sailors.

Another remarkable inversion of values at sea is the appreciation of black waters mentioned in the Fawā’id. Black waters do not mean stormy weather or anything ominous, but are foam-less waters, while white waters are choppy waters, when it is windy and small peaks of foam take shape on the surface of the sea. Black smooth water means stability, calm winds, and above all, an even ride for the observation of the sky and for better calibrated measures.

In what is a typical experience of reversal (taqallub) as one advances through the degrees of knowledge, down the rabbit-hole, or through the looking-glass, or coming out of the cave of ordinary life, the Arab pilots (the ma‘ālimah, “those who know and teach”), seem to have led lives of subtly shifted values. The night and dark which inspire fear and misgivings to ordinary mortals, and which give shelter to crime and transgression, was their element and was for them a time of discernment and attainment. [JA]

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]

The Greeting Stars

When speaking of “stellar navigation”, “celestial navigation”, or “astronavigation”, the implicit understanding is that of a sophisticated observational system. Long nights, repetitive activities, meticulous recording and so on. But Ibn Majid tries to shows us a different aspect of the relation between the pilot and the stars when he says: “It would be fair to use the following image to speak about me,

The radiance of the stars became so fond of me
That they would ask about me whenever I went out of sight.
When arriving they would say hello to me,
And when departing they would wave goodbye.”

Joniton, fourth son of Noah, the First Astronomer
(World Chronicle, 15th c., J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 33, fol. 12)

Can we derive any lesson from such a poetic utterance, to further our understanding of early modern technoscience? Perhaps only this, which we had already touched upon when discussing embodied knowledge: the relation between the expert “artist” (harking back to the technical sense of Latin ars) is multilayered and multifaceted, and hard to fathom. It seems clear enough, in any case, that unwavering attention to an object of knowledge, even something as inconceivably distant and alien as the stars—they who know neither joy nor pain of birth and death—brings about an epistemological shift. The cold object is no longer that cold, the relation not so distant… suddenly, one day, that distant star may wink at you.

This is not quite unrelated to the observer effect in physics, playing out in subtle overtones which were accounted for in medieval science but are fundamentally dismissed nowadays. Somewhere between the detached and practical stargazing, and the loving company of the celestial bodies, a different kind of “objectivity” arises. The cosmos is no longer altogether distinct from the observer, but a “wondrous cosmos” in which “all observers, from the farmer to the astronomer to the monk, had something to learn from watching the sky.” [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]

Us vs. Them: Early Modern Nautical Othering

Reading through the initial pages of chapter 4 of the Fawā’id, we came last week across a remarkable passage on Mediterranean/European vs. Indian Ocean/Arabic nautical techniques. The Westerners are in fact called here by Ibn Mājid “the people of the Egyptian abodes”:

…they have the compass, and in it they have lines, and marks for miles, and their rhumbs are only sixteen… We use thirty-two rhumbs… and they are incapable of understanding our level of attainment, whereas we do reach as far as their knowledge goes and we can sail their ships, for the Indian Ocean is connected to the Atlantic Ocean (al-Bahr al-Muhīt), and it has a knowledge recorded in writings and stellar altitude measures…

Leaving aside other technical details for a future occasion, let us focus on these final lines, where we find one striking assertion and one subtly insightful statement.

The first one is striking if we consider that Ibn Mājid is writing this probably in the 1490s, just as the Portuguese started rounding the Cape (Bartolomeu Dias, 1488), and yet he takes as a given the connection of the two oceans. This is no novelty if we remember that al-Birūnī (11th century), already spoke clearly of this connection with al-Bahr al-Muhīt. Literally the Circumambient, or All-Encompassing Sea, this was the most frequent Arabic name for the Atlantic—while still carrying echoes of the archaic notion of a Universal Surrounding body of water, what the Greeks called Okeanos. We wonder anyway, had Ibn Mājid also had news of the Dias expedition?

Sebastian Münster 1554 map

The second statement is this idea that there was a written body of Indian Ocean nautical science, and that it was this, combined with a certain knowledge of astronavigation, which gave Arab sailors the edge over those “Egyptians”. We have by now got used to Ibn Mājid boasting about his own writings, but here it does certainly sound as if he is referring also to a traditional, well known, nautical corpus. Of these possibly lost writings we have, alas, only the faintest traces left in medieval Arabic literature… what a sunken Atlantis of maritime treasures! [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]

Forms of Knowledge in the Heart

From our reading last week, this is how Ibn Mājid speaks of the purpose of his astronomical descriptions and teachings,

…for the discerning pilot to find his way through the expanse and the compact of the heavenly spheres… to advance to the ultimate degree and thus picture the sciences in his heart; and to comprehend the turning and dimensions of the spheres through the stars as they rise and set.

The original of this curious “picturing the sciences in the heart” is well worth a closer look. It may be said that the Arabic wording, yusawwiru al-‘ulūm fī qalbihi, is medieval epistemology in a nutshell, particularly in relation to technoscientific knowledge. In describing an accomplished pilot and the perfection of his art, this formula has three components: 1–an object, what is acquired or obtained, al-‘ulūm—plural of ‘ilm, knowledge, often translated as “sciences” or “techniques”; 2–a manner of acquisition, or a process, the verb yusawwiru—a root (s-w-r) we had found used for the “shapes” of constellations, and which has to do with forms, and in particular the Platonic ideas/forms/shapes (suwar aflatuniyyah); 3–a recipient or container for the knowledge acquired, qalb—the “heart” as a centre of consciousness sometimes distinct and sometimes overlapping with ‘aql, “intelect” or “mind”.

So, let’s for now leave aside the first component, and let’s unpack the formula by making explicit some of its implicit nuances. First, like those brilliant shapes in the night sky, the Platonic ideas, or objects of real knowledge, had acquired in Arabic a certain tridimensionality; the root s-w-r has to do with sculpture and pottery: the “ideas” were more like bodies of concrete knowledge. Second, their locus was not so much a breath-like, airy subtance like spiritus, ruh, anima, etc., or an abstract ethereal intellectus or mens, but the liquid/solid fixed centre of the body and the seat of vitality, the heart.

I think we might now rephrase and appropriately paraphrase Ibn Mājid’s formula: “the ultimate degree of your craft is when the knowledges acquired take shape like concrete constellations in the life-giving centre of your existence.” It may sound a bit grandiose, but it does express quite well something that takes place in the day-to-day practice of artisans everywhere: embodied knowledge is not just in the muscles and tendons that know the habitual movements, but also deep down in a central locus from where springs (like blood) the existential knowing joy of a work well made. [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]

New Years and Monthless Years

Very aptly, and according to plan, we restarted our reading group last Wednesday with the final session devoted to al-Mahrī’s Qilādah. As far as we are aware, it must be the first time that any shared Western academic initiative has focused on this work in particular, and perhaps even on any work by al-Mahrī. We are grateful to our colleagues in London, Berlin, Leipzig and Abu Dhabi for joining us.

I say very aptly because, as mentioned before, this little treatise is all about the beginning of the year in different calendars, thus about the relations between different calendar eras, and thus about the ever-baffling relations between the paths of sun and moon. To a certain extent it echoes the concerns of computists in medieval Europe for the calculation of the epact.

More specifically, the Qilādat al-shumūs, written by a Muslim pilot, addresses the crucial question of how to reconcile the lunar calendar with the various solar calendars in usage around the Indian Ocean in the late Middle Ages. It was not a theoretical concern, but the very practical one of ascertaining sailing seasons in a region where postponing a departure a few days might have lead to months of delay.

There is one insight from this latest session which has stayed with me after a few days: for most calendrical calculations described, it was necessary to be aware of the number of days elapsed from the first day of the solar year (mā dakhala min al-sanah). This is not unlike the financial “year to date” count, and what in specialised algorithms is nowadays called the dayno. January 11 is simply Day 11, February 1 is Day 32, and March 1 would be Day 60 (i.e. 31+28+1, unless it’s a leap year!) and so on and so forth.

This way of counting the days of the solar year is eminently practical and, remarkably, it does away cleanly with all the layers of mythical and lunar divisions which seem so inseparable from the calendar. It is like stripping the calendar bare and leaving a pure clean sequence of numbers, from 1 to 365. Aniconic, straightforward, arithmetical, almost iconoclastic: what could be more practical?

Calculation table from Wikipedia.

I wonder if knowing that you were born on the 69th day of the year is of any use at all, or a mere idle curiosity. But when a pilot knew that a certain asterism rose in the morning on the 100th day of the year, he knew unequivocally where this fitted within the cycle of the seasons, and where he was within the rhythm of the monsoons and other seasonal winds.

So let’s get ready and practise: What day of the year were you born, sailor? Don’t give me a date, but what is your birthday’s dayno? [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 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]

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]