Marvellous “Properties” 2: Philosophy

Now that we have concluded our reading of Ibn al-Jazzār’s Risāla fī’l-khawāss, the Epistle on Special Properties, let us see how it touches on some fundamental questions on the value of experience and experiment vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge.

The Risāla is a small work that alternates between a few theoretical paragraphs and an abundance of “examples” to justify its scientific thesis. The thesis, grosso modo, is that one should not rely on theory alone and much less on hearsay alone when considering the extraordinary natural properties and effects of some substances. Following every iteration of this line of argument, Ibn al-Jazzār provides us with a wealth of examples to make his point, citing an impressive roster of traditional authorities. Here is a sample,

According to al-Tabarī, when the tongue of a hoopoe is hung above someone who is forgetful, he will recover his memories. // They say that when you take a fang from the upper left jaw of a crocodile, and hang it above someone afflicted by fever, his fever will go away.

Help yourself to materia medica!

Naturally, during our reading we had many occasions for good cheer with the sometimes outrageous and often bewildering examples, commenting on how we should make sure to acquire this or that particularly helpful substance, like body parts of tortoises or lions. But beyond the banter, two points are worth reflecting on: 1) the vanity of rational understanding in the face of the marvellous, and 2) the unquestionable value of experience when reported from trustworthy authorities.

Ibn al-Jazzār goes almost as far as ridiculing the attempt at rationalising the wondrous properties of nature, making a perennially valid epistemological point: how can you claim that something is impossible or absurd, and not simply a reflection of shortcomings in your perception and understanding? This attitude is precisely the acknowledgement of and openness to “anomalies” that, in Kuhn’s language, may give way to needed new paradigms.

The second point follows: you have to stubbornly trust your own experience of the phenomena or, if not your very own (and here comes the twist), the experience of fully trustworthy authorities. That is, the chain of authorities is not hearsay and not mere bibliography, it is as if we ourselves had seen the fever abate under the crocodile's fang, and memories return under the hoopoe’s tongue. I may not have been there and made these experiences with crazy substances, but I trust Aristotle, and Galen, and Apollonius etc.

As ever, we find here how directly our very modern and cutting-edge questions are in conversation with medieval authors, and how from subjects like magic, alchemy and all that “crass baseless superstition” we are questioned, and indeed assayed and improved in our theory and our practice. Ergo, if you have some Arabic, don’t hesitate and join our weekly reading group, restarting in September. [J. Acevedo]

Marvellous “Properties” 1: Authorities

After completing our reading of Sirafī’s True Stories of the Seas and their Marvels, we have started work on the 10th-century Epistle on the Special Properties (Risāla fī'l-khawāss) of Ahmad ibn al-Jazzār. The word khawāss here refers to the special properties, often magical or wondrous, of certain substances and beings, like the magnet, a first-time mother’s milk, or the “royal snake” (i.e. the basilisk). These entities informed an abundant literature on alchemy and magic, and were readily incorporated into more “scientific” treatises, especially medicinal, like herbals and lapidaries. As our reading continues, it becomes increasingly apparent that in spite of the work’s title, we are not far at all from the topic of mirabilia/‘ajā’ib, the wonders of creation. In fact, this text is the main source of Albertus Magnus’ De mirabilibus mundi.

As the reader can imagine, treatises on magical properties can be great fun. We learn about stones that can attract any kind of substance, the usefulness of carrying around a little bit of human bone, or how to avoid being killed by the gaze of the basilisk, to say nothing of natural contraceptive methods like drinking mule’s urine. But apart from such eminently practical content, these first pages have made me reflect on two aspects worth commenting on: the chain of authorities, and the philosophical stance of the author.

Hippocrates (4th c. BC), Galen (3rd c. AD) and Avicenna (11th c. AD)
having a proper learned chat.

The authorities from whom the reports of marvellous properties proceed make a formidable roster, and are a sort of Who Is Who of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. They include first of all Aristoteles, then of course Galen, the ubiquitous Alexander (the Great, often identified with the Quranic Dhu’l-Qarnayn), Cleopatra, Arab luminaries such as Ibn Masawayh, and “Byzantine” scholars such as Qusta ibn Luqa. What is most remarkable about this fascinating list —an advanced educational syllabus in itself, for whomever is curious— is how easily and stably it moved across languages, cultures and textual genres over the centuries. Never mind that you were reading about navigation, medicine, alchemy or astronomy, you would just as easily come across the same authorities.

The enterprise of science is always necessarily alternating through time between its conservative and revolutionary tendencies: tradition versus innovation, respect for the past versus embrace of the novel—this is the way (of knowledge), because it would be absurd not to capitalise on the achievements of our predecessors. Now this term, “respect”, means originally not only to “look back to”, or “to look again”, but also, due to the intensive function of the prefix re-, “to look very intently at something”. One could say that the respectful study of the traditional authorities has to include all these nuances: to go back again and again to the same authors, and also to look at them with patience and persistence, not sparing efforts to understand their ideas, and struggling with them in the pursuit of knowledge. This is how we try to work in our weekly reading groups, ever hoping to engage in the timeless Geistergespräch, the conversation of minds through the ages.*

As for the second aspect, the philosophical stance of Ibn al-Jazzar and how it relates to contemporary science and our daily research, well… I'm afraid it may have to wait until our next post. Stay tuned! [J. Acevedo]

* You are welcome to join us, it's free.

Wonders, Travels and Scientific Knowledge: Reading al-Sirafi

We recently completed our reading of Sulaymān al-Mahrī’s Mirror of Travellers into the Heavenly Spheres (Mir’āt al-sallāk li-kurāt al-aflāk), a primer of astronomy for the use, we believe, of mariners and navigators. Only a few indications relate this text to the several other works by al-Mahrī, which are a totally different genre, that of nautical handbooks, and it is in fact remarkable that it is called Mirror of Travellers, because nothing in its contents is obviously related to travelling. It is a rather dry primer of astronomy, not the usual applied uranography of the navigators, i.e. how to use the risings, settings and relative positions of constellations and stars for orientation, but instead drawing directly from the long tradition of Graeco-Arabic astronomic treatises, like Jaghmini’s Mulakhas fī al-hay’a. But anyway, we have written about it in previous posts here.

Perhaps because we were left yearning for that “travelling” offered by the title, this year we are about to start on a well-known work that will surely deliver on this aspect, Abu Zayd al-Sirafi’s al-Sahīh min akhbār al-bihār wa-‘ajā’ibihā (something like True Stories of the Seas and their Wonders). These travel narratives have been sourced for centuries by historians and geographers, not least students of nautical science, for their valuable data shedding light on the Indian Ocean culture of the Middle Ages.

Delving into this kind of literature with our group, devoted as we are to history of science and technology, makes me think of two ways in which travel and marvels literature benefit the science historian. One is very obvious and it has to do with data and information: simply, there is a wealth of unique or little known phenomena, early mentions of crucial little pieces of information relevant to this or that modern discipline, the name of a place or person, the description of a species, an astronomical occurrence, a linguistic quirk… Very literally, there is no end to the variety.

But there is another less obvious benefit for us in this pursuit: confronting the marvellous, the amazing, incredible and outrageous helps us keep open the door of wonder, to keep a certain kind of humbleness in our gaze. This is directly related to one of the cryptic and haunting aphorisms of Heraclitus: ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον (DK18), “The unexpected shall not be found if it is not expected, for it is beyond searching, impenetrable.”

Good pathbreaking science, the real burning pursuit of knowledge, requires from us always, among other attitudes, the capacity for wonder, the cultivated sense of marvel, a childlike disposition towards the unknown, that open door which might allow us to find otherwise invisible realities. It is as if giving up all bearings with a scientific trust in the unknown. The sense of adventure, of intellectual adventure, “Mi lascio portare dalla fortuna per avere buona fortuna.”

And it is with this intention that we will be starting our semester readings. If you have some Arabic and want to join us, we start this Thursday at 10:00 GMT, on Zoom. You may contact us through the RUTTER website. [Juan Acevedo]

Heavenly Bodies and Their Accidents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Circles and Stars Between Cosmology and Cosmography

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

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

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

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

Sundial, courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan.

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

Cosmic Navigation and Cosmic Pilots

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

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

Gautier de Metz, 13th century.

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

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

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]

Arab Tridua: Three-Day “Weeks” in Arabia

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

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

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

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

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

The Spacetime of Early Modern Navigation

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

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

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

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

Sundial, courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan.

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]