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]

Masters of One Language

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

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

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

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

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

Saudosas Plêiades

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

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

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

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

The Spherical Wisdom of the Turner

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

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

Astronomicum Caesareum, 16th century

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

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

Noachian Musings

The opening chapter of Ibn Mājid’s Fawā’id starts right at the beginning of navigation, explaining that “the first one to ride the sea, and the first one to deal systematically with its concerns (rattaba asbābahu) and the first one to craft a ship” was Noah. This is perfectly in tune with the Abrahamic view of history, finding echoes in the textual traditions of Judaism and Christianity.

What is not so common and I have kept pondering after our first reading session (and while we contemplate moving our meetings to the cyberspace) is the relation between the stars of Ursa Major and the parts of the ship.

According to this very ancient and fundamental idea, master craftsmen on earth are always imitating a heavenly model. This is what is called mimesis in Greek, a word of subtly metaphysical reach, of ritual liturgical meaning, and quite simply the reason why “imitation is the best way to be original.”

“Noah builds the Ark,” from a 13th century English Psalter at St John’s College, Cambridge.

From another angle, this correspondence between the ship design and the constellations bespeaks yet another aspect of mimesis: since number comes directly from the observation of the stars (Plato, Epinomis), and given that artistic (meaning here also technical) design is in practice based on number, it will only be normal that the design of the prototype of all ships is patterned after the order of Heaven.

16th century Persian miniature (from Wikimedia Commons).

Noah has particular rights to our attention these days, since he must rank somewhere there first among the patron saints and precursors of quarantine: he spent forty days and forty nights on a floating zoo, with bleak prospects, without internet, but, we can surmise, with a trusting heart. Let us keep Noah afloat in our minds! [JA]