Looking Upwards: Stars in Ancient and Medieval Cultures 9781536103304, 9781536103496

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CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES

LOOKING UPWARDS STARS IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL CULTURES

CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES JOSEPH J. PILOTTA, ALGIS MICKUNAS, JOHN W. MURPHY – SERIES EDITORS – THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, OHIO. US Looking Upwards: Stars in Ancient and Medieval Cultures Piero Boitani ISBN: 978-1-53610-330-4 (2017)

The Lived World of Social Theory and Method Algis Mickunas and Joseph Pilotta ISBN: 978-1-53611-853-7 (2017) Exultant Forces of Translation and the Philosophy of Travel of Alphonso Lingis Dalia Staponkutė ISBN: 978-1-63117-091-1 (2014) Critical Narrative Inquiry - Storytelling, Sustainability and Power Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Carlos Largacha-Martinez ISBN: 978-1-63117-557-2 (2014) Cosmic Passion for Aesthetics Algis Mickunas and Rekha Menon ISBN: 978-1-62948-200-2 (2013)

CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES

LOOKING UPWARDS STARS IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL CULTURES

PIERO BOITANI

Copyright © 2017 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic, tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. We have partnered with Copyright Clearance Center to make it easy for you to obtain permissions to reuse content from this publication. Simply navigate to this publication’s page on Nova’s website and locate the “Get Permission” button below the title description. This button is linked directly to the title’s permission page on copyright.com. Alternatively, you can visit copyright.com and search by title, ISBN, or ISSN. For further questions about using the service on copyright.com, please contact: Copyright Clearance Center Phone: +1-(978) 750-8400 Fax: +1-(978) 750-4470 E-mail: [email protected]. NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers’ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Any parts of this book based on government reports are so indicated and copyright is claimed for those parts to the extent applicable to compilations of such works. Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and / or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Names: Boitani, Piero, author. Title: Looking Upwards: Stars in Ancient and Medieval Cultures Piero Boitani (Sapienza University of Rome, Professor of Comparative Literature, Roma, Italy). Description: Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2016. | Series: Contemporary cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016045430 (print) | LCCN 2016049605 (e-book) | ISBN 9781536103304 (hardcover) |ISBN 9781536103496 (e-book) | ISBN 9781536103496 H%RRN Subjects: LCSH: Stars in literature. Classification: LCC PN56.S735 B66 2016 (print) | LCC PN56.S735 (e-book) | DDC 809/.9336--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045430

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. † New York

For Emilia, Jill, and Rachel and to the memory of Ginestra Amaldi and Dario Mattei-Gentili

CONTENTS Preface

ix

Note on Texts, Translations and Editions Introduction

xiii 1

Chapter 1:

At the Beginning

13

Chapter 2:

The Morning Stars

33

Chapter 3:

Stars of the Empire

45

Appendix A

59

Chapter 4:

The Ways of the Dark Night

69

Chapter 5:

From Dream to Apocalypse

83

Chapter 6:

Divinity, Life, Perfume: The Music and Dance of the Spheres

91

Chapter 7:

The Music of the Spheres

103

Chapter 8:

The Vaults of Heaven

115

Appendix B

125

Chapter 9:

Caelatum: Creation and Chiseling

147

Chapter 10:

Flaming Cusps

165

Chapter 11:

Black Brocade

179

Chapter 12:

The Beauty of Lakes

197

Chapter 13:

Snow White

211

Chapter 14:

We Are the Stars Who Sing

233

Appendix C Chapter 15:

247 Sparks and Embers

267

viii

Contents

Chapter 16:

From Eternal Nymphs to Beautiful Stars

283

Chapter 17:

Blissful Light, Clear Beams

303

Bibliography

315

Index of Names

321

PREFACE This volume is the English version of the first half of a book that was published in Italian in 2012 by Il Mulino of Bologna with the overall title Il grande racconto delle stelle, which would roughly translate as The Great Tale of Stars. It covers that “tale” from prehistory and antiquity to the Middle Ages, going as far as the year 1400 CE, the year of Geoffrey Chaucer’s death in England. After that, and above all after 1600, things definitely change, first in Italy, then in the rest of Europe, finally in the entire world. To treat the subsequent chapters of the story another volume was needed, and this will appear with the title The Engine of the World: The Modern Cosmos – a companion volume, but by no means a mere sequence, because themes and problems undergo a drastic change when modern science begins to assert itself. A word or two might be opportune to make clear to the American reader what kind of “tale” this is. To begin with, this is not an astronomy textbook, nor a history of astronomy. It is a book that intends to explore, or present, the image of the stars that, throughout history, humanity constructed for itself: the image, that is, as it was transmitted through literature, the visual arts, and music. In so doing, it is of course impossible to avoid those frequent and fruitful moments when the arts encountered science, philosophy, and religion. The present volume, then, is the result of this constant historical interweaving. About the ways in which such interweaving will be unfolded, I will speak in the Introduction. However, I will say that what guided my research throughout this book is the search for a “cosmic poetry,” for beauty, and for the sublime. If I manage to convey to the reader the enthusiasm (or terror) that the writers, painters, and composers of all ages and continents have directed towards the stars, I will consider my task accomplished. I should immediately clarify that “of all ages and continents” has a literal, albeit summary, meaning. If one were to write exhaustively about the stars, no less than an encyclopedia would have to be compiled. This, on the other hand, is meant to be a tale, articulate and detailed but not infinite: the great tale narrated by the night sky itself, of its movements and colors, its shapes and myths, its song and its music. However, my intention is to start from the dawn of human civilization and reach the end of the fourteenth century, wandering through our planet. The concept of world literature is nowadays very popular, but I have yet to see it applied except on a very small scale – and mostly in theory, never in practice. In this book, I intend to practice world literature. In order to write it, I have had to read as I had not read since my teenage years, to research and study images and music, to check constantly historical data and bibliographies,

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and to submit what I was producing (especially when dealing for the first time with fields unfamiliar to me) to the judgment of experts. I therefore want to give heartfelt thanks to all those who helped me, while exempting them from any responsibility for the errors which might be present in the volume. Following the order of chapters, these are: Francesco Sisti, Peter and the late Ursula Dronke, Daniela Amaldi, Alberto Ventura, Meir M. BarAsher, Angelo Maria Piemontese, Raffaele Torella, Sukanta Chauduri, Maurizio Scarpari, Zhang Longxi, Teresa Ciapparoni La Rocca, Michael Lapidge, Jill Mann, Andy Orchard, and the late Sabine MacCormack. Through the years, Emilia Di Rocco gave me much important advice: she has also been incomparable in helping me locate the English versions of the many quotations that appear on almost every single page of this volume. Without her, the book simply could not have appeared. Rachel Jacoff followed this book step by step beginning with the Italian version, flagging some macroscopic lacunae, suggesting improvements, and mostly offering continuous encouragement to complete it. She has also read every single word of the English translation, making fundamental suggestions to improve it. Jill Mann has done the same with severity and finesse, sparing no effort to make the volume feel at home in the English language. These “tre donne,” Dante would say, “intorno al cor mi son venute:” these three ladies – the first Italian, the second American, the third English – have come round my heart to help me. For this reason, this book is primarily dedicated to them. I should not fail to mention that my passion for celestial matters received a fundamental impulse from Ginestra Amaldi (named thus in honor of Leopardi’s Ginestra). She used to tell me about the stars and the cosmos not just in her books, but also during our conversations taking place while sailing, or when walking together in the mountains. This book is therefore also dedicated to her memory, to me very dear. Likewise, I would like to remember all the scientists I have encountered and those with whom I am still in close contact, since during the last few years all of them offered a – direct or indirect – contribution to the fermentation of ideas from which this book was born: late Nicola Cabibbo, Paul Dirac, Stephen Hawking, Marco Tavani, Bruno Bertotti, and Michael Finkenthal. I also fondly recall the days spent, many years ago, with Joseph Needham, who first introduced me to Chinese culture and science. Finally, I would like to acknowledge something of a “genetic” debt. Dario Mattei-Gentili, the uncle of my mother’s father, was Archibishop of Perugia from 1895 to 1910, and was later forced to resign by the Roman curia of Pius X with the accusation, a very dangerous one at the time, of modernism: he wanted the construction of an observation tower, and to educate future priests in the sciences. Maybe something of his passion for the sky was inherited by me. In the last few years I have taught courses and given lectures on the stars in various places: in Pavia, Venice, Urbino, York, Calcutta, and New York. I would like to express my gratitude to the students and colleagues who offered precious advice there and at the Universities of Sapienza Rome, of Italian Switzerland in Lugano, of Zurich, and at the Newberry Library in Chicago. But the volume would not have been published in English had it not been for Alex Kisin’s interest and Joe Pilotta’s enthusiasm and generosity. These became manifest during two wonderful dinners in Rome and in Florence in the spring of 2015, and if the book itself does not fulfill my friends’ expectations, at least all three of us will remember those two occasions. Some guidelines might be necessary for the English-speaking reader. The chapters that follow are organized as stand-alone unities within a more or less chronological and thematic sequence, sometimes interrupted by anticipations or flashbacks, and by what I will call the

Preface

xi

“world tour” taking place between Chapters 10 and 14. I recommend reading one chapter at a time in their order, following their unfolding section by section, taking time to notice and appreciate the beauty of the texts and images included therein. The notes offer the references for the works included in the main text, and references to the secondary literature I have employed in my commentary on those texts. The original texts included in the notes of the Italian edition have been eliminated, and only the English translations are left as witnesses to the beauty of those texts. The Bibliography has been selected to include just the essential, but I hope it will offer a list of books that the reader can refer to in order to further explore the topic. The illustrations try to picture what I say in the text: there are about one hundred plates, and I express my gratitude to the publisher for the, far from trivial, effort of including them all: I have another three thousands of them on the same subject. When, in 2010, I was invited to talk about the stars at the Science Festival in Genoa, I said that maybe the poets (and I of course meant also the painters and the musicians) discover, in the stars, things that the scientists cannot see. One head, in the third row, shook in denial for at least a minute. I am sorry, but I must insist. Piero Boitani Rome, Lugano, Poggio Mirteto, August 2016

NOTE ON TEXTS, TRANSLATIONS AND EDITIONS Unlike the Italian original in Il grande racconto delle stelle, this volume does not contain the originals of passages composed in Greek, Latin, Italian, and many other modern languages, but only the English translation of those passages. The line numbering quoted in the text refers to the original. For Greek and Latin classics I often use the volumes of the Loeb Classical Library (LCL), published by Harvard University Press in Cambridge MA and generally by W. Heinemann in London; the editions of Les Belles Lettres (BL) published in Paris, the volumes of the Fondazione Valla-Mondadori published in Milan (FV); and the translations in the Oxford World’s Classics (OWC), published by Oxford University Press in Oxford and New York. For the Pre-Socratic philosophers the two texts are Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. H. Diel and W. Kranz, Zurich, Weidmann, 2004 (DK), and G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers. A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., 1983 (KRS). Reference is often made to Migne, Patrologia Graeca (PG) or Patrologia Latina (PL), that is, to the volumes of Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca and Series Latina, edited by J.P. Migne between 1856 and 1866 (Graeca) and 1844 and 1855 (Latina). Whenever possible, the much better texts of the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina or Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCSL or CCCM) published by Brepols (Turnhout), or those of the Sources chrétiennes (SC), Paris, CERF, have been used. I have also used texts in Latin with English translations published in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML) by Harvard University Press. The Bible is quoted, except where specifically noted, from the King James version, with slight modifications. The text and translation of Dante, Divine Comedy, are edited by Robin Kirkpatrick, London, Penguin, 2006-2007.

INTRODUCTION By their very nature, human beings love to gaze at the starry sky. They consider it one of the most beautiful and moving spectacles to behold. They have been ecstatically looking upwards, in awe, for millennia, perhaps since the species first stood up on two legs. Cicero thought that Nature, “while she has bent the other creatures down toward their food, she has made man alone erect, and has challenged him to look up toward heaven, as being, so to speak, akin to him, and his first home.”1 Ovid repeats this idea in two powerful verses of the Metamorphoses, when recounting the creation of the world: nature, or a god, “os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre / iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus”, gave humans “a towering head” and commanded them “to stand / erect, with [their] face uplifted to gaze on the stars of heaven.”2 When homo erectus became homo sapiens, what the ancients knew as wonder emerged within him. The amazement in front of the celestial dome is the feeling that generated in the early humans, and still today does in children, the craving for knowledge. In the first sections of the Metaphysics, Aristotle tells us that “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g., about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.”3 It is clear that, for the ancient thinker, philo-sophia includes both that which today we consider philosophical speculation and also what we know as “science.” However, Aristotle also includes the poet in this wondering, since he immediately adds that “even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders.” Philosophy, science, and poetry, then, originate from the same impulse: wonder. This is a conviction shared, millennia later, by the Persian al Qazwīnī, by Dante, by Kant, and by Einstein: the first echoing Aristotle himself, the second talking about “awe” as an “amazement of the mind”, the third of a “rapture”, and the fourth of “wonder” and the “holy curiosity of inquiry”.4 This book takes as its subject the wonder of poets, painters, architects, 1

Cicero, Laws, I, ix, 26, trans. C. Walker Keys, LCL, 1928. Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 85-86, trans. D. Raeburn, London, Penguin 2004. 3 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A2, 982 b, 11–17, Emphasis added: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha, ed. C. Steel, with an edition of the Greek text by O. Primavesi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. 4 Zakariyyā’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī, Le meraviglie del creato e le stranezze degli esseri (Wonders of Creation and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing) ed. S. von Hees, trans. F. Bellino, Milan, Mondadori, 2008, pp. 5, 9, 10; Dante, Convivio, IV xxv 5; Immanuel Kant, “Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,” in I. Kant, Natural Science, ed. E. Watkins, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 182-307; Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P.A. Schilpp, Evanston (IL), Open Court, The Library of Living Philosophers, 1949, pp. 8–9, 16–17. 2

2

Piero Boitani

and musicians facing the stars, through the centuries and across the continents of our planet. There is a “cosmic poetry” which artists, and scientists have given voice to and have pursued for millennia in their art. The architect who designs a dome (pagan, Christian, Muslim, Indian, or Chinese), or the archway of a church or of a palace, often does so with the intention of giving a human, tangible form to the “celestial dome.” The painter who paints frescos on the vault, adding thousands of golden stars—or the constellations—on a blue background is expressing the same sentiment. All humans, by their very nature, love the starry sky. But there are differences between the various ways in which the sky is observed by the lover, the sailor, the artist, the astrologer, and the astronomer: more specifically, there is a difference between those who look at the stars with the aim of extracting scientific data, and those who simply attend to its beauty. Later on we will encounter a passage where Baudelaire defines, with great elegance, the proper domains of the astronomer and of the poet. Here, I give only a brief example. Every day I look at, and download on my hard drive, the images available daily on two websites: NASA’s APOD “Astronomy Picture of the Day”, and TWAN “The World at Night”. Sometimes, the latter website offers a picture to the former (so far, never the other way around). APOD constructs a catalogue of scientific images, often also strikingly beautiful; TWAN collects shots of landscapes which, although they are photos – i.e., exact images, not created by the imagination of a paintbrush—clearly have an aesthetic purpose. We should always collect both: to think of poetry, like Mallarmé, as a constellation; to invent music, like Luigi Dallapiccola and John Cage, by translating the Zodiacal signs onto music sheets. Poets, painters, and musicians choose an image or a melody, whose origin is unknown, and attribute to the stars changeable and surprising qualities: there are those who see them, as in China, as fireflies; those who, as in India, consider the celestial dome to be a lake reflecting the glow of an emerald; those who, as in Persia, gaze upon a black brocade. The Arab poets imagine the stars as running horses, or flaming pinnacles. Dante calls them “everlasting nymphs,” Shakespeare listens to their music. The book of Job tells us that “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” the stars becoming Angels. Everyone contributes a new element: every poet, as Marina Tsvetaeva puts it, “reveals the laws of stars, the formulas of flowers.” Neẓāmī rivals Virgil, Du Fu sings like Homer. Every text I have chosen is beautiful, unexpected, and mysterious. An opera by Haydn is entitled Life on the Moon. But musicians’ involvement with the stars is witnessed also by Verdi’s Otello, Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht, Dallapiccola’s Piccola musica notturna, Stockhausen’s Sternklang, and Philip Glass’ Kepler. The domes of the Galla Placidia Mausolaeum in Ravenna, certainly: and those of the Alhambra in Granada, the caves of Dunhuang in China, the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, the Opéra in Paris, Grand Central Station in New York. Giotto and the Horoscope of Prince Iskandar; the delicate and marvelous paintings by Ma Yuan and Ma Lin, by Kano Tan’yu and by Hiroshige; the Emu in the sky engraved on stone by the Australian Aboriginal people, or Giulio Romano’s paintings; Victor Hugo and August Strindberg as painters; and then Van Gogh, Chagall, Miró, Tamayo, Anselm Kiefer. Imagination is unpredictable, inexhaustible, astonishing, and at times inexpressible: it is impossible—as tradition holds, and as we will see time and again in what follows—“to number the stars one by one”, and yet one cannot stop wondering, along with Leopardi’s Wandering Shepherd in Asia “what mean these depths of air / This vast, this silent sky”?

Introduction

3

The beauty of the universe, echoing the Biblical and Platonic traditions, is the topic of a poet like Vincenzo Monti, a science-inspired bard like Shelley, a scientist-poet like Erasmus Darwin,5 and a mathematician like Henri Poincaré. The latter clearly explains why the scientist studies nature: The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of that beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.6

The beauty of which Poincaré speaks inspires the scientist and the poet both, and brings them together. If the former seeks the “harmonious order of nature,” yet he preserves the sense of the “beauty of qualities and appearances;” if the latter starts from sensible beauty, yet he aims to represent its enchanting proportions, and its laws: even more explicitly if he is a painter, an architect, or a musician. This book is a continuous attempt to highlight the relationship between the arts and the sciences. We need to be clear, however: the former do not need to justify themselves in the eyes of the latter (nor the other way around). But the latter, the sciences, must be aware that their own first impulse, their roots, lay in the very same first principle that inspires the artist and the philosopher: wonder in the presence of the beauty of the cosmos. This could reconcile, once and for all, the “two cultures,”7 offering to the artist the chance of living with modern science, and to the scientist a way to make his science develop alongside a poetic personal inspiration. Richard Feynman, the great American physicist, and an outstanding scientific populariser, knew how to keep both these impulses alive. He was committed to “the beauty and the wonder of the world that is discovered” by science, and yet he described himself as sensitive to beauty in itself, as much as, if not more than, an artist would be. He was capable of genuinely poetic musings, for example while recalling how, standing at the seashore, he would think of the recurring waves as “mountains of molecules,” the one repeating the design of its predecessor “till complex new ones are formed,” and these “make others like themselves ... and a new dance starts.” He who “stands at the sea,” he concluded, “… wonders at wondering ... I ... a universe of atoms ... an atom in the universe.”8 In one of his famous Lectures on Physics Feynman traced the history and the crucial developments of various sciences. Upon reaching astronomy, he affirms that its “most

5

Vincenzo Monti, Opere, ed. M. Valgimigli e C. Muscetta, Milan-Naples, Ricciardi, 1953, pp. 707–717; Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, I, Canto IV, X. 1, Charleston, SC, Bibliobazaar, 2008, p. 174; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, IV, 40-318 (cf. Ch. 20). 6 Henri Poincaré, Science et méthode, Paris, Flammarion, 1908, pp. 15-16 (my translation). 7 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1959. 8 Richard P. Feynman, “The Value of Science,” in The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works Of Richard Feynman, Cambridge (MA), Helix Books, 1999, p. 144. Erwin Schrödinger was also a poet, mostly celebrating love, and admirably translated into German Tennyson’s Ulysses, the dramatic monologue that, more than any other in the nineteenth century, expresses the desire for knowledge and discovery: Gedichte, Godesberg, Helmut Küpper, 1949.

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Piero Boitani

remarkable discovery … is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.”9 He then noted that Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! 10

Feynman perfectly conjoins, in this passage, poetic sensibility and the impulse driving scientific research. The beauty of the stars is one thing only, indivisible and defying imagination. The scientist however, like the philosopher, wonders about the why of things, and holds that to know more about this beauty does not destroy its mystery. “Why,” the physicist then asks, “do the poets of the present not speak of it?,” and addresses to them a pointed question: “what men are poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”11 Is it possible to anthropomorphize a planet, as the artists did for millennia, but not sing its beauty when its true nature is finally revealed? The problem, then, is that of the relation between beauty and truth. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” This is the well-known conclusion of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. A great “Delphic”, Platonic apodictic tautology: whoever said that tautologies – starting with the “I Am that I Am” of Exodus – are necessarily false, or ineffective?12 In any case, this one by Keats is a tautology that a great modern scientist, the Indo-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar echoes in his book Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science.13 *** What has changed, as the centuries passed, is the source that human beings assign to the wonder they feel in front of the stars. Some see in it a religious reflex, and it is undeniable that, in all the cultures of our planet, to look at the sky means to become, as King Lear puts it, God’s spies. Then there are those, from the ancient Sumerian sages to Kepler, who are moved to the study of the stars because they believe in astrology, i.e., in the possibility of assigning an astral cause to the events and phenomena of our terrestrial and human world. Both religion and astrology produced fascinating literary or pictorial representations of the cosmos. It is 9

Richard P. Feynman, Lectures on Physics, New York, Basic Books, 1963, Section 3.4. Richard P. Feynman, “The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences,” in Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher, Reading (MA), Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995, pp. 59–60. 11 Feynman, “The Relation”, p. 60. 12 See H. Vendler, The Odes of John Keats, Cambridge (MA) and London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 147. 13 S. Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press, 1987. 10

Introduction

5

sufficient to think about the vaults of medieval chapels or renaissance frescoes like those in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. The present volume aims at exploring these conceptions of wonder through literary texts, images, and music. When the shepherd in Homer’s Iliad – the ancestor of Leopardi’s shepherd – looks at the stars and the moon that shine upon the immense space between the mountaintops and the valleys, he rejoices.14 Whence this exultation of the spirit? Throughout the ages, we can find a series of different conceptions of the origin and nature of this feeling inspiring humanity in its contemplation of the skies. The first, and most constant of them, is that of beauty. Werner Heisenberg, the scientist who codified the principle of uncertainty, claimed – in a 1970 lecture devoted to the “meaning of beauty in the exact sciences” – that the fundamental conceptions of beauty are two: the one deriving from the “proper conformity of parts one to another and to the whole,” and another, with its origin in Plotinus, aiming at the “translucence of the eternal splendor of the ‘one’ through the material phenomenon.”15 The first one, which Heisenberg tends to prefer, is the idea of beauty that both East and West have most often favored, from ancient Greece to Thomas Aquinas, to the Renaissance and beyond. Thomas, who formulates a theory of beauty in his Summa Theologiae, holds that beauty requires three qualities: integritas, consonantia, and claritas; the integrity of the whole, consonance (i.e., proportion between parts), and clarity – light and brightness.16 Kepler, the astronomer who established the laws describing the orbits of the planets around the sun, and who used to thank God for having allowed him to discern the beauty of creation, seems to combine the two ideas. He believed in the aphorism “pulchritudo splendor veritatis,” beauty is the splendor of truth, and reformulated it thus: “geometria est archetypus pulchritudinis mundi.”17 Geometry, mathematics, is the archetype of the beauty of the cosmos. In an open letter to Galileo in response to his Sidereus Nuncius, Kepler specifies that: “geometry is unique and eternal, and it shines in the mind of God. The share of it which has been granted to man is one of the reasons why he is the image of God.”18 In the Harmonices Mundi he further explains that “the motions of the heavens are nothing but a kind of perennial harmony (in thought not in sound)” produced through “dissonant tunings” and “certain syncopations or cadences” of the universe.19 Music and singing: splendor and harmony. Kepler’s idea was not new, what was new was his integral mathematical application. The music and dance of the spheres had been a heritage of Greece ever since Pythagoras’ time, and later of Rome, of Jewish culture, even of the Native Americans. The literary images of this harmony constitute one of the themes of the volume, and culminate in Dante and Shakespeare. But there is an important moment in the eighteenth century, when Handel composed the music for Dryden’s A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day. The poet had sung of the power of celestial and terrestrial music. Handel’s score makes us understand how composers 14

Homer, Iliad, VIII, 555-560; Cf. Ch. 1. Werner Heisenberg, “The Meaning of Beauty in the Exact Sciences,” in Across the Frontiers, trans. P. Heath, ed. R.N. Anshen, New York, Harper & Row, 1974, p. 167. Heisenberg here appears to echo W. Pauli (see note 17), p. 257. 16 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 5, 4, ad I; I, 39, 8. Cf. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. H. Bredin, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1988. 17 This is, significantly, quoted by Wolfgang Pauli, in his “The Influence of Archetypical Images on the Scientific Theories of Kepler,” in W. Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1994. 18 Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation With Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, trans. E. Rosen, New York and London, Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965, p. 43. 19 Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, Philadelphia, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 209, p. 446. 15

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thought that their music could replace that of the heavens: those skies that, in the same years, were made to disappear by Gulliver’s Travels.20 Something indeed changes with the Renaissance, and above all from the eighteenth century onwards. To begin with, the night starts to get the upper hand over the day. Naturally, antiquity had loved deeply the hours of the night, and the Western poet who invents the night is, as we will see, Virgil. But also in the literature of Persia, India, China, and Japan nocturnal scenes are frequent and magnificent. Nobody, however, had represented night in paintings, except for some Chinese artists (who, as we will see, paint the moon, yet not the stars). The Western Middle Ages, on the other hand, love the daytime, and light. Only from the fifteenth century onwards, and even more markedly in the centuries to follow, the night and “absolute” darkness begin to be represented with growing intensity and pleasure – conducting a dialogue not only in poetry, but also in novels, paintings, as well as music. I will trace this development in this book’s sequel, The Engine of the World, where I will deal with Kant. The latter, as we shall see, not only closes his Critique of Pure Reason with the famous sentence (which will later be engraved on his tombstone) comparing the physical and the ethical universe: “two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”; but earlier he had also proclaimed that “Night is sublime, Day is beautiful.”21 The entire Romantic movement will follow the philosopher of Königsberg on this path. The sublime, which was rediscovered in the Renaissance through a reading of Longinus’s treatise,22 now comes to prevail, with the night, over the beautiful. Edmund Burke is very clear on the matter. The sublime is not founded on an exultation of the soul—the joy of the Homeric shepherd—but on terror; the starry sky is sublime because it moves in us, through its magnificence and the aura of infinity that it suggests, “delightful horror:” The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to any thing in the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our ideas of magnificence. Besides, the stars lye in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity. 23

For at least two centuries, up to the end of the nineteenth century, from Europe to America, the starry sky is seen as sublime. Consider a painting by Adam Elsheimer, a contemporary of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, a picture by Canaletto painted in the same years of Herschel’s discoveries, the romantic sceneries of Caspar David Friedrich, the nightscapes of the Japanese master Hiroshige, the music of Haydn, Verdi, and Wagner, the novels of 20

Cf. Ch. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pratical Reason, Indianapolis, Hackett, 2002, p. 203; “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 16. 22 Something which was not totally absent during the Middle Ages, but rather never made fully explicit: see E. De Bruyne, Études d’esthétique médiévale, Bruges, De Tempel, 1946, vol. II, pp. 205-218; E. Auerbach, “Camilla, or, The Rebirth of the Sublime,” in Literary Language & Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. R. Mannheim, New York, Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1965, pp. 183-233. 23 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. A. Phillips, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 67, 71. On the topic of infinity, Burke echoes John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1996, II, xvii, p. 85. 21

Introduction

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Hugo and Hawthorne all the way to Tolstoy, Novalis’ and Whitman’s poems: in all these different artworks—produced while the nebulae are first discovered—everything is dark, peppered with stars, and grandiose. *** Beautiful or sublime? At the turn of the twentieth century, George Santayana, that “old philosopher” – who lived the last part of his life in Rome, and to whom Wallace Stevens dedicated a marvelous poem – grounds the sense of beauty on subjective perception, but holds that “beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature” and that it “exists by its finitude and is great in proportion to its determination:” in other words, Santayana argues that “we can only see beauty in so far as we introduce form.”24 In his The Sense of Beauty Santayana also elaborates some formal criteria for the beautiful, among which the most important one is that of multiplicity in uniformity. He explains this idea by means of an example which closely pertains to us: that of the stars. “To most people,” he writes, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. The vague and illusive ideas thus aroused fall in so well with the dumb emotion we were already feeling, that we attribute this emotion to those ideas, and persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.25

Santayana goes on to argue that: The idea of the insignificance of our earth and of the incomprehensible multiplicity of worlds is indeed immensely impressive; it may even be intensely disagreeable. There is something baffling about infinity; in its presence the sense of finite humility can never wholly banish the rebellious suspicion that we are being deluded. Our mathematical imagination is put on the rack by an attempted conception that has all the anguish of a nightmare and probably, could we but awake, all its laughable absurdity. But the obsession of this dream is an intellectual puzzle, not an aesthetic delight. It is not essential to our admiration. Before the days of Kepler the heavens declared the glory of the Lord; and we needed no calculation of stellar distances, no fancies about a plurality of worlds, no image of infinite spaces, to make the stars sublime. 26

So much for astronomy, then: and the reader should have noticed that, even though the title of the book seems to privilege the term “beauty,” Santayana employs in his exposition both “beautiful” and “sublime.” Astrology, for Santayana, fares no better than astronomy: “Had we been taught to believe that the stars governed our fortunes, and were we reminded of fate whenever we looked at them, we should similarly tend to imagine that this belief was the

24

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory, New York, Dover Publications, 1955, pp. 164, 92, 91. 25 Ibid., p. 64. 26 Ibid.

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source of their sublimity. … But experience would soon undeceive us, and prove to us that the sensuous character of the object was sublime in itself.”27 Likewise, he goes on, “the kinship of the emotion produced by the stars with the emotion proper to certain religious moments makes the stars seem a religious object. They become, like impressive music, a stimulus to worship. Fortunately there are experiences which remain untouched by theory [i.e., in this case, astronomy and religion] and which maintain the mutual intelligence of men,”28 because they belong to the experiences of human life. As for the infinity of nature, the intellect can even be stimulated by a heap of sand. But “the infinitesimal does not move us aesthetically.” The difference cannot reside in the “import of the idea, which is objectively the same in both cases,” stars or sand. Instead, it is to be sought “in the different immediate effect of the crude images which give us the type and meaning of each.” Santayana further observes that: the crude image that underlies the idea of the infinitesimal is the dot, the poorest and most uninteresting of impressions; while the crude image that underlies the idea of infinity is space, multiplicity in uniformity. … Every point in the retina is evenly excited, and the local signs of all are simultaneously felt. This equable tension, this balance and elasticity in the very absence of fixity, give the vague but powerful feeling [of the infinite].29

Santayana then proceeds by observing that nothing is objectively impressive: things are impressive only “when they succeed in touching the sensibility of the observer.”30 The idea that the “universe is a multitude of minute spheres circling, like specks of dust, in a dark and boundless void, might leave us cold and indifferent, if not bored and depressed, were it not that we identify this hypothetical scheme with the visible splendor, the poignant intensity, and the baffling number of the stars.”31 According to the Spanish-American philosopher, the starry heavens are “very happily designed to intensify the sensations on which their beauties must rest.”32 So In the first place, the continuum of space is broken into points, numerous enough to give the utmost idea of multiplicity, and yet so distinct and vivid that it is impossible not to remain aware of their individuality. The variety of local signs, without becoming organized into forms, remains prominent and irreducible. This makes the object infinitely more exciting than a plane surface would be. In the second place, the sensuous contrast of the dark background, – blacker the clearer the night and the more stars we can see, – with the palpitating fire of the stars themselves, could not be exceeded by any possible device. This material beauty adds incalculably, as we have already pointed out, to the inwardness and sublimity of the effect.33

27

Ibid., pp. 64-65. Ibid., p. 65. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., pp. 65-66. 32 Ibid., p. 66. 33 Ibid. 28

Introduction

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To prove the truth of this, it suffices to imagine a map of the skies on which all the stars would be drawn, including those invisible to the eye. Surely “full of scientific suggestion” this object, Santayana argues, would “leave us …comparatively cold.” That is because “the sense of multiplicity is naturally in no way diminished by the representation; but the poignancy of the sensation, the life of the light, are gone.”34 “Or imagine the stars,” Santayana suggests again, “marshaled in geometrical patterns; say in a Latin cross, with the words In hoc signo vinces in a scroll around them”35 – like those seen in a dream by Constantine, the night before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. They would not lose “any of their astronomical significance and divine immutability.” Indeed, “the beauty of the illumination would be perhaps increased, and its import, practical, religious, and cosmic, would surely be a little plainer.”36 Think, for example, of the bejeweled and starspeckled crosses on a blue background which Byzantine artists painted in the apses in Naples, Albenga, and Ravenna. “But,” Santayana asks, “where would be the sublimity of the spectacle? Irretrievably lost. … The infinity which moves us is the sense of multiplicity in uniformity.”37 “The single star,” Santayana continues, quoting verses from Wordsworth and Keats, “is tender, beautiful, and mild” but utterly remote from the “the cold glitter, the cruel and mysterious sublimity of the stars when they are many.”38 With these, he concludes, “we have no Sapphic associations; they make us think rather of Kant who could hit on nothing else to compare with his categorical imperative, perhaps because he found in both the same baffling incomprehensibility and the same fierce actuality.”39 One of the principal conditions for the sublime, Santayana will later establish, is the impossibility of action: “If we could count the stars, we should not weep before them.”40 *** Wallace Stevens’ “old philosopher” thus offers us a wonderfully argued, elegant lesson. It is, first of all, a pragmatic and physiological insight based on the actual appearance of the starry sky, and on what of it gets registered by our retinas. And, certainly, it is a post-romantic stance, yet one solidly anchored to the concept of form and to that multiplicity in uniformity that places the beautiful and the sublime on the same plane. This is, perhaps, the lesson which the twentieth century would have needed. Instead, the developments of what I would call the “aesthetics of night and stars” have been different and unpredictable. In Ulysses, as we will see in The Engine of the World, James Joyce salvages the aesthetic value of the night-time spectacle only by grounding it on a subjective sentiment “in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in the delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of the satellite of their planet.”41 In both the first and the second half of the twentieth century a series of claims are made about the impossibility of recuperating the beauty, or the sublimity, of the stars and of reconciling 34

Ibid. Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., pp. 66-67. 38 Ibid., p. 67. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 145. 41 J. Joyce, Ulysses, ed. J. Johnson, OWC, 1993, p. 654. 35

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the arts with the sciences. The best example has been Paul Valéry’s critical reading, in his Variation sur une Pensée, of Pascal’s famous aphorism – “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”42 – as well as of Pascal’s separation of “heart” and “mind” and the dichotomy which it implied, i.e., the one between that which tends toward religion and that which tends towards science. This split, however, appears to be much more ancient, and deeper. According to Walter Benjamin it harks back to the birth of modern astronomy. As he argues in a brief essay included in his One Way Street, entitled At the Planetarium, “If one had to expound the doctrine of antiquity with utmost brevity while standing on one leg, as did Hillel that of the Jews, it could only be in this sentence: ‘They alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos.’”43 But the ancients’ experience of the cosmos and that of the moderns is profoundly different, and the decline of the former, is marked by the flowering of astronomy at the beginning of the modem age. Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scientific impulses alone. All the same, the exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come. The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest to us, and never of one without the other. 44

Benjamin wants to argue that the ecstasy (Rausch) characterizing the ancients’ contemplation of the sky gradually disappeared as modern astronomy grew, linked as it was to the “optical connection” with the universe, i.e., the knowledge of it delivered by the telescope. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister would be in agreement with Benjamin. He looks at Jupiter through the telescope an astronomer has prepared for him, but he complains: earlier, while contemplating the planet with the naked eye, he saw it “in some relation to the innumerable others of heaven” and to himself. Now, on the other hand, in his imagination Jupiter stands “incommensurable,” out of proportion over all the celestial bodies. Naturally, he perfectly understands how useful the lenses of a telescope are for astronomers to discover the nature of the infinite objects of the universe, and knows that humanity will never be able to do without the instruments that science and technology have offered, but thinks that, “in life in general and on the whole, … these means, by which we come to the aid of our senses, do not exercise any morally favorable influence on man. He who looks through spectacles thinks himself wiser than he is, for his outward sense is thereby put out of balance with his inner faculty of judgment.”45 Benjamin goes beyond the “morally favorable” effect: the “ecstatic trance” of the ancients, he continues, could only arise “communally”, and, it is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is

“Variation,” in Paul Valéry, Œuvres, éd. J. Hytier, I, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, pp. 458–475. Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One Way Street and Other Writings, Boston, Harcourt, 1977, p.103. 44 Ibid. 45 J.W. Goethe, Goethe’s Works, vol. V, Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, Philadelphia-New York-Boston, George Barrie, 1885 (trans. T. Carlyle), I, x, p. 63. 42 43

Introduction

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not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers. Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology.46

Technology, guided by the ruling classes’ lust for profit, has “betrayed man.” Technology is not the mastery of nature but rather the mastery of “the relation between nature and man.”47 Benjamin continues to argue that “men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.”48 The “experience of velocities” undergone by modern man prepares him for “incalculable journeys into the interior of time” where the “paroxysm of genuine cosmic experience is not tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we are accustomed to call ‘Nature’” and is transformed “in the nights of annihilation of the last war,” a feeling which “resembled the bliss of the epileptic.”49 Benjamin’s prophetic and apocalyptic vision conjoins the past and the future, bringing Galileo’s and Kepler’s innocuous telescope in direct relation with the creation of technological monsters of destruction. In other words, he locates a fissure between antiquity and early modern times, and a continuity between the latter and our contemporary age. We are not just the descendants of Copernicus and Tycho, but – in the best case scenario – the grandsons of Einstein, Bohr, and Plank as well as – in the worst case scenario – the sons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if one wished to talk about astrophysics without mentioning technology (and how could we, considering the space telescopes orbiting the planet?) the “ecstatic trance” of the ancients seems to have become a mere individual “poetic rapture of starry nights.” And yet, this should be our starting point: because the only individuals who are capable to lead us back into a kind of cosmic ecstasy are the poets, the novelists, the painters, the architects, the musicians, the film directors and, most of all, those who try to represent the beauty of our contemporary science. The first picture I have chosen for this book (but it could easily serve as the last one) is a sculpture by Henry Moore, located at the Adler Planetarium, facing Lake Michigan, and with Chicago’s skyline on the background: it is called Man Enters the Cosmos. It is a large, arcshaped sundial which was commissioned – as the epigraph at its base, dated May 1980, explains – “in recognition of the revolutionary program of space exploration which was launched in the second half of the twentieth century, making it possible for man to land on the moon and to send probes to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.” Composed of two semi-circles – one standing at a right angle to the other – and a thin cable linking the two extremities of the external semi-circle, Moore’s sundial measures time. But these four arms are open towards the sky, almost fulfilling, yet again, the natural desire to touch and embrace Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” p. 103. Ibid. p. 104. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 46 47

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the sky which dominates both homo erectus and homo sapiens. Looking at it from a distance, its silhouette resembles that of a radio telescope, open and listening to the cosmos. Whoever contemplates this sculpture also experiences the irresistible (and impossible to satisfy) urge to pinch that bronze string, in order to hear the celestial music that it would surely produce. It is an exceedingly simple work of art, both very ancient (as sundials have existed for millennia) and extremely modern. Built relying on our astronomical knowledge, it works perfectly. But it is also the sculpture of a great artist: and it suggests something more than the mere measuring of time. It is a pawn, a prayer, a token of thanksgiving: a mute sentinel, like the black monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, signaling the entrance of man into the cosmos.

Chapter 1

AT THE BEGINNING The Trojans are about to win the war. Besieged, they are now leading the battle under the guidance of Hector, first in the plain between the city and the sea, then on the shore where the Greeks have dragged their vessels. In vain do the latter build a wall to defend their camp. At dawn, after a brief respite for the burial of the dead, the battle furiously resumes. When the sun reaches the middle of the sky, Zeus raises his golden scales holding them in the center: the fate of the Achaeans is facing downwards, while that of the Trojans rises up. The greatest of the gods thunders from the top of Ida and throws a bolt of fire at the Greek army. Agamemnon, Idomeneus, and the two Ajaxes are no longer able to remain steadfast; even Ulysses flees to the ships. For a while Diomedes resists, then he too is forced to retreat by Zeus. Hector is raging, leading the Trojans up to the Greek wall. Hera and Athena are trying to aid the Greeks, but Zeus, glaring, stops them, openly hinting for the first time at the plan he has in mind: he wants to make sure that Patroclus, Achilles’s friend, goes into battle and is killed by Hector, so that Achilles, abandoning his anger, may return to the field and, eliminating Hector, decisively change the course of the war. The Trojans are still advancing, but the sun plunges into the ocean with its shining rays, “drawing the dark night across the grain-giving earth.” Hector, then, gathers his men and addresses them with a speech: one must respect night (at night, according to the ethos of the Iliad, one cannot fight), prepare dinner by getting food and wine from Troy, and light fires to prevent the Greeks from secretly leaving on their vessels. The next morning, then, the attack will resume and will be crucial. The Trojans “roar assent,” unleash their horses, gather bread, cows, sheep and wine from the city, collect firewood, light the fires, and roast animals. High in hope, they take “positions down the passageways of battle / all night long.” Many watchfires are lit, as one reads in the last verses of Book VIII of the Iliad: Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering round the moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm ... all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts the boundless bright air and all the stars shine dear and the shepherd’s heart exults – so many fires burned

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Piero Boitani between the ships and the Xanthus’ whirling rapids set by the men of Troy, bright against their walls.1

This is the first image of the stars offered by Western literature, between the ninth and eighth century BCE – three thousand years ago. And it is an extraordinary simile. Indeed, Homer could have merely said, functionally (as does the Bible, as do many others): there were as many fires as there are stars in the sky. Instead, he draws up an unparalleled Nocturne, which gradually opens into infinity. First the clear stars around the bright moon, then the still air, and finally the outlines: a horizon, a border, peaks, glades and valleys. Then, a sudden change: the air becomes ineffable, infinite, and once again we see the stars, all visible. Finally, an unexpected spectator: a shepherd who has little to do with the War. He rejoices because, we imagine, he is contemplating the spectacle of the heavens and is enjoying it. The observer introduces a proto-aesthetic perception in the simile: the joy of beauty – or rather, of the sublime. In fact, the ineffable and the infinite beyond the rocks and the valleys are typical traits not of the beautiful but – as noted centuries later by Pseudo-Longinus – of the sublime. Which, indeed, uplifts the heart, broadens it, makes it quiver. One can see why Leopardi, the great Italian poet of the early nineteenth century, was always fascinated with this image, ever since his adolescence: he mentioned it in the Ricordi, quoted it in Discourse of an Italian Concerning Romantic Poetry, and drew inspiration from it in his poems, “Sappho,” “The Evening of the Feast Day,” and in the “Night-Time Chant of a Wandering Asian Sheep-Herder.” But how does such an image fit in the Iliad, the poem of war and power? It clearly serves to picture a cosmos ruled not by conflict, but by harmony. Perhaps, it relates to that “heaven” towards which, at the very beginning of Book VIII, the fortunes of the Trojans rose on Zeus’s scales – it is here, after all, that the Trojans cultivate “high hopes”. And yet maybe there is more to it than that. Let us risk an unorthodox hypothesis. If Hector, against custom, had given the order to carry on with the attack, he would probably have conquered the enemy’s camp. Then his Blitzkrieg would truly have been impossible to resist. Perhaps the Trojans would have won the war. But instead Hector stops – not only because one does not fight at night, nor just because Troy is destined to lose that very first world war, but maybe (mostly) because, obeying an even greater law, that of poetry, Homer had to praise the night and the stars and the infinite sky: the beautiful, the sublime. Upon seeing Helen on the walls, the old wise men of Ilium are struck by her beauty and say: “Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder / the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered / years of agony all for her, for such a woman. / Beauty, terrible beauty! / A deathless goddess – so she strikes our eyes!”2 If we were as old and wise as they we would recognize that – along with Fate, Zeus’s plans, the interventions of the gods and the actions and errors of men – the beauty of the universe (of the stars, of the moon, of the outlines of the earth’s crust) plays an essential role in the defeat of Troy. “Ah, no wonder,” we should say, “that the Trojans saw Ilium destroyed and burnt to ashes for such a view. Beauty, terrible beauty! A deathless goddess – so it strikes our eyes.” And the shepherd would surely agree. For us to be able to contemplate the stars, Troy had to lose the war, and perhaps it was worth it. The vision of the cosmos has fundamental importance in the Iliad. After Patroclus’s 1 2

Homer, Iliad, VIII, 641-649, trans. R. Fagles, New York, Penguin, 1990. Ibid., III, 187-191.

At the Beginning

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murder, Achilles decides to go back into battle, but he needs new weapons, because Hector took the old ones after stripping them off Patroclus’s body. In Book XVIII of the Iliad, then, Achilles’s mother Thetis begs Hephaestus to forge them. The blacksmith of the gods sets to work and produces a wondrous shield. In it, like a mirror of the world, are dramatically depicted two cities (one prosperous, peaceful, celebrating a trial; the other besieged, prey to the terrors of the war), and the countryside, with herds, flocks, vineyards, musicians and dancers. All around, along the far edge of the artifact, as if to enclose the human earth, Hephaestus sketches the great current of the river Ocean. But the first thing that the god sculpts on Achilles’s shield is the cosmos: There he made the earth and there the sky and the sea and the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full and there the constellations, all that crown the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades. Orion in all his power too and the Great Bear that mankind also calls the Wagon: she wheels on her axis always fixed, watching the Hunter, and she alone is denied a plunge in the Ocean’s baths.3 Hephaestus represents the whole universe: the earth, the sea, and the sky. He depicts the Moon, the Sun, and the stars gathered in constellations making up the heaven’s crown; among these, he includes the Great Bear, which never sets in the north sky and was a reference point for the Greeks in the eighth century BCE just as the Pole Star in the Little Bear is today for us. Achilles’s shield brings to the fore the cosmic gaze of ancient Greece. Having the destructive hero wear this cosmos, as he is about to kill Hector, is no less paradoxical than introducing the stars in a poetic simile when the battle stops for the night in Book VIII. The infinite cosmos shines in the suspended moment in which Hector’s battle stopped; now, Achilles will bring the entire universe to the war. In fact, as Diomedes’s had done before, his armor will shine like the Greyhound of Orion when, from the walls, Priam sees him begin the pursuit of Hector. Achilles is Sirius, the shining star bearing “evils,” fire and fever, to men.4 In the Odyssey, the poem that narrates Ulysses’s troubled homecoming after the Trojan War, the atmosphere is very different. Yet here, too, the stars have a prominent place. In Book V the protagonist is leaving Ogygia, the island of Calypso, on the raft that he has built himself, and is headed for Ithaca. The goddess has washed him, provided him with fragrant robes, a bottle of dark wine, one of water, and a bag full of tasty foods. She has sent him a favorable and light wind. Ulysses sets the sails and begins to steer the boat: The wind lifting his spirits high, royal Odysseus spread sail — gripping the tiller, seated astern — and now the master mariner steered his craft, sleep never closing his eyes, forever scanning the stars, the Pleiades and the Plowman late to set and the Great Bear that mankind also calls the Wagon: she wheels on her axis always fixed, watching the Hunter, 3 4

Ibid., XVIII, 565-571. Ibid., XXII, 26-30 for Achilles; V, 10-15 for Diomedes.

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Piero Boitani and she alone is denied a plunge in the Ocean’s baths. Hers were the stars the lustrous goddess told him to keep hard to port as he cut across the sea.5

Odysseus sails, crossing the sea to the east, for seventeen days. On the eighteenth day, he sights the shadowy mountains of the land of the Phaeacians, like a large shield rising from the murky sea. Poseidon, who is just coming back from the great banquet with the Ethiopians, realizes that the man who has blinded his son Polyphemus is about to arrive home at last, so he unleashes a terrible storm, after which Ulysses – naked, salt-encrusted and exhausted – succeeds in reaching Phaeacia. The passage does not really surprise us, as we have navigated following the stars for centuries. But it must have greatly struck the archaic Greeks, because it is the first example of such an enterprise in literature. Ulysses orients the raft based on the stars: this is a detail that, along with others, makes the narrative of the second Homer poetically and scientifically advanced. The gaze that the hero turns to the sky appears neither contemplative nor aesthetic – it has nothing of Leopardi’s talk of “the beautiful stars of the Bear” – but it is rather technical, instrumental: as Calypso ordered, in order to stay on the right route he must constantly keep the Great Bear on the left. At least three observations can be made on this passage. If we act as literary scholars, we must first note that this has become a veritable topos, originating a series of poetic rewritings: Virgil in the Georgics and the Aeneid, Propertius in the Elegies, Ovid in the Metamorphoses and in the Art of Love, and Musaeus in Hero and Leander6 have all marked its survival in the classical world and transmitted it to medieval and modern literary culture. An abbreviated version, which nevertheless intensifies the perception of the night, can be found in Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica: “Then did night draw darkness over the earth; and on the sea sailors from their ships looked at the Bear and the stars of Orion; and now the wayfarer and the warder longed for sleep.”7 If instead we act as historians of astronomy, we will focus on what this passage of the Odyssey tells us of the sky at it was conceived by the ancients. And then we will see that the configuration of the stars is not visibly different from that of today, but that their behavior has been altered by the position of the celestial pole, around which the stars appear to rotate: in other words, because of the precession of the equinoxes. In this specific case, this phenomenon has an important aspect. The technique of stellar navigation is based on the observation that the rotation of the heavens has its pivot in a fixed point, the pole, with respect to which the vessel is constantly kept in a given direction. Being unable to find this point, the sailor had to know the relative positions of departure and arrival. For us, who no longer need such a technique, the pole is – ironically – located less than one degree from the North Star. But because of the precession of the equinoxes, the situation was quite different for Ulysses, and equal to that described by Aratus in the Phenomena: “around the axis the two Bears rotate together.”8 A navigator using the northern stars of the Big Dipper as a fixed 5

Homer, Odyssey, V, 295-304, trans. R. Fagles, London, Penguin, 1996. Virgil, Georgics, I, 138, 246; Aeneid III, 512-517; Propertius III 5.35; Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII, 206; XIII, 726; Art of Love, II, 55; Musaeus, Hero and Leander, 213. 7 Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica III, 744-747, trans. R.C. Seaton, LCL, 1912. 8 Phenomena, 26-27, in Eratosthenes and Hyginus, Constellation Myths with Aratus’s Phaenomena, trans. R. Hard, OWC, 2015, p. 139. 6

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signal would have inevitably been 13° off course – which is not so terrible for a one night trip, considering the whims of the wind and the current, but is certainly rather significant for a seventeen day long navigation. The Great Bear guided the Greeks, as here it guided Ulysses, while the Phoenicians followed a less visible but more precise indication: the Little Bear, about 4° away from the pole at that time. Only with the scientist Hipparchus would the true pole be determined. The Great Bear – which, in his Poetics, quoting this passage, Aristotle considers a “metaphor” of the whole, that is, of Dragon, Little Bear, and most of Cepheus9 – in Homer’s catalogue is the only one that is “denied a plunge in the Ocean’s baths:” it does not sink in the sea, and therefore always remains visible. In Homer, the Earth appears as a flat disc surrounded by the river Ocean. The heavenly firmament covers everything like a dome, so that the stars, after crossing the sky, plunge into the Ocean. As evidenced by the discussion in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, the ancients were trying to establish if the stars would then pass to the east beneath the Earth or revolve around its edge.10 Therefore, when Ulysses looks at the stars, what he sees is the archaic cosmos. Admittedly, this observation has a primarily technical purpose, but we must still point out that it alludes to the whole firmament. This passage of the Odyssey in fact, repeats exactly, word by word, the passage of Iliad XVIII in which the poet describes Achilles’s shield sculpted by Hephaestus. Ulysses, therefore, has a cosmic gaze. *** Ulysses looks at the sky and navigates. It is the beginning of a very close relationship between the Greek hero and the stars. How long until it develops into a veritable scientific interrogation? In short, how long until Ulysses becomes a scientist? The fragments we have about Thales’s life speak of a man constantly absorbed in contemplating the stars: it is he, around 600 BCE, who “discovers” and “fixates” the Little Bear, studies the heavenly bodies and predicts solar eclipses and solstices.11 He stares at the stars, absorbed to the point – says Plato – of falling into a well to the amusement of a Thracian servant. He is so good at astronomy – notes Aristotle – that he successfully predicts an abundant harvest of olives and buys all the mills of Miletus and Chios for next to nothing, reselling them later with immense profit – thus demonstrating that philosophy is far from useless, that it is not difficult for philosophers to get rich, but that this is not what they are preoccupied with.12 Finally, he is the thinker who maintains that water is the first element, and he is also the first to proclaim: “Know thyself.” Astronomy and cosmology were also addressed by the philosopher-poet Parmenides: having meditated on being and non-being, he can be considered in many ways the founder of Western thought. In his Poem on Nature he is told:

9

Aristotle, Poetics, 1461 a 21. Aristotle, Poetics, 1461 a 21. 10 For all this, see J.B. Hainsworth’s comment on Odyssey, Book V, 272-277 in the so-called Valla commentary published in English as A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey by the Clarendon Press, vol. I, Oxford, 1988, pp. 276277. 11 Thales, 74-78, in KRS, pp. 81-84. 12 Plato, Theaetetus, 174 a, and Aristotle, Politics, 1259 a 6. 9

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Piero Boitani And you shall know the nature of the aither and all the signs [i.e., constellations] in it and the destructive works of the pure torch of the shining sun, and whence they came into being; and you shall hear of the wandering works of the round-eyed moon and of her nature; and you shall now too of the surrounding heaven, whence it grew and how Necessity guiding it fettered it to hold the limits of the stars. 13

Heraclitus and Empedocles also dealt with the stars: the former claiming that they feed on the exhalation coming from the earth and, like Parmenides, that they are condensations of fire; the latter celebrating the sun and the aither, “fastening his circle tight round everything.”14 One hundred and fifty years probably passed between Ulysses watching the Big Dipper to determine the route on the one hand, and Thales, Parmenides and Heraclitus on the other. In that century and a half, Greece must have developed something that Aristotle memorably described at the beginning of the Metaphysics, when researching the reasons that prompted human beings to “philosophize,” that is, to love wisdom and to investigate natural phenomena with a philosophical-scientific goal. As he says, the purpose was to seek the first principles and first causes, according to the equivalence between wisdom (sophia) and science (episteme): For it is because they wonder that human beings, both now and at first, began to philosophise. In the beginning they wondered about the curious things that were near at hand, and then gradually moving forward they started to puzzle over the larger matters too, e.g., about the phenomena of the moon, and those to do with the sun and stars, and with the coming to be of the cosmos. 15

This then is the principle within us. Physics, astrophysics and cosmology are products of the original wonder of young humanity, and are still the products of that amazement (“now and at first,” says Aristotle). Anyone who feels a sense of doubt and wonder, he continues, recognizes a lack of knowledge: for this reason, to break free from ignorance, men have begun to “philosophize”. Aristotle here takes up a concept already expressed by Plato in the Theaetetus, according to whom “a sense of wonder is perfectly proper to a philosopher: philosophy has no other foundation, in fact.”16 However, compared to his predecessor, Aristotle introduces a new and extraordinary element by equating the investigation of natural phenomena, philosophy and the love of myth, that is, poetry. “And a man who is puzzled and wonders,” he writes, “thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders).” Placing poetry on the same level as what Einstein would call “heilige Neugier”, “holy curiosity”, is far from a minor statement: it means tracing to a single impulse - to a single principle - all the highest human activities. And it also means granting poetry a dimension of truth that it is generally denied. Before Aristotle, Plato – who loved poetry but at the same time condemned it – exalted sight as the divine gift that enabled humans to contemplate the sky. The passage, in Timaeus,

13

Parmenides, Poem on Nature, in KRS, fr. 305, p. 238. Heraclitus, fr. 224 in KRS, p. 200; Empedocles, fr. 368, ibid., p. 301. 15 Aristotle, Metaphysics A2, 982 b 11-17, trans. S. Broadie, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha, ed. C. Steel, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. 16 Plato, Theaetetus, 155 d, trans. R.A.H Waterfield, London, Penguin, 1987, p. 37. 14

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is one of the foundations of Western thought and reveals an intense passion. Sight, says Timaeus, has always been extremely useful, because none of what he and Socrates are saying about the universe would be possible, if men had seen neither the stars, nor the sun, nor the sky. Then, Timaeus goes to the heart of the matter: As things are, however, the visibility of day and night, of months and the circling years, of equinoxes and solstices, resulted in the invention of number, gave us the concept of time, and made it possible for us to enquire into the nature of the universe. These in their turn have enabled us to equip ourselves with philosophy in general, and humankind never has been nor ever will be granted by the gods a greater good than philosophy. This is, in my opinion, the greatest benefit we gain from the eyes — and why should we celebrate all the lesser benefits, the loss of which would cause a nonphilosopher who had lost his sight to wail and grieve in vain? Instead, let’s simply state that the reason and purpose of this gift is as follows: the gods invented and supplied us with vision to enable us to observe the rational revolutions of the heavens and to let them affect the revolutions of thought within ourselves (which are naturally akin to those in the heavens, though ours are turbulent while they are calm). That is, the gods wanted us to make a close study of the circular motions of the heavens, gain the ability to calculate them correctly in accordance with their nature, assimilate ours to the perfect evenness of the god’s, and so stabilize the wandering revolutions within us. 17

Sight has led to the contemplation of celestial movements, and this has meant that the “circlings” of our minds got even closer to those of the Intelligence that oversees the heavens and to which they are related, allowing for the birth of love for wisdom: philosophy, the greatest good that mankind possesses. Finally, Plato also associates sight with voice and hearing: they too, says Timaeus, have been given to us to the same end, speech making a major contribution to it and sounds having been bestowed on us because of “harmony.” Homo would not be sapiens if he had not been able to see the stars. *** Plato and Aristotle are very clear. The point is to explain the origins of the desire to know. “Now and at first,” writes Aristotle. According to him, wonder is what prompted early humans to wish for knowledge. Three centuries later, Ovid gives the appearance of the stars – in the wonderful “Genesis” that opens the Metamorphoses – a very brief moment of great charm. Above the atmosphere of the winds, the clouds, the fog, thunder and lightning, “the great artificer” unfolds the ether, clear and free of weight. And here, too long hidden behind the dark mist, the stars light up the whole sky (the original, “sidera coeperunt toto effervescere caelo,” shines, in its absolute simplicity, with sudden effervescence), while the universe responds to the principle of plenitude of life, filling up with stars and constellations in the gods’ image. Soon after comes the creation of man. Ovid considers the contemplation of stars as a constitutive principle of man’s creation – a kind of primitive DNA imprinted in any human being at the time of his coming into the world. In fact, no matter if he was fashioned “of a seed divine” by the maker of everything or if he was shaped by Prometheus “into the likeness of gods” from the earth that still bears “some seeds of its kindred elements” 17

Plato, Timaeus, 47 a-c, in Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. R. Waterfield, OWC, 2008, p. 38.

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mixing it with rainwater: man was given “a towering head and commanded to stand / erect, with his face uplifted to gaze on the stars of heaven:” “os homini sublime dedit caelumque uidere / iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere uultus.”18 Going back further in time one finds the most fascinating documents of wonder and meditation of Homo sapiens. In the caves of Lascaux, in France, men of the Paleolithic have painted intriguing animal figures that date back to about 17,000 years ago. Some astroarchaeologists consider them as star charts of the Paleolithic universe. In the case of one of the great bulls, for example, the non-figurative points and some of the points in the figure allegedly represent the constellations of Taurus and the Pleiades and the Summer Triangle asterism. The Goseck Circle in Germany, and Stonehenge in England (built between the fifth and third millennia BCE) bear witness to the special attention given in the Neolithic to astronomical phenomena such as the solstices of winter and summer. The Sun Disc of Nebra, dated about 1600 BCE, most likely depicts the Sun (or the full Moon), the rising Moon, and the stars (including a group that would represent the Pleiades), with two side arches added later to indicate the areas of the sun at dawn and dusk (possibly in the position of the solstices), and a lower arc added later to sketch either the “solar barge” or the Milky Way. Celtic coins, mainly from Central Europe, seem to reproduce these patterns. The Berlin Gold Hat – like its three German and French “twins”19 – is rather an artifact of the late Bronze Age (between 1000 and 800 BCE), which was to serve as an emblem for a deity or a priest of the Sun cult then prevalent in Central Europe and which, by means of a complex series of symbols and their repetition, was probably a luni-solar calendar. The Sun Chariot of Trundholm, dating back to about 1400 BCE, consists of a horse pulling a chariot carrying the Sun. It is more or less contemporary with a famous gold ring – coming from Mycenae (1500 BCE) and now at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens – that seems to represent a rather elaborate religious scene. Sitting under a tree, a female deity, accompanied by two maids, receives an offer of lilies and poppies from two women. In front of the goddess, are a double ax and a lion’s head. From above descends a shield-armed idol in the shape of an eight. At the top of the oval are depicted the Sun and a crescent Moon. If we had Schliemann’s imagination and enthusiasm, we might call it “Agamemnon’s ring” or “Clytemnestra’s ring,” and thus go back to the beginning of this chapter – to the Trojan War. *** Man’s familiarity with the stars therefore dates back to ancient times. Their constant presence, their regular motion across the sky, their importance for the measurement of time arouses amazement and wonder. The mystery of their apparent eternity and their rising and setting has something sacred, religiously arcane about it. Therefore, it is essential to fixate and predict their positions, studying their effects on the terrestrial world, worshiping and invoking them. Hence astronomy and astrology: two faces, in ancient times but also until not long ago, of the same wish to understand the cosmos. At the time when the Bronze Age produced, in Europe, the Nebra sky disk, the Sun Chariot of Trundholm and the Mycenaean ring, Egyptian astronomy – by then a science – was creating sensational documents. For instance, take the astronomical ceiling in the tomb of 18 19

Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 71-86. Of Schifferstadt and Ezelsdorf-Buch in Germany, and Avanton in France.

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Senenmut, the architect of Pharaoh Hatshepsut (1479-1457 BCE). Or that covering the sarcophagus hall in the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I (ca. 1292-1279 BCE), the king who reigned between Ramses I and Ramses II and devoted so much of his government to undoing the “monotheistic” or “henotheistic” (and solar) reform of Amenhotep IV.20 The Senenmut ceiling is divided into two sections showing, at the top, the names of planets and stars and, on the bottom, the names of the months and lunar deities. The upper part, in the vertical columns, represents the southern sky with the Decans,21 constellations like Orion and Isis (here, Sirius) on his boat. The lower part shows the constellations of the northern sky with the Great Bear at the centre. The second, the ceiling of the tomb of Seti I, has the shape of a sarcophagus depicting the northern sky with a group of stars that according to the Egyptians never rise or set, but revolve around the North Pole. The sky plays a fundamental role in Egyptian mythology, too. Unlike other cosmogony myths, in which Heaven is male and Earth is female, in Egypt the god of the sky is a woman: Nut (the Night), the barrier that separates chaos from the ordered cosmos. Slender and elegant, her back is covered with the stars of the afterlife to which she leads the dead, and she bears on her belly the stars of the cosmos, as shown in the vault of the tomb of Ramses VI (1145-1137 BCE), whilst arching on her legs and arms to touch the four cardinal points and protect the Earth and its inhabitants. Daughter of Shu (air) and Tefnut (the void), she sleeps with her brother Geb (Earth) and generates Osiris, Seth, Isis and Nephthys.22 During the day, the Sun and the Moon run through her body. At sunset they are swallowed, they pass through her digestive system at night, and then rise at dawn. Always, in any case, Nut protects Ra, the sun god. Take, for example, the myth of Nut devouring her children, written on the ceiling of the tomb of Seti I: It is to the boundaries of the sky that these stars travel outside her [Nut] in the night when they shine and are seen. It is within her that they travel in the day | when they do not shine and are not seen. With this god [the sun] they enter and with him they go forth. With him they travel on the supports of Shu resting at their places. After in the western horizon his majesty [the sun] sets, | they enter into her mouth in the place of her [Nut’s] head in the west. She eats them. Geb quarreled with Nut, being angry with her because of eating.23

These myths were passed down for thousands of years: in Egypt, in the Roman period (first century BCE), the Temple of Hathor at Dendera was made with an astronomical decoration on the roof of its pronaos, representing Nut – even triple, this time – generating the Sun. From the ceiling of the pronaos of the chapel of Osiris in the Temple of Dendera, moreover, comes the most beautiful ancient Zodiac: a bronze disc now in the Louvre whose diameter is a meter and a half. Sustained by the four pillars of the sky in the form of female Akhenaton, Nefertiti’s husband and Tutankhamon’s father. For the Egyptians, the Decans were 36 bright stars in the sky (including Sirius) that divided the night, and then the year, into 36 periods. 22 Sometimes, as on Butehamon’s sarcophagus in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, she is portrayed while separating from Geb. Elsewhere, as in the Greenfield Papyrus of the Book of the Dead of Nesitanebisheru in the British Museum, it is Shu that lifts Nut separating her from Geb. 23 O. Neugebauer and R.A. Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts, Providence and London, Brown University Press, 1960, 4 vols., vol. I, The Early Decans, p. 67. 20 21

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deities (the four cardinal points), and four pairs of genies with the head of a falcon, the disc has a first circle with 36 spirits symbolizing the Decans, and an inner circle with the planets, the Moon, Sirius, Orion, the three northern constellations and the twelve signs of the zodiac: some, like Aries, Taurus and Scorpio, in the guise familiar to us (that is basically Greek of Babylonian origin); others represented according to the Egyptian iconography (Aquarius has the features of Apis). The Dendera Zodiac is a kind of late Egyptian version of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad. One would seek in vain on the banks of the Nile cosmic poems of the kind that Homer created with the simile of the Trojans’ bonfires. What one can find instead is religious, cosmic, astrological poetry, such as the short verses that celebrate the goddess of the sky in the Pyramid Texts: “Oh, great striding goddess, [who strews the green], malachite, and turquoise of the stars! As you are fresh, [Teti is fresh], and the live foxtail-rush [is fresh].”24 Or else, one can find the songs to Pharaohs Unas (ca. 2370 BCE) and Pepi (ca. 2300 BCE) wishing them a successful outcome to the journey that, after their death, will lead them to the stars and the gods. The passage dedicated to Pepi mentions the Winding Canal and the Paths of Arcs – two unidentified parts of the Egyptian sky – together with the sea, the Great Green, and Duat: the personification of the portion of the sky where twilight is born: So, you should go away to the sky, for the paths of the (sky’s) arcs that ascend to Horus have been swept for you. The heart of Seth shall be fraternal toward you as the great one of Heliopolis, when you have traveled the Winding Canal in Nut’s north as a star that crosses the Great Green that is under Nut’s belly. The Duat shall lay down your hand toward the place where Orion is, the sky’s bull having given you his arm. 25

Finally, Egypt worships the Sun. It adores it as a giver of light and life, the lord of the universe that fills every land with its beauty. Among the wonderful examples of solar poems there are the Hymn to Aten and the Thousand songs in honor of Amon-Ra. Even the Book of the Dead, when speaking of the Sun, vibrates with intense inspiration: Hail to you, O Re, when you rise and Atun when you set. How beautiful are your rising and your shining on the back of your mother Nut, you having appeared as King of the Gods. The Lower Sky has greeted you, Justice embraces you at all times. You traverse the sky happily, and the Lake of the Two Knives is in contentment. The rebel has fallen, his arms are bound, a knife has severed his spine, but Re will have a fair wind, for the Night-bark has destroyed those who would attack him. The southerners, northerners, westerners and easterners tow you because of the praise of you, O primeval god, whose images have come into being. The voice goes forth, and the earth is inundated with silence, for the Sole One came into existence in the sky before the plains and the mountains existed.26

An even more intensely cosmic fresco comes from Mesopotamia, the land of astrology. The ziggurat, the towers from whose terraces they observed the stars; the Chaldeans whom

24

J.P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Atlanta, Society of Biblical Literature, 2005, p. 75. Ibid., p. 105. 26 The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, Spell 15, trans. R. O. Faulkner, London, British Museum Publications, 1985, p. 40. 25

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the Hebrew Bible rebukes, and the Greeks and Romans recognized, for their absolute preeminence in wisdom; the Magi who followed the star up to Bethlehem; the Enūma Anu Enlil, the Astrologer’s Manual: they all come from here. It is from here, from Ur, that Abraham departs, called by Yahweh, in search of the Promised Land. The texts from Mesopotamia that have come down to us are also religious, but the feeling of the universe – which the Chaldeans of Babylon, writes Diodorus, consider eternal – is very strong here. A beautiful Sumerian prayer evokes the stillness and silence of the night, the portals of heaven opening wide and the presence of the stars that, although distant, watch over the world. Then, it invokes the constellations (from Orion to Cancer and the Great Bear) and the planets (from Jupiter to Mars to Ištar-Venus, that is, Ninsianna), and the stars of the north, south, west and east – all the stars of the entire cosmos: They are lying down, the great ones. The bolts are fallen; the fastenings are placed. The crowds and people are quiet. The open gates are (now) closed. The gods of the land and the goddesses of the land, Shamash, Sin, Adad, and Ishtar Have betaken themselves to sleep in heaven. They are not pronouncing judgment; They are not deciding things. Veiled is the night; The temple and the most holy places are quiet and dark. The traveler calls on (his) god; And the litigant is tarrying in sleep. The judge of truth, the father of the fatherless, Shamash, has betaken himself to his chamber. O great ones, gods of the night, o bright one, Gibil, o warrior, Irra: o bow (star) and yoke (star) o Pleiades, Orion, and the dragon, o Ursa major, goat (star), and the bison. Stand by, and then, In the divination which I am making, In the lamb which I am offering, Put truth for me.27 In another great prayer, from Babylon, one can see the same situation. The night has now dropped her veil, the buildings are silent, the land is quiet. The gods and goddesses - Šamaš, Sin, Adad and Ištar - have retreated into the sky to rest; only the lonely wanderer invokes his god in panic. Then the soothsayer prays the stars to show their will and, through the sacrifice of the lamb, let him know the truth:

27 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. J.B. Pritchard, 3rd edn., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 391.

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Piero Boitani May the great gods of the night, brilliant Girra, warrior Erra, the “Bow,” the “Yoke,” Orion, the “Dragon,” the “Wagon,” the “She-Goat,” the “Bison,” the “Horned Serpent,” stand by! In the haruspicy which I am performing, in the lamb which I am offering, place for me the truth!28

The Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and other populations that lived in Mesopotamia have not left us amazing images like those that appear on the ceilings of Egyptian tombs.29 What they left are seals, tablets, stelae, and many kudurru – boundary stones which were used to testify to the royal grant of a piece of land. During the Kassite rule in Babylonia (between the sixteenth and twelfth centuries BCE), and then under the Babylonian rulers, the kudurru were engraved with the terms of the contract, the pictures and symbols of the divinities under whose protection the gift was given, and a curse on all those who violated the grant. One of them – dating back to about 1125 BCE, during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I, and now at the British Museum in London – shows from above the astral symbols of the Sun, the Moon and Venus, then the divine ones of Heaven, of the Atmosphere and the Deep waters, Anu, Enlil, and Ea; the Dragon of Marduk (looking to the left, in a vertical curved line), the fish-goat, the Vulva; the symbols of the gods of War and of the Underworld, Zababa and Nergal; Gula with the Dog and Sagittarius; the thunderbolt of Adad, god of rain and storm; the Turtle of Ea, Scorpio, and the symbol of Nusku, god of light and fire. In short, this is a veritable Pantheon of stars and gods. The fact that it is found on many kudurru explains the sacred nature of the contract and at the same time the importance attached to the stars by the cultures of Mesopotamia. Simply to read the Sumerian and Akkadian cosmogony texts, or the Enûma Eliš,30 the Babylonian poem of creation, is enough to reveal how inexhaustibly anxious were the inhabitants of the fertile crescent to understand the sky. It is also enough to cast a glance on the Assyrian star map coming, several centuries later, from the Library of Assurbanipal in Nineveh. This is a disc of about 18 cm in diameter, divided into eight equal radial sectors, six of which include graphic representations of stars and constellations. Symbols and names of gods, constellations and stars are written in cuneiform characters all around the disk. The constellations are depicted as points (stars) connected by lines; one can identify forms of arrows, triangles and ellipses. Starting from the bottom right, and moving counterclockwise, one can recognize Libra, Sirius in the form of an arrow, Pegasus and Andromeda (Field and Plough), the Pleiades, Gemini, and Virgo-Hydra-Corvus.

Diviner’s Prayer to the Gods of the Night, online SEAL Project of the Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East, SOAS London. 29 While we have an astrology textbook, the Enūma Anu Enlil, and an astronomy textbook, the Mul-apin. 30 The former in Ancient Near Eastern Texts; pp. 37-128; the latter in W.G. Lambert and S.B. Parker, Enuma Eliš, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966. 28

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In essence, the small disc of Nineveh is an atlas of the major constellations, which we can suggestively compare to those of the centuries and millennia to come, to the west and to the east of Assyria: Bianchini’s Roman World Map (second century CE); the Chinese Dunhuang Map (seventh century CE); the Inca map of the stars; the representation of the universe in the Turkish Cream of Stories (1583); the astronomical table of the manuscript Graecus 1291 (ninth century); the constellations according to Aratus in the manuscript Barberinianus Latinus 76 (15th century); the Skidi-Pawnee leather star map (between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries). These are all masterpieces of ingeniousness and art documenting the unceasing human effort to know and to represent the cosmos: the cosmos that Heraclitus, it seems, proclaimed “beautiful” and considered eternal. “This world-order [the same of all] did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everliving fire kindling in measures and going out in measures.”31 *** And so we come back to Greece. This country shows a truly unique passion for the stars, expressed in philosophical and scientific debate as well as in great literature. It is no coincidence that when Odysseus, after twenty years, finally approaches Ithaca, transported in his sleep on the ship of the Phaeacians, the island appears along with the rising of the morning star: And then, that hour the star rose up, the clearest, brightest star, that always heralds the newborn light of day, the deep-sea-going ship made landfall on the island.32 An enchanted moment, with Hesperus shining between dark and dawn, signals the homecoming of the hero who wandered and suffered so much between Troy and the edges of the world. Homer is subtle and delicate, but the philosophers-scientists who follow him are no less skillful. Ion of Chios – writer of tragedies and author of at least one cosmological treatise (the Triagmós, in which he demonstrated the triadic structure of the universe based on Pythagorean assumptions) – was celebrated as the Morning Star. Aristophanes recalls him in Peace, where a servant asks the protagonist Trygaeus if it is true “that when we die, we straightway turn to stars.” “Yes it is,” answers Trygaeus. The servant insists: “And who’s the star there now?.” “Ion of Chios,” replies Trygaeus, “who on earth composed / ’Star o’ the Morn,’ and when he came there, all / at once saluted him as ‘Star o’ the Morn.’”33 The scholia to this work by Aristophanes have bequeathed to us the beautiful opening lines of Ion’s song: “Let us wait for the Star of Morn that haunts the sky, the white-winged forerunner of the Sun.”34 Heraclitus himself, says Strabo, “is better and more Homeric, as he similarly speaks of the Bear in place of the arctic circle: ‘The Bear is the limit of morning and evening, and 31

Heraclitus, fr. 217 in KRS, p. 198. Homer, Odyssey, XIII, 105-108. 33 Aristophanes, Peace, 832-837, trans. B.B. Rogers, LCL, 1924. 34 Ion of Chios, in Lyra Graeca, ed. and trans J.M. Edmonds, LCL, 1927, p. 227. 32

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opposite the Bear is the boundary of clear Zeus’.”35 The most beautiful document, however, concerns Anaxagoras: the first philosopher who, coming from Ionia, lived in Athens in the age of Pericles. In a passage of Eudemian Ethics Aristotle celebrates his passion for the cosmos: They say that Anaxagoras, when confronted with these kinds of worries, and the question of what would make coming into existence better than not, replied, “contemplating the heavens and the order of the whole universe.” 36

After all, Euripides, who according to Diogenes Laertius was a pupil of Anaxagoras, wrote: Happy the man who has gained knowledge through inquiry, not aiming to trouble his fellow citizens, nor to act unjustly, but observing eternal nature’s ageless order (kosmos), the way it was formed, and whence and how. Such men are never inclined to practise shameful deeds.37

The Greeks know, of course, that knowledge of astral motions has fundamental practical applications. Thales is not the only expert in astronomy good enough to correctly predict a great harvest of olives and buy all the mills of Miletus for next to nothing so as to sell them at huge profit. In the Theogony, Hesiod asks the Muses to reveal not only how the gods were born from Gaia and starry Uranus, but also to tell him “how in the first place gods and earth were born, and rivers and the boundless sea seething with its swell, and the shining stars and the broad sky above.”38 In Works and Days, moreover, Hesiod shows perfectly well that the life of every day, season and month must be adjusted according to the phases of the night sky. For example, the harvest should begin when the Pleiades appear: When the Atlas-born Pleiades rise, start the harvest – the plowing, when they set. They are concealed for forty nights and days, but when the year has revolved they appear once more, when the iron is being sharpened. This is the rule for the plains, and for those who dwell near the sea and those far from the swelling sea in the valleys and glens.39 For Hesiod, the Pleiades mark the beginning and end of the agricultural calendar (“When the Pleiades and Hyades and the strength of Orion set, that is the time to be mindful of plowing in good season,”) 40 and navigation should follow the Pleiades, too:

35

The Geography of Strabo, I.1.6, trans. D.W. Roller, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 39. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1216 a 10-15, ed. B. Inwood and R. Woolf, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 7. 37 Euripides, fr. 910, in Euripides, Dramatic Fragments, ed. and trans. C. Collard and M. Cropp, LCL, 2008, p. 227. 38 Hesiod, Theogony, 108-10, in Hesiod, Theogony Works and Days Testimonia, ed. and trans. W.G. Most, LCL, 2006, p. 11 (slightly modified translation). 39 Hesiod, Works and Days, 383-391, ibid., p. 119. 40 Ibid., 614-615, p. 137. 36

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But if desire for storm-tossed seafaring seize you: when the Pleiades, fleeing Orion’s mighty strength, fall into the murky sea, at that time blasts of all sorts of winds rage; do not keep your boat any longer in the wine-dark sea at that time, but work the earth, mindful, as I bid you. Draw up your boat onto the land and prop it up with stones, surrounding it on all sides, so that they can resist the strength of the winds that blow moist, and draw out the bilge-plug, so that Zeus’ rain does not rot it.41 These passages bring back a world where the sky, the land and the sea have the same rhythm – in which the winds, the waves, and the fields abide by the stars. However, the Greeks have taught us first and foremost to gaze at the sky with rapture, to grasp its breadth and beauty. Just listen to Euripides’s Ion to understand this inexhaustible charm. At one point in the play a servant reports that Ion has laid out a peplum from the treasury of the king over the pavilion he is building, so that it acts as a roof. The peplum slopes from the centre to the four sides, “so as to reproduce, albeit in stylized fashion, the concavity of the celestial sphere.”42 And it is a marvel to behold it, for it looks like embroidery: Draped high over the roofpoles, they made a second heaven, a celestial cover, up there, where heaven musters all its stars in the circle of sky, while the horses of the sun, chasing day’s last light, drag the Evening Star behind. There it shines! And night in its chariot rides forth, dark-gowned, striding slow, the stars holding close. And there, the Pleiades, good companions, ford the sky. And Orion with his sword, poised midstride forever. And the Great Bear, curling its golden tail round the polestar. And high in heaven’s festive weave, the white full moon fractions the year, carves the months with blades of light, till the breeding Hyades, clear sign that steers the sailor, are chased away, with all the other stars, by dawn’s light.43 The description of the peplum is a piece of extraordinary skill in which Euripides vies with Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield. But instead of aiming for a total representation of the cosmos, the playwright focuses on the transformations of the sky in one night, from dusk to dawn, and on those in the month of the lunar cycle. Thus, Hesperus appears in the sunset, drawn by the Sun’s galloping horses, while the sky summons the stars. Then the chariot of Night, also drawn by galloping steeds, climbs up, with stars in its cortège – the Pleiades, Orion, the Hyades, the Bear. Finally, Lucifer brings dawn, dispersing the stars.

41

Ibid., 618-626, (slightly modified translation). G. Chiarini, I cieli del mito, Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2005, p. 41. 43 Euripides, Ion, 1112-1124, trans. W.S. Di Piero, New York-Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. 42

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Everything is moving fast, as if in a swirling dance. And visually, the golden tail of the Bear standing out on Night’s black mantle dominates all. Euripides’s passion for the stars is strong and continuous. His Iphigenia at Aulis opens with a great silence – the wind, the birds and the sea are quiet – while in the sky Sirius is wandering near the Pleiades.44 His choruses often sing about the constellations. This passion, however, is also linked to his desire to emulate Homer. Achilles’s shield had become a canonical piece in tragic narrative. In Seven against Thebes Aeschylus had developed a whole “shields scene,” in which the first, Tydeus’s clypeus, presented a flaming starry sky with a shining full moon in the middle: “the queen of all the stars, the eye of night, / stands out, embossed.”45 In Phoenissae, Euripides replicates Aeschylus’s scene, doubling it.46 But in Electra the chorus mentions precisely Achilles’s shield, skillfully elaborating on Homer’s original. Here, on the edges, there are Perseus brandishing the head of the Gorgon and Hermes, the messenger of Zeus. At the centre, however, once again shines the cosmos: the circle of the blazing sun with the winged horses, and “dances of stars in the ether:” the Pleiades and the Hyades, terrifying Hector, prompting him to flee.47 More than four centuries later, Achilles’s shield will return again in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in it, in his speech against Ajax to get Achilles’s weapons, Ulysses affirms that his opponent cannot even distinguish the engravings of the clipeus, “the ocean, the earth and the sky with its constellations, / the Pleiads and the Hyads, the Bear that never sinks in the sea, / the circles of the sun and moon and the gleaming sword of Oríon.”48 The idea of enclosing the universe in the surface of a shield is too good to be forgotten. *** Science, philosophy, and tragedy are all driven by the beauty of the stars as it appeared in epics - in Homer. By following this direction, they open up the immense space of lyric poetry, as in Ion of Chios. Theon of Smyrna — confirming that “the poets ... use the word Sirius of all the stars in common”49– delivers us a fragment by Ibycus, a poet from Reggio Calabria who sang of love and narrated the sack of Troy as well as Sicilian stories: “‘blazing as through long night the brilliant sparklers.”50 The sentiment of the night, which was so religiously strong in Mesopotamia, echoes from Homer (for example, from the simile with which I opened this chapter)51 to the Greek lyric. Alcman’s famous Night is one of its highlights: And the mountain-peaks are asleep and the ravines, the headlands and the torrent-beds, all the creeping tribes that the black earth nourishes, the wild animals of the mountains, the race of bees 44

Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, 6-11. Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 475-476, trans. A. Hecht and H.H. Bacon, New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973. 46 Euripides, Phoenissae, 119-179 and 1090-1138. 47 Euripides, Electra, 464-469. 48 Ovid, Metamorphoses XIII, 291-4 49 Ibycus, fr. 314 in Greek Lyric, vol. 3, ed. and trans. D. Campbell, LCL, 1991, p. 273. 50 Ibid. 51 And from much shorter descriptions, such as Iliad, II, 1-2 and Odyssey, XX, 56-57. 45

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and the monsters in the depths of the surging sea; and the tribes of the long-winged birds are asleep.52 Alcman does not even attempt to depict a night in which the light of the moon and the stars illuminates infinite distances. Instead, he focuses on the tranquility of the world. He achieves a first surprising effect by repeating the conjunction and, involving a growing number of places and living things, taking up the verb “sleep” in every verse (in the original). Then, he increases the wonder by attributing sleep to what is not actually subject to it: mountains, ravines, headlands, torrent-beds. When he introduces animals, he summarizes their space as the “black earth”. Then he goes back to the mountains of the first line and suddenly widens up that space, pointing obliquely to something beyond the earth, the sea and the air. Finally, he speaks of wild animals, bees, fish, birds: that is, the whole animal world. We do not know how this wonderful fragment went on, or was inserted, into the song. In the context of archaic lyric poetry, this description was unlikely to be an end in itself: it was probably set against the restlessness of a human being. This, in fact, would soon become an established topos: quietness dominates all living beings, but the heroine, or hero, is tormented; or, with the introduction of the first person singular, the world is sleeping – I alone stay awake, restless.53 Alcman has his very own way of writing a love song. In a fragment reported by an Egyptian papyrus of the first century CE, he celebrates two girls of the chorus, Agido and Hagesichora: both magnificent coursers, the former compared to the sun, the latter with golden hair and a silver face. But, above all, both are “doves” that stand out like Sirius among all the girls of the chorus, who, instead, must be contented with bringing a votive offering to the goddess – the morning star, Aphrodite, Hesperus, Venus: “This is Hagesichora here; and the second in beauty after Agido will run like a Colaxaean horse against an Ibenian; for the Pleiads, as we carry a plough to Orthria, rise through the ambrosial night like the star Sirius.”54 One star leads to another: from Sirius to Hesperus. And the poet goes throughout the night, from its bottom to the star of dawn. It is an immortal night, divine, perfect in beauty (“ambrosial”).55 In that same light Agido and Hagesichora sparkle like the most shining star of all: they reflect divine perfection. Plato – who, as we have seen and shall see, has a great cosmic passion for the stars – uses an astral simile in a love lyric, again in a completely original way. In two epigrams of the Greek Anthology he praises a young man by comparing him to a star: Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled; Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendor to the dead. Sweet Child, thou star of love and beauty bright, Alone thou lookest on the midnight skies; 52

Alcman, fr. 89 in Greek Lyric, vol. 2, trans. D. Campbell, LCL, 1988, p. 455 (rearranged translation). Examples in Virgil, Eneid, IV, 522-532: night and Dido; Petrarch, canzone 50, “Ne la stagion che ‘l ciel rapido in China.” 54 Alcman, fr. 1, 60 ss., Greek Lyric, vol. 2, pp. 365-367. 55 “Ambrosial night” is a Homeric formula: cf. Iliad, II. 57; Odyssey, IV, 574; IX, 404; XI, 330; XV, 8. 53

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Piero Boitani Oh! That my spirit were yon Heaven of light To gaze upon thee with a thousand eyes.56

The images imply something more than the philosopher’s passion for the beloved. The first establishes a parallel between the life and death of the young man on the one hand, and the stars of the morning and evening on the other: it takes life from Lucifer to Hesperus, from Venus to Venus. The second suggests a reflection on the boy’s gaze at the stars, and Plato’s desire to be the sky with his eyes on that boy: on that star. It implies, in fact, the extraordinary vision of the stars as the eyes of the sky, thus inserting eros within the cosmos so dear to Plato as a philosopher and inventor of myths. *** The poet who introduces the first person singular in love poetry is, memorably, Sappho, thus giving rise to the subjective night lyric in Western literature: “The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time goes by, and I lie alone.”57 At first glance, it might seem that Sappho here takes the place of the shepherd in the Homeric simile between the Trojans’ bonfires and the stars, which we read at the beginning of these pages. But there is a huge difference between Homer’s shepherd and Sappho’s “I”. The shepherd is an outside observer who participates with joy in the spectacle of the night. In contrast, Sappho’s stars reverberate through her, their light is filtered through her eyes, and the whole view of the sky is only a means, beautiful and yet limited to the subjective psyche, to emphasize the loneliness of the poet. For Sappho the setting of the stars is a sign of the inexorable passing of time. In her, there is no room for the joy of the shepherd. If anything, though concealed in the fragment as it is now, there is the opposite: pain, sadness, melancholy – the darkness – into which she is thrown by her loneliness and the disappearance of the moon and the stars. “It is midnight.” Sappho looks at the sky with a fundamentally human concern. One of her most beautiful fragments celebrates Hesperus, the Evening Star, precisely in this intimate fashion: “Hesperus, bringing everything that shining Dawn scattered, you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring back the child to its mother.”58 She is, however, able to get close to Homer as perhaps no other lyric poet before Leopardi. Commenting on the passage of Iliad VIII from which I started my considerations, the archbishop of Thessalonica Eustathius, in the twelfth century, noted that the poet of Lesbos had taken it as a model, so he cited the three related verses: “The stars hide away their shining form around the lovely moon when in all her fullness she shines (over all) the earth.”59 It is very likely that the description introduced a comparison of beauties, something like “as the light of the moon conceals that of the stars, so the beauty of one maid outshines that of others.” Maybe that is why the image is a very short flash, alternating lights. First the stars surrounding the moon, then the splendor of the latter outshining their light. Indeed, the point is this: in Homer “stars in the night sky glittering / round the moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory,” while in Sappho’s lyric the light of the moon overpowers that of the stars. 56

Plato, from the Greek Anthology,VII, 669 and 670, trans. P.B. Shelley, in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, New York, Modern Library, 1932, p. 762. 57 Sappho, in Greek Lyric, vol. 1, trans. D. Campbell, LCL, 1982, fr. 168 B, p. 172; Italics mine. 58 Ibid., fr. 104, p. 131. 59 Ibid., fr. 34, p. 83.

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Sappho rewrites and corrects Homer with a realistic and restrictive intent: it is true that when the full moon shines the stars closest to it tend to disappear in the sea of light it emanates. The two images are equal at first, with the stars around the moon. Soon after, in their totality, they take on different perspectives and breadths. Sappho depicts a lunar halo that, in its full glow, dominates and cancels weaker lights. Homer, instead, focuses on the infinite whole: on the remote borders of the cliffs, the peaks, the valleys, an immense space opens under the vault of heaven and “all the stars” spangle it. The old poet composed a cosmic Nocturne, the poetess a Moonlight Sonata “on earth.”

Chapter 2

THE MORNING STARS God takes Abraham by the hand and leads him out of his tent. “Look now toward heaven,” he tells the patriarch, who is saddened by the fact that he does not have children and the heir of his home will be Eliezer of Damascus. “Look toward heaven” – as if Abraham, who issues from Ur of the Chaldeans, had never done so. As if a Sumerian like himself didn’t know the stars and their motions. “Look now toward heaven,” says Yahveh, obviously because he is expecting him to see with fresh eyes. And then he adds: “and tell the stars, if you are able to number them.” Number the stars: Ur’s Chaldeans, like us, could see about seven thousand of them with their bare eyes, and were able to name 148 constellations, stars and planets. Therefore, Yahveh is using the perspective of omnipotence and omniscience: to echo Petrarch, Leopardi and Valéry, man cannot “annoverar le stelle ad una ad una,” number the stars one by one. God, instead, “telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.”1 Yahveh’s unscientific hyperbole aims at something else. For he goes on to say: “So shall your seed be.”2 Abraham’s children, and his children’s children, will be as many as the uncountable stars. This promise had already been made: when Lot left Abraham, God told the latter: “And I will make your seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall your seed also be numbered.”3 Abraham “believed in the Lord”, as Genesis tells us, “and he counted it to him for righteousness.” Therefore, it was a test. And Abraham passed it, because he believed in God’s words: having faith is a bit like looking at the sky and trying to count the stars. It is no coincidence that the promise is made again when Abraham passes the supreme test of his loyalty, when he is ready to sacrifice Isaac: “in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore.”4 Moses refers to this very promise when, after the construction of the Golden Calf, God wants to destroy Israel.5 And he thinks of this very promise, believing in it, when he tells his people: “The Lord your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, you are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude.”6

1

Psalms 147:4. Genesis 15:1-5. 3 Genesis 13:16. 4 Genesis 22:17. 5 Exodus 32:13. 6 Deuteronomy 1:10. 2

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The Christians will still trust in this promise when proclaiming that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”7 The Epistle to the Hebrews argues that “therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable.”8 God, the stars, faith. The same Epistle to the Hebrews says that “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”9 The Hebrew Bible evokes powerful images of the firmament, but subordinates them once and for all to the Beginning and to the Creator. Stars do not have poetic autonomy as such, because in the cultures surrounding Israel they are idols, cult objects. “And lest you lift up your eyes unto heaven, and when you see the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven,” preaches Deuteronomy, “should be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord your God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. But the Lord hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as you are this day.”10 Stars, the text insists with increasing harshness, are not to be worshipped: anyone who serves other gods, “and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven,” shall pay for this abomination by stoning.11 The stars are, instead, the immeasurable measure of the creative power of Yahweh. After creating light on the first day, God created the heavens – that solid vault that separates the waters above from those below – on the second day. It is only on the fourth, after making the earth fruitful on the third, that he gives shape to the sun, the moon and the stars:12 to “give light upon the earth” and “to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness,” that is, to give light to the world and regulate time. This extremely brief Priestly report is amplified with high poetic sense in the Wisdom Books,13 especially the Book of Job and the Psalms. The Book of Job is the one that contains the most resonant proclamations. It is Job himself, the man torn by evil and suffering, who announces the theme when, speaking of the God whom he nevertheless accuses of injustice, he says: Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars. Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea. Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south... Which doeth great things past finding out; yea, and wonders without number.14 But, above all, it is Yahweh who claims his own absolute power when he speaks to Job from the whirlwind, questioning him and reminding him of the beginning of the world: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” he asks, “when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”15 The poetic style of the Wisdom 7

Hebrews 11:1. Hebrews 11:12. 9 Hebrews 11:3. 10 Deuteronomy 4:19-20. 11 Deuteronomy 17:3. 12 Genesis 1:6-8, 14-19. 13 Genesis 1 is generally thought by scholars to go back to a “Priestly” document (P) dating to post-Babylonian Exile period. 14 Job 9:7-10. 15 Job 38:4-7. 8

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Books (repetition with variation) means that the morning stars of the first hemistich reverberates in the sons of God of the second. The stars are equated to the angels – angels are the morning stars. It is a leap of tense sublimity towards the cosmic jubilation of the reverberate.16 This indirect, glorious poetic equation will feed centuries of Christian imagination, at least until Blake. The appearance of Yahweh on the scene is of course the highlight of the Book of Job. Nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, not even in the story of Moses, does God address man so long and with such power. Yet his answer to the pressing questions of Job appears, at first, incongruent. Job wanted a reason for the injustice and evil that dominate the world. Yahweh responds with a “legal speech” in which a declaration of the infinite inferiority of his interlocutor (“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”) precedes a challenge (“Gird up now your loins like a man: for I will demand of you, and answer you me”), and this in turn develops into a long interrogation based on his work as the Creator: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if you have understanding.”17 God’s double speech is the most powerful celebration of creation of the Hebrew Bible. Only its objects are known to man: but its plan, its mechanisms, its direction appear immeasurable, incomprehensible, unattainable. “Have you commanded the morning since your days; and caused the dayspring to know his place … Have you entered into the springs of the sea? or have you walked in the search of the depth?” Yahveh provides an overview of the entire universe: the atmospheric phenomena, the “mechanics” of the firmament, the motions of the ocean, even “the gates of death,” “the doors of the shadow of death;” then the animals, how they reproduce, their instincts; finally Behemoth and Leviathan, the two monsters of chaos and evil (and perhaps of history).18 Yahweh’s answer is therefore absolute, transcendent and oblique at the same time. Absolute and transcendent because, instead of debating justice, he reveals himself in mystery and incomprehensibility, presenting himself as the Beginning, the Cause and Nature of all things, which are inaccessible to man. On this level, however, God gives Job some oblique answers. First, chaos and evil are part of Creation (which is no small thing, if the supreme Voice itself says so), but God can defeat them: “Behold now Behemoth, which I made with you; he eateth grass as an ox…He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.”19 Second, not only has Yahweh created the universe, but he also has provided and provides constantly for it, its needs, its operation: “Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings.”20 The human being is part of that “providing,” as well as of Creation. Therefore, divine justice is unfathomable, but it is there, and is at one with the “care” that God takes of his creatures. The Voice demands acceptance and trust (faith): not understanding, let alone intellectual, theoretical, scientific knowledge. It frightens and marvels, occupies the silence, filling it with sublime, terrifying and tender images, reviving This is reminiscent of Longinus’s sublimity. In the treatise, On the Sublime (9, 9), Pseudo-Longinus recognizes this quality to the story of the creation of light in Genesis. 17 Job 38:2-4. 18 Monsters of history, if one considers them emblems of Babylon and Egypt. 19 Job 40:15 and 19. 20 Job 39:5-6. 16

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all creation in the Creator’s voice as if he were creating it now with the word “fiat”: “Whereupon are the foundations” of the Earth, asks Yahveh, “who laid the corner stone thereof?” Soon after, he thunders: “Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it, And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, And said, Hitherto shall you come, but no further: and here shall your proud waves be stayed?” Later, he seems to whisper with the care of a mother: “Know you the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or can you mark when the hinds do calve?”21 It is in this context that the cosmos is evoked in the Book of Job. The stars are the privileged place of Yahweh’s creative action, of its primal glory. He insists, in fact: Can you bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Can you bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or can you guide Arcturus with his sons? Do you know the ordinances of heaven? can you set the dominion thereof in the earth? Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover you?22 God declares his transcendence, omniscience and omnipotence. Outside and above the cosmos, it is he who created it, gave it order and laws, establishing ties among its members. Hebrew poetry will never forget this, even when assigning to man, as in the Psalms, a place lower only than that of the angels, creating a topos that echoes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained; What is man, that you are mindful of him? and the son of man, that you visit him? For you have made him a little lower than the angels, and have crowned him with glory and honour. You made him to have dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet.23 The creating power is infinitely transcendent, as Psalm 104 says: God, clothed with majesty and glory, wrapped in light as in a garment, builds his home on the waters, stretches out the heavens like a curtain, makes the clouds his chariot, the flames of fire his ministers, and treads upon the wings of the wind. The wisdom of Yahweh is equal to his power: as we have already seen, man cannot know the number of the stars. God, instead, counts them and “calleth them all by their names.”24 But the most famous text in this regard is the opening of Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

21

Job 38:8-11; 39, 1. Job 38:31-34. “Mazzaroth” is the Hebrew word for the Pleiades. 23 Psalms 8:3-7. 24 Psalms 147:4. 22

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Here the concrete images have disappeared, the names of constellations vanished: there are no morning stars, no groups of stars. Everything has become pure sound, word, narrative, language. The firmament is an announcement, the heavens a narration. And their voice is propagated in space, to the ends of the world, and over time, from day to day and from night to night. The abstraction these verses are capable of is immense. It consists of simultaneous compression and expansion within a total vision. It is not surprising that this kind of biblical poetry – sublime par excellence, as Coleridge put it – has had great influence on our imagination and our art. In his oratorio The Creation, Haydn makes the Chorus and the archangels Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel sing “The heavens declare the glory of God” soon after the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars on the fourth day. There are many variations on the stars-creation theme in the Hebrew Bible: especially in the Wisdom Books. Around 190-180 BCE Jesus Ben Sirach, the Ecclesiasticus, wrote a text that draws on Job and the Psalms. “The pride of the height, the clear firmament, the beauty of heaven, with his glorious shew,” intones the song, and then celebrates the sun (which at its rising proclaims “a marvelous instrument, the work of the most High” and at noon dries the earth), the moon, punctual in its phases and regulating the month, and the stars: “The beauty of heaven, the glory of the stars, an ornament giving light in the highest places of the Lord. At the commandment of the Holy One they will stand in their order, and never faint in their watches.”25 Beauty is also very much present in the Hebrew Bible, where Qohelet had already confidently stated that God “hath made every thing beautiful in his time” and where the Psalms proclaim that the works of the Lord are “glorious” and “wonderful.”26 However, Sirach is the first to declare the stars “beautiful”, and indeed to connect the “glory” of the stars to the “beauty of heaven:” to show, in short, a proto-aesthetic perception along the lines of that of the shepherd in the Iliad. Even in the prophetic Books, the link between the cosmos and the creative power of God is strong. For example, Baruch (whose Book is not present in the Hebrew Bible), gives an original interpretation of the texts of Job and the Psalms, attributing the joy and the shining to the stars themselves: “the stars shined in their watches, and rejoiced: when he calleth them, they say, Here we are; and so with cheerfulness they shewed light unto him that made them.”27 On the other hand, Isaiah – who, in the Hebrew Bible, imagines the fall of the Morning Star with more fervent originality28 – strongly sends the same message as that of the Wisdom Books: Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that

25

Sirach 43:1-2 and 9-10. Sirach does not appear in the Hebrew and in the Protestant Bibles. Ecclesiastes 3:11; Psalms 111:3. 27 Baruch 3:34-35. 28 Isaiah 14:12-13: “How are you fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How are you cut down to the ground, you who did weaken the nations! For you have said in your heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.” The morning star, eosphoros in Greek, is lucifer in Latin, and then Lucifer / Satan among Christians (Luke 10:18 etc.). Satan’s fall seems to be also announced in Ezekiel 28:12-19. 26

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Piero Boitani stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in ... Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth. 29

“Lift up your eyes on high and behold”, says Isaiah. “Look toward heaven”, God told Abraham. This is the message that, from the stars, the Bible sends to mankind. It means: keep the Beginning in the spotlight, think and act looking at the stars, which are “a shadow of Yahweh.” “Consider,” according to the etymology of the verb “con-sidera:” with the stars.30 A touching passage of the Book of Daniel helps us understand how important it is for Israel to thank and bless God for his work. The three young men who refuse to worship the gold statue forged to Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon are thrown into the fiery furnace. The flame, reinforced with bitumen, oakum, pitch and twigs, burns high and irresistible, enough to burn the Chaldeans who are nearby. But the angel of God comes down into the furnace and makes its “midst” “like the blowing of a wind bringing dew.”31 Then the three young men, untouched by the fire, praise God: Blessed art thou, O Lord, the God of our fathers, and thy name is worthy of praise, and glorious for ever … Blessed art thou on the throne of thy kingdom, and exceedingly to be praised, and exalted above all for ever. Blessed art thou, that beholdest the depths, and sittest upon the cherubims: and worthy to be praised and exalted above all for ever. Blessed art thou in the firmament of heaven and worthy of praise, and glorious for ever... O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Angels of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Heavens, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Waters that be above the Firmament, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O all ye Powers of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Sun and Moon, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Stars of Heaven, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Showers and Dew, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Winds of God, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever.32 The entire universe is called, here, to bless God. It is the believer’s response to Yahweh’s questions in the Book of Job.

29

Isaiah 40:21-22 e 26 See J. Freccero, Dante. The Poetics of Conversion, ed. R. Jacoff, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 226. 31 Daniel 3:49-50 (Douai-Rheims Bible). 32 Daniel 3:26-27 and 54-56 (Douai-Rheims), and Book of Common Prayer. Daniel 3:26-45 is not present in the Hebrew Bible (nor in the Protestant), but in the Syriac version, in the Greek ones of the Septuagint and Theodotion, and in the Vulgate. 30

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*** In the Book of Genesis there is a beautiful and mysterious episode concerning Jacob. When his father Isaac sends him to Paddan Aram, the house of the fathers, to find a wife, Jacob stops in Luz to sleep. He takes a stone, puts it under his head, and lies down. Falling asleep, he begins to dream: there is a ladder on earth, with its top reaching heaven, and the angels of God are climbing up and down on it. Then, suddenly, the Lord stands before him and says: “I am the Lord God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon you lie, to you will I give it, and to your seed; And your seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and you shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south.” Jacob wakes up and is afraid, recognizing that “this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” He takes the stone he had used as a pillow and erects it as a stele, consecrating the place, which he renames Bethel (house of God).33 Many years later, this episode will be equalled, at Jacob’s return in Canaan, by the clash of the patriarch with God at Penuel. In it, even though they could have appeared, the stars are absent. In the heavenly vision that opens up before Jacob he does not see any star. The subsequent iconography – for example William Blake in the early nineteenth century and George Segal at the end of the twentieth century – will take advantage of the opportunities offered by the biblical text, filling the patriarch’s dream with stars. In the Book of Genesis adding details like this would probably have appeared a futile aesthetic tinsel, perhaps even a dangerous hint of idolatry.34 The subjects of the passage are the house of God on earth, the spiritual gate of heaven, and the repetition of the divine promise. However, Jewish culture has not always refrained from filling the visions of the patriarchs with a cosmic gaze. The Book of Enoch, a sort of “Pentateuch” (made up precisely of five Books) probably composed between the late fourth and the late second century BCE, describes from the outset, in the so-called Book of the Watchers, the harmony of the universe. The Book of Parables, the second nucleus of Enoch, includes a vision of angels and of the cosmos. Although The Book of the Watchers condemns the science of the sky that the rebellious angels teach men, revealing “the eternal secrets which were (preserved) in heaven,”35 it is driven by a very intense cosmic inspiration. For instance, Enoch is brought to the Water of Life, perhaps the great cosmic water of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian traditions. Later, it recounts: And I saw the storehouses of all the winds, and I saw how with them he has adorned all creation, and I saw the foundations of the earth. And I saw the cornerstone of the earth, and I saw the four winds which support the earth and the firmament of heaven. And I saw how the winds stretch out the height of heaven and how they position themselves between heaven and earth; they are the pillars of heaven. And I saw the winds which turn heaven and cause the disk of the sun and all the stars to set. And I saw the winds on the earth which support the clouds, and I saw the paths of the angels. I saw at the end of the earth the firmament of heaven above.36

33

Genesis 28:10-22. Genesis 1:16 avoids even mentioning the sun and the moon by their name, calling them instead “the greater light” and “the lesser light.” 35 Enoch VIII:3 and IX:6. 36 Enoch XVIII, in The Apocryphal Old Testament, ed. H.F.D. Sparks, London, Oxford University Press, 1984. 34

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The third section of Enoch, the so-called Book of Astronomy, or the Heavenly Luminaries, is dedicated to the illustration of the calendar: it is a very delicate point, because the calendar of Enoch, like that of Jubilees, is completely at odds with that of the Rabbis of Jerusalem. The Book of Astronomy constitutes a veritable treatise on the division of time, bearing religious and scientific concerns that will lead to the condemnation of the Enochian tradition. And the leaders of the heads of thousands who are in charge of the whole creation and in charge of all the stars have to do also with the four days which are added, and are not separated from their position, according to the whole reckoning of the year. And these serve on the four days which are not counted in the reckoning of the year. And because of them men go wrong in them, for these lights really serve in the stations of the world, one in the first gate, and one in the third gate, and one in the fourth gate, and one in the sixth gate; and the exact harmony of the course of the world is completed in the separate three hundred and sixty four stations of the world. For the signs and the times and the years and the days the angel Uriel showed to me, whom the Lord of eternal glory has placed in charge of all the lights of heaven, in heaven and in the world, that they might rule on the face of heaven, and appear over the earth, and be the leaders of day and night, namely the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and all the serving creatures who revolve in all the chariots in heaven.37

The Book of Enoch thus shares the “scientific” drive that the Chaldean scholars (probably) and the Greeks (certainly) had. Another apocryphal text, the Book of Jubilees or Little Genesis, composed in its final form around 100 BCE, confirms that the Jewish world includes other stimuli than those of the canonical Torah. Enoch and Jubilees share several topics and were both important in the gestation of Christianity. They both played a leading role in shaping the collective imagination of the two following millennia, because they narrate the creation (Jubilees) and fall (Enoch) of the angels, which do not appear in Genesis. Jubilees – covering the events of Genesis and the first twelve chapters of Exodus, dividing them into periods of 49 years (jubilees) and then organizing them into seven series of seven years each – seems to recognize Abraham’s problem. In fact, it tells the following story: And in the sixth week, in the fifth year of it, Abram sat up all through the night of the new moon of the seventh month to observe the stars from evening till morning, in order to discover how the rains would fall that year; and he was alone as he sat and observed. And a thought struck him, and he said, All the signs of the stars and the signs of the moon and sun are in the hand of the Lord. Why, then, should I enquire into them? If he so wills, he makes it rain evening and morning, and if he so wills, he withholds the rain; and all things are in his hand. And he prayed that night and said, My God, God Most High, thou alone for me art God: thou hast created all things, and all things that are are the work of thy hands; and thee and thy dominion have I chosen. Deliver me from the evil spirits who have dominion over the thoughts and minds of men, and let them not lead me astray from thee, my God; and establish me and my descendants for ever, that we go not astray either now or ever. And I ask thee, should I return to Ur of the Chaldees, to those who beg me to return to them? Or should I rather remain here in this place? Help thy servant to choose 37

Enoch LXXV:1-3.

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whatever is the right path before thee, and let me not walk in the error of my heart, O my God. And he finished speaking and praying, and behold, the word of the Lord was sent to him through me, saying, Leave your country and your kinsman and your father’s house, and go to a land that I will show you; and will make you a great and numerous nation. And will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be blessed in the earth, and in you shall all fathers of the earth be blessed.38

The travail of Abraham, in the Book of Jubilees, is that of one who “recognizes” God and monotheism, according to Thomas Mann’s skilful formulation.39 As a Chaldean, as the Ur man he is, he stays up all night watching the stars to be able to predict the rains. But a voice rises in his soul that drives him to hand over all the “signs of the stars, the sun and the moon” to God, to accept him as the Creator of all things and of all things the only Agent. The voice ordering him to leave the land between the two rivers thus, simply, responds to his meditations. *** The New Testament apparently makes much smaller use of the stars than the Hebrew Bible and the apocryphal texts. It is true, of course, that its story begins, in Matthew, with the appearance of a mysterious star that leads the Magi from the East to Bethlehem, thus indicating that the birth of the Child is a cosmic event.40 It is also true that the Apocalypse presents the Messiah as the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand, and then introduces the “great sign” in heaven: a woman “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”41 But the use of such images is precisely only symbolic, or prophetic, not poetic. However, there is a particularly important area in which the New Testament develops the icon of the stars taking it from the Hebrew Bible. It is the essential theme of the new religion: the resurrection of the body. Daniel had already prophesied the awakening of those who sleep in the dust of the earth, and announced that the wise shall shine, then, “as the brightness of the firmament” while “they that turn many to righteousness” will be as bright “as the stars for ever and ever.”42 According to Matthew, Jesus takes up the image with an eschatological intention in the parable of the tares, proclaiming that the righteous shall “shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”43 Then Paul brings the comparison to its decisive completion in the great discourse on the resurrection of the body in the First Letter to the Corinthians. In it, the apostle asks how the dead will rise, with which body, and answers obliquely: All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the 38

Jubilees, XII, 16-23. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, trans. J. E. Woods, New York, Knopf, 2005, pp. 343-355. 40 Matthew 2. 41 Revelation 12:1. 42 Daniel 12:2-3. 43 Matthew 13:43. 39

42

Piero Boitani dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. 44

When Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, addresses the problem of resurrection, he says, citing this passage, that the apostle here “corporum resurgentium gloriam comparat claritati stellarum,” compares the glory of resurrected bodies to the stars’ claritas.45 The Christian Good News, therefore, opens with the Star of Bethlehem and ends, ideally, with the star-like resurrection of the body. And there is more. In the eschatological discourse of Chapter 24 of the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus quotes Isaiah in the prophecy that after the great tribulation of Jerusalem “shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven.”46 How can this announcement coexist with the proclamation made by Jesus himself in Matthew, according to which, as we have just seen, the righteous shall “shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father?” One of the major Greek Fathers, John Chrysostom, finds the answer in baptismal catechesis. John writes: Blessed be God! Behold, there are stars here on earth too, and they shine forth more brilliantly than those of heaven! There are stars on earth because of Him who came from heaven and was seen on earth. Not only are these stars on earth, but—a second marvel – they are stars in the full light of day. And the daytime stars shine more brilliantly than those which shine at night. For the night stars hide themselves away before the rising sun, but when the Sun of Justice shines, these stars of day gleam forth still more brightly. Did you ever see stars which shine in the light of the sun? Yes, the night stars disappear with the end of time; these daytime stars shine forth more brightly with the coming of consummation. It was of the night stars that the Gospel says: The stars will fall from heaven, as the leaf falleth from the vine; and of the day stars: The just will shine forth like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Why is it that as the leaf falls from the vine, so shall the stars fall from heaven? As long as the vine nurtures the grapes, it needs the shelter given by the leaves; when it puts aside its fruit, it also puts aside its foliage. So, too, as long as the whole universe possesses in itself the race of men, the heavens also will have their stars, just as the vine will have its leaves. When there is no more night, there will be no more need for stars. Fiery is the nature of the stars in the skies; fiery, too, is the substance of those on earth. But the fire in the skies can be seen with the eyes of the body, whereas this other fire is perceived by the eyes of the soul. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire, says Matthew. Do you wish to learn the names of these two kinds of stars? The stars of the firmament are called Orion, Arcturus, Evening Star, and Morning Star. Among the stars in our midst there is no evening star; all of them are stars of morning. 47

44

1 Corinthians 15:39-44. Summa Theologiae, III Suppl., q. 85, 1, 4 ad fin. In the Timaeus (42 b) Plato imagines that those who lived well return to the star that resembles them after death. 46 Isaiah 34:4; Mt 24:29. 47 John Chrysostom, Baptismal Instructions in Ancient Christian Writers, ed. J. Quasten and W.J. Burghardt, Mahwah, NJ, Paulist Press, 1963, pp. 56-57. 45

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“These” stars are those who were newly enlightened by Baptism, following the literal meaning of “light bearers.” “Those” others are the stars of the physical universe: when there is no more night, there will be no reason for them to exist. *** It is possible that the poor in spirit have found – and still find – all these interpretations unbearably contrived. For them, the Christian culture of the Middle Ages recommends at least one attitude toward the stars: to treat them as Jesus of Nazareth treated the flowers, the lilies of the field: with total simplicity. The one who did this best is Francis of Assisi in his Canticle, certainly recalling the Book of Daniel: Praise be to you, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially the lord our brother the sun, which is the day and you give us light through him. And he is beautiful and radiates great splendor: of you, Most High, he bears the likeness. Praise be to you, my Lord, for our sisters the moon and the stars: in the sky you shaped them clear, and precious, and beautiful.48 What matters here is the creaturely brotherhood that Francis feels toward the sun, the moon and the stars, the gratitude he feels for these divine gifts. The sun, of course, brings the “significatione,” the “likeness” of God, it is symbolically the divinity itself. But what strikes Francis about the sun and the stars are their brightness and splendour: their claritas and primal pulchritudo. Enjoying such beauty in total communion with nature is the first step on the path that leads to surrendering to God “with great humility” and to being part of his Creation.

Francesco d’Assisi, Cantico di frate sole, in Letteratura francescana, vol. I, ed. C. Leonardi, Milan, Fondazione Valla-Mondadori, 2004, p. 217 (my translation). 48

Chapter 3

STARS OF THE EMPIRE “In the city of the celestials I am a fellow citizen of he who holds sway over all peoples, seas, and lands:” these are the opening words of The Rope, Plautus’s comedy that seems to anticipate Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This line is spoken by a splendens stella candida, a “resplendent white shining star” that always rises in a given period: Arcturus, a star of the constellation Boötes. Jupiter put it in the sky so as to “watch over” the Great Bear: his beloved Callisto pursued by Diana’s and Juno’s rage. Arcturus plays no part in The Rope, apart from announcing its plot. However, in the Prologue his presentation continues with some curious details: at night, he says, he stays in heaven with the other gods, and by day he dwells among men along with other stars sent there by Jupiter. The latter distributes them around the Earth so that they can acknowledge “the deeds and characters of men, their virtue and good faith, and how fortune furthers each.” According to the reports given by Arcturus and other celestial bodies, he will thus be able to reward the deserving and condemn the wicked – those who bring fraud cases using false witnesses and perjury. The stars on a mission to Earth make a daily report on all those people to Jupiter, so he can judge them and “punish them with a penalty bigger than the action that they win.”1 The idea of divinities that, under the guise of stars, act as informers for the supreme god seems entirely new. Another original element is the appearance of a star on stage. This is the third century BCE, and Plautus – after Livius Andronicus, who translated the Odyssey into Latin – is the author with whom Roman literature was born – and indeed, one can say it was born mature. It could be argued that the origin of Roman literature is marked by the stars, as Plautus himself, in Amphitryon, wrote a very beautiful passage devoted to them. The night is still, because Jupiter has stopped the course of the sun and the stars to be able to sleep with Alcmene as long as he wishes (while Amphitryon fights and wins his war, his wife Alcmene is being seduced by the god, who appears in the guise of her husband). Amphitryon’s servant, Sosia, stops in the dark, clutching his now consumed lamp, before going to the palace to report to Alcmene the most important moments of the war. He looks at the sky and notices that no star is moving: If there’s anything I believe or know for sure, I certainly do know that this night Nocturnus has fallen asleep drunk: the Great Bear isn’t moving anywhere in the sky, the 1

Plautus, The Rope, Prologue, in Plautus, The Little Carthaginian, Pseudolus, The Rope, ed. and trans. W. De Melo, LCL, 2012, p. 407.

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The intoxication of the night god Nocturnus, in Sosia’s joking words, causes time to freeze. Stasis is in fact totally unnatural in the sky; however, when one contemplates it for a few minutes, it appears to be exactly that: perfect stillness. Without knowing it, Plautus anticipates what painters, ever since the seventeenth century, will be forced to portray by the very nature of their art: a snapshot of the starry sky. When reading astral Latin literature, one is always impressed with the elegance typical of an advanced culture. The Romans did not find anything substantially new in the science of astronomy, but they were the conscious heirs of the civilizations that preceded them, particularly of Greek one. They collected everything, absorbing everything, drawing on it all. In the Theogony, Hesiod spoke of Atlas who “holds up the sky with his head and with his tireless hands, standing at the limits of the earth in front of the clear-voiced Hesperides.”3 In the Odyssey, Homer instead pictured Atlas as Calypso’s father, calling him “dangerous” and saying that he “sounds the deep / in all its depths, whose shoulders lift on high / the colossal pillars thrusting earth and sky apart.”4 The greatest of the early Latin poets, Ennius, does not make a decisive choice between these two images, but aims at beauty: “he who sustains the sky dotted with shining stars,” he wrote according to Macrobius.5 Combining this image with Hesiod’s, Virgil will say: “colossal Atlas turns / on his shoulder the heavens studded with flaming stars.”6 Both Ennius and Virgil add the detail of shining stars, which has both a cosmic and an aesthetic resonance. However, this is not their own invention. A cup from Laconia dating back to around 550 BCE, now in the Vatican Museums, depicts the punishment imposed by Zeus on the Titans Atlas and Prometheus. The latter, tied to a column, has his liver eaten up by an eagle. The former carries the cosmos on his shoulders, and the globe has clearly detectable stars on it. The most famous icon of Atlas is the so-called Farnese Atlas, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. This is a Roman copy of the second century CE – presumably from the Library of the Forum of Trajan in Rome – whose Hellenistic original dates perhaps to the second century BCE, and it contains one of the most complete representations of the celestial sphere ever handed down to us: over forty constellations are engraved on it. The image of Atlas, for that matter, never ceased to fascinate the visual artists. In the seventeenth century, Guercino painted a wonderful version of it with a full globe of constellations and stars, while the famous eighteenth century print by Bernard Picart replaced the sphere with a large dark shape endlessly projecting the stars: this indicated the new conception of the universe and the idea that ancient myth was now understood to simply foreshadow scientific truth. In the twentieth century, finally, all that was left was the huge circular structure of the cosmos, as in the statue of Lee Lawrie at New York’s Rockefeller Center, dating 1937. 2

Plautus, Amphitryon, 271-276, in Plautus, Amphitryon, The Comedy of Asses, The Pot of Gold, Two Bacchises, The Captives, ed. J. Henderson, LCL, 2011, p. 35. 3 Hesiod, Theogony, 517-519, in Hesiod, Theogony Works and Days Testimonia, p. 45. 4 Homer, Odyssey, I, 62-64. 5 Macrobius, Saturnalia, VI, I, 8-9: Ennius, Annales, Book I. According to Macrobius, the image also appears in Ennius’s Books III and VI. 6 Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 481-482, trans. R. Fagles, London, Penguin, 2006.

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*** The love of the Romans for the cosmos has always been intense, from the very beginning of their literature. We have a wonderful fragment of Ennius’s Hecuba, for example, where he mentions the “mighty precincts (magna templa) of all those who dwell in heaven, commingled with the shining stars;”7 and one, magnificent, by Accius, inviting one to go “through the vault of heaven, through the shining constellations of the universe all painted with twice six spoils in a row.”8 Above all, the gigantic figure of Lucretius stands out: his passion for the secrets of nature, for the origins of the universe and its architecture, has no equal in the ancient world except for the Presocratics and Plato and Aristotle; moreover, this love is expressed in a poem of unusual power, well beyond the efforts made by these philosophers. When, in the famous Book V of The Nature of Things, following in the footsteps of Epicurus, Lucretius comes to the generation of the universe starting from the atoms, the difficulty of presentation does not stop him from achieving poetic mastery. It was a fortuitous jumble of matter, in fact, that formed the earth, the sky, the depths of the sea, the sun and the moon. Swirling for a very long period of time, the atoms ended up combined in clusters fit for the beginning of “big things.” There were still no sun or stars or sea, but rather a tempestas: an immense, swirling tempest. The reigning “discord” upset “ways, connections, motion, weights, combinations, blows,” causing endless conflicts between atoms. Then different elements began to separate and similar ones began to join: the atoms of the earth, heavy and intricate, tended downwards; joining up, they shrank and expelled the thinnest material, which, in the form of light and round “seeds,” passed through the holes of the earth and rose like “fire-bearing” ether, taking with it light fire: Not unlike a scene we’ve often had the chance to view – When, in the early morning above the grass bejeweled with dew, The day breaks, and the golden radiance of the sun is kissed With red, and lakes and year-round flowing streams breathe out a mist, So that sometimes it seems the earth is steaming. Then on high, The evaporations gather up beneath the vaulted sky And knit a scrim of cloud-cover.9 Suddenly the stars and the veil of the Milky Way emerge before us: the former are mild particles of fire that shine like dewdrops under the rising sun; the latter is a fog exhaled by lakes and rivers, a cloud in the sky. No one, yet, had been able to combine cosmogony with the humble, glorious phenomena of the earth in early morning, drawing in one fell swoop a picture of the dawn of the world.10

7

Ennius, Hecuba, fr. 203, in Remains of Old Latin, ed. and trans. E.H. Warmington, vol. I, Ennius and Caecilius, LCL, 1935, p. 293. 8 Varro, De lingua latina, VII, 14, in Remains of Old Latin, vol. II, LCL, 1936, pp. 572-573. 9 Lucretius, The Nature of Things, V, 460-466, trans. A.E. Stallings, London, Penguin 2007. 10 In his monumental commentary on Lucretius, C. Bailey points out that the similarity does not simply present an analogy between the “perceptible processes of nature” and the formation of the heavenly bodies, because “the formation of mists at dawn is in fact an example in little of the vast process he [Lucretius] is describing.” Titi Lvcreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex, ed. C. Bailey, vol. III, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1947, ad V, 460-466, p. 1388. See also Bailey’s references, p. 1389, to Aëtius.

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Lucretius, however, persists. The ether, light in its expansion, bends around the Earth and forces everything “in its amorous embrace”: then, the sun and the moon, whose globes spin in the air between the ether and the Earth, take form. Neither light enough to spin in the higher areas, nor heavy enough to lie down at the bottom, they are “living bodies” that rotate and make up whole parts of the universe (“The same is true with our own bodies, for we can attest / parts of us can move while other members stay at rest”). Then the Earth suddenly gives way, filling its depths with “swirling brine”, daily increasing the blue expanse of the sea with its “sweat.” Forced by the flames of the ether and by direct sunlight, it releases new bodies of steam and air, rising up and thickening in the distant bright patches of the sky, altaque caeli ... fulgentia templa: other stars. At this point, the poet can move on to the description of the sky: the movements of its bodies, the position of the Earth, the size of the stars, their orbits, the causes of day and night, sunrise, moon phases, seasons, eclipses. It is a small treatise on astronomy, in which, however, the poetic imagination makes the discourse vibrant, especially when it touches on the astral motions. So, for example, the stars rotating in the eternal cosmos sparkle, or, while the sky as a whole appears motionless, the shiny stars move; or finally the currents of the ether drag and turn the sidereal fires “per caeli summania templa”, around the heavenly dome: the endless shores of the night sky.11 Finally, a look from the Earth to the firmament: the ether fires sometimes seem to change size according to their distance “as long as flame / and flickering are clear.”12 In one verse, Lucretius manages to condense the remote flickering and glowing light of the stars. *** Roman astrology owes its knowledge to Teucer “of Babylon,” Antiochus of Athens, Ptolemy and Vettius Valens,13 and its astronomy continuously moves between the teachings of Eudoxus of Cnidus, Aristarchus, Apollonius of Perge, Hipparchus, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy, between the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle, and between the thought of the Pythagoreans, Stoics and Epicureans. Likewise, Roman astral literature never forgets a Greek work of the Alexandrian age: the Phaenomena by Aratus of Soli,14 of which we have the original as well as a series of translations and illustrations forming a veritable tradition that was in vogue at least until the Renaissance. Inspired by Stoicism and based on the work of Eudoxus of Cnidus (ca. 410-350 BCE),15 this work by Aratus (ca. 315-245 BCE) is the oldest and most complete picture we have of the sky as the Greeks saw it. Of course it is a poem, which takes into account scientific facts but favors the descriptive aspect and especially the mythical-narrative one. Aratus, in fact, traces everything back to 11

Lucretius, De rerum natura, V, 470, 477, 478-79, 482. Ibid., V, 588-87. 13 See F. Boll, Sphaera. Neuegriechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder, Leipzig-Bonn, Teubner, 1903; and N. Campion, A History of Western Astrology, 2 vols., London-New York, Continuum, 20062009. 14 Of course, a notable influence was also exerted by Eratosthenes’s Catasterisms (of which we only have the Epitome, éd. J. Pamàs I Massana, Catastérismes, BL, 2013) and by Hipparchus’s commentary on Aratus and Eudoxus of Cnidus (In Arati et Eudoxi Phaenomena, ed. K. Manitius, Leipzig, Teubner, 1894). For an introduction to ancient astronomy that is not too technical, see J. Evans and J.L. Berggren, Geminos’s Introduction to the Phenomena: A Translation and Study of a Hellenistic Survey of Astronomy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006. 15 With the addition of his mistakes to those of the source, as Hipparchus did not fail to note. 12

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Zeus from the beginning of the book: “Let us begin with Zeus, whom we men never leave unnamed; filled with Zeus are all the streets and all the meeting-places of human beings, and filled too the seas and harbors; and everywhere all of us have need of Zeus.”16 We are his offspring – continues Aratus – and therefore, as a loving father, he gives us favorable indications and prompts us to work, reminding everyone of the law of life. It is he who says when the ground is ready for plowing and when is the best season to plant and sow. For this reason, he has set signs in the sky, distinguishing constellations and providing stars to mark the seasons throughout the year, so as to ensure the growth of all that is alive. Stars and constellations are thus the work of Zeus: man did not have to do anything other than discover them, as someone among those no longer alive did in the distant past, observing them and giving them their name and complete form: For he would naturally have been unable to give a name to all the stars, or to distinguish them, if they were taken in isolation, because there are so many of them in every direction, and many are alike in their size and brilliance, and all circle through the sky in the same fashion. And so he resolved to order the stars into groups, so that they would represent figures when set in due relation to one another. The constellations were thus devised under their respective names, and no longer does the rising of any star take us by surprise.17 Aratus tells us that the stars have been organized in constellations that correspond to the order desired by Zeus. This is the principle of scientific convenience. But there is also a principle that governs the poetic reason. Naming the constellations means giving them a mythical identity, finding in heaven the stories that the poets have sung on earth, inserting them into a narrative fabric. In short, evoking Cassiopeia, Orion, Perseus means bringing poetry into the cosmos. This is not the task Aratus aims for, but the myths are very present in his Phaenomena, often in personal versions. Describing the sky starting from the North Pole, for example, he mentions the two Bears, which closely follow each other and are therefore called “ploughs.” Soon after, he adds that, “if the tale can be credited,” they left Crete to ascend to the heavens at the will of Zeus because they had placed him as a child in a cave on Mount Dicton and fed him for a year, while the Curetes deceived his father Kronos who wanted to kill him. One, Aratus concludes, was called Cynosura, and the other Helike: in navigation, Phoenicians orient themselves following the former (Ursa Minor), while the Greeks prefer the latter (the Major).18 This story is surely not Aratus’s invention, but one should note that he prefers this version to the one about Zeus’s love for Callisto. Later, when speaking of the Maiden (Virgo), the poet combines two themes taken from Hesiod to narrate the story of a young girl – daughter of Zeus or Astraios (a Titan, the “ancient father of the stars”) – who will later become very famous as Astraea but who for him is Dike, Justice. With the rise of the

Aratus, Phaenomena, 1-4, in Eratosthenes and Hyginus, Constellation Myths, with Aratus’s Phaenomena, p. 139. Ibid., 375-382, p. 148 (rearranged translation). 18 Ibid., 30-44, pp. 139-140. 16 17

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bellicose and carnivorous Race of Bronze, after those of Gold and Silver, she left the Earth and retired to the sky as a constellation. So Aratus’s short poem blends seemingly absolute descriptive precision with the wonderful tales of the poets. The reason for his huge success in the following two millennia is all here. He has been translated and rewritten, and he inspired writers in ancient Rome. The Latin versions, both with and without the scholia to the text, ran through the Middle Ages and produced wonderful illustrations as early as the Carolingian era. It is certainly not Aratus who started the tradition of catasterism, the transformation into stars or constellations, as its beginnings can perhaps be traced back to Hesiod,19 and it is certainly present in Pherecydes and then Euripides.20 However, it is in the Alexandrian period that catasterisms were consecrated and, as evidenced by the work of Eratosthenes, encoded in veritable systems. We have a vivid example of this – in the making, as it were – in Callimachus’s The Lock of Berenice. The poet was a contemporary and an admirer of Aratus, whom he praised for his “Hesiodic” theme and manner.21 According to Hyginus, Ptolemy III Euergetes had married his cousin Berenice and set off a few days afterwards to make war against Asia. Berenice vowed to cut off her hair if Ptolemy returned victorious. In fulfillment of her vow, she deposited her hair in the temple of Aphrodite-Arsinoe at Zephyrion, but on the following day it was no longer to be seen. The king was greatly upset by this. This is why the great astronomer Conon of Samos, “in the hope of gaining the king’s favor, claimed to have seen the lock among the stars; and he pointed to seven stars that did not belong to any constellation, saying that these must be the hair.”22 It was the discovery of the constellation still known as Coma Berenices. Callimachus intervenes at this point, making the lock itself speak and first celebrating Conon, who “beheld me in the sky, me the lock of Berenice which she dedicated to all the gods.”23 Unfortunately, the work of the Alexandrian poet has survived only as fragments, and it would be impossible to reconstruct all the details that made it a famous masterpiece of elegance if we did not have the beautiful Latin translation by Catullus. Like his predecessor, the latter opens the poem with a praise of Conon, reaching the object of his celebration – the lock now turned into a star – only seven verses later. The speaker is the lock itself: He who distinguished all the lights in the vault of heaven, who mastered the rising and setting of the stars, the way the sun’s scorching incandescence is darkened, how at set times the stars recede, how She of the crossways takes off to rocky Latmos lured by sweet love from her circuit in the sky – that Theogony, 947-949: Ariadne, Dionysus’s bride, is made immortal and “forever young” by Zeus; Erga, 383-391 on the Pleiads. Pliny, Eratosthenes and the Scholi attributed to Hesiod an Astronomy or Astrology allegedly featuring catasterisms: see H. Diels-W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Zurich, Weidmann, 2004: Hesiod, 4 B 6-7. 20 Pherecydes, fr. 104 in F. Jakoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, Leiden, Brill, 2nd edn., 2005 (Pherecydes uses the verb katasterizo and it refers to the crown of Ariadne, transformed into the Northern Crown by Dionysus); Euripides, Helen, 375-380. 21 Epigrams, XXIX, in Callymachus, Hymns and Epigrams, Lycophron, Aratus, ed. A.W. Mair, LCL, 1952, pp. 156-157. 22 Hyginus, Constellation Myths, in Eratosthenes and Hyginus, Constellation Myths with Aratus’s Phaenomena, p. 70. (Hygin, L’Astronomie, éd. A. Le Bœuffle, BL, 1983, II, 24, 1, pp. 67-68). 23 Callimachus, The Lock of Berenice, in Callimachus, Hymns and Epigrams, Lycophron, Aratus, p. 227. 19

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same Conon observed me at heaven’s threshold, a lordly lock from Berenice’s crown brightly refulgent, that she vowed to an assortment of goddesses, smooth arms outstretched, at the time when the King, strengthened by his new marriage, was off to despoil Assyria’s borderlands, still bearing sweet traces of the nighttime struggle he’d waged for her virgin trophy.24 At first, it seems that Catullus wants to set the magnificence of the starry sky and the glory of Conon’s science against the little importance of the occasion, of the object, and ultimately of the love between Ptolemy and Berenice. Of course, the contrast between the bright cosmos and Berenice’s small arms is striking. Still, her hair is called “refulgent” as if to recall the splendor of the sun. Moreover, Catullus makes a subtle transition from the universe of the stars to eros by inserting two verses dedicated to Trivia, the Moon, which disappears from the sky because it falls on Latmos to visit Endymion, with whom she is in love. The “sweet love” that draws her out of her orbit echoes in the “sweet traces of the nighttime struggle” between the two lovers. It is therefore eros that is elevated to the cosmos, as befits the catasterism that is the subject of the lyric and narrated shortly after. The verses devoted to it combine the yearning of love with the airy and bright lightness of the transformation into a star. Catullus, in fact, opens the stage with the exclamation of the lock “Against my will, O Queen, was I parted from your crown then, / against my will”; then he makes it curse whoever invented iron, which cuts hair and digs mountains. Finally he recounts the two moments of the elevation. First, Memnon’s brother Zephyr, son of Tithonus and Aurora, arrives “beating the air with vibrant wings” on his winged steed and carrying high the hair “through the darkening empyrean” until he reaches Venus’s lap. Then, the goddess places it in the sky, and Catullus’s poetry soars with it, up into the light and the stars: – lest in the clear sky’s motley texture the golden crown from Ariadne’s brow should alone have its fixed place, but rather that we also should shine there, votive spoils of a golden head – all tear-damp as I was, on my way to the gods’ dwellings, the goddess set me, a new star, among the old: now abutting the lights of Virgo and savage Leo, and a near neighbor of Callisto, Lycaon’s child, I round to my setting, ahead of tardy Boötes who merges with deep Ocean barely and late.25 The astronomical coordinates, the mythical allusions, and the poetic echoes make Catullus’s catasterism, in the footsteps of Callimachus, a perfect model. And when the poet

24

The Poems of Catullus. A Bilingual Edition, trans. P. Green, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 2005, 66, 1-4. 25 Ibid., 66, 59-68.

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invites the wives (of Rome) to keep away from adultery,26 he adds that, despite everything, the lock is still yearning to return to her mistress – so that, if that constellation ceased to exist, “Orion / would then shine out bright right next to Aquarius.” Then the wonderful circle would be complete, coming back once again to the lock of hair and the stars. After all, how can one think that Catullus may truly set the stars against love? Catullus is the heir of Sappho, and when, in poem 7, Lesbia asks how many kisses she’d have to give him for him to feel satiated, he replies – in what we could consider a lascivious parody of God’s words to Abraham, but which is actually a rhetorical topos – “Match them to every grain of Libyan sand in / silphium-rich Cyrene, from the shrine of / torrid oracular Jupiter to the sacred / sepulcher of old Battus; reckon their total / equal to all those stars that in the silent / night look down on the stolen loves of mortals.”27 *** The transformation into a star, or constellation, has a canonical tie with eros, one of reward and consolation: when a woman is abandoned, betrayed, or punished, a god turns her into a star. Ovid’s Metamorphoses repeatedly enacts this mechanism with skill and unparalleled speed. When Arcas is about to kill his mother Callisto, already transformed into a bear, Jupiter, who had to leave her because of Juno’s jealousy, transports them both “through space,” making room for them in the sky as “neighboring constellations.”28 Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on a desert island, is rescued by Bacchus, who embraces her and takes off her crown, launching it onto the sky to give it the glory of a perennial constellation. This time, Ovid devotes four beautiful, very light verses to the catasterism: It whirled and spun through the air, And during its flight the gems were changed into brilliant fires, Coming to rest once more in the shape of a jewelled circlet Between the Kneeler and bright Ophiúcus, who holds the Snake.29 The young Cicero also wrote poetry and competed with his precursor Aratus, translating and rewriting him, thus initiating a long Latin tradition. Everything, in the surviving fragments of his Aratea, shows the intention to romanize the Alexandrian poem and make it more lively and dramatic. Metamorphoses, here, are taken for granted, while the author focuses on the movements made by the mythical characters that represent the constellations. The feet of Andromeda, for example, allow us to see Perseus who stretches out his right hand to the throne of Cassiopeia: “Victorious he steps – feet stretched apart, closed in the boots tightened by laces – as if he had leapt, all covered by fine dust, from earth to sky.”30 Regardless of whether Cicero had a celestial globe (to which I shall soon return), what is certain is that he notably reworked his source, also adding the dusty cloud of the star M 34 (NGC 1039), designated in Latin with the simple adjective “puluerulentus.” Lines 79-88, in which Catullus addresses the brides, are not present in Callimachus’s original. The Poems of Catullus, 7, 3-8. 28 Ovid, Metamorphoses II, 504-507. This is followed by the story explaining Juno’s persecution so that the two Bears do not bathe in the sea. 29 Ibid., VIII, 179-182. 30 Cicero, Aratea, 20-26, in Cicéron, Aratea. Fragment poétiques, éd. J. Soubiran, BL, 2002. My translation. 26 27

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Elsewhere, instead, the writer simplifies Aratus, translating his work into crystal clear Latin lines. In describing the Milky Way Aratus had evoked a spectacle capable of arousing astonishment: “If ever on a clear night, when all the stars are displayed in their splendor to human beings by the heavenly goddess Night, and none is dimmed in its passage by the full moon, but all shine bright and clear through darkness.”31 Cicero translates this by shifting the scene into a cloudless night of full moon and pointing to the “circle” of the Galaxy with a paraphrase that – by shortening the original and eliminating the explicit “wonder” – transfers it into the image itself: “If you ever saw a great circle stretch out, it is the Milky Way, shining in excessive whiteness, that becomes visible.”32 *** The subsequent Roman adaptation of Aratus’s Phaenomena is due to none other than a member of the imperial family.33 Julius Caesar Germanicus – belonging to both the Julian and the Claudian families as the great-grandson of Augustus and grandson of Tiberius, adopted by the latter as a son and heir, brother, father and grandfather of three emperors (Claudius, Caligula and Nero) – found the time, between his political activity, his presence at court, his wars, triumphs, and his untimely death, to compose a ditty entitled Arati Phaenomena which had considerable success at that time. Germanicus reworks Aratus with refined taste, evoking or broadening mythical episodes of catasterism absent in the Phaenomena, correcting the scientific and literary data of the source through Hipparchus’s commentary and the work of Eratosthenes, using celestial globes, and emphasizing an ideal based on the individual virtue of the hero as he wanted to practice it in his political and military career. Above all, he places mythical astronomy within Roman imperial ideology. Like many of his contemporaries, the designated heir of the empire mentions the astral deification of Augustus; and replaces the initial invocation of Aratus to Zeus with a dedication to a “genitor” that can only be Augustus himself, as he had already passed away.34 This ideology only faded with the weakening of the empire itself. Festus Avienus, who composed in the fourth century CE a translation and amplification of the original Phaenomena, mentions neither the founders Julius Caesar and Augustus nor the monarchs of his time such as Constantine. And the empire has already vanished, at least in the West, when, towards the end of the seventh century, the anonymous Aratus latinus appeared. However, this is also the time when the empire began producing literary astronomy, which became very popular and was aimed at its affirmation. Julius Caesar, who reformed the calendar and, according to Macrobius,35 composed a De astris appeared – so the people thought – as Sidus Iulium, the comet of Julius, between July 20 and 30, 44 BCE, a few months after he was assassinated, while Octavian was celebrating the ludi Victoriae Caesaris. The writers of the Augustan age were never to forget that. Horace, who showed his knowledge of astronomy and astrology when addressing Maecenas,

Aratus, Phaenomena, 469-479 in Constellation myths with Aratus’s Phaenomena; see also the comment in Aratus, Phaenomena, ed. D. Kidd, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 350-353. 32 Cicero, Aratea, 245-249. My translation. 33 Apart from five verses, Ovid’s translation is not amongst those that have come to us. 34 Germanicus, Arati Phaenomena, 558-560 and 1-16, in Germanicus, Les Phénomènes d’Aratos, éd. A. Le Bœuffle, BL, 2nd edn., 2003. 35 Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1, 16, 89. 31

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and lampooned fiercely Iccius’s cosmological passion in the Epistles, celebrated the star Julius in his Odes and anticipated the stellar deification of Augustus.36 Tibullus and Propertius did the same.37 Virgil also acted similarly: in the Eclogues and at the beginning of the Aeneid he praised Caesar’s comet, while in the Georgics he advocated Augustus’s deification.38 Manilius enhanced Augustus’s star.39 Later Seneca will laugh at Claudius’s starry apotheosis, calling it “pumpkinification” in his Apocolocyntosis. Finally, Lucan claims that Nero ascended into the sky.40 The empire, spanning across the entire known terrestrial globe, requires the involvement of the cosmos: it demands that the stars be part of its fabric. It summons them, discusses them, illustrates them. Nigidius Figulus, Varro and Vitruvius had already spoken of astronomy (and astrology) when the republic came to an end. Now, Pliny the Elder resumes their illustration in Book II of his Natural History. While the eighth month of the year (August) was named after Augustus, and Tiberius, refusing heavenly honors, was interested in astrology,41 Nero placed on the ceiling of the Domus Aurea a fresco depicting the constellations. In Campus Martius, Rome, the clock of Augustus – with the Egyptian obelisk (now in Piazza Montecitorio) acting as the gnomon – marked the hours, months, seasons and the signs of the Zodiac: its shadow was projected on the Ara Pacis on September 23, the day of the autumnal equinox and the Emperor’s birthday. Celestial globes and world maps were produced throughout the empire: from the Kugel globe to the Vatican sphere, from the Mainz Globe to the Bianchini World Map up to the big sphere on the shoulders of the Farnese Atlas – they all represented the cosmos and its constellations, sometimes with impressive precision. The Bianchini World Map, around the two Bears and the Dragon in the center, shows the Greek, Egyptian and Mesopotamian constellations. In four circles it depicts the images of the Chaldean Zodiac, two Greek Zodiacs, an area with numbers indicating the planetary influences on the individual signs of the Zodiac and, lastly, the Egyptian decans. On the outer circle, finally, there are the faces of the Greek decans or of the personifications of the seven planetary deities. These works, and the “sphaeropea” (the spheres) in particular, were obviously not born with the Roman Empire: Strabo speaks of a magnificent sphere, by the astronomer Billaros, transported to Rome by Lucullus;42 and Cicero mentions spheres manufactured by Archimedes and then brought to Rome after the conquest of Syracuse. We even know from Eudoxus of Cnidus of a – solid, full – sphere built by Thales and decorated “with constellations and stars which are fixed in the sky,” later described by Aratus.43 The representation of the universe and calculations of time and of the motions of heavenly bodies have spread since the Hellenistic age, as proven by the globes of Prosymna and Matelica, the

36

Horace, Odes, II, 17, 17-21; III, 29, 17-22 (the constellations at the birth of Horace and Maecenas); Epistles, I, 12, 14-20 (Iccius); Odes, I, 12, 47 (Julius’s star); Odes, I, 2, 45-49 (Augustus’s future catasterism). 37 Tibullus, II, 4, 15-20; Propertius, II, 34, 51-55; VIII, 5, 23-28; IV, 1. 38 Virgil, Bucolics, IX, 46-49; Aeneid, I, 286-290; Georgics, I, 32-34. 39 Manilius, Astronomica, I, 384-386. 40 Lucan, Pharsalia, I, 45-59. 41 Tacitus, Annals, IV, 37-38; Svetonius, Lives of Caesars, Tiberius 69.1, 70.1-3, 71-1. See F. Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and the Romans (1912), repr. Memphis, General Books, 2010. 42 Strabo, XII, 641. 43 Cicero, De re publica, I, 14, 22 in Cicero, De re publica, de legibus, trans. C.W. Keyes, LCL, 1928, pp. 40-43.

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so-called “mechanism” of Antikythera, the Zodiac of Dendera and that of Cairo (or Daressy), and sundials mentioned by Vitruvius.44 What is striking about the imperial age is the geographical, temporal and social extent of such representations. From Tusculum, in the fourth century CE, comes the great mosaic with Minerva and the phases of the Moon today in a Greek Cross Hall of the Vatican Museums. At Pompeii, a first-century fresco depicts Apollo-Helios holding a sphere. In El Jem, Tunisia, in the late second century, someone commissioned a mosaic of Apollo-Sun and a calendar. One Zodiac appears in the great mosaic of Zaghouan, again in Tunisia, of the third century. Münster-Sarmsheim, in the mid-third century, produced a mosaic of the sun god in his chariot, surrounded by the signs of the Zodiac, now at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn. The ceiling of the Temple of Bel in Palmyra depicts the cosmos. In the Hall of the Gnostics of the Basilica of Aquileia, a 2nd-3rd century mosaic depicts the constellations of the Dragon, disguised as a lamb, and that of Cancer, as a shrimp. In the mithraea scattered throughout the empire there is often the starry sky with the Zodiac and the planets. Mithras himself – the God at the center of a popular mystery cult coming from the eastern Mediterranean – is painted with a blue swirling cloak dotted with stars as he kills the white bull and watches the sun.45 Much later, around the beginning of the sixth century, John of Gaza composed a poem describing one of the most important works of art of the winter Baths of Gaza, a fresco representing the universe in allegorized form.46 At about the same time the grammarian and theologian John Philoponus wrote the first Treatise on the Astrolabe to have come down to us.47 Hellenistic and Roman astrology, which had already reached a peak in the Astrological Poem of Anoubion, in Dorotheus of Sidon’s Pentateuch, and in Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos,48 and which was so strong as to engage even the mighty mind of Plotinus,49 was summarized in the Matheseos libri by Julius Firmicus Maternus at the time of Constantine and triumphed everywhere.50 If Augustus wears the mask of Apollo, Nero likes to represent himself as citharede and solar Apollo, and Constantine, more than two centuries later, will produce coins presenting him as Sol Invictus. Starting from the Pantheon, the Roman domes often explicitly or symbolically represent the sky: one surmounted the round room in perpetual motion of Nero’s Golden House, another was located in the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine, others still were in the Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli and in the Baths of Constantine in Constantinople. From here, this type of decoration will pass to churches in Byzantium and Ravenna, whence it will spread throughout Christian Europe. ***

44

Today, respectively, at the Museum of Nafplion (Greece), the Piersanti Museum in Matelica (Macerata, second century BC), the National Archaeological Museum of Athens (ca. 150-100 BC); Vitruvius, De architectura, IX, 8. 45 The example here is the mithraeum of Marino, of the second century, but many others have survived the subsoil of Rome BCE: in Santa Prisca, San Clemente, Santo Stefano Rotondo, Santa Balbina, the Circus Maximus; and the Mitreo Barberini. 46 Jean de Gaza, Description du Tableau Cosmique, BL, 2015. 47 Jean Philopon, Traité de l’Astrolabe, BL, 2015. 48 Anoubion, Poème Astrologique. Témoignages et Fragments, éd. P. Schubert, BL, 2015; Dorotheus, Carmen astrologicum, ed. D. Pingree, Leipzig, Teubner, 1976; Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, trans. F.E. Robbins, LCL, 1940. 49 In the Enneads as edited by Porphyry, Plotinus devotes a whole section (II, 3) to “On Whether the Stars Are Causes.” Porphyry himself, his pupil, is presumed to be the author of the introduction to Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos. 50 Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis, éd. P. Monnat, 3 vol., BL, 1997-2003.

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The astronomical and astrological passion of the Romans appears even in cuisine, at least as it is represented in literature. Trimalchio’s triclinium in Petronius’s Satyricon has a frame carrying a board with the moon and the seven planets. During the famous Dinner, at one point there appears a round tray representing the twelve constellations of the Zodiac in a circle. In each of them the cook has placed the food suitable to the subject: horned chickpeas on Aries, a piece of beef on Taurus, an African fig on Leo, a couple of red mullets on Pisces.51 The most important literary monuments in this regard, except for the works of Virgil and Manilius, which I shall discuss in the next chapter, are Hyginus’s Astronomy and Ovid’s compositions. The former – whom classicists are still reluctant to identify with the author of the Fabulae and the slave brought to Rome by Caesar, freed by Augustus and later to become director of the Palatine Library – created a veritable compendium of knowledge about the stars, one built on Aratus’s model, but predominantly neo-Pythagorean rather than stoic. Hyginus writes prose and organizes his material in four Books, opening his review of the Zodiac with Aries rather than Cancer, as did his predecessors. In Book I he discusses the sphere and the heavenly circles, the Earth and the climate zones; in Book II, clearly using a miniature celestial sphere of the kind I have described, he speaks of the forty-two constellations and their catasterisms; Book III includes the position of the constellations and the number and arrangement of stars in each; finally, Book IV speaks of the movements of the celestial sphere, the Sun and the Moon and the planets; the night and the day; the harmony of the spheres. However, to understand why this work has been so popular for centuries one has to look at the mythological variants Hyginus discusses, thereby opening up whole new perspectives to the scholars and artists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. When, at the beginning of Book II, he talks about the Great Bear, he primarily takes his cue from the canonical version of the myth in Hesiod: Callisto, “the beautiful” daughter of King Lycaon of Arcadia, enters Diana’s following but is raped by Jupiter: when the goddess realizes that the girl is pregnant, she turns her into a bear. Immediately, though, Hyginus adds the hypothesis put forward by the playwright Amphis: Jupiter takes on the appearance of Diana and rapes Callisto; the goddess realizes that she is pregnant and demands explanations, but the girl blames her; Diana, then, turns her into a bear as punishment for her impertinence; captured by the Arcadians, who try to kill her and her son, she is then placed between the stars by Jupiter. A third version follows: indignant because Jupiter has seduced the virgin, Juno transforms her into a bear; Diana kills her by mistake and then, recognizing the body, she places her among the stars. Finally there is a fourth version: after Jupiter chases Callisto in the woods, Juno suspects what probably happened and tries to make him confess; Jupiter instead wants to hide his infidelity and transforms Callisto into a bear, abandoning her. Finding the animal, Juno asks Diana to shoot it down: mourning, Jupiter draws the image of a bear among the stars. The constellation of the Great Bear never sets, Hyginus continues, and “those who want to find an explanation for this say that Tethys, the wife of Ocean, refuses to receive it when the other stars come to their setting because she had been the nurse of Juno, whose place Callisto had usurped as mistress.”52Aretus of Tegea, concludes Hyginus, argues that the girl’s name is not Callisto, but Megisto (the largest), and that she is not the daughter of Lycaon, but of Ceteus, who should be identified with the Kneeler. 51 52

Petronius, Satyricon, XXXV, 2-5, ed. W.H.D. Rouse, rev. E.H. Warmington, trans. M. Heseltine, LCL, 1913. Hyginus, Constellation Myths with Aratus’s Phaenomenap. 5, (Hygin, L’Astronomie, II, 1, 5, pp. 18-19).

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The sequence of stories and overlapping of sources are admirable: for those, like writers of the Western Middle Ages, who could check both the former and the latter only on Ovid and a few other fragments, Hyginus’s versions of myths became definitive. In fact, they were taken as such by Isidore of Seville, Honorius of Autun, Thierry of Chartres, Arnulf of Orléans, John of Salisbury, and Boccaccio in his Genealogies. But perhaps Hyginus also exerted his influence on a writer contemporary to him: Ovid, whom Suetonius calls his intimate friend.53 There are many coincidences between Hyginus’s Astronomy and Ovid’s mythological tales. Ovid, in fact, has his own way of dealing with the astral ideology of the empire. In the Fasti, which he dedicates to Germanicus and fills with catasterisms, he imagines that Vesta has kidnapped Caesar, so that only his shadow was stabbed on the Ides of March. Caesar is now in heaven, where he guards “the halls of Jupiter.”54 Ovid himself approaches the end of the Metamorphoses with the sensational transformation of Caesar into a comet. Here it is his ancestor Venus that, at the time of the murder, appears invisible in the middle of the Senate and takes away the soul of her descendant, placing it between the stars. So Caesar’s spirit lights up, catches fire, flies higher than the moon and, dragging a flaming tail for a long stretch, shines like a star. Then, it turns to contemplate the enterprises of his son Augustus and sees them as greater than his own, so that immediately after, hoping it will happen as late as possible, the poet foresees the latter’s glorification as a star.55 However, Ovid knows that the glory of those who know the stars is greater than any other: “ah happy souls,” he says in Fasti, “who first took thought to know these things and scale the heavenly mansions!” They were seduced neither by forensic occupations, nor by military ones; neither by wealth, nor by false glory. Instead, “the distant stars they brought within our ken, and heaven itself made subject to their wit.”56 The Metamorphoses itself, after the exaltation of Caesar and Augustus, ends with an even bolder shift to the stars: That day which has power over nothing except this body of mine may come when it will and end the uncertain span of my life. But the finer part of myself shall sweep me into eternity, higher than all the stars. My name shall be never forgotten.57 Metamorphoses, which starts with the genesis of the universe, ends with the most glorious star: that of the poet Ovid.

53

Svetonius, De grammaticis, 20. Ovid, Fasti, I, iii, 703, pp. 172-173, trans. J. G. Frazer, LCL, 1989. 55 Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 843-870. 56 Fasti, I, I, 297-305. 57 Metamorphoses, XV, 873-876. 54

APPENDIX A

Figure 1:Henry Moore, Man Enters the Cosmos, 1965-66, Chicago, Adler Planetarium.

Figure 2. Lascaux caves: hypothetical reconstruction of the map of the cosmos.

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Figure 3. Mithras kills the white bull (2nd century CE), Marino mithraeum.

Figure 4. Nebra’s disk, bronze (1600 BCE): sun, moon and stars; including the Pleiades, Halle, Landesmuseum.

Appendix A

Figure 5. Golden hat of Berlin (1000-800 BCE), Berlin, Museum für Vor-und Frühgeschichte.

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Figure 6. The Sun Chariot of Trundholm (1400 BCE), Copenaghen, Nationalmuseet.

Figure 7. Mycenaean Gold ring (1500 BCE), Athens, National Archaeological Museum.

Appendix A

Figure 8. Astronomical ceiling of the burial chamber, tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, depicting stars and constellations, 19th Dynasty. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Department of Collection of Prehistoric, Egyptian, Cypriot and Near Eastern Antiquities. ©Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports. Archaeological Receipts Fund.

Figure 9. Dendera Zodiac (50 BCE), Paris, Musée du Louvre.

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Figure 10. Roman celestial globe (300-100 BCE), Paris, Galleries J. Kugel.

Figure 11. Farnese Atlas (2nd sec. CE), Naples, National Archaeological Museum.

Appendix A

Figure 12. Guercino, Atlas (1646), Florence, Bardini Museum.

Figure 13. Bernard Picart, Atlas holds up the sky on his shoulders (1731), private collection.

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Figure 14. Minerva and the phases of the Moon, mosaic from Tusculum (3rd-4th century CE), Vatican City, Vatican Museum.

Figure 15. Dome of the Baptistery of Naples, S. Giovanni in Fonte (400 CE).

Appendix A

Figure 16. Starry vault of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna (5th century CE).

Figure 17. Transfiguration in the apse of St. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna (6th century CE).

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Chapter 4

THE WAYS OF THE DARK NIGHT Publius Cornelius Scipio Emilianus is in Africa, with the king of Numidia Masinissa, an old family friend. The two dine, then have a long chat during which the king does not talk about anything other than Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Hannibal and Carthage, Emilianus’s adoptive grandfather. When, a little later, Emilianus falls asleep, he has a dream about his grandfather, Scipio Africanus. This is the sixth and last Book of On the Republic, the treatise that Cicero devoted to the state and its ideal constitution, and this passage is the famous Somnium Scipionis, The Dream of Scipio: a piece often considered as a work on its own, Cicero’s answer (surely inspired by Ennius) to the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic. Scipio Africanus immediately shows his grandchild the city of Carthage, announcing that two years later Emilianus would destroy it once and for all, also gaining the title “Africanus.” Then he foresees his premature death and the problems Rome will face with Tiberius Gracchus, Emilianus’s grandson. He tells him to defend the state and, to this end, he explains that “all those who have saved, aided, or enlarged the commonwealth have a definite place marked off in the heavens where they may enjoy a blessed existence forever.”1 Emilianus asks if those he believes to be dead – Scipio Africanus and his father Lucius Emilius Paulus – are actually alive. “Of course these men are alive,” answers his grandfather, “who have flown from the bonds of their bodies as from a prison; indeed, that life of yours, as it is called, is really death.” Then Paulus, Emilianus’s father, comes forward. Hugging him and holding back tears, the son asks: “since this is truly life,” he says, “why do I linger on earth? Why do I not hasten hither to you?” It is impossible to hasten death, says Paulus, until the god who owns the infinite space of the cosmos decrees the end of one’s life. The law men must abide by is to look after the Earth. They were given their minds by those eternal fires they call fixed stars and planets, “those spherical solids which, quickened with divine minds, journey through their circuits and orbits with amazing speed.” Then Emilianus witnesses an amazing spectacle. There is the Earth, at the center of the cosmos. There is a shining circle of luminous whiteness between the dazzling stars, the Milky Way, where all those live who have served the state. There are other celestial bodies, sparkling, beautiful. He can also see the stars that are invisible from the ground, unimaginably great, and finally the smallest: the Moon. The Earth looks very small from up there, and the Roman Empire is just a dot. 1

Cicero, De re publica, VI, xii, in Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. W.H. Stahl, New York, Columbia University Press, 2nd. edn, 1990, p.71.

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Since Emilianus, despite everything, only looks at the world of men, Africanus urges him to contemplate the heavenly spaces, the endless “templa” he has come to. What unfolds before his eyes is the whole universe: the sphere of the fixed stars, the largest of the nine, all embracing and identified with the divinity itself, which contains and governs everything. In this sky there are stars “which circle about in their fixed orbits with marvelous speed.” Below, the seven heavens of the planets rotate in reverse motion: the farthest away, Saturn; Jupiter, which exerts beneficial influence on mankind; the reddish and fatal star of Mars; the sun, “leader, chief, and regulator of the other lights, mind and moderator of the universe, of such magnitude that it fills all with its radiance”; its satellites Venus and Mercury; the moon, lit by the sun’s rays. But below the moon “all is mortal and transitory, with the exception of the souls bestowed upon the human race by the benevolence of the gods. Above the moon all things are eternal. Now in the center, the ninth of the spheres, is the earth, never moving and at the bottom. Towards it all bodies gravitate by their own inclination.”2 So Cicero, after composing Aratea in his youth, comes back to the stars in On the Republic. And the same treatise on the state that started, as we saw in the previous chapter, with the memory of the celestial globes of Archimedes and Thales, now ends with the description of the cosmos. This passage, which Cicero himself calls “vision,”3 is truly grandiose. One might say it is a telescopic portrait, from the top of the sky down to the Moon and the Earth, of the entire universe, with the Galaxy, the fixed stars, and the nine spheres. It is animated by the divine mind that governs all things and dominated by wonder at the twinkling lights of the stars and the smallness of our planet: the first are the places of immortality and eternal divine beatitude; the second is the cramped space of human frailty. The former are full not only of light but also of music. As soon as Africanus has finished his cosmic exposition, in fact, Emilianus exclaims: “What is this great and pleasing sound that fills my ears?” “That is a concord,” replies Africanus, “of tones separated by unequal but nevertheless carefully proportioned intervals, caused by the rapid motion of the spheres 4

themselves. The high and low tones blended together produce different harmonies.” Africanus, however, has not yet finished. Now he devotes his speech to stoically belittling the importance of the fame that men earn on Earth, and to celebrating virtue instead: the former is short and ephemeral in time and limited in space; the latter is the only thing able to rise to true glory. Then, he speaks of the divinity and immortality of man. “Know, therefore, that you are a god,” he tells his grandchild: “if, indeed, a god is that which quickens, feels, remembers, foresees, and in the same manner rules, restrains, and impels the body of which it has charge as the supreme God rules the universe.” The eternal divinity is the moving principle of the world: the soul, immortal, is the driving virtue of the body. Indeed, what is always selfmoved, continues Africanus translating from Plato’s Phaedrus, “is eternal, but when that which conveys motion to another body and which is itself moved from the outside no longer continues in motion, it must of course cease to be alive.” Only what always moves autonomously, then, is the source and principle of movement, but it has no “origin” and no end: it is not born and it does not die, “otherwise the whole heavens and all nature would have to collapse and come to a standstill and would find no

2

De re publica, VI, 4: Macrobius, Commentary, p. 73. In De amicitia, IV, 14. 4 De re publica, VI, 5: Macrobius, Commentary, p. 73. 3

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force to stir them to motion again.”5 The human soul, then, is immortal because all that is animated is self-moving. It is the soul – concludes Africanus – that Emilianus will have to train to achieve the noblest virtues, the highest of which is that aimed at saving the homeland. The souls of those who practice such virtue will reach their true place among the stars, the more quickly the more they detach from the body, contemplating, even in earthly life, the things that lie “beyond.” In contrast, the souls of those who are bound to pleasuring the body, violating divine and human laws, will wander around the earth and rejoin the stars only “after many ages of torture.”6 With these words Africanus vanishes and Emilianus wakes up. The dream is over, and On the Republic as well. Cicero will come back to the cosmos in On the Nature of the Gods and in his translation of Plato’s Timaeus. But he will never match again the breadth, synthetic skill and brilliance of those pages. These, then, are his stars: the place we belong to and to which sooner or later we shall return; an immense expanse of light and harmonious sounds, in which we all become forever what we should have been from the beginning – gods. *** Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil, also believes in a return to the stars, but he extends this destiny to all living beings. When he speaks of bees in Book IV of the Georgics, he states that some of them have “a share of the divine intelligence,” and immediately adds: For the god, they say, is there in everything In earth and the range of sea and the depth of sky; The flocks, the herds, and men, all creatures there are, At birth derive their little lives from him, And when they die their life returns to him, And having been unmade is made again; There is, they say, no place at all for death; The life of beings flies up to the stars And finds its place there in the heaven above.7 There is no space for death, but the lives of beings fly up and rejoin the stars, in the sky up above. Virgil’s tone is calm but convinced and fervid. He is the conscious heir of all the traditions I have discussed so far, and he incorporates them all in his work. In Book I of the Georgics he takes up Hesiod’s Works and Days: farmers must observe the constellation of Arcturus and the days of the Kids and the bright Serpent no less than sailors; when Libra equalizes the hours of day and night and divides the world in half between light and shadow, then the farmers have to use the bulls and sow barley in the fields until the time of rain comes; when “snow-white Taurus with his golden horns / comes up in the springtime sky and Canis falls,” then it is time to grow clover and millet; for wheat and spelt one must wait for the Pleiades and the Crown to hide.8

5

De re publica, VI, 8: Macrobius, Commentary , p. 77: Plato, Phaedrus, 245c-246a. De re publica, VI, 9, p. 77: Phaedrus, 67 d, 81c-d, 249 a. 7 Virgil, Georgics, IV, 218-227, trans. D. Ferry, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005. 8 Ibid., I, 204-230. 6

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At this point, Virgil takes up Aratus. He writes that “the sun / traverses the fixed divisions of the heavens, / making his golden journey through all twelve / zodiacal constellations of the skies.” So, he goes on to describe the five areas in which the Earth is climatically divided, tying the two extremes, north and south, to the night. While in the northern hemisphere “the constellation Snake / slides forth and slithers its riverine coils around / and in between the Bears that fear the water / and never descend to feel cold Ocean’s touch,” in the southern one “there is unchanging darkness, / and endless silence, there, is everywhere,” or the Dawn “returns down there, / bringing back to them the light of our previous day.”9 Virgil’s reference to Aratus’s Phaenomena is even more obvious a bit later, when he lists the “signs” of good and bad weather and the omens of civil wars.10 The third tradition Virgil draws on is that of catasterism. He does so in an imperial sense when – as we have seen in the previous chapter – he celebrates Caesar’s and Augustus’s transformations. However, he also refers to catasterism when alluding to myths and constellations with a poetic aim. Erigone, Callisto, the Pleiades daughters of Atlas, and the Crown of Ariadne are all evoked in Book I of the Georgics.11 What stands out is the reconstruction of the beginnings of civilization, with the transition from the Golden to the Iron Age, when Jupiter himself first “established the art of cultivation, / sharpening with their cares the skills of men, / forbidding the world he rules to slumber in ease.” So rivers began being navigated by “hollow canoes” and sailors numbered and named the stars: “Pleiades, Hyades, Arctos, starry child, / of Lycaon.”12 In the Aeneid instead, what dominates – appropriately – is Orion, the giant, the hunter of the sky, the lord of storms and violence. He is evoked in the first, Odyssean, part of the poem, starting from Book I, when the Trojans tell Dido how their fleet, going to Italy, has been swept away into the cliffs by “stormy Orion.” Then he is also recalled in Book III, in a famous passage I shall come back to in a while. Finally he is mentioned in Books IV and VII, again as the sign of winter and sea storms.13 In the second, Iliadic, part, Orion is instead used in a military function, as when Mezentius’s entrance in the field of battle is described: But here Mezentius comes, brandishing high his massive spear and storming on like a whirlwind down the plain, and enormous as Orion marching in mid-sea, plowing a path through the deep swells, his shoulders rearing over the waves, or hauling down from a ridge the trunk of an age-old mountain ash, as he threads the ground he hides his head in clouds– so vast, Mezentius marching on in gigantic armor.14

9

Ibid., I, 231-258. Ibid., I, 351-514: here Virgil takes up the second part of Phaenomena (758-1154), traditionally called “Predictions”, but the beginning of his presentation (351 ff.) resumes the opening of Aratus’s work (10-14). 11 Ibid., I, 33, 138, 222. 12 Ibid., I, 118-159: the presentation is inspired by Lucretius, but reworked by Virgil according to his own beliefs. 13 Aeneid, I, 535; III, 517; IV, 52; VII, 719. 14 Ibid., X, 902-909 10

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*** From the beginning of his artistic career the poet, who in the Georgics exclaims “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas”– happy is he who has been able to investigate the causes of things – is dominated by a cosmic passion not unlike that of Lucretius and Cicero, or the Presocratics and Plato. Already in Eclogue III Virgil makes the two shepherds Menalcas and Dametas offer each other two cups chiseled by “divine” Alcimedon: a great artist whose name he probably invented himself. In the first shepherd’s cups stand out the figures of Conon, the Alexandrian astronomer who discovered and named Coma Berenices, and that of “the one who portioned out the range of the sky / And showed what time was best for the reaper’s work / And what time best for the bent-backed plowman’s work:”15 perhaps, as Servius says, the astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus, a disciple of Plato, or maybe Archimedes, Nigidius Figulus, Aratus himself.16 Dametas’s cups, instead, have Orpheus in the middle along with the woods he enchants, thus indicating a poetry that is not scientific and focused on the cosmos (like that offered by Menalcas’s cups), but instead inspired and dominated by nature. However, both are united by the same author Alcimedon and his extraordinary art: the “caelatum opus,” engraving. In the field of astral poetry, the poet reveals himself perfectly capable of such great art right from Bucolics, when in Eclogue V Menalcas describes Daphnis as he “wonders at heaven’s threshold, / Seeing the stars and clouds beneath his feet.”17 Virgil’s second instance of cosmic poetry appears in Eclogue VI, where the young Chromis and Mnasyllos find Silenus drunk and asleep in a cave, and decide to tie him up. When he wakes up, admitting he had promised them a song, Silenus starts singing one; his skill and power are such that fauns and beasts dance, woods wave, and Apollo and Orpheus are filled with wonder. His singing began with the story of how the seeds Of earth, air, and water, and flowing fire Were brought together through the vast inane And how from these events all things began. He sang of how the newborn orb of the world Began to coalesce, and how the ground Began to harden, and how it was that the rule Of the god of the sea was confined to the sea, and how The earth looked up in wonder at the new Light of the shining sun, and how from clouds The rain came down in showers; then woods arose, And living creatures wandered on the sides Of mountains unaware of what they were.18 Silenus’s song – which goes on to recount the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the ages of the world, the myths of Prometheus and the Argonauts, the perverted love of Pasiphae, the 15

The Eclogues of Virgil, trans. D. Ferry, New York, Farrar, Straus &Giroux, 1999, n. 15. Eclogue III begins indeed by imitating the opening lines of Aratus’s Phaenomena. 17 Eclogue (Bucolics), V, 56-57. A few verses earlier, Menalcas declares emphatically his desire to raise Daphnis to the stars. 18 Ibid., VI, 31-40. 16

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metamorphoses of Scylla and Philomela – starts out with a veritable cosmogony: like Lucretius in Book V of De rerum natura and Ovid at the beginning of Metamorphoses, he narrates the genesis of the universe, which little by little seems to become very similar to the latter. It is hard to think that a composition staging a song may not discuss poetry and not propose a poetics. Perhaps Virgil wanted to suggest that the pastoral poetry he practiced in Bucolics could include everything: cosmogony, mythical history, metamorphoses. Either way, in Book IV of Georgics, with Clymene’s song, he adds yet another dimension: theogony. In fact, it narrates, beginning with Chaos, the loves of the gods.19 In the Georgics, too, Virgil lets the desire for cosmic poetry speak for itself. He does so from the outset, in the dedication to Maecenas, declaring he wants to talk not only about crop cultivation, livestock breeding and beekeeping, but also about the beautiful lights of the firmament who lead the chariot of the year across the sky.20 While praising the lives of farmers, away from the luxuries of the city, the poet says: But as for me, oh may the gracious Muses, Gracious beyond all else, whose holy emblems I consecrated bear in the procession, Grant me their favor and reveal to me The courses of the stars above in the heavens; Teach me about the sun in its eclipse, And about the many labors of the moon; What is it that causes quakings of the earth? What force is it that suddenly makes the great Sea rise and swell and break through all restraints And then subsides into itself again? Why is it that the sun in winter hurries To plunge itself into the sea and why Is the winter night so slow to come to an end?21 The paths of the sky and the stars: Virgil is following mainly Aratus22 and Lucretius even more, seeking a poetry able to sing about the causes of things with a philosophical-scientific setting (it is here that he exclaims, alluding to the Epicurean philosopher, “happy is he who has been able to investigate the causes of things”). However, he understands that the blood, cold around his heart, will prevent him from approaching these features of nature. So he chooses another way to talk about it, speaking of the countryside, the woods and the rivers running through the valleys.23 The cosmic drive, though, is a constant desire for Virgil, next to the imperial celebration already voiced in Book III of the Georgics.24 In the Aeneid it powerfully comes back to the fore in the song of Iopas and Anchises’s speech. The first, Iopas, is the bard of Dido’s court 19

Georgics, IV, 345-347. Ibid., I, 5-6. 21 Ibid., II, 475-482. 22 The first and third lines are clearly inspired by Phaenomena, 16-18. 23 Georgics, II, 483-485. 24 Ibid., III, 16-39. 20

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Virgil’s version of Phemius, the bard of Ithaca, and Demodocus, the bard of the Phaeacians, in the Odyssey. After the banquet which the queen of Carthage offers to Aeneas, however, Iopas does not sing the tale of returns, as Phemius did, nor that of the fall of Troy, as Demodocus did (Aeneas himself will soon narrate that “unspeakable sorrow”). As Atlas’s pupil, he rather praises “the wandering moon and laboring sun eclipsed”: the wandering moon and laboring sun eclipsed, the roots of the human race and the wild beasts, the source of storms and the lightning bolts on high, Arcturus, the rainy Hyades and the Great and Little Bears, and why the winter suns so rush to bathe themselves in the sea and what slows down the nights to a long lingering crawl.25 Again, this is poetry in the style of Lucretius, but attributed to a singer who is a shadow of Homeric bards, and therefore of Homer himself. Virgil cannot stay away from the cosmos and the stars. The Aeneid, of course, takes another direction, being closer to Homer in its epic inspiration. Nevertheless, the desire to give the poem a cosmic reference powerfully emerges in Book VI, when Aeneas visits Hades, the realm of the dead, and meets the shadow of his father Anchises. The latter is surrounded by a crowd of souls that will return to the earth and be incarnated: the Trojan progeny of Rome, Silvius, Numitor, Romulus, the kings and the leaders that have made the city great, up to Julius Caesar and Augustus. Aeneas wants to know how the souls of these people can come back to life from the depths of Hades. Anchises, then, explains how an “inner spirit” gives life to the sky and the earth,“ the flowing fields of the sea, / the shining orb of the moon and the Titan sun.” The soul of the world, spread through the limbs, moves the whole mass and mingles with the great body. This is where men, birds, animals, and sea monsters come from. Those seeds, as long as they are not burdened by earthly bodies, have the force of fire and a celestial origin, and they live on earth in “a prison dark and deep,” unable to recognize their roots in the sky. Then, after their death, they carry on suffering, paying for the “old offenses” until they are sent to Elysium. Finally, “a cycle of time seen through” and once the souls have been purified over a thousand years, the god calls them to Lethe, “so that / they may revisit the overarching world once more / and begin to long to return to bodies yet again.”26 The opening of Anchises’s speech is Homeric, “The flowing fields of the sea, / the shining orb of the moon and the Titan sun”, echoing the cosmos portrayed on Achilles’s shield. Its first word, “principio,” means “at first” but also “in principle” and “in the beginning:” it is both the beginning of the philosophical argument and, at the same time, the beginning of the universe, which gives the Homeric reference an absolute value. Then Virgil intertwines different stratified echoes: Lucretius; Ennius’s Homeric dream; Cicero’s Somnium; Plato’s Phaedrus, Timaeus and Republic; Stoic, Pythagorean and Orphic doctrines. This is a grandiose vision, where the action of the spirit that breathes in all things gives life to a universal body that occupies the entire space and runs through time in immense spirals of cycles and returns, penetrating from the earth into the underworld and back, to the view of the firmament. 25 26

Aeneid, I, 742-746. Ibid., VI, 724-751.

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In The Dream of Scipio, the sight of the Milky Way and the celestial spheres was functional, glorifying service to the common good and the state; in the same way, in the Aeneid, Anchises’ speech sets the scene for the praise of Rome and the imperial progeny of Caesar and Augustus. In Book VII, Virgil describes the shield that Vulcan made for Aeneas27 upon Venus’s request: here the fusion between cosmic and imperial themes reaches its apex, providing the icon of the entire poem. In fact, the shield celebrates the history of Rome from its origin to the battle of Actium, where Augustus defeated Anthony and Cleopatra, establishing his domination once and for all. Then it follows the progressive extension of Rome’s realm on land and sea; it shows the Roman and Egyptian gods taking part in the decisive battle; and it includes the “the homes of hell, / the high gates of Death” –– that is, Hades, the world of the dead. Thus, Virgil’s strong interpretation of Achilles’s shield (earth, sky, and sea) replaces the two cities of the original with Rome at war and Rome in peace, and the urbs gradually becomes orbis – the whole world. The shield has “seven circles” connected to another seven, septenosque orbibus orbes:28 as many as Rome’s hills and the planets. *** Together with Lucretius, Virgil is the greatest cosmic poet of Rome. He is the one who always yearns “to rise in flight above the earth” with his poetry,29 and for whom the stars are the true destiny of man: “there is, they say, no place at all for death; / the life of beings flies up to the stars / and finds its place there in the heaven above.”30 Virgil is also the writer who invented the night. Of course, there is no shortage of nocturnes in earlier poetry, as shown by the beautiful examples of Homer, Sappho and Alcman that I mentioned in the first chapter. But Virgil continually returns to night scenes and suffuses them with a light and a color of his own. In the Bucolics he had a particular preference for the shadows the evening brings– twilight is the time when each of the ten Eclogues ends. At the end of the first, for instance, while chimneys smoke in the distance, long shadows fall from the mountains. In the ninth, Lycidas tells Moeris: “the waves / make themselves quiet as they come in to shore. / The murmuring of the breeze is utterly stilled.” The closing lines of the last Eclogue– the tenth – repeat the word umbra three times: Now we must go; the shade’s not good for singers, The juniper shade’s unwholesome; unwholesome too For the plants that need the sunshine is the shade. Go home, my full-fed goats, you’ve eaten your fill, The Evening Star is rising; it is time to go home.31 Night as such comes in with the Georgics. It is often mentioned only briefly, as in Book I, when Virgil notes that many activities are more appropriate in the cool of the night or “In the very early morning, just at sunrise, / When the dew is everywhere, or in the night, / When it is certain to be cool”: at night, he writes, the time is right “for mowing the dry meadows or 27

Ibid., VIII, 630-728. Ibid., VIII, 448. 29 Georgics, III, 3-9. 30 Ibid., IV, 226-227. 31 Bucolics, X, 75-77. 28

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shearing the stubble; / The moisture makes it easier then to do so.”32 Or as in Book II, when the poet sees the fresh dew of a short night recreate what the herds have grazed during the long day.33 In Book IV, the bees lie back in the bedrooms, “sound sleep / Possesses their bodies weary from their labors, / All through the night the bees are utterly silent.”34 However, parallel to the emergence of the cosmic inspiration we have seen earlier, there is also a fresco of the great night spectacle of Book I in winter, when the waves swell, the upset coast roars from afar, the woods murmur, the seagulls sing and the coots stir on the shore. Then one can often see the stars “when the storm is coming on, / You’ll see a star precipitously falling, / Trailing its shining wake along the blackness; / Light bits of straw and leaves toss on the wind / And feathers float and play upon the waters.”35 The night is a great shadow run through by “flowing” stars: here they are not tranquil, but “precipitous” as they fall ruinously, accompanied by fiery streaks. But it is in the Aeneid that the night becomes the privileged time of Virgil’s poetry. All the major events of the poem take place at night: Aeneas’s tale, the fall of Troy, the dream of the Penates (the ancestors), the journey by sea, Dido’s love and torments, the entrance into the underworld, Marcellus’s death, the episode of Euryalus and Nisus, and even – metaphorically – the death of Turnus. In the Aeneid the night is always damp, liquid and silent: it flows, it laps the stars, it falls, it plummets, but it is a fixed point. Virgil often begins his line with “nox erat,” it was night: as if to mark a new beginning, or a break. When Aeneas starts his tale of the fall of Troy he claims that it is late, “the dark night is sweeping down from the sky / and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.”36 Soon after, in his narration, the tragedy of the city begins with the night (significantly starless) rising up from the sea: “But all the while / the skies keep wheeling on,” writes Virgil, “and night comes sweeping in / from the Ocean Stream, in its mammoth shadow swallowing up / the earth, and the pole star, and the treachery of the Greeks,” while the Greek ships pop out behind Tenedos and sail towards the Trojan shores “under the moon’s quiet light, their silent ally.”37 Here what prevails is the contrast between the night running (ruit), the immense shadow with which it wraps the universe and the deceits of the Greeks on the one hand, and the stunned silent light of the moon on the other – the same light that guides the Greeks to Troy for the final act, while “the Trojans [sleep] on, strewn throughout / their fortress, weary bodies embraced by slumber.” The odyssey of the Trojans who escaped the massacre first starts in the Aegean, between Thrace, Delos and Crete, while Aeneas founds cities in the hope that each one is the one announced by the Fates. When the hapless survivors, struck by Sirius with arid land and a terrible plague, are about to leave Crete, Aeneas dreams of the Penates, who tell him to head for that land which the Greeks call Hesperia: Italy. “Night had fallen”, specifies the poet, “and sleep embraced all living things on earth.”38 The exiles then sail westward and arrive in Epirus; finally, they make their way to Italy. It is night again, and this time the image is

32

Georgics, I, 287-290. Ibid., II, 202. 34 Ibid., IV, 189-190. 35 Ibid., I, 365-369. 36 Aeneid, II, 8-9. 37 Ibid., II, 250-251, and 255. 38 Ibid., III, 147. 33

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expanded following the example of Ulysses in the Odyssey.39 As Ulysses did in Book V of Homer’s poem, here Palinurus observes the sky to determine the route: Night, drawn by the Hours, approaches mid-career when Palinurus, on the alert, leaps up from bed to test the winds, his ears keen for the first stir, scanning the constellations wheeling down the quiet sky, Arcturus, the rainy Hyades and the Great and Little Bears, his eyes roving to find Orion geared in gold.40 Now the night is breathing – with the breeze blowing, moving slowly through the hours – and the sky opens wide on the wonderful spectacle of the stars. The stars, once again, “flow” in silence, in the cloudless sky. Everything here is enchanted and liquid: the murmur of the wind, the passage of time and the stars. For this perfect image of a starry night at sea, Virgil invokes Homer and Lucretius; he refers to the latter a few verses later when Palinurus sees “the entire sky serene, all clear” and signals the fleet to leave when Dawn is already blushing, “putting stars to flight”.41 However, Virgil intensifies the starlight by staging the sparkling Arcturus, Hyades, Bears, and Orion “geared in gold,” which replace and consolidate the brightness of Homer’s Pleiades, Ursa Major, Bootes, and Orion.42 Moreover, Virgil gives powerful cosmic breadth to his passage not only by recalling Lucretius, but also by quoting himself: the verse in which he lists stars and constellations, in fact, repeats word for word a verse of Iopas’s song at Dido’s banquet at the end of Book I of the Aeneid, the song in which the Carthaginian bard celebrates celestial phenomena. Palinurus observing the night sky is Virgil finally singing the cosmos, as he always wanted to do, while giving to his poetry no longer a scientific tone, but the gift of the moment in the passage of time. Stunned, he looks at the stars that punctuate the night and portrays them in the long hours between midnight and the red glow of Dawn, seizing the moment when the pilot contemplates them. Virgil simultaneously fuses slow motion and stasis, and he immerses it all in silence. With spectacular disposition and thematic craftsmanship, Virgil will make Palinurus die precisely as he looks at the stars. When, after the funeral of Anchises, the fleet departs from Erice, “the dank Night” has already almost “reached her turning-point in the sky.” The sailors are asleep, resting their limbs in “quiet rest”. Then mild Sleep comes down from the stars, cleaving the air and shaking the dark shadows; he sits on the stern of the ship and invites Palinurus to rest. When the helmsman tries to resist and continues to stare at the stars, the god pours on his temples a few drops of “Lethe’s dew.” Palinurus dozes off and falls headlong into the water.43 The night thread of the Aeneid, though, does not end here. Among the ancient authors, Virgil is the one who develops the contrast between nightly quietness and human turmoil (which we have seen in Sappho) in the most comprehensive way. Dido represents its climax. 39

Odyssey, V, 170-175: and cf. ch. 1, pp. 00. Aeneid, III, 512-517. 41 The “sidera cuncta... tacito labentia caelo” of verse 515 are inspired by the“caeli subter labentia signa” of the second verse of De rerum natura (I, 2). The second Lucretian reference is verse 518: De rerum natura, IV, 460461. 42 In Odyssey V, Orion is not “geared in gold”. 43 Aeneid, V, 835-861. 40

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When the night comes, the queen of Carthage – now desperately in love with Aeneas – lies awake on forsaken carpets in torment; “Lost as he is, she’s lost as well, she hears him, sees him,” “the dimming moon / quenching its light in turn, and the setting stars / inclining heads to sleep”.44 Then, when Aeneas is called by the gods to found Rome and abandons her, Dido goes mad with pain and anger. As she is deliriously talking to her sister Anna about finding some love filter in Ethiopia “where colossal Atlas turns / on his shoulder the heavens studded with flaming stars”,45night falls: The dead of night, and weary living creatures throughout the world are enjoying peaceful sleep- the woods and savage seas are calm, at rest, and the circling stars are gliding on in their midnight courses, all the fields lie hushed and the flocks and gay and gorgeous birds that haunt the deep clear pools and the thorny country thickets all lie quiet now, under the silent night, asleep. But not the tragic queen… torn in spirit, Dido will not dissolve into sleep–her eyes, her mind won’t yield tonight. Her torments multiply, over and over her passion surges back into heaving waves of rage.46 Another breathtaking night, but totally different from Palinurus’s. The stars, here, barely appear, halfway through their course in the sky. Now, Virgil focuses on the peace covering the Earth and all living beings. Silence reigns: in the sky, on the sea, in the fields and in the woods. Everything is asleep; sleep embraces all things, opening and closing the passage: flocks, birds, fish, tired bodies immersed in slumber, the hearts forgetful of their sorrows. If it is true that Virgil took his cue from Apollonius of Rhodes, it is Alcman’s wondrous nocturne that, at least ideally,47 he actually rewrites, adding one place after another and one being after the other. So he draws a painting of silent stasis, a soothed and suspended world: the Night. Then, following Apollonius and ultimately also Sappho and Alcman, he sets it against the power of eros: Dido’s desperate folly. As we shall see, this description and opposition will be taken up by Dante who, of course, will also remember the profound night dominating Virgil’s otherworld. As he sets out to describe the entry of Aeneas and the Sibyl in the afterlife, Virgil invokes the gods of the underworld; then, he portrays the two proceeding alone in the night as if it were under the dim light of the moon: You gods who govern the realm of ghosts, you voiceless shades and Chaos– you River of Fire, you far-flung regions hushed in the night– 44

Ibid., IV, 80-81. The second part of the second line repeats II, 9, where, starting with the story of the Trojan fall, Aeneas noted the nightfall. 45 Ibid., IV, 481-482. 46 Ibid., IV, 522-532. 47 Cf. ch. 1, p. 00.

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Piero Boitani lend me the right to tell what I have heard, lend your power to reveal the world immersed in the misty depths of the earth. On they went, those dim travelers under the lonely night, through gloom and the empty halls of Death’s ghostly realm, like those who walk through the woods by a grudging moon’s deceptive light when Jove has plunged the sky in dark and the black night drains all color from the world.48

The night is wide, black, dark, colorless, dominated by shadow and obscurity, in which places and people exchange loneliness and darkness: Aeneas and the Sibyl proceed in the “dark”, the night is “lonely.” This night is much more dense than the one dominating Ulysses’s descent to Hades in the Odyssey, and heralds Dante’s infernal darkness. The night is starless, and yet lit by a dim uncertain moon, so that things have no color but are still visible. Milton will call this “darkness visible.” It is the night of death. This night anticipates another one, which like a sad shadow encircles the head of Marcellus, the heir in whom Augustus had so much hope.49 This night of death is the origin of the night casting its powerful shadow over the second part of the poem: a sortie immersed in luminous shadow that leads Euryalus and Nisus to their death, despite the latter’s prayers to the Moon, “glory of stars, / guard of the groves!”50 It also seems to announce and seal Pallas’s fate: both when he sits next to Aeneas during the night journey “asking / now of the stars that guide them through the night / and now of the hardships he had braved on land and sea;” and when “the dank night … wheeling round the heavens / studded with fiery stars” preside at his funeral pyre after he is killed by Turnus.51 The night of death finally overwhelms Turnus himself. Deceitful like a languid night of sleep, it appears when slumber weighs on the eyes – the counterpart of the drowsiness that wraps the limbs in the great nocturne of Book IV. Now, however, Turnus seeks in vain a way out of the duel with Aeneas. Still and silent, looking around, uncertain, while Aeneas is about to hurl his spear: Just as in dreams when the nightly spell of sleep falls heavy on our eyes and we seem entranced by longing to keep on racing on, no use, in the midst of one last burst of speed we sink down, consumed, our tongue won’t work, and tried and true, the power that filled our body fails–we strain but the voice and words won’t follow. So with Turnus. Wherever he fought to force his way, no luck, the merciless Fury blocks his efforts.52 The situation recalls Achilles’s chase after Hector in the Iliad: “endless as in a dream ... / when a man can’t catch another fleeing on ahead / and he can never escape nor his rival 48

Ibid., VI, 264-272. Ibid., VI, 866. 50 Ibid., IX, 314, 373, 378, 383, 404-409, 411. 51 Ibid., X, 161-162; XI, 201-202. 52 Ibid., XII, 908-914. 49

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overtake him.”53 It is a tremendous simile, grasping Hector’s frozen motion, his breathlessness. Rewriting it, Virgil focuses on only one of the two fighters: it is the paralysis of the dream, the debilitating effect of sleep. Fury denies Turnus any way out: it is the night that silences and nails him. In a few moments, his spirit will disdainfully run away with a groan, into the shadows. As Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil will testify in the twentieth century, Virgil is the poet of the stars flowing bright in the sky, and yet, as Torquato Tasso understood in the sixteenth century, he is also the poet of the “ways of the dark night.”54

53

Iliad, XXII, 199-201. In the first of the passages quoted above, Aeneid, X, 161-162, Virgil uses the expression that, later translated by Tasso, provides a title for the present chapter: Pallas interrogates the stars, “ways of dark night:” quaerit sidera, opacae / noctis iter. 54

Chapter 5

FROM DREAM TO APOCALYPSE Only Virgil is able to rewrite the Iliad and the Odyssey and see the stars in at least two different ways. But he is not the only one to sing about the stars in Imperial Rome. When Quintilian recommends that his readers, in the first century of our era, should master astronomy,1 he must also have in mind the work of another poet: the less known Manilius. Manilius devoted a whole poem to astronomy and astrology: the Astronomica. In it, in a way, he brings to completion Virgil’s desire to compose a work about the universe. He says that, for him, two altars shine “with fame kindled upon them:” that of singing itself and that of his theme.2 He also proudly underlines the originality of his work,3 claiming he wants to narrate something of his own, with no debt to other poets. “For I shall sing,” he says, of God, silent-minded monarch of nature, who, permeating sky and land and sea, controls with uniform compact the mighty structure; how the entire universe is alive in the mutual concord of its elements and is driven by the pulse of reason, since a single spirit dwells in all its parts and, speeding through all things, nourishes the world and shapes it like a living creature.4 Manilius is therefore quite different from Lucretius, who had attributed everything to chance. According to Manilius, there is a god that gives the cosmos order and harmony, as well as a divine breath animating the universe and governing it “with hidden purpose.”5 Then, at the opening of the poem, he deliberately tells the history of astronomy, inspired by Mercury. Primitive mankind, he explains, “gazed in bewilderment at the strange new light of heaven, now sorrowing at its loss, now joyful at its rebirth.” Then reason penetrated the mystery of natural phenomena and “freed men’s minds from wondering:” on the banks of the

1

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, I, 4, 4; in Book X, 1, 55, Quintilian criticises Aratus. Manilius, Astronomica, I, 20-21, ed. and trans. G. P. Goold, LCL, 1977 (rearranged translation). 3 Ibid., I, 113-114. 4 Ibid., II, 60-66. 5 Ibid., I, 250. 2

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Euphrates and the Nile priests could “discern the destinies dependent on the wandering stars” and ascended to wisdom.6 Manilius interprets such wisdom for his readers, beginning in Book I, with a discussion of cosmology, drawing the star chart and giving an overview of the constellations and zodiacal signs. His treatment is very often technical, as in Book II, where he explains the doctrine of “dodecatemoria” that is, the twelve ‘parts’ or divisions of the Zodiac, with the planets that govern each sign. In Book III, the discussion moves to the astrological side, as Manilius believes that nature has also bound the fate of the men to each of the twelve sectors of the Zodiac. Much of the Book is devoted, therefore, to the calculation of the ascendants, the signs of the Zodiac rising on the eastern horizon at the moment of someone’s birth. Book IV examines the characteristics dispensed by each sign of the Zodiac, its decan and its harmful degree, and its influence on a part of the Earth, ending with a eulogy of astrology. In Book V, finally, we come to extra-zodiacal constellations and their astrological influences.7 As Manilius knows, it is not easy to write poetry about such material.8 However, he is often able to instil a cosmic spirit in his verses, especially when it comes to astronomy. The presentation of the North, the Bears and the celestial axis, for example, is pretty powerful: Now where heaven reaches its culmination in the shining Bears, which from the zenith of the sky look down on all the stars and know no setting and, shifting their opposed stations about the same high point, set sky and stars in rotation, from there an insubstantial axis runs down through the wintry air and controls the universe, keeping it pivoted at opposite poles...9 Later, Manilius sides with Sappho, against Homer, in the matter of the stars’ visibility at the time of the full moon: “When in mid-course the Moon is full, then most of all do the princely luminaries shine conspicuous in the heavens; all the crowd of unnamed stars fades from sight and flees.”10 His imagination lights up in a special way when he speaks of the Milky Way, both in the first and in the last Book. No need to look for it, says Manilius: the circle of the Galaxy “of its own accord strikes the eyes; it tells of itself unasked, and compels attention.” In fact, “as the sea whitens where a vessel draws the furrow of its wake and, whilst the waters foam, the surge forms a road which churned eddies have roused from the upturned depths, so the track shines bright in the blackness of heaven, cleaving with a huge band of light the dark-blue sky.” Not content with the two Virgilian similes, Manilius adds a third one which is also inspired by Virgil:11 as Iris gives to her bow (the rainbow) a curved path through the clouds, “even so the white track marking the vault of heaven lies overhead,” inducing people to look at it in amazement and wonder about its cause.

6

Ibid., I, 66-70, 103, 40-52. To locate Manilius in the history of astronomy see S.J. Green and K. Volk, eds., Forgotten Stars. Rediscovering Manilius’ Astronomica, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011. 8 He says so explicitly in the introduction to Book III, 31-42. 9 Astronomica, I, 275-280. 10 Ibid., I, 469-471 (slightly modified, and rearranged, translation): Homer, Iliad, VIII, 555-560; Sappho, fr. Voigt 34 and cf. ch. I, p. 30. 11 Aeneid, V, 158; III, 268; Georgics, IV, 529-530; Bucolics, V, 56; Aeneid, II, 397. 7

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Then the poet enthusiastically proposes five hypotheses on the formation of the Milky Way. Three of them are scientific and are respectively attributed to Democritus, Theophrastus, and Diodorus of Alexandria; two are mythological: the fire caused by the chariot of Phaeton and the milk spilled from Juno’s breast.12 Finally, the Portrait Gallery comes: the list of historical and mythical characters who, after death, have ascended to their eternal dwelling among stars in the Galaxy.13 The glow of the setting Moon is accompanied by that of star clusters in the last image of the poem: the greater part of the stars, writes Manilius, are ranked in the lower range of light intensity, sunk in the vast depths of heaven they shine neither every night nor every season; but when the bright Moon diverts her course below the horizon, when the planets hide their light under the earth, when golden Orion has steeped his resplendent fires, and when, after its passage through the signs, the Sun renews the seasons of the year, then do these stars glitter in the darkness and their kindled flames pierce the blackness of the night. Then may one see heaven’s shining temples teeming with minute points of light and the whole firmament sparkle with the dense array of stars: their abundance yields not to the flowers of the field or the grains of sand upon Ocean’s winding shore; but, as many as are the waves which ride in endless procession on the sea, as many the myriad leaves which fall and flutter down in the woods, more numerous even than these are the fires which circle the heavens.14 Using expressions and images taken from Ennius, Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil and Ovid, but recasting them in an original way, Manilius reaches at one stroke, for a moment, the descriptive intensity achieved much later by Leopardi.15 *** Love for the cosmos and the stars certainly does not end, in Rome, with the Augustan age. Pliny the Elder devotes to astronomy the whole Book II of his Natural History, and his contemporary Seneca addresses with great enthusiasm, in his Natural Questions, issues regarding the stars, planets, shooting stars and comets.16 Seneca feels boundless astonishment for the cosmos, like the wonder that Aristotle attributes to primitive man. In fact, he evokes the latter’s contemplation of the stars in the Letters to Lucilius: men of that time, he says, did not lie under engraved ceilings, “but the stars glided overhead as men lay in the open and the universe swept onward as a glorious show for the nights, performing this great task in silence.” Day and night they had before their eyes the free view of “this most beautiful 12

Astronomica, I, 718-734. Among them, there is also Ulysses, “who by his triumphs on land and sea was nature’s conqueror” (which is rather rare in Augustus’s Rome, but will be more frequent under Tiberius): I, 763-765. 14 Astronomica, V, 718-733 (rearranged translation). 15 Indeed he quotes him often in his Storia dell’astronomia and Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi. 16 Seneca, Natural Questions, trans. H.M. Hine, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010. The whole of Book VII is devoted to comets. 13

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home,” and they enjoyed watching the rising and setting constellations. “How could men fail to rejoice in wandering among such widely spread marvels?”17 Seneca is able to translate all of this into cosmic poetry. Hyppolitus’s flight in Phaedra, for instance, is “faster than a ravening flame / of a comet whipped up by the winds, as it trails / a tail of fire.” Phaedra’s beauty sparkles more brightly than the full moon “as the goddess Diana rides on her rushing chariot, / face aglow as she swoops through the night, / while the lesser stars can show themselves no more.”18 In the same tragedy, the choir anxiously wonders, like Job, why Nature (Jupiter), ruling the sky and governing the stars so as to alternate seasons, would stay far from the world of men, when it should help good people and harm the evil ones: Nature, great mother of the gods, and you, Lord of the sky with all its fires, who seize the stars whirled swiftly round the world, and guide the revolutions of the planets, turning the poles on the earth’s quick hinge, why do you take this care to bring the seasons, shaking out the deep sky’s everlasting changes, so that now the white, cold frosts make bare the trees, and now the shadows return to the groves, and now Leo the lion, mane blazing with heat, bakes Ceres’ wheat with his blast, and then the year makes moderate its strength? How can you be so powerful, controlling the weights of the mighty world as they trace out their orbits, measuring them with so much care, and yet neglect mankind, abandon us? How can you forget to bless us or even to do us harm?19 As a stoic, Seneca – who repeats his predecessors’ claim that man’s posture is erect because it looks to the sky20 – surely could not fail to admire Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, which indeed he takes up in Consolation to Marcia. The latter – the daughter of the historian Cremutius Cordus who, accused of treason under Tiberius, had committed suicide – has lost her son Metilius and is suffering terribly. Seneca tells her of all those who have had similar losses, then he invites her to consider this: everything that in life we get from the outside – children, honors, wealth – was actually lent to us. Finally, he reminds her of her mortality. In this context he presents her with a parable of man’s coming into life. He asks Marcia to imagine receiving advice from Seneca at her very birth, on all that she would enjoy or dislike in life. Seneca would have listed the many “plagues” of the body and the soul: war, theft, 17

Seneca, Selected Letters, trans. E. Fantham, OWC, 2010, 90, 42, p. 186. Seneca, Phaedra, 959-978, in Six Tragedies, trans. E. Wilson, OWC, 2010. 19 Ibid., 959-977. 20 Seneca, Selected Letters, XIV, 92, 30. 18

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shipwrecks, bitter regret of loved ones, and death. But he would also have celebrated the joy, the wonderful spectacle of the universe and the earth: fields, mountains, woods, streams, rivers, cities, shores, islands, tornados, whales, and the stars: You are about to enter a city shared by gods and men, one that embraces the whole world and is bound by fixed and everlasting laws, watching as overhead the heavenly bodies whirl untiringly on their rounds. You will see there the glitter of numberless stars, you will see all of them filled with the radiance of one star, the sun, that distinguishes the intervals of day and night on his daily course, and in his annual course assigns more regularly still the times of summer and winter. You will see the moon inheriting his place by night, and, as she meets her brother, borrowing from him a gentle, reflected light, sometimes hiding herself from our eyes, sometimes hanging over the earth with all her face unveiled, always changing as she waxes and wanes, always different from her last form. You will see the five planets…21

This is the spectacle of the Somnium, but this time it is immanent and takes place on Earth. Seneca, the stoic philosopher whom Nero will force to commit suicide, knows how one should die; but he also knows what can be expected of life. Ptolemy, who lived in Egypt a couple of generations after Seneca, knew that too: in the Amalgest (in the Greek original Syntaxis mathematica) he codified a model of the universe that lasted for fifteen hundred years and, in the Tetrabiblos, he summed up the entire astrological knowledge of his time.22 In the Amalgest he wrote an admirable epigram, which was then placed in the Greek Anthology: I know I am mortal, the creature of a day; yet when I search into the multitudinous revolving spirals of the stars my feet no longer rest on the earth, but, standing by Zeus, I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of the gods.23 *** Before paganism was definitively defeated, the Dream of Scipio came to new life between the fourth and the fifth centuries of our age thanks to Macrobius’s neo-platonic commentary, through which it had a huge influence during the millennium to follow. Macrobius’s work is precious because it hands down a whole world of philosophy, evoking Plato, Plotinus and Porphyry. Also, in chapters 14-22 of Book I, it is the most ample treatise of astronomy of the Latin Middle Ages and, in the first four chapters of Book II, it provides an exhaustive analysis of the music of the spheres. It is also significant how Macrobius constantly tries to harmonize Cicero and Platonism with Virgil. An attentive reader of the latter, the late-ancient scholar does not miss one of the Virgilian cosmological quotations I have discussed in the previous chapter.24 21

Seneca, Consolation to Marcia, 18, pp. 71-72 in Dialogues and Essays, trans. J. Davie, OWC, 2007. Ptolemy’s Almagest, ed. G.J. Toomer, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2nd edn., 1998; Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, LCL, 1940. 23 Greek Anthology, IX, 577, ed. W.R. Paton, in five volumes, LCL, 1917, vol. III (slightly modified, and rearranged, translation). 24 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. 22

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However, to get an idea of the late imperial passion for the stars, it might be better to briefly look at the East – at that Greek half of the Roman world to which Constantine gave a new capital, Constantinople, and which enjoyed an extraordinary continuity for more than a millennium. Between about 370 and 413 that city hosted Synesius of Cyrene, who had been a pupil of Hypatia in Athens and was later unanimously acclaimed (albeit with significant doctrinal objections on his part) the Christian bishop of Ptolemais. Synesius authored numerous hymns, epistles, allocutions and homilies, as well as shorter works such as On Kingship, On Dreams, Praise of Baldness. In one of those, To Peonius on the Gift, Synesius writes a letter, in 399, to Peonius (“count” and important functionary in Constantinople) to go with the precious gift he is sending him: a planisphere he devised based on the teachings of his beloved teacher Hypatia, made in silver by a very fine Libyian engraver. Synesius gives a long description of his sphere, recalling the example of Hipparchus and claiming to having made it better by examining the issues of geometrical projection raised by such a work and devoting to it a treatise in which he provides precise indications on the stars, the orbits, the maximum circles, the numbers and name (in black on the silver, so that the bottom looked like a book) written on or carved in it. This gift was given with a specific purpose: to kindle in Peonius the sparks of astronomy. In fact, “astronomy,” Synesius says, “is by itself a highly distinguished and worthy science, but it can perhaps be used to ascend to something higher, as an opportune means … towards ineffable theology, because the blessed body of the heavens has matter underneath itself and its motion seems to the greatest philosophers to be an imitation of intellect.” Furthermore, astronomy proceeds to its demonstrations “in an indisputable way and it avails itself of the help of geometry and arithmetic, which it would not be inappropriate to call the right canon of truth.”25 The science of the stars is therefore the path between the world of matter and that of Nous, the divine intellect: it is the conjunction between arithmetic and geometry on the one hand, and theology on the other. And yet it is an “exact” science, founded indeed on geometry and arithmetic, proceeding “in an indisputable way” to its demonstrations. However, it depends on divine inspiration and, in the case of Synesius and his gift, it also becomes a form of art. In the sphere given to Peonius, this art is embodied in two epigrams inscribed in solid gold around the antarctic circle and inserted in the empty gaps between the stars. The first is Ptolemy’s, whose epigram I have mentioned above; the second is by Synesius himself. As the author says, it precisely indicates what is found on the “sphaeropea:” the position of the stars in relation to the equator, the declinations of every part of the Zodiac, and also the rising time of each. However, at the beginning, Synesius also adds a few significant elements: sophie, wisdom, which has risen up to the sky; the wonder (thauma) it produces; and the intellect (Nous) which has descended from the heavens. The intellect is that of the divine creator of the cosmos, but it is also the human one of those who conceived the “curved surface of the globe” and those who carved out the circles: Wisdom has found access to the sky– oh, great wonder!– and intellect descended from the celestial beings themselves. It gave order to the curved surface of the globe “A Peonio sul dono,” in Opere di Sinesio di Cirene, a cura di A. Garzya, Turin, Utet, 1989, pp. 544-545 (my translation). 25

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and carved out equal circles with unequal cuts. Look at all the stars on the celestial vault, into which Titan comes to measure night and day. Accept the obliquity of the Zodiac and let not the famous points of convergence of the meridians escape you.26 *** Constantinople, between the fourth and the fifth century CE: a pagan writer, pupil of a Neo-Platonist thinker killed by an angry mob of Christians, who later became himself a Christian bishop. Science, art and poetry: the stars, once again, are at the center of it all. On the poetic side, again in the eastern half of the empire, about a century later, Nonnus of Panopolis wrote in verse a Paraphrase of the Gospel of John and a huge epic poem entitled Dionysiaca. The latter is a compendium of classical mythology and a history of humanity from the beginnings up to two crucial moments: the advent of Dionysus on earth and his final ascent to heaven. Therefore, this story runs parallel to the that of salvation carried out by Christ. The Dionysiaca numbers forty-eight books – like the Iliad and the Odyssey together. All poetic modes – elegiac, epic, erotic – appear in it. The style is baroque, full of the spirals that will characterize seventeenth century architecture and writing. The ancient world is ending: Nonnus resurrects it and seals it once and for all. And his passion for the sky and the stars is great. In Books I and II he stages Typhoeus’s terrible attack on Olympus. The gigantic monster, son of Earth and Tartarus, steals Zeus’s lightning and shakes the heavens with all the constellations, altering the natural progression of time; then, he brings destruction upon earth and the sea. We see him with his thousand arms, clutching the tail of the Dog, holding the Great Bear in his clutch, whipping the Capricorn, hurling the Pisces in the ocean, unfolding a veil upon the shining light of the limpid sky, crushing Ariadne’s Crown. It is war between the chthonic powers (Typhoeus is the monster of volcanoes) and the celestial ones. The gods in disarray find shelter in Egypt. Only Zeus waits for dawn on the heights of the Taurus to go into battle. The Night silently rises like a high cone and dresses the sky with a starry mantle. Olympus, the sky, is a city under siege, with the roar of the stars growing and each of the inhabitants preparing for defense: the Horae surround the sky with a thick ring of clouds, the old Bootes keeps watch, Sagittarius guards the southern ports of Notus, Cepheus watches over the rainy northern ones in Boreas, and instead of the usual music of flutes and bagpipes the winds whistle on their nightly wings. We enter the city, now become a great camp: Watchfires were all around: for the blazing flames of the stars, and the nightly lamp of sleepless Selene, sparkled like torches. Often the shooting stars, leaping from the ether through the heights of Olympus with windswept whirl, scored the air with flame on Zeus’s right hand; often the lightning danced, twisting about like a tumbler, and tearing the clouds as it shot through, the uncertain brilliance 26

Ibid., pp. 550-551 (my translation).

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Piero Boitani which runs to and fro, now hidden, now shining, in alternating swing; and the comet entwined in clusters the long strands of woven flame, and made a ragged light with his hairy fire. Stray meteors were also shining, like long rafters stretching across the sky, shooting their long fires as allies of Zeus.27

In this famous nocturne – which partly resembles Virgil’s description of the stormy night in the Georgics28 – Nonnus blends orphic suggestions and images that date back to the preSocratics, the dramatic tradition and the gigantomachies. Yet, the starting point is Homer’s simile in Book VIII of the Iliad, with which my first chapter begins.29 Nonnus reverses its terms: in the Iliad the bonfires lit by the Trojans looked like the stars in the sky under the full moon, while here the shining stars are the ones that look like torches. Then, the poet unleashes the elements: shooting stars swirling and spurting sparks of fire, darting lightning disappearing and reappearing, a comet wrapping its coma and inflamed braids in bunches of dazzling light, bright meteors like long burning beams. Thirteen centuries after Homer, it is no longer Homer: it is a cosmic apocalypse, which seems to announce the end of the ancient world. Thirteen centuries before its time, it is Van Gogh’s Starry Night.30

27

Nonnus of Panopolis, Dionysiaca, II, 188-201, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, LCL, 1940-1942, 3 vols. (slightly modified, and rearranged, translation). 28 Georgics, I, 365-369: and cf. ch. 4, p. 77. 29 Iliad, VIII, 555-560: and cf. ch. 1, p. 13 ss. 30 Now at MoMa, New York.

Chapter 6

DIVINITY, LIFE, PERFUME: THE MUSIC AND DANCE OF THE SPHERES The stars are gods, have life, produce wonderful music, and dance, influencing both earthly and human events: when one prays to them, one offers them aromas and perfumes. This may seem strange to us, living in the twenty-first century and used to seeing stars as bodies that are born, live and die, made of gas and working through an immense thermonuclear reaction, following laws such as gravity and general relativity. But most of our ancestors have thought and believed fervently in the divinity of the stars up until four hundred years ago, even as scientists gradually discovered what we would call their ‘facts’: size, movements, relations. In Western culture it all began with a thinker who lived in the sixth century BCE, seemingly between approximately 570 and 495, between Samos in the Aegean and Crotone in southern Italy: Pythagoras. It is said of him that he visited Egypt and learned the principles of geometry from the Egyptians, astronomy from the Chaldeans, and calculation from the Phoenicians, while he took from the Magi what concerned the cult of the gods and other norms of life.1 It seems that Pythagoras did not leave any writings, and what we know of his doctrines is uncertain, often attributed to him but perhaps due to his pupils. His views are rather peculiar for us, suspended between science, religion and philosophy. He canonized the theorem that goes under his name, was the first to claim the identity of Hesperus and Lucifer,2 founded a sect dominated by rites, proclaimed the immortality of the soul and its transmigration from body to body (metempsychosis), and believed in the cyclical nature of time and events: what once existed returns at certain times, nothing is new in an absolute sense, and all living things need to be considered as sharing the same nature.3 Pythagoras and his followers believed that the stars are gods and that the cosmos is animated, intelligent and spherical, with the Earth at its center. According to Aristotle, one of them, Alcmaeon of Crotone, said that the stars – the moon, the sun, the stars “and all the sky” – are immortal, animated and divine because they are always moving. Another, Petron, maintained – according to Plutarch – that “the worlds are neither innumerable, nor one, nor 1

Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, 31, in K. S. Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library: An Anthology of Ancient Writings which Relate to Pythagoras and Pythagorean Philosophy, Alpine NJ, Platonist Press, 1920. 2 According to Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. by R.D. Hicks, LCL, 1972, p. 14, Parmenides is the one who claims that Pythagoras was the first to state this identity. 3 Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, 8a.

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five, but one hundred and eighty-three, arranged in triangles, sixty for each side and three at the angles ... one following the other, and they revolve around as if in a dance.”4 A thousand years after Pythagoras’s death, finally, Macrobius wrote that “Pythagoras was the first of all Greeks to lay hold of this truth. He realized that the sounds coming forth from the spheres were regulated by divine Reason:”5 the music of the spheres. Pythagoras must have been a perfect sage, because only those who have reached perfection in virtue and science can hear that harmony.6 A great part of his wisdom is due to his love for poetry and his devotion to the Muses.7 When the people of Crotone asked him how to keep peace in the city, he suggested building a temple to the Muses, claiming that “there was always one and the same choir of the Muses” and that they embraced “symphony, harmony, rhythm, and all things which procure concord.”8 Pythagoras united the Muses and the stars on the basis of celestial music. In fact, he claimed that the nine Muses are the voices of the seven planets, plus those of the sphere of fixed stars and that of the sphere close to the Earth above us, called “anti-Earth.” At the same time, he defined Mnemosyne – Memory, the mother of the Muses – as “the composition, symphony and connection of them all, which is eternal and unbegotten as being composed of all of them.”9 Following him, Aristides Quintilianus says that “divinely inspired poets chant this motion continually, calling it a dance of the stars,” and credits one of the Muses, Urania, with discovering the Pole and the “dance of the stars in heaven.”10 The ancients never forgot this wonderful world of living, intelligent, divine, resounding and dancing stars: they never forgot this poetry, one should say, of the universe. Anaxagoras, who was even prosecuted for blasphemy for claiming that the sun is an incandescent mass, and according to Plato was the first to say that the moon receives its light from the sun, is praised by Aristotle because he said that he was born to look at the sky. According to Philo, indeed, when someone asked Anaxagoras why he would stay out in the cold at night, he replied that he wanted to “contemplate the Cosmos, meaning by Cosmos the choral movements (the dances) and the revolutions of the stars.”11 Socrates, who was also tried and – unlike Anaxagoras, who was saved through the intervention of Pericles – sentenced to death, was accused of atheism, of denying the deity of the sun and moon, of introducing new gods,12 and corrupting the young. Yet Xenophon, who knew him well, said that for him the stars had soul and intellect.13 Moreover, this is how his student Plato presents him as, during the trial, he responds to Meletus’s accusation of not believing in the gods:

4

DK, vol. I, pp. 448-449, 200-201, 213, 105-106. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, II, 1, 8. 6 Aristides Quintilianus, De musica, III, 20, On Music. In Three Books, trans. T.J. Mathiesen, New Haven-London, Yale University Press, 1983, pp. 188-189. 7 Vitruvius, IX, 7; Atheneus, X, 418e; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, 1. 8 Iamblichus, Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras or Pythagoric Life, IX, trans. T. Taylor, London, I.M. Watkins, 1818, p. 21. 9 Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, 31. 10 Aristides Quintilianus, III, 20 (translation slightly modified); Greek Anthology, IX, 504, vol. III of The Greek Anthology, trans. W.R. Paton, LCL, 1917. 11 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, II, 6-15; Plato, Cratilus, 409a7-b1; Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1216a11-16; Philo of Alexandria, On the Eternity of the World (trans. F.H. Colson, LCL, 1967), 4. 12 Plato, Apology, 26 c 5-d 9 and 24 c 1. 13 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1. 4. 8. 5

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You surprise me, Meletus; what is your object in saying that? Do you suggest that I do not believe that the sun and moon are gods, like other men do? ‘He certainly does not, gentlemen of the jury, since he says that the sun is a stone and the moon a mass of earth.’ Do you imagine that you are prosecuting Anaxagoras, my dear Meletus? Have you so poor an opinion of these gentlemen, and do you assume them to be so illiterate as not to know that the writings of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae are full of theories like these? And do you seriously suggest that it is from me that the young get these ideas, when they can buy them on occasion in the orchestra for a drachma at most, and so have the laugh on Socrates if he claims them for his own, especially when they are so peculiar? Tell me honestly, Meletus, is that your opinion of me? Do I believe in no god? ‘No, none at all; not in the slightest degree.’ You are not at all convincing, Meletus; not even to yourself, I suspect. 14

In the Parthenon, the Sun and Moon were represented as gods: despite the fact that Socrates offered prayers to the rising sun,15 violent attacks on him and Anaxagoras were part of the general conservative reaction against the naturalist and materialist philosophy coming particularly from Asia Minor. These “visionaries” – as Plutarch calls them when talking of the hostility towards Anaxagoras – could not be too popular in Pericles’s Athens: it was said that they questioned divinity and reduced it to “irrational causes, blind forces, and necessary incidents.”16 Everyone believed in the divinity of the stars.17 Even the chorus of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex swears on Helios, the Sun,“king of the gods.”18 But playwrights are more free, eclectic and inventive than philosophers. The same Sophocles, for example, makes the chorus of Antigone pronounce a beautiful invocation to Dionysus, “god of many names,” whom he calls “leader of the dance of the fire-pulsing stars;” “overseer of the voices of night, / child of Zeus.”19 In accordance with the Pythagoreans’ belief, the planets sing and dance in Antigone. And this is also how Euripides imagines them, as we have already seen, in Electra, when describing the shield of Achilles, on which the cosmos shines: the blazing circle of the sun with the winged horses, and “the dancing stars of upper air.”20 Euripides, who was said to have been a pupil of Anaxagoras, had a very strong passion for the sky which is demonstrated by the description of the starry peplum in Ion.21 This passion was shared by Critias, the sophist philosopher, poet and playwright who was the chief of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens. In Pirithous, a tragedy of which only fragments remain, he describes the course of time, linking it to that of the stars. Then he goes deeper, glimpsing its spirals and placing it at the center of the cosmic dance:

14

Plato, Apology, 26 d-e, The Last Days of Socrates. Euthyphro Apology Crito Phaedo, trans. H. Tredennick and H. Tarrant, London, Penguin, 1993, p. 49. 15 Thus Plato presents him in Symposium, 220 d 3-5. 16 Plutarch, Lives, Nicia, 23, 3, trans. B. Perrin, LCL, 1916. 17 Plato, Laws, 887 e 2-7. 18 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 660, trans. D. Green, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. D. Green and R. Lattimore, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press, 2013. 19 Sophocles, Antigone, 1115, 1146-1148, trans. E. Wyckoff, ibid. 20 Euripides, Electra, 467, trans. E. Townsend Vermeule, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, 3rd edn. ed. M. Griffith and G.W. Most, Euripides II, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press 2013. 21 Ion, 1145-1158, and cf. ch. I, pp. 00.

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Piero Boitani Time is unwearying; full in its ever-flowing stream it goes its round begetting itself; and the twin bears with the swift traverse of their beating wings keep watch on Atlas’s vault of the sky. You, who generate your own self, who entwine the nature of all things in heaven’s whirl, round which the light of day, round which night’s spangled darkness and the countless host of stars dance perpetually. 22

It is a grandiose image, where Time – generating itself and pregnant of its own flow – ties, envelops and entwines the “nature” of all beings in a heavenly vortex, while on one hand the two Bears fly to guard the northern pole, and on the other hand the light, the darkness dotted with bright spots, and a confused crowd of stars alternate on the firmament creating an ethereal dancing choir. Critias knows well how to look at, and penetrate, the universe. *** Plato is the heir of both the Pythagorean tradition and the Socratic one. Unlike Socrates, he shows great interest in astronomy, keeping up to date with recent discoveries, such as the fact that planets were incorrectly named because they do not wander at all (the Greek word for planet means “wandering”); or that the Earth is spherical and big in size.23 He does not seem to object to the sun and other stars being called gods, but he seems to consider their divinity as a simple matter of tradition, and most of all he thinks that true astronomy does not deal with phenomena but with “problems:” not what one sees in the sky, but what lies beyond.24 Of course, the creator of the firmament has arranged it as beautifully as such things can be put together: but, “as for the ratio of night to day, of these to the month, of the month to the year, or of the stars to the sun, moon and one another,” one would have to doubt that these things are always the same – never varying in any way, though they are corporeal and visible. So one needs to abandon the study of celestial bodies and find a way to profitably examine “the element of the soul, which is by nature intelligent.” In short, suppose one finds skillful drawings made by Daedalus or some other artist or painter. A geometry expert, looking at them, would value them as beautiful for their execution, but “would regard it as absurd to study them seriously in expectation of finding in them the truth about things which are equal, or double or in any other ratio,” that is, to study them in the field of geometry.25 Despite presenting a theory of planetary motion in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, Plato thinks that the universe is alive and animated because there is a mind making it living and rational.26 Therefore, one needs to examine it from this perspective, for which the usual tools of scientific and philosophical investigation are not sufficient. One has to resort to a “truthful myth,” that is, a “tale” that, using rational demonstration, expounds what cannot be

22

Euripides, Fragments. Oedipus-Chrysippus and Other Fragments, ed. and trans. C. Collard & M. Cropp, LCL, 2008, pp. 642-645. Both fragments, transmitted by Clement of Alexandria, are often attributed to Euripides. 23 Laws, 821b5-822c5; Phaedo, 108 e 5-109 d and 97 d 8-e 1; Theaetetus, 174 e 2-5; and cf. Cratilus, 405 c 9 e 409 a 7-b 1. 24 Republic, 508 a 4-7; Cratilus, 397 c 8-d 2. 25 Plato, Republic, ed. G.R.F. Ferrari, trans. T. Griffith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, 530 a 3-b 5 and 529 c 8-d 1. 26 Republic, 616 c 4-617 b 7; Philebus, 30 a 5-8, Timaeus, 36 d 8-e 5; Politics, 269 c 4-270 a 8.

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demonstrated while hinting at the truth. This is what Plato achieves in Timaeus: the dialogue devoted to the universe and its genesis. The first part of Timaeus tells the story of a story of a story. One of Socrates’s interlocutors, Critias narrates how his grandfather Critias the elder was persuaded to tell the story that Solon told when he came back from a trip to Egypt. The latter story consists of the tale of an old Egyptian priest on the origin of Athens and its resistance against the invasion of Atlantis. In this way Plato probably intends to anticipate the nature of the “truthful myth” that makes up the second, much longer, section of Timaeus. This part has always been – and still is – extremely fascinating, both for the tale it tells and for the way it tells it. The cosmos, says Timaeus, was created by an Artificer, a demiurge, who made it by following the eternal pattern: since the demiurge is good, “it was in the very nature of the universe to surpass all other products in beauty and perfection.” First and foremost, the demiurge brought the cosmos from disorder to order, “which he regarded as in all ways better.” As intelligence and soul are the best qualities, the universe created by the Artificer is “a living being, endowed thanks to his providence with soul and intelligence.”27 Plato’s cosmology is therefore teleological and set against the naturalism of the (mainly Ionian) thinkers that preceded him, the chance-dominated materialism of atomists like Democritus, and the inconsistencies Plato himself had noticed in Anaxagoras.28 Free from envy and full of joy, the demiurge creates the cosmos to the sole end that everything be good: he shapes the soul of the world, then its perfect spherical body made up of the four elements, and time – the “moving likeness of eternity.” To mold time, he creates the sun, the moon and five planets. Finally, he fills the world with ‘animals’ belonging to four different species: the heavenly gods, aquatic, airy and terrestrial beings. The first species is composed of fire so that it may be “as visible and as beautiful” as it could be. The Artificer makes it perfectly spherical “after the fashion of the universe as a whole” and distributes it “all around the heaven, to be a true adornment for it, arrayed in complex patterns throughout the whole ring.” Finally, he gives each “god” two motions (even rotation and forward motion) while making them immobile in relation to the five planets.29 Thus, here are the stars: And so all the fixed stars were created as divine, ever-living beings, spinning evenly and unerringly for ever. And I have already described how those heavenly bodies which turn and wander, in precisely the way the fixed stars don’t, were created … But what about the dancing of these gods and the ways they pass by one another? What about the ways their revolutions turn back on themselves and go forward again? What about which of them come into conjunction and opposition with one another, and in what order they pass in front of one another, and at what times any of them are veiled from our sight and then reappear, to frighten those who are capable of calculation and to send them signs of the future? To describe all this without visible models would be labor spent in vain. This will do as an account of the nature of the visible, created gods, so let’s end it here.30

27

Plato, Timaeus, 19 b-25 d and 29 e-30 b. Phaedo, 97 b-100 b: according to Socrates as he appears in Phaedo, Anaxagoras’s inconsistency consisted in postulating an ordering mind of the cosmos and in assigning it material causes like water, air and ether. 29 Timaeus, 29 e (free of envy), 36 c (full of joy), 34 b-36 c (soul), 31 b-34 a (body), 36 d-39 d (time, sun, moon, planets) , 39 e-40 a (animals of four kinds and stars). 30 Ibid., 40 b-d. 28

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These dances are accompanied by music – by a chorus, as it were. The celestial mechanism (but Plato would rather call it the “animal”, the “living one”) is Pythagorean. In the last Book of the Republic, during the narration of the myth of Er, he had offered a poetic explanation of the harmony of the spheres, ascribing it to their rotation around the axis of Necessity. The souls who are in the other world try to come back to Earth and to do so take a long path and finally come to a place where they see a grand spectacle, which connects the moral destiny of each of them to the order of the cosmos. The first thing they behold is “a shaft of light, like a pillar, extending from above through the whole heaven and earth.” The light looks more like a rainbow than anything else, “only brighter and more pure.” This represents the axis of the universe and the earth. This light is what “binds the heavens” and, like the undergirders of a trireme ship, holds “the whole revolving firmament” together. At the far ends is the spindle of Ananke, Necessity, “by which all separate rotations are set in motion.” Its stem and the hook are made of steel, while the whorl – the heavy washer that can be slipped into the bottom corner of the spindle so it can spin better – is a mixture of steel and other materials. It is built like an immense washer: a huge whorl, “hollowed out with a chisel,” has another seven whorls in it, one inside the other, like a vessel. All of them, different in color and luminosity, show their circular edges and rotate in opposite directions with different speed on the spindle’s axis: those are the eight spheres of the fixed stars, and of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Mercury, and the Moon. The spindle spins in Ananke’s lap, but at the top, above each of its circles, there is a Siren that, “carried round with it,” makes one sound and one note; “all eight together combine to produce one single harmony.” Three other ladies in white garments and with crowns on their heads sit in a circle at equal distances, each on a throne. They are the daughters of Ananke, the Moirae, the Roman Parcae who spin the destiny of men: Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos. They “sing to the accompaniment of the Sirens. Lachesis sings of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of the future.”31 In this scene, the coexistence of cosmological, mythical, artistic and domestic elements is powerful to an extent seldom equaled in the history of philosophy and poetry. The radiant light, like a rainbow, dominates everything in the manner of a huge pillar: the axis that passes through the universe and the center of the Earth, replaces Atlas carrying on his shoulders the pillars of the cosmos. Soon after, preceded by the image of the “undergirders” of a trireme ship and followed by that of the vessel, there is the image of Necessity, with the spindle in her lap as if she were Helen in the Iliad or Penelope in the Odyssey, or any Greek woman of antiquity: it is an everyday, familiar reference. And yet it is intertwined with the cosmic one: Necessity is fundamental in orphic cosmogonies, and in Parmenides it is at the center of the universe and keeps Being together.32 The spindle also contains the astral spheres, with their colors and their motions. Finally, the light gives rise to the sound and to mythical figures: eight Sirens and three Moirae, who sing as if they answered each other. They sing the harmony of the spheres and, at the same time, the fate of the world and of man. In this wonderful fresco only the Muses are missing. This was noted by Plutarch, who reprimanded Plato for choosing the Sirens instead; however, there are nine Muses and Plato

31 32

Republic, 616 e-617 c. KRS, p. 251 (=DK Parmenides B8, 31-32).

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talks about eight whorls and eight celestial spheres.33 Aristides Quintilianus and, later, Macrobius, will integrate Muses and Sirens; Dante, describing the dance and melody of the wise spirits in canto XII of Paradiso, will fuse them in the image of the wheel that rotates as the song of the souls conquers “our muses, our sirens.”34 Be it celestial music or the dance of the stars, Plato’s imagination is always filled with an afflatus that all, in ancient times, call divine. Perhaps he is aware of it when, in his old age, he states in the last pages of Laws: “a man is never to be chosen as one of the Guardians of the Laws, nor again as one of those judged approvingly in regard to virtue, unless he has a divine nature and has labored over these things.” The study of divinity, he adds, consists of two other disciplines, both leading to “belief concerning the gods.” One is the study of the soul, which is “the oldest and most divine of all the things which are provided with everflowing existence by a motion that receives its coming-into being.” The other is the contemplation of “the orderly motion of stars and of the other things which intelligence is master of, having arranged the whole in an order.”35 These words will echo in Kant’s dictum: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” 36 – which is proof of how Plato’s spirit would permeate people’s thought and imagination for millennia to follow. *** Once passed through the forge of Plato, the Pythagorean doctrine of the music and dance of the spheres spread over time and space, reaching up to the seventeenth century (as we will see). In the Hellenistic and the Roman world it is the common view of scientists, philosophers and poets, who often introduce into it new elements borrowed from other traditions. The great mathematician and astronomer Eratosthenes, for example, speaks of celestial harmony as much as the poet Alexander Hephaestius: in both, the planetary scale is associated with the lyre given by Hermes to Apollo.37 In Catasterisms, Eratosthenes himself tells how the lyre was delivered by Apollo to Orpheus. In a fragment attributed to the Roman Varro, someone (perhaps Orpheus himself, or one of the two deities) sees “the universe revolve around the celestial axis,” and seven spheres which support each other “produce sound in an eternal concert, which is a cause of immense joy for the gods.” Then, “more than ever welcome, Apollo’s right hand tries to reproduce such chords.”38 In Rome, however, the highest vision of celestial music, as we have seen, comes from Cicero in the Dream of Scipio. After contemplating the cosmos – the Milky Way 33

Plutarch, Quaestiones conviviales, 745 a-f. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, II, 3, 1-4; Dante, Paradiso XII, 8. R. Kirkpatrick, London, Penguin 2007. 35 Plato, Laws, 966 d-e, trans. T.L. Pangle, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press, 1988. 36 I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 161-162. Translated by W. Pluhar, with an introduction by S. Engstrom, Cambridge and Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 2002. 37 Eratosthenes, fragments 8 and 13 (of Hermes), in J.U. Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1925; Alexander the Ephesian, in Supplementum Hellenisticum, ed. H. Lloyd Jones and P. Parsons, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1983, 21, 1-26, in particular 9-10. Some, starting from Theon of Smyrna who passed them on, argue that the verses in question are not by Alexander the Ephesian, or Lychnus, who lived in the first century CE and wrote Phainomena in verse, but by Alexander Aetolus, (fl. ca. 280 BCE), who worked in the Library of Alexandria a couple of generations before Eratosthenes became its director. 38 Marius Victorinus, in Grammatici latini, vol. VI, 60, ed. H. Keil, Leipzig, Teubner, 1855-1880. 34

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and the eight spheres of the fixed stars and planets – Scipio, as the reader probably recalls, suddenly hears a loud and soothing sound that fills his ears. Africanus explains that it is “a concord of tones separated by unequal but nevertheless carefully proportioned intervals, caused by the rapid motion of the spheres themselves. The high and low tones blended together produce different harmonies.”39 Africanus then goes on to explain the music of the spheres in the light of Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines. The movements of the stars are so rapid and great, he says, that they cannot take place in silence, but the various heavens produce different sounds. The sphere of the fixed stars, the highest and fastest in its motion, gives rise to the sharpest and most vibrant sound, while that of the Moon, the lowest and slowest, emits the lowest note. Venus and Mercury, which together follow the Sun, have the same tone; Earth is immobile and mute. Eight spheres then produce seven sounds of different tones, a number which “is the key to the universe,” the musical octave. The celestial harmony is a heptachord. Humans cannot hear the sound of the stars because it is too loud, just as they cannot stare at the glaring light of the sun, and just as those who live near the Nile’s cataracts become deaf. However, there are musicians: “gifted men, imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in singing,” adds Africanus, “have gained for themselves a return to this region” – heaven – “as have those who have devoted their exceptional abilities to a search for divine truth.”40 Human music imitates and translates the heavenly. It is a sensational suggestion, one that will be long remembered in the future. In Rome, the theory of the cosmic dance is re-proposed by Manilius, and the theory of the music of the spheres by Hyginus.41 The most beautiful texts, though, were written later by Apuleius, the author of The Golden Ass, who also composed philosophical works. Quoting Plato, Virgil and Ennius, his On the God of Socrates presents a sparkling image of the “visible gods” and of the “wild beauty” of the night dotted by the stars: If you share Plato’s view, then place the remaining stars too in this same class of visible gods: ‘Arcturus and the rainy Hyades and the twin Triones’ and similarly the other gleaming gods, with which we see the dancing-band of the heaven garnished and garlanded in a clear weather, nights embroidered with austere charm and severe grace, looking up at the multi-colored decorations with their astonishing splendor on the most perfect ‘shield of the firmament’ (as Ennius would have it).42

In De mundo, instead, Apuleius focuses on the motions of rotation and revolution of the world, comparing them to a necklace and a choir, as well as mentioning the very appropriate Greek word “kosmos.” Then he introduces the divine mind that “resolves” all: There is in the world but one rotary movement by which it periodically returns to its point of departure, one concord, and one choral dance of the stars arising from their diverse settings and risings. The Greek language assigns the very appropriate word ‘cosmos’ to this necklace-like ornament. For just as in choral dances when the leader chants the first part of the hymn, the troupe of male and female choristers respond with 39

Cicero, De re publica, VI, 5 in Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, p. 73. Ibid., p. 74. 41 Manilius, Astronomica, I, 670-671; Hygin, L’Astronomie, IV, 2, 3 and 14. 42 Apuleius, On the God of Socrates, I, 120-121, trans. S. Harrison, in Apuleius, The Rhetorical Works, trans. S. Harrison, J. Hilton, and V. Hunink, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 196. 40

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one resounding harmony by mixing low voices with high, so the Divine Mind, following the model of a single unified concert, resolves the various discords in the world. 43

Plotinus, probably the last great philosopher of antiquity, writes beautiful passages on the life and dance of the cosmos. In the Enneads he repeats again and again that “the universe is a single living thing,” that “the process of its life must be rational and all in tune with itself,” and that “there is nothing casual in its life but a single melody and order.” At the very end of the work as edited by Porphyry Plotinus says: “and in this dance the soul sees the spring of life, the spring of intellect, the principle of being, the cause of good, the root of the soul.”44

*** Passages like this one constitute a precious indication: now the idea of the harmony and dance of the stars, while remaining synonymous with Pythagorism and Platonism, pervades the whole ancient collective imagination. Indeed, next to the texts of the neo-Platonists Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Synesius and Proclus – and later Macrobius, Calcidius, Martianus Capella and Dionysius the Areopagite – it emerges in the most varied writings: Orphic, Gnostic, Hermetic, Judaic, Christian.45 I will choose some of them as brief illustrations of their diffusion in time and space. The first is an orphic hymn to Apollo in a collection dating back to about the third century BCE. It should be accompanied – as the text specifies – with “powdered frankincense.” The god is invoked with all his names: Phoebus, Pythian, Loxias, Delius. He is the Sun, who gazes “upon all / the ethereal vastness, / upon the rich earth … through the twilight,” and sees “earth’s roots below” “in the quiet darkness / of a night lit with stars,” and holds “the bounds / of the whole world.” “The beginning and the end to come,” the hymn continues, are yours: You make everything bloom with your versatile lyre, you harmonize the poles, now reaching the highest pitch, now the lowest, now again with a Doric mode, harmoniously balancing the poles, you keep the living races distinct. You have infused harmony

43

Apuleius, De mundo XXIX, 355, in J. Miller, Measures of Wisdom, Toronto-London, University of Toronto Press, 1986, p. 253: and see (pseudo)Aristotle, On the cosmos, 6, 399 a, in On Sophistical Refutations. On Comingto-be and Passing Away. On the Cosmos, trans. E.S. Forster, D.J. Furley, LCL, 1955. 44 Plotinus, Enneads IV, 4, 35; VI, 9, 9, trans. A.H. Armstrong, LCL, 1966-1968. 45 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 22-23, fr. 72, in Proclus, In Timaeum, II, 109; Synesius, Hymns, I, 301-342; Iamblichus, On General Mathematical Science, 18, 5 (astronomy and harmony); 73; Proclus, In Cratylum, 185; Platonic Theology, I, 6-7 (dancing chorus of the mysteric truth of the divine principles), Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, II, 1-4; Calcidius, Commentary to Plato’s Timaeus , LVI ff., LXXIII-LXXV, Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis, II, 126; IX, 909-910 (Harmony’s shield); Dionysius the Aeropagite, On the divine names, IV, 8-10; Celestial Hierarchy, VII, 3-4.

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Piero Boitani into the lot of all men, giving them an equal measure of winter and summer: the lowest notes you strike in the winter, the highest notes you make distinct in the summer, your mode is Doric for spring’s lovely and blossoming season.46

This beautiful cosmic opening is developed in the following verses. First the Sun looks from above at the ether and the surface of the Earth; then, after sunset, it contemplates the “roots” from below. Apollo extends his dominion over the sky and the abyss, over the beginning and the end: he is the lord of space and time, day and night. He rules over the ether, which now is “infinite”, and over the darkness lit with stars. The original has “darkness with eyes made of stars,” and the image of the night sky as a face with starry eyes is surprising and charming. Then, Apollo’s great deed: harmonizing the cosmos through music, using the lyre to regulate the seasons, “harmoniously balancing the pole,” distinguishing the species of living being and also infusing “harmony” into human fate. Sun and lyre, light and music: the long chords and the short ones play, so to speak, winter and summer; the Doric mode makes the flowers bloom in spring. In another orphic hymn, the Sun “tempers” the seasons riding his “dancing horses” and holding “the golden lyre, / the harmony of cosmic motion.”47 Finally, the Sun has a “perfume” and when invoking him one should use powder or grain of incense: we can picture the Orphics praying to Apollo and seeing his universal dominion, trying to listen to his harmony through the fumes of incense. For them, the Sun and the world it illuminates and harmonizes, are incense: God, said Heraclitus, “undergoes an alteration in the way that fire, when it is mixed with spices, is named according to the scent of each of them.”48 Harmony and the cosmic dance also appear in Gnostic and Hermetic writings. In the Gnostic Acts of Thomas there is a famous Hymn of Sophia, where her hands make a drawing and announce “the dance of the blessed aeon.” In the surviving texts by Valentine and Epiphanes there are allusions to the harmony of the cosmos.49 In one of the most significant passages of the first Treatise, Poimandres, of the Corpus Hermeticum, man begins his ascent “through the cosmic framework,” gradually freeing himself from each of his desires and vanities until, deprived of their negative effects, he reaches “the region of the ogdoad:” that is, the soul “stripped of the effects of the cosmic framework.” Purified humans “rise up to the father in order and surrender themselves to the powers, and, having become powers, they enter into god. This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god.” Later, in Treatise X, it is specified that, in the general metamorphosis of all souls, “human beings, changing into demons, possess the beginning of immortality, and so then they enter the troop of gods” and therefore ascend to the sphere of the gods, that of the planets and

46

The Orphic Hymns, trans. A.N. Athanassakis and B.M. Wolkow, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, No. 34, pp. 30-31. 47 Orphic Hymns 8, 5 and 9. 48 Heraclitus, fr. 204, in The Presocratic Philosophers, KRS, p. 190.(= DK 22 B 67). 49 Acts of Thomas, 6 in New Testament Apocrypha, ed. W. Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson, vol. II, Writings Relating to the Apostles Apocalypses and Related Subjects, Cambridge-Louisville (Kentucky), James Clarke & Co., Westminster / John Knox Press, 1992, p. 341.

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that of fixed stars: in the latter, the soul finally joins the chorus of the blessed and enters god.50 Next to this “secret revelation” one can place Constantine’s vision, which is elevated but not mystical. In an oration “to the Assembly of the Saints” – that is, a homily pronounced in church (on a Good Friday, to be precise) – the emperor who allowed the practice of any religion, who built the basilicas in Rome and Constantinople and who (now a Christian) chaired the Council of Nicaea, rhetorically asks the faithful if immortal and immutable things may have been invented by humans. Of course not, he replies: all those things receive their existence from the intellectual and eternal essence of God. “Surely the reason for their orderly arrangement is that providence is at work, ensuring that day is bright because it derives its radiance from the sun, and that night follows day after sunset, and that the succeeding period is saved from total darkness by the choral dance of the stars.” In another sermon Constantine quotes the passage from the Gospel according to Matthew in which the Evangelist recounts the time of the Passion, just before the death of Jesus, when “from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.”51 This, too, he claims, is part of the “marvels” of those days, when those present were filled with terror, thinking that the end had come along with the chaos that existed before the creation of the universe. But God renewed “with calm and dignity” the whole sky “by the choral dance of the stars.”52 Against Constantine’s Christian-Platonic pietas stands his nephew, Julian “the Apostate,” as he was called by Christians, who attempted a “Hellenic” and pagan restoration. Imbued with literature, a devotee of Iamblichus and neo-Platonism, steeped in sorcery and theosophy, initiated in the cult of Mithras and the Eleusinian mysteries, since childhood he had a passion for the “ethereal light” of the sun and the sky dotted with stars. “From my earliest years,” he says, “whenever I walked abroad in the night season, when the firmament was clear and cloudless, I abandoned all else without exception and gave myself up to the beauties of the heavens; nor did I understand what anyone might say to me, nor heed what I was doing myself. I was considered to be over-curious about these matters and to pay too much attention to them, and people went so far as to regard me as an astrologer when my beard had only just begun to grow.”53 In his great oration To King Helios, in the solemn Roman festivity of December 25 dedicated to the Sun, Julian celebrates its supreme power: the night and the day, he says, echoing Timaeus, are his creation under our very eyes. And “the tribes of the intellectual gods,” in their ultra heavenly abodes, are full of his benign power; they work for good by “him to whom the whole band of the heavenly bodies yields place, and whom all generated things follow...” In fact, everybody knows that planets “dance about him as their king, in certain intervals, fixed in relation to him, and revolve in a circle with perfect accord,” move and pause.54 Everything that is earthly “contains being in a state of becoming.” Helios, keeping the world together “by means of definite limits,” endows the Earth with “imperishability.” Hermetica. The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, trans. B.P. Copenhaver, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 6, 31-32. 51 Matthew, 27:45. 52 Constantine, Oration to the Assembly of the Saints, vi. 6-7, in Miller, Measures of Wisdom. The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity, p. 265. 53 Julian, Hymn to King Helios, 1, 8-17, in The Works of the Emperor Julian, trans. W.C. Wright, LCL, 1913, vol. I. 54 Ibid., 1. 8-17, 130 b. 50

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Occupying a middle position between the visible gods surrounding the cosmos and the “immaterial and intelligible” gods surrounding the Good, he unifies and keeps close the separate elements in what, writes Julian, is called the ‘harmony’ of Empedocles.55 The universe as a whole is a “living organism, wholly throughout the whole of it full of soul and intelligence, ‘perfect, with all its parts perfect’.”56 However, there are other numerous divinities populating the sky. As Helios “divides the three spheres by four through the zodiac, which is associated with every one of the three, so he divides the zodiac also into twelve divine powers.” In short, from the sky, from the spheres that Helios has divided into four in order “to send to us the fourfold glory of the seasons”, we have received the “three-fold gift” of the Three Graces, which carry on earth, in their statues, the “circle” dancing up there in the celestial spheres.57 Through the Graces, for Julian, the dance of the stars is reflected on Earth. In his vision, they take the place of the Muses and, in Christianity, of Grace. All those who observe the sky “not casually, nor like cattle,” says Julian, will recognize that it is populated with countless gods.58 For him the “cattle” or beasts are the Christians, who are unable to appreciate the beauty of the cosmos. To celebrate the pagan restoration started by the emperor when he came to Constantinople in 362, Claudius Mamertinus wrote: “Finally we are allowed to contemplate the sky and the stars with secure eyes, whereas until not long ago we were forced to turn them with anguish to the ground like beasts.”59

55

Ibid., 1. 13, 138 d; Empedocles, fr. 358, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 295. Hymn to King Helios, 15. 1-5, 139b. 57 Ibid., 12, 1 and 17, 137 c and 138d; 29, 1-13, 148 c-d. 58 Ibid., 29, 1-5, 148 c. 59 Claudius Mamertinus in Migne, Patrologia Latina 18, 425 A-B (my translation). 56

Chapter 7

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES Not all Christians are beasts, contrary to what Julian the Apostate thought. Almost two centuries before Julian, roughly between the years 90 and 100 of our era, an author traditionally identified with Clement, the third bishop of Rome after the apostle Peter, addressed to the church in Corinth a letter that precedes various writings of the New Testament and that was even considered by some as part of the Christian canon. In the first part of the letter, Clement praises the work of God. He quotes from Yahweh’s speech to Job on the Creation and repeats the opening of Psalm 19, “For the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims the work of his hands.”1 Then he adds, without quoting anyone: The heavens, which move about under his management, are peacefully subject to Him. Day and night complete the racecourse laid out by Him, without impeding one another in the least. Sun and moon and the chorus of stars roll along the tracks that have been appointed to them, in harmony, never crossing their lines, in accordance with the arrangement He has made. By His will and in the proper seasons, the fertile earth brings forth its rich abundance of nourishment for humans, beasts, and all living things that dwell on it, without dissenting or altering any of the decrees He has set forth. Both the inscrutable regions of the abysses and the indescribable realms of the depths are constrained by the same commands. The basin of the boundless sea, established by His workmanship to hold the waters collected, does not cross its restraining barriers, but acts just as He ordered. For He said, “you shall come this far, and your waves shall crash down within you.”

2

The influence of the biblical Wisdom Books on the language is clear, but the shadow of Plato and Greek-Roman astronomy is equally obvious: not only in the image of the choirs of the stars that revolve dancing “in harmony,” but also in the word that Clement employs to describe the “work” by which God has held and collected the waters: demiourgia, the term used by Plato in Timaeus for the creative work of the divine craftsman.

1

First Letter of Clement, 27, 7, in The Apostolic Fathers, trans. B. D. Ehrman, LCL, 2003. First Letter of Clement, 20, 1-7. The final quote comes from Job 38:11 in the version of the Septuagint, with a few changes. 2

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The attempt to merge the Bible and Platonism had already been made with considerable success a few decades earlier, at the time of Tiberius and Claudius, in Alexandria, Egypt, by a Jew of great wisdom: Philo. Of course, he repeats the biblical injunction not to worship the stars, but also argues that the best thing to contemplate is the sky and that the knowledge of it is the “queen of the sciences”– Abraham’s occupation before the call of God. For him the cosmos is God’s temple, and the manna that Israel received in the desert is the wisdom of heaven. Heavenly bodies, argues Philo, are divine images, souls and natures, more divine than human beings and higher than demons and, therefore, angels. The Jewish seven-branched candelabra, he writes, is “a copy of the march of the choir of the seven planets. How so? perhaps we shall be asked. Because, we shall reply, each of the planets is a light-bringer, as the candle-bearers are. For they are supremely bright and transmit the great luster of their rays to the earth, especially the central among the seven, the sun.”3 In his fusion of Judaism and Platonic doctrines, Philo achieves some surprising results. In discussing the seven days of Creation, for example, he exalts the hebdomads, that is, the sevenfold structure of the universe and of man, the seven circles of heaven and the seven planets, the seven stars of the Great Bear and of the Pleiades, and the importance of the number seven in music and grammar: the seven-stringed lyre, he says, corresponds “to the choir of the Planets” and produces “the notable melodies.”4 Philo includes in his exposition even the Cherubim God posted at the entrance of Eden to guard the way to the Tree of Life after the Fall. He maintains that “one of the Cherubim symbolizes the outermost sphere of the fixed stars.” It is, he writes, “the final heaven of all, the vault in which the choir of those who wander not move in a truly divine unchanging rhythm.” The other Cherub is for him “the inner contained sphere, which through a sixfold division He has made into seven zones of regular proportion and fitted each planet into one of them. He has set each star in its proper zone as a driver in a chariot, and yet He has in no case trusted the reins to the driver, fearing that their rule might be one of discord, but He has made them all dependent on Himself.” He also suggests that in “another interpretation the two Cherubim represent the two hemispheres.” Finally, he puts forward with much caution a theory that “a voice in [his] own soul, which oftentimes is god-possessed and divines where it does not know” has inspired in him. God is surely one, but his chief powers are two, goodness and sovereignty, and “in the midst between them there is a third which unites them, Reason (logos)”: the two Cherubim and the flaming sword.5 He is so attached to logos that at one point, while discussing the “unchangeableness of God,” he proclaims that the “revolution of that divine plan (logos ho theios) which most call fortune” moves “circlewise.”6 The second great Alexandrian is a Christian, Clement, who takes up Philo’s method and setting. Also for him the Logos sings and dances, together with the angels and those who convert: “You will dance,” he writes in the Exhortation to the Greeks, “with angels around the unbegotten and imperishable and only true God, the Word of God joining with us in our hymn of praise.” Humanity, declares Clement, originates in the heavens and salvation means returning there. Man, he repeats following Plato and the Stoics, walks upright so that he can

3

Philo, Who is the Heir, 221-222, in Philo, vol. IV, trans. F.H. Colson, G.H. Whitaker, LCL, 1985. Philo, On the Creation, 126, in Philo, vol. I, LCL, 1929, pp. 98-101. 5 Philo, On the Cherubim, 143-144, in Philo, vol. II, LCL, 1927, pp. 22-25. 6 Philo, The Unchangeableness of God, 176, in Philo, vol. III, LCL, 1930, p. 97. 4

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contemplate the sky.7 But from the beginning of the Exhortation, he embarks on a veritable, beautiful, paean: See how mighty is the new song! It has made men out of stones and out of wild beasts. They who were otherwise dead, who had no share in the real and true life, revived when they but heard the song. Furthermore, it is this that composed the entire creation into melodious order, and tuned into concert the discord of the elements, that the whole universe might be in harmony with it. The ocean it left flowing, yet has prevented it from encroaching upon the land ... What is more, this pure song, the stay of the universe and the harmony of all things, stretching from the centre to the circumference and from the extremities to the centre, reduced this whole to harmony, not in accordance with Thracian music, which resembles that of Jubal, but in accordance with the fatherly purpose of God, which David earnestly sought. He who sprang from David and yet was before him, the Word of God, scorned those lifeless instruments of lyre and harp. By the power of the Holy Spirit He arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man too, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument of the universe He makes music to God, and sings to the human instrument. “For thou art my harp and my pipe and my temple.”8

Clement takes up the interpretation that Philo had given, in an astral Platonic key, of the sacred Jewish candelabra and the Ark of the Covenant, and emphatically stresses another idea of his predecessor: that the name of Abraham before the divine call, Abram, meant “sublime father.” This is because he pursued the “sublime philosophy” related to aerial phenomena and to the bodies moving in the sky, but then, looking up, he saw the Son (“as some explain”) or a “glorious angel,” and anyway recognized God as “the sovereign of creation and its order.” At that point he added an alpha to his name (i.e., “the gnosis of the one and only God”) and is called Abraam, a name which means “the elect father of sound,” because, from a student of nature he became wise and a “friend of God.” Astronomy, in short, is preliminary to philosophy, faith and theology. “The same,” Clement maintains, holds also of astronomy. For treating of the description of the celestial objects, about the form of the universe, and the revolution of the heavens, and the motion of the stars, leading the soul nearer to the creative power, it teaches [the pereception] of the seasons of the year, the changes of the air, and the appearance of the stars. [...] This branch of learning, too, makes the soul in the highest degree observant, capable of perceiving the true and detecting the false, of discovering correspondences and proportions, so as to hunt for similarity in things dissimilar; and conducts us to the discovery of length without breadth, and superficial extent without thickness, and an indivisible point, and transports to intellectual objects from those of sense. 9

Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks, in The Exhortation to the Greeks. The Rich Man’s Salvation. To the Newly Baptized, trans. G.W. Butterworth, LCL, 1919, ch. XII, p. 257; Stromateis 4, 26, 163 (for the original texts see volumes 30ff in the Sources Chrétiennes, Paris, 1951ff.). 8 Ibid., ch. I, pp. 10-13. For Iubal, see Gen. 4:21. The source of the last quote is unknown. 9 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, VI, 11, 90 in Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. XII, Clement of Alexandria, vol. II, eds. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1869. 7

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The ingenuity and charm of Philo and Clement pale before the originality and inventiveness of the third Alexandrian: Origen, a contemporary of Plotinus. Of course, Origen has to acknowledge the importance of Plato and harmonize him with the Holy Scriptures, but his mind, constantly on the move, always looking for the truth, proceeds by sudden leaps, sometimes baffling gaps, often withering insights. In his famous treatise On Prayer, for instance, he comes to the dance of the stars in a completely unexpected way. If anyone raised objections on praying to the rising sun, he writes, the answer could be as follows: “the Sun has a certain freedom of will too, inasmuch as it and the moon praise God. Praise ye Him, O sun and moon, says Scripture. And it is clear that this holds also for the moon and consequently for all the stars: Praise Him, all ye stars and light.”10 Therefore, Origen goes on, Just as we have said that God makes use of the free will of every man on earth and arranges it for some purpose, fitting it with the requirements of what is on the earth, so we must suppose that through the freedom of will of the sun and the moon and the stars, being harmonious and firm, fixed, and wise, He has arranged the whole order of Heaven11 and the march and movement of the stars that fits in with all the universe. And if my prayer be not amiss when offered on behalf of what depends on the free will of another man, so much more likely am I to succeed when my prayer is offered for what depends on the free will of the stars that dance in the heavens for the good of the universe.12

Surprising obliquity of approach, one would say. But the fact is that for Origen the stars are not only those that appear in the astronomy and astrology of his time, which he knows very well: they are alive, they have body, intelligence and reason, and they have sinned. If the Book of Job says that “the stars are not pure in his sight,” this means – comments Origen – “that not only is it possible for the stars to be subject to sins, but that they are in fact ‘not clean’ from the pollution of sin. For he writes as follows: ‘the stars are not clean in his sight.’” The phrase “the stars are not clean in his sight” cannot refer to the luminosity of their body, “as if it were a dirty cloth,” because this would be offensive towards their Creator who made them such. Therefore, the stars have sinned and have fallen. Does Isaiah not say so? “How is Lucifer, who used to arise in the morning, fallen from heaven!”13 Does the Gospel according to Luke not say the same, identifying that star with Satan? For Origen, Satan is a fallen star: after the great celestial battle against Michael he will fall down to Earth with his angels, according to the Book of Revelation. Jesus himself, quoting Isaiah, prophesies that after the great tribulation of Jerusalem “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky.”14 Psalm 148:3. Origen, On Prayer, pp. 35-36 in Origen, Prayer Exhortation to Martyrdom, trans. J.J. O’Meara, New York, Mahwah NJ, Newman Press, 1954. 11 Deuteronomy 4:19. 12 Origen, On Prayer, p. 36. 13 Origen, On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth, New York, Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 60, 49. 14 Job 25:5; Isaiah 14:12; Luke 10:18; Revelation 12:7-9; Isaiah 34:4; Matthew 24:29: Origen, Comment on the Gospel according to John, 1.35.257, in Origen. Commentary on the Gospel according to John Books 1-10, trans. R.E. Heine, Washington D. C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1989; Principles, 1.7.2. 58-70, in Origenes Vier Bücher von den Prinzipien, hg. H. Görgemanns u. H. Karpp, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 3rd edn., 1992; Homilies on Ezechiel 12.2, in Homélies sur Ézechiél, éd. M. Borret, SC 352, 1989. 10

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The stars are not malicious and do not exert evil influence over men, but they have sinned and have fallen. They can, however, be purified. Their bodies are the heavy and material consequence of sin, but their keeping the right course of the seasons through the rational movement of their bodies is the service that they consciously render to humanity.15 They can also be redeemed: “it would be strange to declare,” writes Origen commenting on John’s Gospel, that Christ “tasted death for human sins, but not for any other creature, in addition to man, which had fallen into sin, for instance for the stars.”16 In a novel of theological sciencefiction, C.S. Lewis once wrote of the (failed) Temptation of a new Eve and Adam on Venus.17 If there are other planets inhabited by intelligent creatures, one wonders, are these beings fallen? Have they also been offered the possibility of redemption? Origen is contemplating the possibility of a cosmic redemption. And he completes it with a vision of glory. The citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem are, for him, those who have ascended to heaven for their way of life and have become a multitude of stars praising God. Furthermore, human nature, in this life, is able to progress to the point that the resurrection of the dead will equal not only the glory of the stars, but even the glory of the sun, as it is written: “Then the righteous shall shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”18 *** Origen was challenged, condemned, and rejected, but his brilliant work exerted enormous influence on the Fathers who followed him, both in the East and – through Jerome and Ambrose – in the West. I certainly cannot follow these paths here. I would stay a moment longer in the East, and then move on, skipping nearly a millennium, to the West. Basil, brother of another great Father, Gregory of Nyssa, was born half a century after the death of Origen, and was a contemporary of Julian the Apostate. He never forgave the Emperor, whom he met with his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, another great Father, and who was described by the latter as a deformed idiot. Basil and Gregory edited an anthology of the writings of Origen, entitling it Philokalia, “love of beauty,” thus preserving some works of the Alexandrian master. But Basil is not merciful towards Origen’s theories on stars. In his Homilies on the Hexameron, on the six days of Creation, he openly criticizes Plato’s and Origen’s idea that they are animated and sentient beings. “The heavens are not endowed with life,” he writes, “because they ‘show forth the glory of God,’ nor is the firmament a perceptive being because it ‘declareth the work of his hands.’” “And if someone says,” he adds with a little stab, “that the heavens are speculative powers, and the firmament, active powers productive of the good, we accept the expression as neatly said, but we will not concede that it is altogether true.”19 Yet even Basil is ready to concede something to the poetic and platonic imagination. At the beginning of the sixth homily he briefly outlines a clear night, as if he were responding to 15

Commentary on Matthew, 13.6, in Commento a Matteo, G. Bendinelli, R. Scognamiglio and M.I. Danieli, eds., Rome, Città Nuova, 2004-2006; Principles, 3.5.4. 16 Comment on the Gospel according to John, I. 35. 257. 17 C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, London, Bodley Head, 1943. 18 In Psalmos, 147, in Origenis Opera Omnia, ed. C. Delarue, Paris, Jacobi Vincent, 1733, t. II, pp. 845-846, and Principles, 2.11.6.224-235; Matthew 13:43; Origen, Homilies on Numbers, 2.2, in Homélies sur les Nombres, éd. L. Doutreleau, SC 415, 442, 461, 1996-2001. 19 Basil of Caesarea, On the Hexameron, 3, 9, p. 52, in Saint Basil Hexegetic Homilies, trans. A.C. Way, Washington D. C., Catholic University of America Press, 1963.

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the fierce criticism of Julian, who accused the Christians of being beasts incapable of contemplating the sky. “If at any time,” he writes, “in the clear cool air of the night, while gazing intently at the indescribable beauty of the night, you conceived an idea of the Creator of the universe– who is He that has dotted the heavens with such flowers and why in the visible world necessity is stronger than pleasure,” then you will be ready to enter “the hidden wonders of this great city… from which the man-slaying demon drove us.”20 Is the reference to necessity (anankaion) an echo, albeit distant and mediated, of Plato’s Republic? One cannot say for sure. But the shadow of Plato is definitely present when Basil speaks of the “general chorus of creation,” as he does in the third Homily; and even more so when he alludes to the cosmic dance in the second. Here he discusses the verse of Genesis in the lesson, “the earth was invisible and formless,” and notes that the same can be said of the sky that God created together with the earth: “They were not yet brought to perfection themselves, nor had they received their proper adornment, since they were not yet surrounded by the light of the moon nor the sun, nor crowned by the choirs of the stars.”21 *** The music and dance of the spheres then became commonplace also among the great Fathers of the West (Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great) and from them – as well as from authors like Macrobius, Calcidius, Cassiodorus, Boethius, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville and Dionysius the Areopagite – they were handed on to commentators, to John Scotus Eriugena, and to Chartres’s Platonic Renaissance. With admirable variations, they appear in the works of William of Conches, Bernardus Silvestris and Alain of Lille.22 Then, they come into the hands of Dante. In the Convivio Dante describes the movements of the heavens, which were initiated by the angelic hierarchies, and assigns each heaven a “science” (for example, that of the fixed stars is associated with metaphysics), but he never mentions the music and dance of the spheres. Perhaps this is because the treatise is largely based on Aristotle, who in De coelo had called this Pythagorean-Platonic theory absurd.23 In the Comedy, however, they return, appearing at the beginning of Paradiso.24 Immediately after rising, with Beatrice, from the 20

On the Hexameron 6, 1, p. 84 (translation slightly modified). Ibid. 2, 1, p. 22. 22 Ambrose, In Hexaemeron, I, 6, in I sei giorni della Creazione, ed. G. Banterle, Milan-Rome, Biblioteca Ambrosiana-Città Nuova, 1979; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 150, vv. 5-6, ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, CCSL, 40, 2nd edn.,1990; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, VI, 13, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL, 143, 1979; Cassiodorus, De artibus, 5, PL 70; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, ed. L. Bieler, CCSL 94, III, m. 9, 13-24, and De institutione musica, I, 2, in Traité de la musique, trans. C. Meyer, Turnhout, Brepols, 2004; Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies, III, 17, trans. S.A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, O. Berghof, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006; John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon, éd. É. Jeauneau, CCCM, 161-165, 1996-2003, 477C, 546A, 549C, 550C, 630D, 648A-C, 693D, 722C; William of Conches, Glosae super Platonem, éd. É. Jeauneau, CCCM, 203, 2006, pp. 186 and 197, and Glosae svper Boethium, ed. L. Nauta, CCCM, 158, 1999, pp. 156-158; Bernardus Silvestris, Poetic Works, ed. and trans. W. Wetherbee, DOML, 2015: Cosmographia, I, iii, 33-154 (and cfr. G. Chaucer, Man of Law’s Tale, 190-203); Mathematicus, 209-283; Alain of Lille, Literary Works, ed. and trans. W. Wetherbee, DOML, 2013: De planctu Naturae, VII, m. 4, and Anticlaudianus IV, 345-355. For Macrobius, Calcidius, Martianus Capella and Dyonisius the Aeropagite see ch. 6. 23 Convivio, II v 12-17; Aristotle, De coelo, II, 9, 290 b-291 a. Of course, Dante does not only follow Aristotle, but also, for example, Alfraganus and the Scholastics. 24 Dante is perhaps persuaded by Simplicius’s latinized comment to Aristotle’s De coelo (Simplicii Commentaria in quatuor libros de Coelo Aristotelis, ff. 24v-25r (II, ad t.c.37), or simply now agrees with Cicero in the Somnium and Boethius in the Consolation and in De musica. 21

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top of Purgatory to the first heaven, and after experiencing the “transhumanizing”– that is, after “transcending”the human condition – Dante is able to hear the music of the spheres that resounds there. He does not know whether he is now only soul, or whether he still has a body: only God, the love that governs Heaven and that has raised him so high with his light, knows. The circular motion of the heavens that divine love initiates and sustains forever, as they desire it, draws Dante’s attention to the harmonic music that God himself regulates and assigns to each sky. Then, the light becomes dazzling: the flame of the sun illuminates so much of the sky and so brightly that the pilgrim has never seen such a big lake. Then the novelty of the sound and the intensity and extent of the light arouse in him the immense desire to know what causes these phenomena. The poet speaks directly to God: Whether I was no more than soul (which love, in governing the spheres, made lastly new), You know, who raised me up through Your pure light. When that great wheel – which You, desired by that, make sempiternal – had, with harmonies proportionate and clear, made me attend, the skies of Heaven, it seemed to me, blazed out so lit by solar flame no lake on earth, flooded by rain or river, spread so wide. The newness of the sound and that great light kindled in me desire to know the cause sharper than any I have ever felt.25 A voice of unprecedented power is heard here. In fact, Dante manages to concentrate in four terzinas at least five biblical, theological, philosophical and literary allusions, to fuse sound and light, and to mirror and stretch the heat of the sun in the lake. He has just compared his “transhumanizing” to Glaucus’s mythical metamorphosis into a divine being as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Now, he is placing himself on a par with St. Paul who, in describing his raptus and ascension to the third heaven, said he did not know if this had happened “with the body or without the body.” Then, he alludes to the Scholastic theory that in order to achieve the vision of God in this life one must be granted by God himself a “light of glory”(here it is the “light” with which God has raised Dante up to Paradise). He refers to the thought of Aristotle, who had argued that the Prime Mover “moves as if desired.” At the same time, however, he echoes two celebrated meters of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy: “Which love, in governing the spheres” picks up both the “love by which the heavens are ruled” and “you who govern the universe with eternal order.” Finally, he takes up from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio the idea of the music of the spheres.26 In fact, Cicero had employed the very words Dante uses when he speaks of “l’armonia che temperi e discerni,” literally, the harmony You (God) “temper” and “measure” or “distinguish,” in sum the “harmonies / proportionate and clear.” 25

Dante, Paradiso I, 73-84. Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIII, 898-968: Paradiso, I, 67-69; Paul, 2 Corinthians 12:2-4; Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 12, a. 5 (lumen gloriae); Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII, 7, 1072 b; Boethius, Consolation, II, m. 8, and III, m. 9; Cicero, De re publica, VI, 5, 18. 26

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In poetic and philosophical terms, the passage is pervaded by stunning tension: “sempiterni desiderato” encloses in two words both the action by which God gives movement to the entire cosmos in the beginning and for all time, and the response of the sky that, with its desire for God, is the cause of that motion. Two words are also enough for the music that divine love “tempers” and “measures” modulating the harmony and dividing its sounds, from high to low, throughout the celestial spheres. A series of similar images, along with equal synthetic power of words and thought, returns at the end of Paradiso: the “great wheel” that here indicates the skies, there refers to Dante’s will and “desire” (“sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa”); the “desire” that here moves the Mover, there, together with the will, is moved by divine love; finally, the love that here governs the sky there “moves” precisely “the sun and other stars” (“l’amor che move ‘l sole e l’altre stelle”). Thus, Paradiso begins and ends in the same way, like a big circle that, turning, goes back to its starting point (its opening verse, in fact, is “the glory of he who all things moves,” “la gloria di colui che tutto move”). The music of the spheres is not evoked again by Dante in the Paradiso, as – we assume – that “novelty” eventually becomes part of the norm. But for a mysterious and striking poetic transposition from the heavens the pilgrim climbs to the scenes and characters the poet describes, the dance of the stars becomes increasingly more detailed, culminating in the cantos of the Sun and Wisdom (X-XIV), in which the spirits form circles of choirs, singers and dancers. I will offer only one example here, referring the reader to chapter 16 for a more detailed analysis. Here is the song of the first crown of the Wise, whose spokesman will turn out to be Thomas Aquinas. The spirits are “burning suns,” revolving three times around Dante and Beatrice: they look like women who seem to be dancing and stop to wait for the “new note,” the new music. The image acquires decisive cosmic resonance from its first term of comparison: the stars slowly rotating around the fixed points of the celestial sphere, the “poles.” The dance of the Wise is the cosmic dance: And when, still singing, all these burning suns had spun three turns around us where we were – as stars more swift the closer to fixed poles – girl-like in formal dance they looked to me, in figure still but silent, pausing now, listening until they caught the next new note.27 *** The harmony of the spheres is still alive two generations after Dante. The author who would become the father of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, opens his exquisite Parliament of Fowls with a dream inspired by his reading of the Somnium Scipionis, which he imitates and summarizes here. Scipio Emilianus, he writes, “the melody heard […] / That comes from those thrice three spheres, / That well is of music and melody / In this world here, and cause of harmony.” Here the idea is that celestial music is the origin of “mundane music” – terrestrial melody. By contrast, when Chaucer’s Troilus dies in Troilus and Criseyde, his soul ascends, leaving every element, to the eighth sphere and, “as he passed, he saw with 27

Dante, Paradiso, X, 76-81.

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wonderment / The wandering stars and heard their harmony, / Whose sound is full of heavenly melody.” In the world of Troilus, in which Criseyde abandons him for the Greek Diomedes and Troy is about to be destroyed, there is no room for earthly music, and harmony belongs exclusively to the spheres.28 Philosophers and poets continue undeterred to hear celestial music throughout the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe: the authors who speak of it include Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, and Luis de León.29 In 1525 Francesco Giorgio Veneto printed a De Harmonia Mundi in which “the order of the ‘elemental’ series was considered fully appropriate to heavenly Enneads which, in turn, were in perfect harmony with the angelic hierarchies.”30 Fascinated by the “diatonic” musical character of the harmony described in Plato’s Timaeus, Francesco Giorgio divided his work into three ‘canticles,’ and each of them into eight “tones.” Pierre de Ronsard, in his Hymne au Ciel, and Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, in the first great Renaissance poem on Creation, La Sepmaine, praise the harmony and dance of the stars. The latter, indeed, reproaches Copernicus for denying that the stars dance around the Earth, and with a humble neologism defines heaven as “aime-son, aimedance” (sound-lover, dancelover). Torquato Tasso, who was inspired by Du Bartas’s Sepmaine, often echoes Basil of Cesarea’s Hexaemeron and, in Il mondo creato (Creation of the World), speaks of “godly harmony so great” and “so marvelous the music of its lyre”. In the First Day he proclaims that God is the hand and he, the poet, is the lyre that, moved by God, “with most melodious tunes / resounds, and softens every hardened heart.”31 However, the most skillful poetic translation of the music of the spheres between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century is that left by Shakespeare – and it is no coincidence that his works were staged in London in the Globe Theatre, whose ceiling, called “The Heavens,” was painted with the sky and its constellations. In The Merchant of Venice the second night scene between the Christian Lorenzo and the Jewish Jessica immediately acquires a dreamy tone. “The moon shines bright,” begins Lorenzo: “In such a night as this, / When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, / And they did make no noise, in such a night / Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls, / And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents / Where Cressid lay that night.” A few seconds later, Lorenzo asks the musicians to play, then he goes back to the nocturnal: “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! / Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.” Finally, he asks Jessica to sit down and contemplate the sky: Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. 28

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls, 60-63; Troilus and Cryseide, V, 1811-1813, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., gen. ed. L.D. Benson, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1987. The translation from the Parliament is mine, from Troilus N. Coghill’s, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971. 29 For all this see L. Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung,” ed. A.G. Hatcher, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963. 30 Francesco Giorgio Veneto, De Harmonia Mundi, repr. of the edition of Venice 1525, Lavis, La Finestra Editrice, 2008, Introduction by G. Vasoli, p. 9. 31 Pierre de Ronsard, “Hymne au Ciel,” in Œuvres complètes, éd. J. Céard, D. Ménager and M. Simonin, Paris, Gallimard, 1993; and see his “Ode à Michel de l’Hospital,” 12-34 and 169-220; Guillaume Saluste Du Bartas, La Sepmaine (Texte du 1581), II, 965, 986 e IV, 130, éd. Y. Bellenger, Paris, Societé des Textes Français Modernes, 1993; Torquato Tasso, Creation of the World, IV, 998-999 and I, 65-66, trans. J. Tusiani, Binghampton NY, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982.

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Lorenzo invites Jessica to hear the music of the spheres: the one postulated by Plato, Quintilian and Plutarch, which Shakespeare found described in John Florio’s translation of Montaigne.33 He also introduces a new, fascinating detail: the stars sing like angels, yet as choirs to the cherubim. Finally, he adds that this harmony is that of immortal souls, but we cannot perceive it because we are closed in our body, our “muddy vesture of decay.” And yet there is a Shakespearian character who hears this music. Pericles has gone through all sorts of tribulations: he has lost his wife Thaisa and his daughter Marina, he has wandered on the sea, and is now reduced to an old and deranged Nobody, like King Lear. At one point he sails to the harbor of Mytilene, and is greeted by a maiden who “sings like one immortal, and […] dances / As goddess-like to her admired lays.” In the course of a long, slow, sublime scene Pericles comes to see her as Marina, the daughter he believed to be dead. Then, he is reborn. He asks for his robes, invokes the blessing of heaven on Marina, and suddenly hears a music: “But, hark, what music?,” he asks. Then he carries on talking, inviting Marina to tell him everything, point by point. He stops again: “But, what music?” And when the other people present claim not to hear anything, he replies: “None! The music of the spheres! List, my Marina!” Faced with their disbelief, he repeats: “rarest sounds!” Then, the heavenly music wounds him, grips him, enchants him, and makes him drowsy: Most heavenly music! It nips me unto listening, and thick slumber Hangs upon mine eyes: let me rest.34 It is a moment of earthly bliss, supreme happiness, ecstasy. Pericles is still locked up in the “muddy vesture of decay” mentioned by Lorenzo, but finding his daughter and acknowledging that this remarkable twist of fate hides divine providence leads him to penetrate the spheres of transcendence, perceiving its secret harmony: he “feels” the essence of the cosmos. It is material but transcendent music, which makes a metaphysical perception physical. *** Between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, Giordano Bruno, author of De l’infinito, universo e mondi and of Eroici furori, where he recalled celestial harmony, died at 32

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, V i 58-65, in The Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. J. Jowett, W. Montgomery, G. Taylor, S. Wells, 2nd edn., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005. 33 Shakespeare had the following sources available: Plato; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, I, 10, 12; Plutarch, De re musica, XLIV; Montaigne, Essais, I, 23, “De la coutume”, trans. J. Florio (1603), ed. H. Morley, London, Routledge, 1886, p. 42. 34 Shakespeare, Pericles, V i 230- 232.

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the stake: and there was still talk of the music of the spheres. Kepler, who formulated the three laws on planetary orbits and was in conversation with Galileo, also talks about them: persuaded that God is not only a geometer but also a musician, he inserts his third law in a text that also deals with music and astrology, and supports the idea that the music and the solar system are manifestations of the same harmony.35 Meanwhile, Europe remembers what Africanus had said to his grandson in the Dream of Scipio: the musicians, with the sound of the strings and their song, have been able to imitate the celestial harmony. Human music translates into, and recreates, that of the stars. In 1607 one of the first great operas, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, with libretto by Alessandro Striggio, was staged. Music itself appears in the prologue and presents itself as follows: Music I am, who with the sweet accents can charm and comfort the most despairing spirit: with noble anger’s file, or with consuming rage of desire the coldest heart inflaming. I with my lyre of gold and with my singing sometimes beguile men’s mortal ears, and by these charms I awaken desire for the heavenly lyre’s immortal music.36 While some poets, such as Du Bartas and John Donne,37 complain that the new science is destroying the ancient harmony, the new music comes forward to say: I am the one who “awaken desire for the heavenly lyre’s immortal music,” bringing to earth the music of the spheres. Milton – who in Paradise Lost, after Raphael’s long narration of the Creation, inserted a famous passage in which Adam asks the Archangel whether the sun and the planets revolve around the earth, or whether it is the latter, along with the planets, that orbits around the Sun – wrote a poem entitled At a Solemn Music. In it, he invoked the two “Sirens”, Voice and Verse, “sphere-borne harmonious sisters,” and asks them to present “that undisturbed song of pure concent, / Ay sung before the sapphire-colored throne / To him that sits thereon / With saintly shout, and solemn jubilee” while Seraphim and Cherubim play their trumpets and harps.38 Milton transfers the echo to poetry, but retains the link with celestial music. A few decades later, in 1687, John Dryden writes “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.” “From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony,” he says, “This universal Frame began, / When Nature underneath a heap / Of jarring Atomes lay, / And cou’d not heave her Head, / The tuneful Voice was heard from high, / Arise ye more than dead. / Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, / In order to their stations leap, / and MUSICK’s power obey.” Music can inspire any sort of passion, continues Dryden: trumpets and drums accompany war, flutes and lutes the pains of love, violins anger and despair, while the organ expresses love for God. Orpheus could enchant animals and trees with his lyre. Saint Cecilia, patron 35

Johannes Kepler, Harmonice mundi, in Gesammelte Werke, VI, hg. M. Caspar, München, Beck, 1940. Claudio Monteverdi, La favola d’Orfeo, English singing version by A. Ridler, London, Faber Music, 1981, p. 1, lines 4-12. 37 For Du Bartas see above, note 28; John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, 205- 214. 38 John Milton, “At a Solemn Music,” in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. J. Carey, London, Longman, 1971. 36

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saint of music, achieved an even greater wonder: when her organ was given “vocal spirit,” an angel heard it and appeared, mistaking the earth for the sky. “As from the pow’r of sacred Lays / The Spheres began to move, / And sung the great Creator’s praise / To all the bless’d above; / So when the last and dreadful hour / This crumbling Pageant shall devour, / The TRUMPET shall be heard on high, / The Dead shall live, the LIVING die, / And MUSICK shall untune the Sky.”39 On November 22, 1739, the festivity of St. Cecilia, for the first time, based on a text by Dryden, the “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day” was performed. The music was by Georg Friedrich Handel. Then people really understood how earthly music could now replace the celestial one.40 With the spread of musical terms that we still use today (and that reflect their distant Pythagorean-Platonic origin) like “concert” and “symphony,” the music of the spheres began to fade. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift places it in the kingdom of Laputa, the flying island, whose inhabitants have made great progress in astronomy. One morning, recalls Gulliver, the king, the nobles, the dignitaries and courtiers prepare their instruments and then play for three hours without interruption. Gulliver, completely stunned, fails to understand both why his hosts play, and the music they produce. Then his master explains that “the People of their Island had their Ears adapted to hear the Musick of the Spheres, which always played at certain Periods; and the Court was now prepared to bear their Part in whatever Instrument they most Excelled.”41 Transferring the music of the spheres to Laputa means mocking it, belittling it, and removing it from our world. After all, Pascal had already expressed his terror before the “silence éternel de ces espaces infinis”: before the eternal silence of these now infinite spaces.”42

John Dryden, A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, in The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. J. Kinsley, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962, vv. 1-12 e 55-63. 40 As early as 1692 Henry Purcell had composed an ode for the Saint’s festivity, “Hail, Bright Cecilia,” with lyrics by Nicholas Brady. 41 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. C. Rawson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, IV, 2, p. 149. 42 B. Pascal, Pensées, 233, p. 73, in Pensées and Other Writings, trans. H. Levi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995. 39

Chapter 8

THE VAULTS OF HEAVEN A sphere of heavenly light, a concave globe with transparent fire, enters the room and, rolling, turns slowly with a gentle circular motion. In it, it seems, there is a girl. The gods who are gathered in the place, illuminated by this approaching light, sparkle: especially those that dispense fate. Even the texture of the farthest sky glimmers with the reflection of those flashes of brilliance. Astonished by this marvel, the gods of heaven, earth and sea – convinced that the girl just arrived is Themis, the goddess of Justice, or her daughter Astraea, or else the Muse Urania– offer her a chair to sit among them. Instead, the luminous figure leaps forward, sprinkled with gems and eyes all over her limbs. She has a starry head and sparkling hair; wings rippling in glass feathers and acting as thick golden oars to fly anywhere in the universe. In one hand, she bears a measure of a cubit, shining; in the other, a book depicting the cornerstones of the poles, the paths of the gods and the twists and turns of the stars, with multicolored metals. This mysterious figure is Astronomy: she makes her entrance in Book VIII of The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a work in prose and verse written by Martianus Cappella at the end of the fifth century CE.1 It is rather moving to see her join the symposium of the gods in the guise of a radiant young woman. She has become a personification, but is still full of life and light. Her divine nature already reflects in her movements those of celestial bodies, and her light shines on the face of the gods who identify themselves with those bodies, and especially of those who rule human destiny. Therefore, she is also astrology. She bears the signs of the stars, of her art, and of the way in which humans approach her: the starry head, the feathers to navigate through the cosmos, the eyes scattered all over her figure. Her book contains the paths of divinities and stars. Indeed, Astronomy immediately begins her presentation: taking up Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and Plato’s Timaeus, she talks about the creation of the universe, the celestial circles, the galaxy, the zodiac; she lists the constellations and discusses their rising and setting; she explains the motions of the planets and their orbits, the movements and the eclipse of the Moon and the Sun. In short, she presents a veritable brief astronomical treatise – a sort of summary of the late-ancient knowledge of the sky. That is how men of late antiquity probably saw astronomy: well outlined in its doctrines, but still fascinating.

1

Martianus Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. W.H. Stahl and R. Johnson with E.L. Burge, New York-Oxford, Columbia University Press, 1977, pp. 316-317.

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After all, the very way in which Satire announces the fulgent personification is filled with solemnity. Satire, the fictional narrator of the book, has already told the story: upon advice of his brother Apollo, Mercury chose to marry Philology, daughter of Wisdom who knows everything. Philology then rose up to heaven to be submitted by the gods gathered in council to different rites of initiation. Finally Mercury offered his bride some wedding gifts, which consist in the seven arts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, harmony). Philology will then be led into the bridal chamber. When in this “myth” Satire introduces Astronomy, her words are particularly interesting: the time has come – she says – to illustrate the paths of the stars, the course of the poles, the turning of the planets. In fact, she sees “the canopy of heaven now gleam, struck by a bolt of lightning in the sky.” Up there, in the north, shines Bootes, the guardian of the Bears; here, “where earth verges out of sight,” “bright Canopus ranges imperceptible.” One can see the Sun, the Moon, and the constellations.2 *** The “canopy of heaven,” of course, is the vault of the sky; however, it also seems to be the vault of a building bearing a man-made representation of the night sky – as if it were the vault of Nero’s Domus Aurea, or the peplum that Euripides’s Ion unfolds as a roof on the pavilion he is building. In the eastern part of the Empire, vaults of this sort now began to take shape. John of Gaza describes a “heavenly” dome surmounting the Baths of his city.3 And among Christians Paul the Silentiary celebrates the immense dome of Hagia Sophia, the cathedral of the new Rome, Constantinople: Rising above this into the immeasurable air is a helmet rounded on all sides like a sphere and, radiant as the heavens, it bestrides the roof of the church. At its very summit art has depicted across, protector of the city. It is a wonder to see how [the dome], wide below, gradually grows tighter at the top as it rises. It does not, however, form a sharp pinnacle, but is like the firmament resting on air.4 The golden dome of Hagia Sophia, continues Paul, bears lights to illuminate it when it gets dark outside. When the evening comes, then, that half sphere really looks like the vault of heaven: For the deep wisdom of our Emperors has stretched from the projecting stone cornice, on whose back

2

The Marriage, VIII, 808, p. 316. Jean de Gaza, Description du Tableau Cosmique, éd. D. Lauritzen, BL, 2015. And see Johannes von Gaza, Paulus Silentiarius und Prokopios von Gaza. Kunst-beschreibungen justinianischer Zeit, hg. P. Friedländer, Hildesheim, Olms, 1969. 4 Paul the Silentiary, in C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453. Sources and Documents, reprint Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1986, p. 83, 89-90. I have arranged the prose translation into verses to follow the original more closely. 3

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is planted the foot of the temple’s lofty dome, long twisted chains of beaten brass, linked in alternating curves by many hooks. From many points on a long course these fall together to the ground, but before they reach the floor, their lofty path is checked and they form an even choir. And to each chain he has attached silver discs, suspended circle-wise in the air round the central confines of the church. Thus, descending from their lofty course, they float in a circle above the heads of men. The cunning craftsman has pierced the discs all over with his iron tool so that they may receive shafts of fire-wrought glass and provide pendent sources of light for men at night. Yet not from discs alone does the light shine at night, for in the same circle you will see, next to the discs, the shape of the lofty cross with many eyes upon it, and in its pierced back it holds luminous vessels. Thus hangs the circling choir of bright lights. You might say you were gazing on the effulgent stars of the heavenly Corona close to Arcturus and the head of Draco. Thus the evening light revolves round the temple, brightly shining …5 We can no longer contemplate the heavenly vaults of Constantinople, and in particular that of Hagia Sophia, because, after the conquest of the city in 1453, the Turks destroyed them or replaced them with Islamic domes that are equally sublime, but lack the Christian astronomical decoration. Some interiors of the arches of the gynaeceum, however, still show the mosaic decoration of golden stars on a blue background. In addition, the Seraphim that occupied the rib vaults under the dome of Hagia Sophia have been recently recovered. These great figures, each wrapped in his six wings, were repainted in the nineteenth century by Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati, but two also preserve part of the original mosaic on a golden background. In both, what dominates is the contrast between the blue and brown color of the wings: because of this, the face (or the star that, ineffable, replaces it) stands out. Finally, we can infer the importance of the stars and the cosmic drive from the iconography of Byzantine churches of later decoration, such as St. Savior in Chora in Istanbul. Mosaics and frescoes of the fourteenth century are competing here, in illustrating the themes of salvation and resurrection. Two frescoes are particularly relevant: those of the Judgment and the Anastasis in the parecclesion. In the latter, the risen Christ, surrounded by the heavenly court – with the dead stretching their hands toward him from their graves – is 5

Ibid., pp. 89-90.

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inserted inside an oval surrounded by two bands of golden stars on a white and gray background. Above the former – in which Christ, enthroned between the wings of the blessed and Mary standing at his right, judges the resurrected – an angel flying in the black abyss of primordial space carries the huge white roll of the cosmos, on which stand out, in gold, the sun, the moon and the stars. *** We do not have many mosaics from Constantinople,6 but we still have those of San Giovanni in Fonte, the ancient Baptistery of Naples, allegedly built by Constantine himself; in its dome there is a wonderful disk of stars with a cross in the center. Moreover, we have the mosaics of the Baptistery of Albenga and those of Ravenna, which was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire in Italy under Justinian, the emperor who ordered the construction – or rather, reconstruction, after Constantine –of Hagia Sophia. In Ravenna the star vaults are of stunning beauty. The oldest are in the so-called Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, a building constructed in the form of a Latin cross in the first half of the fifth century, when it was probably an oratory dedicated to the Saints Nazarius and Celsus. The central dome of the mausoleum is decorated with mosaics, with golden stars on a midnight blue background, with a golden cross in the center. At the four ends, depicted according to the traditional iconography (a man for Matthew, a lion for Mark, an ox for Luke, an eagle for John), are the four evangelists, again in gold against the background of blue sky dotted with stars. In the barrel vaults of the arms of the building the mosaic decoration represents colorful flowers on a dark blue background. However, those flowers are so stylized and bright as to be inevitably taken for stars, or astral flowers. The dome and vaults of Galla Placida, therefore, evoke the sky, both in the physical sense (the vault of heaven sprinkled with stars) and in the metaphysical one (the cross in the center, that is, Christ): blue is the color of divine wisdom. The same type of decoration is also found in the apse and vaults of the Archbishop’s Chapel, built in the late fifth century as the only Catholic building in the era of the Arian Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king who at the time reigned over Italy. A jeweled cross dominates the apse, against the blue background dotted with white and golden stars, while the vault of the vestibule has a golden background and a multicolored floral decoration. The usual optical effect is, once again, stellar. In Ravenna, the iconography of the Nativity and Epiphany – used in Rome since the age of the catacombs and then beautifully confirmed in the triumphal arch of Santa Maria Maggiore (ca. 430) – was definitively consecrated, once again in the form of mosaic. In Rome, the third century fresco in the Catacombs of Priscilla, representing the Virgin and Child and a prophet indicating the star of Matthew’s story, is linked with the Epiphany scene in Santa Maria Maggiore, where the Magi visit Jesus seated on a throne and one of them points at the star placed at the top, among the four angels. In Ravenna, in the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo built a little later, a magnificent mosaic on a golden background shows the Magi bringing gifts to Bethlehem, following the star. It is only at the beginning of the fourteenth century, after the passage of Halley’s comet, that Giotto gives the star the 6

But there are some in Nicaea, in the churches of Koimesis, Hagia Sophia and Hagios Lukas of Thessaloniki, and elsewhere.

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shape of a comet, in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua: complete with a fiery tail, it dominates the Nativity hut where the Magi adore the Child. In the sixth century the apse design of the Archbishop’s Chapel of Ravenna is taken up in the great apse of the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, decorated with mosaics between 533 and 549. The great golden jeweled cross is here inscribed within a blue circle embroidered with golden stars and bears a small bust of Christ at the foot of the cross, bearing the inscription “salus mundi.” In the upper part of the apse, at the top, there is the hand of God coming out of the clouds to bless the cross, and on the sides are the portraits of Moses and Elijah. The green lawn below, planted with trees, plants, flowers, animals and birds in flight, represents Mount Tabor, and three lambs, two on the right and one to the left, looking towards the cross, symbolize Peter, James and John. The natural world still dominates in the lower band, full of shrubs, animals and stones. The last bottom band shows Saint Apollinaris, first bishop of Ravenna, in the center, praying, surrounded by twelve lambs – six on the left and six on the right, with white flowers between them: the bishop’s flock in the number of the apostles. The deep green and white of the lower half contrast – and perfectly connect from the point of view of color – with the gold of the upper half and the starry blue in the central disc. The arc of the basin resumes all these colors on a golden background, while the apse register represents on the walls, from the bottom to the top, the two archangels Michael (left) and Gabriel (right); two elegant palms, the biblical symbol of the righteous, in the arch abutments; the walls of two cities, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, from the gates of which exit the twelve apostles in the guise of lambs; and finally, in the most important part, there is Christ inside a circular medallion, surrounded on both sides by the symbols of the four evangelists between multicolored clouds. The episode invoked in the apse of Sant’Apollinare is the Transfiguration, in which Jesus takes Peter, James and John on top of a high mountain and is transfigured before them, his face shining like the sun and his white robes as bright as light. Moses and Elijah appear to talk with him, and a voice from the clouds descends to proclaim: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.”7 However, the representation is symbolic, because the only human faces in the apse are those of Saint Apollinaris (in history) and Moses and Elijah, prefigurations of Christ (in sacred history). The face of Jesus is tiny in the Transfiguration scene itself, while prominent at the center of the jeweled cross, on top of the arch. The apostles are represented by lambs both in the Transfiguration and in the upperscene, the number twelve marking them as well as the faithful of Ravenna surrounding Saint Apollinaris. The evangelists are indicated by the traditional figures of eagle, lion, ox and man. The Transfiguration is ineffable, and symbols, such as the general structure and the mosaic representation, have the task of preaching its significance. The intention of representing the two natures, human and divine, of Christ, is for instance clear. It is also obvious that the picture purposefully shows participation in the event of the natural world, from lowest (stones, trees, animals) to the highest (the stars in the circle): from the inanimate to the vegetable to the animal to the cosmic. The stars, though, are precisely what act as a background to the cross, marking the boundary and the intersection of the physical and the metaphysical dimensions, corresponding to the dual nature of Christ. Moreover, at the two

7

Matthew 17:1-13.

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ends of the cross, between the stars, are the two Greek letters Alpha and Omega – symbols of the Lord who is Beginning and End, according to the Book of Revelation.8 Between Alpha and Omega, among the stars of the Beginning and those of the End, in figural relation (the twelve apostles plus twelve lambs) is the Heilsgeschichte, the sacred history of salvation, and the human earthly history on which sacred history acts for its own purposes. At the center of both stand the Incarnation, Passion and Transfiguration of Christ: the cross as the “salvation of the world.” The Father participates in the whole history of the universe and of man with the hand indicating and blessing the Cross of the Son. Father and Son, heaven and earth are united by the clouds: Christ stands above them and the hand of God comes out of them.9 *** As we shall see, the stars of Ravenna had huge success in medieval, Renaissance and modern Europe. But Ravenna is where the Roman Boethius lived and died (in 525), and could see at least the vaults of Galla Placidia and the Archbishop’s Chapel. A Christian imbued with Plato and Aristotle, Boethius marks the threshold between antiquity and the Middle Ages. He may have composed a treatise on astronomy. What is certain is that, recalling Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Claudian, and all the literature he knows, Boethius filled his most famous book, The Consolation of Philosophy, with wonderful stellar images, which are cosmic, philosophical, theological and personal. They form an embroidered fabric, like the peplum of Euripides’s Ion, which the prisoner condemned to death by Theodoric addresses in order to detach himself gradually from the earth and look toward his heavenly home. Almost every meter of the book calls on the stars and praises them with the afflatus of great poetry. This happens from the very beginning when, in meter 2 of Book I, Philosophy reminds him of his passion for the stars: He drowns in the depths, his keen mind dulled in dark brine, far from shore and, battered by waves the winds whip, he thrashes in his despair, this man who once walked the paths of heaven on solid ground under open skies. He used to gaze at the sun and study the constellations of the cold new moon, and he knew how the evening star of the west appears in the east to announce the morning and turns through its steady, stately cycles.10 Recalled to his ancient wonder, Boethius feels at the beginning of a new day, the sun shining bright in the heavens. He explains to Philosophy the origin of his misfortunes and the 8

Revelation 1:8; 21:6; 22:13. The Mystic Lamb of the vault of the chancel in San Vitale, Ravenna, stands out in round blue dotted with gold stars. 10 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, I, m. 2, 1-12, trans. D.R. Slavitt, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2008, I. 9

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accusations against him. Then he breaks into a cry like that of Job: a prayer to God that He may turn to the events of men tossed in the sea of Fortune and calm its waves by the law with which He governs the immense sky. The incipit of the hymn, O stelliferi conditor orbis, celebrates the power of God the Creator and the beauty of the sky by combining classical and biblical inspiration: Starmaker, master of spheres at whose command the heavens spin in the constellations’ dance that you on your steady throne have choreographed, bright stars grow dim as you bring on the moon, crescent or gibbous, reflecting her brother’s dazzling fire, but then she grows pale herself as he draws near in splendor. In the evening, Venus rises bright but loses luster in morning’s sunrise, playing the role that you have assigned her.11 Shortly after, Philosophy explains that the greatest cause of his misfortune is selfignorance. And to do so, she also recurs to the image of the stars: “The darkness of clouds / hides the stars.” If Boethius wants to see the truth, he has to break free of those passions that are clouding him.12 The stars appear again in meters 2 and 3 of Book II: in the former they are mentioned almost incidentally, to indicate an infinite number as in Abraham’s episode in Genesis (as “the stars in the clear / night sky”); but in the latter they are recalled with the lyrical vigor that the theme of the mutability of all earthly things deserves: When Phoebus from his chariot spreads light through the looming sky, his bright flame overwhelms the twinkle of stars.13 The topics are now defined and articulated. The Consolation uses the stars as absolute terms of comparison, objects and natural phenomena that are at the same time ultimate goals. If she wants to indicate the season when the farmer must hurry to the oak trees (summer) Philosophy uses an astronomical periphrasis like Hesiod and Virgil: “In the house of Cancer, the sun beats down / on furrows too hot and dry to receive / the seeds farmers might think to sow.”14 When she outlines the borders of Nero’s empire, she says that “his scepter extended its influence / throughout the world to the westering waves, / to the lands in the east where the sun rises / and the Great Bear looks down with indifference.”15 If she talks about happiness and truth, she states that “stars in the sky / are all the brighter after the dark storm clouds / have been blown away by a steady wind from the south” and that “the morning star is a

11

Ibid., I, m. 5, 1-13. Ibid., I, m. 7, 1-28. 13 Ibid., II, m. 3, 1-4. 14 Ibid., I, m. 6, 1-2. 15 Ibid., II, m. 6, 8-11. 12

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beacon that shines at dawn / to welcome the glory of Phoebus’ shining steeds.”16 When she explains how powerful nature governs all things, and the laws by which it preserves the universe, she resorts to a comparison with the sun: “Phoebus’ car goes down in the west / but rises again in its regular place / in the east to usher in the morning. / Each thing seeks its own return / to what it knows as its preordained / course.”17 Every time the meditation touches upon the causes and order of all that exists, the Consolation goes back to the stars and divine Creation, with the same afflatus as the Bible. It is the case with the grandiose hymn – later taken up by Boccacio and Chaucer – The world rings (Quod mundus stabili fide),18 where love is described as the “foedus perpetuum,” the eternal pact that keeps together the contrasting elements. Love is what acts upon the sun so that it can bring forward the rosy day on his golden chariot “and Phoebe the silver moon, / fulfilling Hesperus’ promise.”19 The same concept is repeated later, in meters 2 and 6 of Book III. In the latter, All mankind (Omne hominum genus), there is an explicit reference to the “one father” who rules over all things and “cares for his sons and daughters,” who gave the sun its rays and the moon its horns, who placed men on earth like the stars in the sky. The image then reaches its peak in the famous meter 9 of Book III, O Lord, you govern the universe (O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas), which invokes the Unmoved Mover: he derives everything from the eternal model and, being himself beautiful, conceives the world as beautiful too, making it in his image and harmoniously linking the elements. The prayer is that He might let Boethius reach His sublime home: O Lord, you govern the universe with your eternal order: you brought time itself into being, and all that marks its changes in the heavens and here on the earth, both moving and also in stillness. Nothing but your love could have prompted you to bring forth the matter and forms that together make up the world. From within yourself, ungrudging, you brought out the pattern of all that is good, inasmuch as it partakes of your own goodness. Its beauty is your beauty; your mind is the source of its grandeur as you shaped it to your liking, imposing upon it your order, which harmonizes the many elements that compose it, the cold with the fiery hot, the dry with the wet, lest any fly off on its own and unbalance the equipoise of creation. In fact, Philosophy urges men to look up to the sky, its spaces, its stability, its fast movements and admire the rational principle that governs it, transcending even the splendor of beauty, as it “passes like that of spring flowers.”20 She will lead the way, as she has fast wings able to rise up and fly through the spheres, up to the heavenly home of the stars, joining her path with that of the Sun or of Saturn, and even higher, where “stars … spangle the night skies,” and even beyond, to the Empyrean. That is the destination, that is the

16

Ibid., III, m. 1, 9-10. Ibid., III, m. 2, 34-35. 18 Ibid., II, m. 8. 19 Ibid., II, m. 8, 7-8. 20 Ibid., III, pg. 8, 9. 17

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“fatherland.”21 From here comes the “rightness” of the universe, the fact that everything happens in the right way. Only ignorance may lead one to think that many phenomena are exceptional: One who has no idea of how Arcturus’ post at the pole of heaven is constant or how Boötes follows behind his wagon and descends so slowly into the sea, although he springs up in the sky with alacrity, will be befuddled by heaven’s motions.22 Philosophy insists: the origin of creation, the evolution of what changes and moves, derive from the immutability of the divine mind, which governs the changing course of fate. It then transmits motion to the sky and the stars, and mixes the elements combining and transforming them; ties, as if in a knot, the actions and fate of men in an inseparable causal connection.23 Here: if you want to investigate “with your mind’s eye / the laws of the mind of the most high God,” “look up at the stars that wheel in the heavens / in peace in their intricate elegant course.”24 The last great meter of Consolation, If you would see (Si vis celsi iura Tonantis),25 contemplates the perfect harmony of the universe, sun, moon, and stars: The sun with his ruddy fire does not delay Phoebe’s colder car of the moon, nor does the dancing Bear follow the other stars to set below the ocean’s distant edge. Instead he remains at his polar post. At balanced times the evening star announces the coming of night, while the morning star declares the return of the light. Their motions are all expressions of love, for there is no strife in those celestial regions above us, but rather concord regulating the conversation of wet with dry and of hot with cold.26 This, finally, is the cunctis communis amor, the common love of all those beings who wish to be governed by a good purpose: “How else could the firmament stay firm / unless the love that gave it a start / did not flow back in grateful return?” With the stars, and through them, Boethius has reached the First Cause. 21

Ibid., IV, m. 1, 1-14 and 25. Ibid., IV, m. 5, 1-6. 23 Ibid., IV, pr. 6, 7-22. 24 Ibid., IV, m. 6, 1-3. 25 Ibid., IV, m. 6. 26 Ibid., IV, m. 6, 6-18. 22

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His importance in the history of theWestern imagination is huge. For one thing, this is because Boethius transmitted to Dante – who lived and died in Ravenna eight hundred years later, and who was to consider the Consolation fundamental for his conversion to philosophy – his passion for the stars and for the search of the First Cause. As Dante knew well, the martyr of Theodoric was then to be buried in Pavia, in the crypt of the church of San Pietro in Cield’Oro, next to St. Augustine.27 In canto X of Paradiso his soul surrounded by light is indicated by Thomas Aquinas, in the Heaven of the Wise, with the words, “the body he was driven from lies, now, / below Golden Heaven Church. He came / to peace from exile, from his martyrdom.” The Basilica of St Peters in Pavia is called “in Ciel d’Oro” (in golden sky) because it used to have a blue fresco vault with myriads of stars in real gold leaf.

27

It was the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, reigning over Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire, who had Boethius imprisoned and finally executed on charges of conspiracy to overthrow him. Dante calls this “martyrdom.”

APPENDIX B

Figure 18. Works of the months and signs of the Zodiac (12th century). The north rose window in the Saint-Denis Cathedral

Figure 19. Creation of the stars, Monreale Cathedral (12th century).

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Figure 20. Interior of Martorana (12th century), Palermo.

Figure 21. Dome of Genesis of San Marco (12th century), Venice.

Appendix B

Figure 22. Wooden ceiling of the Palatine Chapel, Palermo, the Norman Palace.

Figure 23. Upper chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle (1242-48), Paris.

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Figure 24. Lower chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle (1242-48), Paris.

Figure 25. Dome of Parma Baptistery (13th century).

Appendix B

Figure 26. Ceiling of the central nave, Cathedral of Monreale.

Figure 27. Interior of Siena cathedral, (13th to 14th centuries).

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Figure 28. Cathedral of Our Lady (1352-1521), Antwerp.

Figure 29. Giotto, ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel (early 14th century), Padua.

Appendix B

Figure 30. Chapel of the Holy Cross, Karlstein, consecrated in 1365.

Figure 31. Rosslyn Chapel ceiling, Scotland (15th century).

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Figure 32. Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Fontana Maggiore in Perugia (1270).

Figure 33. The Magi followed the star to Bethlehem (6th century), St. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.

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Figure 34. Giotto, Epiphany (early 14th century), Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

Figure 35. One of the four Seraphim in the sails of Hagia Sophia (6th century), Istanbul: the face is replaced by a star.

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Figure 36. Helios in his chariot, and the constellations of the Zodiac, from 'Easy Tables’ of Ptolemy (9th century), Vatican City, Vatican Library.

Figure 37. The Pleiades, Leiden Aratea (9th century), University Library of Leiden.

Appendix B

Figure 38. "Isti mirant stella," the Bayeux Tapestry (1077), Bayeux Tapestry Museum.

Figure 39. Starry mantle of Emperor Henry II (11th century), Bamberg, Diocesan Museum.

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Figure 40. Reliquary casket of Thomas Becket (Limoges, 1180-90), London, Victoria & Albert Museum.

Figure 41. Baptistery of Florence, floor, Zodiac (1209).

Appendix B

Figure 42. Chalice veil, silk embroidered with silver wire and silver gilt (13th-14th sec.), Athens, Benaki Museum.

Figure 43. An angel in flight carries the universe in roll form (14th century), St. Saviour in Chora, Istanbul.

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Figure 44. The man-cosmos, from the Book of the divine works of Hildegard of Bingen (13th century), Lucca, State Library.

Appendix B

Figure 45. The Cosmos with Childhood, Francesco da Barberino, Officiolum (14th century).

Figure 46. World map with the constellations described by Aratus (15th sec.), Vatican City, Vatican Library.

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Figure 47. Italian unknown jeweler, enameled casket (1400-10), Regensburg, Cathedral Treasury

Figure 48. Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Utrecht (1435), New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library.

Appendix B

Figure 49. A page of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven

Figure 50. Lantern of Ely Cathedral (12th century), Cambridgeshire.

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Figure 51. Lantern and vault, Peterborough cathedral (mid-14th century).

Figure 52. Francisco de Colonia and Juan Vallejo, vault of the Cathedral of Burgos (1567).

Appendix B

Figure 53. Bramante, dome of the Temple of S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome (1502-10).

Figure 54. Dome of the Boimchapel-mausoleum, decorated by Johann Scholz and Hans Pfister, L'viv, Ukraine (1609-15).

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Figure 55. Andrej Stackensneider, the ceiling in the Mariinsky Palace church, St. Petersburg (1839-44).

Figure 56. Cavalier d'Arpino, dome of St. Peter's, Rome: internal, with stars closing it at the top and decorating the ribs (1604-12).

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Figure 57. Charles Garnier and Auguste Rube, Golden dome and stars, Rotonde du Soleil (1861-75), Paris, Opéra Garnier

Figure 58. William Burges, ceiling of the ‘Arab Room’, Cardiff Castle, completed in 1871.

Chapter 9

CAELATUM: CREATION AND CHISELING Roughly a century after Martianus Capella, with whom I opened the previous chapter, Bishop Isidore of Seville, later saint and Doctor of the Church, composed his monumental Etymologiae: a work summarizing all knowledge available at the time in etymological form, which had enormous influence throughout the Middle Ages. The Etymologies, in twenty books, deal with the seven liberal arts, medicine, law, books; God’s angels and saints, the Church, nations and kingdoms, languages, words, the human being, portents, animals; the universe, the Earth, buildings and fields, stones and metals, agriculture, war, games, ships, clothes, supplies and rustic household tools. The cosmos presented in the thirteenth book is the traditional late ancient and Christian one. In Book III, which deals with mathematics, and therefore arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, Isidore in the first place distinguishes astronomy from astrology: Astronomy concerns itself with the turning of the heavens, the rising, setting, and motion of the stars, and where the constellations get their names. But astrology is partly natural, and partly superstitious. It is natural as long as it investigates the courses of the sun and the moon, or the specific positions of the stars according to the seasons; but it is a superstitious belief that the astrologers follow when they practice augury by the stars, or when they associate the twelve signs of the zodiac with specific parts of the soul or body, or when they attempt to predict the nativities and characters of people by the motion of the stars.1

Shortly after, Isidore offers us a sample of his etymological technique while dealing with the sky and its name. “The philosophers,” he writes, “have said that the sky (caelum, ‘sky, heaven, the heavens’) is rounded, spinning, and burning; and the sky is called by its name because it has the figures of the constellations impressed into it, just like an engraved (caelatum) vessel.” The Greek word ouranós, though, derives from apò toû horásthai, “id est a videndo,” from the act of seeing, because “the air is clear and very pure for seeing through.”2 But what Isidore is interested in is mainly the etymology of “caelum” from “caelatum”. Why should “sky” come from “engraved,” “chiseled?” For a Doctor of the 1

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, III, xvii, trans. S.A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, O. Berghof, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. 2 Ibid., p. xxxi.

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Church, the answer is obvious: “God distinguished the sky with bright lights, and he filled it with the sun and the gleaming orb of the moon, and he adorned it with brilliant constellations composed of glittering stars.”3 Isidore here shows special sensitivity – which one can only define as aesthetic – for the beauty of the cosmos: for its claritas, for the splendor of the moon, for the brightness and sparkle of the stars. God has “distinguished,” that is, embellished and “adorned” the universe. For Isidore, Creation isn’t just “good,” as Genesis says in the Hebrew original (tob) and in the Vulgate (bonum), but also “beautiful” (kalón), as one sees in the Septuagint’s Greek translation. This is not what Boethius said, echoing Plato’s Timaeus, in meter 9 of Book III of the Consolation, addressing the Creator: “From within yourself, ungrudging, you brought out the pattern of all / that is good, inasmuch as it partakes of your own goodness. / Its beauty is your beauty; your mind is the source of its grandeur / as you shaped it to your liking, imposing upon it your order.” The beauty of Creation – also praised, as we have seen, by Francis of Assisi – is central to the Medieval passion for the stars. It is such beauty that builders and decorators of churches, chapels, shrines and manuscripts want to celebrate with their blue skies embroidered with golden stars. It is this beauty that the great mosaic cycles illustrate when they give visual form to the first chapters of Genesis with the spirit of Job and the Psalms. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork,” says Psalm 19. In the Palatine Chapel in Palermo and the Monreale Cathedral, the Pantokrator raises his hand, against the golden background, to create the cosmos, almost giving motion to the huge sphere of different shades of blue including the sun, the moon and the golden stars. In the Genesis Dome of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, one can admire the motionless point in the center surrounded by circles of angels and stars. In the next band, Creation begins: one can see the Spirit as dove breathing over the primordial waters. The dark sphere of the sky returns twice, then suddenly lights up in the dazzling rays of the sun and the moon. Finally, the Creator shapes the firmament in the following band: and it is the blue sphere of Monreale and Palermo, in which the stars of the day and the night sparkle.4 *** The heavenly vaults of Ravenna, which establish contact between Earth and Heaven and signal the presence of Christ in the universe, have been a notable source of inspiration. In the Middle Ages Europe was filled with frescoed ceilings in blue with gold stars, as if to represent the caelatum – the divine chiseling of creation. From Romanesque to Gothic, until the beginning of the Renaissance and beyond, churches and chapels reproduce the night sky. I can quote and illustrate just a few examples of the hundreds available, all very beautiful and

3 4

Ibid., III, xxxi, p. 100. In San Marco the dome of the Ascension also shows the human figure of God, Christ, in the center, standing out in a blue star-studded circle.

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meaningful, scattered between the West, the center, the East and South of Europe, of these “Domes of Heaven.”5 In Sicily, the vaults of the Martorana (Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio) in Palermo, of the early twelfth century, are a beautiful combination of blue dotted with golden stars and golden Byzantine mosaics matching those of the dome (Christ Pantokrator), of the nave (the Nativity and the Dormition of the Virgin) and the walls. Also in Palermo, the Palatine Chapel inside the Norman Palace, consecrated in 1140, uses a star-carved wooden ceiling, in the Arabian style, to cover the nave. In Monreale, finally, in the Cathedral which was begun in 1174 – fully covered with mosaics on a gold background and with aisles supported by ancient columns topped by Arab arches – the ceiling of the nave is in wooden trusses painted in dark blue embroidered with golden stars. Constantinople and Ravenna, the Islamic and the Romanesque, concur to exalt the stars of the Sicilian vaults under the Normans. In France, shortly after, the Gothic style took hold. In Paris, between 1242 and 1248, the Sainte-Chapelle was built, with the lower chapel reserved for the king and the court, and the upper one for all the faithful. On the Gothic vault of the lower chapel on a blue background the golden lilies of France stand out, like so many dynastic and national stars. In the upper chapel – which rises high and elegant on thin Gothic pillars alternating with big, beautiful multi-colored stained-glass windows – the vault reproduces the Ravenna design of golden stars on a midnight blue background, albeit stylized and enlarged a thousand times. Only by looking at this vault from the bottom can one understand the sublime harmony that it forms with the windows and the rose window, enclosing its vertical momentum but at the same time opening it to infinity in the sky. From the upper Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi to Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Krakow, from the Siena Cathedral to Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, the churches of Europe, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, culminate in magnificent starry vaults. The same goes for chapels, up to the mysterious Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland, in the second half of the fifteenth century.6 In Padua, in the Scrovegni Chapel, in the early fourteenth century Giotto frescoed the barrel vault: the eight-pointed stars dotting a blue sky, two golden middle rounds with the Madonna and Child and blessing Christ, and eight prophets. In Santa Croce in Florence, two chapels, the Barracelli and Rinuccini, were frescoed respectively by Taddeo 5

The Palatine Chapel is the liaison between Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and San Vitale in Ravenna on the one hand, and subsequent buildings across Europe on the other. The church, today the Cathedral of Aachen, once the chapel of the imperial palace built by Charlemagne for the capital of his empire, was built by Einhard, the superintendent of the imperial factories, and the architect Odo of Metz, who got the material from Ravenna and Rome. Arches and vaults are all decorated with mosaics in the Byzantine style (redone in the nineteenth century). The great dome presents a mosaic (which was also recreated in the nineteenth century), with Christ enthroned on a golden background, surrounded by the Evangelists and the twenty-four elders. The golden background is sprinkled with stars. From the top of the octagon hangs the candelabrum donated by Frederick Barbarossa, in the image of the Heavenly Jerusalem. See K. Lehmann, “The Dome of Heaven,” The Art Bulletin, 27, 1 (1945), pp. 1-27. 6 Rosslyn Chapel is a small church about seven miles away from Edinburgh. Famous for its decorations, it has become a place of even greater attraction because of its mysterious associations with the Templars, the Grail and the Masons. Founded by Sir William Sinclair in 1446, its decoration includes completely heterogeneous elements such as shells and lilies, symbols respectively of St. James and the Virgin Mary (but the latter could indicate a connection with France, and are also emblems of royalty); thirteen angels with musical instruments, representing the host of heaven, and a “Dance of Death;” reliefs on the columns with Old Testament episodes, the Prodigal Son and the Crucifixion and scenes from the history of the Roslin family. The chapel also houses the so-called decorated “Apprentice Pillar,” which takes its name from a legend according to which the master mason in charge of it did not feel like doing it without first seeing the original design in Rome. On the way back, however, he found that his apprentice had completed the decoration and, seized with a furious fit of jealousy, struck him in the head, killing him (the head in question is painted in a corner, facing the organ chamber, complete with a wound on the left temple). At the basis of the column, eight dragons spew from their mouths the vine wrapped in coils around the pillar: it is possible that this represents the Christian Tree of Life, but also that it was inspired by the ancient Norse mythology, in which the Tree of Knowledge, Yggdrasil, supports the heavens while its roots are eroded by the dragon of time. An inscription near the column states in Latin, in Lombard characters, from Esdras, “Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but truth conquers all.” Finally, there is the vault: in carved stone inside squares, it bears various types of flowers, roses, a dove bringing an olive branch, and many five-pointed stars. The superposition of all these symbols does not allow for an unambiguous interpretation, and the meaning of the iconography remains a mystery.

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Gaddi and Giovanni da Milano, between the second decade and the middle of the fourteenth century, with the same blue background with gold stars.7 Moreover, that the interiors of churches and chapels had to be surmounted by the starry sky is testified by frescoes such as Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and the Washing of the Feet by Pietro Lorenzetti in the Lower Basilica of Assisi, or by paintings such as the Presentation at the Temple by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Uffizi, where the ceilings of the buildings are regularly covered by a thick gold star pattern on a blue background. *** Artists want to reproduce the divine chiseling of heaven, praising Creation with their own creations, like the morning stars and the angels of the Book of Job. They show amazing skill in working towards this purpose. The most grandiose of the star vaults that I just mentioned are perhaps those of the Duomo of Siena and Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Krakow: articulated and majestic, they seem truly endless, all-encompassing night skies open to God. The stars of the Sienese vault are of particular importance, because they are matched on the floor by the famous inlays of Hermes Trismegistus, the Sienese She-Wolf, the Imperial Eagle, the Hill of Wisdom, the Wheel of Fortune, the Sibyls, and various episodes of the Old and New Testaments. Similarly, the inlaid floor of the Baptistery in Florence, Dante’s “beautiful St. John’s,” is of great interest. Completed in 1209, it depicts the sun with the twelve signs of the zodiac. The impressive mosaic of the dome, executed around 1301 by Venetian artisans on the basis of a drawing by Coppo di Marcovaldo, mirrors the floor by showing the angelic hierarchies around the “point” and the octagon of God, the Last Judgment dominated by Christ, and stories of Genesis, Joseph, Mary and Christ, and John the Baptist. The physical cosmos is on the ground; the metaphysical, and the history of salvation, at the top, in the dome. Often clerics dictated complex and mysterious iconographies, like the one designed by Pantaleone on the floor of the Cathedral of Otranto, where the so-called “Tree of Life” shows the signs of the zodiac along with Adam and Eve, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, Arthur, Alexander, Byzantium, hell and paradise. The zodiac, which already accompanied the goddess Nut on the coffin lid of Pharaoh Soter in the first decades of the second century (British Museum), is a constant motif, from Roman to Byzantine times,8 up until the Door of the Sacra di San Michele in Piedmont, the Fontana Maggiore in Perugia by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, the Fitzjames Gateway of Merton College, Oxford, the Sala dei Venti in the Palazzo Te in Mantua,9 the Valentino Castle in Turin, and the Monastery of Dekoulou in Greece;10 and even beyond, in non-religious contexts, in the atrium of the Main Post Office in Turin and at Milan Central Station. 7

The same pattern, for example, appears in the vault of St. James Chapel frescoed by Altichiero da Zevio in the seventies of the fourteenth century in the Basilica del Santo in Padua. 8 There are notable examples in the synagogues of Sepphoris and Hammat Tiberias, sixth century. 9 This was painted by Giulio Romano and assistants, from 1527 to 1528. The iconological program is based on astrological texts by Manilius and Firmicus Maternus. Each scene in the tondi illustrates a prognostic tied to the constellations rising in the sky at the same time as the zodiac signs (in golden stucco on a black background), all arranged around a vault decorated with scenes about the Olympian gods. In the Palazzo Te Giulio Romano (perhaps with Francesco Primaticcio) also frescoed the vault of the Sun Room with the Sun Chariot. 10 In the Mani peninsula, Peloponnese: here the zodiac surrounds the figure of Christ; the frescoes seem to date back to the eighteenth century.

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In Saint-Denis, near Paris, between 1127 and 1140 Abbot Suger undertook the construction of the church that was to accommodate the tombs of the kings of France, effectively inventing the Gothic style. In the large rose window he asked his artists to depict the zodiac animals and the Labors of the Months, according to an astounding luminous scheme that spreads quickly to Chartres, to the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame of Paris, and further to Laon, Sens, Rheims, Strasbourg, up to Lausanne and Lodi. In Rome, the beautiful frescoes recently discovered in the Gothic Hall of the monastery of Santi Quattro Coronati present the Months, the Seasons, the Vices, the Arts, the Winds, a seascape, the Zodiac, the constellations in the southern bay; Solomon and the Virtues, Mithras killing the bull, two allegorical figures, the sun and the moon. But the most original works, I think, are the dome of the Baptistery of Parma and the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Karlstein in Bohemia. The first, of the thirteenth century, has a structure in which the thin ribs that innervate it all arise from a single point in the form of a foliated cross. It is the point that Dante sees in Canto XXVIII of Paradiso, the metaphysical center of the universe: God. This point is surrounded first by a circle of fifteen small white stars on a red background with eight small white rays; then there is a second, larger circle on a green background made of sixteen golden stars in lozenges with a lime-white background bordered with red, each doubled by another black star prospectively placed behind it. Moving downwards, there are four other bands with the apostles and the evangelists, enthroned Christ and the Virgin, John the Baptist’s life, stories of Abraham (but also the four elements and the four seasons). Still further down, towards the basis of the dome, there are two orders of loggias. Beneath them, the arches divide the famous cycles of sculptures of the months, the seasons and the signs of the zodiac attributed to Benedetto Antelami and his circle. This is clearly a complex iconographic program, centered on Baptism as an instrument of salvation. Antelami’s reliefs recall passages of Augustine, Gregory and Hildegard of Bingen. I cannot go deep into the interpretative complexity of the Baptistery, but it seems evident that it also contains a cosmological dimension. It radiates, so to speak, from the foliated cross of the top to the two stellar bands, and then reverberates in the representations of the four rivers of Paradise, the four elements and the four seasons of the last pictorial register, and then in the sculptures of the months, the seasons, and the signs of the zodiac. The artists have gone through the whole of space and time, from the first Beginning to the apocalyptic End. In this context, the stars are essential: without them, the passage from God to the history of salvation and the partition of time would be impossible. The Chapel of the Holy Cross – consecrated in the castle of Karlstein, not far from Prague, in 1365 – was built to house the relics and the “regalia” of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. The vaults, completely gilded, are made of a myriad star-shaped mirrors. Precious marble and gems adorn the lower end of the walls, while 130 holy icons painted by Master Theodoric fill the higher ones. It would almost appear like an enchanted cave conceived by the imagination of a post-Romantic artist if it were not for the realistic objects – shields, books heavily embossed in wood – that Theodoric gave his saints to hold, and which are fixed to the panels as in a modern collage. However, as we shall see again before long, in the Middle Ages relics require all sorts of precious jewels to stand for the earthly excellence they embody, and stars to testify their inherent heavenly value. Then, if one considers that the Chapel of the Holy Cross was intended to accommodate the “regalia” of the Emperor, a divine legate on Earth, its fantastic decoration will come as no surprise.

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The star decoration is so widespread as to remain compulsory even after the disappearance of the pervasive blue background. In Northern and Central Europe there are Gothic churches in which the vault is white, but still featuring golden stars. Take the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, the Cathedral of SaintRombaut in Malines, Belgium, and the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp: these are all buildings whose construction lasted from the thirteenth or the fourteenth until the sixteenth century. Elsewhere, however, the traditional dark blue expanse remains. Not only in certain scenes, like the apse of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, where the Coronation of the Virgin by Jacopo Torriti (late thirteenth century) is inserted within a circle of stars surrounding one where the sun and moon accompany even more stars; or in the beautiful “Madonna auf der Mondsichel” today at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (fifteenth century); or, finally, in Voronet, Romania, the glorious fresco in which Stephen III the Great offers the monastery to Christ (fifteenth century). But also, as usual, in the vaults and domes. Before Michelangelo painted on it the stories of Genesis, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome presented a design by Piermatteo Lauro de’ Manfredi da Amelia: a huge expanse, 6,000 square yards, of brilliant blue dotted with golden stars. The dome of the Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, built by Bramante in 1502 in Rome, is a blue sky filled with golden stars. The largest and most famous dome of Christianity, the one planned by Michelangelo for St. Peter’s, was decorated inside by Cavalier d’Arpino in the years between 1604 and 1612: sixteen ribs bear long lines of golden stars on a light blue background, leading to the base of the lantern where the light filtering from above illuminates a blue circle strewn with large golden stars. Celebrating the triumph of God, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Pope (Sixtus V in this case), the dome of St Peter’s appropriately culminates in a starry sky that opens toward the light of the Eternal. But the brilliant iconography invented in Constantinople and Ravenna shortly after the consecration of Christianity is still alive: in the seventeenth century, when the Boim family in L’viv, Ukraine, built a mausoleum whose dome has a stellar decoration along the lines of that in St. Peter’s; and centuries later in St. Petersburg, where the church in the Mariinsky Palace, the last great imperial neo-classical building to appear in the city, in the nineteenth century, has an extensive starry ceiling, and where the Church of the Resurrection on Spilled Blood, only completed in 1907, full of neo-byzantine mosaics, echoes the motif of the stars on a gold background. In Notre-Dame, Indiana, the vault of the neo-Gothic Basilica of the Sacred Heart, consecrated in 1888, and fully decorated by Luigi Gregori, is a feast of angels on blue and golden stars. In Jerusalem, the Church of All Nations in Gethsemane, built by Antonio Barluzzi between 1919 and 1924 on the site where tradition places the agony of Jesus of Nazareth in the Garden of Olives, has thirteen vaults of golden stars on a blue background. *** From the exclusively religious sphere, indeed, the topos of the star vault later moves into an eminently secular setting. There are intriguing examples of it in the seventeenth century: the simple bare ceiling of the so-called “Star Chamber” in Ordsall Hall, near Manchester, and

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in the more developed one of the “Star Chamber” in Bolsover Hall, Derbyshire. Later, it became one of the elements of exoticism dominating imperial Europe, as in the “Arab Room” in the Victorian apartments in Cardiff Castle. In the nineteenth century the iconography extends to public spaces, sometimes with astonishing results, as in Leadenhall Market in London or in the ceiling of the two “Rotondes” of the Opera in Paris: that of the Sun and that of the Moon. In the former, Charles Garnier and Auguste Rube devised an immense sun casting its rays through the black universe where numerous silver stars shine. The cosmos and the stars thus celebrate the glory of the Second Empire, but also crown a precise iconography of Music, whose members include, in the same Opéra, the Glorification of Harmony, The Triumph of Apollo, The Cave of the Pythia, and the ceiling of the Rotonde du Glacier.11 Between the nineteenth century and twentieth-century experimentalism, in 1888, in Barcelona, Antoni Gaudi built the Palau Güell, the dome of which, in bare stone, is perforated in several places in order to give the viewer the impression of being under the vault of heaven, full of light. Between the twentieth century and the millennium, the stars finally came to the Louvre: in 1953 Georges Braque painted on the ceiling of the Salle Henri II his famous doves, with three stars, on a blue background, while in 2007 Cy Twombly decorated the Salle des Bronzes with large celestial bodies floating at the sides of a blue sky, accompanying the names of the greatest Greek sculptors. *** But perhaps the most spectacular way to imitate the divine chiseling of Creation emerges with the replacement of the blue star vault by means of architectural elements that are primarily structural and functional rather than decorative. As we shall see, this was achieved with astounding results by the Arabs. But the star architecture has great success also in Europe. In the English Ely Cathedral, built in the Norman style in the twelfth century, the lantern that closes the transept and the nave is a beautiful octagon holding eight structural sails so as to form a big star.12 The lantern itself is then closed, at the top, by an eight-pointed star. There are spectacular star vaults in late Gothic style in the retrochoir and the Lady Chapel of Wells Cathedral, which also houses one of the oldest astronomical clocks in the world. In the Lady Chapel the structure is that of a delicate flowery eight-pointed star, but in the retrochoir six elegant clustered pillars open up into apparently ribs which also form two large concentric eight-pointed stars. In Peterborough, in the mid-fourteenth century, the lantern is square, but its vault is surmounted by an octagon with a central eight-pointed star. The octagon is in turn inserted into two concentric rhombi, while the lines that depart from the rib vaults and the octagon itself form a large ten-pointed star. The entire cross vault is sprinkled with stars. In Spain this design also soon acquired decisive importance: for example in Burgos Cathedral, where Simón de Colonia built the Chapel of the Condestable in the fifteenth century, enclosing it within an eight-pointed star vault, and where in 1567 Francisco de 11

From 1964 onwards, Marc Chagall will complete the program by painting frescoes on the ceiling of the auditorium with a colorful Olympus, filled with famous composers and opera characters. 12 The octagon is a structurally essential element in a square building for it to “hold” without opening up and collapsing.

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Colonia and Juan Vallejo complete the same cathedral with an octagonal lantern enclosing two concentric eight-pointed stars. A similar design is very frequent in the Iberian peninsula: it may have been influenced by Arab star vaults such as those of the Alhambra, and may in turn have inspired the star vaults in stone, like the sixteenth-century one of Christ Church in Oxford, that are found in England. *** The stars thus conquer churches, chapels and palaces. Even the rulers of states use them to emphasize the universal and originally divine natures of their kingdom. The German Holy Roman Emperor Henry II, for example, had a great cloak, now kept in the Diocesan Museum of Bamberg, embroidered with gold constellations, complete with Latin captions to explain their nature and function. The coat was remade at the beginning of the sixteenth century according to the semicircular shape of the cope, and the original purple or violet fabric was replaced by the present, blue, one by transferring to it the gold thread embroidery. Commissioned by Isamhel of Bari, Duke of Apulia, and perhaps made in southern Italy, it was probably given to Henry II for his coronation as emperor in 1013. The embroideries represent the universe, as the Latin inscription says: with the Savior, characters of the Christian world, the constellations, and Hercules to symbolize imperial power (each figure is accompanied by an inscription). Christ is the dominating figure, with the four evangelists on the sides. The symbols of the stars and the zodiac surrounding him indicate time, while thirty-six medallions correspond to the decans and thus represent the cosmos in its spatial dimension. At the center of the coat, at the top, there stands the Majesty of the Lord, flanked by the Alpha and Omega symbols and those of the evangelists. Below, between a cherub and a seraph, is embroidered a bust of the Virgin. Above Christ there are Sun and Moon, depicted as women bearing torches. Under the cherub, the Virgin Mary, referred to as Stella Maris, has John the Baptist on her right. In the top row, inside an octagon, is the Lamb of God. Next to Mary and the Baptist stretches half the sky with the zodiac signs: from Pegasus to Perseus, from Capricorn to the Whale, from Hercules slaying the dragon to the two Bears. Fragments of rhymed prose (perhaps of verses) and philosophical expressions such as usya (from the Greek ousía, “substance”) recall Bernardus Silvestris and Erec’s coronation robe, inspired by Macrobius’s commentary on the Dream of Scipio, in the romance by Chrétien de Troyes.13 This symbolism comes from classical culture, from the Greek scholia to Aratus’s Phaenomena that were already known in the Merovingian era through a Latin translation of the eighth century (which was followed by a new version in the late eleventh century). The Church too, for that matter, and at the highest level, makes use of the same type of imagery. The Carolingian ivory plaques of the Cathedra Petri in Rome depict the constellations of the zodiac. The Cathedra is a venerable wooden chair donated to the Pope by Charles the Bald in 875, but long considered authentic: considered, that is, as St. Peter’s Episcopal chair, and as such used by his successors, the popes. In 1666, topping it with a tiara and accompanying it with the Doctors of the Church Ambrose, Athanasius, John Chrysostom and Augustine,

P. Dronke in his edition of Bernardus’s Cosmographia, Leiden, Brill, 1978, pp. 26-27; Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, 6736-6790, éd. and trans. M. Rousse, Paris, Flammarion, 1994, pp. 396-399. 13

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Bernini enclosed it in a gilt bronze reliquary in the shape of a throne, and suspended it in the clouds in the apse of St. Peter’s under the Gloria that stands on the wall. The mantle of Henry II therefore had its prototypes in the ecclesiastical and the ancient worlds, as both the successors of Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors from Augustus to Justinian had used such symbolism. The Jewish ritual constituted a precedent, too, as the High Priest of the Old Testament showed his power and majesty through a cloak bearing representations of the universe. All this is sealed by the traditions of the Carolingian Empire, where the starry mantle was directly based on the Byzantine model. A similar cloak, belonging to Otto III, was given to the monastery of Saint Alexis in Rome. A fascinating glimpse of political ideology, the “Sternenmantel” of Henry II brings the stars, through literature, into the history that from antiquity continues in the eastern and the western Middle Ages. Soon, the stars were to make their entry in actual history, recorded in the famous Bayeux tapestry. The comet that was later called Halley’s, in fact, appeared a few months before the landing of the Normans in England. Terrified, the islanders look upwards (“Isti mirant stellam,” reads the caption to the tapestry). On October 14, 1066 William the Conqueror defeated them at Hastings thus seizing their kingdom. *** In the Middle Ages, if you want to make something valuable you adorn it with stars. A Byzantine chalice veil, of silk embroidered with silver and silver gilt thread, shows Christ at the center, flanked by two seraphim. Stars are scattered everywhere. The veil was used for liturgical celebration, and therefore had significant importance. The chests designed to contain the relics were just as crucial. Therefore, they were commissioned to experienced artists with a mandate to enrich them through jewelry, precious metals, and stars. Thus, the reliquary of St. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury killed by order of King Henry II, was made in gold, precious stones and blue enamel towards the end of the twelfth century in Limoges: golden stars multiply on its sides. The Sienese goldsmith Ugolino di Vieri created, between 1337 and 1338, an elaborate shrine to preserve the liturgical linens that had been miraculously bathed in blood that came from a consecrated host, during the Mass celebrated by an incredulous Bohemian priest in Bolsena in 1263. The reliquary of the Holy Corporal, under the starry vault of the transept of the Cathedral of Orvieto, shows thirtytwo scenes from the life of Christ and the Miracle of Bolsena. In many of these the starstudded somber blue skystands out. In the same way, it dominates in the Arnolfian ciborium of the Basilica of St John Lateran, Rome’s cathedral. Finally, an unknown Italian goldsmith is the maker of a casket dating back to the early fifteenth century, now in the treasury of the Cathedral of Regensburg. Once again, the decoration is very complex and precious, and the golden stars are even thicker than in the two above-mentioned cases. In the Middle Ages nothing is more precious than a book: therefore, especially if it is destined for aristocrats, it is adorned with all sorts of decorations. The most famous ones are the Tres riches heures du Duc de Berry, illuminated between 1412 and 1416 by the Limbourg brothers, and now in the Museum of Chantilly, in which each page dedicated to the months contains the drawing of a beautiful landscape and a bezel with its zodiac sign, the sun and golden stars on a blue background; and Grimani Breviary of the Marciana Library in Venice, produced in Flanders at the beginning of the sixteenth century: here, in the section devoted to the calendar, the contemporary life scenes illustrating each month are accompanied on the top

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by the relevant zodiac sign against a blue background. But also the Book of Hours of Catherine de Clèves, written in Utrecht around 1440 and now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, contains exquisite illuminations: in an unusual iconography you can see God the Father, in the upper left, sending the Holy Ghost as a dove and the Son bearing a cross on his shoulders, descending towards the Earth through a blue sky dotted with stars. Of course there is no shortage of manuscripts more specifically dedicated to astronomy and astrology or illustrating the cosmos as it was seen at the time. From the age of Charlemagne, for example, we have the famous Leiden Aratea, in which the text of the Phaenomena translated into Latin is illustrated by the personifications representing various constellations; or the manuscript Vaticanus Graecus 1291, which contains Ptolemy’s Handy Tables. The Losbuch in deutschen Reimpaaren of the thirteenth century, and now at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, includes among others a beautiful illustration of the influence of the planets. The thirteenth-century treatise by Gossuin (or Gautier) de Metz, L’Image du monde, is a poem on Creation, the universe, the Earth, and astrology that had great success throughout Europe: the copies that we have, of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, are all richly illustrated. Francesco da Barberino, one of the most interesting intellectuals in Italy at the turn of the fourteenth century, had his Documents of Love and his little Book of Hours, the Officiolum, illuminated with remarkable illustrations: Eternity transcending time and the cosmos, for example, or the Cosmos with Infancy. Still in the fifteenth century, the manuscript Barberinianus latinus 76 of the Vatican Library shows us a beautiful image of the constellations described by Aratus. At the end of that century the so-called Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel, at this point no longer a manuscript but a printed book, contains as many as 1,809 illustrations of a world history from the Creation onward. Published in 1493, first in Latin as Liber chronicarum and soon after in German as Weltchronik, it shows among other things a summary image of the cosmos through the lens of the millenary late antique and Christian traditions a few decades before the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. In a large, allencompassing sphere God, seated on a throne and surrounded by the saints and the blessed, presides over the universe; the latter is contained in a smaller sphere, with the Earth at the center and surrounded by the spheres of the Moon, the planets and the Sun, the firmament with the constellations of the zodiac, the Crystalline Heaven and the Primum Mobile. On the sides, the four winds complete the icon. Finally, I have to mention the Voynich Manuscript, today – after almost novelistic adventures – at the Beinecke Library at Yale. Dated between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, it contains handwritten text and illustrations of plants, astrological charts and naked women. It is evident that the work is broadly related to the nature of the universe, but the problem is that the text, in alphabetic writing and penned in at least two different “languages,” has still not been deciphered. Attributed in a letter to Roger Bacon, suddenly appearing at the court of emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia (devoted to occultism and astrology), and later known to the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, the Voynich Manuscript, just like Rosslyn Chapel, is one of the greatest mysteries of the Middle Ages. *** Manuscripts take us back to the written word. The divine work of creation is to be not only imitated, but first of all understood. Few have done so as acutely as John Scotus

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Eriugena in the ninth century. Inspired by Martianus Capella (whose Marriage he commented upon) and Dionysius the Areopagite (whose Celestial Hierarchy he translated and commented upon), John composed a complex, formidable Periphyseon: a treatise of metaphysics and theology, but also the tale of Creation as it appears in Genesis with references to real physics. For John Scotus, the first verse of the Book – “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” – announces God’s synthetic and instantaneous creation, placing the primordial causes of all intelligible and sensible beings in the Word as the Beginning. The second verse, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” describes the fact that those primordial causes, eternally subsisting in the divine Beginning before proceeding to their genera and species over time, are hidden and unknowable. Then, with the words “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” the text indicates the incubator-like and fertilizing action of the Spirit, which multiplies and distributes the causes in their effects. Creation then begins with the “Let there be light” of the third verse. On the second day God created a firmament in the midst of the waters, he called it “heaven” and separated the waters from the waters. For John, “heaven” means pictura siderum, pictorial table of stars – as if, in line with Pliny the Elder, it were caelati instar, “an example of chiseling” (again this Isidorian definition), and a “bird’s eye view” of all elements of the Greek etymology ouranos (oros ano).14 It is at this point that John passes to hypotheses more closely related to physics. Some commentators, he says, assume that there are extremely rarefied waters above the firmament, that is, above the choir of the stars. Others argue from the stars’ pallor that there are diluted waters, almost reduced to vapor and incorporeal, above the sky. Both hypotheses, he claims, must be rejected. The former, by virtue of the slowness and hierarchy of the elements. The latter, because the cold that they attribute to the stars (hence their pallor) is not necessarily due to a lack of water (Genesis speaks of waters), but can coexist with the “fiery power.” This is heat where it burns and cold where it does not, because fire burns only where there is matter which it can burn and consume: the sun’s rays do not burn in the ether, but they burn as they enter the region of air. “The ethereal and pure and spiritual heavenly bodies which are established in [the upper regions] are always shining, but are without heat,” and therefore cold and pale.15 These are the stars. The same is also true of Saturn, writes John, because it is close to the heaven of fixed stars. But talking about Saturn leads the author to examine the sun and the planets; and during this discussion something quite important emerges. In fact, John says mistakenly quoting Plato’s Timaeus, but probably relying on what Calcidius says of Heraclides of Pontus – that all, with the exception of Saturn, revolve around the sun.16 However, this recovery and anticipation of the heliocentric model is incidental. What matters to John is to continue the exposition of the first chapter of Genesis, in his hexaemeron. Reaching the fourth day, the creation of sources of light – the sun, moon and 14

Pliny, Naturalis Historia, II, 4, 8; Periphyseon, III, 3226-3232 (697 A 4-10): CCCM 163, 1999. The translation of the original, Genesis 1:2c could also be: “the spirit of God nested the waters.” 15 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon, 697 A 11-697 C 9, trans. in Iohannis Scotti Erivgenae Periphyseon (De diuisione Naturae) Liber Tertius, ed. I. P. Sheldon-Williams with the collaboration of L. Bieler, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, vol. XI, Dublin, The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1981. 16 Periphyseon, III, 3257-3277 (697 C 10-698 A 11). Calcidius, in his commentary on theTimaeus (109), testified that according to Heraclides of Pontus Venus orbits the sun. In The Marriage of Mercury and Philology,VIII, 854857, Martianus Capella extends heliocentrism to Mercury.

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stars – he immediately clarifies that this is the same firmament of the second day and that, created among the waters, it indicates the four elements, as Virgil sings: “And then the omnipotent father god descends / in showers from the sky and enters into / the joyful bridal body of the earth.”17 “Father,” says John, indicates the elemental quality of fire, which corresponds to heat; “showers” means water, i.e., cold; “body” stands for humidity, typical of air; “bridal” means dryness, typical of the earth. When they (fire / hot; water / cold, air / humid, earth / dry) combine, they become the generating and animating causes of all bodies that are born on land or in water. Therefore, when Scripture says, “Let there be luminaries in the firmament of heaven,” “we ought to understand in such a way as though it were openly said, Let there be stellar bodies, clear and bright, in the four elements that are diffused everywhere, (and let them be) composed from their qualities.” However, among luminous bodies, one can consider stars in two different ways, continues John, now referring to Basil of Caesarea: on the one hand, one can seek in them the bodies that support them and occupy the places assigned to them; on the other, one can focus on the brightness (claritas) that they emit through the regions of the world. “For the white object is one thing, the whiteness another, nor are the bright and brightness the same; the one is the subject, the other accident.”18 The presentation goes on at length with the examination of the distances between the celestial bodies and their respective orbits. The different calculations that have been developed for that purpose lead John to summarize the Pythagorean theory of the music of the spheres, which also seems to appear in the Book of Job when God asks: “who can make the harmony of heaven to sleep?.”19 Pythagoras, he writes, must have taken this hypothesis to show that the proportions that make up the musical intervals also apply to distances between celestial bodies – for example, the distance between Earth and the Sun corresponds to a diapason, while that between the sun and the constellations of the zodiac to two. Thus one can make calculations, based on the harmonic scale, that reconstruct the dimensions of the universe. The entire celestial sphere will then have a diameter of 1.638 million stades. It is true that the Bible does not mention the cosmic scale and intervals. However, not only does divine authority fail to forbid the search for the causes of the visible and invisible nature, but it also gives encouragement to do so. In fact, as Paul says, “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”20 John Scotus Eriugena is no Galileo Galilei, but has the impulse of those who want to reconcile religion and science. His vision of the cosmos is theological and physical at the same time. He is able to provide a coherent philosophical explanation for everything. To support his theories, he can quote the Bible, Pliny, Virgil, Basil of Caesarea and “Plato.” But what he is fascinated by are waters, vapor, the pallor of the stars, the sidereal cold: the work of chiseling. His acutely logical mind is able to read the stars through the lens of poetry. “Theologia veluti quaedam poetria,” as he says: theology as poetry – and as a poetess.21

17

Virgil, Georgics II, 325-326, p. 73. Ibid., II, 325-326: “tum pater omnipotens fecundi imbribus Aether / coniugis in gremium laetae descendit”; Periphyseon, III, 3838-3865 (711 D 4-712 C 7); 3973-3985 (715 A 9-715 B 9). 19 Job 38:37, Douai-Rheims Bible, following the Vulgate’s “et concentum caeli quis dormire faciet?”: Periphyseon III, 722 A 9. 20 Romans 1:20; Periphyseon, III, 723B7. 21 In the Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, II, 141-151 (146 B-C), éd. J. Barbet, CCCM 31, 1971. P. Dronke noted the importance of this passage: see The Medieval Poet and His World, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984, pp. 39-53. Dronke is also editing the Latin text of the Periphyseon with an important commentary: Giovanni Scoto, Sulle nature dell’universo (Periphyseon), trans. M. Pereira, Milan, Fondazione Valla-Mondadori, 2012-2016; the last, fifth volume will appear in 2017. 18

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*** The philosophers who operated at Chartres in the twelfth century lived in the same places where the artists built heavenly vaults. They tried to understand creation and its origins. In his De philosophia mundi, William of Conches tried to trace the creation of the stars back to elementary physics, arguing that On the first day on which the four elements, as they are called today, were created from that one great body, the earth was covered everywhere by waters, and [the upper part of that elemental] water was so high that it reached well into [the lower] part of air. But air and fire were denser than they are now, this density was the result of the presence, within them, of particles of earth and water. From these particles, and from some particle of fire and air, God created in the ether certain bodies round, brilliant, and mobile, which are called stars.22

William knows very well that he is applying to the biblical account a criterion alien to it. Like modern scientists who want to reconcile religion and astrophysics, he is interested in the divine “Fiat” of the Beginning. In the later stages, physics is what determines the formation of the cosmos, and so Genesis should be interpreted according to precise principles. There are three ways to talk about the “higher things,” he says in Book II of the De philosophia: the “fabulous,” the astrological and the astronomical. The first, which we would call mythical, is employed by Nimrod, Aratus and Hyginus, when they say that the bull was moved to heaven and changed into a celestial sign: it is an absolutely necessary method – William insists – because by means of it we know about the constellations, where they are in the sky, of how many stars they are made up, and how they are arranged. The “astrological” way, instead, which was adopted by Hipparchus and Martianus Capella, is to indicate what is visible in the upper zones of the universe. Finally, the “astronomical” method, used by Ptolemy and Firmicus, means dealing with what exists up there, be it “visible or invisible.”23 William’s is a committed and very serious philosophical-scientific attempt to interpret the universe, which then unfolds in his book through the treatment of fixed stars, circles, parallels, constellations, the motions of the heavens, and finally the planets. In the splendid prosimetrum of his Cosmographia, another philosopher of Chartres, Bernardus Silvestris, makes a similar attempt, but overlaying an original mythopoetic reinterpretation, based on Platonic and Neo-Platonist themes, on physics and the Bible. In the first part, the “Megacosmus” – Nature complains to Nous, the Divine Providence-Wisdom-Reason, about the confused state of primeval matter (Silva, the Greek Hyle), and asks that the universe be made “more beautiful.” Nous gets to it right away: she separates the four elements; places the angels into nine hierarchies in the sky: fixes the stars in the firmament; she arranges the signs of the Zodiac; she gives motion to the seven planets;24 and organizes the four “cardinal” winds in opposition to each other. Then, the creation of living beings and the description of rivers, mountains, trees, smells, spices, and birds begin. 22

William of Conches, A Dialogue on Natural Philosophy (Dragmaticon Philosophiae), III, 3, trans. I. Ronca and M. Curr, Notre Dame IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, p. 42. The Latin original edition is CCCM 152, 1975. Guglielmo di Conches, Philosophia I, xii, 39-4, ed. M. Albertazzi, Lavis, La Finestra, 2010, pp. 64-65. 23 Philosophia, II, iii, 9-10, pp. 64-65. The definition of the astronomical method derives from Bede, Perì didacheon, sive elementorum philosophiae libri IV, PL 90, 1141 A. 24 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, “Summary,” pp. 2-5.

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In the second part – the “Microcosmus”– Nous asks Nature to go looking for Urania, queen of the stars, and Physis, an expert of earthly life. Nature departs and travels through the celestial spheres, and finally finds Urania in the highest. Nature and Urania, together, look for Physis: they find her in the bosom of the Earth, flanked by her daughters Theory and Practice. Nous also suddenly appears. Finally, Physis gives shape to man using what remains of the four elements and completing the work literally from head to toe. The allegorical setting does not keep Bernardus from filling his subject with unusual mythopoietic strength. But what really inspires him is the beauty, order, and genesis of the universe and of man. Bernardus rewrites the Creation in Neo-Platonist terms and fills his book with genies and “usiarchs:” but he also uses this opportunity to describe the structure and mechanisms of the universe. Before Endelechia – the life, light, and soul of creation – his mind stops ecstatically, imagining it as a sphere of shining substance such as that of a running water fountain. Before the stars, which are part of this “more beautiful” creation, Bernardus remains in rapt contemplation, as Urania does when Nature finally finds her.25 We have thus come back to Martianus Cappella’s The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, because Urania’s attitude is taken directly from that of Geometry as she is presented in Martianus’s work. And this same book is also a reference for the last writer of Chartres: Alain of Lille. In Alain’s De Planctu Naturae, Nature complains about human vices. But what interests me here is the beginning of the work, when Nature appears for the first time as a beautiful young lady, with a wonderful coat adorned with birds, fish, land animals and flowers. Alain here begins to chisel. On her head, Nature has a golden diadem shimmering with gems:“this diadem, turning perpetually in a wondrous circle, traveled from its rise in the east to its setting in the west, and was then ceaselessly brought back to its rising point by a reciprocal path.” Gems – diamonds, agates, rubies, sapphires, pearls– are often gathered in groups; sometimes they form circles, suggesting animal shapes. They are the stars, and the diadem represents the celestial vault, the cosmos: “firmamenti representabat effigiem”, “it was in itself a representation of the firmament.”26 The appearance of Nature is once more modeled after Martianus’s Astronomy. Embedded in her crown, the stars sparkle as brightly as the golden stars on the blue background of mosaics and frescoes, like the Karlstein mirrors, like the jewels of reliquaries. Alain truly “chisels” his book. When Nature speaks of Creation, she says that God worked “like an elegant cosmic architect, like a goldsmith creating a work of gold, like the highly gifted artist of an astonishing piece of art, like the skilled producer of an admirable work.”27 The human artist is the model of the Supreme Artist. In Anticlaudianus, Alain tells the story of Fronesis (or Prudentia: Wisdom) travelling to see God, accompanied by Reason. She climbs through the planetary spheres and “enters a region of untroubled light, a gleaming fountain, where the stars are radiant, where the lights of the firmament compete in brilliance, and maintain an endless day, and the constellations adorn the face of the heavens.”28 Those that fame has turned into gods (Hercules, Perseus, Orion) shine like stars along with those whose names were created by the Muse of poets “playfully creating imaginary truth.”29 Wisdom’s eyes – like those of the philosophers, poets Cosmographia, in “Microcosmus”, III, 12, p. 126. Alain of Lille, The Plaint of Nature, I, 2, 6 and 18 27 Ibid, I, 8, 28. 28 Alain of Lille, Anticlaudianus, V, 1-4 29 Ibid., V, 7-12 and 26-28. 25 26

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and artists of the period – revel in the beauty of the sky that “her sight cannot fathom,” amazed “by the miracle of so much light.”30 So, once again, here is the primeval wonder that prompted man to philosophy and science but also to myth and poetry – to “playfully creating imaginary truth.” The stars are essential in the Middle Ages because, being the last and highest of the spheres in the physical universe, after which opens the Empyrean, they are the key to access God. Astronomy, therefore, is the supreme “art,” after which only faith can come. In fact, at the beginning of Book IV of Anticlaudianus, Alain describes the arrival of Astronomy à la Martianus Capella, but with even greater poetic intensity. Here is the virgin that, “foremost in beauty, foremost in dress,” looks at the stars, seeking the arcane mystery of the sky and its “elusive causes.” Her face sparkles blindingly. She holds a sphere, her robe “glows with gems, and waxes proud in gold:” her splendor seems to equal that of the stars. “Here,” writes Alain, “the skill which teaches the laws of the stars, their places, their times, their motions, signs, powers, vacillations, names and causes, through the gift of painting lives, speaks, informs, instructs, even gives rules to its students”.31 Astronomy is like painting: like the heavenly vaults of churches and chapels, like the starry mantle of Henry II – like the chiseled sky of Isidore. It also is a science, of course. Around 1230 Johannes de Sacrobosco published his Tractatus de sphaera, which became the astronomy textbook every student had to read in every European university in the next four centuries.32 In his Sphere Sacrobosco – who had already introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals and methods of calculation with his Algorismus (or De arte numerandi), and was to strongly criticize the Julian calendar for its lack of precision in On Reckoning the Years (De anni ratione) – expounded the Ptolemaic system as found in the Almagest. His description of the motion of the planets, of epicycles and deferents, of the Earth and its climactic zones, is concise, simple and clear. The fact that he quoted not only Ptolemy, but also Arab authorities such as Alfraganus (al-Farghānī) as well as classical poets like Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan, shows us that ancient and modern science could go hand in hand with poetry. *** Let us now take a final step, entering the world of prophetic vision. Hildegard of Bingen is familiar with the writers of the school of Chartres, but her world is different because her gaze is one that tries to penetrate all things at once. In Scivias, for example, she firstly contemplates a large egg that represents the entire cosmos. Inspired by the Platonic tradition and by Macrobius, Calcidius and the Hermetic Asclepius, it nevertheless acquires in the work of Hildegard (and in the illuminations of the manuscripts that illustrate it) extreme concentration and glowing mobility. She sees an immense round dark vision “in the shape of an egg.” Outside, along the entire circumference, a bright fire, under which there is “a 30

Ibid., V, 37-39. Ibid., IV, 1-2, 5, 17-20. 32 Text, with English translation, in L. Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators, ChicagoLondon, The University of Chicago Press, 1949. See also G. Aujac, La Sphère, instrument au service de la découverte du monde d’Autolicos de Pitanè à Jean de Sacrobosco, Caen, Paradigme, 1993. One should keep in mind that the debate about astronomy is very lively in the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century, for instance, a scholar who is now identified with Albert the Great produced a Speculum Astronomiae, where he defended astrology as Christian form of knowledge. See P. Zambelli, The Speculum Astronomiae and its Enigma, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 135, Dordrecht, Springer Science 1992. 31

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shadowy zone.” Inside the fire there lies “a globe of sparkling fire,” so big as to illuminate everything. Above it, “three little torches,” one on top of the other, hold the globe so that it does not tilt, while it rises or lowers emitting bigger or smaller flames. The fire surrounding the vision emits a swirling wind, and the membrane underneath it harbors another impetuous wind. Inside the membrane, a “dark” and horrible fire, “full of thunder, tempest and exceedingly sharp stones,” shakes it all up. With the tremendous sound, the fire is agitated and very strong lightning darts through the air. Finally, here is the ether: But beneath that zone was purest ether, with no zone beneath it, and in it I saw a globe of white fire and great magnitude over which two little torches were placed, holding that globe so that it would not exceed the measure of its course. And in that ether were scattered many bright spheres, into which the white globe from time to time poured itself out and emitted its brightness, and then moved back under the globe of red fire and renewed its flames from it, and then again sent them out in those spheres. And from that ether too a blast came forth with its whirlwinds, which spread itself everywhere throughout the instrument.33

Many years later, Hildegard has a similar vision, which she describes in the Liber Divinorum Operum. There is no egg, here, but a giant wheel bounded by a bright ring of fire and, within it, a black fiery circle. Inside, a number of other circles of pure ether, of humid, white and translucent air, of thin air. At the center of the wheel there stands a human figure, whose head reaches the top, and whose feet go to the bottom of the white and bright circle of air; his outstretched hands brush against the circle. Where his limbs actually touch the circle, the heads of a leopard, a wolf, a lion and a bear are visible. The animals let out puffs that form other animal figures: heads of crab, deer, snake, lamb, each of which blows big breaths. Above the human figure, one can see the stars: Above the head of this human figure the seven planets were sharply delineated from each other. Three were in the circle of luminous fire, one was in the sphere of black fire beneath it, while another three were farther below in the circle of pure ether… [All the planets shone their rays at the animal heads as well as at the human figure]… Within the circumference of the circle that looked like luminous fire, there now appeared sixteen major stars: four between the heads of leopard and the lion, four between the heads of the lion and the wolf, four between the heads of the wolf and the bear, and four between the heads of the bear and the leopard [… ] The circle of pure ether and the circle of sheer white luminous air were completely full of stars which shone their rays at the opposite clouds.34

Of course, the visions of Hildegard have highly symbolic value, and the seven planets represent the three ages of human history (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars: before the Law, in the Law, in the Gospel), the three persons of the Trinity, the divine unity (sun), and, all together, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, while the sixteen stars allude to the ten Commandments and the six ages of man. But this allegory is shaped as very dense poetry pervaded by extraordinary 33

Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. C. Hart and J. Bishop, New York, Paulist Press, 1990, p. 93. Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs, ed. M. Fox, Santa Fe, NM, Bear & Company, 1987, p. 25. 34

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visual imagination. The cosmos has two complementary icons: one (the egg) aiming at its genesis and primal essence, where all is, as Dante would put it, “blown together” in one volume; the other, (anthropocentric) pointing at the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, where man (man and Word, the second person of the Trinity) is measure of the universe. To fully understand the images, though, one must look at the fires glittering in them, behold their rays and the bright dancing globes, acknowledge their colors and shades, observe the animals and the metamorphoses they create in meeting each other– and mostly, stare at the vortices and lend an ear to the winds and the breaths blowing everywhere. For these stars are moved by the Spirit.

Chapter 10

FLAMING CUSPS Aldebaran, “the one that follows (the Pleiades),” Alpha Tauri; Altair, “flying eagle”, alpha Aquilae; Betelgeuse, “shoulder of the giant”, alpha Orionis; Deneb, “goose tail”, alpha Cygni; Rigel “left leg of the giant”, beta Orionis; alpha, “changing spirit,” beta Persei; in the Great Bear: alpha, Dubhe, “back”; beta, Merak, “loins”; zeta, Mizar, “belt”; iota, Talitha, “the third leap of the gazelle.” These are the names of some of the brightest stars, with the indication of the constellation to which they belong and the number, in Greek letters, that distinguishes them within each constellation. Constellations, first in the Western tradition and then in scientific catalogues, bear Latinized Greek names; very many stars have Arabic names. During the long nights spent in the camps, in the desert, the Arabs observed the sky and gave the stars their appropriate names. Arab and Persian poets were probably the first to do this, followed by philologists and scientists, who invented such terms as azimut, zenith and nadir and contributed much to astronomy: Algoritmi, Azophi, Arzachel, Tebitius, Albumasar, Alpetragius, Alhazen (the “Second Ptolemy”), Alberonius, Alfraganus, Avicenna, Averroes, and finally Ibn al-Shatir – who, in the fourteenth century, in Damascus, radically criticized the Ptolemaic system on empirical grounds.1 Between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries, the study of the cosmos is Islamic. There are famous observatories in Cairo, Maragheh in Persia (now Azerbaijan), and Istanbul. Ulugh Beg, Tamerlane’s grandson, a sultan and an astronomer, built a well-known and still visible observatory in Samarkand, in the fifteenth century. Also in this age, many fundamental books were produced that would be used in Latin translation by European scientists, up until Copernicus: Albatenius’s On the Science of Stars, Arzachel’s Tables of Toledo, Azophi’s Book of Fixed Stars, and the Compendium of the Science of the Stars by Alfraganus.2 The Arabs learned much about astronomy and astrology from India: in the ninth century a treatise by one of the greatest Indian astronomers, Brahmagupta, was, with the patronage of The original names are: Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sūfī, Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm ibn Yahyā al-Naqqāsh al-Zarqālī, Al-Sābi’ Thābit ibn Qurra al-Harrānī, Ja’far ibn Muhammad Abū Ma’shar al-Balkhī, Nūr ad-Dīn al-Bitrūjī, Abū ‘Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, Abū Rayhān Muhammad ibn Ahmad Bīrūnī, Abū ‘l-’Abbās Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathīr al-Farghānī, Abū Alī al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā, Abū ‘l-Walīd Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd. 2 Alhazen (al-Haytham) has also written a treatise on astral optics, On Seeing the Stars, published in the original and with an English translation in A.I. Sabra and A. Heinen (eds), in “Zeitschrift für Geshichte der ArabischIslamischen Wissenschaften,” 7, (1991-1992), pp. 31-72. 1

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Baghdad’s caliph Al Mansūr, translated into Arabic with the title Sindhind, and several other works of Indian astronomy followed suit. But Europe learnt all of the new astronomy and astrology from the Arabs. The case of the twelfth-century Raymond de Marseille and his work – the Book on The Courses of The Planets, the Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Book of Judgments is paramount here, because Raymond does not simply sum up classical knowledge, but often recurs directly to Arabic science.3 In the thirteenth century, the most important and fascinating circulation of Arabic lore was set in motion by King Alfonso “El Sabio” of Castile. Alfonso was a passionate student of astronomy and astrology. His work in these fields, which occupies five volumes in the modern edition and is chiefly based on Arabic science,4 includes the famous Alfonsine Tables as well as the Astromagia. One instance of Alfonso’s cultural activity stands out. The traditional account of Muhammad’s ascent to Heaven as presented in the Kitāb al-Mir’āj, an eleventh-century work possibly by al-Nisaburi, was translated into Spanish, at Alfonso’s request, by his court physician, the Jew Abraham Alfaquí, around 1264, and shortly thereafter, again at Alfonso’s request, from Castilian into Latin as Liber Scalae Machometi and into French as Livre de l’Eschièle Mahomet by the Italian Ghibelline exile Bonaventura da Siena.5 It remains possible that the Latin or the French version was brought to Italy by Brunetto Latini, the Florentine ambassador to King Alfonso, who might have showed it to his greatest disciple, Dante. Scholars have been debating for a hundred years whether and how Dante employed it for the description of his own descent and ascent in the Divine Comedy.6 *** Let us go back, however, to Arabic culture proper. The oldest still extant sacred building of Islam is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, whose first construction dates back to around 691. We do not know if the dome covered with gold which still dominates the view of the Holy City had cosmic significance,7 like many of those which fill the Muslim world from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, from Persia to Syria, from Egypt to Spain. But the dome itself, on top of the biblical Mount Moriah, covers the Foundation Stone from which God, according to the Jewish tradition, began the Creation, on which Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, on with that Jacob had his dream about the ladder, and on which Solomon built the temple. In the Islamic tradition, this rock is the place where Abraham was about to sacrifice his son, and from which, according to some sources, Allah returned to heaven after Creation. Muhammad, who completed the isrā’, the night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem’s mosque of al-Aqsa’, See Raymond de Marseille, Opera Omnia, vol. I, Traité de l’astrolabe, Liber cursuum planetarum, ed. and trans. M.-T. D’Alverny, C. Burnett, E. Poulle, Paris, CNRS, 2009. 4 Libros del Saber de Astronomía del Rey D. Alfonso X de Castilla, ed. M. Rico y Sinobas, 5 vols., Madrid, 18631867. A critical edition of Alfonso’s Astromagia was edited by A. D’Agostino and published by Liguori of Naples in 1992. 5 Le Livre de l’eschiele Mahomet: die französische Fassung einer alfonsinischen Übersetzung, hg. P. Wunderli, Berne, Francke, 1968 (Romanica Helvetica, 77); Liber Scalae Machometi. Die lateinische Fassung des Kitāb alMir’ādj, hg. E. Werner, Düsseldorf, Droste, 1986. 6 Ever since M. Asín Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, trans. and abridged H. Sunderland, London, J. Murray, 1926 (La escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia, Madrid, Real Academia, 1919); and see Dante and Islam, ed. J.M. Ziolkowski, New York, Fordham University Press, 2015. 7 However, this is likely the case, given the circular structure with octagonal base, the twelve columns supporting the dome (zodiac signs), and the four doors opening in the direction of the cardinal points. Some have seen in the Dome a representation of the Temple of Solomon, others a foreshadowing of the Heavenly Jerusalem, others an allusion to paradise. 3

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then began from that very Rock (according to some hadīth, the Sayings of the Prophet) his mir’āj, the ascent through the seven heavens up to God.8 The Journey and ascension – which are one and the same in the older traditions – appear obliquely in Surahs 17 and 53 of the Koran, and are then developed into larger autonomous stories, including one attributed to Ibn ‘Abbās. Finally, they reach the West in the Castilian translation by the Jew Alfaquím, and then in the Latin and French ones (from Spanish) by Bonaventura of Siena in the Book of Muhammad’s Ladder (1264). During his journey astride Buraq, in addition to hell, heaven and the angels, Muhammad contemplates the stars: “I saw in it stars hanging like lanterns,” goes the Night Journey attributed to Ibn ‘Abbās, “the smallest of which was the size of a great mountain.”9 A splendid Persian miniature of the sixteenth century in the Khamsa of Nēzamī, now in the British Museum, shows the Prophet, in the night blue sky, ascending among the flames, the angels and the stars. The image of the lamps is already present in the Koran which, like the Bible, places the stars within the creative action of Allah: “In two days He formed the sky into seven heavens, and to each heaven He assigned its task. We decked the lowest heaven with brilliant stars and guardian comets,” proclaims Surah 41, “Such is the design of the Mighty One, the Allknowing;” Surah 67 states: “He is the Mighty, the Forgiving One. He created seven heavens, one above the other. You will not see a flaw in the Merciful’s creation. Turn up your eyes: can you detect a single crack? … We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps…”10 In these verses the architecture and poetry of Islam find justification and encouragement to employ the stars. The dome of the calidarium of Qusayr ‘Amra, the fortress in the eastern Jordanian desert of the first decades of the eighth century, was entirely frescoed with a sky full of constellations. In the following century Ibn al-Mu’tazz – the Abbasid Prince and Harūn al-Rashīd’s great-grandson, was proclaimed caliph in Baghdad in 908 and immediately deposed and strangled. He was the author of Kitāb al-Badī’, a treatise on Arabic poetics, and wrote a short lyric filled with striking images: A cloud, heavy with water, came swaying astride the winds, streamed through the night gushed and surged like blood from a wound. The sky, revealed at dawn amid its stars, Genesis 22:14; 2 Chronicles 3: 1; Isaiah 30:29; Talmud, Yoma 53b-54b; Zohar, I, 231 a-b; Koran 37, 100-111; Abū Bakr Muhammad b. Ahamadal-Wāsitī, Fadā’il al-Bayt al-Muqaddas, ed. I. Hasson, Jerusalem, The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1979, p. 70, tradition 114 (cf. a nearly identical tradition, in Abū al-Ma‘ālī alMusharraf b. al Murajjā b. Ibrāhīm al Maqdisī, Fad̩ā’il al-Maqdis wa-al-Khalīl wa-Fad̩ā’il al-Shām, ed. O. LivneKafri, Shfaram, Aimashreq, 1995, pp. 108-9, trad. 120: both go back to the eleventh century). The text of Fadā’il al-Bayt al-Muqaddas (“Virtues of Jerusalem”), which was pointed out to me by Meir M. Bar-Asher, reads: “We find it written in Scripture that when God, may He be exalted, had created the earth and wanted to go up into heaven—and there was fog all around—He thought He would honor the mountains, seeking the one on which He would take up His place. The rock of the Holy Place (Jerusalem) humbled itself due to the greatness of God, may He be exalted. For this reason God showed his gratitude to it and He made His ascension from it. He stayed there as long as he wanted. Then the Almighty One, praised and exalted be He, spread out His hands as far as He desired, and then He said: ‘This is my Garden to the west and this is my Fire to the east and this is the place of the scales at the edge of the mountain. I, God, will be the judge.’ He said this and His ascension up to heaven was from the rock.” 9 Bakrī’s “total and complete” ascension, p. 207 in F. S. Colby, Narrating Muḥammad’s Night Journey, Tracing the Development of the Ibn ʿAbbās Ascension Discourse, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2008. 10 The Koran, 41:8, 41:12 and 67:2-5, trans. N. J. Dawood, London, Penguin, 2006. 8

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At the other end of the Islamic world, in Andalusia, in the eleventh century, the Sicilian poet Ibn Hamdīs – singer of historical events, elegies, animal plants and natural phenomena, author of didactic and mystical poems – contemplates the stars and the Pleiades in particular: The bright stars, like steeds launched onto a race, are sent to the west where the horoscope of the garden is read; as if they rested their cheeks to sleep down there, although they do not sleep. Often at night I look at the stars, which look like kindled tinder or flaming pinnacles. I see the Pleiades rising, and they seem a string of seven pearls with which you made a necklace.12 Ibn Hamdīs’s imagination is able to view the stars as galloping horses and flaming cusps, seeing the Pleiades as a seven-pearl necklace. This image, also very widespread in the Arab poetry of the East, is taken up by the Sicilian poet, who develops it in a wider composition embracing the whole night and the whole cosmos: How many nights did we plunge into the waves of its darkness until the stars died out on their horizon because of the rising dawn! The Pleiades looked like seven pearls, strung with onyx with which the necklace is in turn decorated. You would have thought they were a handful of the stars’ army, its bright helms and black horses. It looked as if the al-Suhā star were moribund and the undertakers were carrying its coffin, thinking its death decreed. The break of dawn looked like a flame one saw rise, gigantic behind a black veil. You thought it might be a child of the Rūm, born by a black mother instead of his own. Did I perhaps not know that his life in her womb, the moment she gave birth, would last only one day and it made her hair turn white because of the pain? And the morning sun, raiding the earth, spread for us the breath of life in the sky.13

11

English translation in Music of a Distant Drum, ed. B. Lewis, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 62. The original appears in Dīwān, ed. M.B. Sharīf, Cairo: Dar ‘al-Ma’a’rif, 1977-1978. 12 Dīwān, ed. I. ‘Abbās, Beirut, Dār Sādir, 1960 (my translation, based on Il canzoniere, trans. C. Schiaparelli, ed. S.E. Carnemolla, Palermo, Sellerio, 1988, 185, 35-36, p. 267, and 240, p. 303. 13 Canzoniere, 264, p. 334. It seems that al-Suhā (“neglected little star”) is Alcor, in the Great Bear; Rūm “Roman,” that is, in the Arab context, Greek-Byzantine.

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Here, the Pleiades are not just a string of pearls, but also a cohort in the astral army: riding black horses and with shining helmets, the riders race through the night sky, while a star of the Bear seems to fade and dawn burns to the east like a giant behind a veil of darkness. But dawn – a son considered white, but actually still black – is fleeting, until the sun of the day brings about the full breath of life. Ibn Hamdīs makes unpredictable associations, and definitely innovates the wasf, the descriptive poetry of Arab tradition. He is able to pair the shining stars setting to the west with swans plunging into a pond. In the color and smell of rose wine mixed with water, he sees, with a flash of insight, stars between sunrays. In the new moon that pierces the darkness with its light he imagines a golden scythe reaping the narcissus among the flowers in the gardens. The brightest stars are for him white doves nesting where they set, or cups constantly used by a drinker in the west, or, finally, white faces (of Rūm) swimming in the high seas. The chandelier of the Mosque shows him stars of fire in glass constellations. And the Pleiades always inspire overwhelming images to him: they look like a bunch of daffodils or like the wings of a bird flying across the celestial shores, adorning the high regions of the night by giving dawn a bouquet of stars.14 The Pleiades show a hand with bejeweled fingers, the color of which is darkness. Dawn seems to be collecting them, as if they were grapes of light with leaves made of darkness.15 It is as if the poet were possessed by the spirit of a star. Describing a blushing bride he feels the help of “a star with the empty body, the spirit of which is the evening twilight.”16 He imagines a Night Journey through the desert like a march immersed in, and marked by, the stars: I traveled at night with heroes who cross through the desert, with men resolute like drawn swords. The night of that enterprise looked like a black woman adorned with the jewels of stars. She plunged them into the whirlpool of her own terror, but they held on in their nightly march until the darkness dissolved. The knots of darkness seem to melt at daybreak, brushed by the luminous hand of dawn. And the stars on the last tail of night looked like shiny shields riding fleeing black steeds.17 He is also able to use the stars and the constellations to praise the emir ‘Alī ibn Yahyā who, in Mahdiyya (Tunisia), protects him. Once again, the Pleiades inspire an unusual image, that of an earring sparkling on the ear of dawn. Darkness is an overflowing sea, the shores of 14

Canzoniere, 340, 2, p. 423; 158, 1, p. 253; 351, 2, p. 429; 144, 18, p. 242; 287, 16, p. 363; 274, 10, p. 345; 50, 3, p. 122; 93, 21-22, p. 166; 53, 8, p. 124; 266, 5, p. 335; 144, 18, p. 242 (doves); 274, 10, p. 345; 93, 21-22, p. 166. 15 Ibid., 207, 6-7, p. 282. 16 Ibid., 207, 1-2, p. 281. 17 Ibn Hamdīs, La polvere di diamante, ed. A. Borruso, Rome, Salerno Editrice, 1994, pp. 44-45 (My translation).

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which are the West and the East. The firmament with its stars looks like a garden full of chamomile flowers. On land, writes Ibn Hamdīs, there is no one who “might know what the stars do in their conjunctions.” And yet, the “the steeds of poetry” can only race here. And here are the Vultures, Lira and Vega: soaring on their wings, they watch the battle raise dust, swooping down from heaven on the fields where those whose death they announce lie bloodless. Then there are the Twins, who appear like a proud woman “who drags the train of the clouds’ mantle,” like a dancer looking up: The setting stars look like racing grey horses. Dawn seems to have a hand with which she is collecting pearls on the horizon.18 *** We do not know whether Ibn Hamdīs, who lived in Andalusia, knew the two greatest poets of the region who lived a generation before him: Shmuel HaNagid (Samuel the Prince) and Shelomoh Ibn Gabirol, Jewish authors writing in Hebrew, but working in the context of the flourishing Islamic culture in Spain. HaNagid was even prime minister of the state of Granada and commander of its army; Gabirol is mainly known in the West by the name of Avicebron as a philosopher who wrote in Arabic. Both imbued with Scripture, they have a great passion for the cosmos. HaNagid, for example, devotes a poem to Two Eclipses – of the sun and of the moon, which both took place in 1044 – and fills both his poems in praise of the Creator and his love poems with very dense images: “the stars on wings of dawn,” he says echoing Psalm 139, “are like sapphires on a mantle.”19 But it is mainly in Gazing Through the Night that his attention goes to the whole universe and its Creator. “Gazing through the / night and its stars,” he writes, “or the grass and its bugs, / I know in my heart these swarms / are the craft of surpassing wisdom.” The heavens, he continues, are like a tent: the skies resemble a tent, stretched taut by loops and hooks; and the moon with its stars, a shepherdess, on a meadow grazing her flock; and the crescent hull in the looser clouds looks like a ship being tossed; a whiter cloud, a girl 18

Il canzoniere, 319, 11-21, p. 403; 319, 25-26, p. 404; 319, 20-21, p. 403. Hebrew text and Spanish translation, ed. A. Sáenz-Badillos e J. Targarona Borrás, in Šĕmu’el Ha-Nagid, Poemas, vol. II, 140, Cordoba, Ediciones El Almendro, 1988, p. 176. Another wonderful lyric about the night, the moon and the stars can be found in Poemas, vol. II, 43, 48, 63, 109, 141, 155, 156, 160, 176, 183: pp. 3, 13-14, 50, 134-136, 177, 191, 192, 199, 215, 222. 19

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in her garden tending her shrubs; and the dew coming down is her sister shaking water from her hair onto the path; as we settle in our lives, like beasts in their ample stalls – fleeing our terror of death, like a dove its hawk in flight – though we’ll lie in the end like a plate, hammered into dust and shards.20 The cosmic impulse that emerges in the opening lines then flows into the consideration of the infinite vanity of everything (the lyrics appear in two collections, Ben Qohelet and Ben Tehillim, “in the manner of Ecclesiastes,” and “in the manner of the Psalms”). But the path from one pole to the other goes through powerful and delicate images, echoing both the Bible and Arabic poetry. The opening recalls Psalm 8, the creeping beings come from Genesis, and the heavens stretched like a tent from Isaiah. The icons of the clouds, the dew, the plate “hammered into dust and shards” are inspired by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Proverbs, Song of Songs, 2 Kings, and the Talmud.21˙ Often, however, some of them are also part of the Arabic poetic tradition: that of God spreading the stars like a shepherd grazing his flock in the fields, or that of death that breaks men as if they were made of glass. The presence of motifs derived from both literatures makes the poetry of HaNagid fascinating. That of Ibn Gabirol is even more captivating, because Biblical and Arabic inspiration coexists in him with philosophical meditation and stylistic skill unmatched in the Jewish tradition after the Bible. Gabirol has the gift of grasping the essence of a thing in a flash. For instance, when he celebrates “Earth’s Embroidery,” he starts out with a complex image: “With the ink of its showers and rains, / with the quill of its lightning, with the / hand of its clouds, winter wrote a letter / upon the garden, in purple and blue.” Then he stops for a moment and notes that “No artist could ever conceive the like of / that.” Finally he ends the poem with astonishing confidence and delicacy: “And this is why the earth, grown / jealous of

The texts of Ben Tehillim, Ben Mishle (“in the manner of Proverbs”) and Ben Qohelet, edited by Dov Yarden for the three volumes of the Divan Shmuel HaNagid, were published in Jerusalem (Dov Yarden) respectively in 1985 2nd edn., 1982 and 1992. A beautiful English anthology, Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, was edited by P. Cole for Princeton University Press in 1996 (trans. here, p. 117), Hebrew text and Spanish translation in Poemas, vol. II, 45, pp. 8-9. 21 Sal 8:4; Gen 1:25-26; Is 40:22; Gen 10:13; Pr 25:14; Is 18:4; Song of Songs 5:2; 2 Kings 21:13. References to the Talmud and Arabic poetry can be found in Selected Poems, pp. 210-212. 20

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the sky, embroidered stars in / the folds of the flower-beds.”22 And then, in a lyric clearly influenced by the pessimism of the Book of Job: “It was night and the sky was clear, / and the moon was pure at its center / as it led me along discernment’s sphere, / teaching me by its light and direction – / though as my heart went out to that light / I feared extended misfortune.”23 Gabirol’s inventiveness is boundless. He is able to picture that God “has shot out a dawn in the midst of night” and therefore to see night “as a black man / whose head has been crowned / by a white turban;” or “like a shed, wide as the sea is wide; / dawn tarries until it lasts: / she too waits for its command. / Like Sarah before withering, / it lights up stars. Such dew / its clouds distil that one could believe / it is weeping in the sun.” He can reach perfection in a few lines, like a haiku: My friend, isn’t the sky above like a garden, its stars like lilies budding, and the moon like a chalice on high?24 But he is also able to combine visual splendor with an allusion to the name of God. In the lyric that follows he describes the moon as a jewel set in the sky, with a star in its halo. Then he jumps to the world of calligraphy and, following a familiar icon in Arabic poetry (also repeated by HaNagid), he imagines the moon and the star as the Hebrew letter yod accompanied by a dot. Then, quoting Job, he identifies himself with the wise, who immediately think of the following letters in the Tetragrammaton: heh, vuv, and heh. In the night chill, freezing as the wind blows, the moon and the star adumbrate the unpronounceable name of the Creator of the sky: YHWH: The moon was cut in the heavens’ heights like beryl embedded in amethyst, and a star in its spell was fixed and hovered like ellipses begun in parenthesis – and the hair was raised on the flesh of the wise who saw there the name of the Lord…25 However, it is in his most important poem that Avicebron reaches the highest peaks, comparable to the results he achieves in his philosophical masterpiece, the Fountain of Life.26 This is the Keter Malkuth, “Kingdom’s Crown,” apparently composed during the poet’s last

22

Original text and English translation by T. Carmi, in The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, ed. T. Carmi, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, p. 310. 23 “I am the Man,” in the beautiful English translation, used throughout, by P. Cole in Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001. 24 Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, p. 70. 25 Hebrew texts and Spanish translations for these paragraphs in Shelomoh Ibn Gabirol, Poesia Secular, ed. E. Romero, Madrid, Ediciones Alfaguara, 1978, pp. 376-377, 364-365, 368- 369; English translation in Selected Poems, pp. 70, 61. The verse of the Book of Job used by the poet is 4:15. In the text, “And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah:” Genesis 11:27-29. 26 Made available in Latin by Domenico Gundissalino and Giovanni Ispano (the Hebrew original got lost).

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days and therefore in the 1050s.27 The tripartite structure of the work opens with a real journey that begins with God (1-9), then moves on to the work of creation (the celestial spheres, the soul and the body, 10-32), and to the confession of sins and the invocation of divine mercy (33-40, 33), finally closing the circle by returning to God in a hymn of praise (40, 34-40). The poem goes in the same direction as the Fountain of Life: the latter examines in philosophical sequence the chain of substances, trying to identify a link between the lower bodily ones and the first essence, God, and stressing the importance of creation; “Kingdom’s Crown” develops all this in an existential, religious and poetic light. Keter Malkuth, which takes its title from the biblical Book of Esther and is used to this day in the synagogue liturgy of Yom Kippur, inaugurates its first section by echoing Psalm 139 (“marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well”) and literally quoting 1 Chronicles 29:11: “Thine, O Lord is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty.” The poem ends with the words of Psalm 19: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.”28 The text is therefore an immense and brilliant re-Scripture revolving around a description of the cosmos – which is not very closely related to the Torah as such. Gabirol imagines the universe as a series of ten concentric spheres: the seven traditional planets, plus the sphere of zodiac signs and fixed stars, the sphere that contains and leads them, and the tenth sphere of Intelligence. His is therefore a physical cosmos with a metaphysical principle; its structure is Ptolemaic, but it is ruled by neo-Platonism and the Jewish religion. Gabirol glorifies divine creation much like the Bible. In fact, many passages begin with the question “Who could speak of your wonders?” or “Who could evoke your merit?”, or something along those lines.29 Each passage, in response, describes the wonders of each sphere: first of all the earth, with the four elements; then the moon, which completes its orbit in twenty-nine days, stirring up “from month to month its phases of grace and misfortune:” “By night it rules in the sky / till the time for its fading has come / and its glow begins to darken, / covered in a coat of blackness.” Then comes Mercury, who causes disputes and fights in the world, but is also the star of intelligence and wisdom. Venus is next, “Like a queen overlooking her armies, / like a bride adorned with her jewels:” she brings tranquility and peace, joy and happiness, songs and hymns, overseeing the harvest of the fields and the marriage between human beings. The Sun dominates the next three sections: the image of God, the giver of light across the firmament, he who controls time, the years, the seasons, days. “Beneath the Pleiades and under Orion,” he orders the blossoming and fruit-bearing of trees. Then there is Mars, who looks like a hero with the red shield of his mighty men: he brings war, murder and destruction. The immense sphere of Jupiter, star of the will and love, envelops the red planet. Finally Saturn, causing wars and plunder, slavery and famine, “ravages lands and uproots kingdoms.” In the sphere of the twelve constellations, soon after, all the highest stars of the sky are “cast at the time of its casting,” and the signs of the zodiac contain “palaces” for the seven planets.30

The text occupies vol. II of the five that make up the Dīwān of Shelomoh ibn Gabirol, ed. Ḥ.N. Bi’ălik and Y.Ḥ. Ravnitskiy, Tel Aviv, Devir, 1924-1932. A beautiful French translation by A. Chouraqui is to be found in La Couronne du Royaume, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1997. 28 Esther 2:17; Psalms 139:14; 1 Chronicles 29:11-12; Psalms 19:15. 29 Derived from the Bible: Psalms 106:2; Isaiah 63:7; Psalms 71:15; Isaiah 61:10; etc. 30 Selected Poems, pp. 152-162. 27

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In each case Avicebron indicates the size of the sphere and the time of its orbit. He describes the influence of each one, but making sure to attribute the first cause to the Lord. When he reaches the ninth and tenth spheres, his poetry becomes at once exalted and humble, like that of Scripture and Dante. “A ninth sphere in order / to surround creation’s circuits and creatures / and close them within its border,” he writes: it drives the stars of the sky in its might into their westerly motion; each day a dusk it bows in the west to its king and his rule of the kingdom. All the creatures of the world are in it like a mustard seed in the sea – such is its measure, its greatness in truth is nothing to the greatness of its king and creator. Its proportion and vast dimension beside him are Nothing and Void.31 Finally he speaks about the tenth sphere, that of the intellect: the “inner palace,” holy to the Lord, seat of his hiding place, sedan of his glory, unattainable by thought: You formed its frame from the silver of truth; from the gold of mind you created its matter; on pillars of justice you established its throne: its reality derives from your power; its longing is from you and for you, and towards you ascends its desire.32 With the brightness of the tenth sphere God created the splendor of the upper souls: the angels, drawn from the source of light, divided into classes and orders, some forged in the flames, others as violent winds of fire and water; seraphim and sparks, lightning and thunderbolts. Finally, high up, there is the throne of glory: the hiding and the majesty, the secret and the foundation, “where the mind reaches and yields.” Avicebron’s poetry is powerful: it draws on biblical expressions (or on the midrashim, the Talmud, the commentators), places them in a new context and reformulates them creating a cosmic mosaic topped by the Pantocrator, the supreme Creator: “You are wise, / and prime to all that is primeval,” proclaims Ibn Gabirol, “as though you were wisdom’s tutor. / / You are wise and your wisdom gave rise to an endless desire,” he goes, on echoing his Fountain of Life,

31 32

Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 166.

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in the world as within an artist or worker— to bring out the stream of existence from Nothing, like light flowing from sight’s extension – drawing from the source of that light without vessel, giving it shape without tools, hewing and carving, refining and making it pure: he called to Nothing – which split; to existence – pitched like a tent; to the world – as it spread beneath sky. With desire’s span he established the heavens, as his hand coupled the tent of the planets with loops of skill, weaving creation’s pavilion…33 *** The great architecture of the Andalusian Jew Ibn Gabirol finds its equal only in Islamic Persian literature. But it should also be noted that Avicebron’s profane composition “The Palace and the Garden” has long been considered a sort of anticipation of the Alhambra, the complex of buildings erected on top of the mountain that overlooked Granada under the Nasrid rulers, between the middle of the thirteenth century and the middle of the fourteenth. Ibn Gabirol describes a beautiful building in the guise of a fortress, full of courtyards, crossed by canals, paved with marble floors, surrounded by pomegranate trees, palm trees, apple trees, myrtles, roses and daffodils. According to Avicebron, the Palace recalls the Temple in Jerusalem, and in fact there is also a pool in it resembling that of Solomon; only, it does not rest on the shoulders of bulls but is supported by lions spilling clear water from their mouths. Walls and doors with stained ivory panels are topped with large windows, through which one can see the sun, the moon and the stars. The fantastic building is dominated by a pearl-colored dome similar to the palanquin of Solomon, suspended and rotating: “crystal and marble / in day-time; but in the evening seeming / just like the night sky, all set with stars.”34 If the basin with lions obviously reminds one of the Court of the Lions (Patio de los Leones) in the Alhambra, the dome inevitably evokes the same complex. And although 33

Ibid., p. 149. Another Jewish poet of Andalusia is the astronomer (Pisan Tables), mathematician, philosopher, critic and linguist Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092-1167): obsessed with astrology, he also composed hymns in praise of God in which the stars have an important role, and a “tour of the sky,” the Hay ben Meqis, in which, guided by Wisdom, he visits and describes the celestial spheres: see Twilight of a Golden Age. Selected Poems of Abraham Ibn Ezra, ed. L.J. Weinberger (with Hebrew text and English translation), Tuscaloosa-London, University of Alabama Press, 1987, pp. 159-163, 112-125. 34 Text and Spanish translation in Poemas, I, ed. J.M. Cano, Granada, Universidad de Granada, 1987; there are excellent English translations by R.P. Scheindlin in The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. M.R. Menocal, R.P. Scheindlin and M. Sells, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; and by P. Cole in Selected Poems of Ibn Gabirol, ed. P. Cole, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000. Here, Ibn Gabirol, “The Palace and the Garden,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus, p. 1.

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Avicebron’s images bring one back to Biblical archetypes, have metaphysical implications and cannot be considered elements of an iconographic program that appeared a century later, the Alhambra does contain domes that undoubtedly have astral and cosmic significance. This is proven by the Arabic epigraphs dictated by the poet Ibn Zamrak that adorn the halls, or the rooms that precede them, in the large complex. The epigraph on the arc of the Antesala de Comares, for example, invites one to carefully contemplate the bridal diadem overlooking the room: “it resembles the halo of the full moon,” while Ibn Nasr, the founder of the Alhambra, is compared to the sun of this “world.” The inscription in the Sala de las dos Hermanas (Hall of the Two Sisters) is even more explicit, praising king Mohammed V by declaring that the Pleiades are his amulet: “A gleaming vault shines in a unique way, / with apparent and hidden beauties. / The hand of a devoted to Gemini; / and the Moon comes to converse with her. / The stars wish to rest there, / and not turn around the celestial wheel, / and they wish to await submissively in both courtyards, / and serve tenaciously like slaves.”35 The large halls of the Alhambra, of the Throne or of the Ambassadors, de los Abencerrajes and de las dos Hermanas, are topped by spectacular vaults or domes – in wood (like the one kept in Berlin) or in stucco – in which the stellar decoration and cosmic symbolism are obvious. In the Hall of the Ambassadors, for example, the cubic vault, in cedar wood, contains a multitude of stars and represents the entire universe. At the center is the Throne on which, according to the Koran, God is seated. In perfect geometric propagation, the repeated and seemingly intricate pattern of small bright, and slender dark, eight-pointed stars, sends out a continuous ray and forms seven partitions, the seven heavens, among which stands out the Throne, symbol of creation. The four diagonals allude to the four rivers of Paradise and the Tree (or axis) of the World, rooted in the divine Throne, and ramified throughout the cosmos. The actual throne of the hall was located in the middle, perpendicularly under the Throne itself, signifying the function of the king as the representative of God on earth. Twelve rooms (of which only nine were actually built) surrounded the hall, indicating the constellations of the zodiac. The wooden dome now at the Berlin Islamic Museum has instead a sixteen-sided polygon structure, the centre of which is once again the Throne of God. In the stucco vaults, on which you can still see traces of dark blue, the architectural structure itself gives rise to immense eight-pointed stars (which must have influenced similar designs in Christian churches). But in the Sala de las dos Hermanas the largest star contains another, sixteen-pointed one. Both here and in the Sala de los Abencerrajes, the many stucco “stalactites” were originally supposed to suggest a deep night vault and a beehive- or honeycomb-like cosmos (“mocárabe”), woven of light and countless cells. They probably reminded the faithful of the cave where the Archangel Gabriel revealed the Koran to Muhammad. The whole Alhambra is covered with stellar representations: take the wooden ceilings of the Mexuar (Court of the Council Chamber), the Salon de la Barca and the Patio de los Leones, or the decoration in azulejos that covers most buildings both inside and outside and reaches its peak in the Patio de los Arrayanes (Court of the Myrtles). The vaults, mocárabes and azulejos of the Alhambra testify to the strong Islamic astral passion – long before the crescent accompanied by a star became, with the Turks, the symbol adopted on many flags – and are certainly connected to the mysticism and love for astronomy and astrology that 35

Ibn Zamrak, Poem in the Hall of the Two Sisters. Alhambra, in J.M. Puerta Vilchez and M. Cimbro, Leer la Alhambra, Granada, Edilux, 2011, p. 25 (my translation).

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characterizes Islamic culture.36 The large, often beautiful domes of the mosques fill the world from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, from Alexandria to Isfahan, from Istanbul to Samarkand throughout the Middle Ages and to the present day. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, a mosque of the early nineteenth century shows the stars outside, on its domes and on the arches of the porch. In the dome of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, the ChineseAmerican architect I. M. Pei placed, in 2008, a large eight-pointed star, which in turn contains a series of concentric octagonal stars, and a bright star at the centre. “A gleaming vault,” as one of the epigraphs of the Alhambra says, “shines in a unique way / with apparent and hidden beauties.”

36

Of course, this passion is also found in the illustrations of manuscripts and books produced in the Islamic world, from those that accompany the poems of ‘Attār and Nezāmī in Persia, to those inserted in more strictly scientific works, such as the il Kitāb suwar al-kawākib al-thābita (“Book of the images of the fixed stars”) by Al-Sūfī (known in the West as Azophi), or in encyclopedias such as the famous The Wonders of Creation, and the Strangeness of Beings by Zakariyyā’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī (see Chapter 11). A precious illuminated Maghrebi example (Ceuta, 1284) by Al-Sūfī is now at the Vatican Library, MS Rossiano 1033 (see its description in A.M. Piemontese in the Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 110 / 2, 2008, pp. 296-298). Perhaps the most beautiful is the one, of the tenth century, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, MS Arabe 5036.

Chapter 11

BLACK BROCADE Persia has an impressive literary, artistic, philosophical, scientific and mystical tradition. Very often its greatest thinkers and scientists are also some of its greatest writers. This is the case with Avicenna, a physician and a philosopher – of the early eleventh century and therefore a contemporary of Avicebron – but also the author of visionary narratives that make him one of the Islamic consecrators of the genre. In Recital of the Bird, for example – written in Arabic – Avicenna tells of a bird that, with his companions, is captured by hunters and confined in a cage, where he ends up forgetting about the rope that keeps him tied up. Spotting birds flying nearby, he begs them to release him. The other birds, then, urge him to reach a distant country, where he will finally be safe from hunters. The bird and his companions fly away, cross a green fertile valley between the sides of a mountain, and finally reach its highest peak. Beyond the mountain they see eight other peaks and decide to visit all of them. So they come to the eighth, where they find beautiful gardens, palaces, pavilions, fruit trees, and streams of fresh water. “So many delights,” comments the bird-narrator, “refreshed our eyes! Our souls were confounded, our hearts troubled, by so much beauty. And we heard lovely songs, ravishing instrumental music. We inhaled perfumes that not even the most exquisite amber and musk could approach. We gathered fruits, we quenched our thirst at the streams of living water, lingering until we should be completely rested.” Then they ascend to the summit of the ninth mountain, which is lost in Heaven: there they find another group of birds, surrounded by enchanting music and beautiful colors. They are told that beyond this mountain is the City of the supreme King, who gives protection and justice to those who call upon him. So they reach it, enter it, and after a series of curtains are drawn back to reveal endless wonders they finally contemplate with amazement the radiant beauty of the King, who welcomes them with kindness and promises them a Messenger to accompany them. Thus, the birds make their way back along with the King’s Messenger. In the Epilogue, the bird speaks to his brothers of the King’s beauty: “Whatever be the beauty that thou beholdest in thy heart, without any alloy of ugliness— whatever perfection thou imaginest, untroubled by any defect— in the King I found him who is in full possession thereof. For all beauty, in the true sense, is realized in him; all imperfection, even in the sense

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of a metaphor, is banished from him. By his beauty, he is all a Face that thou contemplatest; by his generosity, he is all a Hand that bestows.”1 The mystical meaning of the Recital is quite transparent. The bird that acts as the narrator and protagonist indicates the soul, and the trip signifies its mystic ascent towards God, supreme Truth and Beauty. The nine mountains are the nine celestial spheres; the first stop on the eighth summit corresponds to the Heaven of the Fixed Stars; the second to the ninth Heaven; the third, in the King’s City, to the Empyrean and the Throne of God. It is not superfluous to note that the sphere of fixed stars is associated with lush gardens, marvelous buildings, streams of fresh water, music and fragrances. These are all metaphors used in Islamic art and literature to describe the stars. The genius found in Avicenna’s inventiveness reaches even higher peaks in the greatest “epic” Persian poem: The Conference of the Birds by Farīd al-Dīn ‘Attār, written in the first years of the thirteenth century. It is a complex work, rightly compared to a Wisdom Book, structured as two series of dialogues interspersed with exemplary narratives and a final episode. As the title suggests, the text is about a conference in which the birds choose the Sīmurgh (God) as king and decide to reach his court. Following the discussion and stories of the first two sections, in the last one the birds pass through the Seven Valleys of search, love, knowledge, detachment, unification, wonder, deprivation and annihilation and finally – exhausted, featherless and crushed in their soul – they arrive at the residence of the Sīmurgh. Only thirty out of a hundred thousand make it. Here they are welcomed by a messenger of the court: a “messenger of divine grace.” He opens the door and lifts a hundred thousand veils, thus showing them an unknown world. In this precise moment, the “light of lights” shines upon them. The herald delivers a scroll that tells the biblical (and Koranic) story of Joseph and his brothers. Finally, the thirty birds are allowed to meet the Sīmurgh, but before doing so they realize they have thrown Joseph into the bottom of a dark well: they have “ignorantly sold / Their captive to a passing chief.” So they annihilate their souls as their bodies burn to ashes. Finally they are filled with the light emanated by that presence: unknown awe takes over their minds and all past experiences are uprooted from their souls. In the image of the Sīmurgh they contemplate the world and see the Sīmurgh’s face emerge from it. Looking more closely, they realize that the other thirty birds are actually the Sīmurgh and that the Sīmurgh is the thirty birds (in folk etymology “Sīmurgh” sounds eponymous to “si murgh,” thirty birds). The voice of the presence, at this point, speaks to them: How much you thought you knew and saw; but you Now know that all you trusted was untrue. Though you traversed the Valley’s depths and fought With all the dangers that the journey brought, The journey was in Me, the deeds were Mine— You slept secure in Being’s inmost shrine. And since you came as thirty birds, you see These thirty birds when you discover Me,

1

H. Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. W.R. Trask, Bollingen series 66, New York, Pantheon Books 1960, pp. 190-192. Corbin studies its antecedents and parallels not only in the passages of the Koran discussed above, but also in the Mirâj Nâmeh sometimes attributed to Avicenna himself, sometimes to Sohrevardī.

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The Simorgh, Truth’s last flawless jewel, the light In which you will be lost to mortal sight, Dispersed to nothingness until once more You find in Me the selves you were before.2 The birds are eternally annihilated in the Sīmurgh: the shadow fades in the sun, “and so it is.” Given this conclusion it is no surprise that the seven valleys, which represent the traditional stages of mystical experience, correspond to the first seven heavenly (planetary) spheres of Avicenna, of Avicebron and of the Alhambra. In sūfī mysticism, instead, the greatest role is played by Creation, which ʿAṭṭār celebrates in his initial invocation, quoting the Koran and producing dazzling images of the cosmos. No wonder the Islamic legend says that God occasionally comes back down to Earth because he misses seeing the firmament from below! *** Among the great Persian poets, Neẓāmī– born in 1141 in Ganja, a city in what today is the Republic of Azerbaijan, and died in 1209 – is the greatest in the field of romance poems. In his Khamsa (in Arabic, “Quintet, Pentade, Pentalogy“), called Panj Ganj (in Persian, “Five Treasures“), he collects a philosophical poem and four novels, which are the modified and amplified version of three that were already present in Firdousī’s Book of Kings: The Storehouse of Mysteries, Khoshrov and Shirin, Leylā and Mājnūn, The Seven Beauties, and The Book of Alexander. The third, Leylā and Majnūn, is one of the most moving love stories ever written, often compared to that of Romeo and Juliet. Originally it was the “biography” of an Arab poet that, as early as the eighth century, had become a novel (“Majnūn” is credited with more than three hundred poems, although some doubt he ever existed). The poem tells the story of two young Arabs, Qeys and Leylā. At the age of ten, Qeys sees Leylā (whose name means “night”) and falls madly in love with her, who returns his love: crazed by that feeling, he is nicknamed Majnūn (“the possessed”). His father asks for the girl’s hand on his behalf, but her father gives it to Ebn Salām, a young aristocrat. Desperate, Majnūn wanders naked in the desert, feeding on roots, befriending all animals, and composing songs of longing for his beloved: an Orpheus, a Tristan, an Orlando of the East. Leylā, unwilling and torn, marries Ebn Salām, but is still in love with Majnūn and resists her husband’s desire. Leylā and Majnūn exchange letters and organize a secret meeting, during which, however, they keep a distance from each other, as Majnūn recites beautiful sorrowful love poems. Ebn Salām, who has turned away from Leylā, dies from yearning, and the bride weeps for him, for her pain, for her madness of love for Majnūn. Eventually, with the fall of autumn leaves, Leylā becomes sick of melancholy and dies. Amid a thousand laments, Majnūn goes to her grave: weaker and weaker, more and more evanescent, he utters the last verses, pours the last tears, begs the Creator to free him from his torment, embraces Leylā’s burial mound and, murmuring “My beloved!”, he dies. He is buried next to Leylā, and their flowery tomb becomes an obligatory destination for lovers. Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, The Conference of the Birds, trans. A. Darbandi and D. Davis, London, Penguin 1984, pp. 218-220. 2

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A novel about passion, pain, the furious and sorrowful yearning of two human beings, but also about the gradual transformation of love into ecstasy according to the sūfī doctrine (Beloved and Lover, in this kind of poetry, also stand for God and man), Leylā and Majnūn is heart-breaking and no summary can do it justice, because the torment it elicits depends on the restless recurrence of traditional motifs and the sudden blossoming of amazing images: in a word, on Neẓāmī’s style and art (later taken up dozens of times in literature and painting). The night and the stars play a central role in this narrative. Not only does the work begin with the heavenly ascension of the Prophet and the description of the seven spheres, but the stars also mark the very love of the two protagonists. Majnūn is wandering, his heart is “trembling like quicksilver” as he comes close to his beloved’s abode, declaiming verses, running, stopping, swaying like a drunk. When he sees Leylā behind the curtain of the pavilion, it is dawn: “Once more the young day donned his morning coat, woven from the shimmering brocade. He adorned the ear of the sky with the precious golden ornament of the sun and the quicksilver of the stars melted in its red flames.” Later, as he frees the gazelles in the desert, night has fallen: “night covered day with a blue-black shroud, and the moon rose, borrowing its lustre from the sun.” Majnūn, “the crazed guardian of the moon,” who celebrates Leylā as a new moon and himself as a star, is now emaciated and has become as thin “as a hair, as the tip of a reed.” Now the two lovers are stars in the firmament: “the shadow of the nocturnal vault was as black as the beloved’s locks, the road narrow as the body of the lover.”3 When, soon after, Majnūn frees the deer, it is night again: it exhibits the lamp of the moon, which looks like the face of the biblical Joseph as he came out of the well. The Milky Way now appears to be “foaming like the waters of the Nile, … across the celestial Egypt.” Then dawn smiles, painting “fresh red roses on the horizon” and “heaven’s night blue wheel” adorns its “blue-black shroud“ with “radiant yellow.” Majnūn speaks to the raven and darkness descends again: it is “as black as a raven’s plumage,” the stars are as bright as lamps, “eyes of fire between the feathers of a crow.” Day after day, night after night, Majnūn’s madness is marked by nightfall and sunrise, by the hours leading from the “shimmering brocade” of the sky to its “golden reflections.” No time, however, is more intense than the night Majnūn spends in the desert, his gaze wandering from star to star, his lips invoking Venus and Jupiter, who are silent, and finally praying the Almighty’s Court that the night may turn into light: The night was as light as day, and the face of the sky a garden of flowers, hung resplendent high above the earth. Sparkling like a golden ornament, the firmament kept turning. The seven planets, their hands linked, trod out the dance of fate on the carpet of the horizon. Meteors hurtled through the dome of heaven like spears of light thrown against demons. The air was impregnated with scent and the jewel of the moon was spreading a garment of silver rays over mountains and valleys. Truly, the royal tent of this night was a matchless miracle, full of wonders.

The original critical text is A.A. Alesker-zāde, Moskvà, Idārah-i Intishārāt-i Dānish, 1965; I use R. Gelpke’s far from complete (German) version, then translated into English by E. Mattin and G. Hill, The Story of Layla and Majnun, New Lebanon, Omega Publications, 1997 (Oxford, 1966; New York, 1978), but restoring to the text passages that are present in the original. In this paragraph, for instance, the first quotation comes from p. 13 of the translation, the last from the original. 3

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Like a great shah, the full moon was riding through it, draped in golden brocade. Mercury was his arrow, shot from the royal bow. Venus, the dancer, adorned the border of his saddle as a lovely ornament, while the sword of the sun which during the day scorches the world, remained hidden in its scabbard. In the heat of anger, Mars was seeking to blind the eye of his enemy, while Jupiter carried the salvation of the world in his sleeve. Hanging from Saturn’s belt was the steel rod which he uses secretly in the darkness to sharpen the sword of the morning. May the horizon never be without the shining beauty of a Sovereign of such majesty! My name is at this Sovereign’s service: what a sublime enterprise, o Neẓāmī!4

Neẓāmī is right: it is sublime indeed, like the black brocade of the night. In fact, the metaphor of garments, with many variations, dominates his images of the sky: jewelry, gems, tiaras, silk, linen. Those who recall the night peplum of Euripides’s Ion will be stunned: hesitant at first, then hopelessly captivated. The peplum will suddenly appear to them as the sober Greek tunic, while the black brocade will shine like the fabulous coats of the Magi – like the two women that Atossa, wife of Darius and mother of Xerxes, dreams about in Aeschylus’s Persians. Weaving such a cloth requires the same tradition and geometrical skills as making a carpet (indeed, a Persian one), as well as astonishing boldness and combinatorial inventiveness. In fact, within the metaphor of clothes, Neẓāmī embroiders the dance and the scent of the stars; he inlays precious stones of all kinds; he portrays a rose garden and lavishes moss; he arms the stars with bows, arrows, and swords; he sees a furious ride, a fortress, a siege, a banner. He does not forget a thing, either from the astronomical or from the astrological standpoint: the seven planets decorated with the “bracelets of fortune”, each with its influence, as usual, (auspicious Venus, Mars thirsty for revenge, Jupiter dispenser of prosperity); the moon, the Pleiades, the celestial pole, Setām, and meteors falling from the sky like the demons thrown down by the angels, according to the Koran, in flashes of flame.5 A blinding light pervades all things: the night firmament is a clear day, a bright face, the sparkle of the morning star in a thousand colours, the golden glory of the moon, the yellow and blue glow of the Pleiades, the radiant face of Venus. The black brocade shines with radiant beauty, a cloth of gold: it is what Mohammed contemplates during the heavenly ascension described at the beginning of Leylā and Majnūn. Neẓāmī’s light, though, is of a special kind. Soon after, Rūmī would write in the Mathnawī that there is a “way” between the tone of a colour and its absence: “Color to colorlessness can change quite soon, / Color’s a cloud, colorlessness the moon.” “If in the clouds some radiance should appear, / It is from the sun and moon that it shines here.” The Chinese and the Byzantines, says Rūmī, boasted respectively of being the best artists and of possessing power and perfection. The sultan puts them to the test, giving each a room, facing one another. The Chinese ask for a hundred colors, paint their wall, and rejoice when their work is done. The Byzantines only remove rust from their walls and, pulling a curtain on the entrance, start grinding until they are as clear and pure as the sky. The sultan remains entranced by the paintings of the Chinese, then goes to see what the Byzantines have been up to. The latter pull the curtain: “The image of that work which was so fine / Reflected on the walls that they’d made shine. / Whatever he’d seen there shone on each wall, / Out of their

4 5

The Story of Layla and Majnun, pp. 114-116. The last two lines come from the original. Koran 15:18; 37:6; 67:5.

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sockets eyes began to fall!” This is the light of the nights of Leylā and Majnūn: the luminous “quintessence pure” of primordial times that Milton will see shining in the sky of Creation.6 *** Neẓāmī returns to the stars in an entirely different, and perhaps even greater, manner in The Seven Beauties (Haft Paykar, “The Seven Effigies”). The story here is more complex, even if it concerns the lives and adventures of only one central character: Bahrām Gūr, a historical Sassanid king (Bahrām V) who had ruled Iran in the fifth century. An only child, Bahrām’s father Emperor Yazdegerd I was old when he was born and, fearing his future rivalry, entrusted his education to the Arab king No’mān, his vassal. The young man thus grows up among the Arabs and learns their arts and their skills as a warrior and as a hunter, becoming a knight and a perfect archer (the nickname Gūr means “wild ass,” one of the animals he loves to hunt). As worthy accommodation for the prince, No’mān gets the Byzantine architect Semnār to build the castle of Khavarnaq: Semnār is “master of a thousand painters” and a careful observer and student of the stars. The palace is extraordinary, because it replaces the firmament as the nine heavens fly around it. On the outside, it is adorned like the celestial sphere, with a roof that looks like a mirror and, within twenty-four hours, takes three colours: blue at dawn, yellow after sunrise, white if the sky is veiled by clouds. For fear that he might build an even more beautiful building, No’mān has the architect thrown from the walls of Khavarnaq, then he flees into the desert. His successor Monzer takes good care of Bahrām’s education, making sure he learns Arabic, Persian, and Greek. Being a master of cosmography himself, he also teaches him astronomy through Ptolemy’s Almagest. One day, wandering around the palace of Khavarnaq, Bahrām finds a locked door. He asks for it to be opened and discovers “a treasure-house of gems more beautiful than Chinese picture galleries.” In fact, the walls are painted with seven wonderful effigies, each representing a girl related to a “continent“ of the world: Furak, the daughter of India’s rajah, more beautiful than the full moon; Yaghmānāz; Nāzparī, with a gait similar to that of a mountain partridge, daughter of the king of Khārazm (the Chorasmia, Central Asia); Nasrīnnūsh, daughter of the king of the Slavs, “a Turk of Greek dress decked out with Chinese art” (who will become Turandot in the West); Azaryūn, the daughter of the king of Maghreb, “a sun like the daily waxing moon,” growing day by day; Homāy, daughter of Caesar of Byzantium; and Dorsatī, the daughter of the king of Persia, beautiful as a peacock. In the center is a young adolescent, as beautiful as a cypress, standing tall with his head proud: he is Bahrām Gūr, and the seven princesses, smiling, all look at him, as they are all in love with him. An inscription proclaims that the fate of the seven planets has decided that this sovereign, once he has appeared, would embrace “like precious pearls” the seven princesses representing the seven continents (and the seven climatic zones) of the Earth. Bahrām is struck by the beauty, the love, the craving, the “heaven’s spell” revealed by the legend. He forbids everyone to enter the room, but he often goes there himself, almost intoxicated, to contemplate the “finely painted pictures.” Like a thirsty man who has finally received water, he then falls asleep, full of desire. However, after his father dies Bahrām must go on an expedition to reconquer the kingdom of Persia. Once crowned “between two lions,” Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī The Masnavi I, 3490-3491, trans. Jawid Mojaddedi, OWC, 2004, I, 3492-3498; J. Milton, Paradise Lost, VII, 244-245. And see P. Citati, La luce della notte, Milan, Mondadori, 1996. 6

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he starts hunting at day and drinking at night: the empire declines and the Great Khan invades. The new Shah, Bahram, defeats him and forces him to flee, obtaining the act of submission from the six kings of the earth, each of whom sends his daughter. Finally he adds a Persian princess. The King of Kings, who marries the seven princesses, is now ready for the new wisdom. Another Byzantine artist, Shīdè, a disciple of Semnār, builds for him a castle that touches the sky, reaching to the starry sphere, with seven domes built according to the nature of the seven planets, each with the color fit for the “matter” of its planet: Saturn is black as musk, Jupiter the color of sandalwood, Mars red, the Sun yellow, Venus white, Mercury turquoise, the moon green. Seven planets, seven continents, seven days of the week with the name of the planets (day of the moon, Mon-day), and seven princesses (a beautiful pictorial rendering appears in an early fifteenth-century illuminated page now in the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon). Bahrām, in fact, places a princess in a pavilion of the same color under each of the seven domes, and every day, dressed with the color befitting the day of the week, he goes to visit one of them. The lady of the house sits in front of him, “shows her charm in some new light” and, the better to enthrall the king’s heart, she tells him tales that arouse love and heighten desire. The seven princesses are therefore each like Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights (by his own allusion, the pen name Neẓāmī, according to the numerical value of the Arabic letters that make it up, means “one thousand and one names,” while his real name Elyās stands for ninety-nine: the ninety-nine names of God),7 and the tales they tell have the vividness of the best novels of medieval collections. Each tale is also generally in line with the color, the planet and the day of the week: the first is sad and “black,” like Saturn (Bahrām starts his visits on Saturday in the black pavilion hosting the Indian princess); the second is bright and golden (Sunday: sun); the third is pious and green like the Moon and Islam; the fourth is bloody, violent and cruel like Mars; the fifth is blue like the mourning befitting Mercury; the sixth is sandalwood-colored like the desert sand, like Jupiter; the seventh is white like Venus and ends in purity. However, there is no doubt that the way the stories are organized also outlines a mystical journey, from black in the first pavilion (indicating mere materiality and detachment from the divine) to white in the last, alluding to the dazzling clarity of divine light. The third tale, for instance, comes from the Gnostic-Ishmaelite encyclopedia of the “Brothers of Purity.” Some have seen the seven domes as the seven stages of the purification of the soul: from the predominance of carnality to repentance, inspiration, peace, satisfaction in God, the satisfaction of God, purity and perfection. Others have associated colors, stages of the soul and “prophets:” dark grey, Adam of being; blue, Noah; red, Abraham; White, Moses; yellow, David; black light, Jesus; emerald green, Muhammad of being.8 What Bahrām Gūr undertakes is therefore a cosmic and mystical ascension – once again, like Muhammad’s mir’āj described at the beginning of the book. When the last princess finishes her story, Neẓāmī writes: “Thus many a night in comfort and in joy he went and tarried in the Domes. The sky, constructor of the lofty domes, opened the doors of the Seven

Cf. M. Barry in Neẓāmī, Le Pavillon des sept princesses, Paris, Gallimard, 2000, pp. 586-588. Nizāmī of Ganja, Haft Paikar (The Seven Beauties), translated from the Persian, with a commentary, by C.E. Wilson, London, Late Probsthain & Co.,1924 pp. 40, 55-57, 73 (I have at times modified the translation); H. Corbin, En Islam iranien, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, vol. III, p. 290; Barry, Pavillon, p. 639. 7 8

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Domes to him.”9 He had before his very eyes all of the seven spheres of the firmament. Then Neẓāmī praises spring as the completion and new beginning of life on Earth, which is still the centre of the universe. The song corresponds to the pages describing, much earlier in the poem, the winter and the fire, and is rather similar to the text that, a couple of centuries later, will become the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. With astonishing ability to approach different images, the passage portrays a Garden placed in cosmic harmony (it opens with the entrance of the Sun in Aries and the trigon of Jupiter and Saturn), but resting mainly on the infinite luxuriance of trees, plants and flowers and on the feast of scents and colors. Dominated at first by the Water of Life and the wonderful source Salsabīl of the Islamic paradise, it ends with the bird bearing the Zand, the Avesta: the holy book of the Zoroastrians. The perfect harmony of this marriage between land and sky is nevertheless broken by history and life. The Great Khan attacks again, and a corrupt minister has seized power. Bahrām, who has abandoned himself to the pleasures of the senses, the sky and the soul, must get back into action. Following the teachings of an old shepherd who shows him how he has “learnt to rule,” he asks the minister to account for his conduct, he convenes seven (again) men who were seriously offended by him, hangs the guilty and restores the prosperity of the kingdom, while the Great Khan makes an act of submission. Then he leaves his palace, entrusts the marvelous pavilions to seven Magi, lighting a fire above each of them, thereby turning them into a Zoroastrian temple, and devotes himself to adoring God. One day, he goes hunting in search of animals but, most of all, of himself. His companions seek a wild ass (gūr), while he looks for the tomb (gūr). He sees a wild ass, chases it galloping through the desert and ruined places, and slips into a deep cave: there he disappears. This is how Neẓāmī ends his book, addressing both himself and mankind. You, who have written about Bahrām Gūr – he tells himself – do not seek him. If you want to conquer heaven, rise, lift your foot up and flee the earth! “The stars celestial are your shoulder-belt; (these stars) what are they all? They are your means. / Your field surrounds the narrow bounds of all; (all) these designs are on your canvas limned.” Then, in a dizzying spiral, he passes from the seven tablets of human destiny, the heavens, to the One who created them. The quiet, wise revolution of the heavenly vault, he warns, is quick in taking life away – as it did with Bahrām Gūr. Neẓāmī urges the reader to lead a sober life and take care of the soul. He calls upon the Lord. Then he takes his leave from the work and the king to whom he dedicated it. This text – the author says – is a fruit whose outside is pleasant and whose kernel is nutritious, containing a “locked up case of pearls, the key to which is wrapped in metaphor:” “allusion, hints, and subtle thought.” This book speaks of the darkness that, due to the glimmering light, appears like “a tulip growing from a ḥūrī’s locks;” it describes the night as black silk raising her mossy pennant and inscribing silver with pitch; it sees “the palace of the sky’s black” or the “arched willow” of the firmament; calls the early stars “collyrium-colored ocean’s shells” that “poured pearls into the water-dragon’s jaws.”10 But, above all, it is a poem structured by the celestial spheres, built around the planets, organized by the stars: this book, indeed, is a cosmos.

9

Haft Paikar, p. 250. Ibid., pp. 286, 107, 137, 214. One could quote many other examples.

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*** Man is the astrolabe of Truth: of God. So said Rūmī, the greatest Persian mystic poet, founder of the Sūfī brotherhood of the “whirling dervishes,” whose life covers the first two thirds of the thirteenth century. But it takes an astronomer to use the astrolabe. The tool is completely useless to a seller of vegetables: it would reveal nothing about the state of the heavens, their rotation, their influences and the movements of the stars. Instead it is extremely useful to the astronomer, because “He who knows himself knows his Lord.” The copper astrolabe is a mirror of the celestial spheres: the human being, of whom God said, “we have honored the children of Adam,” is the divine astrolabe. “When God causes a man to have knowledge of Him and to know Him and to be familiar with Him, through the astrolabe of his own being he beholds moment by moment and flash by flash the manifestation of God and His infinite beauty, and that beauty is never absent from His mirror.”11 The image is striking and penetrating, and it renders well the way in which Rūmī approaches the icons of the cosmos. He is familiar with the astronomy and astrology of his time, as well as with Arab and Persian literature. He knows that stars play a privileged role in it. But he aims for something different and better. He says so clearly in Mathnawī, where he states that whoever has affinity with a planet possesses the principal qualities of that planet. If their influence is Venus, then all their propensity and desire will be for joy; if they were born under the influence of Mars, they will seek war, wickedness, hostility. However: Beyond them there’s another universe Where stars don’t burn out, nor seem ominous, In other heavens such stars circle round, Not those that we can gaze at from the ground, Bathed in the light of God, immaculate, Not joined together, nor kept separate–– If for ascendant you have one of these Your soul will burn each infidel you seize!12 Rūmī restates this, shifting the emphasis on the soul, both in the title page of Mathnawī and in Fīhī mā fīhī, now quoting the Hadīqat al-haqīqa by Sanā’ī, the sūfī poet of the early twelfth century whom Rūmī, along with ‘Attār, considers his teacher (one is his soul, the other his eyes): “The saints have seen other heavens besides these heavens. This world is unimpressive and lowly next to what they have been shown. The saints have set their foot upon those heavens and transcended them. ‘Heavens there are in the province of the soul / That hold our worldly heaven in their control.’”13 Rūmī privileges the skies of the soul. In the Fīhī mā fīhī the great sage takes issue with the astronomer who maintains that there is nothing beyond the terrestrial globe and the celestial spheres we see. If it is so, says the astronomer, show me where is that “something

Discourses of Rūmī, trans. A.J. Arberry, London, New York, Routledge Curzon, 1993, p. 17. Mathnawī, I, 758-761 (754-757), p. 123. The original is edited by T.H. Subhānī, Teheran, Sāzmān-i Chāp va Intishārāt-i Vizārat-i Farhang va Irshād-i Islāmī, 1994. 13 Discourse n. 63 in Discourses of Rūmī, transl. by A.J. Arberry, London, John Murray, 1961, p. 230. 11 12

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else” that you claim exists beyond. The Master14 responds first with an argument, then with insults. The question, he says, is flawed at the origin. There is no place for this reality. Try to show me where your objection lies: it is neither in language, nor in the mouth or in the chest. Thought does not exist in a place. And if you don’t know the place of thought, how can you know the place of He who created thought? That son of a … proclaims that God is not in heaven. “You cur!,” is the answer, “how do you know that he is not?” You must have gone through the heavens inch by inch! You’re not aware of the prostitute you have in your house, and yet you think you know the heavens. Sure, you know the names of the stars and the spheres, but if you really knew them you would never say such nonsense: What do I mean when I say that God is not over heaven? My intention is not, that He is not over heaven; my meaning is, that heaven comprehends Him not, whilst He comprehends heaven. He has an ineffable link with heaven, even as He has established an ineffable link with you. All things are in the hand of His omnipotence and are His theatre and under His control. Hence He is not without heaven and the universe, neither is He wholly in them. That is to say, these comprehend Him not, and He comprehends all. 15

The argument – an elementary introductory lesson in theology as can be also found among Christian thinkers – is not necessarily mystical. Rūmī, however, goes further. In Mathnawī he writes that the whole firmament, which rotates perpetually and is always searching for something, is like its children: sometimes at the nadir, sometimes at the zenith. “The sun which rises up with flames of fire Then sinks head-first when it can’t go up higher; / The stars shine while the lofty heavens turn Each single moment they are caused to burn; / The beauty of the moon is cherished most, / But when it is sick it looks more like a ghost; / The earth, as if through manners, keeps so still, But tremors make it shake as if it is ill.”16 In short, the reality of this beautiful universe is ever-changing, transient, fleeting. How to save it, save oneself and access those other heavens, then? I believe Rūmī’s best answer lies in his Divan Shams-i Tabrīz, in a lyric entitled The Moon. In Arabic love poetry, the moon stands for the beloved. Rūmī starts from this traditional association to talk about another kind of love, another moon, another firmament: At the dawn hour a moon appeared in the sky, came down from the sky and gazed upon me. Like a hawk which seizes a bird at the time of hunting, that moon snatched me up and ran over the sky. When I gazed at myself I saw myself no more, because in that moon my body through grace became like the soul. When I voyaged in soul I saw naught but the moon, so that the secret of the eternal revelation was all disclosed. The nine spheres of heaven were all absorbed in that moon, the ship of my being was entirely hidden in the sea. The Master is Rūmī himself, but I would not rule out that his figure might also hint at Shams-i Tabrīz, the mysterious master who shook Rūmī’s quiet contemplative life, and at the great Andalusian mystic Ibn al-’Arabi, whom Rūmī met in his young age in Damascus. Both are present, in a different way, in the works of Rūmī. 15 Discourse n. 59 in Discourses of Rūmī, London, 1961, p. 219. 16 Mathnawī, I, 1289-1290 (1280-1281), p. 166. 14

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That sea surged, and Reason arose again and cast abroad a voice; thus it happened and so it befell. That sea foamed, and at every foam-fleck something took form and something was bodied forth. Every foam-fleck of body which received a sign from that sea melted forthwith and became spirit in that sea. Without the royal fortune of Shams al-Dīn of Tabriz one could neither behold the moon nor become the sea.17 First there is rapture, as if it were eros: the moon falls and seizes the poet like a hawk, flying away into the sky. But, on that trip, introspection leads him to see his self no longer, because in the moon what was once the body has become pure soul, and in the soul everything becomes moon. Then the whole mystery of eternal epiphany unfolds: all the celestial spheres have sunken in the moon, and the very being of the poet is hidden in that abyss. The beloved is everything, everything is the beloved: the cosmos is the moon, and the moon is the sea. The sea ripples and breaks in the waves: reason breaks the ecstatic rapture, the unity. Then, little by little, it is recomposed: the thin foam of the sea forms somebody’s outline, the body of something; the fragments of foam blend together and enter the sea. In the end, Rūmī attributes to the Lord and to the Master of Tabrīz the function of essential intermediaries: without them, one can neither see the moon nor be the sea. Moon, sky, sea: a wonderful progression through the elements, towards the perfect mystical union of the sūfī– towards what Dante, in another context, will call the “great sea of being.”18 *** If one started from Rūmī and Neẓāmī and went back in time to look at the poetry of ‘Omar Khayyām, the Khayyām dear to the West (who lived between 1048 and 1131, a contemporary of the Sicilian Ibn Hamdīs), one would have a very different impression of Persian poetry on the stars. Khayyām is not only a poet, but also an astronomer and a mathematician. Reading his Robāʻ iyyāt, the famous Quatrains, one even has the impression that he might be the kind of astronomer against whom Rūmī inveighs: that is, a faithless rationalist devoted to wine and eros. This leads straight into the heart of the “Khayyām question,” which has been troubling scholars for more than one hundred and fifty years: that is, since Edward Fitzgerald published his beautiful, but also quite unfaithful, English translation of the collection. Under the exaltation of love and wine, is the poet hiding subtle allusions to another type of love and drink? Does his pleasure-loving face conceal a sūfī sage? Of course, reading the following quatrain, perhaps composed after a lecture on cosmology, one gets the impression of disenchanted skepticism: Oh, come with old Khayyām, and leave the Wise To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;

Mystical Poems of Rūmī, trans. A. J. Arberry, ed. E. Yarshater, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 108. The original can be found in Kulliyyāt-i Shams-i Tabrīz, ed. B. Forūzānfarr, Teheran, 19581968, vol. II, pp. 65-66. 18 Paradiso I, 113. 17

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On the other hand, the corpus includes compositions that scoff at the knowledge of astronomers and astrologers, such as this, in which the rotation of the celestial spheres is reflected in the scientists rolling their head: The stars, who dwell on heaven’s exalted stage, Baffle the wise diviners of our age; Take heed, hold fast the rope of mother wit. These augurs all distrust their own presage.20 Then one wonders if the alternative suggested by the poet isn’t actually that of wine. After all, it is the sweetest thing after the moon and the stars: While Moon and Venus in the sky shall dwell, None shall see aught red grape-juice to excel: O foolish publicans, what can you buy One half so precious as the goods you sell?21 But what kind of wine could it be? The grape juice, which intoxicates and enchants and subsides, or something else, which is perhaps closer to the spheres than we think? The following quatrain imagines a cup in the sky that is passed in a circle to all human beings: it is the cup of fate, on which stars have powerful influence according to astrology. Khayyām’s final exhortation refers again to wine: drinking when it is one’s turn means happily accepting one’s fate. There does not seem to be here the sense of “drinking the sour goblet” (and wine does not seem to have religious or mystical connotations as it does in Christian Eucharist). If the shadow of death – obvious elsewhere – is present at all, it only appears here as a hint. Deep in the rondure of the heavenly blue, There is a cup, concealed from mortals’ view, Which all must drink in turn; Oh, sigh not then, But drink it boldly, when it comes to you!22 This veil appears darker in another composition, in which Khayyām takes up the traditional image of heaven as a puppeteer, to develop it in full metaphor: we are the puppets, we play our small part on stage, then we are placed back in the box – from being to nothing. We are but chessmen, destined, it is plain, That great chess-player, Heaven, to entertain; 19

E. Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. D. Karlin, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 29. The original, together with the English translation, can be found in The Rubaiyat, ed. P. Mahmoud, New York, Carlton Press Corp., 2nd edn.,1996. 20 The Quatrains of Omar Khayyám, trans. E. H. Whinfield, London, Routledge, 2000, n. 214. 21 Ibid., n. 208. 22 Ibid., n. 254.

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It moves us on life’s chess-board to and fro, And then in death’s dark box shuts up again.23 In fact, Khayyām is perfectly able to capture the helplessness of the scientist and the man before the mysteries of the universe and life, but he also fully understands the grandeur of the universe, the wonder that takes hold of us before the vault of heaven. Compare these two quatrains: I solved all problems, down from Saturn’s wreath Unto this lowly sphere of earth beneath, And leapt out free from bonds of fraud and lies, Yea, every knot was loosed, save that of death! This wheel of heaven, which makes us all afraid, I liken to a lamp’s revolving shade, The sun the candlestick, the earth the shade, And men the trembling forms thereon portrayed.24 The two poems share the shadow of death: in the first, it is the “knot,” the lump, the stumbling block that hinders the ability of the scientist; in the second, it manifests itself as the inescapable goal of human transience. The perfect central image of the sky presents the universe as a lantern and the sun as the light inside it. It may be an allusion to the God of light. But the poet prefers to focus on the feelings that the spectacle arouses in man. The wonder of the first line, as is easily noticed, turns into dismay in the last. And the very vault has an extraordinary power: it enchants and enraptures, to be sure, but it also deceives and deludes. Khayyām the astronomer is wise enough to see both sides of the cosmos. One does not quite understand Petrarch, who in one of the letters written in his old age, the Seniles (XII, 2), wrote to Giovanni Dondi that he knew what kind of poets the Arabs are: “there is nothing blander, slacker, more enervated, and uglier.” One wonders which Arabic poets, and in what language, Petrarch knew – perhaps the Sicilian-Andalusian Ibn Hamdīs, or indeed his contemporary Hāfez – and why he would have such low esteem of them. After all, he did not become famous for strong, dramatic poetry in Dante’s manner, but rather for his refined sweetness.

*** Mohammad Shams al-Dīn Hāfez was also very popular in the West. After a German translation of his Dīvān inspired Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, there have been countless imitations, re-workings and misunderstandings of his work. A contemporary of Petrarch, Hāfez is a poet of supreme skill and lightness, but also possesses a piercing gaze like few others, so much so that he is known as “Language of the Arcanum” and “Interpreter of the

23 24

Ibid., n. 270. Ibid., n. 303 and 310.

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Mysteries:” for these reasons it is impossible, in this context, to adequately analyze his Divan. I will limit myself to a few passages and two ghazals to illustrate his cosmic afflatus. Hāfez celebrates wine and love, but always does so with one eye on what is earthly and the other on what lies beyond. In a composition in which he urges the cup-bearer to light the “Light of Wine“ and the singer to praise joy because he saw the face of the Friend reflected in the glass, he proclaims: “Never dies that one, whose heart is alive with (true) love (to God): / On the world’s record, is written the everlasting existence of ours.” Therefore eros pervades the whole universe. No wonder that the lyric ends with the image of the “green (blue) sea of sky” and the “bark of the new moon.”25 Wine and love are the key to true knowledge: gnosis. “The Arif knew the hidden mystery,” sings the poet, “from the wine’s sparkle,” because it is through wine, “ruby”, that the Gnostic (whom the poet here calls “sūfī”) gazes into “every one’s essence.” Only the nightingale, who really knows love, knows “the value of the rosebud,” that is, of the writings collected in the Divan. One cannot “learn love” from “the book of reason.” Only wine allows for a deep understanding: “Bring wine. He who knows the plunder of the autumn wind / Will not be proud of the roses of the garden of the world.” Hāfez has shown very well “the two worlds” to his “adept heart:” it regarded everything “except your transient love.” Indeed, wine and love: all else shall perish. In the original, however, “everything except” and “transient” recall two verses of the Koran stating “All that lives on earth is doomed to die. But the face of your Lord will abide for ever, in all its majesty and glory,” and are related to terms that in sūfīsm indicate “permanence” and “extinction” or “annihilation” in the Absolute. Wine, love and cosmos, therefore, but pervaded by a religious and mystical aura.26 Hāfez knows very well that no man in the world is wise enough to answer the question “What is this lofty ceiling, plain or with many patterns?” (the day and night sky); he also knows that the “celestial engineer” has forged the cosmos as a “hexagonal house,” though without a “way out of this dungeon” – that is, death. However, hit by the arrows of misfortune that Heaven has thrown at him, he never ceases to urge himself to knot, as if he were inebriated, “the cord of the Gemini’s quiver,” to sprinkle the “Palanquin” in one gulp and to “send the roar of the harp into this azure dome.”27 Mostly, he is able to contemplate the sky and see its reflexes in himself. In a ghazal filled with allusions and images he evokes luck, Jesus’ ascension, and the ancient rulers Kāvus and Khoshrow, but warns the sky not to boast of its greatness. The lyric shines with stars: I saw the sky’s green field and the new moon’s sickle, And remembered what I had sown and the time of reaping. I said: “O fortune, you slept while the sun rose.” It said: “Despite all this, let the past favors give you hope”. On the night of death, like the Messiah, so rise to heaven That many rays from your light may reach to the sun. Do not rely on the night-stealing star, for this impostor stole The throne of Kâvus and the girdle of Kay Khoshrow. Though the ring made of gold and ruby endears your ear, 25

Hafez, Diwan, trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke, Calcutta, Government of India Printing Office, 1891, vol. I, n. 3. The Divan of Hafez. A Bilingual Text Persian-English, trans. R. Saberi, Lanham, NY, Oxford, University Press of America, 2002, n. 49, p. 61. 27 Ibid., n. 72, p. 87; n. 293, p. 351; n. 340, p. 404. 26

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The period of beauty is transient. Listen to this counsel. Far be the evil eye from your mole that moved a pawn on The chessboard of beauty and won from the sun and the moon. Tell the sky not to show off grandeur! For in love, the moon’s harvest Is worth a barley-corn and the Pleiades’ cluster two barley-corns. The fire of pretentious piety will burn the harvest of faith. Hâfez, cast off this woollen kherqa and go!28 Hāfez sees the great spectacle of the sky, contemplating the music played by Venus and her ecstatic dance in the “palace of innovation” of the sun. He is filled with wonder before the firmament and its “abode,” from which the “candle of the east” sheds light at dawn. The world reveals its face, “the sky pulls out a mirror from the horizon’s breast.” Faced with this glowing view, the harp and the chalice speak out against those who blame and ban. Yes, it is time to raise the cup and praise the king: there are no better conditions. Because the world is also a handsome young man whose hair is woven with “fetters and deception” and the wise know very well the thread of which it is woven. Hāfez knows the universe perfectly: At dawn when from the privacy of the palace of innovation, The candle of the east casts its rays in all directions, The sky pulls out a mirror from the horizon’s breast And therein displays the world’s face in thousands of ways. In the corners of the house of mirth of the sky’s Jamshid, Venus plays its lyre to the sound of the samâ’. The harp calls roaringly: “Where did the denier go?” The cup asks with a guffaw: “Where did the forbidder go?” Behold the status of the world and take the cup of pleasure, For in any case these are the best of circumstances. The locks of the world’s Shâhed are fetters and deception. Ârefs do not quarrel over this chain. Pray for the king’s life if you want the world’s profit. For he is a generous, kind, and benevolent one. The manifestation of the primordial grace, the light of hope, the soul of The world, the assembler of knowledge and practice, Shah Shojâ’.29 In a very famous ghazal devoted to love and beauty, Hāfez declares he wants to hear only about lutes and cups, “not of the secret of being. / For no one has solved this puzzle by wisdom, nor ever will”. Then he concludes with the traditional image of making poetry as “piercing pearls”, relating it to the necklace of the Pleiades: “Hāfez, you pierced pearls with your ghazals. Sing joyfully. For the sky will scatter the Pleaides’ necklace on your verse.”30 He knows what he is talking about.

28

Ibid., n. 399, p. 470. Ibid., n. 288, p. 344. 30 Ibid., n. 3, p. 3. 29

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To conclude we must go back to the beginning. The encyclopedias of astronomy and natural science produced in the Islamic world are masterpieces that were not surpassed by the West until the eighteenth century, a time when they still circulated and Ottoman astronomers observed the sky with the same passion they had five centuries earlier. Zakariyyā’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī – a great Persian scholar of the thirteenth century who, escaping the progressive advance of the Mongols, lived in Mosul, Baghdad and Wasit – composed an encyclopedia of great importance: The Wonders of Creation and the Strangeness of Beings, which skillfully combines Aristotle and the Koran.31 As we have seen, Aristotle claimed that wonder is the drive that leads man to philosophize, that is, to love wisdom (meaning, of course, the forms of wisdom we call philosophy and science). He also added poetry, because those who love myths and tales are philosophers, too, in a way: myths deal with wonderful things. Al-Qazwīnī captures the spirit of Aristotle’s Metaphysics urging to “gaze” at creation: “to meditate on things perceived, to seek for their hidden meaning and their behavior in order to discern their reality.” Indeed, this is the real cause of earthly pleasures and happiness in the hereafter, as the Prophet understood by saying: “My God, let me see things as they really are!” In the first introduction to his encyclopedia, The Wonders of Creation and the Strangeness of Beings, al-Qazwīnī echoes Aristotle: “Some people say that wonder is the amazement generated in men when they ignore the reasons of something or how to act on it.” Then he talks about the wonder one feels when contemplating celestial bodies, “their size, their solidity, and their ability to remain unchanged and uncorrupted till they reach the limit established in the Book.” And now he quotes the Koran: “We built the heaven with Our might, giving it a vast expanse.” Wonders and strangeness: all those wonderful events that occur infrequently and that differ from things as we usually know them – miracles of the prophets and saints, stories of soothsayers, terrestrial phenomena such as the transformation of land into sea and vice versa, the birth of strange animals, the action of magnets. All that exists, apart from the Only One, has been created: what we see and know, what we don’t know, and what we know overall but not in detail. “No atom moves in the skies or on the earth that in its movement does not have one, two, ten, thousand divine wisdoms.”32 Sayings of the Prophet, Ptolemy, Al-Sūfī, Avicenna and other encyclopedists of the Islamic tradition complement Aristotle and the Koran. In love with books (“the best company to spend the time with,” he says at the beginning of his work, quoting a verse of the famous Arab poet al-Mutanabbī), al-Qazwīnī expertly organizes his material, following Aristotle’s Physics and distinguishing between “higher” beings (Celestial spheres, angels, time and its order) and “lower” ones (spheres of fire, air, water, and terrestrial globe). But what makes his encyclopedia fascinating is its infinite variety and the passion the author shows for the objects he finds curious. Water animals, the Elder of the Sea, springs and rivers, and the four elements are accompanied here by the stars. Al-Qazwīnī describes the spheres: those of the planets, those of fixed stars, the sphere of the ecliptic, and the “sphere of the spheres.” He does not forget the enigmatic Milky Way, the Zakariyyā’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī, Le meraviglie del creato e le stranezze degli esseri, ed. S. von Hees, trans. F. Bellino, Milan, Mondadori, 2008, pp. 5, 9, 10 (English translations are mine). The original, Kitāb ‘ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt, was edited by F. Sa’d, Beirut, Dār al-Afāk al-Jadīda, 1973; Koran, 51:47. 32 Le meraviglie, p. 25. 31

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northern constellations, the zodiac and the southern ones, the lunar stations, comets and shooting stars. He also explains the names of individual stars: “the young goat” for the North Star, “the daughters of the Great Bear” and the “gazelles,” the “belly of the Aries,” the “paw of the Lion,” the “claws of the Scorpion.” Astronomy, philology, poetry. And absolute transcendence: God created and creates all, manifesting Himself in every aspect of creation. Al-Qazwīnī cites the Abbasid poet Abu ’l-Atāhiya: “For God, in any movement, in any stillness you can always contemplate God. / Everything bears a sign indicating that He is the Only One.” And he keeps on recalling the verses of the Koran where God proclaims “They never observe the sky above them, and mark how We built it up and furnished it with ornaments, leaving no crack in its expanse;” “the heavens and the earth were but one solid mass which We tore asunder;” “He has created other things beyond your knowledge.”33 He would hardly have agreed with the fourteenth-century Persian poet ‘Ubayd-i-Zākānī, who wrote: “He who built the heavens and made the stars / and fashioned mind and soul and made mankind / tied all the strings of being in a knot / then lost the thread of this cosmic tangle.”34 Finally, al-Qazwīnī turns to the inhabitants of heaven: the angels. They must exist, otherwise enormous depths of outer space would be empty, whereas “there is not a single particle in the Universe that is not entrusted to one or more angels, there is not a single drop that is not accompanied by an angel.” Blue, red, black, golden, brown, with the most amazing shapes, they are catalogued here: cherubs, angels carrying the Throne of God, angels of the seven heavens, guardian angels, wandering angels – Hārūt and Mārūt, Munkar and Nakīr, Azrael, Michael, Gabriel, Israfil. And the first of all, the Spirit, ruh, that spins the spheres, moves the stars, the elements and all created things “that are under the sphere of the Moon, that is, the three realms of Nature: minerals, plants and animals”. He is “Spirit” because “each of his breaths becomes vital spirit for the living beings.” Indeed, “each atom of the atoms of a substance, accident, quality and object possesses prodigies and marvels that reveal the wisdom of God the Almighty and His power.”35

33

Ibid., pp. 25, 4, 16-17, 24; Koran 50, 6; 21, 30; 16, 8. English translation in Music of a Distant Drum, p. 126. The original is in Dīvān-i ‘Ubayd, ed. S. Yūs, University of Madras, 1952. 35 Le meraviglie, pp. 108, 110, 24. Beautiful representations of the universe as al-Qazwīnī imagines it can be found in the many illustrations that accompany the manuscripts and editions of the Wonders of Creation, but also in various works, for example in Zubdat at-Tavārikh (“The Cream of Stories,” 1583), now at the Museum of Islamic Antiquities in Istanbul. A large illuminated page here designs, in concentric multicolored circles, going outward, the nine spheres, the twenty-eight constellations with the stars containing the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the twentyeight lunar stations, and the twenty-eight constellations in their “mythical” forms. In the four corners, eight angels impart motion to the heavenly spheres. 34

Chapter 12

THE BEAUTY OF LAKES We are coming from Persia, and there is no better way to continue our journey to the East than to follow the lead of a Persian author. In the first three decades of the eleventh century, between 1000 and 1030, Abū al-Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī (known as Alberonius in the West), travelled extensively across India. He was born in Chorasmia, a region today in Uzbekistan, in 973, and died in Ghazni, today Afghanistan, in 1048, but he was Persian by culture: the greatest scientist and the most learned man of his time. In addition to his own language and Arabic, he also spoke Hebrew, Sanskrit and Syriac. He wrote about mathematics, astronomy, physics, medicine, philosophy, chronology and history. He exchanged letters with his compatriot Avicenna. He left many seminal works, of which I will only mention here the most important ones: the History of Ancient Peoples, The Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology, the so-called Mas’udi Canon (his astronomical masterpiece), and Kitāb al-Hind, simply known as India. India is not a travel story as will be those of William of Rubruck, Marco Polo and Ibn Battūta, or as was that of the Chinese monk Xuanzang in the seventh century. It is the rigorous report of a cultural and scientific exploration. The author delves into religion, philosophy, literature, history, geography, traditions, laws and customs. It is an impressive book, showing an effort to understand, compare, detail and systematize its material that is unique for its time. Al-Bīrūnī – whose reference terms for Indian beliefs, way of thinking and science are the Islamic world, ancient Greek culture, Sufism, the doctrines of “some Christian sects” and Manicheans – knows a lot about Indian culture.1 He quotes the Veda (and the Upaniṣad), Bhagavadgītā, Mahābhārata, Rāmāyana, books of grammar and metrics, Patañjali’s Yogasūtra, as well as some writings about Buddha and his disciples. And of course he has extensive knowledge of Indian astronomy and astrology: he is familiar with the Sūryasiddhānta and some form of the Bṛhat Parāśara Horāśāstra, two of the most important traditional treatises on the matter. He has also read the works of three great Indian scientists of the sixth and seventh century: Āryabhaṭa, Varāhamihira (translating into Arab the brief version of his astrological treatise Bṛhat-Jātaka), and Brahmagupta. Let us follow Al-Bīrūnī on his way through the stars of India, organizing the material into four sections: religion and metaphysics, epic poetry, lyric, and visual arts. Of course, we must Original text Kitāb al-Bīrūnī fī tahqīq mālil-Hind, Hyderabad, Matba’ah Majlis Dāirat al-Ma’ārif al-’Uthmānīyah, 1958; English translation by E.C. Sachau, Alberuni’s India (London, 1888), repr. in 2 vols., New Delhi, Asia Educational Services, 2004. 1

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remember that twists and overlaps are constant: for example, poetry and painting are imbued with religious and mythical thinking, just as astronomy and astrology are reflected in epos and architecture. In particular, astronomical and astrological doctrines often merge into a single whole. Varāhamihira, the great intellectual of the sixth century familiar with GreekRoman science, composed his most important works – Pañcasiddhāntikā, Bṛhat-Saṃitā and Bṛhat-Jātaka (in verse) – shifting between the two without any of the modern distinctions.2 The latter is a treatise of predictive astrology that is crucial to Indian culture; Bṛhat-Saṃitā, on the other hand, starts with a praise of the Sun and continues by mentioning the beginning of the universe, the golden egg and the Brahman, moving on to the revolutions of the sun, moon and planets, the signs, astral influences, stellar domains, and asterisms. In other words, when an Indian looks at the stars, he or she cannot help regarding them as superior, divine, officers of his / her world and his / her life as well as objects of scientific observation and aesthetic pleasure. *** We begin with the religious sphere. It is easy to imagine Al-Bīrūnī’s fascination for a hymn of the Ṛgveda celebrating the power of Varuṇa, the first lord of nature, who brings back the heavenly bodies every night: “Whither by day depart the constellations that shine at night, set high in heaven above us? Varuṇa’s holy laws remain unweakened, and through the night the Moon moves on in splendor.” This is the hymn that mentions the nyagrodha, the tree that, in ancient India, is assimilated to the heavenly vault: “Varuna, King, of hallowed might, sustaineth erect the Tree’s stem in the baseless region. Its rays, whose root is high above, stream downward.”3 Of course, the Persian scholar must have appreciated the cosmic inspiration that pervades so many hymns of the Ṛgveda. Think, for example, of those praising Surya, the Sun – the ātman or essence, the “soul of all that moveth not or moveth,” he who, “like as a young man followeth a maiden,” goes towards divine shining Dawn, who folds the great cloak that the night has laid out: His brilliant banners draw upwards the god who knows all creatures, so that everyone may see the sun. The constellations, along with the nights, steal away like thieves, making way for the sun who gazes on everyone. The rays that are his banners have become visible from the distance, shining over mankind like blazing fires.

Texts: Pañcasiddhāntikā, ed. O. Neugebauer and D. Pingree, København, Kongelike Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Hist-Filos. Skrr. 6, 1, 2 vols.; Bṛhat-Saṃitā, ed. M.R. Bhat, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1981, 2 vols.; Bṛhat-Jātaka, trans. Ushi&Sashi, New Delhi, Sagar, 1977. Since 2005, the Clay Sanskrit Library has been publishing, for the New York University Press, the most important works of Sanskrit literature, with original text in transcription and English translation. 3 The Hymns of the Ṛgveda, I.24.10 and 7, trans. R.T.H. Griffith, ed. J.L. Shastri, reprint Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, rev. ed. 1973, p. 14. The original edition is Ṛgveda. A Metrically Restored Text With an Introduction and Notes, ed. B.A. van Nooten and G.B. Holland, Cambridge, MA, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, distributed by Harvard University Press, 1994. The nyagrodha tree mentioned by Al-Bīrūnī at at the end of ch. 24 of India, is ficus indica, the Indian fig tree from whose branches grow fibers that descend to the ground and take root, thus giving rise to new logs and forming a sort of vault. 2

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Crossing space, you are the maker of light, seen by everyone, O sun. You illumine the whole, wide realm of space. You cross heaven and the vast realm of space, O sun, measuring days by nights, looking upon the generations. Seven bay mares carry you in the chariot, O sun god with hair of flame, gazing from afar. We have come up out of darkness, seeing the higher light around us, going to the sun, the god among gods, the highest light.4 The Persian scientist would have certainly been fascinated by the exaltation of Indra, who has filled the universe with the five orders of beings and with the seven classes (the Marut, the sun’s rays, the senses), and looks around with thirty-four lights: sun, moon, planets, and lunar mansions.5Al-Bīrūnī must have read one of the last hymns, in which mythical thought leads to metaphysical speculation, with the attentiveness of a philosopher used to Greek and Arab thinkers: There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomless deep? There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That One Thing breathed, windless, by its own nature. Other than that there was nothing beyond. Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning; with no distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with emptiness, that one arose through the power of heat. 6

Maybe, though, given his belief in the Koran, the Persian scientist was perplexed by the conclusions reached by that hymn: Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know. 7

However, the uncertainty typical of the dawn of philosophy finds an answer in mythical thought. In Mānavadharmaśāstra, the Law Code of Manu – Manu being the son of Brahmā – the origin of the universe is clear. At the beginning of his work, Manu states that once upon a time everything was dark, indiscernible, unthinkable, incomprehensible, “in a kind of deep sleep all over.” Then “the Self-existent Lord appeared – the Unmanifest” revealed himself: “manifesting this world beginning with the elements, projecting his might, and dispelling the darkness.” He focuses his thought, issues the waters, and lays his seed there. This becomes a golden egg, “as bright as the sun,” where he is born as Brahmā, “the grandfather of all the The Ṛgveda, trans. W. Doniger, London, Penguin, 1981, I, 50. Ibid., 10.55.3. 6 Ibid., 10.129.1-3 (modified Griffith translation). 7 Ibid., 10.129.6-7 (modified Griffith translation). 4 5

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worlds.”8 “That cause which is unmanifest and eternal, which has the nature of both the existent and the non-existent” emanates the man who “is celebrated in the world as Brahmā.”9 He then divides the egg into two, with each of the two halves creating the heavens and the earth: in the middle he puts the atmosphere and the eight directions of space as well as the home of the perennial waters. Then, he extracts his mind, and from the mind he extracts the ego and the “great self,” and gradually the five organs of sense. So, he combines the subtle parts with particles of his body and gives shape to all beings. At this point, he emanates “the group of gods who are endowed with breath and whose nature is to act:” from fire, wind and sun he squeezes out “the eternal triple Veda,” time and its divisions, the stars and the planets, the rivers, oceans and mountains, flat and rough terrain; “austerity, speech, sexual pleasure, desire, and anger.”10 Along with the stars, Brahmā also creates the states of mind: this is a first symptom of the system of correspondences that, in Indian culture, considers the stars as part of a much greater unity – the Whole. Al-Bīrūnī certainly understood the true meaning of these passages, and devotes a whole section of Chapter 20 of India to the egg of Brahmā. He links the Indian beliefs with the theories of Asclepius, the Koran, and Plato’s Timaeus; then, in the more strictly astronomical field, he recalls Brahmagupta, the Pauliśa-siddhānta, Āryabhaṭa, Aristotle and Ptolemy, in order to determine the equivalence between the Brahmāṇḍa, Brahmā’s egg, and the totality of the celestial spheres. He then offers a description of the pole, of Mount Meru, of the shape of heaven and earth, and of the first two movements of the universe (it is the wind that moves the sphere of fixed stars). Listening to the songs of the Atharvaveda, he must have realised that Night, Dawn’s sister, has sacred importance in India: it spreads through the “seats of the sky” and gives rise to “bright darkness,” a mother who has assumed the splendor of the lion, stag, tiger, leopard. “Excellent are you, O night, like a decorated bowl; you bear [as] maiden the whole form of kine; full of eyes, eager, [you show] me wondrous forms; you have put on the stars of heaven.”11 *** “This self of yours who is present within but is different from the moon and the stars, whom the moon and the stars do not know, whose body is the moon and the stars, and who controls the moon and the stars from within – he is the inner controller, the immortal.”12 So proclaim the Upaniṣads, tying phenomena and creatures in the wind – the breath of the body and the universe, and a symbol of the Ātman. This is the supreme principle, both inner and outer. Because space “within the heart” is just as great as outer space: “Both heaven and earth are contained within it, both fire and air, both sun and moon, both lightning and stars; and whatever there is of him (the Self) here in the world, and whatever is not (i.e., whatever has been or will be), all that is contained within it.” Original text and English translation are to be found in Manu’s Code of Law. A Critical Edition and Translation of the ‘Mānava-Dharmaśāstra’, ed. P. Olivelle, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005; English translation by P. Olivelle also in The Law Code of Manu, OWC, 2004, from which quotations are taken here, pp. 12-13. 9 Or, in the neutral form, brahman: the absolute impersonal being. 10 Ibid., p. 14. 11 19.47.1, 19.49.4 e 9. The original is Atharvavedasaṃhitā, Vāraṇasī, Caukhambā Vidyābhavana, 1990; English translation by W.D. Whitney, rev. C.R. Lanman, Atharva-Veda- Samhita (Cambridge, MA, 1905), repr. Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1984. Cp. Ṛgveda 10.127. 12 Upaniṣads, 7.3, trans. P. Olivelle, OWC, 1996, pp. 41-42. 8

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Gārgī asks Yājñavalkya: “That which is above the sky, that which is beneath the earth, that which is between these two, sky and earth, that which people call the past and the present and the future – across what is that woven?.” The answer is: “that is woven on space.” And when the question becomes, “on what is space woven?,” the answer is akṣara, the Imperishable: “Under the rule of the imperishable the sun and moon abide in their separate places. Under the rule of the imperishable sky and earth abide in their separate places. Under the rule of the imperishable moments, hours, days and nights, half months, months, seasons, and the year abide in their separate places.” The Imperishable is the Unseen Seer, the Unheard Hearer, the Unthought-of Thinker, the Unknown Knower: in other words, “your Ātman.” Everything, therefore, tends to coherence, and to designing an immense circle. In Tat (undifferentiated being), the sun, the moon, the stars, lightning and fire do not shine: “When He shines, everything shines after Him; by His light everything is lighted.” Not a single star, but the Ātman – what matters is not the individual subject, but its location in the absolute. All corresponds and all is connected: the world down here, for one thing, is also a sacrificial fire, the fire that surrounds the dead on the pyre and makes them ascend into heaven, and then descend on earth to new life: “the fuel is the earth itself, the smoke the fire, the light the night, the coals the moon, the sparks the stars.”13 These concepts are so important that they are repeated several times: for example, the stanza that in Kaṭhopaniṣad proclaims that everything shines when the Ātman shines, returns in Mundakopaniṣad and Śvetāśvatropaniṣad, but also in Purāṇa.14 In the great epic of the Mahābhārata itself, the teaching that Sanatsujāta – one of the “mental” sons of Brahmā – gives on the appearance of the “supreme, immortal, imperishable place of the real Brahman” includes this statement: It appears not as white, or red, or black or ironlike, or sun-hued. Neither in the earth nor in the sky is it found, and the water in the ocean does not carry it. It is not in the stars or clinging to lightning, and its color is not seen in the clouds; it is not in the wind or the deities, not found in the moon or the sun…It is the foundation, the immortal, the worlds, the Brahman, the glory: from it are the creatures born, in it they are dissolved. 15

Once again one is struck by the absoluteness of the discourse, the attempt to go beyond matter, natural phenomena, stars (and shortly after, death itself and the Vedic hymns) to arrive at the “foundation.” The sages, says the Mahābhārata in this same passage, hold that these differences “are the products of speech.” “On it is this whole universe established, and they who know it have conquered death.” But the essence is in itself ineffable: it transcends nature, religious observance, the language of the hymn and of poetry. Later, the Mahābhārata

References for the last three paragraphs: Bṛhadāranyaka-Upaniṣad, 3.7.11; Chāndogva-Upaniṣad, 8.3; Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad, 3.7.23; Bṛhadāranyaka-Upaniṣad, 3.8.9; Kaṭha-Upaniṣad, 5.15; BṛhadāranyakaUpaniṣad, 3.2.11. Italian translations in Hinduismo antico, vol. 1, ed. F. Sforza and others, Milan, Mondadori, 2010, pp. 177, 331, 179, 180, 392, 220; English translations by M. Müller, 2 vols., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1879 and 1884 (Dover reprint, New York, 1962), and online at Internet Sacred Texts Archive. 14 Śvetāśvatara-Upaniṣad 6.14, Muṇdaka-Upaniṣad 2.2.11; Īśvaragītā 10.13 (HA1, p. 1302). 15 Mahābhārata 5.44.26-27. The original is The Mahābhārata, critically edited by V.S. Sukthankar, S.K. Belvarkar e P.L. Vadya, 18 vols., Poona, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933-1966: the wonderful English translation is by J.A.B. van Buitenen, Mahābhārata, vol. III, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 291292. 13

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takes up the doctrine formulated in a famous hymn of the Ṛgveda to illustrate the creation made by the Puruṣa, the Primordial Man who sacrificed himself to shape the cosmos: When they divided Purusa how many portions did they make? What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet? The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made. His thighs became the Vaisya, from his feet the Sudra was produced. The Moon was gendered from his mind, and from his eye the Sun had birth; Indra and Agni from his mouth were born, and Vayu from his breath. Forth from his navel came mid-air the sky was fashioned from his head Earth from his feet, and from his car the regions. Thus they formed the worlds.16 In the Bhagavadgītā – the “Song of the glorious Lord” which is a portion of an episode of Book VI of the Mahābhārata – Kṛṣṇa, avatāra of Viṣṇu, reveals to Arjuna, the son of Indra, the manifestations of his power: I am the Self established in the heart of all contingent beings: I am the beginning, the middle, and the end of all contingent beings too. Among the Ādityas I am Viṣṇu, among lights the radiant sun, among the Maruts I am Marīci, among the stars I am the moon. Of the Vedas I am the Sāma-veda, I am Indra among the gods; among the senses I am the mind, amongst contingent beings thought.17 Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna are therefore the same thing with two different faces, as are Viṣṇu and Indra. They are both the first star – the sun – and the brightest star: the moon. *** Ancient Indian poetry, however, is not only about absoluteness, identity, unity, correspondences, and interiority. It also pays very special attention to phenomena: the importance and beauty of the sky. The Rāmāyaṇa, the great Indian epic traditionally attributed to Vālmīki and perhaps composed around the third-second century BCE, tells the story of Rāma, the seventh avatāra of Viṣṇu and brave warrior. Heir of the kingdom of Kosala, Rāma is deprived of his right and exiled from the capital city Ayodhyā. But he conquers the beautiful Sītā and takes her as his wife, spending the long years of exile with her and his brother Lakṣmaṇa, first in the vicinity of Mount Citrakūṭa, then in Daṇḍaka forest, inhabited by demons. In the forest, the demon king Rāvaṇa kidnaps Sītā and, anxious to possess her, he takes her to the island of Laṅkā. To rescue her, Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa join forces with the people of the ape-men, the Vanara, and with their greatest warrior: the wise, just, honest, faithful Hanumān. The Vanara build a bridge linking the southern tip of India with Laṅkā, the combined army defeats the demons and Rāvaṇa is killed in combat by Rāma. Hymns of the Ṛgveda, 10.90, trans. Griffith: Mahābhārata 12.347.47cd-53ab. Bhagavadgītā, trans. R.C. Zaehner, New York-Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969, 10. 20-22.; the original is found in The Bhagavadgītā, critically edited by S.K. Belvalkar, Poona, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1945. The Āditya (including Sūrya and Varuna) are a group of twelve sun gods, Viṣṇu the first; Marut the storm god, Marići their leader; Veda is sacred wisdom, Sama-veda is liturgical wisdom. 16 17

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Returned to Ayodhya and crowned king, however, Rāma must respect the dharma (ethical norm) and reject Sītā, suspected of having given in to Rāvaṇa. To provide incontrovertible proof of her innocence, Sītā submits herself to the acid test and passes it. In this great plot involving the action of spirits and demons, men and gods (often two faces of the same people), and in which the forces of good and evil play a cosmic role, the hero’s very birth takes place under an auspicious alignment of the stars: Castor and Pollux, the two brightest stars of constellation Gemini, are dominant; Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus reach their maximum height; Jupiter and the Moon are ascendant in Cancer. The Pleiades themselves nurse Skanda, the god of war, according to what the wise Viśvāmitra tells Rāma. When Triśaṅku is rejected by Indra and asks Viśvāmitra to make him ascend to heaven with his body, Rāma’s preceptor is able to create a new celestial vault with his ascetic powers: the new world is located in the southern hemisphere, and Triśaṅku is placed there in the manner of a constellation, perhaps the Southern Cross, a southern replica of the Great Bear.18 The whole story is marked, in its crucial points, by the appearance or disappearance of the stars. When Rāma reaches the forest, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and the Southern Cross take on a threatening aspect, the stars cease to shine and the planets lose their splendor. Later, when the demons appear in the forest, the stars rise “with the brilliance of fireflies,” while fish and water birds remain motionless in the lakes, the lotuses dry up, and flowers and fruits fall from the trees.19 At times there are veritable special effects. For example, Hanumān decides to travel to Laṅkā to seek Sītā, becomes gigantic and takes flight – he looks like the sun. In the fantastic spectacle that follows, colorful flowers of trees, torn and transported by the huge windy vortex caused by Hanumān’s body, fall into the sea and “that great ocean [shines] like the sky filled with stars.” Shortly after, when he enters Laṅkā at night, the full moon rises in the sky “in all its glory.” As the monkey watches the rising moon, the latter appears “white as a conch shell, white as milk, white as lotus stalks, it reminded him of a swan gliding in a lake.” When he returns to India, the endless sea reflects the sky on which the moon shines “vast as a sea of white water:” with the constellations that we would call Cancer and Capricorn as swans, clouds as duck weed, Castor and Pollux as big fish, Mars as an alligator, an island as an elephant, a swan in the form of Arcturus, and the rays of moonlight as fresh water. The whole fifth section of the poem, in line with its title Sundara, “beautiful”, is full of images of radiant brightness. The very court of Rāvaṇa, under the astonished eyes of Hanumān, shines with female faces: bright as lotus flowers desired by bees in the hall that glitters “like a calm cloudless sky in autumn shining with stars,” while Rāvaṇa himself shines like the moon.20 Two moments of the second section of the Rāmāyaṇa stand out for their intensity. One takes place in Ayodhyā, when Anusūyā,21 at sunset, urges Sītā to go back to Rāma: everything is quiet, the birds chirp before going to sleep, the ascetics still wear their wet clothes from the evening ablutions, grey smoke spreads from sacrificial fires, the trees make Rāmāyaṇa, 1.18.8-11; 1.37.30; 1.60.16-34. The critical edition of the original is in 7 voll., ed. by G.H. Bhatt, P.C. Divanji, D.R. Mankad, G.C. Jhala, P.L. Vaidya and U.P. Shah, published by Baroda between 1960 and 1975. The best (and most complete) translation is French: Le Rāmāyaṇa de Vālmīki, éd. P. Benoît, B. Pagani, B. Parlier, J.-M. Peterfalvi, M.-C. Porcher et A. Rebière, dir. M. Biardeau et M.-C. Porcher, Paris, Gallimard, 1999. 19 Ibid., 2.41.9; 3.23.11. 20 Ibid., 5.1.46-50; 5.2.57-59; 5.9.51-42. 21 The great ascetic, wife of sage Atri and mother of Dattatreya. They form the trinity Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Shiva known as Trimurti. 18

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up a thick pool of darkness, and the horizon vanishes: “Sītā, the night has arrived adorned with stars and the moon fills the sky with a veil of light. Go to Rāma and take care of him.” This is a nocturne that recalls Alcman’s, but is infinitely more human. Another episode anticipates it, in the section dedicated to Rāma’s childhood. Viśvāmitra, after telling the story of his life and of his family, realizes that it is already midnight: the trees, he says, are immobile, birds and animals are resting, and the darkness of the night pervades everything. “The twilight has slowly faded. The sky, thick with stars and planets, is shining with lights as though it were filled with eyes. And the cool-rayed moon is rising, dispelling the darkness of the world and gladdening with his radiance the hearts of all its creatures, while here and there the creatures of the night … are roaming.” If one didn’t know that this was written two thousand and five hundred years ago in India, one could easily mistake it for the work of Shakespeare or the imagination of some Romantic poet.22 No wonder that, before the decisive battle against Rāvaṇa, the wise Agastya prompts Rāma to utter the Ādityaŗdaya, the celebrated Vedic Hymn to the Sun, Sūrya. The latter embodies all the gods: Brahmā the creator, Viṣṇu the protector of the universe, Śivathe god of destruction, Skanda and Prajāpati, the Lord of the gods Indra, Kubera the lord of wealth, Kāla the spirit of time, Yama the god of death, Soma the god of the Moon, and Varuṇa who rules the waters. Sūrya, Origin of beings, Lord of the stars, the planets and the stars, Creator of the universe: he appears in the twelve forms of the months and knows the Ṛgveda, the Yajurveda and the Samaveda: Hail to the dispeller of darkness, the destroyer of cold, the exterminator of foes, the One whose extent is immeasurable, the destroyer of the ungrateful, the God who is the ruler of lights! The Sun gives life to all beings: “planted in created beings, he remains / awake when they have fallen asleep.”23 It is the hymn that announces Rāma’s victory. *** The women of the Rāmāyaṇa are of lunar, silvery-golden beauty. The comparison with the moon appears in all Indian love poetry. Bhartṛhṛari, the poet who writes of giving up worldly wisdom around the fifth century of our era, speaks of the pretty face of his lady as if it were the moon: “her mouth beautiful as the moon, hair deep black, / her two hands – rubies. / She radiates, / like a star.” In another stanza, he calls her face “moon-like,” her walk “Saturnine:” “she glitters like a star.” In five verses that have the same haunting beauty as Sappho’s, he laments: There may be light, may be fire, May be stars, jewels, the moon. Rāmāyaṇa, 2.119.10-13; I, 33, 15, trans. R.P. Goldman, Rāmāyaṇa I, New York, New York University Press, JJC Foundation, 2009. 23 Ibid., 6.105.3-19. 22

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But without my doe-eyed woman This world has become utterly dark. 24 Bhartṛhṛari here uses images that, in love lyric, are topoi of female beauty, to describe a night in which that beauty is dark because of the absence of the beloved. Magha, one of the great poets of the seventh century, sees Love itself, Kāma, shine through the window illuminated by the rays of the moon: Love, who for endless languor lay in the recesses of his abode, rose hanging on to the rays of the moon – these reached the window’s opening and shaped a grating of shimmering crystals.25 All it takes is moonrise: when its circle appears and forms a pattern of crystals at his the window, the pleasures of eros, which have languished in exhaustion all day, awaken. In the famous Amaruśataka attributed to the mysterious Amaruka, the flame of love is ignited by a series of elements that should instead dim it: Cool necklace, dampened couch and lotus petals, The wind from the Himalaya bringing drops of sleet: when these and even liquid sandal are but fuel to Love how shall his fire ever be extinguished?26 The paradox defying the laws of physics is of course only apparent, because the fire of love is fuelled precisely by the sight of the woman, with her pearl necklace and the face radiating moonlight, which in India oozes dew and frost. Even in remembrance, the face that resembles the moon circle continues to enchant. In The Secret Delights of Love attributed to Bilhaṇa– the poet from Kashmir who lived between the eleventh and twelfth century –there is a “lovely full-moon face”; “her long eyes at break of day / tremulous roving stars” are the source of fascination and nostalgia: Still I remember my beloved’s face Gleaming with pearls of sweat and saffron’s gold; The abundant moisture and her wandering eyes All the fatigue of love’s fulfillment told. No brighter does the full-faced moon appear When from Eclipse’s jaws she frees her sphere.27

24

Bhartṛhṛari, in Love Lyrics by Ámaru and Bhartri·Hari, trans. G. Bailey, and by Bílhana ed. and trans. R. Gombrich, New York, New York University Press, and the JJC Foundation, 2005, pp. 91-93. The original can be found in Śatakatraya, ed. D.D. Kosambi, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlala Publishers, 2002. 25 Magha, Śiśupāla-vadha (“The Slaying of Śiśupāla”), IX, 39, online transliterated text at GRETIL (“Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages” (my translation)). 26 Amaru, Amaruśataka, in An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry, trans. D.H.H. Ingalls, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, MA, 1965, p. 265. 27 Bilhaṇa, in Love Lyrics, p. 289.

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The cosmos never disappears from great love poetry, as eros and poetry are strong and universal dimensions. A ninth-century poet, Ratnākara, expressed the second equivalence in his long poem The Triumph of Hara, through the words of Śiva himself, setting clear parallels on the one hand between the parts of creation and the sarga (the cantos of a poem), on the other hand between the different ways of life and the alliteration and citrabandha (figurative poetry): The Creator’s wonderful world is like a poem: within its manifest sphere, it is composed of sarga, it celebrates the different manners of life, with citrabandha and alliteration; the ancient seer’s, the poet’s luminous fame is entirely fulfilled by you who understand it.28 Between the eighth and the ninth century, Yogésvara describes the autumn night with supreme virtuosity. In a stanza, he presents a sequence of four metaphors: “saucepan of the sky,” “tongue of lightning,” “cloud cat,” and “creamy moonlight.” In fact, they are resolved in two contiguous utterances: the cat sips the milk with his tongue from the bowl; the cloud aspires (to) the moon with lightning from heaven. In other words, the poet hints at the similarity between heaven and bowl, lightning and tongue, cloud and cat, moon and milk: a dark cloud flashes in the moonlit night, a cat drinks milk from the bowl – an autumn night and an animal night: Now the great cloud cat, darting out his lightning tongue, licks the creamy moonlight, from the saucepan of the sky.29 Moreover, in his compositions on worldly wisdom, Bhartṛhṛari shifts the parallels to the equivalence between the cosmic and the ethical level. The sun, he writes in a lyric, “makes brilliantly resplendent the lotus grove,” while “the moon makes the profusion of white night lotuses bloom;” the cloud, even without being asked to, “gives water:” “spontaneously the good apply themselves to others’ benefit.” In another composition he stages the five planets of Indian astronomy – Budha (Mercury), Śukra (Venus), Maṅgala (Mars), Bṛhaspati (Jupiter) and Kāla (Saturn) – with the sun, the moon, and the eclipse. Then he adds Rāhu, the ascending lunar node, the invisible planet that devours the Sun and the Moon in an eclipse. In the myth of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, Rāhu would like to get hold of the ambrosia that gods and demons have extracted from the primordial Ocean, but the Sun and the Moon prevent him from doing so by warning the gods, and Viṣṇu cuts him in half (the other part is Ketu, the descending lunar node). Rāhu, reduced to “merely a head,” cannot stop Sun and Moon but only eat them in the short time of an eclipse:

The Haravaija of Rājānaka Ratnākara, ed. Paṇḍit Durgāprasād and Kāśīnāth Pāṇḍuraṅg Parab, Delhi, Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 2005 (my translation). 29 Yogeśvara, in Sanskrit Poetry from Vidiākara’s “Treasury”, trans. D.H.H. Ingalls, Cambridge MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968, p.104, No. 257. 28

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Like Jupiter, Five or six others are also venerated. Toward them, and delighting in valor spectacular, Rāhu shows no hostility. Only these two shining lights he swallows: Sun, the day-maker, and Moon, lord of night. At which time, behold, brother! The Lord of the Dánavas is merely a head.30 It is an admirable integration between astronomy, cosmology and myth, to which the poet adds a gnomic element: the aim is in fact to indicate how revenge, even by the immortal lord of demons, can only be short-lived. Kālidāsa, the greatest Indian poet of all time, knows how to blend eros, nature and art. In Meghadūta, The Cloud Messenger praised by Goethe, a servant of the god of wealth Kubera is exiled for a year by his master and has to leave his beautiful bride. Eight months later, when the rainy season reaches mount Rāmagiri, where he is located, a cloud (who in the original is the lover of water currents) approaches him. The exile is overcome by nostalgia and composes a message for his bride, praying the cloud to deliver it and describing the path to follow, the signs by which to recognize the city, the home and the lady; finally, renewing his pleas, he leaves him the message. The description of the trip through the endless Indian districts is of unparalleled skill, because the poet not only reproduces – as if through a film camera – a landscape that is constantly changing, but he also describes the actions that the exile suggests to the cloud, and fills everything with the aura of myth and yearning, so that nature acquires a coloring of its own, of extreme delicacy and depth. When he comes to describing the city, then, the details light up with desire and become precious. The cloud immediately recognizes Alakā, where “palaces with their cloud-kissing tops / equal you in loftiness, / and their gem-paved floors rival the glitter / of your glistening rain drops.”31 The urban landscape is seen as an artificial reflection – that is, created by means of human art – of the natural one. The vault of heaven, in this context, looks more and more like the outside of a cup set with gems. Kālidāsa seems to accomplish something equally extraordinary in four amazing stanzas of his Ṛtusaṃhāra, the Garland of Seasons. This is the section devoted to Autumn, song III. In India autumn nights are the clearest, those in which the moon and the stars shine with the greatest purity. The first description is of the night itself. Splendidly jeweled by numberless star-clusters, Night wraps herself in moonlight’s shining robe when the moon her face struggles free of obscuring clouds. Day by day, she grows like a young girl steeping gracefully into proud womanhood. … The moon, the eye’s delight, captivates all hearts with aureoles bright; 30 31

Bhartṛhṛari, in Love Lyrics by Ámaru and Bhartri·Hari, p. 41. Meghadūta, in Kālidāsa, The Loom of Time, trans. Chandra Rajan, London, Penguin, 1989, 66, p. 152.

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Everything, in this vision, starts from the comparison between the autumn nights, which grow increasingly longer, and the girl growing into a woman. The translation cannot render the compound forms that make up an adjective in the original, but it is clear that the first three verses describe a girl and, at the same time, the autumn night: the moon is the face of the Night and, once free of the clouds, the Night wears the brightness of the former like a cloak, but the girl’s face is like a cloudless moon. The moonlight is the cloak of the night, but the girl is wearing a silvery-white coat, like the moonlight. The star clusters are also the girl’s jewels. Gradually, the hidden beauty of the Night and the girl is revealed. The girl, who was growing up in the first stanza, in the second is a woman: a bride. The moon now captivates the heart with its rays that fall down like snowflakes, but only increases the torment of the wives left alone by their husbands. The second passage, instead, focuses on the landscape, introducing lakes, emerald light and a swan: A cloudless sky inlaid with the moon and countless stars wears the exquisite beauty of lakes glowing with the sheen of emeralds, and strewn with moon-lotuses, wide open; and a regal swan floats serene Autumn skies are enchanting, star-sprinkled, lit by a clear-rayed moon; serenely beautiful are the directions of space, free of thronging rain clouds: the earth is dry; waters sparkling clear; breezes consorting with lotuses blow cool.33 As in the first stanza, sky and water mirror each other. The former, in which are embedded the gems of the moon and the stars, takes on the green-dark blue emerald reflection of a lake; the latter, dotted with white lotuses, reflects the bright spots of the stars, as the white swan swims in it milky and snow-white like the moon. The second takes up the charm of the first, changing it: the sky and the stars are illuminated by the claritas of the moonbeams; then there is the earth, no longer wet, but whose water is collected in clear pools; the wind blows lightly. The lotuses seem transported in the air, in the breeze. As in the first stanza, the sky is clear of clouds. Their absence opens it up into an expanse: the vastness of the lakes here becomes a “beautiful” extended space, as immense as in the Homeric simile of Iliad VIII. This is presumably between the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and Indian poetry reveals a cosmic afflatus of unusual power.

The Ṛtusaṃhara of Kālidāsa, ed. M.R. Kale, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1969, III, 7 and 9: a beautiful English translation can be found in The Loom of Time, p. 117. I am using here Rajan’s commentary. 33 The Ṛtusaṃhara of Kālidāsa, III, 21-22: Loom of Time, pp. 119-120. 32

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*** Every Hindu temple, since ancient times, has also been a representation of the cosmos. In the tenth century, but probably long before that, Indian art produced the sculpture of nine deities embodying celestial influences and bodies: the Navagraha. The British Museum possesses two groups of them: one, of the tenth century, is smaller and made of sandstone, representing the gods (Sun, Moon, the five planets, Rāhu and Ketu) on an architrave; the other, truly impressive, was made in slate in the thirteenth century, in Konark. There, in the thirteenth century, King Narasiṃhadeva I built a Sun Temple also known as “Black Pagoda.” It is shaped like a giant Sun Chariot on twelve pairs of wheels, pulled by seven pairs of horses. Thousands of sculptures adorn it: deities, divine and human musicians, dancers, lovers (the temple is famous for its erotic reliefs), animals, plants and geometric patterns. In short, it is a universe of its own, imitating the cosmos. Finally, India has also numerous “heavenly vaults” originally inspired, art historians think, by Western models.34 In the 1720s, Jai Singh II ordered the construction of five “observatories,” the two most famous of which are in Delhi and Jaipur. The latter, Jantar Mahar, was built in 1727 after the model of Ulug Begh’s observatory in Samarkand. It consists of fourteen enormous geometric instruments to measure time, predict eclipses, track the motions of the stars, and check the declinations, altitudes and ephemeris of planets. Between the construction of the Temple of the Sun in Konark and that of Jantar Mahar in Jaipur at least five centuries passed. In that time, starting from the thirteenth century, the Islamic Delhi Sultanate was born and the Mughals conquered India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, establishing their empire there. It was Babūr, a descendant of Tamerlane, who initiated this enterprise, in the first decades of the sixteenth century. After him there were Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and then all the other kings up until 1857 when, after the Revolt against the British East India Company, the “British Raj” was established. Both the Delhi Sultanate and, above all, the Mughal Empire have had tragic consequences on the religious-political level (almost all Mughal emperors attempted to impose Islam everywhere), but they also played a fundamental role in the development of science, culture and visual arts in India. The importation and reworking of Persian models in architecture, painting and miniature – which Al-Bīrūnī would certainly have approved of – take on massive proportions, and the stellar patterns of Islamic art gradually occupy the imagination of people living in the vast expanse of land ranging from Iran’s borders to the west, up to Bengal and present Bangladesh to the east. If one looks at the latticed windows of the Qutb Minar in Delhi, and then the great Mosque of Fahtepur Sikri, one will find a pattern of stars that, in different forms, recalls the Alhambra. While Indian astronomy, with Jainism, produced beautiful illuminated manuscripts such as those in the Schøyen Collection, the Mughals illustrated the Babūrnāma, the “Memoirs of Babūr,” with miniatures strongly affected by Persian influence. In one you see Babūr warming himself up at night by the campfire, with his men: squatting on the green grass and surrounded by their horses, the warriors listen to their leader, while trees, rocks, wild animals and a fortress act as a background. A wonderful starry sky dominates the scene. An even more impressive example

Cf. A. Coburn Soper, “The ‘Dome of Heaven’ in Asia,” The Art Bulletin, 29, 4 (1947), pp. 225-248. See in particular the pictorial decoration of the Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra, a marvel of Buddhist art of the second century BCE. 34

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is The Book of the Birth of Iskandar by ‘Imādal-Dīn Mahmūd al-Kāshī (about 1411, Wellcome Institute Library, London), which splendidly illustrates the horoscope of Iskandar – Tamerlane’s grandchild – showing the positions of the skies on April 25, 1384, the day the prince was born. Mughal architecture, especially in the seventeenth century, both in Pakistan and in India, gives precise geometric shape to star motifs: consider the tomb of Akbar at Sicandra, the Mosque of Shah Jahan in Thatta, the Jama Mosque of Delhi, the Harmandir Sahib (the Golden Temple of the Sikhs) in Amritsar, up until the grandiose forts scattered across the territories of the empire. The stars dominate the decoration of all those buildings with evernew inventions. Fort Amber in Jaipur and Fort Lahore feature some Sheesh Mahal: Palaces or Mirror Halls intending to reproduce the view of the night sky. The one in Lahore, built by Shah Jahan between 1631 and 1632, is perhaps the finest example. Legend has it that his wife asked the emperor to gather the stars in a room for her. The ingenious architect to whom the king passed the request, then, invented a room in which thousands of small mirrors reflect the light of a torch simulating the stars that fill the night sky. Perhaps due to the influence of Mughal art, or perhaps to contact with the West, or else to the internal development of India, in the seventeenth century a new sensitivity emerges in Hindu painting. A miniature today in Berlin and dating back to 1650 shows Rādā, Kṛṣṇa’s consort, sitting and holding her long hair with her right hand; the moon and the stars, at the top, act as a frame. Another miniature, from the beginning of the eighteenth century and now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, shows a lady visiting an ashram, a hermit, at night. Thick vegetation surrounds and covers the hermitage, while (in the center on the ground) the fire and (on the top left) a crescent moon and the stars illuminate the scene. Another miniature of the mid-eighteenth century, now at the Art Museum in Berkeley, represents, in the Khambavatī-Rāgiṇī, four-headed Brahmā seated on a throne at the altar of sacrifice as a lady assists him. The moon shines on high, while myriads of golden stars fill the sky, descending almost to touch the god. With the nineteenth century, finally, syncretism takes root. The Sarvasiddhāntatattvacūḍāmaṇi, the “Jewel of the essence of all sciences,” a celestial chart of 1840 preserved at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, shows the constellations of the two hemispheres in a unique blend of Western and Indian figures. In the seventeenth century, the poet Bihārī Lāl wrote: The lengthening starry nights bring immeasurable joy to every couple, but to the ruddy geese pair they give boundless grief.35 He sounds like an Arabic or Persian poet. Instead, he is an heir of the Indian tradition, perhaps under the influence of Mughal art. If one reads it after Kālidāsa, one gets the impression of going from Homer to Sappho, and from autumn to winter.

Bihārī Lāl, in Bihārī, The Satasaī, trans. K.P. Bahadur, London, Penguin, 1992, 709, p. 309 (modified translation). In Bahadur’s explanation, popular belief has it that the male and female ruddy geese part at night, each of them going to the two extreme ends of the pond. Hence, the longer winter night, that makes human couples happier because it affords them more time for love-making, is cause of immense grief to the geese. 35

Chapter 13

SNOW WHITE One day, the young cowherd Niu Lang comes across seven fairy sisters as they are swimming. Encouraged by the ox that accompanies him, he steals their clothes and waits to see what happens. The seven girls choose the youngest and most beautiful among them, the weaver Zhi Nü, to retrieve the clothes, but because Niu Lang has seen her naked she must agree to marry him. The two are happy together, but the goddess of the Sky (and mother of Zhi Nü) finds out that the fairy has married a mortal and forces her to go back to weaving coloured clouds in the sky. Niu Lang, transported in flight by the ox, reaches her, but the goddess (or the Emperor) of the Sky decrees that the two should remain apart, each on a different shore of the great celestial river: the Milky Way. Zhi Nü is Altair, in the constellation of the Weaver (our Aquila); Niu Lang is Vega in the constellation of the Shepherd, Lyra. Zhi Nü and Niu Lang may meet only once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, when all the magpies in the world rise to the sky and build a bridge over the River of Stars. That day is celebrated in China as the qixi Festival, in the seventh month of the seventh moon (Tanabata in Japan and Chilseok in Korea): The Night of the Seventh Month or Competences, the Anniversary of the Seventh Sister, where girls make a show of their domestic skills (particularly in cutting melons) and make vows to find a good husband. It is one of the most beautiful stories of Chinese mythology, and explains the position of Altair and Vega in the sky with a catasterism similar to the Greek-Roman ones. It is found in both engravings and poetry. One of the Nineteen Old Poems (the seventh of which contains a beautiful nocturne of the moon and constellations taken up in the third century by Lu Ji) sings: Far far away, the Herdboy Star; bright bright, the Lady of the River of Heaven; slim slim, she lifts a pale hand, clack clack, plying the shuttle of her loom, all day long – but the pattern’s never finished; welling tears fall like rain. The River of Heaven is clear and shallow; what a little way lies between them!

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It is said that the first Roman embassy in China, sent by Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius in 164-166 (perhaps only made up of merchants claiming to be ambassadors to get more credit), brought with it a treatise on astronomy, but we do not know if this is true. Instead we know for sure that Indian Buddhist Chhuthan Hsi-Ta, in the first decades of the eighth century AD, during the Tang period, compiled the Kaiyuan zhanjing: the “Treatise on Astrology (and Astronomy) of the Kaiyuan Era.” Rome, India, China. The stars appear to travel from west to east. However, China has an ancient tradition of science, myth and representation of the stars. I cannot go over it here, but I would like to recall a few facts. In a tomb of the Neolithic, in Puyang in the Henan province, a mosaic was made (about 4000 BCE) reproducing the shape of Beidou (the Big Dipper), the Tiger and the Blue Dragon. Moving on to the historical period, the fifth century BCE left us a lacquered box of lunar mansions which was found in the tomb of Zeng Hou Yi in Suizhou, in Hubei: it includes the Dragon to the left and the Tiger to the right, with the pictogram of a large spoon in the middle (Beidou, the Big Dipper), surrounded by twenty-eight characters that name the Chinese constellations. The second century BCE produced the star charts of Mawangdui, on silk, now preserved in the Provincial Museum of Hunan. The one that shows a series of comets is perhaps the most remarkable. The famous Dunhuang star chart, now at the British Museum, dates back to the early eighth century CE, during the period of the Tang Dynasty.2 The star charts, astronomical clock and armillary sphere of the great scientist Su Song date back to the eleventh century. In China there have been three different cosmological models. According to the first, Gai Tian, the skies are a hemispherical dome revolving around its peak, the North Star: “the Earth is the plough, and the sky its lid.” According to the second, Hun Tian, the sky is spherical and so is the Earth, which is within it. Finally, according to Xuan Ye, the sky is infinite and shapeless, and celestial bodies fluctuate in it. With the establishment of Taoism, the centre of cosmology became the yin and the yang, the two opposing principles that also represent Night and Day, darkness and light, cold and heat, Earth and Heaven. Everything is rooted in Chaos, source of the energy (qi) that moves the stars, while the seven luminaries – the sun, the moon and the five planets – are slowed down by the influence of the Earth. The universe is made up of qi and li (structure, order), and stars, planets, the sun and the moon float at will in empty space. Tao is also related to the theory of five phases (wuxing) that follow one another in the two cycles of generation and destruction: they reflect the five elements (fire, earth, metal, earth, wood) and correspond to colors, seasons and shapes. From a historical standpoint, the periods in which astronomy and astral art seem to flourish with particular intensity are the fourth century BCE, the Han period (from 206 BCE to 220 CE), the Tang (618-907 CE), the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Ming (1368-1644). In the 1

The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry. From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century, ed. and trans. B. Watson, New York, Columbia University Press, 1984, p. 100. Since 2006 the Library of Chinese Classics has published, first for Zhonghua Book Company (Beijing) and then for Hunan People’s Publishing House (Hunan), the most important classics of Chinese literature, each with the original text, the modern Chinese translation and the English translation. 2 In the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang (covering a period of about a thousand years, from the third century BCE), the Buddhist art has often depicted beautiful “domes of Heaven” on the vaults: cf. A.C. Soper, “The ‘Dome of Heaven’ in Asia.”

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fourth century BCE, at the time of the Warring States, the two astronomers Shi Shen and Gan De were observers of planets, sun spots and stars. Under the Han dynasty Indian astronomy reached China along with the expansion of Buddhism, as the great astronomer – and mathematician, poet, critic, geographer, cartographer – Zhang Heng invented the seismometer, the water armillary sphere and the odometer, corrected the calendar, studied the eclipse of the sun and moon, and wrote an extensive star catalogue as well as the Ling Xian (“Mystical Laws”): a compendium of all the astronomical theories of the time. In this same period, the great historian and Great Astronomer of the emperor Sima Qian (castrated for defending a general fallen in disgrace) completed his father’s project by writing the Shiji: the “Records of the Grand Historian.” In it, he inserted a section entitled “Book of Celestial Offices,” in which he discusses the work of scientists Gan De and Shi Shen, and presents a star catalogue. There are at least three artifacts testifying to the great importance of astronomy and astrology in the Han period. The first is a hu, a sacrificial vase with a lid, now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which probably comes from Luoyang, the ancient capital of the Eastern Han, where the Roman “embassy” arrived in 164-66. Decorated on one side with a blue animal with bared fangs rushing towards an archer, and on the other with a long tiger, it undoubtedly presents a heavenly iconography: the blue wolf is Sirius, and the archer is Bow (the constellation of the Dog); the White Tiger is the cosmological symbol of the West, whose domain borders with that of the Wolf and the Bow. The second is the chamber of a tomb in Luoyang. Above the main girder are three bricks, the central one being the universe: a blue dragon, a white tiger, a red bird, a snake and a turtle (the four cardinal points), a bear, a leopard, a monkey, a man and a woman each with a bi disc in hand (the yin and yang). The ceiling, consisting of twelve bricks, represents the sun, the moon and the stars; day and night occupy six bricks each. The last artifact is an engraving on stone depicting the sun at the center, flanked on the left by the constellation of the Weaver and on the right by another.3 In the Tang period – when China starts “pacing the void”4– two characters dominated the scene at the scientific level: Yi Xing and Gautama Siddha. The former, a Buddhist monk, a mechanical engineer and an astronomer, was hired to direct the mapping of earth and sky and was the first to apply the exhaust to the water celestial globe mechanism. The latter, of Indian descent, introduced Indian numbers in China, translated the Navagraha calendar into Chinese and edited the compilation of the Treatise on Astrology of the Kaiyuan Era, which includes the astronomical tables of Āryabhaṭa. The Tang period was the richest in terms of astral poetry. This is symbolically represented by the star chart of Dunhuang and the bronze mirror today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The former, now at the British Library, shows over 1.350 stars and is articulated into thirteen sections, of which the first one is a planisphere (that is, a flat map centered on the North Pole) while the remaining twelve are flat maps centered on the celestial equator. The mirror is a veritable compendium of Chinese science and thought about the cosmos. It is a bronze disc with five concentric circles. Starting from the centre, the first depicts the 3

J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China. III, Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 276, pl. 26. 4 E.H. Schafer, Pacing the Void. T’ang Approaches to the Stars, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1977.

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four animals of the Heavenly Palaces: the crimson bird, blue dragon, black turtle, and white tiger representing four macro constellations, each composed of seven smaller ones, so as to form the twenty-eight constellations of the Chinese zodiac. The second circle depicts the twelve animals of the animal cycle: rat, bull, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. Combined with the five elements, they form the cycle of the Chinese calendar for sixty years. In the third circle we find the eight trigrams – the eight series of continuous and broken lines, each of which represents the yin and the yang respectively – which, in sequence, stand for the Sky (three solid lines), the Earth (three broken lines), Thunder, the Wind, Water, the Mountain, the Swamp. Then, in the fourth circle, counterclockwise, there are the diagrams of the constellations of the twenty-eight xiu, the lunar mansions. On the last circle, finally, a clockwise inscription declares: (This mirror) has the virtue of Chhang-kêng (The Evening Star, Hesperus, Venus) And the essence of the white Tiger (symbol of the Western Palace), The mutual endowments of Yin and Yang (are present in it), The mysterious spirituality of Mountains and Rivers (is fulfilled in it). With due observance of the regularities of the Heavens, And due regard to the tranquility of the Earth, The Eight Trigrams are exhibited upon it, And the Five Elements disposed in order on it. Let none of the hundred spiritual beings hide their face from it; Let none of the myriad things withhold their reflection from it. Whoever possesses this mirror and treasures it, Will meet with good fortune and achieve exalted rank.5 Astronomy, astrology, calendar, Taoist doctrine, correspondences, and correlations: the whole universe is enclosed in a mirror. The two Song eras – during which Chinese and Japanese astronomers were the only ones to record the supernova explosion that gave birth to the Crab Nebula – produced a flowering of nocturnal poetry and painting. The following Yuan period begins with Kublai Khan, the host of Marco Polo and builder of the “stately pleasure-dome” that Coleridge later celebrated in his poem. The Chinese scholar Yelü Chucai had accompanied Genghis Khan to Persia in 1210 to study the local calendar and adapt it to the use of the Mongol Empire. Under Kublai, some Chinese astronomers worked in the Persian observatory of Maragheh. Then the emperor founded the one in Beijing, entrusting it to the Persian Jamal ad-Din, who gave him a globe, an armillary sphere and an astronomical almanac. Perhaps the greatest scientist in Chinese history, Guo Shoujing – astronomer, hydraulic engineer, mathematician and scholar of the Five Classics of literature – issued a new calendar which anticipated the Gregorian one and worked in the observatory of Gaocheng. He also founded another twenty-six observatories. Finally, in the Ming period the national observatory was moved from Beijing to Nanjing, while the great temples of Heaven, the Sun, the Moon and the Earth were built, between 1420 and 1530, in the northern capital. Islamic astronomy continued to influence China, until European astronomy took hold, starting from the arrival of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (Li Madou in Chinese) in Macau, and then in Beijing in 1601. Ricci, who spoke and wrote Chinese and 5

Needham, Science and Civilization, vol. III, opposite p. 248, pl. 22.

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preached and practiced Chinese inculturation, introduced Euclidean geometry, trigonometry and isoperimetric inequality, the sphere and the astrolabe; drew famous celestial and terrestrial maps; accurately predicted the eclipses; and translated the four books of Confucius into Latin. His successors, Ferdinand Verbiest and Adam Schall von Bell, continued his work, as the telescope finally reached the Middle Kingdom. *** One of the Nineteen Old Poems, towards the first or second century of our era, presents a beautiful picture of the moonlit autumn night with the sky full of stars: the frost, “white dew,” drenches the grass, the cicadas cry among the trees, the black swallows have disappeared. Then the poet recalls a classmate who, flying high into ambition and career, has forgotten their friendship, leaving him behind like “a forgotten shadow”: what are the ancient vows for, he asks? They were empty words, as empty as the Winnow (Sagittarius) to the south, the Spoon (the Big Dipper) to the north, the Ox that “takes no yoke” (Capricorn): if they are not founded on a rock, these names are high-sounding but unnecessary. In fact, these verses are a variation on those – sacred because of their attribution to Confucius – found in Shi Jing, the Book of Songs, a collection of three hundred and five compositions, some of which may date back to 1000 BCE: “Bright shines that Draught Ox / but one yokes it to no wagon; … / South there is the Winnow / but it can’t be used to sift with; / north there is the Dipper / but no wine or sauce it ladles.”6 Stars and constellations are thus very alive in Chinese lyric poetry from the beginning, and exquisite astral poetry is composed also by protagonists of Chinese history. For example, Cao Cao, War Lord and penultimate Han Chancellor – a brilliant and ruthless politician who lived at the turn of the second and third centuries of our era, appearing as a cunning deceiver in the fourteenth-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms – wrote a short lyric on the Ocean, made of successive brush strokes that seem to come from a Flemish master of the seventeenth century. The sea is boundless, with seething waters and shattered waves rising with a roar. The islands look like mountains, with dense trees and lush grass; the autumn wind mournfully cries, and the sun and the moon seem to rise from the abyss, while the stars and the Galaxy, brilliant in their effulgence, seem to sink into it. “How great is my delight! I sing of it in this song.”7 However, it is in the Tang period that poetry blooms with unprecedented splendor, also expressing deep feeling for the night and the stars. Du Mu recalls the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver by introducing a lady who flaps away the fireflies with a little silk fan. The poet uses a fine brush to paint different shades of luminescence: the candle spreading cold light on the walls, the wandering fireflies, the moon shimmering in the night, the stars: The painted screen is chilled in silvery candle and autumn light. With a little silken fan, she tries to flap away the fireflies. The moonlight in the sky 6 7

The Columbia Book, p. 99. Ibid., p. 105.

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A pensive and enchanted night: the cold blows on the light and the latter, in turn, is mirrored in the former in alternate streams and points: whole, on the walls; in a dance of particles, with fireflies; full, again, in the night reflected in jasper; and finally star-spangled (thus corresponding to the fireflies) at the end. Du Mu did not read Rūmī on the painting of the Byzantines and the Chinese. However, just like the Byzantines, he prepared a perfectly polished wall for the Chinese colors to be reflected on.9 These colors are made of “sfumature,” – shades of shades, as it were – as in the best Chinese painting, and create a masterpiece that seems drawn with the air moved by a light fan. Wang Wei – who was also a great and much imitated painter – described instead an “An Autumn Evening in the Mountains,” where the light fades into the moonlight amidst the trees: After rain the empty mountain Stands autumnal in the evening, Moonlight in its groves of pine, Stones of crystal in its brooks. Bamboos whisper of washer-girls bound home, Lotus-leaves yield before a fisher-boat – And what does it matter that springtime has gone, While you are here, O Prince of Friends?10 An intact nature, purified by the rain: the crisp moonlight among the pines frames and defines the stream, the rocks, the river, the women, the flowers, the boat. Everything shines. It is springtime, and a poet is drinking under the moon. He is one of the major Chinese artists: the “Immortal Poet” Li Bai. Among the flowers, near a jug of wine, he is alone with his shadow and the stars. He is happy, when he sings, the moon vibrates up and down; if he dances, his confused shadow leaps. “Sober, we three remain cheerful and gay; / Drunken, we part and each goes his way.” At the end of “Drinking Alone under the Moon,” however, Li Bai imagines that the shadow and the moon accompany him to “linger” in his wandering with “his song:” “Next time we’ll met beyond the stars above.”11 A light-hearted journey up to the final leap towards the Milky Way: from shadow and moon to the ascension into the sky. Li Bai is shadow and moon: with them, after passing beyond the human, he shines in the distant light of the Galaxy. The evocative power of such a poet is impressive. One can see it fully deployed in what is perhaps the best known Chinese lyric poem, his “Quiet Night Thoughts,” where a supreme compression reduces everything to its essence: a man lying down, the moon. The moon

8

Original and English translation in How To Read a Chinese Poem. A Bilingual Anthology of Tang Poetry, ed. E.C. Chang, North Charleston, Book Surge, 2007, pp. 322-323. 9 See chapter 11 above. 10 Wang Wei, “Early Autumn in the Mountains,” in The Selected Poems of Wang Wei, trans. D. Hinton, London, Anvil Press Poetry, 2009, p. 32. 11 Li Bai (Li Po), Drinking Alone Under the Moon, in Songs of the Immortals. An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. Xu Yuan Zhong, London, Penguin, 1994, p. 50.

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shines; the man lifts his head and contemplates the light; then bows his head and thinks of the land where he was born: Before my bed there is the bright moonlight So that it seems like frost on the ground: Lifting my head I watch the bright moon, Lowering my head I dream that I’m home.12 The second half-line of the first verse (“bright moonlight”) is taken up in the second halfline of the third (“bright moon”): first the moonlight as such, then as seen by the subject. The two movements of the head are parallel and opposite; the bed of the first line corresponds to the ground of the second and, finally, with a leap, to his homeland. It is the moonlight that arouses reflection and nostalgia, leading to the thought of “home.” That light is like white frost, a frequent simile in Chinese (and, as we have seen, Indian) poetry. But the usual image reverberates, here, on both the preceding and the following one (the moonlight and the bright moon). And because the bed and the ground are parallel, the frost scatters its cold luminescence even on the bed and, by virtue of the last correspondence, it casts its light on the native land. Here and there, the present bed and the distant homeland, are united by the moon and by the frost. As Dante would say, “the frost writes fair copies on the ground / to mimic in design its snowy sister:” like a pen on the page, it replicates the image of snow, her sister, in the fields.13 In Li Bai’s poem, frost replicates – reflects – the moonlight, and thus becomes the image of here and there. Not all poets have such ability to synthesize. Han Hong, for example, in his “In reply to the poem ‘On an autumn night’ received from Cheng Yan,” starts with a similar situation: from his bamboo bed he turns to the morning wind, while on the lonely city “the pale moon is hazy;” up along the “River of Stars,” the Milky Way, flies “a single autumn goose,” and in the dark you can hear steps on the stones. The day advances in the air, but the poet has now overcome sleep by reading the verses of his friend, and “the crows have started to caw.”14 Once again, a bed and the moon. But then, the goose flies high against the background of the starry sky. The poet does not turn his head this time, but continues his sleepless reading. The night is the goose that flies across the sky: it is the poem, and poetry.15

12

Original and English translation in Li Po and Tu Fu, Poems, ed. A. Cooper, London, Penguin, 1973, pp. 108-109; good translations and essential notes can be found in Li Bai, Florilège, éd. P. Jacob, Paris, Gallimard, 1985. There are many translations of this most famous of poems: to give an idea of the variations, I reproduce here that of Xu Yuanchong for the Selected Poems of Li Bai in the Library of Chinese Classics, 2007, p. 35: “Before my bed a pool of light – / O can it be frost on the ground? / Eyes raised, I see the moon so bright; / Head bent, in homesickness I’m drowned.” 13 Inferno, XXIV, 4-5 14 Ha Hong, “In reply to the poem ‘On an autumn night’ received from Cheng Yan,” p. 93, in Three Hundred Tang Poems, trans. and ed. P. Harris, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poetry, New York, London, Toronto, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. 15 Xu Hun, “Early Autumn,” in Three hundred Tang Poems, p. 249.

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The image of geese flying against the background of the Milky Way is also used by Xu Hun. In his “Early Autumn” he describes the lengthening of the night and the west wind blowing on the vines, as “the last of the glow-worms settle on the white dew.”16 Liu Fangping, instead, sets his vision of the night in the spring. Again the moonlight bathes the house. Now, though, there are constellations filling the sky with their movements: the Big Dipper, to the north, is horizontal; the stars of the south are declining. The night – this night – makes the poet realize that the spring air is warm, and as if to confirm this the sound of insects begins to penetrate the green veil at the window: Moonlight bathes half of the house as the night deepens. The Big Dipper hangs horizontally; the southern stars slope down. On this very night, I find out the spring air is warm. The sound of insects begins to penetrate my green window gauze.17 Moon and stars, as if they were a perpetual systole and diastole, conjure up the Chinese night. Gu Kuang, for example, imagines a lady of the palace hearing the songs and the sounds of pipes going up into the sky from the “jade tower.” Then Shadows part for the moon palace – I hear a water clock drip in the night. Rolling up my crystal curtain I draw close to the Milky Way.18 Li Shangyin sees Chang’e – the girl who, according to the legend, became the moon goddess by stealing the pill of immortality from her husband – go every night across the sky against the stars of the setting Milky Way: the elixir that enabled her to leap up into the sky makes her a solitary, eternal wanderer: The candle light casts a deep shadow on the mica screen. As the Milky Way is ebbing down the morning stars are ready to sink. Chang’e must have some regret for having stolen the elixir of life, for night after night, she faces alone the blue sky and the emerald sea.19 Tu Hsün-Ho links the missing lunar halo and the luminescence of the stars to emphasize that he spends midnight under the only light of the lamp: the color of the hills and the sounds of the river wrap him “in unseen sorrow;” “ten years of memory / join with the sudden rain to 16

How To Read, pp. 150-151. Ibid., pp. 364-365. 18 Gu Kuang, “Palace Song,” in Three hundred Tang Poems, p. 92. 19 How To Read, pp. 358-359. 17

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pelt my heart.”20 Zhang Hu wrote his verses on the wall near the Jinling ferry, Nanjing, where the moon and the stars appeared to him by reflection: the former, the moon, as an agent of the tide, the latter, the stars, as a term of comparison with the fires shining on the other bank of the Yangtse River. Unlike Homer in Book VIII of the Iliad, the poet does not develop the simile between fires and stars: he only cares about his sadness, and to express it he merely sketches in the landscape: In the building on the hill by the Jingling ferry crossing A traveler staying overnight is bound to feel melancholy. In the setting moon on the river at night, as the tide recedes, There are two or three starry sparks of light – the township of Guazhou.21 Li He is a poet of the late Tang period who, according to legend, had “demonic talent” and lived only twenty-six years. This “Ghost of Poetry” of boundless inventiveness has left at least three compositions that are worth remembering in this context. “Song beyond the Frontiers” describes the imminence of an invasion of the barbarians, the Tartars: there is a Tartar horn that has “summoned the north wind,” a Gate shining “whiter than a stream,” the sky swallowing the way to Kokonor –“along the Wall, a thousand moonlit miles.” These images, with their unexpected associations, show bright audacity. The dew falls, the flags drip, bronze clangs, the nomad armor meshes serpent’s scales, and the horses whinny: In autumn stillness see the Banner Head, On the vast sands the mournful furze. North of our tents the sky itself must end, Across the frontier comes the River’s roar.22 “A thousand moonlit miles” as a way to indicate the Great Wall is surprising and immediately convincing. The process leading to the “Banner Head,” the constellation Mao (which roughly corresponds to the Pleiades) is more complex: the original term is máotóu, where máo indicates the “yak’s tail,” and a flag with a yak tail on top as decoration, while máotóu (head of máo) refers to the Banner Head. The glittering Pleiades signal the arrival of the barbarians from the north along with the banner decorated with the yak tail. Along with the sand and gorse, the horns, the clanging bronze, and the nomads’ weapons, this draws a perfect picture of the Desert of the Tartars, of the Border. In Twelve Poems on the Months, instead, Li He represents the passing of the year according to the Moons, from March to the following February. The Seventh Moon, September, presents a “cool glint of starlight round the Cloudy Island,” dewdrops coming together on a plate, the last flowers blooming at the top of branches, orchids withering in “deserted gardens.” Autumn is the season of agony that the poet, in his pessimism, prefers. In the beautiful “Ballad of Heaven” the writer evokes a whole world of myths to show how the gods and the immortals can afford to disregard the passage of time and the ages of the Earth. In rapid succession we see the Star River, the Jade Palace, the cassia tree and the fairies (all 20

The Columbia Book, p. 291. Zhang Hu, Inscribed at the Jingling Ferry, in Three Hundred Tang Poems, p. 257. 22 Li He, “Song beyond the Frontiers,” in Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons. The Collected Poems of Li He, trans. J.D. Frodsham, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1983, p. 181. 21

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on the moon); the Qin princess who marries the king’s son, an Immortal; dragons; the legendary plant of Jade; the Celestial Island in the East Sea, the abode of the Immortal Maidens; and Xi He, the mother of the sun. It is a flight of fancy that runs through an entire cycle of the Cosmos: from the Milky Way that “wheels round at night / drifting the circling stars / While land begins to rise from the sea / And stone hills wear away.”23 Out of time, the Immortals are up there in the Star River and on the fantastic Celestial Islands; slow, but still transient, are the geological eons in which the Earth grows and ceases to exist. *** There is no doubt, however, that – along with Li Bai, his older friend – the greatest of Tang poets is Du Fu, the “Poet Sage.” His poetry of the night, the moon and the stars is so great and so intense that I am forced to choose some short works.24 Du Fu always manages to combine the feeling of the night landscape with the exploration of the soul, or the human condition. In one of his most famous poems, “Traveling at night,” he places in the “vast plain” of the stars – in the stream which flows on the moon – the consideration of himself: old and forgotten, Du Fu now feels like a “A solitary gull / Between the heavens and the earth:” Slender grasses, A breeze on the riverbank, The tall mast Of my boat alone in the night. Stars hang All across a vast plain. The moon leaps In the Great River’s flow. My writing Has not made a name for me, And now, due to age and illness, I must quit my official post. Floating on the wind, What do I resemble? A solitary gull Between the heavens and the earth.25

23

Ibid., pp. 32, 39. A good anthology in The Selected Poems of Du Fu, trans. B. Watson, in the Library of Chinese Classics, Hunan, Hunan’s People Publishing House, 2009. 25 Original and English translation in The Heart of Chinese Poetry, ed. G. Whincup, New York, Doubleday, 1987, p. 6. A splendid edition of Du Fu’s complete poems, with Chinese original accompanied by French translation and extensive commentary, has just begun to appear with Les Belles Lettres in Paris in their series, “Bibliothèque Chinoise.” The first of several volumes devoted to Du Fu’s Œuvre poétique is Poèmes de jeunesse, éd. N. Chapuis, 2015. 24

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It is a perfect picture, in which the emotion arises quite naturally from the scene of the night: the lone gull flying on the beach is the image “between the heavens and the earth” of the vast plain in which the stars linger in the sky. In another composition, “A Night at the Pavillion,” the meditation is extended to all humankind. The present time is marked by war and divided families, while the powerful of the past are now only dust. The silence that envelops the whole scene acts as a mirror to the River of Stars – the Milky Way – sparkling in the sky: Yin and yang of the year’s end have cut the scenic view short. On a cold night far away from home, the snow has just stopped falling. The drum and bugle sound solemn and stirring at the fifth watch. The shadows of stars and Milky Way tremble over the Three Gorges. As thousands of families wail in the field, the noises of fighting continue. Fishermen and woodcutters start to hum the barbarian songs here and there. Sleeping Dragon and Horse Leaper became yellow dust in the end. Why do they still matter– personal affairs and loss of contact?26 The artist’s brush here moves with supreme mastery from the feeble light that the sun and moon shed in winter to the glow that glares from the frost and snow, and finally to the glitter of the stars. In the meantime, the soundtrack is made up of sad drums and horns, families weeping and songs of woodcutters and fishermen. Finally, the story sinks into silence: the lights of the first verses now correspond, on the visual level, to the yellow dust that is left of the great. A similar movement also governs “Thinking of My Younger Brothers on a Moonlit Night.” Once more, war resonates in the world: in the first and last verse. Autumn, during which Du Fu made the journey to the far threshold of the world, the western border, is the cry of the wild goose as the lack of news – again, the silence – wraps the living and the dead: Drums on the watchtower Cut off men’s travels. Autumn in the borderlands– A wild goose’s cry. The dew Starting from tonight Is white. 26

How To Read, pp. 174-175.

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Piero Boitani The moon Over my old home Is bright. I have brothers, But they are scattered. There is no one to tell me If they live or die. The letters that I send Never reach them. And still, The fighting goes on.27

The moonlight, which shines here “over my old home,” reaches in thought those who are far away, but also reveals them to be dramatically separated by war, each lost in his own destiny. There is no news, there is no home: the living and the dead have become frost, dew, which, “starting from tonight, is white.” The thought of Du Fu’s family also comes from the moonlight. His loved ones are in Fu Zhou, while the poet is located in Chang’an, in the hands of the rebels. Du Fu sees his wife watching the star, then her arms, lit and chilled by the “clear moonlight.” With a very light touch, delicately and passionately, he evokes his torment and suffering: At this very moment tonight in Fu Zhou, you are watching the moon alone in your boudoir. Far away, I feel for my young children who do not understand why Chang’an is on your mind. The fog moistens the locks of your hair; the clear moonlight chills your arms. When can we lean by the thin curtain and let the moonlight shine on the traces of our tears?28 Du Fu is in pain for his children, but the question that arises with painful nostalgia is: when will we be together again “and let the moonlight shine” on us? It is moonlight that

27 28

Heart, pp. 71-73. How to Read, pp. 30-31.

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dominates the whole poem, enveloping it with love. The moon will also cause Du Fu’s dream of Li Bai, his friend, in exile and old of age.29 The moon and the stars also dominate the half-sleep of the poet, in “Lodging at the Left Imperial Court on a Spring Night.” As darkness comes, he thinks, sleepless, of the office signs. An imperial adviser, he is located in the courtyard of the palace: he seems to hear the sound of the golden key that opens the door and the rattle of the officials’ jade pendants ready to be received at court; he recalls the writing and seals that he has to present the next morning. What time is now, in this night that never ends? Flowers at sunset look darkish by the wall of the court. Jiu, jiu, the birds chirp, looking for a place to perch. Stars hanging low, thousands of houses appear shaking; the moon shines brilliantly onto the farthest limits of the sky. Unable to sleep, I keep hearing the turn of the golden key. Wind blowing, I think of the jade horse-bells. Early morning tomorrow, I must report to the throne. Repeatedly I ask, what time is now?30 The immensity of space against the wing of the great palace: the heavens, the stars and the moon are set against the petty concerns of an imperial official. Du Fu’s nights are often restless. It is then that he contemplates the motions and the light of the stars, the dew gathering, the insects flying through the air, the birds calling each other: The cool of bamboo invades my room; moonlight from the fields fills the corners of the court; dew gathers till it falls in drops; a scattering of stars, now there, now gone. A firefly threading the darkness makes his own light; birds at rest on the water call to each other; all these lie within the shadow of the sword – Powerless I grieve as the clear night passes.31 War never ends, drawn swords are everywhere: it envelops the otherwise serene natural world and casts a shadow on the light of the moon and the stars, on the insect in the dark, on “Dreaming of Li Bai”, 1 and 2, “Thinking of Li Bai from the end of the world,” in Three Hundred Tang Poems, pp. 46-47, 70. 30 How To Read, pp. 34-35. 31 The Columbia Book, p. 232. 29

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the murmuring birds. As the soul of the poet is filled with painful impotence, the clear night passes, with the dark threaded by the lonely light of a firefly. The feeble glow of the insect is now as powerful as the light of the stars, as the shadow of the sword is about to darken all things. The poet becomes a firefly. Finally, an absolute masterpiece, “Stars and Moon on the Yangtse,” in which the cosmos shines clear and pure: After sudden rain, a clear autumn night. On the golden waves the sparkle of the Jeweled Cord. The River of Heaven white from eternity, The Yangtse’s shallows limpid since just now. Reflections, pearls from a snapped string: High in the sky one mirror rises. Afterlight which fades as the clock drips, Still fainter as the dewdrops settle on the flowers.32 The sense of infinity and the perception of a vast deep sky dominate the entire composition. Yet this infinite void is gradually filled with the lights of the stars: first a single constellation, the Jeweled Cord; then the whole River of Heaven – the Galaxy. The Blue River reflects the lights of the five planets: the Pearls. The moon rises in the sky like a polished mirror, but one that is in turn mirrored in the dewdrops on the flowers just like the fading light that comes from the sky. These couples emanate unequalled harmony: two necklaces, the Jeweled Cord and the Pearls; a constellation (in our Big Dipper); the planets. Two Rivers, Celestial and Blue: Milky Way and Yangtse. Gold waves for the Jeweled Cord, whiteness for the Galaxy; the transparency of the Yangtse, the pearly glow of the planets; moonlight glow and frost. Space is also time: it is now the autumn night; it is now the Jeweled Cord, but it has always been the eternal Milky Way, and now again it is the Blue River. Finally, the hourglass marks the setting of the stars, drawing the trickle of Time. And the frost freezes the flowers, waiting for the morning. The sequence, contrast, and parallel between emptiness and fullness, dark and light, gold and white, light and pale, works like human breath, or like the systole and diastole of the heart. The universe appears in all its claritas, in all its glory, reflected in the small icy corolla of the flowers. *** Tang poetry, and in particular Du Fu’s, says all there is to say about the night, the moon and the stars. It consecrates once and for all the celestial and earthly space of the night, the echo and intimacy of the dark: it sees the universe “in forma lunae et siderum,” in the form, as it were, of the moon and the stars. Even the best Chinese poetry of later centuries will never reach such peaks. Of course, there is no shortage of nocturnes, as in the poems of Su Dongpo, Lu Yu, Mei Yaochen, Yang Wanli in the Song period, or those by Zhao Mengfu and Ma Zhiyuan in the Yuan period. In the three centuries of both the Ming and the Qing eras, the

The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, trans. D. Hinton, London, Anvil Press, 1989, p. 105: Poems of the Late T’ang, trans. A.C. Graham, New York, New York Review of Books, 2008, p. 46; cf. One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, ed. K. Rexroth, New York, New Directions, 1971, p. 32. 32

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autumn night – now a literary topos – dominates poetry: there are fascinating variations on the theme proposed by Zhang Yu, Gao Qi, Xie Jin, Shen Zhou, Wang Jiusi, Yang Shen, Li Kaixian, Tang Xianzi and Wu Weiye. Some, like Mei Yao Ch’en, speak of a moon eclipse; others, like Hsieh Chin, wonder at a shooting star, “A black pearl from the sea, glittering in a vast sky!” Shen Chou sees the moon in his cup; Wang Chiussu even celebrates, wishing eternal power to the Ming, the “Song of the Painting of the Long-Life Star.”33 Some of these compositions are very intense, others daring: but none has the thoughtful delicacy of Du Fu, Wang Wei, or Li Bai. Instead, the night conquers new space in painting, beginning with the thirteenth century. Traditional Chinese paper and silk are too thin and fragile to represent the dark dotted with stars: the black ink would perforate the material (which of course does not happen with lacquer, used in the trays from the seventeenth century). Therefore, ancient Chinese painting does not represent the stars shining in the sky that we find in poetry. The moon is quite another thing. One can draw it as a small golden circle on the pale background of the sky. Around 1200, for example, Ma Yuan painted Facing the Moon, or Viewing Plum Blossoms by Moonlight, in which a man sitting among the rocks observes the minute golden disk that seems to flood the air with light, the skeletal trees, the ground. Each profile of this autumn or winter night is an outline, without shadows or light and shade. This seems to confirm Matteo Ricci’s rather negative judgment of Chinese painters: “They do not know oil painting, nor do they know how to paint shadows, so that all their paintings are dull and lifeless.”34 This assertion, however, is contradicted by the ink on silk of Xia Gui, also dated about 1200, called the Autumn Moonlight on Dongting Lake, now at the Smithsonian Freer Gallery in Washington: here the trees clinging to the rocks in the foreground are the threshold, and those far away on the other side are the remote border, of a huge space that blends the lake and the sky. There are no shadows, it is true, but the work certainly does not lack vividness: rather, nature appears in it still and silent, as if by magic, only aiming at capturing the reddish light of the moon shining up above. The clear, beautiful composition of Ma Lin, Waiting for Guests by Lamplight, painted in about 1250 and now in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, is divided into three sections. On top of the building, there is a boundless sky with the moon. Then, the trees frame a stylish home, inside which one can see people illuminated by candlelight. On the driveway, marked by torches, some people are waiting. In front there are two large trees with lush leaves and flowers bordering the extended land belonging to the house. The perception of the night, in this context, is profound thanks to the two gradations of light, external and internal, and the contrast between trunks, foliage and flowers. The moonlight acts as a dome: as shown by a science book printed in Beijing in 1580, the Study of Celestial Phenomena, this seems to be the dark sky preferred by the Chinese for their nights. To the right there is an eclipse, with crescent moons and a black and red disk indicating the blood that it will bring with it. A rabbit on the white moon, to the left, prepares the elixir of life for Chang’e, the Moon Goddess. It is a luminous sign of good fortune. 33

The Columbia Book, pp. 298, 302-303, 316, 328 341, 343 (Mei Yao-Ch’en on the eclipse), 349 (Song); The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry. Yuan, Ming, and Ching Dynasties (1279-1911), ed. J. Chaves, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 24, 37, 54 (Yuan); 89, 90, 91, 131, 157 (Hsieh Chin on the shooting star), 171 (Shen Chou, “The Moon in a Winecup”), 196-197 (“Song of the Painting of the Long-Life Star”), 276, 280, 301, 339, 342 (Ming); 368 (Ching). 34 Matteo Ricci, Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella Cina, ed. M. Del Gatto, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2000, p. 22 (my translation).

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The rabbit on the moon is also found in Japan, and in most Far Eastern cultures, like the legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver and many other myths from the territories of the Celestial Empire. In Man’yōshū – the oldest Japanese lyrical anthology, dating back to the eighth century of our era – anonymous tanka celebrate the Tanabata Festival: the encounter between the Cowherd and the Weaver, Altair and Vega, at the ford of the River of Heaven, the Milky Way. The Oxherd and the Weaver Maid standing Face to face across the River. Since heaven and earth were parted Never has he ceased from loving, Nor has he ceased from grieving.35 The subject then runs through Japanese poetry until the eighteenth century, and the image of the Cowherd and the Weaver is cleverly exploited to speak of the impossibility of love: linked to that of autumn or mulberry leaves, it also becomes a metaphor for poetry.36 Chinese literature has had a decisive influence on the Japanese, and the latter unsurprisingly shows the same modules and themes as the former. Even more than China, though, Japan is the country of the moon. All Japanese nocturnes, since Man’yōshū, are lunar rather than stellar. In the One Thousand Poems we find compositions such as “As I sit worn and weary, / Pining after you, / The autumn wind goes sighing / And low hangs the moon;” or “When we look up to the plains of heaven, / The light of the sky-traversing sun is shaded, / The gleam of the shining moon is not seen, / White clouds dare not cross it, / And for ever it snows. / We shall tell of it from mouth to mouth, / O the lofty mountain of Fuji!”37 In Goshūishū, ninth-century poet Izumi Shikibu sings with even more elegance: I now must set out of darkness on yet a darker path o blest moon, hovering upon the mountain rim, shine clearly on the way I take ahead.38 However, already in the ninth century, the poet, scholar, and politician Sugawara no Michizane imitated Tang poetry. Apparently, he composed his first lyric in Chinese at the age of eleven: Viewing the Plum Blossoms on a Moonlit Night The Moon glitters like pure snow. The Manyōshū. The Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai Translation of One thousand Poems, with a New Foreword by D. Keene, New York, Columbia University Press, 1965, pp. 211-212. 36 Cf. Seasons and Landscapes in Japanese Poetry, ed. M.F. Marra, Lewiston, NY, Edwin Mellen Press, 2008, pp. 169-172. 37 The Manyōshū, pp. 297, 187-188. 38 Izumi Shikibu, in in R.H. Brower and E. Miner, eds. Japanese Court Poetry, London, The Cresset Press, 1962. 35

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The plum blossoms resemble twinkling stars. How charming! The golden orb crosses the heavens And the jewel petals perfume the garden.39 This is a perfect, though simple, picture, where the glittering of the Moon meets the twinkling of the stars, and snow and plum blossoms appear, as it were, like reflections and refractions of both. In Kokinshū, the anthology completed in 905, there is a short masterpiece marked by strong compression and unparalleled delicacy: The deep red oak leaves of Saho Mountain will soon fall even at night the moonlight gleams brightly to display their autumn beauty.40 Before falling, the reddish-yellow leaves are suspended, for just a moment, on the branches of the oaks. Their ephemeral splendor is illuminated by a clear moon, as if its light kept the leaves tied to the trees for a moment more: then, even in darkness, that miracle of beauty, of momentary epiphany, is to be admired immediately, before the leaves rise up in flight. In the autumn nights, writes Ariwara no Motokata in a waka welcomed in the Kokinshū, the moon shines so bright that even the Dark Mountain is illuminated and can be crossed. The moon conquers all: it shines, states Abe no Nakamuro, on the “endless plain of the sky.” Diaphanous, it rises unexpectedly, like a second moon – says Ki no Tsurayuki – “from the bottom of the water,” and not from a mountaintop.41 But because it bears the same name as the month, one should not praise it: when a group of older friends gathers to observe it – says Ise Monogatari, the collection of prose and poetry composed between the ninth and the tenth century – one of them says: “as a general thing / I have but little heart / for praise of the glorious moon / whose every circuit / brings old age closer.”42 And yet, the Japanese cannot look away from the moon: it is all they see in the Milky Way, as shown by a splendid anonymous waka of the Kokinshū. Everythingis liquid: the Heavenly River, the stream of clouds, and the moon that slides over it: in heaven’s river the tumbling rapids of clouds flow so swiftly the moonlight courses endlessly as the moon rides the current.43

39

R. Borgen, Sugawara No Michizane and the Early Heian Court, Cambridge MA, Harvard UP 1986, p. 89. Kokinshū. A New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern, ed. L. Rasplica Rodd, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984, 281, p. 128. 41 Kokin Waka shū. Raccolta di poesie giapponesi antiche e moderne, ed. I. Sagiyama (with Japanese text and transcription), Milan, Ariele, 2000, 195, 406, 881: pp. 165, 278, 531. 42 Tales of Ise. Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1968, 88, p.132. 43 Kokinshū, 882, p.303. 40

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The work and life itself of Saigyō – the military man who at twenty-two, in 1140, abandoning his wife and daughter, became a Buddhist monk and devoted himself to asceticism and poetry – are marked by the moon. It is enough to look at the Tale of Saigyō, the most important work on him after his death, to realize this. The book tells the story of Saigyō, reporting his sayings and poems: it is an impressive document endowed with the aching sensitivity, the passion for beauty, the austere passion for simplicity and elegance that characterized this truly extraordinary man. He explains his unusual and difficult choice, talks about leaving his wife and daughter as well as the world: ascesis must be renewed day by day. But Saigyō was a poet before becoming a monk: when the emperor goes to Toba palace to admire the paintings of shōji, the young Norikiyo (his name before the monastic vows) presents him with some lyrics, including the following, “On a scene depicting a storm scattering the autumn leaves at Ogura Mountain, with a bright moon above:” Leaves are falling in the village below dark Ogura Mountain– and there in the branches, the brilliant moon.44 It is an immediate and direct poem, which links the fall of the leaves to contemplation in an indissoluble bond that will last for a lifetime. When Saigyō meditates – and a buddhist monk meditates a lot – he inevitably turns to the moon, as if it were the mirror of his soul, the light that opens up the world and the soul. While deciding for the ascetic life, Saigyō feels restless: in autumn, despite having made up his mind, he feels melancholic. Hearing “autumn’s first wind” and looking at the “autumn moon” he writes these verses: Autumn’s first wind carries feeling into even the most unfeeling heart. Autumn moon hold this heart fast that drifts this way and that with the world’s drifts of grief. What shades of sadness do I add to the moon’s light,

Tale of Saigyō (Saigyō Monogatari), trans. M. McKinney, Ann Arbor, Centre for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan 1998, p. 23. 44

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gazing at her with this heavy heart?45 The charm belongs to the moon, suffering to the soul: the two are distinct, but the latter – projected onto the former – generates irremediable melancholy. So, the poet calls upon the moon to prevent his heart from walking away “with the world’s drift of grief,” as if a celestial body – able to charm and, in painful contemplation, produce melancholy – could ease the pain of the world. So Norikiyo becomes Saigyō: he immediately proclaims a hymn to leaving the world behind, writes verses for a cherry tree, goes on a pilgrimage to the Great Temple in Ise Bay. Then he devotes a chapter, and several poems, to the moon: when the light becomes clearer, he understands that Buddha, too, possesses divine nature. This is the key revelation, the moment truth appears absolute and final: Saigyō sees it in the moonlight.46 His meditation on the moon is more intense every time autumn comes, to the point of wishing for integral purity and clearness: How might I polish the moonlight mirror of my soul to an unclouded purity of self? What can I now do? Were I still in the sad world I would turn away yet again despairing of its grief. This single evening alone should bear the sad name of autumn– though in the unchanging sky the same moon shines unclouded.47 The moon, now, is halfway between a natural subject, the coagulation of a feeling and an allegory – it is the disk shining in the sky, but also the poet’s heart, and wisdom. It is a multifaced moon, then, that has the supreme ability to “hold the hearts of men.” It marks the years and experience, the progressive understanding of self, the lacerations of the soul: “Moved / even as I turn in fresh despair / from this suffering self, / I gaze at the moon / as the year ends.” He will need the moon “to light the way / for those along the mountain path / into death,” to write love poems for a minister, to say goodbye to a friend by turning to the darkness expanding over the East at sunset: “When you are gone / I will fix my eyes on the

45

Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., pp. 41-43. 47 Ibid., pp. 53-54. 46

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east, / watching each evening sky / waiting / for the returning moon.”48 He will look at the moon up until the threshold of death, when, after planting a cherry tree close to the temple, Saigyō writes his last verses: I pray that I may die in the spring beneath the blossoms under the second month’s full moon.49 This, indeed, is what happens, and as Saigyō dies a faint melody can be heard in the sky, and a wonderful fragrance pervades the air; in the firmament a purple cloud stretches, and as all those present concentrate hearing and sight, the monk realizes his constant desire: to be reborn in paradise.50 The apotheosis eventually leads the monk among the stars, as the celestial music resonates in the cosmos. *** In the Tale of Saigyō the stars are never mentioned except indirectly, when the protagonist ascends into the sky after his death. Either the monk-poet has not seen them or he has not recorded them on his retina and his soul. This is not unusual in Japanese art, literature and painting from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. The great writers after the Heian and Kamakura periods (in which Saigyō lived), until all of the Muromachi and AzuchiMomoyama period, from 1333 to 1600, do not seem to pay attention to the stars, while the moon continues to exert irresistible attraction. In the seventeenth century, then, something changes. Bashō, one of the greatest poets of Japan, consecrates the appearance of the stars in his haikus. Here is a famous example: a rough sea stretching over to Sado heaven’s river.51 In the following century, it is Yosa Buson’s turn to speak about the stars: cherry petals in the rice-seedling waters – moon and stars.52

48

Ibid., pp. 60, 65, 67. Ibid., p. 80. 50 Ibid., p. 81. 51 Bashō, The Complete Haiku, trans. J. Reichold, New York, Kodansha USA, 2013, p. 142. 52 Yosa Buson, in H.G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki, Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958, p.106 (modified translation). 49

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Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Kobayashi Issa sees the Heavenly River between paper doors: looking pretty in a hole in the paper door … Milky Way.53 It is an exciting moment, when the eyes see the stars: Issa speaks of a “miracle.” Buson even contemplates them in a “moonless” night. Bashō contrasts with exquisite art the storm at sea and the Milky Way suspended in the sky. It is like discovering the stars as they enter the soul, nature, and even the house. When Buson sees them together with cherry blossoms falling on the water of a rice field, the consecration is complete, those flowers being the dearest thing to Japanese culture. Its stars are reflected in the water precisely by means of the white flowers. When Issa sees the Galaxy from a hole in the shōji, the paper door, he brings it into domestic intimacy, making it part of the simple and elegant furnishing, and projecting the home and the soul onto outer space. Bashō widens the horizon: the ocean, and the Star-River, storm and calm, water and sky. In the few words of a haiku, we see the whole cosmos. A similar thing happens also in painting. There is a wonderful sixteenth-century Landscape by Maejima Sōyū at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. There you see a pavilion on the bank of the river, with tall pines on the background of mist and clouds enveloping the sharp mountain peaks in the distance. The moon appears high up. A century later (post 1672), Kano Tan’yu draws a triptych, which is also now at the Metropolitan, devoted to the subtle variations of a Landscape in Moonlight: the silhouette of a boat, round mountains shrouded by clouds, the moon once again remote in the sky. In 1670 Kano had painted Eight Views of Omi Province, now at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, where the landscape, of supreme elegance, is more detailed and relaxed: in one, the mountains stretch as far as the eye can see, alongside trees, a house, a temple. In the sky, the moon shines. Then, in the eighteenth century, Utagawa Hiroshige comes on stage. And along with the moon, in dozens of paintings, the stars finally shine in Japanese painting.

Kobayashi Issa, Issa’s Best: a Translator’s Selection of Master Haiku, trans. D.G. Lanoue, HaikGuy.com, 2012, p. 148. 53

Chapter 14

WE ARE THE STARS WHO SING Following the stars, I will try to complete a sort of tour around the world. So, retracing the path followed by the Europeans towards the West and by “indigenous” populations towards the East, I have now come to what the Conquistadores called first India and then America, where about thirteen thousand years ago the people coming from Eastern Asia had settled. Over time they differentiated themselves, following different lines of development: for instance, in Central and South America there were highly structured empires, while the north was characterized by small groups and by mainly nomadic hunters living in the desert and the wide prairies. The study of the stars is fundamental for both, as is documented by the monuments left by pre-Colombian civilizations: the famous Aztec calendar stone, today at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City; or the lid of K’inich Jahnaab’ Pakal’s sarcophagus (683 CE) in the Maya Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque. There are also seemingly similar artifacts such as the Skidi-Pawnee leather star chart or the Anasazi petro glyphs scattered around Colorado and New Mexico, representing among other things a man with a shield decorated with the sun, the moon and the morning and evening stars.1 Incas and Aztecs built veritable observatories, generally using the tops of their temples. Mayas, Aztecs and Incas also left us important codes containing astronomical tables, calendars, textbooks of astrology and divination, and representations of celestial gods. Thus, we have the great FejérváryMayer Aztec Code, today at the World Museum in Liverpool; the Mendoza Code at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, made about twenty years after the Spanish conquest so that Charles V could see it, and which later belonged to André Thévet, Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas and John Selden; those of the so-called “Borgia group;” the wonderful Maya Code of Dresden, dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century.2 Finally, there is the manuscript of

1

R.A. Williamson, Living the Sky. The Cosmos of the American Indian, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1984, pp. 170-176, 192-196. 2 The Borgia Group includes the Borgia Codes (Vatican), Vatican B (3773), Fejérváry-Mayer, Cospi (or Bologna), Laud (ms. Laud Misc. 678 of the Bodleian Library in Oxford). To these are sometimes added the Porfirio Diaz Code (or Tututepetongo) and the Fonds Mexicain 20 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The Mendoza Code (ca. 1533) is MS Arch. Selden A. 1 of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Maya codes, in addition to that of Dresden, include those of Madrid and Paris as well as the Grolier (whose authenticity, however, is dubious).

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the Relación de las antigüedades deste Reyno del Pirú by the Hispanized and Christianized canchi Indian Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamquí, who describes Inca cosmology with drawings reproducing the golden reliefs of the Coricancha, the Sun Temple in Cuzco.3 Of course, there is much more: corpora and collections of fascinating legends and poetry filled with cosmic echoes. The beautiful Quiché Popol Vuh (of Maya tradition) talks about the Beginning, when all was suspended, calm, silent, still, dark: the sky was empty, the earth had not yet emerged, and everything was placid and solitary water. Then the tale becomes grand: the primordial gods – Tebeu and the Heart of the Sky high up, and Gucumatz in the sea – create animals, the mud men and the wooden men. The latter have no tongue, soul or intelligence and therefore are inadequate to help and adore them, so the gods make a corn man. Later, four hundred young men are turned into stars. But the sun, the moon and the stars only appear later, born together with Dawn and the Morning Star, which brings joy to all the gods.4 According to the Navajos of the Southwest of the United States, the story of Creation is different. In their Diné Bahane’, all begins with the Wind and the mist of light rising from the dark to animate the Divine People. There are five Worlds. The First, small and set on an island amidst the Four Seas, is home to the Divine People, the Coyotes, and the Insect-People. In it, the supernatural beings First Man and First Woman are born. The inhabitants of the First World fight against each other and fly away towards an opening to the East, reaching the Second World. Here, once again, the inhabitants fight with each other and the First Man creates a stone wand: by walking on it, they can reach the Third World. A great deluge forces all inhabitants to leave and go to the Fourth. It is here that the First Man and the First Woman create the sun, the moon and the stars. They form what the Bilagáana, the Whites, would call a rock crystal – a round disk. Around it, they embed an edge of turquoises; then on the outside, in succession, rays of red rain, lightning rods, and sparkling whirlwinds. This is the sun. Then, the Fist Man and the First Woman create the moon. They use a smaller disk of mica; they surround it with a border of white shells and sprinkle on its face the glow of lightning and a mixture of rain water, snow and hail, adding water from the east, south, west and north. Finally, they give life to the sun and the moon and assign them dwellings and movements. Four days later, the First Man and First Woman realize that the sky is too dark, especially for those who want to travel at night, and especially when the moon does not shine. So they collect as many fragments of mica rock crystal they can find, while the First Man sketches on the ground a drawing of how to “light up the skies.” Working slowly and carefully, the First Man places a shard of mica in the north, where he wants a star that never moves, which will serve to guide those who travel at night. Then he places in heaven seven other pieces of mica,

3

The Relación de las antigüedades deste Reyno del Pirú by Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamquí appears in MS 3169 of the Biblioteca Nacionál of Madrid, a collection (Papeles varios sobre los indios Incas, Huarochiris y otras antigüedades del Perú, in Antigüedades del Perú, ed. H. Urbano and A. Sánchez, Madrid, Información y Revistas, 1992), dating back to about 1613. There are two of these drawings: one presents the Creator Wiracocha flanked by the Sun and the Moon; the other (f. 83), much more complex, based on the Inca principle of hanan-hurin (high and low), is divided in two sections, horizontally and vertically. At the top, in the middle, there is Wiracocha, surmounted by a starry Cross and flanked by the Sun and the Moon; below, the Star of the Morning and the Evening, summer and winter. Then, going downwards, every extreme is joined by stars, flame, cloud and hail; air, earth and water; at the center, man and woman, flanked by a tree and by “all eyes of all things:” see Figure 91. 4 Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya: trans. A.J. Christenson, Norman, Okla., University of Oklahoma Press, 2007, pp. 67-69, 104, 190-191.

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the seven stars of the north, and continues distributing a sparkling piece of stone also to the south, east and west. Working slowly, as he aims for perfection, he gives shape to some constellations. But then comes Coyote: he looks at the work of the First Man, and immediately notices three red shards on the ground. “I will take these for my very own stars,” he says, “And I shall place them where I please:” these are the three large red stars that shine among the white ones in the dark. Soon after, Coyote observes the laborious work of the First Man, but quickly loses patience and – shouting “Never mind doing it that way! …Why must I wait this long for your work to be done?”– grabs all of the remaining fragments of mica, throws them in the air and, exclaiming “Let the stars sit wherever they will,” blows over them, making them fly around and stick to the sky in a mess. That is why the stars, with the exception of those placed by the First Man, are distributed in random and chaotic clusters in the dark night sky.5 It is a beautiful story, which explains with earthly materials the formation and appearance of the heavenly bodies, makes the light shine in the dark, and sets the orderly constellations against the immense disorder of the sky. The ambiguous figure of Coyote, the impatient agent of chaos, adds a mocking trait that is found in other versions of the Beginning, for example in the short song of the Creation of Heaven by the Algonquin Blackfoot, at the other extreme of the North American continent: First Woman patterned our stars To help the moon make light, Patterned them neatly, patterned them right Into star-lit animals against the night, But old Coyote switched about in play And scattered the stars as they are today.6 In the cosmological myth of the Iroquois, on the contrary, the Ancient’s wife falls from the sky in the water that fills the Earth and is rescued by the Turtle. She glides on its carapace and spreads some soil over it that gradually grows to form dry land. Then the woman becomes aware of her ability to create and, talking, gives life and movement to the “orb of light,” the sun. From her words, the stars are born: in the north, a group she calls “They-arepursuing-the bear;” then a big star that “will rise customarily just before it becomes day,” “Itbrings-the-day;” then the Group Visible, “They-are-dancing;” and finally “She-is-sitting,” whom “the Ancient-bodied” baptizes in the group “Beaver-its-skin-is-spread-out” – an orientation point for those who travel at night.7 There are many intriguing legends explaining the formation of stars or constellations by means of catasterism. The Montagnais-Naskapi living between Labrador and Hudson Bay evoke the origin of Summer and the Great Bear through a story involving a child with lice, an otter, a beaver, a bird, a muskrat, a sturgeon, a moose, and a marten. All animals are trying to

Diné Bahane’. The Navajo Creation Story, ed. P.G. Zolbrod, Albuquerque, NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1984, pp. 35-89, 90-94. 6 Dawn Boy. Blackfoot and Navajo Songs, ed. E.L. Walton, New York, E.P. Dutton & Company, 1926, p. 36: Navajo song Making the Sky. 7 J.N.B. Hewitt, Iroquoian Cosmology, Part I, “A Seneca Version,” Extract from the Twenty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1904, pp. 225-229. 5

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capture Summer in a series of spectacular chases. In the end, the marten is struck by the arrow of one of the hunters and ends up in the sky, becoming the Star of Marten – the Great Bear – as the pursuers see the birds of summer and the child hunting them with his arrows.8 Stories of a similar kind and equally enchanting – coming from people as diverse as the Onondaga, the Cherokee, the Blackfoot, the Pawnee, the Sioux, and the Apache – concern the Pleiades, the Morning Star, the Milky Way, Sirius and Canopus.9 The Inuit, living in the far north of Canada, have an astral mythology focused on the moon, but they also have a saying about the stars that counts as a whole wonderful legend: perhaps they are not stars, but holes in the sky through which the love of those we have lost pours out and shines upon us, to let us know they are happy.10 *** Peoples living in Central and South America are equally inspired in their songs and poetry. The Mayas, for instance, have left us the Songs of Dzitbalche: a collection of lyrics expressing love and pain, sketching a philosophy, describing ancient rites and underlining spiritual values. The “Flower Song” begins with a beautiful evocation of the moon: The most alluring moon has risen over the forest; it is going to burn suspended in the center of the sky to lighten all the earth, all the woods, shining its light on all. Sweetly comes the air and the perfume. It has arrived in the middle of the sky, glowing radiance over all things. Happiness permeates all good men.11 Under the radiant moonlight, the poet has stepped with his beloved into the forest, where no one shall see what they have come to do. They have brought all sorts of flowers: plumeria flowers, chucun blossoms, dog jasmine, milah blooms, and resins, cane wine, turtle shells, quartz, chalk powder, cotton, leather. Everything is new, even hair bands, which sprinkle over

8

F.G. Speck, Naskapi: the Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula, Norman, Okla., University of Oklahoma Press, 1935 (new edn. 1977), pp. 62-65. 9 See They Dance in the Sky. Native American Star Myths, ed. J.G. Monroe and R.A. Williamson, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 10 J. MacDonald, Arctic Sky. Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend, Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum, and Iqaluit, Nunavut, Nunavut Research Institute, 1998, pp. 33-34, 143. 11 Original and English translation in Ancient American Poets, ed. J. Curl, Tempe, AZ, Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingüe, 2005, p. 71. The Aztecs seem to be less lyrically passionate about the night and the stars: see N.P. Arbuthnot, Mexico Shining. Versions of Aztec Songs, Colorado Springs, Three Continents Press, 1995; and especially M. León-Portilla, Trece poetas del mundo azteca, Mexico, SEP, 1972, then extended in Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, Norman, Okla., University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

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them the “nectar of the roaring shell of the ancients.” They are now in the heart of the woods, on the rocky edge of the lake, awaiting the rise of the “smoking star:” Venus. “Take off your clothes, / let down your hair, / become as you were / when you arrived here on earth.” The stars are part of the renewal of nature celebrated with ritual festivals. As in the Bible, they are the most beautiful manifestation of the Creator’s power. The “Song of the Minstrel” exalts the divine fiesta that begins in the villages, with dawn rising bright on the horizon dispelling the dark, and the birds singing: “The beautiful star / shines over the woods, / smoking as it sinks and vanishes; / the moon too dies / over the forest green.” The priest of the Tun Year praises the Lord Hunabku, who gives light to the Earth and keeps all things alive: “thus the sun and moon / thus the morning star, / that luminous flower / of the skies.”12 In the Sacred Hymns of Pachacuti, the Incas express the same feelings: in the first they praise Wiracocha, the Original Splendor, who gives life to all things, shapes and orders the world and gives speech to man and woman: “O Creator, root of all, / Wiracocha, end of all, / Lord in shining garments / who infuses life / and sets all things in order …Molder, maker, / to all things you have given life: …Where are you? / Outside? Inside? / Above this world in the clouds? / Below this world in the shades?” They also address Wiracocha in the sixth Hymn, to celebrate and pray to the sun: “Lord Wiracocha, / Who says, / ’Let there be day, / let there be night!’ / Who says, / ’Let there be dawn, / let it grow light!!’ / Who makes the Sun, your son, / move happy and blessed each day, / so that man whom you have made / has light: / My Wiracocha, / shine on your Inca people, / illuminate your servants, / whom you have shepherded, / let them live / happy and blessed / preserve them / in peace, / free of sickness, free of pain.”13 However, the songs of the Native Americans are the ones that best render the sense of participating in the life of the cosmos. The Diegueños, for example, celebrate in the “Eagle Ceremony” the sunset and the rise of Orion and the Pleiades: “The waves say: I am beating back and forth. / The water rolls, / the water rolls. / The eagle says: I am here / at the edge of the surf.”14 This is not a simple evocation of nature, but a deeply religious way to penetrate it. This is clarified by the “Song of the Sky Loom” by the same Diegueños, where the invocation of divinities becomes a child’s awe before the dawn, the evening, the rain, and the rainbow: Mother Earth

Father Sky we are your children With tired backs we bring you gifts you love Then weave for us a garment of brightness, its warp the white light of morning, weft the red light of evening, fringes the falling rain, its border the stranding rainbow.

Thus weave for us a garment of brightness so we may walk fittingly where birds sing, 12

Ancient American Poets, pp. 79, 101. Ibid., pp. 126-127, hymns 1 and 6. Clarice Lispector narrates several beautiful stories derived from indigenous legends in Como nasceram as estrelas: Doze lendas brasileiras, Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1999 (1987). 14 Wearing the Morning Star. Native American Song-Poems, ed. B. Swann, Lincoln, NE, and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, pp. 80-81. 13

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Piero Boitani so we may walk fittingly where grass is green. 15 Mother Earth Father Sky.

Conscious of how fatiguing it is to serve the gods, the Diegueños ask to be turned into light, to be able to float in the air, to traverse the endless prairies and the ever-green garden of eternity. The Luiseños sing about the alternating seasons: the arrival of summer and the swarm of insects, bison grazing, elks mating, deer shaking their heads, and the Milky Way that “lies stretched out on its back, / making a humming sound. / Look: Antares is rising, / Altair is rising. The Milky Way, / Venus is rising.”16 The Apaches address the constellations, contemplating in amazement the star rising where the sky and the earth meet, on the horizon: Look as they rise, up rise Over the line where sky meets the earth. Seven Stars! Lo! They are ascending, come to guide us, Leading us safely, keeping us one. Seven Stars, Teach us to be, like you, united.17 Going upwards, the stars lead the ascension of the people. Grouped in constellations, they will teach the values of community and unity. It is with the same wonder that the Navajos look at the sun and the sky, representing them with an inspired flight of fancy related to their traditional legends. The sun is for them “a luminous shield / Borne up the blue path / By a god.” As the imagination strives to comprehend the cosmos in human terms and grasps the earth and the stars together, the moon “is the torch / Of an old man who stumbles over stars.”18 The Navajos sing with bright inspiration the Song of the Rising Sun Dance: Where the sun rises, The Holy Young Man The great plumed arrow Has swallowed And withdrawn it. The sun is satisfied. Where the sun sets, The Holy Young Woman The cliff rose arrow Has swallowed

15

Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., pp. 77-78. 17 For the Pawnee, “The Pleiades,” in American Indian Love Lyrics and Other Verse. From the Songs of the North American Indians, selected by N. Barnes, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1923, p. 91. 18 Dawn Boy. Blackfoot and Navajo Songs, ed. E.L. Walton, New York, E.P. Dutton & Company, 1926, p. 35. 16

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And withdrawn it. The moon is satisfied.19 The Navajos reconstruct the path of the sun from dawn until evening, but place its permanent abode “under the sunset” and imagine it built of the changing daylight, made of the wheat matured by the sun, adorned with fabrics, fur, gems, shells and water holes. It is a familiar and radiant sky, as in the deserts where the Navajos live: eyes open with the birth and death of light. The Wintun project themselves on the cosmic space. They fix Waida Werris, the North Star, and leap into the sky: The circuit of the earth you see the scattering of the stars in the sky which you see all that is the place for my hair.20 Natives of North America claim to descend from the Pleiades, represent the Spirits as stars, and honor the Morning Star. For them, this star is a sign of braveness and purity, a symbol of the imminent renewal of tradition and the resurrection of past heroes, and they represent it in a thousand different ways on their blankets.21 They also await the arrival of the Star. Yet no one does so more than the Pawnee of Nebraska: believing that the first human being was a girl born from the union of the Morning Star (the male figure of light) and the Evening Star (the female figure of darkness), they had a Morning Star ritual during which they sacrificed a captive maiden as that star rose.22 One of their songs describes the wait for Venus: Oh, Morning Star, for you we watch! Dimly comes your light from distant skies; We see you, then lost you are. Morning Star, you bring life to us. Oh, Morning Star, your form we see! Clad in shining garments you come, Your plume touched with rosy light. Morning star, you now are vanishing.23

19

Native American Poetry, ed. G.W. Cronyn, Mineola, NY, Dover, 2006 (1918), p. 71. “Song of Waida Werris, the Polar Star,” in Songs of the Sky. Versions of Native American Song-Poems, ed. B. Swann, rev. and expanded edn., Amherst, MA, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, p. 102; see Native American Poetry, p. 129. 21 While the Aztecs built the Sun Temple in Teotihuacan (later, Mexico City), the Toltecs have dedicated the Temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the Morning Star, to Quetzalcoatl, in present Tula, Mexico. 22 The last known sacrifice happened in 1838: see G. Weltfish, The Lost Universe. Pawnee Life and Culture, Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 106-118. 23 Invocation to the Morning Star, in Native American Poetry, p. 240 and, for other songs, A. Grove Day, The Sky Clears. Poetry of the American Indians, New York, Macmillan, 1951, pp. 104-105, 127-133. 20

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A song with less bloody resonances – and certainly the most beautiful astral song of the Native Americans – is We Are the Stars Who Sing of the Abenaki, part of the Algonquin nation who lived in the Northeast of North America: We are the stars who sing, We sing with our light. We are the birds of fire. We fly in the sky. Our light is a star. We sing on the road of the spirits. Three hunters among us follow the bear. There never was a time when they were not on the hunt. We look upon the mountains. This is a song of the mountains.24 “We are the stars:” we had not yet come across a song uttered by the stars themselves. It is a song of light, sung by beings that feel like birds of fire and trace a path in the sky for the spirits. They picture the three hunters in pursuit of the Great Bear in an eternal hunt. They fix their eyes on the mountains and invent the horizon upon which they themselves shine. The music of the spheres of the West is, here, the stars’ song of light. *** “The Moon has risen over the horizon / I count the many stars / Pleiades for one. That is Brown’s ship / Beating there”: so said the Maori between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in one of their waiata, their songs, after spotting a ship of white men and seeing it as a symbol of abundance. But in another composition a man who, according to the manuscript, was in love with a friend’s wife, complains: “There Pleiades rises slowly from the sea – / You come like a sign from the one I love / From whom I had to turn.” The man goes on to state that he is a boat sailing in bad wind: he cannot turn, he is carried away, and will end up among the fish of the sea, “the offspring of Manahuna,” the guardian of sea creatures.25 In the evening, after sunset, the stars appear in the dark sky, illuminating it. In the vast darkness of the night swims Te Ikaroa, the Milky Way, the big fish of the Heavenly Father, Rangi. For the Maori, the appearance of Matariki and her six daughters, the Pleiades, in the twilight between night and dawn, between late May and early June, in New Zealand, marks the beginning of the New Year. That is when they sing their waiata of woe for those who died

Abenaki, We Are the Stars Which Sing, in Songs of the Sky, p. 114 (“adaptation from the work of John Dyneley Prince”); phonetic version of the original in C. Leland, Algonquian Legends, New York, Dover reprints, 1992. 25 “A Song: There the Moon” and “A Song: There Pleiades” in B. Mitcalfe, The Singing Word. Maori Poetry, Wellington, Price Milburn for Victoria University Press, 1974, pp. 77-79; in the original “Pleiades” is singular, Matariki, deliberately hidden – as sacred – under the form Kariki. 24

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in the year just passed, but also celebrate with joy the arrival of the new year and of light.26 The Maori have a wonderful corpus of astral myths and legends. One of their traditional stories, that of Tau-toru, possesses extraordinary grace – reminding a Western reader of Ovid. Tau-toru is renowned for his skill in hunting birds. He has invented a snare surrounded by fragrant flowers and succulent berries from which neither the kereu nor kaka nor tui manage to escape. Despite his fame, he is modest and unpretentious, and this is why Rau-roha, a female spirit of the higher worlds, falls in love with him. Every night, she spends with him the hours of darkness. But one day he sees her face, and Rau-roha is forced to leave him, because beholding her beauty is forbidden to mortals. Tau-toru loses all interest in hunting, becomes careless, and while placing a trap on top of a tree, he loses balance, falls and dies. Rau-roha, no longer seeing him from the sky, finds his still body and weeps over it. Time goes by. Tau-toru’s friends look for him and, after finding him in the forest, they lift up his corpse – seated and dressed in precious clothes – on a stretcher. But as they approach the village, the body mysteriously disappears. The priest declares that Tane, the god of nature, has transported him to heaven, where he was surely welcomed by Rau-roha. In the Orion constellation one can see Tau-toru catching kereru. The main star cluster is the set of berries and flowers with which he decorated his snares. Rigel is the flower of the berry, the star below it is “the elbow of the snare;” there is also a “row of stars” making up “the shaft or handle of the snare.” The line of the three central stars, Orion’s belt, is the young man himself. On clear nights one can see swarms of small kereru – the nebula in Orion – fly frantically toward Tau-toru’s trap.27 This is a delicate catasterism with a surprising and elegant ending that testifies to an original attention to astronomy and an intense passion for nature. It is not surprising that, upon the first visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1954, the Maori greeted her as the Pleiades and Canopus, “the stars that circle the rim of the skies.”28 All the peoples of Polynesia have astral legends of equal beauty. The elderly of Manuae, for example, handed down the story of a visit to their atoll by Ru, father of the great demigod Maui. The inhabitants of Manuae had a problem: at the beginning of the world, the sky, an immense blue stone, rested on their land. Moved with pity towards their condition, Ru told Maui to cut big piles of wood, and the inhabitants of the island to insert them underneath the stone of the sky, while, lying on the ground, he held it aloft with his feet. In this way Ru gave light and space to Manuae. Maui, however, soon grew tired of his father’s bragging about the wonderful world he had created, and the two came to blows. The father threatened to throw his son up in the sky, grabbed his belt and tossed him into the air like a pebble. Maui bounced against the blue stone, but instead of smashing to the ground he turned first into a bird flying towards the ground, then into a huge and strong man: he grabbed his father and threw him high with such violence that he tapped against the stony sky and was pushed far away, so far away that he got lost in space. Ru was now entangled in the stars. The inhabitants of Manuae looked up in amazement, wondering what was happening. The sun began to cross the sky,

26

K. Leather and R. Hall, Work of the Gods. Tātai Arorangi: Māori Astronomy, Paraparaumu, Viking Sevenseas, New Zealand, 2004. 27 Tau Toru the Hunter, in A.W. Reed, Myths and Legends of Polynesia, Wellington-Sydney-London, A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1974, pp. 76-77. The names of the groups of stars in Orion are built on Tau-toru: so, for example, the berry flower (Rigel) is Te Pua-tawhiwhi-o-tau-toru. 28 The Singing Word, pp. 145-146.

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followed by the moon. The stars twinkled like fairy lights. Wind and rain were followed by good weather and calm seas. Canoes ventured on the water. The smoke rose from the fires and got lost in the immensity of space. The islanders forgot about Ru, who had lifted up the sky on the poles. He died: the body, after remaining long in the now distant sky, shattered and fell in pieces on the ground, and its bones covered the hills and valleys of the island: they are, even today, the pumice and lava fragments scattered everywhere around Manuae.29 *** The original inhabitants of Australia filled the island with numerous stone carvings. A very famous one, in the Elvina site of the Kuring-Gai Chase National Park, not far from Sydney, shows an emu, the largest bird native to the island. The emu plays a very important role in the mythology of Australian Aborigines, as in the story of Creation of some groups in New South Wales, according to which the sun was formed by hurling an emu egg in the sky. Elvina’s “Emu in the sky,” however, is special, but not unique. A dark nebula, near the Southern Cross in the southern sky, is called by the Aborigines “Coal Bag:” for them, this is the emu’s head, while its neck, body and legs are formed by the lines of cosmic dust that stretch along the Milky Way. A beautiful and famous photograph of Barnaby Norris portrays the emu in the engraving of Elvina, dominated by the nebula, in autumn. The Aborigines have an advanced astronomy and a fascinating mythology. Orion, for example, is seen as a canoe. The traditional story speaks of three fishermen brothers, one of whom ate a forbidden fish. The Sun transported them, along with their canoe, up to heaven: the three stars that for us represent Orion’s belt are the three brothers, the nebula above is the forbidden fish, and Betelgeuse and Rigel are the bow and the stern of the canoe. The Pleiades, which appear in many of the “dreams” of the Aborigines, are seven sisters running away from a man, as in the Greek myth. After death, the Yolngu are transported on the mystical canoe Larrpan to the island of spirits, Baralku, in heaven: the fires of their camps burn on the banks of the great river of the Milky Way, while the canoe is sent back to earth in the form of a shooting star, which signals to the family the arrival of their beloved on the island of Baralku.30 The land of the Aborigines echoes with “Songlines” or “Dream slopes:” they are the “Footprints of the Ancestors” that only indigenous eyes can see and “listen to.” When Bruce Chatwin published Songlines, in 1987, this wonderful mythology (and metaphysics) suddenly became known in the West. I would like to quote here a passage from his book, without commenting on it, to give an idea of the enormous stellar afflatus of Aboriginal culture. Based on the Aborigines’ myths, it is a reconstruction of the Beginning: In the beginning the Earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight. There were neither Sun nor Moon nor Stars. Yet, far away, lived the Sky-Dwellers: youthfully indifferent beings,

29

Myths and Legends of Polynesia, pp. 86-88. R.D. Haynes, “Astronomy and the Dreaming. The Astronomy of the Aboriginal Australians,” in Astronomy Across Cultures. The History of Non-Western Astronomy, ed. H. Selin, Dordrecht-Boston-London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, pp. 53- 90; F.P. Miller, A.F. Vandome and J. McBrewster, Australian Aboriginal Astronomy, Alphascript, VDM, Beau Bassin, 2010; W.J. Thomas, Some Myths and Legends of the Australian Aborigines, Melbourne-London, Whitcombe & Tombs, 1943. 30

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human in form but with the feet of emus, their golden hair glittering like spiders’ webs in the sunset, ageless and unageing, having existed for ever in their green, well-watered Paradise beyond the Western Clouds. On the surface of the Earth, the only features were certain hollows which would, one day, be waterholes. There were no animals and no plants, yet clustered round the waterholes there were pulpy masses of matter: lumps of primordial soup –soundless, sightless, unbreathing, unawake and unsleeping –each containing the essence of life, or the possibility of becoming human. Beneath the Earth’s crust, however, the constellations glimmered, the Sun shone, the Moon waxed and waned, and all the forms of life lay sleeping: the scarlet of a desert-pea, the iridescence on a butterfly’s wing, the twitching white whiskers of Old Man Kangaroo —dormant as seeds in the desert that must wait for a wandering shower. On the morning of the First Day, the Sun felt the urge to be born. (That evening the Stars and Moon would follow.) The Sun burst through the surface, flooding the land with golden light, warming the hollows under which each Ancestor lay sleeping. 31

These Men of Ancient Times, the Ancestors, unlike the inhabitants of Heaven, were lame and exhausted old people who had slept for centuries. When they felt the warmth of the sun, their bodies began to produce children and to awaken themselves, to the point that each Ancestor shouted: “I am!,” “I am the Cockatoo,” or the Serpent, or the Honeysuckle: “And this first ‘I am!,’ this primordial act of naming, was held, then and forever after, as the most secret and sacred couplet of the Ancestor’s song.” Every Ancient began to move and, by naming all things, called them to life and composed verses with their names: The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, saltpans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed: wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music. They wrapped the whole world in a web of song; and at last, when the Earth was sung, they felt tired. Again in their limbs they felt the frozen immobility of Ages. Some sank into the ground where they stood. Some crawled into caves. Some crept away to their ‘Eternal Homes,’ to the ancestral waterholes that bore them. All of them went ‘back in.’32

*** The Abenaki of North America let the stars sing, the Australian Aboriginals let the Ancestors sing. The Zulus of South Africa, by contrast, speak of the Tree of Life and the “Song of the Stars.” The former appears in the tale of the Beginning; the latter recounts the origin of man. In Zulu cosmology, the Beginning is marked by darkness and by the absence of earth, sun, stars and moon. Back then there was only Nothingness. It all started with a spark of Fire, a primordial Consciousness that wanted to be and that, struggling with Nothingness and the Fertile Darkness, ate them in order to grow. The still hot ashes of the

31 32

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, London, Penguin, 1988, p. 72. Ibid., p. 73.

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great conflagration between Flame and Ice, Light and Darkness, Hot and Cold, gave birth to the first goddess, Ma: the Mother. Controlled by the Great Spirit, Ma ordered the universe, creating the sun, the stars and the earth. Then, she sat on top of the Iron Mountain and began to cry, because she was terribly lonely. As her tears became waterfalls, streams and rivers, the Great Spirit promised Ma she would have a companion. But when he finally came, he turned out to be a tree full of needles and nodes: the Tree of Life. Horrified, the Great Mother fled, but the tree caught her and possessed her. Their union generated the first humans, while the Tree spawned reptiles, birds, animals and seeds that, falling to the ground, produced other trees, then woods, and finally forests.33 However, there is another account of the Beginning of humanity, the Song of the Stars. In it, men come from the cosmos. All of Africa shares very beautiful astral legends, which often relate the animals that populate the continent to the sky. The lion, cattle, and fish of our world, for example, come from the constellations of Leo, Taurus and Pisces. There is a group of stars that the Venda call the Giraffes: there are six of them, and they appear as if they were the neck and head of six giraffes surmounting the trees. The Pleiades, conversely, are for the Namaqua the daughters of the God of the Sky. When their husband (Aldebaran), threw his arrow (Orion’s sword) at three zebras (the belt of Orion), he missed the target. Then Aldebaran did not dare go home, because he had not caught any game, but he did not try to retrieve the arrow either, because a ferocious lion (Betelgeuse) was guarding the zebras. Thus, he is still up there in the open, thirsty and hungry. The same spirit animates the Song of the Stars. In the tale of Credo Mutwa, the Zulu shaman of South Africa, the gods created humans in a world of red sands not far from ours. In that world, power belonged to women: they hunted for males, slept with them and then devoured them. Then men rebelled and a terrible war burst out between them, made worse by the involvement of star-eating demons. The hero of men, Moromudzi, fell in love with one of the women, Kimanmireva, and strove for peace. A group of men and women left the world of red sands, flying in the belly of a huge iron dragon capable of crossing interstellar space, and finally reached Sirius, the “Star of the Wolf.” Sirius was a water world, populated by amphibious humans, as smart and gentle as the dolphins. They welcomed the humans in peace, but were poorly repaid over time, because the foreigners killed and devoured one of Aquatics. The latter of course started a terrible war against humans, at the end of which humankind was almost entirely destroyed. Nommo, the wise king of the Aquatics, pitied the humans and sent his twin sons Wowane and Mpanku to save them. In the darkness of space they found a giant egg, emptied it and placed human beings inside it to take them away. Then, they rolled the egg across outer space, with the intention of bringing it back to the original world of men, that of red sands. Instead they passed it by and reached a habitable world of earth and water: our own. The Firebird, to whom that egg belonged, rushed through space and attacked the twins. Wowane was kidnapped and murdered; Mpanku dived into the water and placed the egg in orbit around the Earth, which is why the moon looks like a pockmarked egg.34

33

Song of the Stars. The Lore of a Zulu Shaman, ed. S. Larsen, Barrytown, N.Y, Barrytown Ltd., 1996, pp. 32-40; see A. Werner, Myths and Legends of the Bantu, London, Cass, 1968 (1933), chs. 2-4; and African Cultural Astronomy, eds., J. Holbrook, R. Thebe Medupe and J.O. Urama, Berlin, Springer, 2007. 34 Song of the Stars, pp. 121-152.

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This story echoes the Native Americans’ belief in their descent from the Pleiades. The Song of the Stars composed in the continent where mankind was born proclaims that humans come from the stars. This legend is a very appropriate way to end my stellar tour around the world. However, I want to add one last important detail: as we have seen, the Inuit believe that stars are holes in the sky through which the love of the dead ones shines, showing us they are happy. Well, for the African Karanga the stars are the eyes of the dead. The Bushmen believe, on the other hand, that the dead become stars.35 We come from the stars, and to the stars we shall return.

35

A similar belief, as we have seen in ch. 2, emerges in early and medieval Christianity about human bodies after the resurrection.

APPENDIX C

Figure 59. Vault of the Sala de los Abencerrajes, Alhambra, Granada (14th century).

Figure 60. Vault the Hall of the Ambassadors, Alhambra, Granada (14th century).

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Appendix C

Figure 61. Starry mosaic, Patio de los Arrayanes, the Alhambra, Granada (14th century).

Figure 62. Dome of the Imam Mosque (formerly the Shah), Isfahan (1611-38).

Appendix C

Figure 63. Ieoh Ming Pei, dome of the Museum of Islamic Arts, Doha, Qatar (2008).

Figure 64. Mosque of the Stars, Dhaka, Bangladesh (first half of the 19th century).

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Appendix C

Figure 65. Fainting Leyla and Majnun, from the Khamsa of Nezami (17th century), Washington, Library of Congress.

Appendix C

Figure 66. The rise of Mohammed on Buraq, illustration of the Khamsa by Nezami, Persia (1539-44), London, British Library.

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Appendix C

Figure 67. The universe, Zubdat At-Tavarikh (Cream of stories, 1583), Istanbul, Museum of Islamic Antiquities.

Figure 68. Ottoman astronomer, 18th century miniature, private collection.

Appendix C

Figure 69. Star grille of Qutb Minar, Delhi (18th century).

Figure 70. Fretwork wall in the portico of the great mosque of Fahtepur Sikri (15th century)

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Figure 71. The first five Navagraha, the deities and the bodies of celestial influences, from Komarak (12th century), London, British Museum.

Figure 72. Prince Iskandar’s Horoscope, from 'Imad al-Din Mahmud al-Kashi’, Book of the birth of Iskandar (1411), London, Wellcome Institute Library.

Appendix C

Figure 73. Shah Jahan Mosque, Thatta, Pakistan (1647).

Figure 74. Ceiling, Sheesh Mahal, Lahore Fort (1631-32).

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Appendix C

Figure 75. Durgasankara Dathaka, Sarvasiddhāntatattvacūḍāmaṇi (The jewel of the essence of all sciences; 1840), Los Angeles, Getty Museum.

Figure 76. Babur and his companions get hot at night by the camp fire, illustration to Babūrnāma (1598), New Delhi, National Museum.

Appendix C

Figure 77. Indian Anonymous, Rada in the moonlight (1650), Berlin, Berlin Staatliche Museen.

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Figure 78. A woman visiting an ashramat at night (early 18th century), London, Victoria & Albert Museum.

Figure 79. Four-headed Brahmā sits on the throne by the fire of sacrifice, while a lady assists, Khambavatī-Ragini (1750), Berkeley Art Museum

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Figure 80. Lid of the Lunar Mansions casket, tomb of Zeng Hou Yi, Suizhou, Hbei (5th century BCE).

Figure 81. Tang bronze mirror, New York, American Museum of Natural History.

Figure 82. Ma Lin, Waiting for the guests (1250), Taipei, National Palace Museum.

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Figure 83. Xia Gui, Autumn Moonlight on the Lake Dongting, ink on silk (1200), Washington, D.C.,Smithsonian Institution.

Appendix C

Figure 84. Comets in one of the star charts of Mawangdui, on silk (2nd century BCE), the Hunan Provincial Museum.

Figure 85. XiangYi Fu, Study of Celestial Phenomena, 1580, Bejing.

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Figure 86. Qing tray (17th century), New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Figure 87. Kano Tan'yu, Landscape in the moon light 2 (1662), New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Appendix C

Figure 88. Maejima Soyu, Landscape, Muromachi period (16th century), New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Figure 89. Utagawa Hiroshige, Boats at anchor in the evening (1856-58), from Hundred Views of Edo, Tsukuda island, private collection.

Figure 90. An Aztec priest-astronomer observes the night sky, Codex Mendoza (1530), Oxford, Bodleian Library.

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Figure 91. Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti, Inca cosmological design, Relaciòn de las antiguedades deste Reyno del Pirù (1613), Madrid, National Library.

Figure 92. Cover of K'inich Jamab' Pakal sarcophagus (683 CE), Maya temple of Palenque.

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Figure 93. Anasazi petroglyph (about 1000 CE): Men with shield, which indicate sun, moon and stars in the morning and evening, Mountains of Galisteo, New Mexico.

Figure 94. Skidi-Pawnee star map on animal skin (17th-19th century), Chicago, Field Museum of Natural History.

Chapter 15

SPARKS AND EMBERS Let us go back to Europe, in the middle of the millennium we customarily refer to as the Middle Ages. Alongside the tradition stemming from the classical age there are others developing in this period, rooted in even more ancient grounds. Julius Caesar, in his report of The Gallic War, wrote that the Celtic priests and the masters of Gallia and Britannia – the druids – “have many discussions as touching the stars and their movement, the size of the universe and of the earth, the order of nature, the strength and the powers of the immortal gods, and hand down their lore to the young men.” However, he adds that the druids do not consider “it proper to commit these utterances to writing.”1 Perhaps this is the reason why we do not have any documents on Celtic astronomical knowledge, even though we know – thanks to coins that have been found and to monuments like the sacred enclosure of Liebnice, the monumental fountain of Bibracte, the Acropolis of the Závist Hillfort, and the Coligny Calendar – that the observation of the night sky must have been constant among all Celtic tribes of central and western Europe. The most ancient surviving Irish poetic work, the twelfth-century (but probably several centuries older) Book of Invasions (Lebor Gabála Érenn) forcefully proclaims that: I am Wind on Sea, I am Ocean-wave, I am Roar of Sea, I am Bull of Seven Fights, I am Vulture on Cliff, I am Dewdrop, I am Fairest of Flowers, I am Boar for Boldness, I am Salmon in Pool, I am Lake on Plain, I am a Mountain in a Man, I am a Word of Skill, I am the Point of a Weapon (that poureth forth combat), I am God who fashioneth Fire for a Head. 1

Caesar, The Gallic War, VI, 14, trans. H.J, Edwards, LCL, 1917; cf. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, XV, 9, 2-8.

268

Piero Boitani Who smootheth the ruggedness of a mountain? Who is He who announceth the ages of the Moon? And who, the place where falleth the sunset? Who calleth the cattle from the House of Tethys?2

In the myth, this song is attributed to the first poet and magician, Amergin, who is said to have composed it on the first of May 1698 BCE, upon first setting foot on the ground of Ériu, during the Gaelic invasion of Ireland, thus putting an end to the dominion of the gods, the Tuatha dé Dannan. With it, Amergin and the Gaels take possession of the new land, with a poetry that is also magic. But Amergin really grasps the whole universe: the elements, the stars, the animals. A true shaman, he proclaims himself lord of knowledge, of poetry, of war, of intellect, of interpretation, of astronomy, of the sea (and earth). He is a druid with divine powers, whose words are enchanting. In order to be a good king and a great warrior, however, one needs to know how to look at the stars. The Instructions of King Cormac, a work in prose composed around the ninth century, records – in form of questions and answers between Carbre (the son) and Cormac (the father) and following the traditional alliteration – the precepts according to which one may grow in virtue, value, and authority: “O Cormac, grandson of Conn”, said Carbery, “What were your habits when you were a lad?” “Not hard to tell”, said Cormac. I was a listener in woods I was a gazer at stars I was blind where secrets were concerned I was silent in a wilderness I was talkative among many I was mild in the mead-hall I was stern in battle … I would not ask, but I would give For it is through these habits that the young become old and kingly warriors.”3 In Wales, another land of the Celts, the first bard was Taliesin, who lived in the sixth century. Under his name we have a Book of Taliesin (Llyfr Taliesin), written around the thirteenth century, but also some poems, probably from around the tenth or even the sixth century. This tradition also includes a proclamation not too dissimilar from that of Amergin, a shamanic declaration of origin and power:

2

Song of Amergin, trans. R.A.S. MacAllister, Dublin, Irish Text Societry, 1941. Original text and English translation in The Instructions of King Cormac maic Airt, ed. K. Meyer, Dublin, Hodges Figgis, 1909, 7. 3

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Primary chief poet Am I to Elffin. And my native country Is the place of the Summer Stars. John the Divine Called me Merlin, But all future kings Shall call me Taliesin. I was nine full months In the womb of the hag Ceridwen. Before that I was Gwion, But now I am Taliesin. I was with my king In the heavens When Lucifer fell Into the deepest hell. I carried the banner Before Alexander. I know the names of the stars From the North to the South.4 The bard’s claim is solemn: like Wisdom, he was with God at the moment of Creation; like Christ, he is before Abraham. Later he presents himself as Tetragrammaton (the proper name of God, YHWH), patriarch of Enoch and Elijah, who witnessed the construction of Babel’s tower, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Exodus, the killing of Absolom, the birth of the Child and the Crucifixion. Taliesin is the incarnation of both sacred and profane history. He was not only the standard bearer of Alexander the Great, but he also knew Africa before Rome was built, and has now reached Britannia, “the remnant of Troy.” He is part of Welsh mythical history, recalling Gwydion, Mabon, Arianrhod, Deon of Lochlin and Cynfelyn (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline). He is meat and fish or, as he puts it in another work, he has existed in perennial metamorphosis: crow, frog, fox, squirrel, deer, bull, bear, iron, sword, grain of wheat, boat.5 He has seen and known everything, he can tell everything: “I was instructor / To the whole universe. / I shall be until the judgment / On the face of the earth…There is not a marvel in the world / Which I cannot reveal.” That is because Taliesin has received the “muse,” poetic inspiration, from the awen, the cauldron of Ceridwen the enchantress, his mother. His origins, finally, are astral. His homeland is the Other World (the land of the Summer Stars), but Taliesin has lived in the Milky Way (Caer Bedion), in Cassiopea (Llys Don), in the Boreal Crown (Arianrhod’s Castle). “I know the names of the 4

Original texts in Canu Taliesin, ed. I. Williams, Caerdydd, Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1960; English translation in The Poems of Taliesin, ed. I. Williams, trans. J.E. Caerwyn Williams, Dublin, Institute for Advanced Studies, 1987; and J. Matthews, Taliesin. The Last Celtic Shaman, Rochester, Inner Traditions, 2002, pp. 283-286. 5 Taliesin. The Last Celtic Shaman, pp. 281-282.

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stars,” he says, “from the North to the South.” Taliesin, like Amergin, is a shaman and a poet of the cosmos: he speaks of what stands above us and of what, according to the Celts, we have inside ourselves. Indeed, some Irish lyrical poems exemplify this internalization of the universe, and there seems to be a peculiar link between legends and characters of Gaelic myths (such as Cuchulainn, for example), and the comets.6 Two cosmic songs are also attributed to Taliesin: the Song of the Macrocosm and the Song of the Microcosm. These are two tales of Origins, composed of a mixture of Celtic and Christian elements, the latter probably derived from the cosmology of Isidore of Seville in his De Natura Rerum.7 In the first work “Taliesin” praises the Father who gave him reason and the seven senses: instinct, touch, speech,, taste, sight, hearing, and smell. God created the seven skies “above the astrologer’s head” as well as the three parts of the sea, which laps against the shore and “is great and wonderful” like the entire world. He made the seven planets – Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn – and the five zones of the Earth and the three Continents. Last, he made the awen, Taliesin’s own inspiration. In the Song of the Microcosm a more ancient stratum emerges. Here the Skilful One, the supreme Artist, first of all linked the four elements in a chain, suspended between heaven and earth, and then filled the seas with salty water; he adorned the skies with stars, the Sun and the Moon, making them rotate around the Earth, lighting it and determining its zones through cold and hot climates. Finally, he built two fountains, one of warm air where the sun rotates, and one of water, from which the sea springs forth.8 In the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Vita Merlini was to report a conversation between Taliesin (“Telgesinus”) and Merlin, in which the former explains Creation and cosmology to the great “prophet:” Out of nothing the Creator of the world produced four [elements] that they might be the prior cause as well as the material for creating all things when they were joined together in harmony: the heaven which He adorned with stars and which stands on high and embraces everything like the shell surrounding the nut; then He made the air, for forming sounds, through the medium of which day and night present the stars ...9

Among the Celts, popular traditions and high literature are constantly contaminating each other. We have at least three Scottish-Gaelic prayers dedicated to the Sun, the Moon and the New Moon endowed with profound cosmic passion. The first salutes the Sun “of the seasons,” the mother of stars, which traverses “the skies on high, with strong steps on the wing of the heights” and sinks in the perilous ocean without harm, only to rise again from the tranquil wave like a young queen. The last one invokes the Moon Greeting to you, gem of the night! Beauty of the skies, gem of the night! Mother of the stars, gem of the night!

6

Ibid., pp. 238-239; P. McCafferty and M. Baillie, Celtic Gods. Comets in Irish Mythology, Stroud, Tempus, 2005. M. Smyth, “Isidore of Seville and Early Irish Cosmography,” in Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 14 (1987), pp. 69-102. 8 Taliesin. The Last Celtic Shaman, pp. 321-323, 262-263. 9 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, in Die Sagen von Merlin, hg. San Marte, repr. Hildesheim-New York, Olms, 1979, pp. 738-744; trans. in Taliesin. The Last Celtic Shaman, p. 258. 7

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Foster-child of the sun, gem of the night! Majesty of the stars, gem of the night! This tradition will survive up to the nineteenth century,10 but the most beautiful compositions are two written by Dafydd ap Gwilym, arguably the pre-eminent Welsh poet of the Middle Ages, who lived in the fourteenth century: one is dedicated to the Moon, the other to the Stars.“A wide moon,”Dafydd writes in the former, is “like a dazzling maid / candle of the hard, cold weather.” Then, his thought pursues astronomical data, and the poem becomes more complex: Troublesome with every new moon is the bloom of the day’s radiance. A parish of a saint’s construction, water planet of all new growth. Every fortnight her routine — her home beneath heaven is night — is to take her course from there (I’m deep in thought), growing ever larger until she becomes two halves, the stars’ sun on a bright night. She hurls the tide, fair radiance, she is the phantoms’ sun. … Her compass is as wide as the earth, the refuge of the wild and civilized are all one color. Her form is that of a finely meshed sieve, her rim is familiar with lightning. She’s a path–walker in heaven’s sky, the shape of a lace, brass cauldron’s brim. Power of a measuring–lamp of a star–bright field, a sphere from the bright blue sky.11 Thought, the erudite Wisdom-like construction, is also the perception of beauty. The beauty of the Moon sought by Dafydd emerges from the marvelous variations on the theme of its light: on its being “the stars’ sun on a bright night.” In his Y Sêr (The Stars) Dafydd turns to the girl he loves and tells her what happened to him in the process of reaching her. In order to get a kiss from her, he had to cross the forests and the moors at night, blind in the dark “like Trystan was for a pretty girl.” Everything was black as he walked among the mountains, the ruins of ancient walls and the peat bogs, haunted by ghosts. Dafydd made the sign of the cross, imploring Christ to save him. And lo! 10

W.J. Gruffydd, Blodeuglwm o Englymion, Swansea, n.d., pp. 32, 31; Id., Y Flodeugerdd Gymraeg, Cardiff, 1931, p. 75; A Celtic Miscellany, p. 127. 11 The best edition can be found at www.dafyddapgwilym.net run by Swansea University, with both the original text and the English translation: n. 58, Y Lleuad (The Moon), 19-32 and 51-58.

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The merciful son of Mary lit up the beacons of the Twelve Signs, the Zodiac: “a fair shower against awful trouble.” Suddenly, the stars are blossoming, “cherries of the night.” Their light shines like the “sparks of the bonfire of seven saints:” Flaming plums of the cold harsh moon, sparkling berries of the icy moon; swollen glands of the hidden moon, they are the seeds of fair weather; radiance of the moon’s large nuts, color of a sunny hillside, our Father’s paths; common sign of fine weather, Aquila of every good climate; flint mirror, sun lighting the earth, faces of great God’s halfpennies; pieces of lovely bright gold covered in hoar–frost, gems of the crupper of heaven’s host. They are neatly hammered in place in pairs, rabble of the broad grey sky; the shield nails are sunlight for us across the heavens, very deep arrangement. No swift breeze will dislodge the auger holes of the sky from their sanctuary. They extend far and wide, the wind does not beat them, they are the embers of the great sky. The backgammon pieces of the mighty sky’s board, bright is their work. The needles (I value them highly) of the great firmament’s head–dress.12 Dafydd calls the stars “shamrock flowers,” “wax candles on a hundred altars;” the beautiful beads of Holy God’s rosary detached from the string and scattered around in the celestial vault. A formidable imagination and an almost Oriental skill in associating images dominate the vision of this Welshman, a contemporary of Petrarch and Hāfez. *** Much farther north, in Scandinavia, both poetry and prose present images that, albeit less baroque, are just as alluring. What fascinated the Vikings was clearly the Beginning, the becoming, the End and the renovation of the cosmos. In the Völuspá (“The Prophecy of the Seeress”), the poem that opens the poetic Edda with distant echoes of the Christian world, the Seeress – a kind of Nordic Sybil, who seems to have some elements in common with the Sybilline Oracles – narrates “the world’s old news,” the things she remembers “from remotest

12

Y Sêr, n. 161, 49-72.

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times.” The evocation then begins: the giants “born early in time;” the “nine worlds,” and “glorious tree of good measure, / under the ground:” It was early in the ages when Ymir made his dwelling: there was nor sand nor sea nor chill waves. Earth was not to be found nor above it heaven: a gulf was there of gaping voids and grass nowhere, before Burr’s sons lifted up seashores, they who moulded glorious Miðgarðr. Sun shone from the south on the stones of that mansion – then the ground was covered with the green leek’s growth. …

Sun flung from the south – moon’s partner in travel – her right hand round the rim of the sky. Sun did not know where she had mansions, stars did not know where they had stations, moon did not know what might he had. Then the powers all strode to their thrones of fate, sacrosanct gods, and gave thought to this: to night and her offspring allotted names, called them morning and midday, afternoon and evening, to count in years.13 13

Original text, English translation, and an excellent commentary in The Poetic Edda, II, Mythological Poems, ed. U. Dronke, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 7-8.

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In less than twenty verses the poet of the Völuspá evokes the primordial giant, Ymir, from whose body the heavens and the earth were molded; the birth of the immense world tree, the axis of the universe and the giver of life; the rise of earth out of the ocean at the hand of the sons of Burr, Odin, Vili, and Vé. But the poem also recalls the Ginnungagap, the enormous abyss of chaos; and Middle Earth and its naked walls of rock. Then, light explodes: the sun, the moon, and the stars, which were not aware of their place, now start burning, the sun leaping to the south, its right hand stretched around the edge of the sky in order to lighten and warm it. The sun and the moon move the cosmos in a circle, like a gigantic, turbulent windmill. As the earth, finally, blooms with green, the Gods give a name to the night, to the phases of the moon, and to the day. Finally they give order to the universe, and establish Time. In the Edda there are two dialogues – one between Odin and the Giant Vafthrudhnir, the other between Thor and the dwarf Alviss – which return to cosmological themes about the origin and the early times. Odin asks Vafthrudhnir whence the Earth, the Sky, and the Moon came. The giant answers: From Ymir’s flesh the earth was formed, and the rocks from out of his bones; the sky from the skull of the ice-cold giant, and the sea from his blood. … Mundilfœrri he is called, who is the father of Moon, and likewise of Sun the same. they must sweep through the sky every day, to mark off the years for men.14 Thor, on the other hand, wants to know from Alviss the names of the sky, the sun, and the moon. The dwarf lists six names for each of them, one for each kind of living creature: men, for instance, call it “sky”, the gods “Vault of Stars,” the Vanir “Wind Weaver:” “Earth” it is called by men, by Æsir “ground”, the Vanir call it “ways”; “evergreen” giants, “growing” elves, the lofty powers call it “mud”. … “Moon” it is called by men, but “glow-ball” by the gods, they call it “spinning wheel” in Hel; “speeder” giants, “shining” dwarfs, the elves call it “tally of years”. …“Sun” it is called by men, but “sunlight” by the gods, the dwarfs call it “Dawdler’s deluder”; “ever-glow” giants, elves “pretty wheel”, “all-bright” the Æsir’s sons”.15 14

Vafthrúdnismál, in The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore, trans. and ed. A. Orchard, London, Penguin, 2011, pp. 42-43.

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As in the Völuspá, here we witness a powerful accumulation of myths, images and words: the description of the universe and of its Beginning is a true re-creation, wherein the poet assigns names to things just as the gods did. The afterglow of these images still lingers on in Snorri Sturlson who, between the twelfth and the thirteenth century, compiled the magnificent Edda in prose. In the Gylfaginning, the first part of his work, Glyfi, the Swedish king who goes under the name of Gangleri, asks a series of questions about the Beginning: Hàr (the High One), Iafnhàr (the Just as High One) and Thridhi (the Third One) respond in turn. Snorri, a great scholar of the Icelandic tradition, continually merges their responses with citations from the Völuspá, while also adding some fascinating details. When, for example, Thridhi recalls the Gods’ creation of the sky by means of Ymir’s skull, he declares that this was placed over the earth at its four regions and that a dwarf was placed underneath each corner. Austri, Vestri, Nordhri and Sudhri: the solid celestial vault rests upon four personified cardinal points. Then the poet speaks of the Muspell, the clear, serene world, the flaming and burning region, the reign of fire remembered just before. The sons of Burr, Odin and his brothers, create the stars: Then they took glowing sparks, that were loose and had been cast out from Muspelheim, and placed them in the midst of the boundless heaven, both above and below, to light up heaven and earth. They gave resting places to all fires, and set some in heaven; some were made to go free under heaven, but they gave them a place and shaped their course.16

The stars, then, are what is left from that primeval world of fire: sparks and embers which once upon a time whirled about and danced in circles in the Muspell. The poet goes back to the myth shortly thereafter, to explain, through Hàr’s voice, the path of the Sun: There was a man called Mundilfare, who had two children. They were so fair and beautiful that he called his son Moon, and his daughter, whom he gave in marriage to a man by name Glener, he called Sun. But the gods became angry at this arrogance, took both the brother and the sister, set them up in heaven, and made Sun drive the horses that draw the car of the sun, which the gods had made to light up the world from sparks that flew out of Muspelheim.17

A few centuries earlier, the glare of this fire had cast its light on the poetry of ninthcentury skalds, the Viking court poets. In the Description of the Shield, for example, two images immediately strike the reader: one describes Thor as he throws the eyes of the giant he killed into the “winds’ wide basin” (the sky), turning them into a constellation; the other represents the incipient end of the world, with the firmament alight in flames.18 But, of course, it is in the Völuspá of the poetic Edda that the End is described with unprecedented skill. Æsir and Vanir clash, and Baldr, son of Odin, dies tragically. The Gods fight with Alvíssmál, ibid., pp., 109-110: in Icelandic, the Moon is male, the Sun female, the Vani are deities – including both Freyr and Freya – and Dvalinn is a dwarf. 16 Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Old Norse Mythology, ed. J.L. Byock, London, Penguin, 2006, pp. 18-19; original text in Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, ed. H. Palsson, Reykjavik, Mal ogmenning, 1992. 17 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, p. 20. 18 Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál, 71, in The Prose Edda, trans. A.C. Brodeur, New York: AmericanScandinavian Foundation, 1916. 15

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Loki’s followers. Then the cosmos is destroyed, massive rocks plummet, malignant spirits fall, men take the way of death, and the sky crashes: The sun turns black, land sinks into sea; the bright stars scatter from the sky. Flame flickers up against the world-tree; fire flies high against heaven itself.19 The Sybil of the north, however, also foresees the rebirth of the world, akin to the new sky and the new earth of Isaiah and of Revelation. The green earth once again surfaces from the sea; the water level lowers; marvelous golden tables can be found among the grass; the fields produce crops without need of planting seeds. Finally, a sanctuary rises in the dwelling of the Gods, Gimlé, “more beautiful than the sun, / better than gold:” it is the purified cosmos of the future, with the stars joined together to form a palace of light. *** In the early Middle Ages, England was an extraordinary melting pot of different cultures: conquered in the fifth century by Germanic invaders – the Anglo-Saxons – it had a local Celtic tradition and was surrounded by Gaelic lands (Wales, Scotland, and to the west and across the sea, Ireland). Undergoing continual raids and partially colonized by the Vikings, it was reconverted to Christianity first by Irish, and then Roman, missionaries. These four cultural traditions – Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Greco-Roman – continually intermingled, superimposed, and merged with each other. In the more specifically scientific writings, including astronomical ones, the Greco-Roman conception was the prevailing one, brought back to the island by monks from Rome and Byzantium. We know that Theodorus and Hadrian – the former from Tarsus, educated in Constantinople, then Roman citizen, and later Archbishop of Canterbury; the latter African-born and then in charge of a monastery near Naples – taught astronomy in Canterbury after moving there in 669. Even the Archbishop of York, Aelberht – as reported by his disciple, Alcuin – taught astronomy in the eighth century. This tradition, after all, had begun two generations earlier, in the same century. Bede, who can be considered the father of English identity and historiography because of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, composed works such as On Time, On the Reckoning of Time, and On the Nature of Things. In these he faced the problematic task of establishing a date for Easter, and elaborating a new universal chronology, but he also examined cosmology, the movements of the sun and the moon, and the spherical shape of the earth. In his On the Nature of Things, modeled on the work by Isidore of Seville that bears the same title, Bede proceeded with method, passing from the fourfold work of God, the creation, to the world, the elements, and the firmament. He then examined the celestial waters, the stars, the planets, the Zodiac and its signs, the Milky Way. Finally, he went on to treat the sun, the moon, the eclipses, the comets, and the Earth. Of the stars, for example, he writes:

19

Vőluspá, in The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore, 57, p. 13.

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The stars, borrowing their light from the sun, are said to turn with the world since they are fixed in one place, as opposed to being carried unfixed, with the world standing still. The exception is those that are called planets, that is, wanderers. The brightness of the full moon and the eclipse of the sun prove that they are concealed by the advent of the day and never sink from the sky, although we see particles of fire fallen from the ether being carried by the winds, and resembling the light of a wandering star, which forecast the imminent rise of violent winds. But some stars are productive of moisture released in liquid form, others of congealed moisture in the form of frost or of compacted moisture in the form of snow or of icy moisture in the form of hailstorms.20

In the tenth century the tireless Ælfric wrote, in the vernacular, an On Time which, imitating Bede, explained to a wider public the seasons, the equinoxes, the movement of the moon, and the stars. In the eleventh century it was to be Byhrtferth’s turn, with his Enchiridion (again strongly influenced by Bede) to reintroduce cosmology and astronomy into English culture. In the meantime, however, the stars did not fail to reach the poetic realm. The central name here is that of Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and bishop of Sherborne, who lived about forty years before Bede. Aldhelm was a disciple of Hadrian in Canterbury and visited Rome. King Alfred tells us that he attracted people to sacred things by singing, clearly in the vernacular, “on a bridge like a minstrel.” He wrote in both English and Latin. Nothing is left of his Old English works, but those in Latin had a profound influence on medieval English literature. Among his Enigmata, for example, we find one that, echoing Isidore’s On Nature, has Arcturus speak – just as had happened a thousand years earlier, in Plautus’s The Rope: At the summit of the universe I stand, hemmed in by starry things. I bear the name ‘esseda’ [‘war-chariot’] in common parlance. Revolving continually in a circle I never incline downwards, as do the other stars of the heavens (which) hasten to the sea. I am enriched by this endowment, since I am nearest to the pole, which stands out above the Rhipean mountains of Scythia. I equal in number the Pleiades at the summit of the sky, the lower part of which is said to sink down in the Stygian or Lethean swamp among the black shades of hell.21

Artcturus is the brightest star in Bootes, and in classical mythology it is considered the guardian of the two Bears. Therefore, he drives the chariots that bear the same name. Aldhelm, however, builds upon the data of both astronomical and mythological traditions with outstanding care, employing Latin with rare focus and elegance. He suggests that the number of stars in Bootes is the same as that of the Pleiades: seven. He shows us the axis that connects the celestial poles, the position of Arcturus at the top of the northern pole, and the fact that it never descends towards the horizon because it is too close to the axis itself: Arcturus does not set, as other stars that “hasten to the sea” do, or also those which plummet down to the point of reaching the infernal regions. Aldhelm uses erudite terms: the essedum is not just any chariot, but the war chariot employed by the Gauls and the Britons; Vergiliae is 20

Bede, On the Nature of Things and Of Times 11, trans. C.B. Kendall and F. Wallis, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2010, p. 80. 21 Enigmata LIII, pp. 80-81. Original text in Aldhelmi Opera Omnia, ed. R. Ehwald, Monumenta-Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 15, Berlin, 1919, Aldhelm; The Poetic Works, trans. M. Lapidge and J. Rosier, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 1985.

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the more refined Roman name synonymous with the more common Greek “Pleiades;” gaza is the treasure of an eastern monarch; the references to Styx, Lethe and the Manes are better known, but still require a good knowledge of ancient mythology to be understood. In another famous composition, the Carmen Rhythmicum, Aldhelm tells of his journey from Cornwall to Devon during a terrible storm, which tears apart the roof of the church where he found refuge. At a certain moment, however, the storm becomes a cosmic event, during which the moon and the stars disappear, as if swallowed by a black hole, an immense vortex of wind: In fact, with the normal order of things upturned, the brightness of the sister of Phoebus and the gleaming stars grew dark in the storm; nor did Lucifer, the fiery herald of day, glisten and arise as a golden star as it customarily does; rather, it was blackened by the gloom as if by the darkest soot. The exquisite runnings of the Plough are not clearly visible from the northern region of the North(-star), carefully keeping its course; and likewise the beautiful constellation of the Pleiades, offspring of Atlantis, with its seven gleaming lights lies hidden: these stars climb through the heavens from the sun’s (first) rising. Then the gleaming scale of Libra, with its finely-poised balance, grows slack; the circle of the Zodiac – which, I have learned, was called Mazaroth in ancient times – with all its throng of twelve stars glistening in the heavens, is darkened. Nor did the reddish star of Sirius gleam as it usually did, for the pitch-black mantles of cloud obscure the heavens …22

Here too we witness rhythmic and alliterative pyrotechnics of rhymes, words, and precise structures of numbers and chiasms: and, again, great synoptic skill. The “circium,” for example, is a north-western wind that blows over southern Gallia: to associate it with Bootes indicates as it were the “North-West of the North.” Mazaroth is the Jewish name of the Zodiac, from the Book of Job (38: 32). Olympus means, of course, the sky, and the Pleiades are defined – echoing classical mythology – as Atlas’s progeny. Aldhelm is a virtuoso of the cosmos. Anglo-Saxon poetry also celebrates the universe with splendid images. Deeply in love with (Christian) Creation – as testified by Cædmon’s Hymn, Beowulf, Genesis A, Christ and Satan, and the Riddles – ancient English poetry has a particular passion for the skies. The Riddles, for example, build around the stars a thin web of references and wondrous images. Number 27 describes the sun and the moon: I saw a wonderful creature carrying Light plunder between its horns. Curved lamp of the air, cunningly formed, It fetched home its booty from the day’s raid And plotted to build in its castle if it could A night-chamber brightly adorned. Then over the east wall came another creature Well known to earth-dwellers. Wonderful as well, It seized back its booty and sent the plunderer home

22

Carmen Rhythmicum, ibid. p. 178.

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Like an unwilling wanderer. The wretch went west, Moved morosely and murderously on. Dust rose to the heavens, dew fell on earth – Night moved on. Afterwards no one In the world knew where the wanderer had gone.23 The Sun and the Moon are fighting a fierce fight. A few days before the new moon, a luminous scythe rises, which seems to complete the otherwise dark lunar circle in the sky. It is the Moon, which “fetches” the light of the Sun and carries it between its horns, like a bounty, travelling towards its celestial castle, where it will keep it in a nocturnal chamber bright with light (in reality, this pale image of the full moon is light reflected by the Earth on the Moon). But the Sun eventually rises and takes its light back: as it rises above the horizon, the Moon gets gradually paler, and slowly sets. The thief runs towards the West, and sets behind the earth. The following night, it has vanished. Among Earth’s inhabitants, nobody knows where it went. The Moon is a thief, then, and the Sun a warrior claiming back what belongs to him, his light. The poet, however, with just a few verses, is able to portray not just an astronomical phenomenon, but also the intriguing bright crescent which makes the moon appear full when it is just rising: it is the lamp of the sky wishing for luminous plenitude in the chamber of its celestial castle. The sun and the moon are at the center of other magnificent Riddles, with the burning power of the one and the magic properties of the other. But there is one composition that is truly out of the ordinary, describing Ursa Major, probably with some echo of Aldhelm’s Enigmata on Arcturus: Sixty rode horses down to the shore – Eleven were prancers, proud and fine, Four gleaming white. They champed For the sea-charge but the channel was deep, The wave-clash cruel, the banks steep, The current strong – so the spear-proud warriors, Horses and earls, mounted a wagon, And under its beam rode the bright wain Over sea-curve to land. No ox drew the wagon, No strength of slaves, no road-horse hauling. She was no sea-floater or ground-roller With her weight. She did not drag water, Fly down from the air or double back, But bore earls and white horses from steep Shore to shore – mounts and their men Over deep water and home safe again.24

23

Original text in The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. C. Williamson, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1977, p. 85 and pp. 226-229; this splendid English translation by Williamson can be found in A Feast of Creatures. Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs, London, Scolar Press, 1983, p. 87. 24 The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, 20, p. 80, pp. 201-204.

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This composition is crafted with the greatest care, employing alliteration and synonymy: for example, it employs eight different words for “men” and seven for “horses,” and eight more for the waters they cross.25 Everything takes place within a complex, coherent, and concrete image. The perilous sea is the endless expanse of the sky. Every twenty-four hours Ursa Major leaves the horizon – which, in the British Isles, that constellation almost touches – and circles around the North Star, before returning to the earth. The knights and horses are the stars close to the Wagon. Under the handle of the plough, there lies the constellation of the Hunting Dogs, composed by eleven stars, four of which are extremely bright.26 In the background, there are countless other stars (“sixty”). The Anglo-Saxon poet imagines warriors and horses crossing the great celestial gulf: but the abyss is so deep, and the waves and currents so strong that the knights climb on the Plough and place their horses under the handle. And Ursa Major majestically crosses the skies. It is not a Plough pulled by oxen, slaves, or horses; it does not sail, nor fly, nor slide across the ground: rather, it rotates, suspended, barely touching the great bay of the sea that is the celestial vault. The ancient Anglo-Saxons knew well how to paint the cosmos. *** When the moon did not loose him nor did the sun set him free all his times felt strange his life felt irksome: he shifted the stronghold gate with his ring finger slid the lock of bone with his left toe, came with his nails from the threshold with his knees from the doorway. Then he tripped head first seaward hands first he tumbled waveward; the man stays in the sea’s care the fellow in the billows. He lolled there five years both five years and six seven years and eight. He stood on the main at last on a headland with no name on a mainland with no trees. With his knees he tensed upward with his arms pulled himself round: he rose to look at the moon to admire the sun

25

See D. Bitterli, Say What I Am Called. The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp. 60-68. 26 See L. Blakeley, “Riddles 22 and 58 of the Exeter Book,” Review of English Studies 9 (1958), 241-251.

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observe the Great Bear and study the stars.27 This recounts the birth of Väinämöinen, one of the protagonists of the Kalevala: the great Finnish epic reconstructed and written by Elias Lönrot in the nineteenth century. Väinämöinen, who will become a great bard, is the son of Ilmatar, daughter of the Sky. In the Beginning, indeed, only the primordial waters and the Sky existed. Looking for a place to rest, Ilmatar lowered herself into the waters, and floated and swam there for seven centuries. She saw a bird, also looking for a place to rest; she lifted a knee and the bird came to rest upon it. It then laid on her seven golden eggs, and one of iron, and started brooding them. But the heat on Ilmatar’s knee became scalding, and she had to shake off the eggs, which fell and broke in the waters. From their lower half the Earth was formed, from their upper half the sky was created. The yolk became the sun, the white the Moon, what was streaked became the stars, what was dark the clouds. Ilmatar stayed in the waters for another five centuries, continuing the process of creation. Then, Väinämöinen was conceived. He had never seen the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, and implored them to set him free from his mother’s womb. Not obtaining any answer, he forced his way out. The first man was thus born, and he immediately set about contemplating the Sun, the Moon, and the stars.

27

The Kalevala, trans. K. Bosley, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 9-10; original text ed. L. Honko, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1987.

Chapter 16

FROM ETERNAL NYMPHS TO BEAUTIFUL STARS It is time for us to return to the European literary tradition: here we now encounter thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Italy, and its greatest poets. Dante Alighieri spent many years in Ravenna, where he could not remain indifferent to the stars adorning its churches. Moreover, he confessed that, together with Cicero, it was Boethius who pushed him towards his love and study of philosophy.1 The beautiful stars of the Consolation of Philosophy certainly left a profound impression on the Florentine poet. Devoted to Saint Francis, Dante could not have forgotten that the stars are praised, “clear, and precious, and beautiful,” in third place after the sun and the moon in the list of creatures Francis had chosen for his Canticle of the Creatures. Finally, the verses of Guido Guinizzelli (whom Dante calls his father in poetry) surely had repeatedly echoed in his mind. In his famous canzone Al cor gentile rempaira sempre amore, the founder of the Dolce Stil Novo wove a complex counterpoint of sun and stars in order to explain the reason for the correspondence between a noble heart and love, as he clearly showed in the second and fourth stanzas: Love’s fire catches in the noble heart, Like the power of a precious stone Whose potency does not descend from the star Until the sun makes it a noble object: After the sun has drawn out Everything base with its own force, The star confers power upon it. In such a way, a lady, Like the star, transforms the heart Chosen by Nature and made pure and noble. … Sun strikes the mud all day long; It remains base, nor does the sun lose heat. A proud man says, “I am made noble by thy birth.” I liken him to the mud and noble worth to the sun. No man should believe 1

Dante, The Banquet (Il Convivio), II xii and xv, trans. R. Lansing, New York-London, Garland, 1990.

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Piero Boitani That nobility exists outside the heart By right of lineage, Unless he has a noble heart disposed to virtue, Just as water carries the sunray And the sky holds the stars and their brightness.2

Guinizzelli’s analogies in the second stanza are drawn between the noble heart and a precious stone; nature and the sun; a lady and a star. But his reasoning is more complex, since it frames the analogies within the Aristotelian categories of potency and act: the sun, Gianfranco Contini writes, “purifies the stone and makes it suitable to receive its real properties from its specific star.”3 Likewise, in the fourth stanza the analogies are drawn between mud and those who hold that nobility is something inherited, and between the sun and “noble valor.” In the last lines of the same stanza, however, the poet goes beyond mere analogy between natural objects and human feelings and aims at the astonishing similarity between on the one hand nobility residing in the heart (if the heart possesses “virtue) and, on the other, the phenomenon of water reflecting starlight, while the stars and their radiance remain in the night sky. The two extraordinarily compact and interwoven images of the water which “carries” light, or lets it permeate itself, and that of the sky which “holds” the unalterable splendor of the stars must have helped Dante to understand how it might be possible to write astral poetry of incredible imaginative power, merging the data of common experience with scientific and philosophical theories. In fact, Dante’s works, starting with the Vita Nuova, and even more with The Banquet, are filled with stars. In his passion for them, the poet even compared the sciences to the various heavens – and in particular, Physics and Metaphysics to the Starry Sky – and affirmed that “in every science the written word is a star filled with light,” i.e., it possesses words capable of unveiling its meaning.4 Finally, it is with stars that the Comedy both begins and closes each of its three canticles. The itinerary of the poem begins with stars in the first canto of the Inferno, when the pilgrim sees the sun rise: “The sun was mounting, and those springtime stars / that rose along with it when Holy Love / first moved to being all these lovely things,” when God created the cosmos.5 The descent through Hell ends with the ascent through the “hidden path,” the return to the “shining world” and finally the sight of the stars: “until through some small aperture I saw / the lovely things the skies above us bear. / Now we came out, and once more saw the stars.” The Purgatorio opens with the sight of Venus and of Pisces, as well as with the four stars of the southern pole. It closes with the pilgrim “pure and prepared to rise towards the stars.” The celestial voyage in the Paradiso begins with the “beacon of the world,” the Sun at the spring equinox, shining where four celestial circles (the ecliptic, the equinoctial colure, the horizon, and the equator) intersect and are thus united by three crosses, and ends with the “love that moves the sun and other stars.” From the beginning to the conclusion of the poem, the stars are “moved” by supreme Love; one should note how the beginning of Inferno (the stars rising with the sun “when Holy Love / first moved to being all those lovely things”)

2

The Poetry of Guido Guinizzelli, trans. R. Edwards, New York-London, Garland, 1987, pp. 20-23. In Poeti del Duecento, vol. II, ed. G. Contini, Milan-Naples, Ricciardi, 1960, p. 461, n. 11. 4 The Banquet, II, xv, 1. 5 Inferno, I, 37-40. 3

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corresponds to the last line of the poem, where the same Love “moves the sun and other stars.” Substituting stars for the shadows with which Virgil concluded his Aeneid and Eclogues, Dante signals a drastic change: the three endings with the word “stars” – a formula that remains impressed in memory – indicate an opening to light and to the sky: a return to life, to hope, to the marvel and the wonder of creation,6 at the end of the Inferno; a readiness for the ultimate climb, at the end of the Purgatorio; and the supreme identification – in a new and perennial creation – with the cosmos and its movements, at the end of the Paradiso. Moreover, the openings and the closures with “stars” make manifest a precise aesthetic intention, a poetic inclination, a choice for pulchritudo which is visible in the rhymes themselves: from the first to the last cantos of Inferno, “stelle” (stars) rhymes with “belle” (beautiful). The beginning of Purgatorio depicts the horizon as opening itself up like a smile when the morning star, Venus, appears, and the sky enjoying the flames of the four southern stars. In Canto XXVIII of Paradiso the stars are called simply “beauties.” Dante is in love with the beauty of the stars. He is, first of all, a devout stargazer. When, in The Banquet, he confesses that the year in which he composed the canzone Love, speaking fervently in my mind,7 the strain of reading had debilitated his “visual spirits” to the extent that “the stars seemed to me completely overcast by a kind of white haze,”8 he is revealing precisely a committed and regular engagement with the night sky. In the Comedy, indeed, the starry sky is invoked in the poet’s imagination to highlight some of its most significant moments. Virgil, recounting the apparition of Beatrice and her mission to save Dante in canto II of Inferno, reveals, adopting a lyrical trope, that “her eyes were shining brighter than the stars.” If in the Inferno then, the stars are suitably hidden (with only one exception), from the beginning of the Purgatorio the pilgrim and his guide return to see the stars that shine with a primordial light. Dante now turns his gaze towards the “other pole” and its stars. He observes them with joy since the sky, he says, seems to feel pleasure because of their “gleams.” There are four stars, and they have never been contemplated by anyone except Adam and Eve, at the dawn of creation, in the Garden of Eden. Another character in the poem, however, has gazed upon those stars: Ulysses. His tale is the exception, in the Inferno, that I have just mentioned, and proves once again that the poetry of the stars and the myth of the Greek hero have something in common. Furthermore, it constitutes a truly outstanding example of how the stars can be used for the construction of the story and the symbolism of the narration. Here, as in the Odyssey, there is a route, this time towards the West, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. And here too the sky offers points of reference. When the ship “flies” beyond Gibraltar, towards the unexplored Atlantic Ocean, Now every star around the alien pole I saw by night. Our own star sank so low it never rose above the ocean floor.

“Riveder le stelle”, the expression that concludes Inferno XXXIV, is anticipated in Inferno, XVI, 83. Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, in Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. and trans. K. Foster and P. Boyde, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967. 8 The Banquet, III, ix. 6 7

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The North Star has disappeared, and the stars of the southern hemisphere are visible. Dante employs this astral notation – and the rise and fall of the moon five times – in order to give temporal rhythm to a tale which has no spatial reference, thus endowing it with a special trait: the world in which Ulysses sails is truly a distant and alien one, and that sailing takes place, metaphorically, in the darkness of night, lit only by the light of the moon and the stars. The poet does not specify which stars appear to Ulysses in the “alien pole”, but in canto I of Purgatorio, when in the poem’s fiction he has reached the place where Ulysses was shipwrecked – that “empty shore / that never saw its waters sailed upon / by any man who knew how to return” – he sees in the southern sky, the four stars of the Antarctic Pole. The four mysterious stars allegorize the four cardinal virtues – prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. But this could also be a genuine astronomical observation, as they correspond to the four stars of the Southern Cross which appeared (albeit not as a constellation) in ancient maps of the sky, and were known to astronomers and sailors.9 Dante thereby endows the landscape of Purgatory with an atmosphere both exotic and primeval. *** Little by little, during the ascent on the mountain of Purgatory, the light of the stars grows in vigor. The angel of humility, in canto XII of the Purgatorio, comes “white-vestured, in countenance, it seems, / trembling in air as does the morning star.” At the beginning of canto XIX the last hour of the night is evoked through the cold coming from the moon and from Saturn, and through the apparition in the sky of the stars that announce the dawn in the socalled “Fortuna Maior” configuration. Later on, the play of lights, on which Dante will reveal himself an expert in the Paradiso, begins. When the last rays of the sun are followed by the shadows of dusk, the stars appear “in many parts,” while shortly thereafter the moon “formed like a copper bucket burnished red” makes them “seem fewer.”10 A sign of the arrival at the gates of the Garden of Eden is then the fact that the stars appear to be clearer and bigger than usual. And during the purification rites which the pilgrim has to undergo there, after Beatrice’s apparition, the dancing “four lovely ones” – the cardinal virtues – reveal themselves as nymphs of the Garden, yet stars in the sky: the four stars of the South which Dante saw upon entering Purgatory.11 In the Paradiso, where each one of the heavens is a “star,” the astral poetry develops in a series of deservedly famous images. They are employed in order to shed sudden light upon the movements of the blessed, the state of the pilgrim’s soul, and the very nature of the truths revealed to him. In the Heaven of the Sun, the sages, as if they were “burning suns,” rotate three times, singing, around Dante and Beatrice – “as stars more swift the closer to fixed poles.”12 To Saint Peter, examining him on his faith, Dante declares that the Trinity in which he believes is a “spark” “that spreads to light the living flame” over the other articles of the

9

Dante knew that, in the Ptolemaic star catalog of the Almagest, eight of the fifteen biggest stars were in the Southern Hemisphere: cf. Paradiso, XIII, 4-6. 10 Purgatorio, XVII, 70-72; XVIII, 76-78: see A. Cornish, Reading Dante’s Stars, New Haven-London, Yale University Press, 2000. 11 Purgatorio, XXXI, 106-108. 12 Paradiso, X, 76-78.

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Creed, “which flashes out in me as stars in heaven.”13 After Beatrice’s explanation about the celestial hierarchies, “truth was seen as stars are in the sky.”14 From the shining of the souls to the splendor of truth and of faith: Paradiso assimilates both the external and the internal universe to the stars. But it is in the cantos between XIII and XV that these images reach a first, extraordinary density and complexity. While describing the dance and the chant of the wise spirits, Dante demands of us an imaginative effort. If we truly want to understand what he saw, we must imagine a sequence of five phenomena, and then hold on to these images. We should first of all envisage fifteen stars of the first magnitude (those indicated by Ptolemy in the Almagest), which in different celestial regions revive the sky with a luminosity so intense that it dissipates any mist in the air. Secondly, we ought to imagine the Big Dipper of Ursa Major in the northern sky. Thirdly, we ought to picture the last two stars of Ursa Minor, that is, the wider extremity of that horn-shaped constellation which begins with the North Star, at the top of the “axle” – the celestial axis around which the Primum Mobile (the first moving heaven) rotates. Fourth, it will be necessary to observe how the fifteen stars of the first image, plus the seven of Ursa Major, will have composed two constellations, similar, in their circular shape, to the Crown (the constellation into which Ariadne, daughter of Minos, was transformed when the chill of death fell upon her). Finally, fifth, one should imagine that one of the two constellations has its radius inside that of the other – that is, they are concentric – and spin in opposite directions. Here we would have a faint image of the “true” double constellation and the double dance which, rotating, surrounded the pilgrim. For, the poet concludes with another simile, the spectacle that he was presented with surpassed that which we are used to just as the Primum Mobile, the fastest of the heavens, surpasses in its rotation the slowly flowing river Chiana. In short, we encounter here twenty-four lines, twenty-four stars, and twenty-four blessed souls. Starting with simple contemplation, we move to the astronomic observation of one, then two, constellations, towards finally elaborating a genuine astral play of the imagination. We behold a stellar metamorphosis – with the metamorphosis of Ariadne into Corona Borealis serving as its mythical correlative – made up of fission, then concentric fusion, and finally opposite rotation. In the twenty-first century reader, this arouses the very same wonder evoked by contemporary cosmology and the movements of galaxies and nebulas it describes. The light of the stars, intensely radiating, at first, in the heavenly regions and melting away the density of the air, is later concentrated into inter-penetrating rays, circular and internal one to the other. While the sequence of images develops, slow and majestic, pausing on the triple repetition of the verb “imagine,” and revolving almost as a spiral, the “double dance” really is envisaged as an extremely fast movement, equal to that of the Primum Mobile, twice in fact evoked: Imagine, if you truly want to know what I saw now – and while I’m speaking grip this image firm, as though a steady rock – some fifteen stars, from various demesnes, that bring the heavens to life with light so clear

13 14

Paradiso, XXIV, 145-147. Paradiso, XXVIII, 87.

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Piero Boitani they overcome the thickest weave of air. Imagine, too, the Wain which needs, by day or night, no arc more ample than our lap of sky – its turning plough shaft never lost to view. Imagine, too, the bell mouth of the Horn, its point beginning at the axle end round which the wheel that starts the cosmos rolls. Imagine these all forming, in the sky, two signs among themselves (as when the child of Minos, Ariadne, felt death’s chill) so that the rays of one contained the next and each was now revolving differently, one set in this direction, one in that, you’ll have a shade, then, almost, of that true constellation – the dance that, doubled there, circled around the point where I was now. That goes as far beyond the norms we know as does that sphere which outruns all the rest beyond the sluggish current of Chiana.15

Dante can also, however, deliver astral images with absolute simplicity. Still in the Heaven of the Sun, in order to describe the clarity growing around the two crowns of wise spirits – right after Solomon speaks of the resurrection of the flesh – Dante mentions a uniform halo of light that rises “above” the one already present, just as the horizon becomes bright once again at dawn: “as though a new horizon, brightening.”16 Then, leaping from dawn to dusk, he compares his discerning another circle of souls to the sudden and surprising appearance, in the sky, of new stars: When early evening hours are drawing in, new things begin to show across the sky so that the sight both seems and seems not true. There, too, it seemed to me that newer things began to rise to view and form a ring beyond the circumscription of those two.17 This image plays on the elementary contrast between the horizon, rising bright at dawn, and the darkness of night that rises at dusk from the same horizon; and later on the contrast between “new things”, the mere appearances of stars, and “newer things,” the real substances of the blessed lights. The light of a day is born and then dies: it becomes dimmer as new lights appear, when the sky becomes peppered with still evanescent stars, barely perceptible. A moment later, in the long dusk of Paradiso, those lights become very strong indeed. In the sixth Heaven, the Eagle of Justice is silent between the two parts of its long speech. Dante 15

Paradiso, XIII, 1-24. Paradiso, XIV, 67-69; see P. Dronke, “Orizzonte che rischiari. Notes towards the Interpretation of Paradiso XIV,” in his The Medieval Poet and his World, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984, pp. 407-430. 17 Paradiso, XIV, 70-75. 16

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compares that momentary silence to dusk, when the sun, shining on the whole world, descends from one hemisphere to the other, and the sky, formerly luminous thanks to its light, becomes lit once again by an infinite number of stars (in which, according to ancient and medieval lore, the light of the Sun is reflected). The “new things” of Canto XIV correspond to the sky “made new;” to the “early evening hours,” the day that “fades throughout these parts.” But the protagonist at dusk also contemplates a dawn of stars, their rising out from the incipient darkness. When he whose flame casts light round all the world goes down and leaves our northern hemisphere – and daylight therefore fades throughout these parts – the sky, once lighted by the sun alone, seems suddenly made new by many flares, reflections kindled from that single source.18 When, from the Heaven of the Wise, Dante ascends to that of Mars, where the spirit of those who fought to defend faith appear to him, the analogy he employs is, up to the penultimate verse, completely linear. The term of comparison is here the Milky Way, the strip of white glow extending between the two celestial poles, letting stars of various luminosity emerge, and which poses many questions to wise men.19 The image then grows in intensity towards the end, when the souls form a constellation where their rays design the “honored sign” of the cross in the depths of the heaven of Mars, the one composed of four lines which, in a circle, conjoin its four quadrants: The galaxy, distinctly marked by lights, both great and small, between the earth’s two poles, glistens and makes the learnèd wonder why. So too, like constellations in the depths of Mars, these rays composed the honored sign that quadrants (joined within a circle) form.20 Again in this heaven the sudden movement towards Dante of one of the blessed lights – which will reveal itself as that of Dante’s ancestor, Cacciaguida – is seen as a shooting star crossing the sky. In the first part, this is an analogy of integral serenity and purity, which becomes dramatic and extremely precise in the second. The first impression – that of a star changing its trajectory – is replaced, then, by another, more reflexive one: when the fire of the star burns of a sudden combustion in the sky, the observer understands that no real star is missing, and that the new trajectory is extremely short. An extremely fast, flaming stream of light, a sudden flare, which interrupts the tranquil and pure background: the immobile and unchangeable landscape of true stars in the sky. Dante describes the phenomenon of shooting stars, following the movement of the eyes of the observer, as no one before him had:

18

Paradiso, XX, 1-6. Dante discusses the Galaxy and compares it to metaphysics in The Banquet, II, xiv, 1-8. 20 Paradiso, XIV, 97-102. 19

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Piero Boitani Sometimes, across a pure, untroubled sky, there runs an instantaneous flash of fire, moving our steady eyes to trace its course, from which, it seems, a star is changing place, except that, at the point it caught alight, nothing is lost, nor does it last for long. So, from the right extension of the cross down to its foot, there ran an astral spark which left the constellation shining there.21 ***

The last vista of the physical universe is contemplated by the protagonist during his ascent to the heaven of the fixed stars, when Beatrice invites him to turn his gaze downwards and he beholds the seven celestial spheres, their positions and movements, and lastly the Earth, small and of very little value.22 From this moment onwards, his eyes will be ever more fixed upon that which will be revealed as the summit and the true centre of the cosmos, God. Already from the eighth heaven that supreme light – here, the image of Christ – is seen as a sun which lights up all the stars, and that sun as a full moon, smiling and surrounded by stars, like Diana accompanied by her nymphs: whose breasts seem to be (verbally) mirrored in the distant, boundless gulfs of the starry sky.23 The five-fold transposition – Christ / Sun / physical Sun / Moon / Trivia – rotates around the delight of the moon (“smiles”) and the “painting” of the stars across the gulfs of the sky: a full splendor, a brocade covering the celestial vault, an infinite expansion and shrinking of light into points: As in the calm, clear skies of moonlit nights, tri-form Diana smiles (eternal nymphs, around her, paint all Heaven’s curving spheres), above a thousand lanterns or still more, I saw one sun that, soaring, lit them all, as our sun lights the stars seen over us.24 The Primum Mobile, “the regal mantle of those rolling spheres / that form our universe,” the sphere that is “alive with stars / all shimmering at the breathing of God’s rule,” is still too distant, and therefore not visible. But as soon as Dante reaches that heaven, the ninth, he can finally gaze upon the “point” which irradiates so strong a primeval light that he is forced to shut his eyes. Compared to that, he claims, any star which appears small from the Earth, would look as large as a moon – as a star is compared to another in order to measure its magnitude: Even the star that, seen from here, seems least

21

Paradiso, XV, 13-21. Paradiso, XXII, 133-154. 23 In Italian, the play is between “seni” (breasts of the nymphs) and “seni” (“insenature,” gulfs, bays, coves). 24 Paradiso, XXIII, 25-30. 22

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would seem, when set beside that point (as star is set by star), a moon in magnitude.25 The properly metaphysical nature of the universe is then revealed: “from that one point,” as Beatrice explains, “depend both Heaven and all of Nature’s world,” and around it rotate, with decreasing velocity, the nine concentric circles of the cosmos. The first one, hosting the angelic hierarchies, is on fire and rotates with extreme speed around that point, as far from it as the halo around a star appears to the eyes (a star whose very light delineates the contour of the halo), as the intervening mist is at its thickest: that is, very close. The universe then appears as if it were turned inside-out: at its centre not the Earth, but God.26 And what is appropriate to this moment is a full splendor and a primeval Dawn. The glow of the former is immediately seen, as Beatrice has explained the relationship between the point that is God and the sensible world. Just as the atmosphere remains splendid and serene when Boreas, the wind of the North, blows from his more gentle cheek – the maestrale – and the nebulous impurities which pollute the air dissolve, so that the entire sky seems to smile in its clarity together with the “beauties” of all its parts, so Dante rejoices, his mind enlightened and purified, after Beatrice’s clear answer: “and truth was seen as stars are in the sky”: Compare: when Boreas, the northern wind, blows from his milder cheek, our hemisphere is left serene, its air bright, sparkling, clear. The crusted scum of clouds that swirled there first is freed and clarified. The whole sky laughs. Its many beauties smile round every steeple. So I became, as – caring for my good – my lady answered with such clarity, and truth was seen as stars are in the sky.27 It is not just Trivia, then, who smiles, but the entire sky, with many stars in all of its gulfs: those stars, now simply called “beauties” – at the beginning and at the end of the Inferno they were defined as “lovely things” – shine in Dante’s “mind in love,” just as the truth shines like a star in the sky.28 The perfect circularity of this scene is followed by the Dawn which signals the vanishing of the angelic hierarchies and the ascent to the Empyrean, that is, the entrance into the divine world. With Dante, we have already seen more than one dusk when the sky starts showing the first stars. And a dawn whose uniform halo of light rose above the previous one, “as though a new horizon, brightening.” Now, it is the disappearance of every star from the light of dawn which interests him, since with the vanishing of the angels every trace of stars also disappears 25

Paradiso, XXVIII, 19-21. See C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1964; C. Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 15-35, 169-192; H.-R. Patapievici, Gli occhi di Beatrice. Com’era davvero il mondo di Dante?, Milan, Bruno Mondadori, 2006, pp. 54-89. 27 Paradiso, XXVIII, 79-87. 28 In Paradiso, XXVII, 88. Dante says his mind is always in love (“la mente innamorata”) with Beatrice. This is also the title of a fundamental essay by K. Foster, “The Mind in Love: Dante’s Philosophy,” in J. Freccero, ed., Dante. A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1965, pp. 43-60. 26

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from the last part of paradise. The spirits appear as a river of light, a white rose, a swarm of bees dancing and flying into flowers, and the [traveler] pilgrim fixes his gaze ever more deeply into the uncreated divine substance: Maybe, around six thousand miles away, the sixth hour, close to noon, flares out, while earth inclines its shadow-cone to rest, near level. At this same time, the mid-point of the sky will start, so deep above us, to transform, and some stars lose their semblance in those depths. Then brightest Aurora who serves the sun advances and, dawning, the skies, vista by vista, are closed till even the loveliest is gone.29 Stars are losing their “parere,” their appearance, while, earlier, the “parvenze,” their appearances, had acquired consistency. The disappearance of the stars marks a solemn moment in the poem. They will re-appear only in the very last verse, when they will be objects, together with the sun, of the motion God’s love gives them. *** Dante’s use of stars, then, is at once astronomical, metaphysical, psychological, descriptive and aesthetic. Astronomical, because his interest is dynamic, oriented towards the movements of the stars and of the celestial vault, and because he employs them to mark precise dates and hours. Metaphysical, because the stars – which, in The Banquet, he had already indicated as equivalent to metaphysics – are means he employs to describe the true structure of the universe. Psychological, because he uses sidereal images to give an impression of his mental states. Descriptive, because he employs the analogies with the stars to allow the reader to understand the revelations and the movements – the dances – of the blessed spirits, of whom they are mere shadows. Within this framework, a properly aesthetic space is disclosed, one of pure enjoyment of the sight of the stars: indeed, Dante often calls them “beauties” or “lovely things.” His joy is primeval and full of wonder at beholding the universe’s pulchritudo, a joy he expresses through the smile of Trivia and of the eternal nymphs, in fact of the whole celestial vault, an exultation he indicates through the sky’s own enjoyment of the southern stars. This, therefore, is the beauty of Creation, and of the small, human creation attempting to imitate it. When, opening Canto X of the Paradiso, Dante invites the reader to turn with him towards the “wheels,” the celestial spheres, and particularly to direct our gaze to that part of the sky where the two movements of the spheres meet, he affirms that God’s ordering of the cosmos is such that “it can never be, / that we, in wonder, fail to taste Him there.” This “taste” (“gustar”), this enjoyment is purely aesthetic, as the poet immediately reminds us: and there, entranced, begin to view the skill the Master demonstrates. Within Himself, He loves it so, His looking never leaves. 29

Paradiso, XXX, 1-9.

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God is the artisan, the supreme maker (in Canto XVII he is seen as a Painter, and in Canto XIX as the Geometer-Architect of the Heavens), and his creation is the product of the infinite and constant love for it he harbors in himself. But the reader of the Paradiso is invited to view in entrancement, i.e., to contemplate with love and joy the divine Work. Also, to reflect on it if he wants “not tedium but joy:” if he wants to enjoy its beauty. And the beauty of the poem he or she is reading, a poem that treats the subject of this beauty and has in fact just offered a taste of. Dante has set up a banquet for the reader: it is now his or her turn to proceed to eat: “the theme of which I’m made to be scribe / drags in its own direction all my thoughts.” The Comedy – the Paradiso – is the work of an artist imitating God, rewriting His Creation in a literary creation.30 Yet Dante rewrites God’s creatures as well, for he does not just describe the look of the stars, but rather offers an idea of their pristine splendor. He concentrates on their elementary scattering across the celestial vault, as if they were mere points of light. He is interested in the purity of the stars, that which shines after the impurities in the atmosphere are dissipated. He captures the stars, then, always in transitional moments, dusk and dawn, their first appearance and their disappearance: as if it were only in those borderline instants between the “appearing” and the “losing appearance” that the ultimate essence of the stars could shine through to us human beings. *** Whoever would have attempted, after Dante, to talk about stars in Italian literature, would have felt shipwrecked against a mountain of incommensurable height. Yet Petrarch was not intimidated, and he wrote poetry about them with extraordinary intensity. His is, naturally, a different approach than Dante’s. Petrarch – at least twice in his Canzoniere – assimilates the stars to the “cose belle,” the “lovely things.” And in canzone 72 (where he celebrates Laura’s eyes) the echo of Dante’s verses in Inferno I (“The sun was mounting, and those springtime stars / that rose along with it when Holy Love / first moved to being all these lovely things”) clearly reverberates, mediated through the ending of the Paradiso, in the verses “I think: if up there, whence the eternal mover of the stars deigned to show forth this work on earth, the other works are as beautiful.”31 But Petrarch elaborates his own sidereal poetry, wholly focused on the person and the eyes of the beloved, and from these proceeds to celebrate the universe. Let us gather, then, the coordinates of this image. Dante had Virgil say of Beatrice that “her eyes were shining brighter than the stars.” Laura’s eyes are, for Petrarch, two stars. So, for example, in sonnet 157, where he recalls the day he fell in love, the poet declares himself incapable of describing the “lively image” though his own art or his style. The beloved’s cries, her “sweet bitter lamenting,” made it difficult to call this lady who “made the sky clear all around” either a mortal or a goddess. But her beauty leaves no doubts: “Her head was fine

30

Paradiso, X, 1-27. Canzoniere, 72, 17; the other occurrence of stelle: cose belle is 70, 36-37. For translations from the Canzoniere I use here Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. R.M. Durling, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 1976. See also the two most important recent editions of the Canzoniere with extensive commentary: by M. Santagata, Milan, Mondadori, 2 nd ed., 2004; and by R. Bettarini, Turin, Einaudi, 2005. 31

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gold, her face warm snow, ebony her eyebrows and her eyes two stars whence Love never bent his bow in vain.” This theme is picked up in sonnet 160, where the poet, together with Love, contemplates Laura with infinite marvel, while she speaks or laughs. “From the lovely clear sky of her tranquil brow,” Petrarch now writes, “my two faithful stars so sparkle that there is no other light to inflame and guide whoever wishes to love nobly.” In sonnet 200 the serene eyes and the “starry brows” of Laura stand out among her many beauties. And again, in sonnet 299, where Petrarch laments – with the ubi sunt theme – the disappearance of the beloved, “the lovely brow and the two stars” which gave “light” to his life are prominent from the very beginning. The stars, the eyes of this lady, are “signs” used to find bearings in the navigation of love, of life, and of poetry.32 But the lady herself is a star, both in life and in the foreboding of death: “star on earth” and evergreen laurel leaf, “perhaps God wishes to take such a friend of virtue away from earth and make her a star in Heaven.”33 However, the poet involves the whole cosmos in his love story. The sonnets 41 to 43, for example, form a triptych pivoting on the absence and the presence of the beloved. In the first one, Petrarch announces that when the laurel loved by Apollo strays far from “its own dwelling,” the world cries: Vulcan sighs and sweats in his workshop in order to prepare new bolts for Jupiter, who produces thunder, snow and rain; the earth weeps; the sun, seeing “his dear friend” somewhere else, is far away; Saturn and Mars, “cruel planets,” “regain boldness;” Orion rips the sails of sailors; Eolus, the god of winds, makes the sea (Neptune), the sky (Juno) and us (on Earth) understand what it means that the “lovely face awaited by the angels” has disappeared. On the other hand, when (as recounted in sonnet 42), the “sweet smile humble and modest” comes back to show “its new beauties,” Vulcan is idle in his workshop, Jupiter lacks his bolts, the air (his sister Juno) seems to renew herself through the gaze of the sun (Apollo); Zephyr blows across the shores of the west, making “the mariner secure without any exercise of art and awakens the flowers in the grass in every meadow.” Here the stars which in the previous sonnet had been defined “cruel” and are now qualified as “harmful” – those, that is, that cause storms – “flee on every hand, dispersed by her lovely face.” In the third sonnet, number 43, “The son of Latona” (Phoebus Apollo, the Sun) has already cast his gaze down from the sky nine times (nine days elapsed) in search of Daphne (the laurel / Laura) who once provoked his longing sighs, and now those of the poet. Vainly looking for the object of his love, he seems “like one mad with grief at not finding some much-loved thing.” Tired and “tristo,” sad and irritated, the sun keeps itself aside, and cannot see the return of the visage that the poet will everlastingly praise in his “pages:” the pain has changed his face so radically that he weeps once again, and the air once more becomes stormy, as at the beginning of the sequence. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses (particularly by the episode of Phaethon), and full of memories from Virgil and Dante, this triptych is really an oblique description of the essential place that poetry and its inspiration occupy in Petrarch’s life. The absence of the laurel and of the sun who loves it – of Laura and of poetry, and the inspiration, the love that desires her and articulates her praise – provokes the downturn of nature; it is the harbinger of winter. The return of beauty resuscitates light in Apollo’s gaze, makes sailing easy, awakens flowers, routs stormy stars. Beauty (invoked three times in sonnet 42, and attributed to the lady, to 32 33

Canzoniere, 73, 46-51;139, 12; 329, 3. Canzoniere, 29, 46-49; 254, 7-8.

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Apollo’s gaze, and again to the lady’s face) is a new spring, a breath of Zephyr – inspiration – which makes poetic composition possible and effortless. When, on the contrary, the sun cannot find that sweet and divine breath it shows itself sickly, sad, troubled, and solitary: the beautiful eyes shed new tears, and the air returns to being stormy and wintery. The world cries when that visage – awaited by angels, enamored, and praised “on more than a thousand pages,” a visage that is love and poetry – is missing. The world smiles only when inspiration is present. This is the space within which Petrarch’s imagination moves, as shown by sonnet 154, where the poetic field is conjoined to the cosmic and the ethical ones. The whole universe – the sonnet explicates – has put its entire power and its whole care into the “living light” into which Nature and the Sun mirror themselves, something to which nothing compares. The resulting work is then so high, delicate and new that no mortal gaze can dare to behold it, so strong is the grace and the sweetness that Love infuses into its beautiful eyes. The air itself, shaken by their sweet rays, is lit by honesty, and is such that it goes beyond the poet’s capacity of imagining and description. In that air, it is impossible to feel any base desire, but only honorable and virtuous ones. When, the poet wonders, was sensual desire annihilated by the supreme beauty of a woman? The stars, the heavens and the elements vied with all their arts and put every ultimate care into that living light, where Nature is mirrored and the sun, which finds its equal nowhere else. The work is so high, so lovely and new, that mortal glance cannot look at it amicably, Love in her beautiful eyes so seems to rain down sweetness and grace without measure. The air struck by their rays burns with chastity and becomes such that it far surpasses our speech and thought; no low desire is felt there, but desire of honor, of virtue. Now when was base desire ever extinguished by highest beauty?34 The opening verse – “The stars, the heavens and the elements vied” – is solemn, recalling the strife of every single part of the cosmos to exercise the maximum of its formative virtue towards the goal of generating the light of life, identified with Laura’s eyes.35 This process of generation has a fundamentally Aristotelian shape, yet results in a wholly neo-Platonic mirror, within which the “living light,” the “incarnate brightness” of the lady’s eyes recalls the “living light” in which Dante contemplates the divine Trinity in the last canto of Paradiso.36

34

Slightly modified and rearranged translation. For the informing virtue, cp. Dante, The Banquet, IV, xxi. 36 R. Bettarini’s commentary, vol. I, p. 738. 35

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The product of the sky and of Love, then: divine, beautiful, extraordinary, full of sweetness and grace, incommensurable. Yet in this “work” is also dimly reflected the terrestrial artisan, the poet, who had called “work” Laura’s portrait painted by Simone Martini and who immediately evokes his own “speech” and “thought.” For, the ineffability that he proclaims (“it far surpasses our speech and thought”) is a poetic word: to the extent that he plays on the assonance between “l’aere,” (the air), and “Laura,” and in “the air struck by their rays” follows Cavalcanti’s example in “Who is she that comes, makyng turn every man’s eye, / And makyng the air to tremble with a bright clearenesse.”37 Ineffable Laura is yet pronounced and described, and to her are attributed the ethical qualities of honesty, honor, and virtue, coalesced into supreme kalokagathía, “highest beauty.” *** The cosmos is evoked again in the marvelous Nocturne of sonnet 164. Here, modeled on Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, the contrast between nature’s stillness and the poet’s restlessness is developed. But the description of the universe in the first quatrain is itself a microcosm of sky, earth, and wind; of animals and birds; of stars and seas. There is deep quiet, in which the only movement is that of night’s chariot, and this appears as a slow, solemn “circling about” (“giro”) that suggests the rotation of the star-spangled celestial vault: Now that the heavens and the earth and wind are silent, and sleep reins in the beasts and birds, Night drives her starry car about, and in its bed the sea lies without a wave.38 Petrarch recreates in a lyrical rhythm the enchantment of Dante’s “nights” in the Paradiso: yet not in the amazement caused by the rise and the fall of the stars – which prompts the observer to try and understand their movements and their essence – but rather in the fullness of the whole, in the complete and satisfied contemplation against which an interior “war” (“I am awake, I think, I burn, I weep”), full of anger and pain, is fought. The agonistic drama of Dante’s way of learning and imagining is gone. What replaces it is “putting everything on the same level,” or “leveling all details of reality:”39 here sky, earth, and wind; elsewhere, errant stars, ships, and knights. Compare Dante’s analogy, “Sometimes across a pure, untroubled sky / there runs an instantaneous flash of fire” with the image that, in the Canzoniere, opens sonnet 312, “Not wandering stars going through the clear sky.” Of Dante’s strong movement, present already in “flash of fire,” only the “clear sky” is left, while Dante’s “running” is flattened into a mere “going”, the “fire” is replaced by the planets (the “wandering stars”), and the “instantaneous” completely disappears. The drama has not been completely eradicated, but it has shifted, internalized in the poet’s soul. The external world is a series of attractive realities, in which the stars that Dante had assimilated to the “lovely 37

Ezra Pound, Translations, London and Boston, Faber, 1953, p. 39. Slightly modified, rearranged translation. 39 The expression, “parificazione dei reali,” is due to G. Contini, “Cavalcanti in Dante,” now in his Un’idea di Dante, Turin, Einaudi, 1976, p. 145. I. Calvino uses it, again for Cavalcanti, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 13 and 15, where the very abstract Italian is translated into concrete English by “putting everything on the same level,” or “leveling things.” 38

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things” (“cose belle”) become, foreshadowing Leopardi, “vaghe:” beautiful, yes, but in a much softer manner: Not wandering stars going through the clear sky, nor oiled ships through calm seas, nor armed knights through the fields, nor swift happy wild creatures in lovely woods.40 The inner world ensues, the pleasure of intellectual life and work: to wait, to write poetry, to sing: Nor fresh news of a hoped-for good, nor poems of love in high and ornate style, nor amid clear fountains and green meadows the sweet singing of virtuous and beautiful ladies. The obstacles against which the harmony of nature, the contemplation of human activities, and the dreams of love and poetry come to shatter is the thought of her, Laura, now dead and yet ever so close. No warmth, no joy can seize the heart anymore: she, sole light and mirror of the poet’s eyes, has buried them with herself. Life itself is now nothing but tedium and torment, to the extent that he invokes the end of it all, since he only desires to see once again that which was perhaps better never to have seen. In other words, though acknowledging that Laura’s death (the impossibility of seeing her) was for the best, Petrarch perceives this absence as unbearable, and desires to die in order to see her once again in the afterlife: nor will there ever be anything else that can reach my heart: she has so buried it who was alone the light and mirror to my eyes. Living is such heavy and long pain, that I call out for the end in my great desire to see her again whom it would have been better not to have seen at all. That light and that dream persist unbroken: an ideal and an image against which the beauties of the world and of poetry are worth nothing. Thus, from a passage such as this, one understands that Laura represents, for Petrarch, not just the Lady, Love, Poetry, or Glory, but all of this together: a perennial aspiration to a luminous Living, full of desires and expectations, an ideal of a life of which indeterminacy and dissatisfaction constitute an integral part. The contemplation of the stars, in this context, is reserved only to the afterlife. In sonnet 287 Petrarch addresses his fellow poet Sennuccio del Bene, recently passed away, and declares himself – albeit “alone and sorrowing” – comforted by the thought that his friend is now soaring in his high flight. Now, he continues, you “see both the one and the other pole 40

Rearranged translation here and in the following quotations from sonnet 312.

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and the wandering stars and their winding journey.” After death, there comes the ascent to heaven: conceived as a flight like that of Dante’s Ulysses, and modeled on that of Pompey’s soul in Lucan’s Civil War41 – an ascent and contemplation of the planets and of their oblique path. And also, the acknowledgement, following Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, of how “short” “our seeing,” our earthly sight, really is. Once he reaches the third sphere – that of Venus – Sennuccio, Petrarch hopes, will be greeted by his predecessors and colleagues, the other poets of Love: Guittone, Cino of Pistoia, Dante, Franceschino degli Albizzi, “and all that band.” And he will tell Laura how many tears Petrarch still sheds, transformed into a wild animal, “remembering her beautiful face and her holy works.” The thought of Laura, and of himself in relation to her, allows Petrarch (at least twice) to look upon the full glow of the stars: in sestina 22 and in canzone 127. The two compositions, linked by an inspiration that looks at the entire universe as a term of comparison for the lady and the poet’s feelings toward her, are among the most important and suggestive of the entire Canzoniere. In the first – undoubtedly indebted to the models of Arnaut Daniel’s “Lo ferm voler” and to Dante’s “petrosa,” “Al poco giorno” – the situation is the same that we find in sonnet 164 (harking back to Virgil’s Dido): the peace of the world at night is contrasted with the interior struggle of the self. Employing spectacularly virtuous variations, this conclusion, before the final farewell, is in line with Dante’s “Così nel mio parlar,” in which repressed erotic desire finally explodes: Might I be with her from when the sun departs and no other see us but the stars, just one night, and let the dawn never come! and let her not be transformed into a green tree to escape from my arms, as the day when Apollo pursued her down here on earth! With the only explicit mythological allegory of the sestina – that of Daphne’s / Laura’s metamorphosis into laurel – the second part of the stanza really re-affirms the (not merely physical) impossibility of grasping the lady. This transpires even in the envoi, where the possibility of this event (to be alone with her during an infinite night) is definitely denied: But I will be under the earth in dried wood, and the day will be lit by the tiny stars, before the sun arrives at so sweet a dawn. The confines that mark the borders of this universe, in space and time, are six: the earth, the sun, the day, the stars, the forest, and the dawn – the concluding words of each stanza of the sestina. All the animals, then, labor during the day, but rest at night: For whatever animals dwell on earth, except the few that hate the sun, the time to labor is while it is day; 41

In Book IX of the Civil War (1-18) the soul of Pompey (killed in Egypt) rises from the pyre to the orbit of the moon, where the Stoics thought the virtuous souls ascended, and where the dark air ends and the luminous ether of starry spheres begins.

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but when the sky lights up its stars some return home and some make a nest in the wood to have rest at least until the dawn. The poet, on the other hand, knows no end to his sighs, day or night: And I – from when the lovely dawn begins to scatter the shadows from about the earth, awakening the animals in every wood – I never have any truce from sighs with the sun; and then when I see the stars flaming I go weeping and longing for the day. The day is framed by dawn and by night, and by the sun and the stars – stars that are first described as lit, then flaming, and then transformed into the stars which created man out of mud, and gifted him with sensibility: therefore “cruel:” When the evening drives away the bright day, and our darkness makes elsewhere a dawn, I gaze full of care at the cruel stars that have made me out of sensitive earth; and I curse the day on which I saw the sun, for it makes me seem a man raised in the woods. If the poet looks upon the stars with rage it is because they made him a limited being. Yet he is ready to acknowledge (in the fourth stanza) that his desire originates in them, even while he is “a mortal body of earth.” Heaven and Earth, then, are both the cradle of man: brute matter, mere sensibility, the body; gift of the stars, the spirit endowed with desire and will (“firm desire”). The destiny of this soul, as the fifth stanza declares, will be the return to the “bright stars”42 or the falling into the “amorous wood” leaving in this world the “body which will be powdered earth.” For this reason, the poet hopes to see in his lady the “pity” that in just one day could restore the damage of many years of pain, and make him happy before dawn. The great play of earth, sun, day, stars, forest, and dawn becomes the world of grass, sun, leaves, violets, snow, stars and roses in a golden vase which is evoked in canzone 127. This is seen as in harmony, and in contrast, with the blonde braids, the neck and cheeks of Laura, “the flower of all beauties.” “I say that although I gaze intent and fixed on a thousand different things, I see only one lady and her lovely face:” such is the thematic announcement of the canzone in the first stanza. So, if the poet sees the world beginning “in youthful guise,” dress itself in grass, he really is imagining Laura “at that same unripe age,” when she was young. And when the sun rises, and becomes hotter, it seems like a “flame of love” (second stanza). When he observes the leaves on the branches, or the violets growing as spring comes “and the better stars gain power,” there come back before his eyes the images of the violets and of the “green” with which Love was armed at the beginning of his long “war,” or of her complexion, or finally of the dress which covered her “little members” (third stanza). When from far away the poet sees “new snow” lit by the sun on the mountains (fourth stanza), he 42

Posited in Plato’s Timaeus, recalled by Dante in The Banquet (II, xiii, 5), and discussed by Beatrice in Paradiso, IV, 22-54.

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really feels governed by Love, as snow is by the sun, because he thinks about the “face of more than human beauty” which from a distance is capable of melting his eyes into tears, and, when near, blinds him. “There is always shown what no mortal eye ever saw, I believe, except my own:” that which, when she smiles and sighs, “enflames” him with the desire that knows no rest “but becomes eternal.” The poet has never seen “after nocturnal rain the wandering stars going through the clear air and flaming between the dew and the frost” without having his lady’s beautiful eyes in front of him, as he contemplated them when shadowed by a beautiful veil: as that day the sky shone with their beauty, so he still sees them now, when wet with tears. If he looks at the rising sun, he feels the rise of love’s light within him; if he sees the sun set, he seems to see that light turning away, and leaving in the dark its place of origin (fifth stanza). If ever he saw white and red roses, freshly harvested by “virgin hands” in a golden vase, he thought he was beholding the face that overcomes “all other wonders” with the three “excellences” gathered in it: the loose blonde braids, the pure white neck, the cheeks “adorned with a sweet fire.” But as soon as “l’òra” – the breeze – moves white and yellow flowers on the fields, the mind goes to the place and time he first saw “freed to the air (“a l’aura”) the golden hair” (sixth stanza). The wordplay, of course, is entirely centered on Laura, both “l’òra,” the breeze, and “l’aura,” the air and, with the golden hair, the aura. So far, then, the canzone has established a series of precious equivalences: spring world / young lady; sun / flame of Love; leaves-violets-green / “bark;” sun and snow / face and eyes; errant stars / beautiful eyes; sun / light; roses / visage; breeze moving the flowers / golden hair in the wind (l’aura / Laura). This is however a composition dedicated primarily to the problem of “saying” – of expressing oneself and poetizing – and framed by it from the beginning, where the counterpoint with Dante’s Vita Nova (“in quella parte,” “toward where”) announces Love’s confused “dictation” and a reconstruction entirely from the subjective point of view. Within the constant contrast between today, yesterday and the eternal this reconstruction is configured – the poet tells us in the first stanza – as an “istoria,” that is, memory: a narration, albeit not ordered and sequential (since it lacks any clear distinction between ‘last’ and ‘first’ things and rhymes), through time, through the year, through the day, in Laura’s life and in the Laura-Petrarch story. We begin from spring, from sunrise and Laura’s youth to sunset and her maturity, and on to autumn, in the second stanza. In the third, we again go from the spring and her adolescence through the years, to her becoming a woman. From the end of the winter we move in the fourth stanza to a time without seasons, eternal, not changed by summer nor ended by winter. In the fifth we are led from the starry night to dawn and then dusk, and from the day the poet saw her eyes “in the shadow of a lovely veil” to the present day. In the sixth, finally, the memory of the first day Petrarch saw Laura, “freed to the air the golden hair,” dominates. Above all – beyond the self-quotations, the Biblical references, the echoes of Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Cino da Pistoia, Bernart de Ventadorn – wider images of Laura emerge and dominate: as Spring, Sun, Flower, Stars, Breeze. In the last stanza before the envoi the icon of the Flower comes to prominence: remaining always identical to itself, like divine Wisdom, it spreads its light across innumerable places, almost like Dante’s “eternal valor” which is refracted in the several angelic mirrors “one in Himself remaining as before.”43 But the problem remains that of expressing all of this, to tell precisely “in how many places the 43

Wisdom 7:27; Paradiso, XXIX, 142-145.

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flower of all beauties, remaining in herself, has scattered her light / in order that I may never depart from her.” Doing this means to “count the stars one by one” as God invited Abraham to do in order to comprehend the infinite number of his descendants, and to “enclose the sea in a little glass” as God did, according to the Psalm, at the moment of Creation:44 it means, in other words, to aspire to the impossible: Perhaps I thought I could count the stars one by one and enclose the sea in a little glass when the strange idea came to me to tell in so few pages in how many places the flower of all beauties, remaining in herself, has scattered her light in order that I may never depart from her …45 The impossibility of singing this infinite “in so few pages” is the poetic drama of Francis Petrarch, who indeed in the envoi affirms: “whatever I say is nothing.” Because Laura, of whom one can only predicate analogies like those with Wind, Laurel, Spring, Sun, Flower, etc. is ultimately the whole celestial vault and the entire primordial sea: it is a properly metaphysical aspiration, if not a metaphysical entity. And yet, one can write poetry about her, through these analogical means, as Petrarch maintains referring to the permanence of her image inside him, the exclusiveness of his passion, and the invocation – giving her a “name:” “and thus she stays with me, / for I never see another, nor do I wish to, / nor in my sighs do I call the name of another.” Two centuries later, the most beautiful crown of the love lyric inspired by Petrarch will be woven by Torquato Tasso who, in a majestic madrigal, will imagine the stars weeping tears of dew because of the departure of the beloved, the moon laying a “pure cloud” of “crystalline drops” – frost – on the grass, and the celestial spheres rotating in grief, “wandering all around” in the darkened air. The cosmos then pours over the earth in a perfect succession of images of light and darkness: What dew or what weeping, what tears were those I saw bestrewn from the dark veil of night and from the white, dazzling face of the stars? And why did the white moon scatter a pure cloud of crystalline drops on the lap of cool grass? Why in the dark air was there heard, almost grieving, the breezes wandering all around till day-break? Were these perhaps signs of your departure, life of my life? 46

44

Genesis 15:5; Psalms 77:13. The combination of the two images of numbering the stars and locking up the waters in a small vial, as noted by Santagata, Canzoniere, p. 614, already appears in Propertius, Elegies, II, 32, 49-51. 45 Rearranged translation. 46 T. Tasso, Rhymes of Love, XXXVII, trans. M. Pastore Passaro, Ottawa, Legas, 2011, p. 179.

Chapter 17

BLISSFUL LIGHT, CLEAR BEAMS In the fourteenth century, Dante and Petrarch were not the only poets who treasured the stars. Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English literature, fully assimilated the lesson of the ancient classical authors, of the Italians, and of Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy he translated into English. But Chaucer also translated (from previous compilations) a Treatise on the Astrolabe and probably the Equatorie of the Planetis – two works on techniques necessary to astronomy. Most notably, he filled his narratives with astronomy and astrology, for characterization as well as structural, philosophical, and ironic purposes. In his Book of the Duchess, for example, the Black Knight, telling the story of how he fell in love with (and then lost) his lady, recounts how he first saw her, most beautiful among women, as a clear and luminous summer sun, outshining “any other planet in heaven, / The moon or the stars seven.”1 The traditional lyrical image, used also by Dante and Petrarch, is here employed in a fresh way, but in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales this image acquires a strongly ironic tone. The merry Friar of the party going from Southwark to Canterbury, in pilgrimage towards the grave of St. Thomas Becket, is a charming man and has a strong interest in women. He has provided various young ladies with dowries, and keeps in his hood pins which he bestows on women as presents. He gives absolution in return for monetary donations, and is skilled in begging. He knows the taverns of every town, and gets money even from poor widows. He modulates his voice while singing, and his clothing is as impressive as if he were the Pope: Of the best double-worsted was his cloak, And bulging like a bell that’s newly cast. He lisped a little, from affectation, To make his English sweet upon his tongue; And when he harped, as closing to a song,

1

Book of the Duchess, 820-824: The Knight and the Duchess represent John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster. All references are to the Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L.D. Benson, 3rd ed., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

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Piero Boitani His eyes would twinkle in his head just like The stars upon a sharp and frosty night.2

The portrait of Friar Hubert is one of the masterpieces of Chaucerian irony. A friar acting as a worldly-wise man, who sings and plays the harp, and with an affected pronunciation: he has eyes shining like frozen stars. Chaucer subverts the lyrical topos of the eyes of the beloved, radiant like stars, and attributes to the friar eyes like frozen stars. He does not describe these stars, but the writing is sufficient to give us a powerful impression of the cold glitter of the character’s eyes. In the Prologue to The Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Wife, fighting with her fifth husband – a clerk whom she married soon after burying her fourth husband, she in her 40s and he in his 20s – is portrayed as fully “Venerien” of feeling and “Marcien” of heart: the planet Venus gave her “lust,” Mars strength and hardness. Her ascendant sign, she says, is Taurus, and she did nothing but follow the inclination assigned by her “constellation,” which never permitted her to refuse her “chamber of Venus” to a good partner: “Yet have I Martes mark upon my face, / And also in another privee place.”3 The Wife, obviously, leaves it to the reader to figure out what this private (“privee”) place is, but the incongruity of the influence of Mars on a place traditionally belonging to Venus (which she herself identifies with her “chambre”) makes the joke explode in a true conflagration – an astrological / sexual short circuit. Shortly afterwards, moreover, the Wife recuperates all these astrological connotations to characterize her relationship with Jankyn, the student she married, and the beatings she got from him. The fact is that those born under Venus and Mercury “are at cross purposes in all they do,” because Mercury loves wisdom, knowledge and science, while Venus favors revelry and extravagance. Scholars and women, then, are mortal enemies: the two planets have not just a different position but also different ascendants: “And so, you see, Mercury’s powerless / When Venus is ascendant in Pisces, / and Venus sinks where Mercury is raised.” So scholars never praise women, and when they are old, and in the works of Venus they are not even worth an old boot, “Then in their dotage they sit down and write: / Women can’t keep the marriage vows they make!”4 The astrological amusement caused by the Wife pairs well with that which the narrator pours on Nicholas, the Oxford student protagonist of The Miller’s Tale (yet Chaucer declares, in the Treatise on the Astrolabe, that he does not believe in any influence of the stars). Nicholas studies the Arts, but has a burning passion for astrology: he keeps Ptolemy’s Almagest and an astrolabe, together with his abacus and books in the room he rents from a carpenter. Very soon, the lovely eighteen-year-old wife of the carpenter, Alysoun, succumbs to his charms, while being hopelessly courted by the parish clerk Absalon (who even sings her a moonlight serenade). In order to spend the night with Alysoun without interference, Nicholas invents a marvelous stratagem: because of his astronomical and astrological knowledge, he has the fame of being able to predict events, and so he pretends to foresee the end of the world by means of a second Flood. Under his recommendation, the carpenter then builds, and secures to the roof, three wooden tubs, in which he places himself, Nicholas, and Alysoun. As soon as he falls asleep, the two lovers slip away from their ‘arks,’ towards the 2

General Prologue, 264-268. The modern English translations of the Canterbury Tales are by D. Wright, OWC, 1998. 3 Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 609-620. 4 Ibid., 697-710.

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master bedroom, to begin their love dances, lasting until the morning bell that signals Lauds. The parish clerk, in the meantime, not having seen the carpenter all day, thinks this to be the best night to conquer Alysoun, and begins to call for her under her window, begging for a kiss. She agrees to give him one, but pokes her bottom out of the window, while Nicholas, amused, shouts “A beard! A beard!” (referring, presumably, to Alysoun’s pubic hair, the “beard” on her “face”). Absolon runs away swearing revenge, and asks a blacksmith friend for a red-hot coulter. Back at the window, this time he is offered Nicholas’s posterior, and brands it with the glowing iron. When the student starts shouting, “Help! Water! Water! Help, for Goddes herte!,” the carpenter, thinking that the Flood has come, cuts the rope which keeps the tub suspended and crashes down to the ground: he is then ridiculed by his neighbors, since the lovers claim that he has gone mad. This comic tale has perfect symmetry and rare power, since all three male protagonists are fooled: the carpenter is cuckolded, hurt by the fall and mocked, Absolon insulted by being offered the rear of the two lovers, and Nicholas is burned. Nicholas uses the astrological gift of prediction to fool the carpenter, but cannot foresee and thus avoid his branding. Yet astronomy and astrology dominate the center of the tale, in a moment of absolute suspension. In order to prepare his trick, Nicholas pretends to fall into some kind of trance in his room, allegedly caused by having seen signs, on the Moon, of the incumbent Flood. Rigid on his bed, mouth agape, his gaze fixed on the ceiling, he is spied through the keyhole by the carpenter’s knave who, upon seeing him, reports back to his master. The carpenter makes the sign of the cross, invokes Saint Frideswide, and exclaims: No man can tell what may betide, He’s fallen in a fit, or some insanity, And all because of all this astroboly, As all along I thought that it would be! One shouldn’t pry into God’s mystery. Yes, the unlettered man is blessed indeed Who does not know a thing except his Creed! So ferde another clerk with astromye; Much the same fate befell, it seems to me, That other student of astroboly: He walked the fields stargazing, to foresee What might befall; and suddenly fell in A claypit – something that he’d not foreseen.5 The credulous and ignorant carpenter, who says “astromy” for astronomy,6 nevertheless lives in Oxford and has heard of the fall in the pit of the proto-philosopher, Thales, busy observing the stars. Man, he says, should not enquire into God’s mysteries, but be content with knowing his Creed. “Astromers” fall into pits. And yet, he will be the one to fall! Astral configurations appear throughout The Canterbury Tales. In The Merchant’s Tale – another story of an old husband, January, who is cuckolded by a young wife, May – the plot is framed by the encounters of the stars, from the solemn moment when the sun concludes his 5 6

Miller’s Tale, 3450-3460. In the original, the word is “astromye,” “astronomy.”

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daily path and night, the first wedding night, spreads its black mantle upon the entire hemisphere. When the young Damyan falls in love with May and she reappears in public – the fifth day after the wedding – the moon, which during the celebrations had been in Taurus, has moved to Cancer. Later, in preparation for the final denouement – when Damyan and May are having sex in a pear tree while January, blind, finally sees them thanks to Pluto’s intervention, only to be convinced by May that his sight is still impaired – the day is glorious and shining: Bright was the day, and blue the firmament; Phoebus was sending down his golden rays Cheering each bud with his incalescence, Being at that time in Gemini, I’d say, And not far from his northern declination In Cancer, which is Jupiter’s exaltation.7 Night, day, and astral conjunctions do not commence nor resolve the plot, which is initiated by sexual appetite and resolved by human cunning, but rather serve as embellishments throughout the story, to underline the cosmic resonance it has already received by the names of the protagonists: January (winter) and May (spring). They also prepare, with mythical solemnity (through the reference to Pluto, Proserpina and Phoebus) the resolution – between the magical, the pathetic and the comical – of the plot. Comedy reaches its most sublime moment in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale when the cock Chauntecleer, after a long and erudite discussion with the hen Pertelote on the value of dreams, comes out into the farmyard along with her on a morning which, the narrator suggests, could be that of the Creation of the World, in order to gaze at the sun. Chauntecleer is a proper sultan: he addresses other birds, with complacency, as “these birds” and is accompanied “in all his pride” by the harem of seven hens that surround him. However, he is also an infallible natural astronomer: “He knew by instinct each revolution / Of the equinoctial circle in that town;” and he infallibly sings “every fifteen degrees, on the hour.” Facing the golden sun, rising “twenty and one degrees, and somewhat more” into Taurus, he knows, “by no teaching other than nature.” that it is prime, 9 a.m., and he starts to sing joyfully: “The sun has now climbed up / Forty-one degrees, and a bit more, I’d guess.”8 *** The sublime astronomical irony of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale has a double edge: it addresses human scientists, painstakingly acquiring their knowledge, and the prideful cock who, after all, like all his fellows, only knows when dawn comes, and who, in spite of all his science, cannot foresee the disaster that is going to happen a few minutes later. However, we should not forget how the same instruments are used by Chaucer in hagiographic short stories, both in tragic ones and in those we would today label as romantic: yet always problematically. The Man of Law’s Tale – the story of the daughter of a Roman emperor, Constance, and of the troubles and travels she has to endure like a saint – seems entirely regulated by an absolute 7 8

Merchant’s Tale, 2219-2224. Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 3187-3199.

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astral determinism. At the beginning, referring to the sultan who will marry the lady and then die, the narrator explains, drawing his statements, as we saw in Chapter 7, from Bernardus Silvestris: Perhaps it was inscribed in that great book Which people call the sky, set out in stars When he was born, that it should be his luck, His destiny to die for love, alas! For in the stars, clearer than in a glass, Is written, for whoever cares to read, The death of every man; no doubt of it.9 The stars, the Man of Law continues, had already foretold the death of Hector, Achilles, Pompey, Caesar, Hercules, Samson, Turnus and Socrates, even before their birth. In Bernardus Silverstris the stars predict peculiar qualities of each individual: in Chaucer they simply foretell death. If the Tale, overall, has a happy ending, with Constance’s return to Rome, the first section, telling of her departure for a long and unlucky voyage, seems inevitably destined for the worse. The narrator’s comment on this is a genuine complaint against the heavenly laws and their divine legislator: O Primum Mobile, you unpitying sphere, Whose diurnal eternal motion sways All things from east to west, and every star, That naturally would go the other way! Your thrusting set the heaven in such array That at the outset of this grim voyage, Unfavorable Mars blasts the marriage. Aries presages, with his oblique ascent, Misfortune; cadent Mars, helplessly thrust Out of his angle into the darkest house, Is in this case a baleful influence. O powerless Moon, how feebly you are placed …!10 Here the Primum Mobile, the angle and even the atazir – the technical name to indicate the influence of a star – are mentioned. One would expect nothing less from the writer of the Treatise on the Astrolabe. However, Chaucer defines the “firste moevying,” the first celestial sphere to be set in motion, as cruel: he is the only one to do so throughout the Middle Ages, something that would indeed be inconceivable for someone like Dante. The technical flourishes I have mentioned are not an end in themselves, but rather have profound philosophical meaning, as is evident in the first of the Tales, the Knight’s. Chaucer is inspired, here, by Boccaccio’s Teseida: while shortening it and modifying the structure in some key points, he actually deepens its philosophical, theological and astral dimension. The two Theban cousins, Arcite and Palamon, both fall in love with the young Emilia and fight 9

Man of Law’s Tale, 190-196. Cf. Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I, iii, 33-154. Man of Law’s Tale, 295-306.

10

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for her in a tournament. Before the fight, they offer their prayers to, respectively, Mars and Venus: – Arcite asks for victory (and thus the prize, Emilia), while Palamon asks for the girl. The two deities, presented also as planets with their influences, argue about how to fulfill the prayers of their devotees. Saturn then intervenes to defuse the argument, proposing a solution: Arcite will win the tournament, but will die because of a lethal wound after his triumph; Palamon will then obtain the lady after his friend’s death. After Mars and Venus, Saturn takes the scene not just as a god, but also as a planet, raising another problem, since later Theseus will claim that the First Mover, Jupiter, is he who regulates the events of the Universe. Saturn, as he himself claims, is the cause of plagues, illnesses, betrayals, the fall of castles, walls and towers. Mine is the widest orbit round the sun, And so my power is greater than men suppose; Mine are all drowning in the gloomy seas, Mine is the prison in the dark dungeon; Mine are all stranglings, hangings by the throat, The mutter and rebellion of the mob, All discontents and clandestine poisonings; When I am in the sign of Leo, mine Is vengeance, mine is fell retribution.11 The terrifying description of Saturn’s influence is corroborated by subsequent events: not only does the god, through Pluto, arouse an infernal Fury which starts up out of the ground in front of the victorious Arcite’s horse, making it shy and thus causing the fall of the warrior, but he is also the indirect cause of his death. Arcite indeed does not die because of the fall, but only after a long, cold illness, as if following the various degrees of the Saturnine influence. Even in tales with the more marked character of romances, the presence of the astral theme is still very strong. It is so in the Tale recounted by the Squire,12 son of the Knight, and mostly in The Franklin’s Tale. In the latter, the dominant theme is that of the Squire Aurelius’s desperate love for Dorigen, the affectionate and faithful wife of Arviragus. In order to avoid giving in to the young Aurelius, Dorigen promises that she will be his only once the rocks in the sea of Brittany, which her husband needs to avoid if he is to come home safe, will disappear. They worry her so much that she, like Boethius, comes to doubt divine Providence. After having prayed to Apollo and Lucina (the sun and the moon) for help in making the rocks disappear into the abyss, Aurelius visits a magician in Orléans. It is a cold December day, and Phoebus, the sun, is not golden but “old” and coppery: in Capricorn, it shines bleakly. “How have the bitter frosts, with sleet and rain, / Destroyed the green in every garden yard! / Janus sits by the fire with double beard, / He’s drinking wine out of his great ox-horn, / And set before him is the tusked boar’s head. / ‘Sing Noel!’ is the cry of every man.”13 The magician of Orléans gets on with his studies: he examines Toledan astronomical tables, elaborates roots, arguments, equations, centers, proportions; he observes the eighth

Knight’s Tale, 2454-2552. See especially lines 48-55, 263-277, 383-386, and 671-674 of the Squire’s Tale. 13 Franklin’s Tale, 1245-1255. 11 12

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sphere, Aries, and the great star Alnath; he makes sure of the moon’s phases, the time it rises and the presence nearby of certain planets. When he is convinced that everything is in line, following the guidelines that “heathens used to practice in those days,” he begins his incantation. The rocks seem to disappear in the sea. Aurelius goes to Dorigen to ask her to keep her promise. Desperate, the woman reveals everything to her husband, and asks what is best to do. Arviragus, noble and faithful knight, tells her to keep her promise. Moved, Aurelius absolves her from her commitment, and the magician of Orléans waives the fee of one thousand pounds that the squire promised him for the disappearance of the rocks. The astronomical / astrological wisdom of the magician is the keystone of the whole plot: he does not really make the rocks disappear, but rather, by observing the tides, creates the illusion of their disappearance. The art of the master of Orléans is “natural magic,” as the brother of Aurelius claims, “apparence” which, grounded on the phases of the moon, hides the rocks from sight. If the cleric can elaborate this deception and make it seem – as Aurelius’s brother puts it in a couple of lines that will be quoted in the epigraph of Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea – that the ships come and go on the horizon, remaining suspended in this “form” for one or two weeks, then Aurelius will finally obtain Dorigen. This magic is – in the Middle Ages and, as we will see in due course, in the early Renaissance – a science, albeit not in Galileo’s terms. It is, rather, a tentative science: the great desire that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe harbors to construct a coherent explanation of the world and its events through the contemplation of the stars, combining astrology and astronomy. And yet, the arts of the magician are presented in this Tale, and much later in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as mere theatrical illusion. *** After the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer composed two other short dream poems: The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls. In both works, under the influence of Dante, of the Dream of Scipio, of Macrobius and Alain of Lille, he voiced a strong cosmic impulse. In The House of Fame, for example, the (Dante-inspired) eagle who kidnaps Geoffrey and transports him through the ether, tells him to look upwards, toward the vast space where he will see the “citizens” of whom Plato speaks, the beings of air: Cast up your eyes. See yonder, lo, the Galaxy, Which men call the Milky Way Because it is white (and some, indeed, Call it Watling Street), That once was burnt with heat, When the son of the red sun, Phaeton, wanted to drive His father’s chariot.14 However, Geoffrey declines the invitation: to observe the celestial beings from up here, bright as they are, could, he argues, damage his sight. In fact, he is scared that Jupiter is about 14

House of Fame, 935-942 (my translation).

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to turn him into a star, and when the eagle asks if – in order to learn poetry rather than astronomy – he would like to listen to some Ovid-like mythological stories about the origin of the constellations, he replies that he is too old for them, and that anyway he trusts the authority of those who wrote about them. In a reversal of Dante, and once again using irony, Chaucer remains grounded in the terrestrial dimension of the cosmos, and the journey with the eagle is not a journey through the skies to the Empyrean, but leads to the House of Fame. In Chapter 7 I have shown how Chaucer’s cosmic impulse permeates the Parliament of Fowls and the Troilus and Criseyde: the great romance in verse that Chaucer composed in imitation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato. In both he goes so far as to mention the music of the spheres. But the Troilus is also imbued with nocturnal and stellar poetry. Book III of the poem opens with a great Lucretian hymn of praise to Venus, goddess and planet of love. This is actually modeled on a passage from the Filostrato, in turn inspired by Boethius. But to these influences, Chaucer adds an echo of Guinizzelli’s Al cor gentile: O blissful light, whose beams in clearness run Over all Third Heaven, adorning it with splendor, O daughter of Jove and darling of the Sun, Pleasure of Love, O affable and tender, The ready guest of noble hearts, defender And cause of all well-being and delight, Worshipped by thy benignity and might! In heaven, in hell, in earth and the salt sea Thy power is felt and is in evidence, Since man, bird, beast, fish, herb, and greening tree Feel thee in season, eternal effluence! God Himself loves, nor turns His countenance thence, And there’s no creature in this world alive That without love has being or can thrive.15 God loves: nobody had come so close to John the Evangelist, to Boethius, to Dante in the last verse of Paradiso. Trolius too will echo these claims at the end of Book III, in a song, again inspired by Boethius, celebrating the universal power of Love. And yet, how far will Troilus and Criseyde’s story stray from this path! Criseyde, who has given herself to Troilus, and sworn him eternal faithfulness, is summoned by her father, Calchas, to the camp of the Greeks. She promises a swift return to Troy, but when she arrives among the Greeks, she is vigorously wooed by Diomedes. On this occasion too Venus shines in the sky, at the beginning of a marvelous starry night, with a bright moon and the Zodiac that shows its shining “candles.” Criseyde, in bed, considers staying in the Greek camp: Bright Venus, following her heavenly courses, Showed the way down for Phoebus to alight; And Cynthia laid about her chariot-horses Troilus and Criseyde, III, 1-14, trans. N. Coghill, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971. In line 5 Chaucer’s original translates the incipit of Guinizelli’s canzone literally: “in gentil hertes ay redy to repaire.” 15

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To whirl her out of Leo, if they might; The candles of the Zodiac shone bright, And to her bed Criseyde that evening went, Within her father’s shapely, shining tent, Ever in soul revolving up and down The sayings of this sudden Diomede, His high position and the sinking town, Her loneliness, the greatness of her need Of friends and helpers; thus began to breed The reason why – and I must make it plain – She made it her intention to remain.16 Night and darkness dominate the last Book of the Troilus, the fifth: the one in which Criseyde’s betrayal takes place and Troilus’s despair becomes unbearable. Here, at the beginning, we are introduced to a Dantean dawn, with stars still visible and a dim moon, as the horizon acquires a new clarity and the sun rises in the East, in his rosy chariot: In heaven still the stars were to be seen, Although the moon was paling, quickly too, As the horizon whitened with a sheen Far to the east, as it is wont to do When Phoebus with his rosy car is due; He was preparing for his journey thus.17 Troilus, anxious and sad, asks for Pandarus, Criseyde’s uncle who played as intermediary between the two. Those times are gone for good, and soon Troilus will be alone in the night, staring at the moon, uttering a last, desperate song of love. Criseyde is for him the star he has lost, and Troilus, like Ulysses, is dragged between Scylla and Charybdis: if his beloved will not be back on the tenth night, if her light will be just one hour late, then Charybdis will devour him and his poor ship: O star of love, since I have lost thy light, Shall not my heart lament thee and bewail In darkening torment, moving night by night Towards my death; the wind is in my sail. If the tenth night should come, and if it fail, Thy guiding beam, if only for an hour, My ship and me Charybdis will devour.18 Criseyde does not return, and Troilus looks at the shining moon, speaks to it, and implores it to rise one more time, because at the new moon Criseyde will come back.

16

Ibid., V, 1016-1029. Ibid., V, 274-279. 18 Ibid., V, 638-644. 17

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Piero Boitani But after singing it, he very soon Fell once again to sighing, as of old, And every night rose up to see the moon As was his habit, and to her he told His sorrows all, and yet he would make bold To say ‘Yet moon, the night your horns renew I shall be happy – if all the world is true!’ ‘Old were the horns I saw you wear that morning When my dear lady rode away from here Who is my cause of torment and of mourning And therefore, O Lucina, bright and clear, For love of God, run swiftly round thy sphere; For when thy horns begin again to spring Then she will come who has my bliss to bring.’19

No, Criseyde does not return. Troilus passes another night in talking to the moon, an icon of the lover looking at the celestial bodies, an image that will survive at least until Puccini’s Tosca (“E lucevan le stelle”). But Troilus will be remembered just so, in another starry night we have already encountered, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees And they did make no noise, in such a night Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls, And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents Where Cressid lay that night.20 *** Chaucer constitutes a unique moment in European poetry on stars. It was neither he nor Dante, however, who transmitted these astral icons to later European poetry. It was rather Petrarch: he never describes the stars, but he sprinkles them throughout his Canzoniere, almost as if they were emblems, names indeed, of women, love, and poetry. Whoever is minimally familiar with European literature has probably already thought of the return of astral images in at least a dozen poets. The “vaghe stelle” for example, are present in the whole of Italian Renaissance poetry, from Galeazzo of Tarsia to Bandello, from Gaspara Stampa to Tasso.21 Bandello also employs the Petrarchan expression “minute stelle,” minute stars, and picks up the image “to speak of heaven’s stars one by one.”22 Bembo repeats it,

19

Ibid., V, 645-658. The Merchant of Venice, V, I, 1-6. 21 Galeazzo di Tarsia, Rime 19, 48; Bandello, Rime 49, 7 and 239, 9; Gaspara Stampa, Rime 160, 1-2; Tasso, Rime 377, 7; 951, 1; 1226, 11; 1513, 3, 18. It is impossible for me to reconstruct a history of European petrarchism here. For part of this history and the related bibliography I refer the reader to the seminal Lirici europei del Cinquecento. Ripensando la poesia del Petrarca, ed. G.M. Anselmi, K. Elam, G. Forni and D. Monda, Milan, Rizzoli, 2004. 22 Matteo Bandello, Rime, 142, 2; 157, 53, ed. M. Danzi, Modena, Panini, 1989 . 20

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going back to Petrarch: “noverar le stelle,” to count the stars.23 In his Orlando Innamorato, Boiardo mentions “counting the stars” as an impossible task, but his king of Garamante, a wise magician, can do it.24 Tasso too, who in Jerusalem Delivered echoes Dante’s “a riveder le stelle,” to see the stars again, and Petrarch’s “fiammeggiar” (flame forth) in his Rhymes of Love employs the verb “numerar.”25 The other topos established by Petrarch is that of the comparison between the eyes and stars. There is no European poet who does not employ this image, from Poliziano in his Rispetti to Ariosto in both his lyrical poetry and in his Orlando furioso, from Bembo’s Asolani to Giovanni della Casa, from Veronica Gambara to Du Bellay, from Ronsard to Fernando de Herrera, and later from Bruno to Campanella, and from Marino to Chiabrera.26 In England, this trope is fully exploited by Sir Philip Sidney: no wonder he gave the name Stella to the lady in his collection of poetry. Sonnet 26 of Astrophil and Stella links this theme to that of astral influences, and derives the first eleven verses from the Fourth Day of Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine. Some minds, too linked to the earth, Sidney writes, dare to disparage astrology and think that the stars, those “lamps of purest light,” are there with their number, their orbits, their size and eternity only to arouse wonder; and that they have no purpose except “to spangle the black dress of night” or perform a pleasing dance for the observer. But the poet, who knows that Nature does nothing without a purpose, and knows how great causes produce great effects, also knows that those supernal bodies reign over the inferior ones. And even if those rules were false, there’s something else that absolutely proves it: “those two starres in Stella’s face.”27 Shakespeare re-employs Sidney’s artifice in sonnet 14, reaching a conclusion that weaves together truth and beauty. Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck, And yet methinks I have astronomy; But not to tell of good or evil luck, Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality; Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell, Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind, Or say with princes if it shall go well By oft predict that I in heaven find. But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, And, constant stars, in them I read such art As truth and beauty shall together thrive If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;

23

Pietro Bembo, Asolani, 2, XXVII, in Prose della Volgar lingua, Asolani, Rime, ed. C. Dionisotti, Turin, UTET, 1966. 24 Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando innamorato, XXII, 28, 7-8; I, 57, 8, in L’innamoramento di Orlando, ed. A. Tissoni Benvenuti e C. Montagnani, Milan-Naples, Ricciardi, 1999. 25 Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, IV, 18, 3; XVII, 58, 3; Rime, 1253, 78: “numerar le vaghe stelle”, ed. B. Basile, Rome, Salerno Editrice, 1994. 752 Of course, this is not an organic survey: Poliziano, Rispetti, 14, 6 e 37, 5; Ariosto, Lirica, son. 25, 3-4; Orlando furioso, VIII, 80, 5; Bembo, Asolani, 1, XXXII; 2, XXII; Della Casa, Rime, XX; Gambara, Rime, 20; Du Bellay, L’Olive, LXV, 4; XI, 14; Ronsard, Amours, I, vi, 7; xviii, 9; Herrera, Poesías, son. X; Bruno, Degli eroici furori, I, V, xii; II, I, vii; Campanella, Poesie, 147, 1-4; Marino, Adone, 43, 2; 115, 1-4; Chiabrera, Rime, 30, 39; 53, 6. 27 The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W.A. Ringler, Jr., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, pp. 177-178.

314

Piero Boitani Or else of thee this I prognosticate, Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.28

The opposition between astrological knowledge, which is also materialistic and base, and the far more certain and elevated one deriving from the eyes of the beloved (precisely “constant stars”), leads to the exhortation to procreate: in those eyes the poet reads the “art” for which truth and beauty will flourish if the fair youth addressed in the sonnet consents to reproduce himself. If he does not do so, then his death will also be the end of truth and beauty: he will not reach immortality – the supreme ideal where truth and beauty are conjoined – which, as the following sonnet says, only poetry, or offspring, can ensure. In the famous scene when Romeo is looking at Juliet on her balcony, Shakespeare again employs this topos, but reworks it with the originality one can only expect from the Bard. Romeo sees a light appear at the window: Juliet “is the east, and Juliet is the sun,” he exclaims; “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, / Who is already sick and pale with grief, / That thou her maid art far more fair than she.” “It is my lady,” he continues, ecstatic “O, it is my love! O, that she knew she were! / She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that? / Her eye discourses; I will answer it.” At this point Romeo begins his praise of his beloved’s eyes: Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night.29 Shakespeare goes well beyond Petrarch: love’s enthusiasm makes Romeo literally see the stars, and it makes him proclaim that Juliet’s eyes, were they in the sky as stars, would flow in such a brilliant river of light that the birds would start singing, believing night to be over. The beloved’s eyes form a veritable milky way: yet one so bright that it lights up the darkness, turning it into daytime. For this reason, in The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo is able to continue his speech to Jessica: “Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.” When love is involved, the brightness of the stars and that of the eyes are one and the same. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is generally dated to 1595-1597, his Sonnets came out on May 20, 1609. A year later, on March 12, 1610, Galileo Galilei published his Sidereus Nuncius, a “starry messenger” that would herald a new age in astronomy. It was time for the “machine of the world” to take over.

28 29

W. Shakespeare, Sonnets, 14. Romeo and Juliet, II ii 15-22.

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INDEX OF NAMES A Abe no Nakamuro, 227 ad-Din, Jamal, 214 Aelberht, 276 Ælfric, 277 Aeschylus, 28, 183 Akbar, 209, 210 Akhenaton, 21 Al Mansūr, 166 Alcmaeon of Crotone, 91 Alcman, 28, 29, 76, 79, 204 Alcuin, 276 Aldhelm, 277, 278, 279 Alexander Aetolus, 97 Alexander Hephaestius (Alexander the Ephesian), 97 Alexander the Great, 155, 269 Alfonso, 166 Alfred, 217, 277 al-Mutanabbī, 194 al-Nisaburi, 166 Amaru, 205 Amaruka, 205 Ambrose, 107, 108, 154 Amenhotep IV, 21 Amergin, 268, 270 Ammianus Marcellinus, 267 Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, 93 Anoubion, 55 Anselm Kiefer, 2 Antelami, Benedetto, 151 Antiochus of Athens, 48 Antoninus Pius, 212 Apollonius of Perge, 48 Apuleius, 98, 99 Aratus of Soli, 48 Arbor, Ann, 228 Aretus of Tegea, 56

Aristides Quintilianus, 92, 97 Aristophanes, 25 Aristotle, 1, 17, 18, 19, 26, 47, 48, 85, 91, 92, 99, 108, 109, 120, 194, 200 Ariwara no Motokata, 227 Arnaut Daniel, 298 Arnulf of Orléans, 57 Āryabhaṭa, 197, 200, 213 Asclepius, 101, 161, 200 Athanasius, 154, 156 Athenaeus, 17 Atossa, 183 Attār, 177, 187 Augustus, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 72, 75, 76, 80, 85, 155 Azaryūn, 184

B Babūr, 209 Bacon, Roger, 156 Bandello, Matteo, 312 Bar-Asher, Meir M., 167 Barluzzi, Antonio, 152 Baruch, 37 Bashō, 230, 231 Basil of Caesarea, 107, 158 Becket, Thomas, 136, 155, 303 Bede, 159, 276, 277 Bembo, Pietro, 313 Benjamin, Walter, 10 Bernardus Silvestris, 108, 154, 159, 307 Bernart de Ventadorn, 300 Bhartṛhṛari, 204, 205, 206, 207 Bihārī Lāl, 210 Bilhaṇa, 205 Billaros, 54 Blake, William, 39 Blanche of Lancaster, 303

322

Index of Names

Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 313 Bonaventura da Siena, 166 Brady, Nicholas, 114 Brahe, Tycho, 10 Brahmagupta, 165, 197, 200 Braque, Georges, 153 Broch, Hermann, 81 Brunetto Latini, 166 Bruno, Giordano, 111, 112 Burke, Edmund, 6 Byhrtferth, 277

C Caecilius, 47 Caesar of Byzantium, 184 Cage, John, 2 Calcidius, 99, 108, 157, 161, 317 Caligula, 53 Callimachus, 50, 51, 52 Cano, 175 Cao Cao, 215 Catherine de Clèves, 156 Cavalier d’Arpino, 152 Celsus, 118 Chagall, Marc, 153 Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan, 4 Charlemagne, 149, 156 Charles IV, 151 Charles the Bald, 154 Charles V, 233 Chatwin, Bruce, 242, 243 Chaucer, Geoffrey, ix, 110, 111, 303 Chhuthan Hsi-Ta, 212 Chrétien de Troyes, 154 Chrysostom, John, 42, 154 Cino of Pistoia, 298 Claudius, 53, 54, 102, 104 Claudius Mamertinus, 102 Clement of Alexandria, 94, 105 Cleopatra, 76 Confucius, 215 Conon of Samos, 50 Constantine, 9, 53, 55, 88, 101, 118 Contini, Gianfranco, 284 Coppo di Marcovaldo, 150 Credo Mutwa, 244 Cremutius Cordus, 86 Critias, 19, 93, 94, 95 Critias the elder, 95

D Dallapiccola, Luigi, 2 Daniel, 38, 41, 43 Dante Alighieri, 283 Darius, 183 Darwin, Erasmus, 3 Dattatreya, 203 de Ronsard, Pierre, 111 de’ Manfredi da Amelia, Piermatteo Lauro, 152 Democritus, 85, 95 Diodorus of Alexandria, 85 Diogenes Laertius, 26, 91, 92 Dionysius the Areopagite, 99, 108, 157 Domitian, 55 Dondi, Giovanni, 191 Donne, John, 113 Dorotheus of Sidon, 55 Dorsatī, 184 Dov Yarden, 171 Dronke, Ursula, x Dryden, John, 113, 114 Du Bartas, Guillaume Salluste, 111 Du Fu, 2, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224 Du Mu, 215, 216 Durgāprasād, Paṇḍit, 206 Dyneley Prince, John, 240

E Ecclesiastes, 37, 171 Eco, Umberto, 5 Einhard, 149 Einstein, Albert, 1 Elsheimer, Adam, 6 Elyās, 185 Empedocles, 18, 102 Enoch, 39, 40, 269 Epicurus, 47 Epiphanes, 100 Eratosthenes, 16, 48, 49, 50, 53, 97, 115 Eudoxus of Cnidus, 48, 54, 73 Euripides, 26, 27, 28, 50, 93, 94, 116, 120, 183 Eustathius, 30

F Farīd al-Dīn ‘Attār, 180 Festus Avienus, 53 Firmicus Maternus, 55, 150 Fitzgerald, Edward, 189 Florio, John, 112

323

Index of Names Fossati, Giuseppe, 117 Franceschino degli Albizzi, 298 Francesco da Barberino, 139, 156 Francesco Giorgio Veneto, 111 Francisco de Colonia, 142, 154 Frederick Barbarossa, 149 Friedrich, Caspar David, 6 Furak, 184

G Gaddi, Taddeo, 150 Galeazzo of Tarsia, 312 Galilei, Galileo, 158, 314 Gambara, Veronica, 313 Gan De, 213 Gao Qi, 225 Gārgī, 201 Garnier, Charles, 145, 153 Gautama Siddha, 213 Gelpke, R., 182 Genghis Khan, 214 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 270 Giovanni da Milano, 150 Giovanni della Casa, 313 Glass, Philip, 2 Gossuin (or Gautier) de Metz, 156 Great Khan, 185, 186 Gregori, Luigi, 152 Gregory of Nazianzus, 107 Gregory of Nyssa, 107 Gregory the Great, 108 Gu Kuang, 218 Guinizzelli, Guido, 283, 284 Gundissalino, Domenico, 172 Guo Shoujing, 214

H Hadrian, 55, 276, 277 Hakluyt, Richard, 233 Han Hong, 217 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 114 Hannibal, 69 Harūn al-Rashīd, 167 Hatshepsut, 21 Heisenberg, Werner, 5 Henry II, 135, 154, 155, 161 Heraclides of Pontus, 157 Heraclitus, 18, 25, 100, 315 Herrera, Fernando de, 313 Hesiod, 26, 46, 49, 50, 56, 71, 121

Hildegard of Bingen, 138, 151, 161, 162 Hillel, 10 Hipparchus, 17, 48, 53, 88, 115, 159 Hiroshige, Utagawa, 231, 264 Homāy, 184 Homer, 2, 5, 14, 16, 17, 22, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 46, 75, 76, 78, 84, 90, 210, 219 Honorius of Autun, 57 Horace, 53, 54 Hsieh Chin, 225 Hugo, Victor, 2 Humayun, 209 Hyginus, 16, 49, 50, 56, 57, 98, 159 Hypatia, 88 Hyppolitus, 86

I Iamblichus, 92, 99, 101 Ibn ‘Abbās, 167 Ibn al-’Arabi,, 188 Ibn al-Mu’tazz, 167 Ibn al-Shatir, 165 Ibn Battūta, 197 Ibn Hamdīs, 189, 191 Ibn Nasr, 176 Ibn Zamrak, 176 Ibycus, 28 Iccius, 54 Imādal-Dīn Mahmūd al-Kāshī, 210 Ion of Chios, 25, 28 Isaiah, 37, 38, 42, 106, 167, 171, 173, 276 Isamhel of Bari, 154 Isidore of Seville, 57, 108, 147, 270, 276 Iskandar, 2, 210, 254 Iubal, 105

J Jacoff, Rachel, x Jahan, Shah, 209, 210, 255 Jahangir, 209 Jai Singh II, 209 Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī, 184 Jerome, 107 Jesus Ben Sirach, the Ecclesiasticus, 37 Jesus of Nazareth, 43, 152 Johannes de Sacrobosco, 161 John of Gaunt, 303 John of Salisbury, 57 John Scotus Eriugena, 108, 157, 158 John the Baptist, 150, 151, 154

324

Index of Names

John the Evangelist, 310 Joseph, ii, x, 41, 150, 180, 182 Joyce, James, 9 Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamquí, 234 Julian the Apostate, 103, 107 Julius Caesar, 53, 75, 267 Julius Caesar Germanicus, 53 Julius Firmicus Maternus, 55 Justinian, 118, 155

K Kālidāsa, 207, 208, 210 Kano Tan’yu, 2, 231 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 6 Kāvus, 192 Keats, John, 4, 30 Kepler, Johannes, 5, 113 Khoshrow, 192 Ki no Tsurayuki, 227 Kircher, Athanasius, 156 Kobayashi Issa, 231 Kublai Khan, 214

Maejima Sōyū, 231 Magha, 205 Mann, Thomas, 41 Marcia, 86, 87 Marcus Aurelius, 212 Marius Victorinus, 97 Martianus Capella, 99, 108, 115, 147, 157, 159, 161 Martini, Simone, 296 Masinissa, 69 Mei Yao-Ch’en, 225 Mei Yaochen, 224 Meletus, 92, 93 Milton, John, 113 Mohammed V, 176 Mojaddedi, Jawid, 184 Monteverdi, Claudio, 113 Monti, Vincenzo, 3 Moore, Henry, 11, 59 Muhammad, 1, 165, 166, 167, 176, 177, 185, 194

N

L Lapidge, Michael, x Lawrie, Lee, 46 Li Bai (Li Po), 216 Li He, 219 Li Kaixian, 225 Lispector , Clarice, 237 Liu Fangping, 218 Livius Andronicus, 45 Lloyd Jones, H., 97 Locke, John, 6 Lönrot, Elias, 281 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 150 Lorenzetti, Pietro, 150 Lu Ji, 211 Lu Yu, 224 Lucan, 54, 161, 298 Lucius Emilius Paulus, 69 Luis de León, 111 Luke, 37, 106, 118 Lychnus, 97

Narasiṃhadeva I, 209 Nasrīn-nūsh, 184 Nazarius, 118 Nāzparī, 184 Nebuchadnezzar, 24, 38 Nebuchadnezzar I, 24 Needham, Joseph, x Nefertiti, 21 Nero, 53, 54, 55, 87, 116, 121 Nesitanebisheru, 21 Neẓāmī, 2, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189 Nicholas of Cusa, 111 Nigidius Figulus, 54, 73 Nonnus of Panopolis, 89, 90 Norris, Barnaby, 242

O Octavian, 53 Odo of Metz, 149 Orchard, Andy, x Origen, 106, 107, 319 Otto III, 155

P M Ma Lin, 2, 225, 259 Ma Yuan, 2, 225 Ma Zhiyuan, 224

Pāṇḍuraṅg Parab, Kāśīnāth, 206 Pantaleone, 150 Patañjali, 197 Paul the Silentiary, 116

325

Index of Names Paul, St., 109 Pauli, Wolfgang, 5 Pei, Ieoh Ming, 249 Peonius, 88 Pepi, 22 Pericles, 26, 92, 93, 112 Peter, x, 103, 119, 144, 152, 154, 286 Petrarch, Francis (Francesco Petrarca), 301 Petron, 91 Pherecydes, 50 Philo, 92, 104, 105, 106 Philo of Alexandria, 92 Philostratus, 92 Picart, Bernard, 46, 65 Piemontese, Angelo Maria, x Pisano, Giovanni, 132, 150 Plato, 17, 18, 19, 29, 30, 42, 47, 48, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 115, 120, 148, 157, 158, 159, 160, 200, 299, 309, 316 Pliny, 50, 54, 85, 157, 158 Pliny the Elder, 54, 85, 157 Plotinus, 5, 55, 87, 99, 106 Plutarch, 91, 93, 96, 97, 112 Poincaré, Henri, 3 Polo, Marco, 197, 214 Porphyry, 55, 87, 91, 92, 99 Pound, Ezra, 296 Primaticcio, Francesco, 150 Ptolemy III Euergetes, 50 Purcell, Henry, 114 Purchas, Samuel, 233 Pythagoras, 5, 91, 92, 158

Q Qohelet, 37, 171 Quintilian, 83, 112

R Raeburn, D., 1 Rajan, Chandra, 207 Ramses I, 21 Ramses II, 21 Ramses VI, 21 Ratnākara, 206 Raymond de Marseille, 166 Ricci, Matteo (Li Madou), 214, 225 Richard P. Feynman, 3, 4 Romano, Giulio, 2, 150 Ronsard, Pierre de, 111

Rube, Auguste, 145, 153 Rudolf II of Bohemia, 156

S Saigyō, 228, 229, 230 Salluste Du Bartas, Guillaume, 111 Santayana, George, 7 Sappho, 14, 30, 31, 52, 76, 78, 79, 84, 204, 210 Schall von Bell, Adam, 215 Schedel, Hartmann, 156 Schrödinger, Erwin, 3 Segal, George, 39 Selden, John, 233 Semnār, 184, 185 Senenmut, 21 Sennuccio del Bene, 297 Seti I, 21, 63 Shakespeare, William, 112 Shams al-Dīn Hāfez, Mohammad, 191 Shams-i Tabrīz, 188 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 3, 30 Shen Chou, 225 Shen Zhou, 225 Shi Shen, 213 Shīdè, 185 Shmuel HaNagid (Samuel the Prince), 170 Sidney, Philip, 313 Sima Qian, 213 Simón de Colonia, 153 Simplicius, 108 Sinclair, William, 149 Socrates, 19, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 307 Sohrevardī, 180 Sophocles, 93 Stampa, Gaspara, 312 Stephen III the Great, 152 Stevens, Wallace, 7, 9 Strabo, 25, 26, 54 Striggio, Alessandro, 113 Strindberg, August, 2 Sturlson, Snorri, 275 Su Dongpo, 224 Su Son, 212 Sugawara no Michizane, 226 Swift, Jonathan, 114 Synesius of Cyrene, 88

T Taliesin, 268, 269, 270 Tamayo, 2

326

Index of Names

Tamerlane, 165, 209, 210 Tang Xianzi, 225 Tasso, Torquato, 81, 111, 301, 313 Thales, 17, 18, 26, 54, 70, 305 Theodoric, 118, 120, 124, 151 Theodorus, 276 Theodotion, 38 Theon of Smyrna, 28, 97 Theophrastus, 85 Thierry of Chartres, 57 Thomas Aquinas, 5, 42, 110, 124 Timaeus, 18, 19, 42, 71, 75, 94, 95, 99, 101, 103, 111, 115, 148, 157, 200, 299, 316 Torriti, Jacopo, 152 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 2 Tu Fu, 217, 224 Tu Hsün-Ho, 218 Tutankhamon, 21

W Wang Chiussu, 225 Wang Jiusi, 225 Wang Wei, 216, 225 William of Conches, 108, 159 William of Rubruck, 197 Wu Weiye, 225

X Xenophon, 92 Xerxes, 183 Xia Gui, 225, 260 Xie Jin, 225 Xu Hun, 217, 218 Xu Yuan Zhong, 216 Xu Yuanchong, 217

U Y

Ubayd-i-Zākānī, 195 Ugolino di Vieri, 155 Ulug Begh, 209 Unas, 22

V Valentine, 100 Valéry, Paul, 10 Vallejo, Juan, 142, 154 Vālmīki, 203 Varāhamihira, 197, 198 Varro, 47, 54, 97 Verbiest, Ferdinand, 215 Vettius Valens, 48

Yaghmānāz, 184 Yājñavalkya, 201 Yang Shen, 225 Yang Wanli, 224 Yazdegerd I, 184 Yelü Chucai, 214 Yi Xing, 213 Yogésvara, 206

Z Zeng Hou Yi, 212, 259 Zhang Heng, 213 Zhang Hu, 219 Zhao Mengfu, 224