The Fading Stars: How the new astronomy obscured the traditional night sky. By Holly Haworth
More than four hundred
years ago, around 13.8 billion years after the beginning of the universe, in
September 1608, a Dutchman from Zeeland came to The Hague announcing he’d
invented an instrument “by means of which all things at a very great distance
can be seen as if they were nearby.”
The prospect was thrilling. European
explorers had spent centuries crossing wide oceans in hopes of finding distant
lands to claim for their countries, and they were doing so with increased
fervor - bringing the resources of faraway places closer to home by establishing
trade routes; collapsing cultural distance by eradicating languages, religious
practices, ceremonies, myths, and stories; forcing distant others to charade as
Europeans with imposed cosmologies and worldviews - since Christopher
Columbus had pulled a new world closer, 116 years before the seeing
instrument was introduced.
The soldiers who were
convened at The Hague that day seized on it as a way to spot enemies on the
horizon. They were gathered to talk about independence of the Dutch Republic
from Spain’s control, and they paused to consider the arrival of the new
contraption. The commander of the Spanish forces said to the commander of the
Dutch Republic, “I could no longer be safe, for you will see me from afar.”
Ship captains of every European nation would soon have an instrument to spy on
one another, to bring distant lands into focus.
News of a “spyglass”
reached Galileo Galilei, a professor of mathematics at the
University of Padua, in the spring of 1609, when a friend shared with him a
description of the invention. Galileo worked out how to make one for himself from
a tube and two lenses. But instead of pointing it horizontally to look for
enemies, he canted it upward to spy on the faraway night sky. At once, it gave
up some deep, dark secrets about the moon, that nearest object to us which had
in many cultures been an orbed goddess or the home of one. According to church
doctrine and Aristotelian philosophy, it was an immaculate heavenly
body—perfectly smooth, perfectly spherical. But what Galileo saw instead were
shadows signaling rifts, craters, and mountains. It was not goddess-like but
rather a body of rock with topography, an object of scientific study that might
be mapped and surveyed.
This moon had already
lived ten thousand lives. Hawaiians - not yet “discovered” by Captain
James Cook, who would arrive with a telescope in hand in 1778 - had thirty
different names for it, in accordance with the phases of its cycle, such names
as Hilo, “faint thread”; Hoaka, “arch over the
door”; Mohalu, “unfold like a flower”; Akua, “god,” for
the full moon; and Mauli, meaning “ghost” or “last breath,” for the
waning crescent. This same moon was for the Japanese what held the waters of
life (silimizi) and the waters of rejuvenation (bakamizi).
The
same moon that a woman in the Congo 37,000 years ago kept track of by etching
notches into a baboon fibula. Moon that for the Yakuts had taken in a young
orphan girl as she fetched water with her yoke and pails. Moon that for the
Maya a rabbit lived in. Moon that an old man lived in. Moon that had through it
all ruled the tides and thus the ocean and all waters of the planet. Moon the
cycles by which all cultures always had planted, fished, traveled, harvested,
and hunted. Moon that was alive to the faraway eye until men would come to walk
on it, imprint its fine untouched dust with their boot soles, plant the
American flag to proclaim it—360 years after Galileo first spied it, 4.5
billion years into its existence—desolate, dead, a once mysterious place
finally conquered by knowledge. One giant leap for mankind… read more:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/night/fading-stars-constellation