Posts Tagged ‘astrology’
“What a piece of work is a man”*…
The estimable Samuel Arbesman on the path dependency of our fundamental ideas about ourselves…
Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human.
But perhaps some of these concerns are simply Western preoccupations, rather than universal human concerns?
In the recent book Fluke (which is fantastic! [your correspondent heartily agrees]), Brian Klaas noted the following provocative point about differences between Western and Eastern thinking—and their views on human distinctness—and how it might have been due to the ecological milieu that each one arose from:
In this vision of a world humans are distinct from the rest of the natural world. That felt true for the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe around the time of the birth of Christianity. Camels, cows, goats, mice, and dogs composed much of the encountered animal kingdom, a living menagerie of the beings that are quite unlike us.
In many Eastern cultures, by contrast, ancient religions tended to emphasize our unity with the natural world. One theory suggests that was partly because people lived among monkeys and apes. We recognized ourselves in them. As the biologist Roland Ennos points out, the word orangutan even means “man of the forest.” Hinduism has Hanumen, a monkey god. In China, the Chu kingdom revered gibbons. In these familiar primates, the theory suggests, it became impossible to ignore that we were part of nature—and nature was part of us.
This is almost a Guns, Germs, and Steel-kind of approach, but for ideas. At the risk of creating too much determinism here, it’s intriguing to explore the path dependence of ideas and concepts that organize how we think about the world and ourselves.
This reminds me of other research that examined how small historical distinctions can still affect our modern world, even if they are no longer relevant. For example, there is research that looks at how certain locations betray their histories as portage sites—places where boats or cargo were transported over land, allowing travel between more traversable waterways—despite this being obsolete. And yet it still has a certain long-term effect, as per this paper “Portage and Path Dependence”:
And returning to ideas, there is a paper entitled “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States” that explores whether or not certain differences in location—areas considered the “frontier”—affect the geographical variation of ideas and beliefs in the United States.
In the end, simply being more aware of the ideas and history that suffuse our thinking—rather than taking them for granted—is something important, whether or not we are trying to understand humanity’s place in the world, how technology should impact humanity, or why cities are located where they are…
From his marvelous newsletter, Cabinet of Wonders: “Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures,” @arbesman.
Pair with his earlier piece: “Archaeology of Biology and Software.”
And for a(nother) taste of Brian Klaas (@brianklaas), see “Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
###
As we ruminate on the roots of our (received) realities, we might recall that it was on this date in 3 BCE that a planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Venus was visible… and may have been the Star of Bethlehem mentioned in the New Testament.
In this pre-dawn, “morning star” conjunction, the two planets appeared very close to each other in the sky (a mere 0.07° apart as viewed from Earth). It occurred when the planets were in the last degrees of the zodiacal sign of Cancer which was the concluding sign for interpreting that astrological year. The same two planets met again just ten months later (June 17, 2 BCE), even more closely, almost touching (0.01°), in an “evening star” conjunction in the first degrees of Leo, the beginning sign of the new astrological year. These two unions of Jupiter and Venus might well have been interpreted as the close of one age in history and the beginning of another age in 2 BCE.
For more on these conjunctions and other potential candidates for “historical Star of Bethlehem” (and an explanation of how/why the astronomers/astrologers who sighted the star became Magi/Wise Men in Church teaching) see here.
“You are an alchemist; make gold of that”*…
From Hugh Aldersey-Williams and Public Domain Review, a macabre morality tale for mid-May…
The man in the oval frame here is Georg Honauer. On the left, we see his unusual execution. A Latinized inscription gives his pretended noble alias, Lord of Brunhoff and Grobeschütz, along with the year 1597 and his age: twenty-four years old. Honauer is richly dressed in an embroidered tunic and is wearing an extravagant plumed hat. Two little devils repose on cushions beneath him.
Spectators cluster round the elaborate gallows. The tall iron construction, complete with finial balls and dangling chains, stands on a specially cut stone plinth. In a gory detail, blood drips down from the hanging figure. There is reason both for the fancy dress and the fancy construction.
Honauer was born in Olomouc, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), in 1572. Passing himself off under his alias as a goldsmith and alchemist, in 1596 he entered the service of Friedrich I, Duke of Württemberg, in Stuttgart, claiming to be able to convert iron into precious metal using a process that combined alchemical transmutation with the bulk techniques of metal ore smelting.
Most ancient cultures with metallurgy have a version of alchemy, from the Chinese to the Egyptians. Alchemy flourished in medieval Europe, with its promise of divinely assisted immortality and its alluring sub-discipline, chrysopoeia, the transmutation of base metal into gold. It came with its own compelling logic that metals in the earth exist naturally in a constant state of evolution toward gold. Ores were near the start of the journey; easily smelted base metals such as lead a little further along. Alchemists believed that with the right chemical agents they could accelerate the process. But others doubted these claims, and during the centuries when some were pursuing alchemy in all seriousness, others — from Chaucer and Dante to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Ben Jonson — made it a topic of derision and satire.
Alchemists nevertheless found patrons among men in urgent need of money, and the duke was certainly one of these. Before the end of the decade, Friedrich would raise the cash to persuade Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, to release his duchy from Austrian control, and was pursuing expensive utopian projects, such as building the new city of Freudenstadt as a Protestant refuge.
So Honauer’s arrival in Stuttgart was well timed. Friedrich was already offering a reward to subjects who discovered promising ore deposits. Honauer claimed he could produce eight hundred ducats’ worth of “fine gold” from a hundred pounds of iron, and a friend said he had seen him using a tincture to draw gold from a lead bullet at a military camp in Hungary. The duke demanded a small-scale demonstration, which Honauer duly performed, and the metallic product passed an assay by the duke’s mining adviser; it was “at least as good as ducat-quality gold.”
Driven by fascination with the subject of alchemy as well as his avarice, Friedrich immediately directed that his Stuttgart summerhouse be converted into a laboratory for Honauer, and granted him further facilities at Kirchheim unter Teck, a short ride away from the city. He placed a large initial order for 200,000 ducats of gold, but Honauer said he did not have a sufficient quantity of the reagents necessary for such a large undertaking. They agreed on a monthly target of 36,000 ducats, to run indefinitely. The duke then arranged for thirty-six hundredweight and eighteen pounds (nearly two tons) of iron to be transported more than 150 miles from his armoury in Mömpelgard (now Montbéliard in France) to provide Honauer with the “raw material” he needed. Honauer’s order for additional chemicals necessary for the operation was equally impressive: 1030 pounds of saltpetre, 1852 pounds of lead, as well as similar quantities of “white copper” (cupronickel) and “mountain antimony”, and other reagents.
However, when he finally saw the scale of the task before him, Honauer lost his nerve and fled the city. Keen to get him back, believing that he had seen transmutation with his own eyes, the duke had his court painter produce “wanted posters” for the vanished alchemist, who was soon apprehended and brought back to attempt the transmutation again. When this failed, Friedrich had Honauer interrogated. Although the duke clearly wanted to believe Honauer could do as he had claimed, the fact that the alchemist had run away could only add to suspicions he was a cheat — a Betrüger, to use a word adopted at this time specifically to categorize alchemists who had been found unsuccessful, and who might or might not have been deliberately fraudulent.
The trial that followed was complicated by the fact that Honauer was indicted for impersonating a member of the nobility as well as the alchemical Betrug. He was quickly found guilty and, despite a personal appeal to the Holy Roman Emperor, sentenced to hang in a unique public spectacle. On Friedrich’s orders, all the iron that Honauer had been unable to convert into precious metal was converted instead into his gallows. The thirty-foot structure was then gilded in mockery of his claimed abilities and, on April 2, 1597, Honauer was dressed in robes woven with gold brocade to humiliate him still further, and led out to his death…
“The Gilded Gallows of Georg Honauer,” from @HoooAW in @PublicDomainRev.
* Shakespeare, Timon of Athens (Act 5, Scene 1)
###
As we tackle transmutation, we might note that today is the luckiest day of the year… or so suggests the alchemist’s cousin, the astrologer:
On May 18 at 2:36 p.m. EST, we will experience a once-a-year Jupiter cazimi.
Cazimi comes from the Arabic word kaṣmīmī, meaning “as if in the heart.” In astrological terms, a cazimi transpires when a planet is in close or exact conjunction with the sun, right in the infernal heart of it, if you will.
Also known as the “Day of Miracles,” a Jupiter cazimi occurs when the planet of good times, good luck, deep pockets, limitless potential, laughter, wisdom and diamonds on the soles of its proverbial shoes, is within one degree of the sun. A cazimi is something of a solar amplifier/purifier, where the inherent energy of a planet is hyped and heightened by its proximity to that show-boating death star.
On Saturday, the planet of growth, optimism, and abundance is getting a solar tongue kiss at 28 degrees and and we’re all primed to reap the benefits…
… It’s anyone’s guess what an unlucky ruler might do to punish an over-promising astrologer.
“Mathematics has not a foot to stand on which is not purely metaphysical”*…
Lest we forget…
A forgotten episode in French-occupied Naples in the years around 1800—just after the French Revolution—illustrates why it makes sense to see mathematics and politics as entangled. The protagonists of this story were gravely concerned about how mainstream mathematical methods were transforming their world—somewhat akin to our current-day concerns about how digital algorithms are transforming ours. But a key difference was their straightforward moral and political reading of those mathematical methods. By contrast, in our own era we seem to think that mathematics offers entirely neutral tools for ordering and reordering the world—we have, in other words, forgotten something that was obvious to them.
In this essay, I’ll use the case of revolutionary Naples to argue that the rise of a new and allegedly neutral mathematics—characterized by rigor and voluntary restriction—was a mathematical response to pressing political problems. Specifically, it was a response to the question of how to stabilize social order after the turbulence of the French Revolution. Mathematics, I argue, provided the logical infrastructure for the return to order. This episode, then, shows how and why mathematical concepts and methods are anything but timeless or neutral; they define what “reason” is, and what it is not, and thus the concrete possibilities of political action. The technical and political are two sides of the same coin—and changes in notions like mathematical rigor, provability, and necessity simultaneously constitute changes in our political imagination…
Massimo Mazzotti with an adaptation from his new book, Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity: “Foundational Anxieties, Modern Mathematics, and the Political Imagination,” @maxmazzotti in @LAReviewofBooks.
* Thomas De Quincey
###
As we count on it, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Regiomontanus (or Johannes Müller von Königsberg, as he was christened); he was born on this date in 1436. A mathematician, astrologer, and astronomer of the German Renaissance, he and his work were instrumental in the development of Copernican heliocentrism during his lifetime and in the decades following his death.
“I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.”*…
(Roughly) Daily has looked at almanacs before (e.g., here and here), but never with an eye to their astrological underpinnings. Livia Gershon plugs that gap…
Some Christians today see astrology as a clear affront to their beliefs, and possibly a dangerous manifestation of the occult. And yet, as historian T.J. Tomlin writes, through the eighteenth century, it was a central aspect of the almanacs that were ubiquitous in Protestant American homes.
By 1800, Tomlin writes, U.S. printers produced enough almanacs to provide one to every household in the country. People turned to the books for a clear, simple idea of how the universe worked. Their astrological calculations helped readers gain practical know-how about agricultural management, weather, and personal health.
…
Like the study of the natural world in general in that time and place, almanacs were rooted in Protestantism. They presented simple, widely held religious ideas—God’s power, redemption through Christ, the promise of heaven—to an increasingly literate public. “This was the liturgy of early American popular culture,” Tomlin writes.
But there were debates about what sort of astrology was compatible with this religious belief. “Natural astrology,” using the movements of heavenly bodies to draw conclusions about agriculture, medicine, and the weather, was widely regarded as “a way to illuminate God’s creative impulse in the universe,” Tomlin writes. But “judicial astrology,” predicting the events of individual lives or political affairs, might be seen as blasphemous…
Wildly popular, almanacs helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with their faith: “The Protestant Astrology of Early American Almanacs,” from @LiviaGershon in @JSTOR_Daily.
* Arthur C. Clarke
###
As we study the stars, we might send multi-faceted birthday greetings to the painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, physicist, chemist, anatomist, botanist, geologist, cartographer, and writer– the archetypical Renaissance Man– Leonardo da Vinci. Quite possibly the greatest genius of the last Millennium, he was born on this date in 1452.
While Leonardo’s attention (and thus his notebooks) extended to astronomy, there’s no evidence that he believed in astrology. That said, his chart has been cast myriad times (e.g., here).
Self-portrait in red chalk, circa 1512-15 [source]
“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust”*…
Beyond the Prisoner’s Dilemma— an interactive guide to game theory and why we trust each other: The Evolution of Trust, from Nicky Case (@ncasenmare), via @frauenfelder@mastodon.cloud in @Recomendo6.
* J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
###
As we rethink reciprocal reliance, we might send far-sighted birthday greetings to Michel de Nostredame; he was born on this date in 1503. Better known as Nostradamus, he was an astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties (published in 1555), a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.
In the years since the publication of his Les Prophéties, Nostradamus has attracted many supporters, who, along with some of the popular press, credit him with having accurately predicted many major world events. Other, more critical, observers note that many of his supposed correct calls were the result of “generous” (or plainly incorrect) translations/interpretations; and more generally, that Nostradamus’ genius for vagueness allows– indeed encourages– enthusiasts to “find” connections where they may or may not exist.
You must be logged in to post a comment.