Beneath the Night: How the stars have shaped the history of humankind
By Stuart Clark (2020, Guardian Faber), 290 pp.
Starry night
Why do we look at the stars? We are interested in the nature of the Universe, a drive to understand and interpret what we see. Equally valid is an appreciation of the beauty of the night sky, an aesthetic response that often shades into a sense of awe and contemplation of our place in the vastness of space. And these two views are not incompatible. Over the long span of human history, what are the ways in which we have we looked at and found meaning in the patterns of the night sky?
Author Stuart Clark spans both the scientific and artistic responses: he is an astrophysics graduate and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a fine writer and science populariser. This very readable book explores humankind’s relationship with the stars, from the Stone Age to the Space Age. In the beginning, people paid attention to the night sky to measure time. The phases of the Moon and rising of distinctive asterisms marked the seasons – when to hunt, when to sow and when to harvest. A six-star pattern in the cave painting at Lascaux in France hints that the appearance of the Pleiades in the night sky was significant perhaps 17,000 years ago!
Star stories
As more star patterns were recognised, this knowledge was useful enough to pass on through generations, and for pre-literate societies the shapes became associated with animals and human figures. The sequence of their procession across the sky was then captured in story-form, which developed into the myths which for most of human history was the best medium of encapsulating wisdom. And so the hunter and his dogs chase the bull through the stars, and we can see that the origins of our constellations were practical and educational. The author contends that these stories from pre-history later gave rise to mythology, astrology and religion that then shaped so much of human societies up to the Enlightenment and the scientific revolutions.
With various world mythologies come in concepts of cosmology, origin stories and the afterlife. Did you know that on the inside of ancient Egyptian coffin lids were painted star maps, so that the dead could find their way? For millennia there was no distinction between different branches of knowledge, between astronomy and astrology: one observed, measured and predicted (conjunctions, eclipses, planetary motions) while the other interpreted, mapping events on Earth against the patterns of the sky and vice versa.
Stars in their eyes
Knowledge is power, and the arcane skills of the stargazers bolstered the politics of princes and kings. The origin myths and concept of the afterlife blossomed into the myriad religious movements, which provided societies with unifying stories and motivation to organise on a vast scale, resulting in the building of temples, cathedrals and great works of art, alongside systems of power, control and dominion.
And what about today? Space exploration has taken men to the Moon, and probed the mysteries of the Solar System, while science has brought the stars down to Earth as we begin to harness the nuclear fusion at the centre of stars and are on the verge of revolutionising energy production (as long as we avoid destroying everything in nuclear war, of course. The ongoing explosion of knowledge from modern astronomy and cosmology has, for some, felt like the “disenchantment” of the world, brought about by Newton and the scientific revolution. In the 18th and 19th centuries that provoked a huge anti-scientific backlash expressed in the art and literature of the Romantics.
A matter of perspective
These days we have witnessed a resurgence of New Age and other “magical thinking”. Clark urges us to find a true re-enchantment of nature through the iconic images of the Space Race: the breath-taking “Earthrise”, the beautiful “Blue Marble” photo and the tiny “Blue Dot” as Voyager 2 Looked back at the single pixel image of our planet against the infinite black of space.
The pity of it is that so far the view [of Earth from space] has been the exclusive property of a handful of test pilots, rather than the world leaders, who need this new perspective, or the poets who might communicate it to them
Astronaut Michael Collins, reflecting on the view from Apollo 11
Beginning with contemplation and the necessity of marking time, through the bristling complexity of communities both riven by and unified by organised religion, to the emergence of nation-states and empires, Clarke traces a compelling narrative of how our concepts of the Universe and humanity’s place in it have been moulded by the stars. Our ancestors in ancient history and pre-history were not stupid. They had all the capabilities we have of observation, attention and imagination. They did not, however, have the technologies we enjoy, or the ongoing scaffolding of science to climb up for a clearer view. We know now that the position of stars and planets do not, and cannot, influence human life or behaviour. But it is undeniable that our ever-evolving relationship with the night sky has changed human history.
[This review was originally written for New Zenith, the newsletter of Vectis Astronomical Society]
Picture credits
- Book cover: design by Andrew Smith; Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo
- Lascaux Sky Map: from LJ. DOBROSAVLJEVIC-GRUJIC and P. GRUJIC, The Language of Sky in Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade No. 96 (2017), 407 – 412 (ref. https://publications.aob.rs/96/pdf/407-412.pdf)
- Earthrise: By NASA/Bill Anders – http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/AS8-14-2383HR.jpg, Public Domain, and wikimedia
Elsewhere
- Darken our Lightness – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – my review of a very different book, with a very similar name!
- New Horizons – Old Harmonies – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – revisiting the “Music of the Spheres” that held the ancient Cosmos together in its harmony
- At the Cutting Edge – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – the history of an idea, and the shaping of the history of science
Mongolia has no light pollution, is far from the sea and is a thousand metres up. The night sky was stunning, and just as impressive when the moon rose and the Milky Way faded out of sight. The constellations were set out across the sky like an illustration from a textbook, a sight that everyone would have seen on a clear night until not too long ago. The patterns and their slow movement would have been as much a part of daily life as the weather.
The famous ‘Earthrise’ photo was taken from Apollo 8, the first manned craft to leave Earth’s orbit and travel to the moon. I remember the astronauts pointing out the difference between seeing the image in a rectangular photograph and viewing it as they did, with no boundaries and the Earth hanging in empty space. As Michael Collins said, the handful of astronauts who have seen this sight are a very exclusive club.