The Britannica dictionary defines the lesser-used, formal adjective of “dread” as something “causing great fear.” But it can also be awe. We can confidently say that the ancients, our ancestors at the dawn of civilization, would have felt the evening empyrean to be a dread dwelling.
The sky was the celestial abode of great beings and outer entities, embodied or represented in the stars and constellations, charting the fates of puny humanity. If we speculate further back to the prehistoric era of evolving hominids, when our primeval forebears gained the physical and figurative ability to look up at the stars and the world beyond, they must have felt so small.
It is natural that every great civilization begins with pondering the awesome inspiration and trepidation of the glimmering night sky and, almost as if in return, to begin charting the celestial bodies that many believe to this day shape one’s fate on Earth. While in London last month, I visited the fantastic, compact temporary exhibit at the British Library called “A Silk Road Oasis.” It featured what curator Mélodie Doumy calls, “the earliest known celestial atlas from any civilization.” The so-called Dunhuang star chart, which is dated from 650 to 700 CE, features, according to Mélodie in our previous interview together, more than 1,300 stars recorded and organized into 257 constellations, or asterisms, drawn in different colors that represented three old schools of Chinese astronomy: Shi Shen (red), Gan De (black), and Wu Xian (white).
Mélodie says that the document consists “of 12 maps that represent the sky in 30-degree sections from east to west, aligned with the months of the Chinese lunar year. A 13th map illustrates the north-circumpolar region, which includes stars visible throughout the year.” She also notes how each map is accompanied by commentary, naming the corresponding region of the sky, the astrological predictions associated with it, and the area of the Tang-era empire thought to be influenced by those stars.
“This reveals the close connection between astrology, astronomy, and governance in ancient China, where understanding and interpreting the heavens was a task reserved for imperial astronomers. Such observations were believed to maintain cosmic order, with direct implications for political stability,” notes Mélodie, and one of the best books on the dictated, systematic nature of Chinese cosmo-astronomy remains David W. Pankenier’s Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven. (2013)
In contrast, the “Western” astrological system that conforms to the Julian calendar was actually more “fluid” in its historical transmission, having been clearly adapted from the Egyptians, who got it from the Babylonians. This inheritance is evident at one of the pillars of Western art and history: the Louvre. After the British Library’s “A Silk Road Oasis” symposium in February, I was in Paris to do some filming at the Guimet. The Louvre shares with the Guimet a similar illustrious reputation, except for different regions: the Louvre holds France’s collections west of Iran (in other words, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and Africa, and Europe), whilst the Guimet holds the items east of the Persian world: Central Asia, India, South Asia and the Himalayas, and all of East and Southeast Asia.
The Louvre is famous for its Egyptian collection, which comprises the first Egyptian museum in the modern sense of the word. Having opened at the Louvre in 1827, one of its most exquisite items is tucked away in a small wing that is easily missable without actually, quite literally, gazing upwards. I cannot help but think of the tagline of the upcoming Superman movie: “Look Up,” an invitation to experience awe for something greater than one’s mortal conceptions. The majestic Dendera Zodiac, the only complete map of the ancient world’s sky, is exactly such a thing.
This circular, sandstone bas-relief is a planisphere that depicts the northern celestial pole, which was Ursa Minor at the time, the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean zodiac, and the Egyptian asterisms and decans in artistic form. When I visited Egypt last year, I went to one of its most breathtaking temples, Upper Egypt’s Dendera temple complex. This planisphere had been torn off by the French from the ceiling (pronaos) of a chapel to Osiris inside the Hathor Temple. Hence the cruel irony of the Egyptian government replacing the displaced authentic item with a replica in its own home.
The bas-relief was placed on the Osiris chapel’s ceiling sometime after 51 BC during the Greco-Roman era, after the chapel’s construction had begun during the Ptolemaic period. While lacking the sophistication of the constellation and asterism analysis of the Dunhuang star chart, the craftsmanship and knowledge expressed by this older chart of the heavens is undeniable. As Pankenier has noted, the northern celestial pole was also of critical importance in pre-imperial, ancient Shang and Zhou Chinese astronomy, for the Chinese believed that the pole was where the Supernal Lord, or Di, resided.
The Louvre has collaborated with Snapchat to showcase the zodiac with interactive AR. It’s an unwitting indication of how far humanity has come since we first gazed up at the stars, and there is probably no longer that primal reverence and awe that once defined our existence (even though out in nature, we can probably retrieve some of those guttural, visceral emotions). Rather, our fear and perplexity is now existential: directed inward, against our greed, hatred, and ignorance. In comparison, the dread stars seem rather friendly and gentle. I like to think that our great celestial guides ultimately are so.
Reference
David W. Pankenier. 2013. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Related features from BDG