The Muses: Urania or Astronomy

 In this episode of The Makers Rage Podcast, I explore Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, and her influence on the intersection of art, science, and creativity. From ancient beliefs about the music of the spheres to Johannes Kepler’s view of celestial harmonies, I examine how the study of the stars evolved from mystical art to empirical science. I also discuss Urania’s role in poetry, her symbolism through the globe and compass, and the historical significance of constellations, the Zodiac, and astrology. Join me as I trace the fascinating connection between astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics across cultures and eras. 

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Transcript

The Muses: Urania or Astronomy

Introduction

Hello, my name's Darren and welcome to The Makers Rage podcast – Urania or the muse of Astronomy. So, this is a continuation of the Muse series, the first episode being on the epic, with a corollary episode on the Heroes journey. I'm not doing these in any particular sequence. Although the epic muse, Calliope, is traditionally considered chief of the nine. Urania is nonetheless regarded as one of the senior members of the sorority as well. Named after her grandfather, Ouranos or Uranus or if you're 12, Ur-anus. 

Today, Astronomy is considered more a science than an art, yet the ancients regarded the study of the planets and stars as an art form and linked it to astrology and divination. Even the planets were called musical spheres because the ancients believed this celestial bodies emitted their own unique hum, and that they did so according to numerical ratios the Pythagoreans discovered when describing the pitch of musical notes, specifically notes produced by a string. And this is what links music and mathematics. 

Johannes Kepler, famed mathematician and astronomer, was also an astrologer who believed the celestial bodies music to be audible, or that the music could at least be heard by the soul. This implied a sympathetic relationship between the souls of men and women and the planets and stars, though the stars are unreachable, inconceivably remote. Even we’ve hitherto only set foot on the moon; sent probes and robots to Mars and other moons in our solar system. And though Astronomers today can see things the ancients and Kepler couldn’t even imagine, they’ve yet to see any evidence that what happens on a star or planet light years away has any bearing on the lives of creatures inhabiting a single rock in the suburbs of one among billions of galaxies.

Urania’s Emblems

And yet dressed in a cloak embroidered with the stars, Urania was the mystical link between the inaccessible heavens and human affairs; her gaze always upwards, ever fixed upon the heavens: it's no surprise she became a muse of later Christian poets. Like Milton, in Paradise Lost, who invokes it directly: “Descend from heaven Urania, by that name, if rightly thou art called, whose voice divine, following above The Olympian hill I soar.” But being aware of her Pagan origins, he's careful not to cross the line and says “The meaning, not the name. I call.” The meaning being the Holy Spirit, for whom she is a poetical stand in. 

Her emblems are the globe and compass, not the instruments of a poet or musician, but a geometer, s mathematician – Eratosthenes, who measured the circumference of the earth by shoving sticks in the ground and examining their shadows, had more reason to invoke her than any Christian poet. The Globe is not the earth, but the celestial globe, which shows the apparent positions of the stars in the sky: a map not of the earth and its continent, but of the spangled firmament surrounding it. Christ, when depicted as ‘Salvatore Mundi’ in Renaissance art, is shown holding an orb, Recalling this emblem of Urania. And though this orb is often understood to be the earth, over which he’s supposed to have dominion, the right association would extend his dominion to include not just the Earth, but all the stars above and surrounding it. 

Her other emblem, a compass, is just a simple technical drawing tool for making circles and arcs. As a divider it can also be used to mark distances on maps – useful in geometry, drafting and navigation, but again, not so much in poetry and song. Some of the most important theorems in mathematics and geometry have been proved using just a compass and a straight urge or ruler. Indeed, proving some constructions insoluble or impossible – like squaring the circle, doubling the cube, or trisecting an angle – wouldn't be achieved until the 19th century, and doing with tools far more sophisticated than a compass and a straight edge or ruler. 

Constellations

And though not useful tools for so useless and activity as writing poetry, they are crucial to one of the most useless activities ever devised, writing horoscopes. What it has in common with Geometry, is the fact it reflects our species mania for discovering patterns, even where there are none, our predilection for seeing faces on the moon, Virgin Maries in rocky outcrops or penis-shaped anything. It is also manifested in how we choose to group the stars into constellations. The asterism known in America as the Big Dipper is better known in the UK and Ireland as the Plough. In German it is known as the Great Wagon; the Norse called it Odin’s Wain; in Vietnam they see a great rudder; in Malaysia, a boat; in Burma it is a crustacean, like a lobster; in Indian tradition, the seven stars comprising the Dipper were called the Seven Sages. We tend to name them after things familiar to us. Hence the Inuit referring to the Dipper as the Caribou or reindeer. And our vantage point on Earth makes us see these groupings very differently than they’d appear to us if we stood on Mars, say. Or on a planet in another solar system. If you examine them closely, you’ll notice the seven stars in the Plough or Dipper vary in brightness or magnitude as well as distance, with the nearest one, Mizar being almost equidistance between Earth and the star furthest from us in the constellation, Alpha Ursa Majoris, which incidentally points to Polaris or the North Star, whose stable position in the northern sky enabled navigators to discover unknown continents. It's actually a triple star system, but to the naked eye looks like a single point of light – a lamp to encourage adventurous sailors tired of always hugging the shoreline; a reassuring beacon for more wary seafarers fearful of the sea monsters and Dragons that lurk in the depths. The North Star stays fixed as the hinge of a compass, however far its limbs are stretched, whether on the map of the earth or of the sky.

The Zodiac

A far more significant star, of course, than Polaris. Is the one nearest us, our sun. The ecliptic is the great circle on the celestial sphere, or Urania’s globe, that represents the sun’s apparent path during the year. It's called the ecliptic because lunar and solar eclipses can only occur when the moon crosses it. The Zodiac is a belt extending 9° on either side of the ecliptic, taken from the Greek, Zodiakos Kuklos, or ‘circle of animals’. Because most of the constellations through which the ecliptic passes represent animals like Pisces the fish, Capricorn the goat, Scorpio, Leo, Cancer the crab, Taurus the Bull, and Aries the Ram – invoked by Chaucer at the beginning of The Canterbury Tales: “When in April with its shower sweet, its tender crops, and the young son had in the Ram his half coarse run”. Also referring to the Ram is Dante, thought to have been born in May, when in La Vita Nuova he describes his first encounter, at aged nine, with Beatrice, his lifelong muse. “Nine times since my birth”, he says, “had the heaven of light returned to almost the same point in its orbit, when to my eyes first appeared the glorious lady of my mind”. Before this moment, he says in the book of his memory, little could be read. But upon seeing her for the first time, he writes “Incipit Vita Nuova”. Here begins the new life. Wallace Stevens called Dante's La Vita Nuova the greatest of all Christian poems. But nowhere does Dante acknowledge Urania as his muse. For him there is only Beatrice. So here I am back to hugging the shores of poetry. And though I’ve called astrology a useless pursuit, so much of our poetry is influenced by it. 

Disasters

Consider the word ‘influence’ itself. From influenza: in medieval Italian it meant being influenced by the stars, as the disease we call by the same name, which we’ve since shortened to ‘the flu’, because in the Middle Ages it was taught Epidemics were also caused by the stars. As is the human temperament. For if you happen to be born when certain planets were rising in the sky, like Jupiter, say, you would have a jovial or happy disposition; if Saturn, a Saturnalian or gloomy one; Mercury would make you mercurial or changeable, erratic, impulsive; and as for Venus, well, that would make you venereal. No need to elaborate on that. But speaking of love, how does Shakespeare describe perhaps the greatest lovers in our literature, Romeo and Juliet? “Star-crossed” – meaning the position of the stars at their births determined they could never be together. A Tragedy. A disaster, even – from the Italian ‘distastro’ literally ‘ill-starred’. You can imagine the people who built Stonehenge or Newgrange, who relied upon the movement of the stars, including the Sun, to predict seasonal patterns – When to plant? Went to Harvest? – would say if you were born when an inauspicious alignment of heavenly bodies could be seen, the pattern of your life would be decided thereafter. If not by the stars directly, then by the community who determined by this alignment that you were not destined for great things. Rather unscientific, of course, but scapegoats are needed to prevent the apocalypse. Why else would they come together as a community to build these spectacular structures if not doing so meant the world would come to an end? Nowadays astronomers look to the skies for a more empirical sign of impending doom, like a wayward comet or meteor. But there are still many who’d interpret a wayward space rock as a sign of something more than chance, for how could beings as important as we be destroyed by chance?

Kepler: Court Astrologer

Johannes Kepler, mentioned earlier who inherited Galileo's mantle, and played just as big role in the mystifying the heavens, was nevertheless employed by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II as imperial astrologer and cast detailed horoscopes for friends, family, and patrons, though it seems he took a dim view of astrologers’ claiming they could predict the future. Kepler's most important benefactor though was the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who didn't insist he waste his time on horoscopes, but to help him develop his star catalogue and planetary tables that would help with the computation of the positions of the then known planets and stars to a greater level of accuracy than ever before and provide observational evidence that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, that moves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit, exploding the geocentric Ptolemaic model once and for all. Copernicus waited until after his death to publish the work that contradicted this, and Galileo was sentenced to house arrest. And had he not had powerful friends might have been burned at the stake, like Giordano Bruno, for disseminating a heresy confirmed by the evidence of his eyes. And after being forced by the Inquisition to “abjure, curse, and detest” these opinions, was heard to murmur defiantly “And yet it moves”, referring to the earth going around the sun. 

The Church may force a retraction, burn all the evidence and declare a scientist’s work heretical, but the truth will out eventually, if not in Catholic Italy, then in the Protestant north. Incidentally, it was only in October 1992 that John Paul II finally apologized for the Church’s treatment of Galileo almost 400 years before. He might have escaped to the Netherlands. Indeed, he was offered a professorship there. But like Socrates he stayed home to face the music. And with his house arrest, the Church ensured Italy would become a scientific backwater for 100 years. Even in Galileo's own lifetime, the collaboration of Kepler and Brahe indicated the Scientific Revolution was moving north. Incidentally, Tycho Brahe named his observatory Uraniborg, the castle of Urania: the first custom built observatory in modern Europe. Though it lacked a telescope. The magnifying glass that was transformed by Galileo from a toy to a scientific instrument, with which he was the first to observe lunar craters and the moons of Jupiter. Despite his house arrest, Galileo, who was born the same year as Shakespeare, died in 1642, the year Isaac Newton was born.

The Telescope

Besides inventing calculus and the binomial theorem, devising the three laws of motion and the classical theory of gravity, besides discovering that light is composed of an electromagnetic spectrum, it can be easy to forget that Newton was also responsible for inventing the reflecting telescope. It was long known that curved mirrors behaved like lenses, but it was Newton who first made use of this knowledge to construct an instrument whose technology is still being used in space telescopes today. And I'm sure had the Greeks invented it, the telescope would have been one of Urania's emblems.

But the first telescopes were only invented in the 17th century. Observatories had existed before then of course for thousands of years with stargazers relying only on the naked eye to map the heavens. In the 2nd century BCE, the Greek Hipparchus didn't need one to create his magnitude scale of stellar luminosities or to discover the procession of the equinoxes. He's also credited with inventing the astrolabe. Chinese astronomers in the 2nd century CE observed the first supernova with the naked eye. Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in the 10th century CE makes the first recorded observation of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Around the same time, the Persian astronomer Al Biruni describes the Milky Way Galaxy as a collection of nebulous stars. 

Also around this time, but half a world away in the Yucatan Peninsula, at the El Caracol Observatory in Chichen Itza, the Maya were following the path of Venus through the year and building structures that align with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, the Maya associated Venus not with love but war, and they would even schedule their battles to align with the planet's movement. As for Mars, the planet the West associates with war, the Maya carefully noted its retrograde motion, that is, it appears to reverse course for a while, which Ptolemy explained by saying it moves in epicycles because of his belief the celestial spheres orbited the stationary Earth. The real explanation is that the Earth and Mars both orbit the sun in elliptical orbits and at certain times of the year, the Earth seems to overtake Mars, which will certainly appear strange to you if you insist the Earth doesn’t move at all while Mars looks as if it's doing a moonwalk. 

Who knows if the Maya deduced, as Kepler and Copernicus did, that the Earth and Mars move in relative motion around the Sun. So many of their codices were burned by Jesuit priests, the same people who condemned Galileo, who dismissed the mysterious Mayan script they couldn't read as Devil's writ. Anyway, although much was achieved in astronomy with the naked eye, consider all that has been achieved in the centuries since that invention of the telescope, not just the kind descended from those Galileo and Newton used, but telescopes that can detect light outside the visible range, like X-ray, UV, and radio telescopes, and the James Webb telescope, which sees in infrared. Even divine Urania, gazing up at the heavens, couldn't fathom this. Indeed, she should probably lay both her emblems aside and exchange them for the telescope. 

This will certainly be the most scientific of the episodes and the Muses, Urania being the most scientifically inclined of the nine. And yet it's interesting to muse on why astronomy was taught as one of the seven liberal arts in medieval universities, with preparatory work being done in the Trivium, Grammar, logic and rhetoric before the more advanced quadrivium, Arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. As late as the 20th century, the physicist Richard Feynman recalls astronomy being taught as a humanities subject. And though we have long accepted there is no sound in space, no music, there is a poetry in the conceit that light falling into our telescopes, and our eyes, after traversing unimaginable distances through space has a mathematical kinship with that stringed instrument the Pythagoreans imagined could, to quote Shakespeare, “make heaven drowsy with the harmony”.