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The Churning of the Milky Ocean Bikaner workshop, Rajasthan, India; ca. 1700 Opaque watercolor and gold on paper 5 5/8 x 8 1/8 in. San Diego Museum of Art, Edward Binney 3rd Collection 1990:793
This painting presents the story of the churning of the “Milky Ocean,” the primordial waters that give birth to amrita, the nectar of immortality. At the center of this story is Vishnu, who, as the source of creation, enters the world repeatedly to restore order and righteousness. The Hindu sacred texts, the Puranas, explain that a rogue sage placed a curse on the gods, leaving heaven, hell, and the middle world bereft of good fortune and steeped in moral desolation. Evil power-seeking deities known as asuras took advantage of the gods’ misfortune and defeated them in battle. The gods went to Vishnu for assistance. He instructed them to promise the asuras a portion of the nectar of immortality if they would aid in its creation by churning the Milky Ocean. With Mount Mandara serving as the stirrer and the great serpent Vasuki as a rope aid, the gods and asuras engaged in a sort of tug-of-war, with the gods at Vasuki’s tail and the asuras at its heads. Vishnu appeared as a giant tortoise to support the rotating mountain as it began to sink. As the waters were churned, fourteen treasures emerged, the last of which was the nectar of immortality, leading to a fight between the gods and asuras. In the end, with Vishnu’s help, the nectar was imbibed by the gods, allowing peace and good fortune to be restored. Although this story is fundamentally about Vishnu maintaining the cosmic order, another element of the narrative attempts to explain the behavior of heavenly bodies. When the sun and the moon catch one of the asuras drinking the nectar, Vishnu cuts off the asura’s head, which becomes immortal. In revenge, the head occasionally swallows the sun and moon, an explanation for solar and lunar eclipses. 2
contributors Rebecca Bloom (Hinduism and Jainism) Martin Brauen (Buddhism) Mario Diacono (Alchemy) Bonnie Lee (Astrology) Steven Soter (Western Visions) assistants Tracey Friedman and Kavie Barnes editor Jonathan Kuhr
This booklet is published on the occasion of the exhibition Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe December 11, 2009, through May 10, 2010 Š2009 Rubin Museum of Art, New York The exhibition is made possible, in part, by grants from the Bodman Foundation and the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation. Image detail from page 33
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Introduction For thousands of years humans have tried to understand the motions of the stars and the structure of the universe. Looking to the sky—at first with only bare eyes and then with devices of evolving sophistication—peoples of all times and places have recorded their theories of the cosmos in words and images for contemporary discourse as well as the benefit of later generations. The exhibition Visions of the Cosmos, organized by the Rubin Museum of Art, presents a number of these attempts to define the cosmos, together reflecting a variety of times, places, and traditions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, medieval Christianity, Renaissance science, and modern astrophysics. Selected objects from the exhibition have been reproduced in this publication. They demonstrate not only the diversity of how humans have envisioned the universe but also the striking similarities that appear in cultures separated by great periods of time and geographic distance.
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Hinduism “In this beginning …” may be the appropriate introduction to Hindu cosmology considering the tradition’s multiple creation stories, a testament both to the cultural and geographic diversity of India, the religion’s birthplace, and the many millennia over which the religion has evolved. The Puranas, sacred texts compiled between 300 and 1000 CE, are the primary sources for Hinduism’s cosmic mythology, and they reflect this eclecticism, combining elements of earlier texts and oral traditions. It is among these narratives that we find the stories of creation and the ordering of the universe. From the Puranas a complex vision of the universe emerges, at the heart of which is a cyclical creation. Hinduism proposes that existence periodically dissolves into potentiality only to be brought into existence again in a cycle that has no beginning and no end. This process is often connected not only to the activity of a god, as it is in the West, but also to the “divine body.” The Puranas describe the cosmos as emerging from the body of the creator god Brahma and contained within the body of Vishnu. The cosmos is equated with the body of god both spatially and temporally, with the lifespan of the universe corresponding to the life of Brahma. This system is further organized into four cyclical ages, each progressively diminishing in length and declining in virtue. Like each previous cycle, our current world cycle began with perfection and has slowly deteriorated until, at its conclusion, Brahma’s life will end and everything will again dissolve into the cosmic ocean, awaiting re-creation.
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Vishnu Sleeping on the Cosmic Ocean Possibly Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh, India; 11th century Sandstone 31 1/2 x 44 x 10 1/4 in. Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University Ester R. Portnow Collection of Asian Art A gift of the Nathan Rubin-Ida Ladd Family Foundation 2001.1.14
In between cycles of time Vishnu floats in deep sleep upon the cosmic ocean, the scene depicted in this sculpture. He sleeps on the serpent Ananta, whose name means “endless,” a reference to Hinduism’s concept of cyclical time. The ocean contains all the phenomena of the universe waiting to be created. Vishnu is believed to be represented in all three elements depicted—god, snake, and ocean—and is therefore the source of all creation in his substance and his power. At the end of Vishnu’s long sleep his consort Lakshmi massages his feet to awaken him. Creation commences as a “pouring forth” of forms from the body of the god, beginning with the creator god Brahma’s emergence on a lotus from Vishnu’s navel. All elements of creation then emanate from Brahma: the physical universe and the various beings that inhabit it, the system of time from instants to epochs, and religious culture in scripture and literature. After each cycle of four ages, when human society and the cosmic order have naturally declined, everything is destroyed and dissolves into the cosmic ocean until Vishnu is awakened and creation commences once again.
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Purusha (detail) Nepal; 18th century Pigments on cloth 36 x 83 in. Collection of Shelley and Donald Rubin P1994.27.3 (HAR 100001)
The identification of the relationship between the universe and the individual—the macrocosm and the microcosm—goes back at least three thousand years in South Asian history. In the Rig Veda, a sacred Hindu text dating to approximately 1200 BCE, the creation of the universe is said to be the result of the sacrificial dismemberment of a primordial man, or purusha. The purusha in this painting, however, refers to the most basic meaning of the word, “man,” and depicts the system of bodily energy centers, or chakras, present in every human. Chakras are the focus of much of the yoga practice prescribed by Tantric Hindu manuals. These manuals discuss awakening the energy or power within the practitioner, represented in the form of the serpent (kundalini) coiled at the base of the spine and in this painting likely by the small red snake between the figure’s calves. Meditation and yoga force the kundalini to awaken and rise up through the body’s chakras, depicted here by the seven circular points on the body from groin to crown. Practitioners force the kundalini to rise through a variety of techniques, many of which are analogous to cosmic processes.
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Jainism Janism emerged in northeastern India around the fifth or sixth century BCE. It developed a cosmology that is at once similar and completely distinct from that of India’s other indigenous religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. As in these religions, the Jain universe is divided into three worlds: the upper world of the gods, the middle world of humans and animals, and the lower world of hell realms. These three worlds and the innumerable souls that inhabit them are eternal, never created or uncreated. Just as there is no beginning or end to the Jain universe, so, too, is there no beginning or end to the cycle of time for the Jains. Beginning with perfection, the cosmos slowly regresses. When things are at their very worst, however, the universe does not dissolve as it does in the Hindu tradition but instead starts to improve until things are again ideal and the decline begins again. The Jain universe has been meticulously measured, from the size of the many realms to the length of the time cycles. Because these numbers are so immense, more meaning is found in their magnitude than in the calculations themselves. They are meant to remind us that human beings occupy a miniscule part of the vast universe, and we must therefore take advantage of our extremely rare human birth to live morally.
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Lokapurusha Page from a Samghayanarayana loose-leaf manuscript India; ca. 16th century Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper 10 x 4 3/8 in. Collection of Navin Kumar, New York
The Jain universe is divided into three basic realms, which together form the composite “Cosmic Man,” or Lokapurusha, illustrated in this manuscript page. The torso and head of the Cosmic Man contain a series of ten or twelve heavenly realms where the inhabitants experience lives of pleasure. The legs represent a series of seven hells, which contain the majority of souls and offer an endless variety of torments. But the smallest part of the universe, represented by the disk at the Lokapurusha’s waist, is the most important. This middle world, which is rotated in this diagram to show its details, is the mere sliver of the cosmos where humans can live and where the great Jain teachers can be born. Here the mixture of pleasure and pain, of good and bad, provides the perfect environment for religious practice and ethical awareness, ultimately making it the only realm where spiritual liberation is possible. When this occurs, the perfected soul floats to the top of the universe and eternally resides in the crescent-shaped realm above the heavens, shown at the forehead of the Lokapurusha.
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Mount Meru Page from a Samghayanarayana loose-leaf manuscript India; ca. 16th century Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper 10 x 4 3/8 in. Collection of Navin Kumar, New York
Mount Meru is the axis around which the disks of continents and oceans of the middle world are arranged. Jain cosmographers calculated its size as 100,000 yojanas—a distance of approximately 20,000 miles—not including the mountain’s pinnacle of beryl, which stands forty yojanas high and bears a sanctuary to the Jinas, the founding teachers of Jainism. Meru is also the stationary point around which the chariots of the gods of lights move, carrying the two suns, two moons, planets, and constellations. The mountain comprises three truncated cones, one on top of the other and each smaller than the one below. The lowest level projects from below the Earth’s surface and extends to the heavens. At the foot of the mountain on the Earth’s surface, and on the three successive terraces, parks and groves are carefully laid out, while sanctuaries of the Jinas, divine palaces, and residences of the directional guardians dot the mountainside.
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Buddhism Buddhism proposes that there is a relativity to the way that individuals experience the world. In this spirit many cosmologies can be considered valid while no single cosmology can be deemed absolutely true. This section presents two popular Buddhist cosmologies: one based on the Abhidharmakosha and the other on the Kalachakra Tantra. Buddhist cosmologies have several common characteristics. They all suggest that the universe is in fact the multiplication of individual world systems, combined to form a massive cosmic cluster. They also do not place the earth or human beings at the center of these universes. Rather, the gods and their worlds form the system’s axis, while humans and other living beings eke out an existence at the margins of the center. Buddhists believe that at least one billion world systems exist. These systems arise, pass away, and arise again in endlessly long periods of time, with the entire universe susceptible to continuous change. These periods, or cosmic pulse beats, called kalpa in Sanskrit, embrace such enormous spans of time that they are often not reckoned in years but rather described in parables like the following: Imagine a cubical container, each side measuring about 15 km, completely filled with fine hair tips. Take out a single hair tip each hundred years. The time it takes to empty the whole container is a single solar day. 36,000 such solar days form one least eon. The medium eon is a multiple of a least eon and a superior eon is a multiple of a medium eon.
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Wish-fulfilling Offerings (detail) Mongolia; ca. 1800 Silk; appliqué 53 5/8 x 94 1/2 in. Private Collection, Germany
This extraordinary appliqué work would typically hang in a shrine room dedicated to protector deities (gon khang). It depicts all of the offerings presented to wrathful deities: yaks, camels, dogs, horses, black vultures, ritual implements, auspicious symbols, and the entire universe. The universe is depicted rather small at the bottom center of the work, recognizable by its round form with four sets of shapes representing the continents at the cardinal directions (triangles = south, circles = west, squares = north, semicircles = east), Mount Meru at its center, and the palace of the gods on top. The mandala shown above Mount Meru should be visualized as lying horizontally on top of the universal mountain. This mandala is a representation of both the cosmos and the palace of the deity Vajrabhairava, to whom all these offerings are given. Vajrabhairava is represented at the top center of the work, shown only by his garments, crown, and arm bracelets.
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Buddhist Cosmological Scroll (details) Tibet; 16th century Pigments on cloth; 19 x 72 in. Rubin Museum of Art; C2009.9
Illustrated here and on page 19 are two details from a scroll that presents diagrams of various aspects of the cosmos as described in the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time) Tantra. The tantra describes the genesis of the universe as the result of a “stockpile� of collective karma from earlier ages of the world, forcing the atoms of the five elements (air, fire, water, earth, and space) to enter new combinations. The air atoms move together resulting in strong winds. These in turn make the fire atoms unite, a reaction that leads to the creation of electricity. Next follows the formation of water atoms, which bring about rain. As a result, rainbows appear, representing manifestations of the first earth atoms. These atoms thicken to become solid earth, and finally space atoms fill the space between all of the atoms and float both below and above the world system. The tantra also makes particular note of correlations between the outward appearances of the universe and the individual, with the two corresponding exactly in composition, construction, and inner periodicity. The universe and the human body display many more subtle correlations, some of which are depicted in the detail shown here, one of eight that make up the scroll.
The Cosmic Man The human body represents a complex inner cosmology with direct correlations to the cosmic universe. Branching off from the vertical central channel of this cosmic man are six centers, or chakras. These chakras are associated with the six elements: space, located at the crown; water, at the forehead; fire, at the throat; wind, at the heart; earth, at the navel; and awareness, at the genitals. In addition to these primary chakras, the painting also depicts the twelve chakras at the main joints (shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles). These centers are associated with the twelve zodiac signs. The fingers also reflect the greater cosmos and are associated with the elements: the thumb with earth, the second finger with water, the third with fire, the fourth with wind, and the fifth with space. 16
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Wind Tracks In the Kalachakra cosmic model, one’s attention is immediately drawn to the twelve “wind tracks” on which the sun glides. Pictorial representations of these wind tracks are found mainly on the walls of monasteries, but this scroll includes two such representations. The tracks are drawn from a bird’s eye view, beginning at a point directly above the cosmic center. Such illustrations admittedly do not offer a clear view of the spatial arrangement of the tracks. Only a side view of the Kalachakra cosmos can reveal that the planets form a kind of cap or dome around Mount Meru. This section of the painting depicts the different positions of the sun along its annual orbit of Mount Meru. This is a view from above Meru, showing the cross section of the base of the mountain at the center. Surrounding Meru are a number of concentric circles representing the rings of continents, oceans, and mountains. Around these are the twelve main continents. The continent on which we live, Jambudvipa, is the lowest depicted—the middle red triangle. Around all of these elements is a great salt ocean. Most of the orbits are drawn as black lines, while some are highlighted in various colors. The orbit at the bottom, dark gray in appearance, is representative of the time when the sun enters the sign of Capricorn. This is the winter solstice in Jambudvipa, when the sun passes far to the south of the continent. The writing that is visible on the orbit itself mentions the winter solstice, and the small word just underneath it is “Capricorn.” The yellow orbit represents the point when the sun enters Aries and is marked on the painting as the spring equinox for our world. Three months later the sun orbits along the blue line. This represents the position of the sun when it enters Cancer, the summer solstice for our world, with the sun passing high overhead. The pink orbit represents the position of the sun when it enters Libra, the time of the autumn equinox.
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Stupa Tibet; 13th or 14th century Copper alloy with semiprecious-stone inlay 70 x 27 in. Rubin Museum of Art C2004.17.1 (HAR 65335)
Stupas are commonly viewed as reliquaries for saints, holding their mortal remains and clothes as well as sacred texts, articles of worship, and, in Tibetan Buddhism, figures made of clay and the ashes of the deceased (tsa tsa). However, there is also a clear correspondence between the stupa and the Buddhist model of the universe. The trinity of sun, moon, and flame frequently crowning the Tibetan stupa are references to the three main channels in the human body, an indication that there are also correlations between the stupa and the body, or at least the body of the Buddha. This is evident in an observation found in a late Buddhist Javanese text: “The body of the Buddha, seen from without, is a stupa.�
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Western Cosmology When we observe the sky and the motions of heavenly bodies from Earth, it appears that the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets revolve around us. Thus early attempts in the West to understand the cosmos naturally accepted an Earthcentered model of the universe. Additionally, traditional Western philosophy regarded the heavens as a realm of changeless ethereal perfection and denigrated the Earth as the domain of corruption and decay. In 1543 this all changed when Nicolaus Copernicus revived an ancient Greek idea that the Earth is a planet orbiting the Sun. Copernicus’s findings led to a scientific revolution that ultimately broke down the false dichotomy between the Earth and the heavens. Discoveries with the telescope—from Galileo’s primitive spyglass to modern orbiting observatories—have revealed that the entire visible universe is made of the same elements as the Earth and obeys the same physical laws. As we continue to learn more about our universe, we further understand that we are living on a speck of dust in an evolving cosmos of awesome size and age.
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Creation According to traditional Christian cosmology, God created the universe in six days about six thousand years ago. The Earth was immobile and at the center of creation. The visible universe was not much larger than the Earth. Surrounding this compact spherical universe was the realm of God and the angels.
The Fourth Day of Creation from Liber Chronicarum Hartmann Schedel (1440 –1514) Nuremberg, Germany; 1493 Hand-colored woodcut 18 3/4 x 13 5/8 x 4 3/8 in. Rare Book Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Incun 1493 S3 cop.2
In this work the hand of God is shown, in a gesture of blessing, dividing the universe into spherical shells and assigning to them heavenly lights surrounding the Earth, shown upside down at center. This geocentric image combines the ancient Greek astronomy of Ptolemy with the theology of Genesis, where the fourth day of creation is described as follows: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years … and He made the stars also.” The image is from the Liber Chronicarum, commonly called the Nuremberg Chronicle, a history of the world from the Creation to the year 1493. The volume, written by the physician and humanist Hartmann Schedel, was the most elaborately illustrated printed book of its time. 22
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Geocentric Universe Medieval Europe accepted the ancient astronomical ideas of Ptolemy and the physics of Aristotle. The heavens, according to Aristotle, were an ethereal realm of immutable perfection, in contrast to the earthly realm of change and decay. The stars and the seven planets, which then included the Sun and Moon, were attached to a concentric set of crystalline shells that circled the stationary Earth. At the time it was easy to believe that the mysterious motions of these lights in the sky traced a pageant bearing fateful portents for humanity. Thus astrology and astronomy developed together.
The Universe in a Nutshell from De Mundi Sphaera Oronce Finé (1494–1555) France; 1549 Manuscript on paper 27 1/2 x 37 x 3 in. (open) Houghton Library, Harvard College Library Gift of Christian A. Zabriskie and Philip Hofer 1951; MS Typ 57
This depiction of the entire universe was created by Oronce Finé in 1549 and is modeled on the ancient Greek cosmology of Ptolemy. The elementary land and waters of Earth, enclosed by shells of air and fire, are shown lying immobile at the center. Seven crystal spheres carry the planets—the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—in their orbits around the Earth, and the starry firmament encircles the whole. The entire Earth-centered universe was not much larger than the Earth itself. The stars and planets were regarded as mere lights in the sky or perhaps semidivine beings. No one imagined them to be other worlds. 24
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Heliocentric Universe In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus revived an ancient Greek idea that the Earth was actually one of the planets, spinning daily on its axis and circling the Sun every year. The stars, however, were immobilized in his model of the universe and remained mere points of light arrayed on the surface of an enclosing spherical shell. Thomas Digges made the next advance by suggesting that the stars extend out into infinite space. By 1584 Giordano Bruno realized the truly revolutionary implications of the Copernican theory and proclaimed that the stars are actually other suns, circled by their own inhabited planets.
An Infinite Universe from A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes Thomas Digges (1546 –1595) London; 1596 Book 7 x 10 x 2 in. (open) Collection of Jay and Naomi Pasachoff
Thomas Digges was the first to depict the Copernican theory for English readers in A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes (1576), and he added a profound innovation. Since the rotation of the Earth meant that the heavens did not revolve around us every day, Digges realized that the stars could extend out into infinite space, and he depicted them accordingly. He envisioned the stars as “perpetuall shininge glorious lights innumerable, far excelling our sonne both in quantitye and qualitye.” In 1584 the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno took the next step and taught that the stars are actually other suns, circled by their own planets in an infinite universe. For that heresy and others, the Roman Inquisition burned Bruno at the stake. 26
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Expanding Horizons Discoveries with the telescope, beginning in 1609, confirmed the Sun-centered model of our planetary system, the identification of the planets as other worlds, and the stars as other suns. In 1755 Immanuel Kant proposed that the Milky Way is actually a vast rotating disk of countless stars, including the Sun, and that the faint elliptical nebulae are other Milky Ways, or galaxies as we now call them. He also proposed the now-accepted understanding that stars and worlds were constantly coming into being and perishing. The latter concept, while revolutionary for its time and place, had been a cornerstone of the cosmologies of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism for centuries.
Other Solar Systems from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe Thomas Wright (1711–1786) London; 1750 Printed book on paper 11 1/2 x 9 9⁄16 in. Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Spencer Coll. Eng. 1750 94–193
After Galileo, discoveries with the telescope continued to expand our view of the universe. By 1750, in An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, the English astronomer and architect Thomas Wright depicted the stars as accompanied by other planetary systems. Each sphere in this image represents the domain of a star. The circles near the center of each sphere represent the orbits of planets, while the ellipses represent the elongated orbits of comets. These stellar domains recede into the distance without end. 28
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Alchemy A first-century Greek text, now lost, defined the alchemist’s cosmology with the simple yet esoteric statement, “What is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below.” These words, which have formed the foundation of alchemical philosophy, suggest that there is not only a correspondence between the incorruptible world of the planets and stars (macrocosm) and the corruptible earth (microcosm) but that the world below can transform into the world above. Such transmutations, between the earthly and heavenly realms and between base objects (e.g., lead) and their heavenly forms (e.g., gold), are made possible because of ether, the “fifth element.” In hermetic cosmology, which was synthesized from Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Stoicism, and Egyptian traditions, the universe was mapped as concentric circles through the ether, with Earth at its center.
The Fourth Day of Creation: The Creation of the Celestial Spheres from Tractatus Mago-Cabalisticum et Theologicum Gregorius Anglus Sallwigt, aka Gregor von Welling (1652–1727) Germany; 1781 Etching Collection of Mario Diacono, Brookline, MA
This diagram presents in detail how the firmament is composed, highlighting the spheres of the nine angelic orders and the three inner spheres of the “World of Intelligences.” The emphasis here on the angelic orders is due to the author’s belief that creation was caused by the fall of Lucifer, traditionally thought of as the father of alchemy. The Earth, at the center of the diagram, is magnified in a circle adjacent to the top of the firmament, where seven small circles indicate the planets and enclose Solomon’s Seal, connoting the four elements. 30
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Astrology The study of celestial bodies’ influence on earthly events and human affairs dates back to the Mesopotamian cultures of the late third millennium BCE and was independently developed by various cultures all over the world. In the West, astrology expanded to encompass the natural sciences: botany, chemistry, zoology, mineralogy, and anatomy. According to this world view, all of nature was moved by the heavens and could be “read” to understand divine intent and to predict the future. The body of highest interest for Renaissance scholars was, of course, that of the human, and medicine became an integral part of astrology. Diseases were attributed to an imbalance of the body’s four humours, which were affected by the position of a planet, constellation, or star. During the scientific revolution, discoveries of the natural order of the universe still did not entirely displace astrology (in fact, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler all self-identified as astrologers), and only in the eighteenth century was astronomy separated as a serious academic discipline.
Zodiac Man from Grilandus Inventum Paulus Grillandus Italy; 1506 –1507 Manuscript on paper; 25 x 36 x 5 in. (open) Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University Bequest of Philip Hofer 1984; MS Typ 229
At one time it was believed that the health of a person was strongly influenced by the position of the planets and that each body part was governed by a sign of the zodiac, a principle at work in this drawing from an early sixteenth-century text. The Moon was believed to affect blood flow—when full, it exerted the strongest pull—and so a chart of the Moon’s phases was often printed alongside a “zodiac man” such as this. According to this diagram, for example, blood should not be drawn from the head when the Moon is in Aries. Bloodletting was a popular practice until the late eighteenth century and was believed to bring the body’s four humours into balance. 32
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An Evolving Universe Modern astrophysics reveals a dynamic, evolving universe containing nearly one hundred billion galaxies, each with many billions of stars and planets. These worlds are made of the same elements as the Earth and follow the same physical laws. We observe new stellar systems being born from the ashes of old ones. The farther out we look in space, the further back we see in time—all the way back to the fiery birth of our universe nearly fourteen billion years ago. In microwave light we observe in every direction our so-called cosmic horizon, the faint remnant glow of the big bang. The visible components of the universe make up only a small fraction of what exists, while the rest of the cosmos remains mysterious and unidentified. As to what lies beyond the cosmic horizon, what happened before the big bang, we can only speculate. The history of astronomy teaches humility and that we still have much to learn.
An Island Universe New Mexico, U.S.; September–November 2005 Telescopic digital image Robert Gendler (www.robgendlerastropics.com)
The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, which it resembles. It is also the most distant object we can see with the naked eye, at more than two million light years away. The great spiral contains several hundred billion stars in a rotating disk about two hundred thousand light years across. The combined light of all those stars produces a cloudy appearance. The dark lanes contain opaque interstellar dust and mark regions of new star formation. The brilliant core has the highest density of stars and contains a massive invisible black hole. The elliptical blob below Andromeda is a satellite galaxy. 34
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