The Yin-Yang teachings (in Japan] have nothing to say on the subject of the Red Tongue Days. Formerly people did not avoid these days, but of late – I wonder who is responsible for starting this custom – people have taken to saying things such as, ‘An enterprise begun on a Red Tongue Day will never see an end,’ or, ‘Anything you say or do on a Red Tongue Day is bound to come to naught: you lose what you’ve won, your plans are undone.’ What nonsense! If one counted the projects begun on carefully selected ‘lucky days’ which came to nothing in the end, they would probably be quite as many as the fruitless enterprises begun on the Red Tongue days.
There is something curious about the national flags of the planet Earth. The flag of the United States has fifty stars; the Soviet Union and Israel, one each; Burma, fourteen; Grenada and Venezuela, seven; China, five; Iraq, three; São Tomé a Príncipe, two; Japan, Uruguay, Malawi, Bangladesh and Taiwan, the Sun; Brazil, a celestial sphere; Australia, Western Samoa, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, the constellation of the Southern Cross; Bhutan, the dragon pearl, symbol of the Earth; Cambodia, the Angkor Wat astronomical observatory; India, South Korea and the Mongolian Peoples’ Republic, cosmological symbols. Many socialist nations display stars. Many Islamic countries display crescent moons. Almost half of our national flags exhibit astronomical symbols. The phenomenon is transcultural, non-sectarian, worldwide. It is also not restricted to our time: Sumerian cylinder seals from the third millennium B.C. and Taoist flags in prerevolutionary China displayed constellations. Nations, I do not doubt, wish to embrace something of the power and credibility of the heavens. We seek a connection with the Cosmos. We want to count in the grand scale of things. And it turns out we are connected – not in the personal, small-scale unimaginative fashion that the astrologers pretend, but in the deepest ways, involving the origin of matter, the habitability of the Earth, the evolution and destiny of the human species, themes to which we will return.
Modern popular astrology runs directly back to Claudius Ptolemaeus, whom we call Ptolemy, although he was unrelated to the kings of the same name. He worked in the Library of Alexandria in the second century. All that arcane business about planets ascendant in this or that solar or lunar ‘house’ or the ‘Age of Aquarius’ comes from Ptolemy, who codified the Babylonian astrological tradition. Here is a typical horoscope from Ptolemy’s time, written in Greek on papyrus, for a little girl born in the year 150: ‘The birth of Philoe. The 10th year of Antoninus Caesar the lord, Phamenoth 15 to 16, first hour of the night. Sun in Pisces, Jupiter and Mercury in Aries, Saturn in Cancer, Mars in Leo, Venus and the Moon in Aquarius, horoscopus Capricorn.’ The method of enumerating the months and the years has changed much more over the intervening centuries than have the astrological niceties. A typical excerpt from Ptolemy’s astrological book, the Tetrabiblos, reads: ‘Saturn, if he is in the orient, makes his subjects in appearance dark-skinned, robust, black-haired, curly-haired, hairy-chested, with eyes of moderate size, of middling stature, and in temperament having an excess of the moist and cold.’ Ptolemy believed not only that behavior patterns were influenced by the planet’s and the stars but also that questions of stature, complexion, national character and even congenital physical abnormalities were determined by the stars. On this point modern astrologers seem to have adopted a more cautious position.
But modern astrologers have forgotten about the precession of the equinoxes, which Ptolemy understood. They ignore atmospheric refraction, about which Ptolemy wrote. They pay almost no attention to all the moons and planets, asteroids and comets, quasars and pulsars, exploding galaxies, symbiotic stars, cataclysmic variables and X-ray sources that have been discovered since Ptolemy’s time. Astronomy is a science – the study of the universe as it is. Astrology is a pseudoscience – a claim, in the absence of good evidence, that the other planets affect our everyday lives. In Ptolemy’s time the distinction between astronomy and astrology was not clear. Today it is.
As an astronomer, Ptolemy named the stars, listed their brightnesses, gave good reasons for believing that the Earth is a sphere, set down rules for predicting eclipses and, perhaps most important, tried to understand why planets exhibit that strange, wandering motion against the background of distant constellations. He developed a predictive model to understand planetary motions and decode the message in the skies. The study of the heavens brought Ptolemy a kind of ecstasy. ‘Mortal as I am,’ he wrote, ‘I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the Earth. . .’
Ptolemy believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe; that the Sun, Moon, planets and stars went around the Earth. This is the most natural idea in the world. The Earth seems steady, solid, immobile, while we can see the heavenly bodies rising and setting each day. Every culture has leaped to the geocentric hypothesis. As Johannes Kepler wrote, ‘It is therefore impossible that reason not previously instructed should imagine anything other than that the Earth is a kind of vast house with the vault of the sky placed on top of it; it is motionless and within it the Sun being so small passes from one region to another, like a bird wandering through the air.’ But how do we explain the apparent motion of the planets – Mars, for example, which had been known for thousands of years before Ptolemy’s time? (One of the epithets given Mars by the ancient Egyptians was sekded-ef em khetkhet, which means ‘who travels backwards,’ a clear reference to its retrograde or loop-the-loop apparent motion.)
Ptolemy’s model of planetary motion can be represented by a little machine, like those that, serving a similar purpose, existed in Ptolemy’s time.* The problem was to figure out a ‘real’ motion of the planets, as seen from up there, on the ‘outside,’ which would reproduce with great accuracy the apparent motion of the planets, as seen from down here, on the ‘inside.’
* Four centuries earlier, such a device was constructed by Archimedes and examined and described by Cicero in Rome, where it had been carried by the Roman general Marcellus, one of whose soldiers had, gratuitously and against orders, killed the septuagenarian scientist during the conquest of Syracuse.
The planets were imagined to go around the Earth affixed to perfect transparent spheres. But they were not attached directly to the spheres, but indirectly, through a kind of off-center wheel. The sphere turns, the little wheel rotates, and, as seen from the Earth, Mars does its loop-the-loop. This model permitted reasonably accurate predictions of planetary motion, certainly good enough for the precision of measurement available in Ptolemy’s day, and even many centuries later.
Ptolemy’s aetherial spheres, imagined in medieval times to be made of crystal, are why we still talk about the music of the spheres and a seventh heaven (there was a ‘heaven,’ or sphere for the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and one more for the stars). With the Earth the center of the Universe, with creation pivoted about terrestrial events, with the heavens imagined constructed on utterly unearthly principles, there was little motivation for astronomical observations. Supported by the Church through the Dark Ages, Ptolemy’s model helped prevent the advance of astronomy for a millennium. Finally, in 1543, a quite different hypothesis to explain the apparent motion of the planets was published by a Polish Catholic cleric named Nicholas Copernicus. Its most daring feature was the proposition that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe. The Earth was demoted to just one of the planets, third from the Sun, moving in a perfect circular orbit. (Ptolemy had considered such a heliocentric model but rejected it immediately; from the physics of Aristotle, the implied violent rotation of the Earth seemed contrary to observation.)
It worked at least as well as Ptolemy’s spheres in explaining the apparent motion of the planets. But it annoyed many people. In 1616 the Catholic Church placed Copernicus’ work on its list of forbidden books ‘until corrected’ by local ecclesiastical censors, where it remained until 1835.* Martin Luther described him as ‘an upstart astrologer . . . This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy. But Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth.’ Even some of Copernicus’ admirers argued that he had not really believed in a Sun-centered universe but had merely proposed it as a convenience for calculating the motions of the planets.
* In a recent inventory of nearly every sixteenth-century copy of Copernicus’ book, Owen Gingerich has found the censorship to have been ineffective: only 60 percent of the copies in Italy were ‘corrected,’ and not one in Iberia.