Sky Scholarship

I take endless enjoyment from viewing the sky—either in the daytime, while watching patterns of the clouds, or at night, while watching patterns of the stars. Sometimes when I'm stargazing, I realize that I have not taken the time to learn the names and locations of many of the constellations. I feel quite unschooled in the celestial display above me. I know that the ancients were much more familiar with it than I am.

When I think about their sky scholarship as compared to mine, I recognize that our contemporary knowledge is fundamentally different from theirs. I know, for example, that those points of light are stars like our sun, off at distances that are hard for anyone to grasp. The science of astronomy has given me the knowledge to know certain facts that were beyond the ancients’ scholarship. They had no way of knowing what a star is, but their familiarity with the patterns and their movements far surpasses mine.

I sometimes fancy being able to transport myself back several thousand years, to sit beside an ancestor, as together we look up at the night sky, sharing our perspectives and individual scholarship on what we're viewing. I would love to tell my forebear what I know—as I struggle with attempting to describe what a star is and where it is and how it was created. Assuming we could surmount the language barrier—how might I get across the nuclear physics of star formation and their brilliance being due to all the energy being created by the fusion of hydrogen atoms? How could I even describe an atom?

But I would guess that my ancestral companion might equally struggle to help me understand the scholarship that they had built. But if we had the patience, I could benefit from their experiential understanding. I could delve deeply into the astronomical observatories that they painstakingly built—those marvels of engineering, like Stonehenge. I would learn about the knowledge accumulated over generations, as to the cyclic movement of the heavens—they did it by oral transmission, without writing anything down.

I would, with fascination, listen to how—despite their lack of astronomy—they had studied and become intimate with the comings and goings of the sun, the stars, the Moon, and the planets. They did not understand the true nature of these heavenly bodies, but they possessed a deep-seated scholarship of their behavior. And they saw meaning in those events... in the cycles. They could even forecast some heavenly happenings. They laid the foundation of their civilization and their spirituality on the predictable recurrence of those celestial sequences. My ancestor could show me a few things.