Why no Christian constellations?
Comments(0) I was really on a tear Friday nite, buzzed before I left the house, though responsibly not driving to the bar (walking is quality time to get down a few more beers), ended up kissing some strange girl in an alley, by which I mean someone I didn’t really know more than she was so strange, but anyway, not my standard behavior. Had one of those conversations with a friend: mostly wasted nonsense but touching on deeper topics, some of which might return to haunt one later. For example, marveling at the way some seemingly obvious things didn’t arise in human history sooner than they did: balloon travel, focusing intense beams of light through giant lenses – and somewhere in the midst of imagining epic, very slow battles waged on sunny days by a balloonist aerophorce, burning their enemie’s wooden villages with giant dangling lenses they could manipulate, it struck me… Why didn’t the Xians use the stars to map out and re-enforce their mythos? There’s Mary, there’s the twelve apostles, Judas rises in the east, etc.
It’s come back to me tonight. And my best guess is it had to do with monotheism battling with the pantheists. All those panthesitic heathens babbled in starchatter, perhaps the ‘one God squad’ were out to set some new standard. Allegory and parables OK, using a clover to illustrate the trinity was one one thing, but no imaginary pictures in space – lines you could pretend to draw between objects of similar luminosity that where actually nowhere near one another, only appeared so from our vantage. Pictures to go with the stories told round the fire. But then, Chosen waiting on their messiah weren’t into constellations either, at least not that I was aware of, maybe in kabbalah. Maybe there was some Christan constellation set that got squelshed at a later date, once The Organization really got rolling, the same dudes who decided which books were going in the big collection and which once were left out.
It’s weird to think how long alchemy got to sit at the ‘science table’ as well, as astrology is very much part of that vocabulary. Knowledge has always been sort of a jumbled mess, one system saying what’s in vogue and ‘true’ suppressing another.
But back to the original tangent: it’s funny how three wise men, kings from exotic lands and astrologers go on a long voyage to see the arrival of a savior – or so the story goes, but this is the last time a star is used to signify anything in the beef of ‘the story’. I don’t even think stars are mentioned during various testimonies of ascension, which I guess took place during daylight hours. No more use for the stars in christian mythology.
“Where are you going, risen son of god?”
“To the moon, mortal fuckwit”
… seems like it might have been good copy.
There are also specific mentions of stars, and falling stars, in ‘The Book of Revelation’ as well, but I’m not even gonna touch that hornet’s nest… Revelation my ass, I’ll take Crom vs. Cthulhu anyday-
