Intersections of Religion and Astronomy

Chris Corbally, Darry Dinell, Aaron Ricker, Chris Corbally, Darry Dinell, Aaron Ricker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000217438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión y ciencia

This volume examines the way in which cultural ideas about "the heavens" shape religious ideas and are shaped by them in return. Our approaches to cosmology have a profound effect on the way in which we each deal with religious questions and participate in the imaginative work of public and private world-building.

Employing an interdisciplinary team of international scholars, each chapter shows how religion and cosmology interrelate and matter for real people. Historical and contemporary case studies are included to demonstrate the lived reality of a variety of faith traditions and their interactions with the cosmos. This breadth of scope allows readers to get a unique overview of how religion, science and our view of space have, and will continue to, impact our worldviews.

Offering a comprehensive exploration of humanity and its relationship with cosmology, this book will be an important reference for scholars of Religion and Science, Religion and Culture, Interreligious Dialogue and Theology, as well as those interested in Science and Culture and Public Education.

Part 1

Intersections of astronomy and religion

Ancient and post-ancient worlds

Aaron Ricker

The past is, as novelist L. P. Hartley wrote, a strange country.¹ The things the locals cook up with the ingredients of religion and astronomy may surprise you, as you consider this first group of essays on the ancient world. At times, the strangeness of the past may, on the other hand, include a strange sense of familiarity. Our deepest and dearest beliefs about the world are, after all, the thoughts such strangers eventually got around to thinking.

It took people a very, very long time to get around to inventing telescopes, pointing them at the sky, and trying to make sense of the things they revealed for the first time to human eyes. If anyone who’d been looking up in all the millennia before suspected that Polaris might really be two stars—or three, or five—they left us no trace. If anybody pursued astronomy as a discipline unto itself—distinct from the kind of speculations we today might call “spiritual” or “religious”—they too have managed to disappear completely. Even the most scandalously materialistic philosophers of the ancient world (like Thales or Anaxagoras) were known for teachings about the cosmos that would be scattered across the Theology, Mythology, Astrology, and New Age sections of your local bookstore.

For most of human history by far, the sun, moon, planets, and stars seem to have been revered as wondrous witnesses to the work and the will of divine beings. More often than not, they were divine beings of some kind.² Questions about the nature of the heavens have therefore long been deeply, dependably connected to “religious” questions like life after death, or the proper way to send off the dead. It’s quite well known, for example, that Christian churches, tombs, and headstones are usually oriented to face the rising sun in the east, for symbolic and eschatological reasons. When science historian Michael Hoskin surveyed the single-entrance mass tombs built by Neolithic tribes 10,000 years ago in Portugal, he found that all 177 of them were similarly built to face east.³ The following collection of essays addresses the dauntingly grand temporal sweep of such intersections of astronomy and religion over time.

John T. Fitzgerald argues that the perceived authority of religious traditions as somehow transcendental and “revealed” was historically related to the perceived authority of local beliefs about the heavens, and the following essays help illustrate and examine the implications of this relationship. Eldon Yellowhorn looks back millennia to help trace the evolving constellation of sky-watching, organized hunting, mythology, and ritual practice in living Blackfoot tradition. Rebecca Robinson takes a comparative approach to the construction of authority based on cosmological knowledge by juxtaposing ancient Chinese and Roman calendar-making. Jeffrey Kotyk describes the impact of ancient developments in astronomy and astrology on classical Buddhist cosmology. Danielle Adams provides a comparable account of the struggle over the power and meaning of Arabian “rain star” traditions in early Islam. Shulamit Laderman analyzes strategic uses of cosmological speculation in Jewish and Byzantine Christian art. Finally, Andrea D. Lobel adds a useful reminder to be conscious of the assumptions and politics involved in studying ancient religions and cosmologies, by drawing attention to the question of which sources are often ignored in cultural and religious histories of astronomy, and why.

By shining a spotlight on ancient points of contact between the “astronomical” and the “religious,” the essays of this section set the stage for thinking about the intimate relationship between influential global cosmologies (in the broadest sense) and the human fascination with astronomy and cosmology (in the more scientific sense). As noted in the General Introduction, ideas about the creation and architecture of the heavens figure prominently in the articulation of people’s worldviews—including in this case their religious worldviews. The following essays show that this phenomenon has a very long and distinguished pedigree. Clearly, cosmic questions have long been recognized as “good to think with” in arenas of grandeur, power, beauty, order, and wonder. These case studies invite the reader to comparative reflection on how and why such cultural projects are “religious” projects.

Notes

1Leslie Poles Hartley, The Go-Between (London: H. Hamilton, 1953), 1.

2See Giulio Magli, Archaeoastronomy: Introduction to the Science of Stars and Stones (New York: Springer, 2016): Nicholas Campion, Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

3Michael Hoskin, The History of Astronomy: A Very Short Introduction (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–3.

1 Religion and cosmology

John T. Fitzgerald

Introduction

All ancient cultures have a cosmology of some kind, and these cosmologies are invariably religious in nature or constitute a reaction to or reinterpretation of a prior religiously conceived cosmology.¹ The two-fold corollary to this pervasive and reciprocal relationship of religion to ancient cosmology is, first, that one cannot understand ancient cosmologies without understanding the religions that produced them, and, second, one cannot understand ancient religions without giving attention to their cosmologies. This is especially so for Jewish and Christian creation narratives inasmuch as “every creation myth is soteriological as well as cosmogonical,” dealing with both salvation and the origins of the cosmos.² For both Judaism and Christianity, the biblical cosmogonies and cosmologies have particular importance because they are foundational theological texts on which the two religions draw to understand God, the cosmos, and the place of humans within cosmic structure. At the same time, these foundational texts were produced in a daunting variety of different times and circumstances. Furthermore, since they were not the first or the only cosmologies to be produced in the ancient Mediterranean world, it is important to study the biblical texts not only in their own right but also in relationship to other ancient cosmologies.

Cosmogony, anthropogony, and theogony

Ancient cosmologies may provide a description of the current cosmos as well as an explanation for its coherence as a whole, but that is rarely their focus. Their concern is much more with the origins of the cosmos and of humans within it. That is, cosmology in the ancient world often includes cosmogony—the genesis of the cosmos—and sometimes anthropogony—the origin of humans within this cosmos. Moreover, since ancient cosmology is usually religious in nature, it often includes theogony—the genesis of the divine—or at least indicates the relationship of the divine to the cosmos. In short, in ancient cosmologies there is often an intersection of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony. One of the reasons why the peoples of the ancient world rehearsed the myths of their primeval origins was etiological, since these myths provided an explanation for the current state of affairs, for the way things are now. But the rehearsal of this primordial history was not merely etiological but also sociological and ethical, for it was intended to provide what the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski called a social “charter” of conduct for the society as a whole as well as for individuals within it.³ Ancient cosmology is in this sense paradigmatic for the cultural or religious group that embraces it, having “important social, material, and economic ramifications as well as deep religious significance.”⁴ For a group to articulate a cosmology is thus to give expression to its understanding of itself, of the world in which it lives, and of its relationship to both that world and to the divine.⁵

It is not without interest that the theme of death occurs in many ancient cosmologies. Indeed, in cosmogonies, even gods may die, and death becomes the destiny of humanity. As Charles H. Long astutely notes, “This tragic element explains the finitude of human community and introduces death as a cosmogonic structure of human existence.”⁶ Some ancient myths, such as the Gilgamesh Epic, depict the attempt to escape this destiny, and some ancient religions offer the hope of success in the accomplishment of this task.

Myth, cosmology, and creation

Myth is the oldest form in which ancient cosmologies are stated, and these cosmological myths are quite old; indeed, they are among the oldest narratives that we possess. We have, inter alia, cosmological and cosmogonic myths from ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Israel, ancient Greece, and ancient India. It seems relatively certain that one such creation myth is Proto-Indo-European in origin, and that this Ur-myth narrated the creation of the cosmos by sacrifice, a myth of origins in which “a primordial being is killed, dismembered, and from his body the cosmos is fashioned.”⁷ A late form of this myth appears in Norse mythology, in which Ymir, a primordial being born from venom and who gives birth to a male and a female from the pits of his arms, is killed, and three gods fashion the world from his corpse: “from his blood the sea and lakes, from his flesh the earth, from his bones the mountains; rocks and pebbles they made from his teeth and jaws and those bones that were broken.”⁸ As the Ymir episode indicates, violence of some sort is often a feature of cosmogonic, theogonic, and anthropogonic myths, though it is certainly not present in all such myths. Indeed, the absence or deletion of acts of violence may be one way of culturally inte...