Dismiss from your mind the impetuous course of the Moon, for she moves always by the power of necessity. Nor was the progression of the Stars generated for your sake.
Chaldean Oracles
If poetry is a methodical dismantlement of platitudes, the following will be somewhat poetically lacking. No apologies for coming clichés and déja vus: repetition and rumination are prime paths for understanding. The oracle intuits, the concept-monger elaborates.
Let us start with a strange reverie from a very late very German romantic called Werner Herzog, stranded in the Amazonian forest, entangled in the consequences of some Promethean endeavor of his own making :
Of course we are challenging Nature itself, and it hits back. It’s much stronger than we are. Nature here is vile and base. I don’t see anything erotical here, I see fornication, asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, the birds here are in misery, I don’t think they sing they just screech in pain. We are cursed for what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger, it’s the only land where the creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is a sort of a harmony, it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder, and we, in comparison to the articulate vileness and obscenity of all this jungle, in comparison to that enormous articulation, only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban cheap novel, and have to remain humble in front of this overwhelming misery, overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here up in the sky look like a mess.1
His would not be the first guilt-ridden European mind found collapsing under the unendurable weight of history exteriorized as derelict imagination of Nature : once an word for Growth, overwhelming or not, here mobilized, in not so much projection, but rather exposition, highly precise in its very variability, of one’s positionality through selective highlighting of affordant qualities within one’s Umwelt.
Let us then focus our own cursed gaze on the mention of the stars. « Even the stars look like a mess here ». « Even », because in all reason they are the last ones who should be, as habitual bearers of order. What does it mean for stars to be messy, aesthetically, spiritually, morally, epistemically even ? How can the silent ordinance of soundless constellations be deemed alienating ?
If we try to take Werner at his word, and empathize with his eloquent recoil, we can turn to a kind of prefiguration, scoffed by a German modernist, very much a critic of Romanticism at the very least, called Georg Hegel. Walking with the poet Heinrich Heine, who started channeling his inner Kant by gushing in admiration for the starry sky above us a a symbol of moral elevation, the Encyclopedist answered « Pfah ! The stars are but a gleaming leprosy on the sky ».
A few years later, pestered by students who kept recounting the anecdote, he elaborated :
It has been rumoured around the town that I have compared the stars to a rash on an organism where the skin erupts in a countless mass of redspots, or to an ant-heap in there, too, there is Understanding and necessity. In fact, I do rate what is concrete higher than what is abstract, and an animality that develops into no more than a slime, higher than the starry host.2
The relation here outlined between the mineral, non-autonomous being of the burning masses of celestial bodies, and abstraction, sounds significant. Hegelian abstraction is another term for separation, for non-relational ways of knowing. One might be mistaken, within the endless spiral that constitutes the process of Spirit becoming itself in the Hegelian hero’s journey, for discounting the stars as just one stage in which the processus of individuation and concretization happens, swept up in the truth of the Whole. One might also, with an eye towards cynicism, be reminded that it was this selfsame Hegel which, exalted young Naturphilosoph, once follower of his younger friend and future foe Friedrich Schelling, felt so drunk with intellectual hubris as to pretend to offer a philosophical deduction for the necessity of the Solar system being composed of precisely seven planets. There is a relationship to a rejection of youthful enthusiasm, here, assuredly3. The problem Hegel raises is however one of a mistaken trust in material and aesthetic awe, one which does not consider the inner working of the world, but only the dazzling shimmer of appearances. Stars are seductive, precisely because they appear as a lure, their immediate presence above us a wonderful Rorschach test for our relationship towards nature, here envisaged through the lens, perhaps, of distance : nature as immense, divine, void, cold, loving, ordered or wrong.
It is not so much the love of the stars, then, that Hegel derides, but rather the misrecognition of our geistige selves, our endless interpretive powers, as if they were something other than our own mark on the world: the fallacy of Narcissus, who believed his reflection on the shining surface of water to be something other than himself, something he could love. The stars are not the only locus of such intellectual and spiritual errors, insofar as we settle in their halo of light instead of progressing forwards into that which they birth and bathe and warm, to ultimately realize what is to be done; the way is riddled with such partial stages of enlightenment which threaten to maim our understanding of the Whole. But they are the first, in the realm of visibility, or maybe shall we say the third, once the crushing heat of the sun and the gentle movements of the moon have subsided.
In that respect, the stars can be considered to twist the relation between abstraction and concreteness back onto itself, insofar as they constitute a concretization of distance, a manifestation of abstraction itself. And in an universe which, suspending for but a moment Spirit’s self-actualizing decrees, does not posit freedom and recognition as ontological primaries, the eternal and unredeemable existence of that which does not act, which only consumes itself, ending either in brute exhaustion or abyssal collapse, does not necessarily entail a sorting into a kind of cosmic ladder or Stufenfolge nor under the rubric of potential material for labour. Absent any folding back of their value unto their being (this neat little trick called dialectics), stars can be understood as themselves: nothing less than locus of existence in its aspect of duration through entropy. In other words, the mark of time itself, burning. Plato’s Timaeus called them, and the greater revolution, return of oneself to oneself, the moving image of eternity, after all.
It is not indifferent that the Copernician turn consister in a literal disaster, a deranged movement of the stars, as the Ptolemaic system could well enough account for the general movement of the stars, but not for their retrocession. When it became apparent that some stars were going backwards, were acting wrong, even the most faithful were shaken : how could God have fashioned a world where Nature would sometimes go in reverse ?
It was not Mercury retrograde which messed up the world, but a gang of rogue Moons, the first of which is called Europa. Alongside Io, Ganymede and Callisto, her sisters, all together mistaken for stars, they slowly ate away at the consistency of geocentric cosmologies, blurring calculations and requiring a baroque ornery of circles within circles dancing perversely around each other, until, exhausted by the desperate sophistication of a half-blind understanding, that closed machinery of the cosmos couldn’t help but implode, and atopic infinity broke in. A cadre of moons glimpsed through a glass darkly, imposed immeasurable distances between the stars they were impersonating, and we still live in their shadow, under their pull.
Stars do not talk, and yet they can be heard. Their reading we call astrology, their hearing, angelic apparitions. In Cicero’s De Divinatione, a scathing work of Middle Skepticism and an inspiration for all the hard-nosed materialists of this world (spoiler alert : he doesn’t believe in oracles much), the famed orator differentiates between two kinds of divination, natural and artificial. The latter involves a human grasping of nature, through gaze, evisceration, and all manipulations in between. The former happens some moment where nature grips the mind, through inspiration, prophecy, dreams or intuition.
Divination of the stars is therefore to be understood as a kind of reading. The linkage of the points in the sky are not so much speech, as the primal aspect of language itself : connecting the dots, making meaning out of our surroundings, a pure act of understanding through figuring. To speak from nature, as do the deluded philosophers, requires a form of prosoppopeia, of figure- and face-granting, in which the speaker acts as if they were writing the book of the world itself, speaking in Nature’s voice, articulating Nature’s inordinate vileness. One has very little to say of language, when one is language.
From artificial divination let us move to natural : Stars qua angels. Prophets are those to whom an angel appears, bearer of the presence of God, multiple in eyes, some of them granted faces and wings. In the branch of Christian mythology known as scholasticism, angels are those creatures through which the presence of God is made manifest. They were tasked, among the infinite bureaucracy of cosmologizing, of keeping the world in check that is, with patiently unspooling the thread of stars’ orbits. Maybe it was one of them, more distracted or scheming than their peers, who started altering pregalilean trajectories.
In Karl ove Knausgaard’s A Time for Everything, we find a description of the mediumnic relationship between earth and sky through the thorny question of what an account of time from the standpoint of aiôn would even mean.
As eternal beings, time can have no meaning for the angels. And as their presence on earth is generally brief, nothing of what happens here can leave a mark on them, but must glide shadow-like past ; we might think of it as something like the images of our dreams, frightened up by what is to them an unknown will. In the angels’ time — which is our time before we are born and after we die, and therefore impossible, although material, as it means that that precious and inalienable I, to which we cling as fast as the shipwrecked mariner to a piece of flotsam, wouldn’t exist all the time that death and the divine exist — everything ephemeral is in constant flux. The dead get mixed up with the living, what happened a century ago with what is happening now. A city mushrooms up, for a few centuries it quivers with activity, waves of bodies rise and fall in the streets, its inhabitants die, are born, die, are born again. Then just as suddenly as it began, it vanishes.
The intervention of angels within historical time is described just below the previous.
Every proximity, even for the briefest period, must have been very strenuous for them. From all the intermingling days, with all their confusion of infinitesimal events, they were required to earmark a particular moment, retain it for long enough to go into it, stamp it with preordained action. Not just the stream of days, but that particular day, not just the stream of hours in this day, but that particular hour, not just the stream of minutes in this hour, but that particular minute. Not just the stream of people through the days, but this particular person right now. Not just eyes and mouths, ears and hair, but these eyes, this mouth, these ears, this hair. Moses, Isaac, Jacob, Hagar, Joshuah, Elijah, Ezekiel, David, Daniel, Tobias, Abed-nego, Gideon. And Abraham.
In the petri dish that was early XIXth century German anthropology, which operates on symbolic figures more than fieldwork, a context full of historiographically dubious entities such as Indo-Europeans and Gnostics, we find a mention of a people called the Sabians. Sabianism was a pre-Islamic worship of the stars which developed out of Babylonian and Assyrian cults, in which the stars were revered as the original version of the Gods. Schelling, living in Hegel’s shadow, makes a curious mention of them in his Philosophy of Mythology, as part of a strange attempt to seize the development of various forms of religion as expression of the mind grasping itself and nature : not as allegorically true, but in some form, literally so.
For the Sabians, or so Schelling says, « the supra-corporeal, this pure astral, the constellation itself, is what is deemed divine ». Stars here are what Schelling terms, within his strange algebra of absolute unfoldings, the locus of the figure B (which, as you might suspect, comes after A) : the « indivisible remainder », the elementary power which remains inscribed in being no matter how thorough its successive deployments. That which always persists. Against Hegel’s sublation of stars into earth, he argues that « stars cannot be subsumed under any of the categories which pertain to concrete being : they are neither inorganic beings nor organic forms, neither rocks nor plants nor animals. It is not nature, but that which remains anterior and superior to nature, which in them was worshipped. »4
This being, shortly, is Unity in multiplicity, and thus something other than a subjective reading of the sky but rather an awakening of consciousness to something which subjects it to its forceful reality : « The One God disjected into a multiplicity ». The Night of the World is not the stage for an abasement in confusion, a loss of clarity, but for the dismemberment of consciousness under the crushing immaterial presence of Understanding, that is, of the divisive power of abstraction, representation, and language. It is not an adolescent flight of fancy, nor a primitive stage of consciousness : there is no recognizable telos here, no definitive overcoming, no evolutionary progression, only the insuperable persistence of the originary within its progeny, of the principle within the principled.
Schelling remains, to be clear, committed to an Odyssey of spirit somewhat less geometrical in feeling than Hegel’s, but no less oriented for it towards a terminal focus. Yet in his minute attention to what he terms the positive, that is, the necessary character of historicity’s irreducible concreteness with regards to the broader current of consciousness, he allows us for a respite, a brief suspension within contemplation of every particular in its specificity.
The Stars are Gods, because they are language itself. Let us gaze upwards one last time, with the history of Polynesian navigators, as reconstructed in Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, in which an American spy attentively studies the strange theories from the intellectual master of a leftist commune in the french countryside. How, asks our fictitious theorist, can one traverse the ocean without compass, maps, or powerful armadas ? It must have required the work of navigator-priests, who did not distinguish between orientation and divination. The stars are not first of all worshipped or understood : both operations are one and the same. This is the very simple meaning of what Schelling called tautegory, as a contrasting term to allegory : to revere is to understand.
Divination is the practice of the city-dwellers, those which have given up on perpetual movement, and require a spiritual orientation, those who have delegated power to a class of priests peddling their allegorical readings full of direction, purpose, and meaning. So that they can realize themselves as beings of individualized fate, they cleaved spiritual matters from spatial wanderings.
Stars are for navigation. Their observation is not one that extracts meaning : it indexes movement, in the holiness pertaining to spatiality itself.
To conclude, one last saying by Schelling, who while a philosopher at times tended to sound very much like an oracle : you cannot cross the ocean by endlessly walking along the coast. To reach a shore, there is no choice but to dive into the immensity of light, and therein find an outer God allowing orientation.
In gratitude and admiration to Blue, Circé, Persis.
Notes
1 From the movie Burden of Dreams, and most commonly encountered on youtube dot com and other related short video loci. I cut the full quote for effect, but the last sentences are worth quoting : “There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that… there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement.”
2 From the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, vol. 2, add. to §341. See also add. to §268. Heine’s anecdote is from his Confessions. Hegel can thus be read as an early, if cautious, adopter of slime molds ; for more on the latter see Oken’s Principles of Naturphilosophie, and Iain Hamilton Grant’s ‘Being and Slime’.
3 Following the old proverb about youth and age and brain and heart, and Hegel’s own rumblings on the matter of spiritual development over time (Encyclopedia, vol. 3, add. to §396) we could sketch a series of archetypical philosophical stages of life : one begins as a Nietszchean at 15, then goes on to be a Spinozist at 20, a Deleuzean at 25, a Marxist at 30, a Hegelian at 35, finally becoming a Kantian around 40 or so (Kant having only become a Kantian in his fifties, this should be considered an achievement). I leave the further declining trajectory as an exercise to the reader.
4 Philosophy of Mythology, SW XII 41 (175) and following, Lesson Nine.