[Aztlan] Astronomical thinking universal?

[ECOLING at aol.com]

Continuing discussion with Martha Noyes:

> There is, however, quite a difference between sky knowledge as 
> native people know/knew it and what we call astronomy today.  
> One need not be an astronomer to learn this sky knowledge.  
> In fact there are many accomplished astronomers who would 
> miss much of the import of sky knowledge.

Agreed.   At the same time, astronomers may have tools which help to
suggest that our modern *interpretations* of native sky knowledge
may be off base.   And those same astronomers can also go overboard,
wanting a kind of precision which is inappropriate to the kind of
information in native sky knowledge, or missing a precision present there.
There is simply no one method to detecting what a the more
knowledgeable people of an ancient culture thought -- it is not directly
accessible to us.

> One important thing about sky knowledge is that it is nearly 
> universal.  

Disagree.

> The sky is the sky wherever on earth one is.  

Agree.   So it is legitimate to *consider the possibility* that people in
one part of the world in one time have interpreted what happens in the
sky in ways at least partly like those in another place and time.
But there are still many possible patterns of interpretation to choose from.
We cannot just jump to conclusions.

There is another opportunity I think you have not mentioned,
to use unique events in the sky to assign absolute dates to observations
in native sky knowledge and in history, *if* we have approximate dates
and *if* we can be certain of observations of ancient records.
But this can be slippery.   How to know whether something we *think*
reflects the explosion of the crab nebula really does refer to that?
How to know whether a particular graphic symbol in a Mixtec codex
refers to a comet or not, and if so to which one, given the potential that
our reasoning about their historical records is not absolutely certain
and that we can be off by a multiple of 52 years?   Difficult questions,
all of these.

> The basic "rules" of the sky's behavior are therefore also universal, 
> not only across cultures, but across time.  

Not if those rules are cultural.

> The ancients of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and Persia had skywatchers
> who observed the same phenomena the Skidi (Skiri) Pawnee, the Maya, 
> the Inca, the Chumash, and Polynesians observed.
> The solar year, the lunar month, the annual track of the sun (the 
> ecliptic), the unmoving Pole star(s), the "turning" of the sun at its 
northern 
> and southern limits (the solstices), 

So, far I agree.   Though the *importance* assigned to various of these,
and the metaphors used to refer to them, can be very different.

> the midway point between these when the
> length of the day equals the length of the night (the equinoxes), 

Potentially, but not necessarily.   Aveni may have established statistically
that the Maya changed from an earlier view which did use the equinoxes
to a later view which used sun-at-zenith.   
The earlier view would divide the year into approximately 4 x 91 days.   
The later view would divide the year into approximately 260 + 105 days,
and works with those numbers only in a certain range of latitudes.   
Aveni inferred this from a change in the orientations of "E-shaped" 
structures, 
and did so only by using a large number of them and displaying their
orientations statistically so that centers of gravity could be seen 
statistically
for the two time periods he considered.   

Perhaps you deliberately did not mention directions North, South, East 
and West.   Even these may not be universal, in some sense, though I
personally am taking no position on this, from lack of intimate knowledge.
Some cultures are said to have cardinal directions in NE, NW, SW, SE,
reflecting perhaps maximal northern rising and setting points of the Sun
in summer and winter.

> that the planets "wander" among the "fixed" stars, 

Surely yes, but then things get more complicated.   Did a particular ancient
people think about the planets as being at a certain altitude above the 
horizon?
Or did they think of their motions as measured against the background fixed
stars and as moving along the ecliptic?   I think probably some peoples one
way, some the other, and some used both.   I'm in an ongoing debate with some
archaeoastronomers who seem to believe the former, and argue that we 
must calculate that in a particular way, that it is very difficult to 
determine 
an exact day of maximum elongation or of standstill (for outer planets), 
which I agree with.   But they seem to want to interpret ancient records from
a people as necessarily making precise claims about an exact day of for
example standstill, or as not being about standstill at all.   I frankly do 
not
understand how one can propose to know that a priori for a given set of
records which might be about astronomy.

> that the earth has an axis around which the sky turns, 

Shouldn't that read that the "sky has a center around which it turns" ?

> that the sun rises on a slightly different point on the horizon 
> each day of the year, and so on were all easily observable 
> to people of old, just they are to us.

Surely yes to the last one.   I have even read an account that an Orca in an
equarium on the NWest coast of the USA would lick the edge of its
confining pool each day at the place where the light of the Sun was
*going to* appear that morning.   I take that as evidence for thought.

But notice the several difficulties I pointed out earlier for assuming
that sky knowledge is universal in the way it is conceived.   It is, 
after all, a *cultural* phenomenon, and it is notoriously easy for us
humans to assume that another culture has to think about something
in the only possible way, which just happens to be the same way we do. (:-))

> More than just the architecture and mechanics of the sky are/were 
> common across cultures and time.  Some myths/legends were celestial, 
> and there are keys to recognizing them as celestial.  Not surprisingly, 
> just as the sky is universal, so, too, are some of these keys.  

Very dangerous to reason thus, even though sometimes one will come
to a correct inference by doing so.   

> The presence of twins at the beginning; association of kings and high 
chiefs 
> with the sun; Venus as a major player, often having to do with war or 
ritual 
> violence; 

Statistically, some validity to that.   Forcing such an interpretation onto 
an ancient culture merely because we are familiar with it in some cultures,
no, we can't justify that.   It doesn't matter where ideas come from, we can
get an idea anywhere.   But asserting it applies to a particular culture is
much more difficult.

> the moon's association with water and dragon/lizard/crocodile type 
creatures; 
> celestial crosses - the Southern Cross, the crossing of the ecliptic and 
the 
> Milky Way, and other crosses; 

I doubt the first of these.   And the use of the word "cross" can be vague 
here
so it becomes almost impossible to know what claim is being made, therefore
impossible to know what evidence supports or argues against it.

> the death and rebirth of the sun, usually at the winter solstice; 

Certainly in some cultures.   Isn't the daily one more common?

> a boat or canoe in the sky; a path or entry to the realm of souls / 
> the deceased in the sky; 
> a tree or pole or mountain or heap of stones as the axis; 

In *some* cultures

> North as up and South as down; 

I think I have read indications that in some area of NE Asia, the underworld
is in the North instead of the South, and the color black is in the North.
This would be only reasonable given that they are in the far northern 
hemisphere.
The North-up and South-down correlation you note certainly *does* extend
also far into the northern hemisphere, but it may not be universal.

> a bird at the top of the axis when the axis is a tree, and so on.

Does occur repeatedly, but may have different interpretations and historical
origins, and our *interpretations* of this may lump these together much
too easily.   There is for example a ferment currently going on in Mayan
studies, concerning how many different birds there are, and whether we
have correctly understood the metaphorical or literal associations of the
"Principal Bird Deity", etc.   This ferment is healthy, but it constitutes
precisely going *beyond* the lumping of all such birds together.

> Time, cycles, and measures were of particular significance to 
> ancient and native people.  It wasn't so much that it was esoteric 
> knowledge as that it was secret, privileged knowledge.  

Both statements above apply just as much to modern peoples today.

> That's why it was couched in language of story, metaphor, analogy, 
> pun, and symbol.  It's also part of why it became obscure, 
> almost forgotten - when the conquering began the secret knowledge
> was, as it had always been, in the minds of the those of the elite 
> who had been trained in it.  As they succumbed for whatever reason, 
> the keys to the language began to be lost with them.  But it was never 
> really gone; it was in the myths and legends all along.

The phrase "that's why it was ..."   is actually a *very strong* claim,
potentially an empirical claim, but very difficult to argue for or against.
One similar approach (Santillana and von Dechend _Hamlet's Mill_)
was to claim the knowledge was encoded in myth *in order to* hide it
or to preserve it.   Very close to your "That's why
it was couched in language of story, metaphor, ..."
That approach has been much disfavored in academic scholarship,
and I can't argue for it specifically.   "Astralism", finding astronomical
meanings everywhere in myths, certainly can be overdone.   So given that, 
how do we know when such an interpretation is valid, and when not?

Another approach might be that astronomical events were couched in 
language of story, metaphor, etc. either because of cultural play or as a way 

precisely of making astronomical knowledge more accessible to the
larger population.   But then the stories can take on a literary life of
their own, and be changed through time for literary reasons.
In that case they will deviate from what a simple story geared to
astronomical events would have narrated, and the match between
the two becomes incredibly difficult.   We cannot know for certain
what the story was about long ago, and cannot even be certain
what the story *was* long ago.

We should *both* admit that information really can be lost,
in cultural history all over the globe, when either elites or people
in general succumb for whatever reasons, 
and *also* that much information is preserved in cultures which
academic scholarship does not take account of, because lines of
communication are not open, or because students of the subject
(academic or not) have preferred subjects and methods of working,
and neglect what does not fit those preferred methods.
It is a constant struggle to get ethnography of any kind,
including ethnoastronomy, to be included in scientific studies.
Finding new ways of "translating" information between different
human communities is a part of the task of overcoming this.

>
> Phew.  Sorry to have gone on and on.

Not a problem.

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson


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