July 2, 2021
On Sunday, I visited the Cleveland Museum of Art for the first time since the pandemic, and, as always, made a pilgrimage to my favorite work in the museum, a small, semi-abstract female figurine under seven inches tall, carved in white, translucent marble. Her head is tilted upward in what seems an enraptured gaze towards the heavens, so that she has been titled “The Stargazer.” Dated somewhere around 3000 BCE, she may be the oldest work in the entire collection. She never fails to move and inspire me, and I have a photo of her framed, sitting on a bookshelf here at home.
“Stargazer” is an inference. There is a kind of empirical attitude that hates conjectural interpretations of that sort in the absence of hard evidence. For all we know, she could be in exercise class, or checking the laundry on a clothesline.
But I am fine with qualified conjecture. Although the figure was found in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, it belongs to the Cycladic art of the Aegean area in the early Bronze Age. Cycladic culture, and the slightly later Minoan culture of Crete, are part of the widespread pre-patriarchal “goddess cultures”—another conjecture, based largely on the presence of hundreds of female figurines assumed to have a religious significance. Whatever she meant in her original context, to me the Stargazer represents the awe and wonder that humanity has felt looking up at the night sky.
Or at least part of humanity: there is something of a temperamental divide here. In a fine essay, “The Voyagers,” that I have taught for decades, Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan says she grew up believing that there were sky people and earth people: those who look up (and fall into holes because they aren’t looking where they’re going) and those, like herself, who feel that earth is our home, and earth is enough. Being a sky person from an early age, I was always baffled and upset when people expressed indifference to space exploration, then in its beginnings. But I contented myself knowing that there were kindred sky people. One of them was Carl Sagan, who helped designed the Golden Record, a disc containing visual, aural, and written record of both earth and humanity to be put aboard the two Voyager satellites that would be the first human objects to leave the solar system. It was the twin Voyager launching that inspired Hogan’s essay, whose point is that the Voyagers enabled her to appreciate the perspective of the sky people.
In the Christianized mythology that informs most of European literature until the eighteenth century, the fall of humanity led to a corresponding fall of nature, from the paradisal level to the harsh Darwinian world we have lived in ever since. But the limit of the Fall was the orbit of the moon. Above the “sublunary” world, the heavens remained perfect and eternal. Medieval people in Dante’s time could look up at the night sky and see a spiritual, still-unfallen realm. Each of the canticles of the Divine Comedy ends with the word “stars” to signify that promise. The persecution of Galileo was in part the Church protecting its authority, but we should not underestimate the possibility of a concurrent psychological backlash: the trauma of finding out that the eternal world that glitters above us with hope and possibility is really a natural realm of inhuman conditions, signifying nothing except to physicists.
There is a wonderful moment in the Purgatorio (of which more in my podcast episodes of the last couple of weeks) when Dante and Virgil have achieved the top of the mountain of Purgatory at nightfall, and Dante sees the stars larger than they appear on earth because he is now so much closer to them. I always think of that line in terms of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” the stars huge swirls and flakes. And in Dante, heaven is the place where beauty is also truth, truth beauty: the seemingly unchanging order of the heavens is in fact the image of God imprinted upon nature in the form of a perfect and meaningful order. All this is what the Copernican revolution has abolished, leaving behind a feeling of loss and disillusionment.
It is an adult form of the disillusionment of finding out that Santa Claus does not exist. Quite literally so, for the vestiges of genuine myth lie beneath the Germanic and Victorian kitsch of our image of Santa—and in fact of the same myth of descent from a miraculous realm above. Santa flies down at night from the North Pole because the north is where the lower world intersects with the upper, leaving gifts under the stylized axis mundi we call a Christmas tree, along with the intangible gift of a belief that magic is possible. It is worth speculating how far contempt for the Christmas holiday as nothing but a commercializing vehicle of “late capitalism” at times disguises the deeper disillusionment of embittered grown-up children.
The old mythological perspective in which the heavens were a numinous, transcendent realm lost much of its persuasiveness by the end of the seventeenth century, undermined by the materialistic perspective of the new science but also by the discrediting of the social ideology that had been attached to it. That ideology represents a kind of kidnapping of the vertical axis to rationalize authoritarian top-down rule in the form of a great Chain of Being, as it was sometimes called. God created a hierarchical order of nature, but also ordained a hierarchical social order, embedded in such phrases as “the divine right of kings,” and it is no accident that kings and emperors have been associated with the sun. The success of the democratic revolutions of the 17th-19th centuries meant that this old hierarchical view was increasingly clung to only by right-wing reactionaries.
But with the passing of the old cosmic order passed the old moral order, which may have rationalized the power of kings, aristocracies, and priesthoods but which also gave sanction to common morality. People like C.S. Lewis argue that, beyond all differences in customs, there is really a universal human morality, presumably stemming from God on high. Cultural relativism is wrong: no society in history has condoned murder or theft. But that stance was challenged as early as Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear repeatedly calls upon the heavens, the gods, whatever is up there, to avenge the hideous evils of the villains Goneril, Regan, and Edmund. The response he gets is the storm on the heath: a whirlwind without a God in it, an epiphany of “nothing,” a word repeated obsessively throughout the play.
Moreover, the speeches of Edmund rebut Lewis’s view: laws against murder and theft are universal only because they are created by the privileged to protect their privileges. Those who are bound by them are just dupes, puppets. That may sound like the rhetoric of comic book supervillains, but perhaps the comics creators intuit something about the nature of human evil. As much as 20% of America, from Donald Trump to the Republican Party to the insurrectionists of January 6, show by their behavior that they share Edmund’s perspective, and have come out from under their rocks in a time of weakened social order because they see their chance.
If there is no higher order, then the only law is the law of nature, and the law of nature, contrary to popular belief, was evident long before Darwin. A character says in Lear,
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep. (4.2)
In other words, the “survival of the fittest,” the philosophy of which Social Darwinism and Ayn Rand-style libertarianism explicitly approve. The big fish eat the little fish, and if you are eaten it is your fault for not being a bigger fish. And the biggest fish of all is Leviathan, who will swallow the whole world. Perhaps, indeed, he already has.
A crucial reversal took place in modern mythology, as pointed out by Northrop Frye in an essay significantly titled “New Directions from Old.” In the modern imaginative perspective, top and bottom of the axis mundi switch their associations. Instead of being the location of an unfallen spiritual realm, what we now call “outer space” is not just the emptiness that terrified Pascal but the locus of a new demonic. There is an affinity of some fantasy writers with Gnosticism, in which the fallen world is ruled by Archons identified with the astrological constellations, they themselves being ruled by a false deity who thinks he is God, although he is really only a powerful megalomaniac, the model for would-be tyrants of every era, including Trump.
The seminal figure in the development of science fiction in the late 19th century was H. G. Wells. Wells was determined to be optimistic and progressive, writing utopias with titles such as Men like Gods. His imagination had other ideas: while the utopias are intelligently unsuccessful, The War of the Worlds is an epiphany of the demonic descending from the heavens above, and it is unforgettable. In traditional mythology, the demonic rose from below, and it is interesting how many writers attempt to come to terms with the modern reversal of mythological directions. H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters, such as Cthulhu, are typically discovered buried under the ocean or in Antarctic ice (the opposite of Santa Claus!), but in later stories we learn that many of them originally came from the stars, or from dimensions even further “beyond” interstellar space. The up-down ambiguity holds true even of Wells’s Martians, who arrive from above but, curiously, burrow into the ground and then emerge.
Yet the reversal is not complete. Carl Sagan worked hard to recapture the sense of the heavens as a place of wonder within the framework of modern astronomy. He titled his PBS series Cosmos mindful that in Greek the word signifies a kind of ornament, a thing of order and beauty. And we have not by any means entirely lost the sense that some kind of redemptive power might descend from above—or that we might ourselves ascend into a mystery beyond the Archons, as in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, whose benign aliens might well be the lost family that the Star Gazer is watching for. On her first album, Horses, Patti Smith, with whom I’m honored to share this Substack platform, has a piece called “Birdland,” spoken to musical accompaniment, inspired by the visionary experience of Peter Reich, as recounted in his Book of Dreams. Peter was the son of Wilhelm Reich, the wild man of psychoanalysis (or one of them, anyway). Grieving after Wilhelm’s death, Peter Reich had a vision of his father descending towards him in a UFO, although on second glance it turned out to be a flock of crows. Smith’s rhapsodic monologue builds for 9:14 to extraordinary intensity, so much so that she is clearly out of breath when she pauses towards the end. In the climactic moment, she imagines Peter crying to the UFO “Take me up! Take me up! I’ll go up!” in yearning despair. Who of us has not wished to be gathered thus, like Elijah in the fiery chariot?
I write within a week of the release of a government report that takes UFOs seriously. The last UFO craze took place when I was young, at the height of the Cold War and its paranoid terrors. The depth psychologist C.G. Jung wrote a short book on them treating them as psychological rather than literal, visions called forth by the apocalyptic anxieties of the time. We are again in a time of apocalyptic anxiety, and it is no wonder that “signs and wonders” abound. I fully believe that we are responsible for trying to better the human condition through the use of all our imaginative gifts, scientific, creative, and social. But I also believe that we have to recognize the limitations of our powers, and, like the Stargazer, look upward towards a mystery that is not ourselves. Not God, at least not for me, for we have learned that “God” is a projection. Perhaps what Paul Tillich, following the mystics, called the God beyond God, whose language is paradox and whose manifestation is the sense of wonder.