Introduction
I seem to have been deluged by videos on the theme of our ancestors engaging intensely with the night sky and orientating structures to the solstices or stars.
Back in 1997 I had moved to a remote house outside Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania. I was taking up a role as Community Recovery Coordinator in the wake of the shocking mass shooting event the year before. One evening I had gone to bed before 22:00 but was unable to get to sleep. I lay in bed in a dark room with my eyes mostly closed for around 4 hours. I may have drifted off briefly. Around 02:00 I heard a car approaching. I assumed it was my sister who was late leaving Hobart. I suddenly remembered I had forgotten to leave an outside light on as promised. I sat up and glanced out the window as I was about to turn the light on. I was stunned by what I saw.
The sky was awash with light of such intensity I felt overwhelmed. I could see stars well enough but not with a dark backdrop, rather wash of light that ranged from soft to strong. Everything felt so close. There was no moon. I wanted to stay gazing out the window, but I had to get downstairs. I have to confess I also felt a sense of relief as I turned away.
I had looked at night skies for many years before then. I had lain by campfires in the Tasmanian wilderness a gazed up into clear cold skies where the stars were crisp, and the Milky Way was bright. But I had never seen anything like that night at Port Arthur. What made this experience so unique wasn’t the sky. My eyes hadn’t been exposed to light for around 4 hours. Every other time I had looked at a night sky there had been light from campfires or torches.
This experience had a profound impact upon me and transformed how I thought about how our ancestors saw the heavens. Below I want to reflect on this theme.
Proximity
I grew up leaning how far away the moon, sun and stars are from Earth. Our ancestors didn’t have those ideas. They were out of reach of course, even when they climbed a mountain.
In Genesis 11:1-9 we are told of people determined to build a tower that “reaches to the heavens” (NIV). How close were “the heavens” to them? If my experience was any guide, they were very close – but just out of reach. Our ancestors also thought the (night) sky was a place. That suddenly made sense to me. It had a sense of presence. It was somewhere not too far away. It was part of where I was – like the far bank of a wide river is.
The heavens, in this sense, are part of the environment – the world of human experience. There was movement, and any movement in one’s environment was meaningful. Such movement should be observed and interpreted. The heavens were populated, like the Earth.
Paradoxical nature
The heavens were not visible in the daytime. When they were visible, they were not reachable by any living person but shamans. Hence there was a strange duality – visible then invisible, close but out of reach.
Our ancestors were animists. Their reality was full of lives. Heaven and Earth were a unity – a community. They interacted.
We have replaced place and presence with space and absence. Either way the difference between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is replete with potential. Our potential expresses absence and remoteness – which may be why what comes out of our sense of potential expresses as UFOs.
Our ‘heaven’ is unthinkably vast and remote – there is no place amenable to life as we define it anywhere near our ability to go there. In fact, it has been a rational act by our culture’s ‘finest minds’ to wonder whether we are alone in the cosmos – in terms of life in general and intelligent life in particular.
If by ‘heavens’ we mean literal physical places there could be something in that. However here we are seeing the conditioning of materialism imposing a dogma. The ‘heavens’ might also be states of reality expressed in other dimensions – signified by a perception of the night sky.
Other dimensional realities are testified to in accounts of OOBEs, NDEs, dreaming, mystical encounters and so on. Arguably imagination at least participates in such realities too. And let us not forget the technological phenomenon of ‘virtual reality’.
By stripping away any sense of interdimensional reality we not only dispossess ourselves of a legacy as old as human history, we replace relational proximity with spatial loneliness.
That encounter with the heavens I experienced was intense and intimate. Its still there. Its just that we are functionally blind to it. Where and how we live now has dulled our vision.
Three points on the horizon
As I write this, we are coming up to the summer solstice in just under 3 weeks. On 21 December (give or take a little) the sun will rise in the morning on the eastern horizon at its most extreme point north. From there it will travel south until it hits its most southerly point – the winter solstice. The mid-point between these two extremes is recognised as the autumn and spring equinoxes, depending on which direction the sun is travelling along the horizon.
The solstices are clear markers. The sun reverses course. All you need is a fixed point and repeated timely observations sufficient to establish a pattern.
Cultures around the world have used the solstice sunrise to orientate their important structures. In one sense it’s a primary, easy, thing to do. It enables a reliable awareness of the passing of a year – giving a foundational sense to the rhythm of Earthly time. Yet on that foundation more complex examination of how the heavens behave been based. Arguably our present astronomy was born from that original measurement.
We have able to do so much more because we invented the clock. We agree on when is midnight and hence can coordinate so many time sensitive activities – like flight and train timetables (so we don’t have crashes), when businesses open or close, and (in days gone by) you could catch the news on your telly (that still happens, only fewer people are bothered).
These 3 points on the horizon also set the year into seasons. If we take the summer solstice as a starting point, we have the summer season through to the autumn equinox. Autumn continues from there to the winter solstice, and winter extends to the spring equinox. Spring proceeds to the summer solstice and the cycle begins again. Seasons aren’t real in the sense that they are defined by anything other than convention, but the rhythms of weather and the response of animals and plants are real. They may be messed up now, though.
These days the popular convention is that summer starts 3 weeks earlier on 1 December. Have we forgotten the solstice or are we simply seduced by human fiat to measure time by a made calendar rather than natural event?
The ability to see
That early morning encounter with a stunning sky was an accident in the sense I did not consciously intend it to happen. It helped me appreciate that what appears to our eyes isn’t always what is present. How much do we not see?
I got a telling lesson a few years later. In 1999 I had enrolled in a Social Ecology course, and I had an elective called Sense of Place. The idea was to select a location and return to it regularly over several weeks and note how one’s perception of that changes.
I selected a 100-metre-long portion of Broadwater Beach. I thought I’d do a photographic essay. On my 5th visit I was in a state of despair. All I could see was the same beach I saw on my first visit. Then something profound happened. I suddenly noticed patterns in the sand created by mineral and organic content, wave behaviour, the tides, wind, rain, the angle of the sun, and whether there were clouds.
Light reflecting off wet sand was golden in the morning and silver in the afternoon. I started going before sunup and late in the afternoon before the light had fled. What I feared was the same old beach visit after visit was transformed into a captivating ever changing canvass. The spirit of the place was making sand art and I was coming to see it.
What was supposed to have been a month-long exercise became a 5-month passion. I ended up offering 30,000-word project report with photos and poetry. My supervisor was okay about me doing that, so long as I didn’t bore him.
I haven’t looked at a landscape or a place the same way since then.
Conclusion
It is interesting that the day sky hides so much. It shows us our waking mundane world but hides the full spectrum of its subtle relationships with levels of reality that are fundamental to our full sense of who are.
What I learned at Broadwater Beach was to shift my expectations and allow the daylit world to show me more. Port Arthur was about my eyes being dulled by light. Broadwater Beach was about my mind being dulled by sight.
In both cases it is about not being to see what is there, and not being able to have a deep relationship with what is present.