The Music of the Spheres

And the power of the discarded image

The constellations as depicted in Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius

When our medieval forebears looked into the sky, they didn’t look into the vastness of space. They looked towards the lights of divine heavens. The enchanted, celestial vista, and its felt presence, is described by Owen Barfield in his book, Saving the Appearances.

“If it is daytime, we see the air filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood proceeding from a living heart. If it is night-time, we do not merely see a plain, homogeneous vault pricked with separate points of light, but a regional, qualitative sky, from which first of all the different sections of the great zodiacal belt, and secondly the planets and the moon (each of which is embedded in its own revolving crystal sphere) are raying down their complex influences upon the earth, its metals, its plants, its animals and its men and women, including ourselves ...”

This image has now been discarded, to use the phrase of Barfield’s great friend, C.S. Lewis. To look into the sky in the 21st century may provoke an experience of awe and wonder. But the sense of beauty, even connection, is compromised by an awareness of the incomprehensible emptiness that fills the space between the lights and the indifferent nuclear processes which generate their luminescence.

Some still practice astrology, for sure, though paradoxically they may never look up. Instead they look ahead, at a glowing screen of diagrams and tables.

So, a question worth asking is why it is worth contemplating a sumptuously produced, richly animated atlas of the spiritual heavens – replete with creatures as well as constellations, saints as well as stars?

Take the Harmonia Macrocosmica, created by Andreas Cellarius in the mid-seventeenth century, recently republished by Taschen.

Don’t its inspirational pages belong to a lost era?

Even at the time, astronomers found little practical use for the starry atlas, as it does not carry accurate details of celestial positions. Further, the days were numbered when an astronomer might also be an astrologer, aware of their participation in the life of the skies and so glad of the contemplative power of the maps.

And yet, the Harmonia Macrocosmica still speaks.

Partly, that is because of its sheer aesthetic appeal, which is considerable. The atlas is regarded as a masterpiece from the Golden Age of Dutch cartography. The beauty of the plates, enhanced by the large scale Taschen deploys, is undeniable. But I think there is a subtler force at work, raying from within its enchanting pages.

That spirit can be understood when you consider that the maps show the heavens according to various projections.

First is the Ptolemaic model, which was developed in Ancient Greece, placing the Earth at the centre of things. Here, the Sun, Moon and stars revolve around us – the plate depicting this also including a feature that I love: learned philosophers, surrounded by books and globes, sit alongside the spheres as if positioned outside of the cosmos, neutrally looking on.

That objectivity is a central feature of modern science. So, although the geocentricism of the Ptolemaic model was replaced by heliocentrism, which the Harmonia Macrocosmica also embraces wholeheartedly, Cellarius felt the older model worth including.

But still, there was a further shift, characteristic of the heliocentric dispensation that proved pivotal.

Barfield unpacks it, by reflecting on the title of his book. The expression, “saving the appearances”, reaches back to Aristotle, describing the old way of doing science. A theory of the heavens, say, could be accepted if it accounted for what was observed - though no-one back then thought to presume that their hypothesis was the only option, let alone the only one that was correct. This is why, although the Ptolemaic model was most commonly used, because its mathematics was best understood, heliocentrism was also discussed in the ancient world, notably by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC.

The difference made by Copernicus and then, Galileo, in particular, is not therefore heliocentrism per se. Rather, modern science sought not only to save the appearances but to insist that one hypothesis was right. That would now be the goal of investigations. So, Galileo’s real innovation when he apocryphally uttered of the Earth, “And yet it moves”, was a theory about theories.

Ultimate truth no longer resided in the ineffable mind of God, therefore attracting multiple hypotheses, but in the inquiring mind of Man, who could decide right from wrong.

The shift was momentous. If the correct hypothesis is a mathematical hypothesis, which excludes ideas about the divinity of the stars, then the cosmos could no longer speak a living language but merely follow the abstract diktats of mathematics.

A reproduction of the Harmonia Macrocosmica today, then, has a nostalgic feel: its pages are at once beautiful and melancholic, a record not only of Dutch art and early modern science but of a lost participation.

For there was a time when the night sky was not only a source of amazement but of extrasensory links and heavenly threads. William Blake called them “fibres of love” and clearly, though discarded, these connections entice us still. Taschen knows as much. The question, then, is might the old wonder return in new guise? Might enticement precede a rediscovery?

A version of this article is published in the latest issue of The Idler.