The Spheres

Welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know podcast episode 9. Good for us. Yeah, it's a lot. And I'll try to keep this a little quick because we have to turn off the air conditioner so that you can actually hear us and it gets really hot in this room really fast. We get worked up. Yeah, I put off a lot of heat when I'm podcasting. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about cosmology, the way that we believe the universe is made. For us, the universe seems large and cold and dwarfing. We are maybe the mid-level between the tininess of atoms and the grandeur of the universe and how large it really is. For us, when we stare out into the night sky, what we see is an incredibly dwarfing, harsh, cold thing. Cold, dark silence. That is what moderns believe about the universe, but that's not what we have believed about the universe for ever. And if we want to understand the way that some of the ancient texts are written, the Iliad, Gilgamesh, et cetera, we should understand something about the cosmology in which they existed, how they viewed their world. So you think that the way we understand the universe will affect the way we understand our life and ourselves and our placing? Well, it's not just that. I mean, yes, obviously. But it will also affect the references in literature, things you may not even understand just because you don't know how they understood the world. Without that understanding, it's like trying to understand someone who lives on a different planet. They see their world differently than you see it. So let's start way back with the Mesopotamians. The oldest epic that we have is the Epic of Gilgamesh. And they understood their world similarly to the Greeks of the later times, but maybe just a little bit smaller. So they lived in the Fertile Crescent, and around them was a mountain range. And they viewed their world as a flat disk with an impenetrable barrier on the outside floating on sort of this cosmic watery sea. And if you passed that barrier of mountains, you entered into the realm of the gods. This is where the gods lived. So really, I imagine that they could look to the horizon and see the mountains and think that is the edge of our universe. They knew that it was way out there. But if they traveled through the mountain, they would meet the gods. That's where the gods lived. And Gilgamesh does this. He travels underneath the mountain. And then where he emerges, and it's a very long journey. It's I think something like 20 days he spends in the bottom of this mountain. And when he emerges, he emerges to this garden made of gemstones and gems and the wine goddess Siduri. And then he crosses the River of Death and meets the equivalent of Noah to their society, Utnapishtim. And he talks with them, et cetera, et cetera. But if you didn't know that the mountains were the barrier, that passage makes a lot less sense to you. Later, the Greeks, their world was a little bit larger. Theirs was probably about the size of the Mediterranean. And again, it was kind of a flat disk, but it was a little more interesting. So they had their flat disk and around it ran the ocean river, right? So when they reference the ocean, they're kind of just saying this big circular river that runs around the whole thing. And conveniently, that makes their universe really easy to paint on bowls and that sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a plus. Yeah. You can just put the whole picture right there. If we wanted to get our universe on a bowl, I doubt it would look quite as interesting. It would just be kind of lots of empty space and little bit blips in between. Cold black silence. Cold black bowls. With your cereal. So they had the ocean river and the sun on its journey would emerge from that ocean river out of the water, make its journey, and then at the end, plunk itself right back down. So if you traveled outside the ocean river, you would find yourself in a land of darkness. And this is what happens to Odysseus. When he's going to the afterlife or the underworld, he has to pass the ocean river and then he meets the people who live in darkness. The Greeks also thought that the underworld was under this disk and then Tartarus and the pillars of the earth were below that. And so he does meet the dead folks. They sort of, I think it's kind of vague there. They sort of emerge from a hole in the ground or I can't, it might be my own memory that's failing me, but he travels past the ocean river and then he has to come back over the ocean river to get back home. And so outside that is God space, sort of. After the Greeks came the Ptolemaic universe. And that's what held sway for probably 1500 years was what Ptolemy cooked up. And the ancient man believed that the earth was a sphere. Just about, at least by Ptolemy's time, they knew the earth was a sphere. Columbus was not the guy who invented this. But I thought that the middle ages were a backwards people who thought the earth was flat. Well, Graham, you would be wrong in thinking that. They actually had some pretty dang good math that put together the Ptolemaic universe. They were, they observed so well that they noticed that things didn't even quite, there was still geocentric, the earth was in the middle, but they noticed that things didn't quite act like they should. And so they actually put the center of rotation just a little outside the earth and everything rotated kind of around that, at least to Ptolemy for a little bit. They knew it was round. Columbus was not the first to think that it was round. He was, he actually had kind of bad math and believed that it was smaller than it was. And so he thought he could sail to Asia while everyone told him he was stupid and his math was bad. I'm starting to think that everything I learned about the middle ages in public school was wrong. Oh, you would probably be right about that. So the middle ages, let's talk about that for a second. In the center, you have earth and that is the very bottom of all things created. We were what was left, we're kind of the dreg heap after all the good stuff was created. And the good stuff is above us, above us is the air and then a ring of fire, which I'll explain in a second. And then the spheres, the outermost sphere or outside is, is sort of the, the eternal and the timeless. This is the space of logic. It's in reason. It's where God lives. Once you pass the outermost sphere, you essentially meet God and it's eternal, not in the sense that it just keeps on existing, but it's illimitable life in expression, right? It is eternal life spring is kind of how you should think about it. Inside that is the primal mobile. It's the outermost sphere. And this is the one that contains the stars and the stars were thought to be eternal. In fact, I think the first supernova was observed when 16 something, do you know this? The 16th century, I think it was the 15, the 15 seventies. I can't remember, but it did kind of rattle their cages, right? They thought that everything above the earth was timeless and eternal and could not change. And so when they saw something change in a star explode, well, everything's sort of got flipped on its head. So you have the primal mobile and it rotates one direction. And what causes this movement is actually a, an inclining towards God, right? It is moved of love for God. They thought that each sphere had an intelligence that sort of ran the show. It wasn't so much a soul or a creature they argued back and forth, but there was some sort of intelligent thing running the sphere and it wanted to mimic or be near or be like God and God is an immovable thing. And since the closest we can get to that is still motion, they gave the spheres a perfect circular motion. Perfect object shape is a circle. And then the spheres would sort of move in that direction. The primal mobile moves in one direction and all the other spheres move a little bit the other direction. And so, but the primal mobile is still the one that sort of transfers its motion to all the spheres below. So everything in the universe, according to them, is moved by a love for God, which is kind of a big deal. Below the primal mobile, we have Saturn, then Jupiter, then Mars, then the sun, which has its own sphere. They thought it kind of like a planet. So when you read in Dante, it's the planet which guides us on our way. What he's talking about is the sun. He thought it was a planet, not a star. And then below that you have Venus, Mercury, and then the circle of the moon. And then a sphere of fire. And the sphere of fire comes- The Johnny Cash sphere. Yeah. Floated up through a big old sphere of fire. That's what Dante could have said. That was the first draft. Yeah. It didn't go so well. He had to edit things. Little known Johnny Cash was a big medieval scholar. Anyway, the sphere of fire was there. We couldn't see it because it was pure fire. And when you look at a fireplace, you know, the hottest is whiter. And then eventually it turns transparent. And the reason fire reaches upward is because its natural inclination is to move upward. And so where does all fire go? Back home. Up above the air. So fire is the lightest of the four elements of which that they understanded their world to be composed of. Fire, then air, and then earth and water were both heavy and kind of mixed at the bottom. So there's a sphere of fire. And when you read the old texts, they often fear that they're going to be burned up when they go through this. I think Don Quixote goes through one. Don Quixote. Yeah. He fears that he's going to be lit on fire and he's really terrified about it. Dante goes through and is amazed that he goes through without feeling burnt or scorched. It's kind of fantastic for him. And then there's that scene in Apollo 13 when they're re-entry, burning and scorching. Yeah, that's just air though. Oh. That's right. Yeah. Below that is the sphere of air and then one of earth. And they all kind of move in concert. And if you're really quiet on any given night, you can actually hear the spheres in harmony with one another. They sing to each other. When they reference the music of the spheres, this is what they're talking about. That I do believe. Yeah. Well, and we can actually hear it in some of our hymns. If I can find my, this is my father's world. Is it that one? Hold on. I've got it in my notes here someplace. And the spheres, maybe not. While you're looking that up, turns out that that supernova was recorded not in 1554, like I thought, or 57, but 1054. So I was only off by 500 years. So maybe it took a while to shake down into the- But still, that must have been a really sort of destabilizing thing. It would be interesting to see how, what they attributed to the explosion of a star. But anyway. Yeah. So I found the words and it's, this is my father's world. And to my listening ears, all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres. That's what they're talking about is the universe in harmony. They had a little bit of a misunderstanding about how large all of this was. At some points, they kind of don't care so much, but they wrote it down. And so it's about 117 million miles is what they understood it to be. If he could travel 40 miles a day, he wouldn't have reached it in 8,000 years, which figures out to about 117 million, which is still small considering our sun is 93 billion miles away from our earth, but still pretty big. They understood that their world was a big place, but the sun was always shining. And so everything within these spheres was illuminated. The only reason we could see at night was because we were casting a shadow. So instead of conceiving the universe as this cold, dead, harsh, unforgiving space that's, you know, has no air, you have to consider it as a place inhabited by these spheres that move in concert with God, with constant illumination, and even with fire. So something, this, this incredibly organized dance, this sort of pageantry of the universe where everything has this place and it revolves, it all revolves around God, which is their center. Exactly. It's beautiful. It's super beautiful. And not only that, but every sphere is inhabited. The angels lived in the upper spheres. And then, oh, there's a ring of aether. Yeah, yeah. So this is all ethereal. It's like a fifth element. We have no experience of what it's like, but outside water, earth, air, and fire comes the aether, which is where all of the angels live. Fifth element is a fantastic movie. I do not doubt you there. Indeed it is. And some of these you may have heard of, right? There's the seraphim, the cherubim, and the thrones, right? It talks about thrones and powers. Dominations and powers and virtues or efficacies are the ones who sort of still face God. And then there's some who are concerned with man, the princedoms or principalities or princes, the archangels and the angels. So in Ephesians 6.12, it says, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, authorities, the powers of this dark world against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. A lot of that is talking about the angels that live in the aether. And then there were even some beings that lived in the air, which I could go into at a later time. It's not necessarily important, but the universe is inhabited. Those were the fairies, right? Is that the medieval fairies? No, the fairies live on the earth. You're definitely doing a podcast on fairies. Oh, for sure. And the inhabitants of the air were daemons. So it's a completely different thing. They can suffer change and pain like we can, but they are, they don't die the same way. Oh, raw deal. I could talk about daemons for a while. I don't think it's necessarily important, but just know that even the air was inhabited. There's something in between God and man. The last thing I'll say is about the influence of the spheres. So each sphere and each planet had its own influence on man and the world. I don't want to say that some of them are kind of negative, but it's not the fault of the sphere itself. It's just our bad reaction to these influences. So Saturn, when it influenced the earth, it would produce the metal lead. It's also called infortuna major. It produces melancholy in men and disasters in history. When Saturn is influencing the world, things go totally screwy. So just back up for a second. When you mean influence, like, is this where Saturn has some sort of place of predominance in the night sky? And that means that Saturn is enacting some sort of change in the air or is somehow, I mean, gravity is kind of a way that you think about it, even though they wouldn't have had a concept of gravity, but it is affecting some kind of pull or push, like how the moon affected tides. I know that they would understand. That's what exactly I was going to say is probably the way the moon affects tides. You might know more about that than I do. I think it's whenever that's in the night sky, it is sort of above you and exerting its influence. So this is what they mean when they say, oh, you were born under this particular star or born under this particular influence. If you were born in Saturn, you said it was melancholy in men. So if you have like a gloomy and grumpy disposition, you would be considered to have been born under Saturn. That's where we get the word Saturnine from to describe that in people. Yeah, exactly. And there's a few other words that strangely come from these influences. So Jupiter is Fortuna Major. It produces tin, which sounded a lot cooler back then than it does now. Yeah. The king of the planets giving you tin does not fill me with jovial mirth. Yeah, exactly. The only thing I can describe this influence is kingly joviality and it produces prosperity in men. So while Saturn is unfortunate, Jupiter is definitely fortunate. Mars produces iron and it's related to sturdy hardiness in men and wars in history, which goes right along with the god Mars. They weren't necessarily separate in their minds, the planets and a little bit of the remnants of the god they were connected to. Next was Sol and he made gold. He made wise and liberal men and fortunate events. Venus, beauty, amorousness, not surprised if it's connected to the god Venus, who's Aphrodite in Greece. Mercury, quicksilver. We actually name that metal Mercury now. That is what they thought the planet sort of grew in the earth was the alloy Mercury. And that's where we get our word mercurial, where they're kind of shifty, a little shaky. Their moods change frequently. Their moods change frequently, exactly. The influence that they exerted on men was it brought out sort of a skilled eagerness or curiosity and a bright alacrity. They're good at studies, these guys who are mercurial. And if I understand also, if you're mercurial, you were sort of also mercantile. You were a merchant. You were somebody that was good at doing business. You were constantly busy. That sort of skilled eagerness. Exactly. It wasn't something high like governing or important like war, but it was the, yeah, being skilled in clerk duties, like the duties of a merchant, the duties of a businessman. You're right. You're a fan. Yeah. You're a fantastic businessman. Next up is the moon. And this one actually is pretty important for us. It produces silver. That's kind of neither here nor there. But it produces wandering in men, both bodily and in mind. It's where we get our word lunatic from lunar. Because your mind's wandering. Because your mind has wandered. And that is what the moon kind of exerts upon men. And so these influences were all, the church kind of thought it was fine. It was not like predicting the future. What they kind of disallowed in relation to the planets was kind of fortune telling with these things. They had, the church had no doubt that this stuff actually happened, that the planets exerted influences upon men. It was how you sort of reacted to those influences that could be positive or negative. And a wise man could recognize the influence and sort of act against it. But not all of us are wise. And not all of us have complete, you know, self-control. So I am a gloomy person and Saturn is affecting disasters in history. But if I can master my temperament, I can rise above the influence of Saturn. And it's not fate, but it is still influential. Cool. So this, this makes a difference because when you read old texts like Milton, you get the line from Paradise Lost, I from the influence of thy looks receive access in every virtue. What he is doing is making her into a planet, essentially. Is that the AC? Did it just kick on? It's raining outside. Are you serious? I'm for reals. And now it's gone. Good, because my windows were down. I was about to hoof it outside. And now it's back. We gotta wrap this podcast up. Oh, good heavens. Okay, so let's, let's draw this to a close. So yeah, he makes her into a planet. This is Adam speaking to Eve, and he makes himself an Earth and her sort of a Jove or Venus kind of character. She exerts influence. She exerts her influence upon him. That's very nice. Yeah, it's really positive. So yeah, it's also where we get our, let's say this. If you were an Italian doctor, and I was very sick, you might attribute my sickness to the influence of the planets, right? Some unfortunate thing. And you would blame it on, in Italian, like the influenza, which is where we get influenza or the flu. We still use that word. Is influenza Italian for influence? Yeah. And then it means, and then we say influenza. As connected to a sickness, but it's still connected to the influence of the planets. The influence of the air. They were more right than they knew with bacteria and with germs. Yeah, exactly. The air did influence us and make us sick. Yeah. So next time you walk outside, you have to look up into the night sky, and instead of imagining this dark, horrible place that's sort of an infinite, endless expanse and void, think of it as something with real vertical space. You can look out into the distance, see the stars in the prime immobile, and know that just outside that line is God, and everything underneath moves in concert with a love for God, and in harmony with Him and with each other. It's a completely different picture of the universe. And for medieval man, it was incredibly comforting, I think. They write about it all the time. Looking up into almost the same kind of intricacy that they would have seen in a church service, with all these different parts, all these different people moving and lighting things and saying things, and all with this, yeah, it's almost like the liturgy of the heavens to point our hearts to that which we revolve around, that which is sort of the center. It's almost like the universe is a cathedral or a liturgical service. Yeah, and they didn't believe this because they were stupid and couldn't do science. It was because they trusted their authorities, and their authority would have been Ptolemy and Plato and authors that had come before them, and people that knew math and knew what they were talking about. They just had less information to go on, and everything sort of moved in concert. They were credulous and bookish. Yeah. That's super cool. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. That's going to change the way I look up at the night sky. Well, maybe it shouldn't because it is a big, empty, cold void. That's not it. So that's another issue. The way that we talk about things that we can't ultimately perceive, we have to use, we've got to use metaphors. But that's a whole other conversation about the relationship between science and space. And I know that in C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, he has a lot to say about, should we just think that they're stupid, unscienced individuals? In many ways, we too are stupid, unscienced individuals struggling to come up with a way of talking about the universe. And with every scientific discovery, we realize that the models that we have constructed for ourselves are not actually all that accurate. And we need to come up with a different way of describing it. So big, empty space suddenly becomes like the curvature of space and space-time. And then we need to come up with new metaphors to describe this. So, and even more than that, I mean, we read the same book. This is, a lot of this is from The Discarded Image. I really recommend it. It's C.S. Lewis's last book. It's a hard but fulfilling read. He even, and in it, he even implies that our model of the universe responds at least to an extent to our, what's going on in our mental state, our cultural dispositions. We think of the universe as cold and dark, but in fact, it's not dark. It's one of the only places that light rays don't have anything to stop them. If you ever look at a spaceship or any NASA footage, one side of that spaceship is lit bright as day because it's not going through any clouds, right? It is actually a space that is filled completely with light. It's just that it's on a backdrop of darkness. Interesting. Very cool. This talking about these seven planets reminded me that Lewis, who was very into these planets, wrote seven books of Narnia. And there's a theory floating out there in a book called Planet Narnia that each individual book of the Narnia series corresponds to one of these planets. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe being Jupiter, Mercury being the horse and his boy, the moon being the silver chair, Saturn being the last battle, the end of the world, and that kind of thing. It's a fantastic book. I definitely highly suggest people read it. I wouldn't be surprised if he modeled his books after the influences. It'd be an easy organizational principle. Cool. All right. Well, thanks. Come back next time for episode 10. Great job, AJ. That was awesome. Thanks. See you next time.