On cold clear nights the stars are so brilliant it’s as if they were speaking. But if they could speak, what would they say?
The Moon, New on Tuesday morning, will take a spectacular walk through a garden of planets this week, tiptoeing past Mercury and Venus Wednesday evening; then, grown a little bolder, the waxing crescent will meet the warrior planet Mars on Thursday.
It’s easy to imagine that this is the kind of celestial scene that inspired the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the words: The moving Moon went up the sky and nowhere did abide. Softly she was going up, and a star or two beside…
But while Coleridge wrote beautifully about the stars, Ancient scholars trained themselves to understand what the stars themselves were speaking. They referred to this as the astro-logos, literally as star words, which we experience in a much diminished form today as ‘astrology.’ Astrology or the ‘speaking of the stars’ is remarkably different from ‘astronomy’, which is the contemporary science of the stars.
For the ancient readers of the starry script, the fixed points of light we know of as the still stars were like the consonants in the human language. And in the rhythmic sweep of the Moon and planets they discerned what we consider vowels ~ the letters that give motion to spoken words.
Each night this starry speaking sweeps into a new expression as the Moon and the planets slowly change their positions against the background of fixed stars.
Watch the Moon as our poetic scribe this week, looking slightly south of west about 45 minutes after sunset, and find your way to the poetry of the night.