Overpowered by the forces of the stars

I remember looking up one night through broken clouds, with icy snow underfoot, and feeling afraid. The kind of fear that creeps along the back of your neck and clogs your throat.

I was looking at a star, one pin of light among thousands, unimaginably far away – huge distances are always chilling. But this time its photons, launched from its burning surface centuries before, seared my mind’s eye and the star sort of awoke. It scared the hell out of me.

It’s reckless to recount a story like this in public. It could provoke mean laughter, or worse, indifference. A grown (and young) man “afraid” of a star countlessly far away?

It was a long time ago. I don’t know what star it was. In the next decades I built up some objective, sky-chart-type knowledge. But that first moment of fear was not the last. And what’s more, I was not the first to feel it – and hardly the last, I imagine, though our experience of the natural world is very different here in the 21st century from what it used to be.

One summer Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, the lion, got my attention. It’s about 72 light-years away and five times as big as the sun. It has an unusual sheen, or luster. That luster can work strange events on your mind’s eye. I didn’t spend a lot of nights on Regulus. It got uncomfortable quickly. Overbearing and invasive.

I don’t know why I think you’re supposed to understand the words “uncomfortable” or “overbearing.” It’s just a star, for crying out loud. But there it is. And apparently I was not the first.

When I stopped looking and started reading about it, I discovered the name Regulus, a form of the Latin for “king,” is just the latest (given by Copernicus in the 1500s) in a long line of names marking this star as a ruler. The Romans called it Regia, “royal one.” The Arabs called it Malikiyy, “kingly one,” a word translated from a Greek link to an ancient king, Amagalaros. The Greeks also called it Basilicos, “regal.”

Persians called it Miyan, “central one.” Earlier, Babylonians called it Sharru, “the king,” and Akkadians called it Amil-gal-ur, “king of the celestial sphere.” This is going back more than 3,000 years. Hindus called it Magha, “mighty.” Some Chinese astronomers called the constellation the Yellow Dragon – in China the dragon has many of the same connotations of regality the lion has for us.

Here in the scientific age, it’s taken for granted that the original star names were whimsies (which ironically is how they can arise now – by a dust cloud’s shape, or after a TV character) because the stargazers, being ignorant of scientific facts, could only concoct fantasy explanations: Mars was named after the war god because it’s red, like blood, and blood is spilled in war.

Were they really that innocently hasty? Those ancient astronomers were no less intelligent and no less diligent than our guys with telescopes and calculus. But they were not seeking the same kind of knowledge modern astronomers seek. They not only tracked Regulus’ path in the zodiac, they also paid attention to the particular kind of awe its luster worked on their minds’ eye. An intuition of “royal” developed there repeatedly, for millennia, before anyone had a clue there was any such distance as 72 light-years. The star names were not whims but expressions of certain kinds of knowledge. In the ancient experience, the stars were forces, detectable through fear, that we are obliged to pay respect to.

The ancients would no doubt be astounded to know what we know. And I have a feeling we would be astounded, or terrified, to find out what they knew.

-DWILDE@BANGORDAILYNEWS.NET