Looking back over the history of our relationship with the cosmos shows how we’ve banished gods, debunked myths and written our own, evidence-based, creation story. Stripping out subjective meaning and focusing on quantifiable observations has given us an epic power to understand and shape the world that dwarfs anything that has gone before. But unchecked, it has the potential to be a cold, narcissistic, destructive force. This is a book about how we closed our eyes to the stars. The challenge now is to open them again.
The Human Cosmos is an overview of humanity’s relationship with the night sky — from groupings of dots in the cave paintings at Lascaux that can be interpreted as constellations to the awe-filled experiences of astronauts at the International Space Station as they perform their first spacewalks — and in an incredibly wide-ranging and consistently fascinating variety of historical anecdotes, author Jo Marchant makes a solid case that the more we have relegated the study of the stars to scientists alone, the more we have lost something of what made us human in the first place. I loved every bit of this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
When scientists first split light with the spectroscope — turning its colors into numbers — they took one more step away from a subjective, qualitative view of the cosmos toward an objective, mathematical one: from an internal universe that we experience, to an external one that we calculate. And with the development of electronic detectors, our sense of vision — how the cosmos looks to us — was finally erased from the picture altogether. In this sense, modern astronomy is radically different from any kind of cosmological inquiry or understanding that has gone before. It no longer requires us to turn our faces to the sky. Our dominant source of knowledge about the universe — what it is, how it was made, how it relates to our life, and to us — is now our instruments, and not our eyes.
Marchant starts right at our beginning — with cave paintings and the construction of Stonehenge and the rise and fall of Babylonian kings — tracing how studying the stars led to superstitions and the divine rights of monarchs, and eventually, monotheism. In every section (with chapter headings such as Myth, Land, Faith, and Fate), she tells simply fascinating stories that explore humanity’s evolving relationship with the cosmos — and it would seem that everything (in the West) suddenly changed with Isaac Newton: with gravity proven as the fundamental force of nature, there was suddenly less need for divine intervention in ordering human affairs (Thomas Paine would eventually use the language of Newton to demand the equality of men as a “Natural Law” that led to the overthrow of kings; his subsequent release of Age of Reason would ultimately lead to the death of God; from that point on, the Milky Way could coldly spiral and the universe blindly expand with or without humanity). The new Rationalism and Positivism insisted on scientific facts as the only markers of reality, but eventually, Einstein and Quantum Mechanics and collapsing wave functions came to suggest that “reality” can never be measured separately from human consciousness. And while we have come such a long way from sacrificing to the sun gods to ensure another dawn, recent studies have shown that we are more in communion with the stars than we might suspect:
Doctors are realizing that most medical conditions display daily fluctuations in their occurrence or symptoms, including heart attacks, asthma, bronchitis, cystic fibrosis, strokes, fever, pain, seizures and suicide, to name just a few. The time of day can determine how we’ll respond to an infection or drug, or whether eating exactly the same meal will cause us to gain or lose weight. And even seasonal changes are important: the month in which babies are born affects their later risk of diseases such as dementia, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia ( with opposite patterns in the northern and southern hemispheres). Scientists don’t understand exactly why (theories include early-life infection risk, nutrition, and vitamin D levels) but it’s clear that the position of the Earth relative to the Sun at the time you are born has health consequences that last for life.
(In 1954, an American Biologist named Frank Brown tried to publish his findings that clams will continue to be affected by tides — even correcting for local conditions — when moved inland and shielded from environmental clues. Brown knew that they were responding to electromagnetic cues from the sun and moon, but the idea was too outside the mainstream to be published or discussed at conferences — which I include as a curiosity when thinking about “scientific consensus”.) The Human Cosmos was full of so many interesting stories, I’ll just collect a few here: I had heard of Constantine’s celestial vision of a cross that led to his subsequent conversion and promotion of Christianity, but I never heard before that he never stopped his pagan sun worship, or that Constantine simply merged the two traditions in order to hedge his bets (which is why we hear that Christian holidays are co-opted pagan festivals) and this is where the Christian halo came from (“Thanks to Constantine, the humble teacher became a cosmic emperor, ruling over the universe with the radiance of the sun.”) When an assistant curator of the British Museum, George Smith, translated a section of The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 and realised that it was an alternate version of Noah and the Flood — written centuries before Genesis — “he reportedly became so excited that he started taking off his clothes”. Polynesian navigators who worked with Captain Cook in the Eighteenth Century were so in tune with subtle markers on the ocean — from the positions of the sun and moon to tidal swells, wind direction, and cloud formations — that if fog obscured the direction of waves approaching one’s canoe, “he stood with legs apart to feel the swell patterns using the swing of his testicles”. And I don’t know why it hasn’t made a more lasting impression on my memory that it was only in 1995 that astronomers discovered 51 Pegasus b — the first planet definitively identified outside of our own solar system; it has only been since 1995 that science has even contemplated the possibility of life on other planets because until then, they couldn't prove there were other planets.
I love that Marchant brings our relationship with the cosmos full circle: early humans were obviously filled with awe when they looked at the night sky and endeavored to understand its workings. This led to superstitions and pseudoscience, civilisation and religion, and eventually, the Scientific Method and its efforts to erase mystery. Today, when light pollution and traffic jams of satellites obscure most people’s vision of the heavens, we’re beginning to realise that perhaps we’re more connected to those celestial bodies than mathematical equations alone can explain (I was fascinated by her explanation of Panpsychism), and I’m left wondering how close we are to affordable space tourism and a return to widespread awe at the sight of the depthless cosmos. I will admit that this perfectly piqued my own quirky interests — Marchant even references Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (an investigation into the use of psychedelics to prompt an awe-filled experience, which I loved) — so while this may not have wide appeal, I found it to be an engaging and informative read.
