Look at the sky, once again

Gazing at the sky, a daily gesture that has been around for millennia and raises thousands of questions. Some answers can be found these days in Marseille, at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MUCEM), in the exhibition Lire le Ciel (Lire the Sky), impeccably curated by Juliette Bessette and Enguerrand Lascols, which focuses on the astral imagery in the Mediterranean world.

The location makes the task easier. The former fortress of the Order of Malta dominates the port with the air of a coastal defense building. Centuries and centuries of conflict between empires and countries moved from land to sea. A long history, as Fernand Braudel would say, of galleys and naval battles.

But today, the protagonists aren't the land or the sea, but the sky. Immersing oneself in the six sections of the Mucem exhibition is a rite of passage for understanding cultures of dreams and multiple emotions that traverse the Mediterranean Sea, from the Iranian highlands to the Atlantic coasts from ancient times to the present day. A long journey, then.

/Since the beginning of written history, the sky has been a privileged subject of observation, which gave rise to the study of the cosmos, that is, cosmology.

From the beginning of recorded history, with Sumer and the Chaldean city-states like Ur, the sky was a privileged subject of observation, giving rise to the study of the cosmos—that is, cosmology. The sages who observed the firmament were magicians with profound knowledge of the workings of the stars, and they came to the conviction that they influence human beings.

And so astrology emerged, with which they interpreted what they saw from their ziggurats in order to predict the future. One of their observations became popular in the West when it became accepted that three of these Magi, acting as the Three Wise Men, observed a star "in the East" and traveled to a town in Judea to worship a child. This Gospel account is part of a historical event: the observation of the cosmos and the interpretation of the stars moved to the West to play a decisive role in classical Greek and Hellenistic civilization.

At the Mucem, we follow this process through key figures such as the philosophers Favorinus of Arles and Sextus Empiricus. They support Florian Audoureau's assertion in an article in the beautiful catalogue published for the occasion: "Classical cosmology is a game for questioning the place of human beings in the world."

Just stop in front of the fresco of Apollo Cosmocrator from Pompeii or the silver celestial globe, originally from Turkey, which inspired Aby Warbur in his Atlas Mnemosyne , and we will come to the correct conclusion that the stars are the mirror of our illusions.

The wise men who observed the firmament were magicians with profound knowledge of the workings of the stars, and they came to the conviction that they influence human beings. And thus, astrology emerged.

The cosmological and astrological legacy of Antiquity would not have been known to us without the studies developed in the Middle East and Central Asia by the distinguished Abd-al Rahman al-Sufî, an Iranian from the mid-10th century: studies that reach back to the Book of the Stars of Alfonso X the Wise, passing through the creation of precious and precise objects such as the globe of Ibn Sa'id al-Sahli, active in the Taifas of Valencia and Toledo in the mid-11th century.

Among these scientists, the figure of the falakî, the astronomer, soon stood out, a wise man capable of guiding princes through astrological readings as a form of divination. The Treatise on Births by the Persian astrologer Abû Ma'shâr (Albumasar) demonstrates not only the importance given to astronomers in the Arab-Muslim world, but also the strong acculturation ties with the steppe world and the Chinese world. A glance at the pages on display (some virtual) at the Mucem reveals that culture has been, is, and should be a field open to the most diverse influences.

The need to look at the sky to understand it was influenced by the scientific revolution of the Renaissance, with Copernicus and Galileo, and the host of anonymous astronomers who observed the universe from their study, as we see in Johannes Vermeer's painting The Astronomer. The revolution of the cosmological paradigm, to use Thomas Kuhn's term, occurred at the same time as popular culture revived its approach to the world of stars.

In this aspect of traditional knowledge, the shepherds' calendars stand out, like a beautiful image in which a shepherd searches for water like a water diviner, recognizing that what our eyes see directly every day is also a way of seeing the sky: the sun "rises" every morning and "sets" every night.

The need to look at the sky to understand it was affected by the scientific revolution of the Renaissance with Copernicus and Galileo.

That same spirit inspires Camille Corot's painting from the Augustinian Museum in Toulouse, the farewell of the day by a figure leaning against a tree as proof of the effect of the stars on everyday life, and in today's world more than ever.

Just look at the large number of people who devote themselves to astrological reading, the massive popular following of meteor showers, or the thousands of people traveling to where a total eclipse can be observed.

What was the heritage of the studios of magicians such as Michel Nostradamus, Mathieu Langsberg, Belline or Camille Flammarion became public domain thanks to cinema, when in 1907 Georges Méliès filmed with his caustic style the moment in which three distinguished Marseilles astronomers observed in Guelma, a town in Algeria, the famous solar eclipse of August 30, 1905.

The interest in total eclipses was such that they became a regular feature in publications, including comics like the famous Tintin in the Temple of the Sun. And that brings us to the big question: What place does the sky occupy in the concerns of today's society? The answer is that this concern has infinitely active value, judging by the effect produced by the Mucem exhibition on a mostly young audience, fascinated by the cultured, refreshing, and ingenious explanation offered.

A magnificent symptom that many of the terrestrial foods André Gide spoke of can be found when looking at the sky and understanding it.

Reading the Sky. Under the Stars in the Mediterranean. Mucem . Marseille. www.mucem.org. Until January 5.