The Art of Looking Up

Hamlet, Vico, Roman Law and the Auspices

Last night not of all,

When yond same star that’s westward from the

pole

Had made his course t’ ilume that part of

heaven

Where now it burns…

These lines are part of opening dialogue in Hamlet when two night watchmen are retelling the story of the visit of a ghost, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, to Horatio, a close friend of Hamlet. In their retelling they identify the time of the night when the ghost appears by indicating when a certain star reaches a certain part of the sky.

Before watches and clocks, the “heavens” were used to indicate times of the day and night. The point used to indicate the position of the night sky was the pole star. Everything in the night sky appears to revolve around this star, also called the North Star or Polaris, hence the name.

Using this star as a benchmark, the night sky could be divided into positions, like numbers on a watch, and then time could be kept when certain stars at night reach various points in the celestial dome.

This positional method of timekeeping was used also for longer cycles like seasons of the year. During the day, the position on the horizon where the sun rose each morning were used to track the seasons of the year with the solstices marking the positions on the horizon when the sun rises on it farthest positions north and south.

Likewise, tracking the position of certain stars at night also helped with cycles of the year. This is captured poetically in one of the earliest works of the West, Hesiod’s poem the Works and Days which begins

Pleiades rising in the dawning

sky,

Harvest is nigh.

Pleiades setting in the waning

night,

Plowing is right.

As tradition has it, this poem was said to have been part of an oral tradition which a father set his son to memorize to help manage a family estate. Hesiod links constellations like the Pleiades with various human activities and animal migrations throughout the year to create an oral calendar to help run a self sufficient household.

The ability to divide the sky, using reference points, was not only used to tell the time of the day or help with the planting season, it was also used by antiquity to divine the will of the gods though the science of augury. The 18th century legal philosopher Giambattista Vico noted the central importance of augury, or interpreting auspices, to the foundations of Roman Law, and incidentally our own modern legal system, in his work New Science. He states,

Now the greatest solemnity of marriage was the auspices, which were both the exclusive domain of the patricians, and also the great source of all Roman law, both public and private.¹

Lets unpack this sentence a little.

Roman augury was, simply put, the ancient art of bird watching. By interpreting the flights of the birds they looked for signs from the gods, notably Jupiter, and these signs became auspices which would be used to time legislative, ceremonial and military actions.

For Vico, the foundation of Roman Law was based on three things - divine providence, marriage and burial of the dead. In order to perform a proper Roman marriage and burial, it must be timed correctly according to the auspices, in other words an auspicious time. All people were thus dependent on the augurs to help time marriages and other important acts such as enacting new legislation.

The practice of augury involved looking up at the sky to read the signs of the birds. As Vico states, “In their science of augury, the Romans used the verb ‘contemplari’ for observing the parts of the heavens where auguries came or the auspices were taken.”² Contemplation, before it becomes turned into an internal mental practice, comes from this act of looking at the heavens above for signs from providence.

The science of augury is known as a type of divination. For the Romans, this was completely in line with their religious and political way of thinking. The latin word for the divine, “divinity”, comes from the word divinare which means “to foretell the future.” Thus the divine and predicting the future were linguistically the same and associated with looking up at the sky.

This ability to contemplate the heavens did have a methodology and it was initially reserved to only a few elites, 9 patricians in the beginning of the Roman Republic, who were known as augurs. Cicero, the great orator, lawyer and statesman was also initiated into this science and held one of these positions as augur for Rome.

The method of reading the auspices of the birds was through a tool called the lituus, a curved wand that marked the space through which the observation took place.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, public domain

The region that was marked out in the sky was known as the the templa coeli, the “heavenly temple.” The augur knew the time of the day and the space in the sky to place his tool in order to get his reading which usually involved the passage of birds through that space. The pattern of the flight, the type of the bird, the number of birds that passed through, and those that didn’t, were all likely factors that went into the interpretation of the auspices.

In order to interpret space, markers were needed whether they were a Roman lituus or large stones to mark the position on the horizon when the sun reaches it zenith point. Without these points of reference, things appear in space without any meaningful significance, like points on a grid with no axis.

Around the same time Vico was writing his legal theory on the foundations of law, Rene Descartes was inventing analytical geometry which enabled the placement of algebraic equations onto a grid using the famous x and y axis that we all learn in elementary school. This revolution of graphing put the tools and methodology of augury on to an abstract space and helped open the door to analytics through spatial mapping.

Vico’s focus in the New Science, a work largely ignored in his own time, was a historicist look on how the concepts of our own scientific era were abstractions of divine thoughts from the ancient peoples, ideas that still permeate and form our way of thinking.

Interestingly enough, another book with a similar view was published in 1969, also largely forgotten, called Hamlet’s Mill. The subtitle is: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth. The book was written by a historian of science from MIT and a scientist from the Goethe institute who looked at myths from across the world and found a unifying theme about the change of the North Star to Polaris, a 25,000 year cycle known as the precession of the equinoxes.

Largely criticized and dismissed at the time, it makes the case that ancient peoples dating back as far as the Neolithic period were somehow able to track large astronomical cycles dating back thousands of years. Recent findings at archaeological sights like Goebkli Tepe may someday prove to support this theory of ancient astronomy.

Hamlet’s Mill begins with the same character we started with who the authors trace back to an old Scandinavian myth about a young man named Amlodh whose father is killed by his uncle. Amlodh’s mill that grinds grains breaks and must be put back together again. This mill, according to the authors, has an astronomical significance symbolically connected to the pole star.

***

How we orient ourselves to space and time is one of the themes of the Astros Module in Innerstice. By understanding basic positions of the stars we can help put our lives in harmony with cycles of nature, a practice that was maintained around the world for thousands of years. Using modern tools can help us reorient reorient ourselves in the biorhythms of the world. To find out more, go to www.innerstice.com/modules/astros1

1. Giambattista Vico, New Science, p. 69.

2. Ibid., p. 15.