The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena VIASP Conference Series, Vol. 441Enrico Maria Corsini, ed.c©2011 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

The Alphabet and the Sky

Arnold Lebeuf

Instytut Religioznawstwa, Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Krakow, Poland

Abstract. Since the beginning of the 17th century the letters of the Greek alphabetare used to identify the stars of constellation by order of magnitude. This was simplya practical means of astronomical classification. In several instances the Bible usessuch metaphors as “The sky rolled up like a scroll”. The idea of associating lettersof different alphabets with stars, constellations and the sky in general can be found today in the marginal subculture. The persistence of such an association of writing withastronomy or cosmology is at least of interest for cultural reasons, but the problemmight be of good interest as well for the history of astronomy and cosmology. I presenthere two examples of this tradition in works of art. The first a painted representationof the Revelation of Saint John in the Orthodox church tradition, and the other in theconstruction of the late bronze age sacred well at Santa Cristina in Sardinia, Italy.

Since the beginning of the 17th century, after Johann Bayer started to use them in hisstar atlas Uranometria1, the letters of the Greek alphabet have been used to identify byorder of magnitude the stars of constellations (Figure 1).

This was simply a practical means of astronomical classification, but the idea ofassociating the letters of different alphabets with stars, constellations and the sky ingeneral can also be found to day in the efforts of marginal subculture adepts to findorder in the universe at any rate in a mixture of cheap mystics, ethnic dreams andother madness. For example a runic alphabet seen in the constellations2. Both of thesemodern schools, are the inheritors of very ancient traditions. The subject has beenapproached by some scholars.

In 1903, Franz Boll3 touched the question with a clear mind in the paragraphBuchstaben und Tierkreiszeichen, of his masterwork book Sphaera. In 1913 EdwardStucken, explored the relations of the alphabet with the Moon stations in Der Ursprungdes Alphabets und die Mondstationen4. The work of Franz Dornseiff, a pupil of FranzBoll, returns to the subject in 1925 with Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie5. More

1I B R I. C., Uranometria: omnium asterismorum continens schemata [. . . ], 1603.

2See the website http://alynptyltd.tripod.com/TheRunicSky/TheRunicSky.htm.

3F. B, Buchstaben und Tierkreiszeichen, in Sphera. Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zurGeschichte der Sternbilder, Leipzig, Teubner, 1903, pp. 469-472.

4E. S, Der Ursprung des Alphabets und die Mondstationen, Leipzig, Hinrichs, 1913.

5F. D, Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie, Leipzig und Berlin, Teubner, 1925.

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Figure 1. Johann Bayer, Uranometria, 1603, detail of Taurus constellation.

recently, in 2004, Stefano Serafini and Giuseppe Sermonti presented respectively Lascrittura celeste: nell’alfabeto un’antica testimonianza archeoastronomica?6 and Untentativo di raffronto tra stazioni lunari e alfabeti7. But there are many more workstouching the subject.

Most of these documents, whether modern critical studies or delirious beliefs re-lated to various combinations of different alphabetic systems with stars and constel-lations were inspired or directly stem from the famous paragraph Athanasius Kircherdedicated to that question in Oedipus Aegyptianus8. This basic reference to Kircher forsome of the queerest claims is unjust and cruel for the 17th century polymath Jesuit,because indeed, in the paragraph he dedicates to celestial writing, he is among othersthe one who engaged most strongly against these ideas and traditions, showing, themadness of such attempts to read in the sky. But Kircher was interested in everything,a curious collector who reproduced an alphabet of the constellations and a map of thesky covered with Hebrew letters. These were copied from Gaffarel’s lecture des etoiles9

(Figure 2), and Agrippa’s Occult philosophy10 (Figure 3).

6S. S, La scrittura celeste: nell’alfabeto un’antica testimonianza archeoastronomica?, “RivistaItaliana di Archeoastronomia”, 2, 2004, pp. 95-105.

7G. S, Un tentativo di raffronto tra stazioni lunari e alfabeti, “Rivista Italiana di Archeoastrono-mia”, 2, 2004, pp. 107-116.

8A. K, Oedipus Aegyptianus, Roma, 1652.

9J. G, Cvriositez inovies sur la scvlptvre talismaniqve des Persans. Horoscope des patriarches etlectvre des estoilles, Paris, 1637.

10H. C. A. N, De Oculta Philosophia Libri Tres, Leiden, 1551.

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Figure 2. Gaffarel’s sky in Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptianus, Rome, 1655.

These two had built on some ideas of Pico della Mirandola, Guillaume Postel,and Raymon Lulle. The Renaissance flourished with such ideas, which were devel-oped, discussed or criticized. Kircher especially attacks and mocks the divinatory usepromoted by Gaffarel and his method of reading in the sky:

Si au mot AME, nous ajoutons devant un F, nous lisons FAME et en rajoutant

un R nous obtenons ARME; en retirant les deux premieres et les deux dernieres

lettres du mot EMPEREUR, nous lisons PERE; et de meme, en eliminant les trois

lettres centrales de ROYAUME, nous obtenons ROME11.

He treats such methods of childish, inept and inane and calls those who acceptthem, of disturbed minds and many more insults, fortunately all of them in Latin. Thearguments presented by Kircher could well be addressed to many of our colleaguesin the field of archaeoastronomy, i.e., in a quasi infinity of points and their arbitrarycombinations, the only trouble is with choice. With such methods, one can find andprove anything at all, at best it makes a good gymnastic for the brains.

As we see, we need not be anxious in front of the too rapid changes of the world.The world of ideas is very steady and conservative, it loves continuity. Indeed the epochof the Renaissance was in a certain way very similar to our present New Age, peoplewere feeling anguish in front of too rapid a change of knowledge and customs, andwere frantically looking for order at any rate.

11K, Oedipus Aegyptianus (cit. note 8), pp. 215-224.

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Figure 3. Agrippa’s sky alphabet in Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptianus,Rome, 1655.

The Renaissance esoteric tradition of sky alphabet was directly influenced by theJewish Cabbalah, mystic ideas presenting the creation of God as a text, a piece of liter-ature, a mathematical and semantic potential of creative combinations. The sephirothictree is a cosmogram. The Cabbalah states that the whole universe is a text written withthe 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and Adolph Frank, quoting the Zohar, recallsthat:

They speak of the celestial alphabet in the following manner: “Throughout the

entire extent of the heavens whose circumference surrounds the world, there are

figures and signs by means of which we may discover the most profound secrets

and mysteries. These figures are formed by the constellations and the stars which

are observed and investigated by the wise. He who is obliged to travel in the

morning shall rise at daybreak and look attentively toward the East. He will see

something like letters graven on the heavens, and placed one above the other.

Those brilliant forms are the letters with which God created the heaven and the

Earth; they form His mysterious and holy name”12.

It is supposed that Cabbalistic tradition dates from the Spanish middle-ages, butsimilar ideas were already present in the Revelation of Saint John: “In the beginningwas the verb”13. In the apparent worrisome disorder of society projected to the uni-versal scale, man was always looking for order and reason, and was convinced that theCreation of God is logical, well ordered and meaningful, and that God from the begin-ning has offered the answers to all of our anguishes, and that all we need is to learn howto read the message in the large book of the Universe.

Medieval literature presents good examples of the association of wisdom with theability of reading the messages of heaven on the sky vault. In the legend of Melusine,the young Raimondin is taken by his uncle for his education:

12A. F, The Kabbalah or the Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews, rev. and enl. I. Sossnitz, NewYork, The Cabbalah Publishing Company, 1926. See Zohar, II, ff. 74-76

13John 1:1.

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[. . . ] Count Aimery was full of qualities and much more a scholar than one might

imagine. Just by looking at the stars and observing their disposition, he knew the

future and what would happen in good or bad–crouched under a tree, the uncle

was looking at the stars, he seemed to be reading in the sky as if it were a book,

he was so absorbed that he did not give heed to anything14.

Medieval literature was justified by the biblical text itself, which uses in severalinstances such metaphors as “The sky was rolled up like a scroll”15. These texts werenot only inspiring popular literature, but very scholarly dissertations as well, such asthose of Gildas of Roma, a 13th century monk who establishes a parallel between celes-tial graphic signs and the letters of the alphabet on one side, and on the other, comparesthe angelic virtue to the ink for writing and the sky to a parchment stretched out by theLord to make of the Heaven the book of the Universe16. Or the other way round: “Allthe stars of the heavens will be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll”17. Thepersistence of such an association of the letters of the alphabet and writing, with thesky, astronomy or cosmology is at least of interest for cultural, historical, sociological,or psychological reasons, but the problem might be of good interest as well for the his-tory of astronomy and cosmology. Indeed, the alphabet may represent the cosmos, theUniverse.

When we use such expressions as “from Alpha to Omega”, we are alluding to atotality, a universal totality. Everything from the beginning to the end: “I am Alpha andOmega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord” in Revelation (1:8).

Alpha and Omega are sometimes used to translate the first and the last in the verseof Isaiah (48:12) “I am the first, I also am the last”. But that is an abuse because theformulation Alpha and Omega, could not appear before the Byzantine times. Of course,the Hebraic tradition had for long used the totality of the alphabet as a representationof other totalities or the Totality in general, the Universe, but certainly not the Greekalphabet. Psalm 119, for example, is an acrostic of 22 verses from Aleph to Taw. Wecould see an intention in the observation that Psalm 22 of David starts with the words“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” which are the last words uttered byChrist18. Again, presenting the relation of the beginning to the end, the beginning ofthe end, or the end as the foundation of a new beginning.

14A. B, Histoire de Melusine, “L’Ethnographie”, 46, 1951, pp. 7-45.

15John 6:14.

16“tout comme l’homme produit des signes par une application particuliere de la plume sur un supportmateriel, l’ange produit son langage figure par une application de sa ‘vertu’ au ciel empire (a une petiteou grande partie de celui-ci), dessinant des figures qui lui servent a manifester sa pensee, et qui ne sontvisibles que par un autre ange. Gilles etablit un parallele entre les signes graphiques celestes et les lettresde l’alphabet d’un cote, la vertu angelique et l’encre de l’autre, enfin entre le ciel et le parchemin commesupports de l’ecriture, en assimilant le ciel a une peau que tend Dieu, pour que le ciel devienne le livre de

l’univers [. . . ]”, I. R C, Arts du langage et theologie au Moyen Age, Ecole Pratique des Hautes

Etudes, programme de l’annee 2006-2007, I. La locution angelica selon Gilles de Rome.

17Isaiah 34:4.

18Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34.

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In many cultures it was believed that the alphabet had been given or revealed tomen by God himself19. In short, the relations between the alphabet and the heavenlyvault seems as old as writing itself.

The letters of different alphabets have been associated with the zodiacal constel-lations or the lunar mansions, this was easy with a Greek alphabet of 24 letters, butof course presented many difficulties and distortions with alphabets of 22 or 26 letterswhich are not congruent with the known division of the ecliptic by 12 signs or 36 decansor 27 or 28 lunar mansions.

The efforts to find structural equivalences between the heaven and the alphabet ledto many abuses, but there is a series of singularities I would like to present here.

According to Macrobius, the dead part of the year, the winter part, took placebetween Scorpio and Pisces, where the Milky Way crosses the ecliptic20. In Scorpiostarts the dark hemisphere, and according to Czubrytski, this is what means “darkness”in the Revelation21. “The persecution will last for five months”22 corresponds to

the arc of the zodiac from Scorpio to Pisces inclusively, on which is limited the

hemisphere of night, and then starts on the sign of Aries the hemisphere of the day.

If we can accept that Belzebub is to be found in Scorpio, then these five months

of persecution correspond to the power of the devil until Aries’ victory starting

a new year and a new era. According to Assyrian and Phoenician traditions, the

dark underworld of the year where the Sun passed winter started in the claws of

Scorpio23.

All this means that the part of the zodiac associated to life goes from Aries toLibra included, that is to say seven months. According to this author, this would be aspecificity of Assyrians and Phoenicians, but in fact we meet in very many traditionsthe same division of the year in the proportions of 5/7, corresponding to North/South;Night/Day; Death/Life, etc.24. Well, if we are offered here the Phoenicians, let us keepthem in mind as they were the inventors of an alphabet of 22 letters, an informationwhich will be of interest if we consider that from the first point of Aries to the last ofLibra we count 210 degrees and thus 21 decans bordered by 22 points.

Now has come the critical moment when my kind reader will start thinking I hadbetter not criticized the numerologists and their combinatorial use of the alphabet andthe stars, as I start feeling the same vertigo they did. Let us look at that a bit closer.In 1980, Christian Peder Moesgaard published an article concerning a cuneiform tabletfrom the British Museum where is written that the eclipses return to the same place in

19D, Antike Ansichten ueber den Ursprung der Schrift (cit. note 5), I, p. 2.

20M, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, New York, RCSS, 48, 1952, pp. 2-12.

21Revelation 8:12.

22Revelation 9:5.

23A. C, Komentarz astralystyczny do Apokalipsy Jana, Bydgoszcz, Polskie Towarzystwo Astro-logiczne, 1938, p. 40.

24A. L, The Milky Way, Path of the Souls, in V. K-D. K (eds.), Astronomical Traditions inPast Cultures, Sofia, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, National Astronomical Observatory Rozhen, 1996,pp. 148-161.

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the sky after 19 years25. All the scholars rejected the formulation as a scribal error,according to them, the scribe had confounded the Meton cycle with the Saros, butMoesgaard trusted the scribe. He placed all the full moons on a band of 10 degreesaround the ecliptic and found that the successive positions of the full Moon formeda very regular pattern made of two serpent-like undulations crossing regularly at 10degrees distance of each other. The full moons situated on the ecliptic were eclipsed, ofcourse. He called the figure the Full Moon Serpent. And so he rediscovered that indeedthe Meton cycle is also an eclipse cycle. He noticed as well that the Mesopotamiantables of eclipses and observations of star occultations were limited between Taurusand Scorpio, that is to say 210 degrees of the ecliptic, or 21 decans marked by 22 of thecrossing points on the ecliptic of the Full Moon Serpent. The winter part was altogetherignored by Mesopotamian astronomers. Thus limiting the system to the summer, lightand life part of the cosmos. The 21 decans, or 210 degrees from the first point of Taurusto the last of Scorpio. Taurus, the head and Scorpio the tail of the system correspondedto the whole alphabet from Aleph to Taw.

Now, we know a short series of Byzantine icons representing the Revelation, onwhich a serpent comes out of the mouth of an infernal monster, a Leviathan at thebottom of hell. This serpent crosses all the center of this icon upward to reach and bitethe heel of Adam kneeling in front of the Divine Throne. A striking singularity of theserepresentations is that the body of the serpent is covered with pairs of black and redrings. These are eclipses. These couples of rings are 21 or 22 in most of the knownexamples. On the icons of Venecja Lukow in Slovakia and Polana in Poland (Figure 4),each of these 22 eclipse representation is accompanied by a word or two. The names ofsins. Each of them starts with one or two capital letters. I first found some difficultiesto read these inscriptions, until I understood that the first capital letters should be takenoff the inscriptions.

These capital letters are simply the letters of the alphabet used as numbers. Alpha,Betha, Gamma, . . . etc. giving an ordered linear progression to the sins upward. Thesins are: A-Malediction, B-Quarreling, G-Envy, D-Lie, E-Anger, J-Pride, Z-Calumny,I-Usury, etc. Because the number of steps is 21 or 22, we could expect 21 or 22 differentletters attached to the successive stages, but the fact is that they were used only asnumbers, from A to Phi for the first nine digits, and then L for ten, and K for twenty.The letters of the alphabet in order were often used as a classificatory device to express atotality, but here we find a singularity, because although using Greek letters in a decimalway, the number of steps is only 22, so that it is almost certain that this icon reproducedan oriental older prototype based on the Phoenician/Hebrew alphabet of 22 letters26.

Other icons also associated with the Last Judgment and the Ascension to heavenrepresent a ladder instead of the serpent, the number of steps is sometimes of 21, 22 or23 degrees, sometimes more, sometimes less, but 22 seems the standard.

Other variants such as the representations of Saint John Climaque (of the Ladder)show a ladder standing from Earth to heaven with humans, saints or angels trying toreach the Lord, being attacked by demons. This recalls us of course of Jacob’s ladder

25K. P. M, The Full Moon Serpent, “Centaurus”, 24, 1980, pp. 51-96.

26There are only 21 eclipse stations represented, but we could start from the zero point out of the monster’smouth, or count the last step, the foot of Adam. We could also enter the problem of the silent “Aleph” andof the permanent problem in ancient arithmetic, whether or not to include the limits, do we start with azero or with one? etc. There is no room in this paper for such discussions.

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Figure 4. Icon of Polana, 16th century, National Museum, Cracow

and the angels coming up and down, but the number of steps can vary. So it seems theOrthodox tradition repeats an old iconographic, religious and cosmological motive of aladder to heaven, representing human existence. And the number of steps between theEarth and the sky is most often 22.

Let us now turn somewhere else. We know the domes in general like those ofmodern planetariums represent the celestial vault, a camera obscura, a microcosm. Theprototype of all semispherical domes, before their invention by the progresses of ar-chitecture, is the tholos, a corbel construction also called false vault. One of the mostbeautiful example is certainly the tholos of the SacredWell at Santa Cristina, in Sardinia(Figure 5).

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Figure 5. Sacred well at Santa Cristina in Sardinia, Italy. Plan by A. Lebeuf, 2007.

I have studied, and published partially the results of my investigations on thismonument. It shows that it was built very precisely to receive and measure the lightof the Moon at the time of lunistices. It is an instrument for the observation of thedeclinations of Moon in lunistice during the Draconic cycle of 18, 61 years. When themoonlight descends on the wall of the well, it creates a ladder of light by hitting theedges of the stone rows. Let us now remember that the tradition of dividing the “useful”part of the sky in 22 points was attributed to middle or near oriental archaic traditions.Of course we also keep in mind that the prototype of all alphabets is the Phoenicianone which invariably counts 22 letters. Now well, the Phoenician influence in the lateBronze epoch of Sardinia is well documented.

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The well at Santa Cristina is certainly a cosmic temple, a sort of primitive plan-etarium, a camera obscura reproducing on a minor scale the movements of heaven, amicrocosm. In these conditions, we will certainly appreciate that the number of rowsof stone in this perfect construction is precisely of 22. Could this be casual?27.

27A. L, The Nuraghic Well of Santa Cristina, Paulilatino, Oristano, Sardinia. A Verification of theAstronomical Hypothesis: Work in Process, Preliminary Results, “Archaeologia Baltica”, 10, 2008, pp.155-163.