The insatiable ability for humankind to not just acquire knowledge but to actually imagine it into reality is nothing less than miraculous. But it also hastened the growth of civilizations. It fueled mysteries that defied knowledge and it became central to ancient religions. They were inextricably linked to the heavens in a way that we aren’t.
As agriculture took root and cultures shifted from nomadic to agrarian with the consequence being the establishment of villages, then towns, then cities, the night sky helped guide the people towards accurate planting and harvesting routines. Our modern astronomers and telescopes are reaching back nearly to the Big Bang and the beginning of time in our universe, able to literally see the invisible, but most of modern humanity is wholly unacquainted with our own cosmic neighborhood because the night sky has been rendered almost meaningless.Īncients the world over “read” the night sky and correlated it to the passage of time and the change of seasons and they wove its meaning into their daytime pursuits. It is ironic that the more we know the less we see. It wasn’t just something out there to be feared, it was fully present and revered. The Milky Way has a name like an avenue because it was a route to be traveled and understood. They understood its contours, they had names for everything.
The night sky was so clear that they became familiar with it to a degree we can’t imagine. It was so vivid that ancient people not only looked at the night sky with curiosity, they studied it. The beauty of this situation was that the clear night sky would be ablaze with stars and planets, galaxies, moons and comets, asteroids and meteors.
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