53. United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change—Phase III Report, Feb. 15, 2001, 30, govinfo.library.unt.edu/nssg/PhaseIIIFR.pdf (accessed Apr. 4, 2016).
54. Council on Competitiveness, Competitive Index: Where America Stands, 2007, 15, 67, www.compete.org/storage/images/uploads/File/PDF%20Files/Competitiveness_Index_Where_America_Stands_March_2007.pdf (accessed Apr. 4, 2016).
55. Joan Johnson-Freese, Heavenly Ambitions: America’s Quest to Dominate Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), ix.
56. Marc Kaufman and Dafna Linzer, “China Criticized for Anti-Satellite Missile Test,” Washington Post, Jan. 19, 2007; Johnson-Freese, Heavenly Ambitions, 9–10, 15.
57. Translation displayed at the British Museum, room 7. Another translation of the Standard Inscription, adapted from that by Samuel M. Paley, reads, in part: “the divine weapon of the Great Gods, the potent king, the king of the world, the king of Assyria; . . . the powerful warrior who always lived by [his] trust in Assur, his lord; who has no rival among the princes of the four quarters of the earth; [who is] the shepherd of his people, fearless in battle, the overpowering tidewater who has no opponent; [who is] the king, subjugator of the unsubmissive, who rules the total sum of all humanity; [who is] the potent warrior, who tramples his enemies, who crushes all the adversaries; [who is] the disperser of the host of the haughty; [who is] the king who always lives by [his] trust in the Great Gods, his lords; and captured all the lands himself, ruled all their mountainous districts, [and] received their tribute; who takes hostages, who establishes victory over all their lands.” Vaughn E. Crawford, Prudence O. Harper, and Holly Pittman, Assyrian Reliefs and Ivories in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Palace Reliefs of Assurnasirpal II and Ivory Carvings from Nimrud (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), full text at archive.org/stream/AssyrianReliefsandIvoriesinTheMetropolitanMuseumofArtPalaceReliefsofAssurnasirpalIIan/AssyrianReliefsandIvoriesinTheMetropolitanMuseumofArtPalaceReliefsofAssurnasirpalIIan_djvu.txt (accessed Apr. 5, 2016).
58. J. H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Overseas Empires in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Praeger, 1971), 3, 5–6.
59. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1982), 133.
60. Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt” [print title] or “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush” [online title], New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004.
61. Maureen Dowd, “Are We Rome? Tu Betchus!” op-ed, New York Times, Oct. 11, 2008.
62. Mick Weinstein, “Ben’s Bid to Boost Buck,” Yahoo Finance, June 6, 2008, finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/stockblogs/86614 (link disabled).
2. STAR POWER
1. See discussion of biological timekeeping in organisms from blue-green algae to humans in Roger G. Newton, Galileo’s Pendulum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4–23.
2. For instance, the ca. 35,000 BC Lebombo bone from the mountains bordering South Africa and Swaziland; the ca. 20,000 BC Ishango bone from the border between Zaire and Uganda; the ca. 18,000 BC cave drawings at Lascaux, France. It is speculated that many of the early notched “calendar bones” were kept by women in order to monitor menstrual cycles.
3. Ronald A. Wells, “Astronomy in Egypt,” in Astronomy Before the Telescope, ed. Christopher B. F. Walker (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 33–34; James Henry Breasted, “The Beginnings of Time-Measurement and the Origins of Our Calendar,” Scientific Monthly 41:4 (Oct. 1935), 294.
4. In Astronomy Before the Telescope, ed. Walker, see David Pingree, “Astronomy in India,” 129, for a discussion of the kalpa and associated units, and Anthony F. Aveni, “Astronomy in the Americas,” 272–73, for the Maya.
5. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 104, 192–97. Lanz von Liebenfels, publisher of Ostara, was preoccupied with all things occult, strange, spiritual, and Aryan. The subtitle of Ostara translates as something like “the blond ones and the rights of man.” Hitler discovered this publication as a young man and went to the Ostara office to buy back issues, but he was so obviously poor that Liebenfels simply gave him the copies.
6. Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Picturing Heaven in Early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 45–47, 238, 316–19, 335–36. The Han view of Heaven conflated the sky and the supreme deity; a tomb being a microcosm, its ceiling represents the celestial realm. Furthermore, squareness refers to Earth, roundness to Heaven. Regarding the lunar lodges, writes Tseng, the ancient Chinese divided the sky into twenty-eight segments. Within each segment, the brighter stars were seen as a lodge—a place to rest or reside—because the Moon moved cyclically from one segment to the next. Jessica Rawson, in “The Eternal Palaces of the Western Han: A New View of the Universe,” Artibus Asiae 59:1/2 (1999), notes that the more elaborate of the Han rock-cut tombs “were complete settings for the afterlife. Each tomb was an entire universe centered on its occupant” (13). Our thanks to Jessica Rawson of Oxford University and John P. C. Moffett, librarian of the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge University, for their assistance.
7. Clive Ruggles, “Archaeoastronomy in Europe,” in Astronomy Before the Telescope, ed. Walker, 21–23.
8. Ron Cowen, “Peru’s Sunny View,” Science News 171:18 (May 5, 2007), 280–81; J. McK Malville et al., “Astronomy of Nabta Playa,” African Skies/Cieux Africains 11 (July 2007), 2–7.
9. As an example of detailed Chinese celestial chronicles, Gang Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, c. 2100 BC–1900 AD: Contributions in Economics and Economic History 188 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 36, excerpts a Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1046–256 BC) book on the positions of Taurus at night: “It shows up from the east at sea level in the Sixth Month, / . . . Reaches the zenith in the Eighth Month, / . . . Drops to sea level in the Tenth Month.” Colin Ronan, “Astronomy in China, Korea and Japan,” in Astronomy Before the Telescope, ed. Walker, 247, stresses the exclusivity of astronomical, as well as meteorological and astrological, activity and the potential disruptiveness of the findings. Everyone who was not part of the emperor’s staff of expert astronomers was discouraged from engaging in astronomy-related activities. Astronomical records were closely guarded—in effect, classified documents. Also see F. Richard Stephenson, “Modern Uses of Ancient Astronomy,” in Astronomy Before the Telescope, ed. Walker, 331–32.
10. Noel Barnard, “Astronomical Data from Ancient Chinese Records: The Requirements of Historical Research Methodology,” East Asian History 6 (Dec. 1993), 47–74; David S. Nivison, Kevin Pang, et al., “Astronomical Evidence for the Bamboo Annals’ Chronicle of Early Xia,” Early China 15 (1990), 87–95, 97–196; Salvo De Meis and Jean Meeus, “Quintuple Planetary Groupings—Rarity, Historical Events and Popular Beliefs,” J. Brit. Astronomical Assoc. 104:6 (1994), 293–97.
11. Alexander Jones, “The Antikythera Mechanism and the Public Face of Greek Science,” Proceedings of Science, PoS(Antikythera & SKA)038, 2012, pos.sissa.it/cgi-bin/reader/conf.cgi?confid=170; Tony Freeth and Alexander Jones, “The Cosmos in the Antikythera Mechanism,” ISAW Papers 4, Feb. 2012, dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/4/ (accessed Apr. 7, 2017); Tony Freeth et al., “Decoding the Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator Known as the Antikythera Mechanism,” Nature 444 (Nov. 30, 2006), 587–91. Was the Mechanism unique? One notable, though nonsurviving, related object is the sphaera of Posidonius, described in a firsthand account by Cicero, “in which single turnings have the same effect for the Sun and Moon and the five planets as occurs in single days and nights.” In addition, historians of technology contend that nobody in the ancient world would have cast a complex device full-scale in “expensive and intractable” bronze unless it was already clear from previous wooden models that it would work, and wooden versions and components do not survive; the Me
chanism would have been “part of a long period of technical evolution largely hidden from us.” Stephanie Dalley and John Peter Oleson, “Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw: The Context of Invention in the Ancient World,” Technology and Culture 44:1 (Jan. 2003), 16. Re ruling out the possibility of a later date for the Mechanism, Jones writes, in part, “Also the Egyptian calendar scale on the front was designed to be removable so that the beginning of the Egyptian year could be lined up with any position of the Sun in the zodiac. That was necessary because the Egyptian calendar year was always 365 days long, with no leap years, so that the calendar year gradually shifted backwards relative to the natural seasons and the Sun’s apparent motion through the zodiac. But after Egypt came under Roman rule in 30 BC, leap years were instituted every 4 years, so after that reform there would have been no need to make the scale adjustable in this way. More generally, the state of knowledge of astronomy built into the Mechanism makes good sense for around the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, whereas by say Ptolemy’s time (2nd century AD) it would have seemed quite crude and archaic” (email to Avis Lang, Apr. 7, 2017). For context, see “Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” exhibition curated by Alexander R. Jones, Oct. 2016–Apr. 2017, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, isaw.nyu.edu/exhibitions/time-cosmos. The advanced technologies used in recent work on the object were provided by X-Tek Systems and Hewlett-Packard.
12. See, e.g., D. L. Simms, “Archimedes and the Burning Mirrors of Syracuse,” Technology and Culture 18:1 (Jan. 1977), 1–24; Wilbur Knorr, “The Geometry of Burning-Mirrors in Antiquity,” Isis 74:1 (Mar. 1983), 53–73. In the fall of 2005 David Wallace, a mechanical engineer at MIT, and his students staged two simulations of this incident; see detailed accounts at “Archimedes Death Ray: Idea Feasibility Testing,” web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experiments/deathray/10_ArchimedesResult.html, and “2.009 Archimedes Death Ray: Testing with MythBusters,” web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experiments/deathray/10_Mythbusters.html (accessed Dec. 17, 2006).
13. John Noble Wilford, “Homecoming of Odysseus May Have Been in Eclipse,” New York Times, June 24, 2008.
14. In Herodotus, Histories, 440 BC, trans. George Rawlinson, available as The History of Herodotus, Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.html (accessed Apr. 4, 2017), we read: “As, however, the balance had not inclined in favour of either nation, another combat took place in the sixth year, in the course of which, just as the battle was growing warm, day was on a sudden changed into night. This event had been foretold by Thales, the Milesian, who forewarned the Ionians of it, fixing for it the very year in which it actually took place. The Medes and Lydians, when they observed the change, ceased fighting, and were alike anxious to have terms of peace agreed on” (1.74).
15. Book 9.12–21, The Histories of Polybius, Loeb Classical Library Edition, vol. 4, 1922–27, text in the public domain, penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/9*.html (accessed Apr. 4, 2017).
16. Histories of Polybius, 9.15.1–5.
17. Histories of Polybius, 9.19.1–3. The “men acquainted with astronomy” would have included, most notably, Anaxagoras, who may have seen the eclipses of both 463 BC and 478 BC and who as a young man had hypothesized that the Moon is opaque and thus capable of casting a shadow on Earth; see Dana Mackenzie, “Don’t Blame It on the Gods,” New Scientist, June 14, 2008, 50–51.
18. Alan C. Bowen, “The Art of the Commander and the Emergence of Predictive Astronomy,” in Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. C. J. Tuplin and T. E. Rihll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 76, 87–89.
19. Edward Cavendish Drake, A New Universal Collection of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages and Travels (London: J. Cooke, 1768), 32.
20. For overviews of astrology in history, see, e.g., S. J. Tester, A History of Western Astrology (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1987); Anthony Grafton, “Girolamo Cardano and the Tradition of Classical Astrology: The Rothschild Lecture, 1995,” Proc. Amer. Philosophical Society 142:3 (Sept. 1998), 323–33; Ellic Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare During World War II (London: Rider, 1972). Referring to Rudolf II, Kepler wrote in a letter on Easter 1611, “Astrology does the emperor endless harm when a shrewd astrologer wishes to play lightly with the credulity of people. I must see to it that it does not happen to our emperor. . . . The ordinary astrology is a mass of garbage and can easily be twisted and its messages recited out of both sides of the mouth.” Mark Graubard, “Astrology’s Demise and Its Bearing on the Decline and Death of Beliefs,” Osiris 13 (1958), 239. See also Richard Kremer’s review of Tester’s History of Western Astrology in Speculum 65 (1990), 209; Sheila J. Rabin, “Kepler’s Attitude Toward Pico and the Anti-Astrology Polemic,” Renaissance Quarterly 50:3 (Autumn 1997), 759, 764.
21. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos I.1, ed. and trans. F. E. Robbins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 3–4.
22. Grafton, “Girolamo Cardano,” 326.
23. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos I.4: “Of the Power of the Planets”; I.5: “Of Beneficent and Maleficent Planets”; I.6: “Of Masculine and Feminine Planets”; II.3: “Of the Familiarities Between Countries and the Triplicities and Stars.”
24. This is echoed in Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism, 103: “[Otto] Pöllner’s first work, Mundan-Astrologie [Mundane Astrology] (1914), laid the basis of political astrology by casting the horoscopes of state, people and cities, in order to determine their future destiny, while his second work, Schicksal und Sterne [Destiny and the Stars] (1914), traced the careers of European royalty according to the dictates of their natal horoscopes. [Ernst] Tiede gave an analysis of all belligerent state-leaders’ horoscopes, before declaring that there was a two to one chance of victory for the Central Powers.”
25. Often, of course, a celestial configuration does have a clear connection to an earthly event. Major earthquakes are more likely to take place at new and full Moons, when tides are at their highest and lowest and especially huge loads of water are straining plate boundaries. But such phenomena are a matter of ordinary physics and seismology, not astrology. The opposing view is stated by a well-known Indian astrologer, founder of the Astrological Magazine, who contended in his book Astrology in Forecasting Weather and Earthquakes, “There is a need on the part of the seismologists and meteorologists to shed their prejudices and embark on the investigation of the ingenious methods used for thousands of years with such success.” Michael T. Kaufman, “Bangalore Venkata Raman, Indian Astrologer, Dies at 86,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 1998.
26. Grafton, “Girolamo Cardano,” 326.
27. “[T]he mistakes of those who are not accurately instructed in its practice, and they are many, as one would expect in an important and many-sided art, have brought about the belief that even its true predictions depend upon chance. . . . Secondly, most, for the sake of gain, claim credence for another art in the name of this, and deceive the vulgar, because they are reputed to foretell many things, even those that cannot naturally be known beforehand. . . . Nor is this deservedly done; it is the same with philosophy—we need not abolish it because there are evident rascals among those that pretend to it.” Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos I:2: “That Knowledge by Astronomical Means is Attainable, and How Far.”
28. George Sarton, “Astrology in Roman Law and Politics,” Speculum 31:1 (Jan. 1956), 160; Tester, History of Western Astrology, 110.
29. During the Thirty Years’ War, at the Spanish court, diplomat Diego de Saavedra Fajardo argued against the recommendation of Philip IV’s Council of State that the king should stop paying attention to astrological predictions. For Saavedra, both astrology and history provided knowledge and relevant models of action; as one historian writes, “[D]ivine and natural laws could not be known by humanity without the use of somewhat trustworthy learned disciplines. . . . Without these means, the entire paradigm of order and organic linkage between macrocosm and human microcosm collapsed.” Abel A. Alves, “Complicated Cosmos: Astrology and Anti-Machiavellianism
in Saavedra’s Empresas Políticas,” Sixteenth Century J. 25:1 (Spring 1994), 67–68.
30. Tester, History of Western Astrology, 220.
31. William D. Stahlman, “Astrology in Colonial America: An Extended Query,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 13:4 (Oct. 1956), 557.
32. See also, e.g., N. M. Swerdlow, “Galileo’s Horoscopes,” J. History of Astronomy 35 (pt. 2):119 (2004), 135–41; Mario Biagioli, “Galileo the Emblem Maker,” Isis 81:2 (June 1990), 232–36; Richard S. Westfall, “Science and Patronage: Galileo and the Telescope,” Isis 76:1 (Mar. 1985), 11–30; Nick Kollerstrom, “Galileo’s Astrology,” in Largo Campo di Filosofare, Eurosymposium Galileo 2001, ed. J. Montesinos and C. Solís (Puerto de la Cruz, 2001), 421–31, also at www.skyscript.co.uk/galast.html; Galileo’s Astrology, ed. Nicholas Campion and Nick Kollerstrom, special issue of Culture and Cosmos 7:1 (Spring/Summer 2003).
33. See, e.g., Stahlman, “Astrology in Colonial America,” 561; Ellic Howe, Urania’s Children: The Strange World of the Astrologers (London: William Kimber, 1967), 21–67; Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 14–17. In the City of London the Stationers’ Company, a craft guild, had been granted the monopoly on almanac publishing as early as 1603, when it began to publish an annual almanac. The Vox Stellarum, written by Francis Moore for many years (even well after his death), had a print order of 393,750 copies in 1803. The first weekly astrological periodical in any language, published in London every Saturday beginning in 1824, was called The Straggling Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century; Or, Magazine of Celestial Intelligences; the first almanac to have daily predictions was The Prophetic Messenger for 1827, An Original, Entertaining, and Interesting Melange—also published in London (Howe, Urania’s Children, plates 1 and 2, following p. 36). Stahlman writes that in the American colonies between 1639 and 1799, more than a thousand almanacs were published, a few of them with considerable input from the colonies’ earliest astronomers (561). Writing in 1931, Carl Jung criticized the common notion that “astrology had been disposed of long since and was something that could safely be laughed at. But today, rising out of the social deeps, it knocks at the doors of the universities from which it was banished some three hundred years ago.” C. G. Jung, “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man,” in Civilisation in Transition, quoted in Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 12–13.
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