I’ve been working through a decision of late, and when it comes to such things I tend to become a whirl of thoughts, breezes of a hundred ideas whirring through my mind, trying to sift through it all, hoping to find a clue of a positive outcome in one direction. But the fates are secretive with their knowledge. How to know what kind of future we create when we make a choice?
I tend to seek out omens in times like this—not with a belief necessarily, but more in just hints that might point out a line of thought, might echo something in the whir that I can’t help but continue to sort through. A feather in an unexpected place on a walk; the appearance of an unfamiliar bird at the sill. Some kind of hard mercy to shrive the mind, as lines in a Christian Wiman poem relay, although not in that order.
On Sunday night—or early morning—I stepped outside and found myself looking for northern lights, my son texting me excitedly that they were out as he drove home. And I saw maybe the faintest trace, a ghostly movement in the darkening sky. Is this a sign? And then I saw Cassiopeia’s chair—one of the handful of constellations I can recognize with some consistency. Outlines of an almost W that will later turn into an M as it moves across the sky, yet never rising or setting, always present in the circumpolar sky. And I realized it was the first time I had seen the night sky, the stars, since March.
Cassiopeia’s chair covers 1.451% of the sky. It has roughly five stars, but many more are adjacent and surrounding. It had also once been the location of a supernova, which Tycho Brahe—he of the golden nose—had recorded in 1572. Remnants of that supernova are still present, but its shine is no longer visible, a ‘naked eye’ star-that-was. It is now the strongest radio source that can be observed beyond the solar system. What kind of message might it be sending, I wonder.
In myth, Cassiopeia was an Ethiopian queen who boasted that either herself, or her daughter, Andromeda, was far more beautiful than all of Poseidon’s Nereid daughters. As punishment for such boasts, Andromeda had to be sacrificed, chained to a cliff awaiting the feast of a sea monster to satisfy the bruising of Poseidon’s ever-fragile god-ego. Perseus meanwhile happened to swoop over Ethiopia after having slain Medusa, and was overcome by Andromeda’s beauty (apparently agreeing with Cassiopeia) and vowed to marry her after he dispatched the sea beast. Which, snicker-snack, he did.
Cassiopeia, however, was punished for her boast (because fragile gods cannot abide a woman speaking truth) and tied to her throne, set into the nightsky on a circumpolar journey.
I had always imagined her throne as more of a reclining lounge, some greco-roman type of throne, perhaps. But renaissance illustrations show various means of Cassiopeia tied to a chair and the points of the constellation are the points at which her knees bend, for instance—which in all honesty is doing a lot of work for a shape so clear, with its chaise longue shape. Maybe they didn’t have such furniture in their imagination in ancient times. Maybe Cassiopeia is telling us to rest more, and they misunderstood the message.
Because Cassiopeia’s chair is almost wholly within the Milky Way, the Celts attributed it to the Llys Dôn, the kingdom of the fairies, thought to be ruled by a king of the fairies, but is more likely ruled by a queen.
They might have been hinting at something, because Cassiopeia’s constellation includes a runaway star, a massive supergiant that moves at such speed that it creates a bow shock four lightyears ahead of its arrival. Magnetic fields and the particles flowing off the star collide with gas and dust, tracing filaments of other magnetic fields—revealing things in the universe that would otherwise remain hidden.
Such as, perhaps, fairies that had momentarily lost the power of vanishing in the cosmic dust.
Along the side of Cassiopeia’s chair are two nebulas—called the Heart and Soul nebulas. Emitting ion gas, the Heart Nebula was first identified by William Herschel in 1787. His sister Caroline, who helped with all of his calculations and data, was not similarly attributed in this ‘discovery.’ Despite also identifying several comets and nebulae herself, her own observations were interrupted to help him record his observations. She wrote in her account of their work: “but at the end of 1783 I had only marked fourteen [comets], when my sweeping was interrupted by being employed to write down my brother's observations…”1
Still, Caroline’s contribution was recognized, as she would go on to become the first woman to be read at the Royal Society, gaining a stipend from the crown for her work, placing her in that elite class of being paid for one’s work—a professional astronomer. She would later become one of the first women to be admitted as a member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. The other woman, in the same year, was her friend, Mary Somerville—for whom the term scientist was first coined.
Mary Somerville published her first paper, “On the Magnetizing Power of the More Refrangible Solar Rays,” in 1826. She had persevered through a first marriage to a husband who didn’t believe in women’s education, and after his early death, she excelled in becoming a celebrated polymath. She also became a tutor and friend to Ada Lovelace, whose mathematics would go on to help create the first computer. Somerville would go on to write books that made astronomy and science understandable to a wider audience. Her second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, sold 15,000 copies and became the most widely read publication on science until Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
Somerville wrote: “In [astronomy] we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with everything that exists in the heavens or on earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motions of animate and inanimate beings, and is as sensible in the descent of a rain-drop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the moon.”2
While Somerville believed in Victorian ideas of humanity being superior to the natural world, she argued vehemently for the interdependence of all life. In 1868, when she was 87, she became the first person to sign John Stuart Mill’s unsuccessful petition for female suffrage.
In 1847, across the Atlantic, Maria Mitchell identified a new comet, making one of the most celebrated astronomical discoveries of the era. Her work earned a gold medal from the King of Denmark and induction into the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848—the only woman to be inducted in the nineteenth century (and it would still be nearly 100 years before another woman was inducted). Mitchell’s achievement was also acclaimed at another widely held event of that year—the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848.
That same year, Caroline Herschel died—a year which would have found Emily Dickinson attending Mount Holyoke, which the president and Dickinson’s teacher, Mary Lyon described as a “castle of science.” And in fact, Dickinson references Astronomy, and Herschel, in a poem:
Nature and God—I neither knew Yet Both so well knew me They startled, like Executors Of My Identity. Yet Neither told—that I could learn— My Secret as secure As Herschel's private interest Or Mercury's Affair— F803/J835
I often turn to poems as a type of florilegia, another way to look for a certain phrase, word that might lead to the hint of an answer, to offer some small guidance. I’ve marked the poem above before, but finding it arrive unsolicited as I wandered along the paths of Cassiopeia—is there something more to glean from it, as it arrives for me in the meandering thoughts of stars and sister ancestors who have also looked to the sky and seen something speaking back?
Whether the stars have an influence on us or not, it’s clear that there is a relationship with how the words we write and read fold back into the landscape, the night sky. It’s both an offering and a kind of hope—that something looks back at us. We write in the hopes of someone looking at our words, which can sometimes feel as nebulous as our own hearts and souls, longing for direction despite a distance that is unknowable. I wonder that it would be any different when we find the unexpected arrival of a bird feather, the appearance of a favorite poem, or the return of a familiar star to our night sky. To seek and find that something “quickened toward” us, as Dickinson once wrote to a friend. An offering, a sign, a hope.
The word throne etymologically means to hold firmly, support. Its earliest definition meant first “the seat of God or a saint in heaven,” which, in the circularity of eternal beings, is how Cassiopeia’s chair is now truly a throne in the heavens—holding and supporting the lines of a woman who dared to confront a god.
Its root is also tied to words like fermata, a sustained tone, and firmament. And somehow the circularity of all of this—the whir of thoughts in my mind, the ties between women astronomer ancestors, Dickinson’s love of astronomy—all of which I’ve thought of writing about before—arrived unbidden, circling like imaginative winds holding up the sky firmly, despite my questioning, anxious heart and soul.
And perhaps that is the best omen I can seek—one that returns to the question asked. Because so often if we ask the question, something in us believes that an answer is waiting to move towards us.
Excerpted at: http://www.messier.seds.org/xtra/Bios/cherschel.html
Freya, the innocuous tryanny of humans is forgetfulness or rather ignorance; we are too close to ourselves because, obviously, the world asks and takes so much and then, articles and newsletters like yours, come as gently as a breeze to secure that, out there, amidst the stars and leaves, we can be and breathe, Thank you!
Stunningly beautiful and utterly fascinating! I hope you arrived at a conclusion that makes your heart feel calm. ❤️🔥