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.Just sky.Sometimes I feel I may fall up into the sky.If the stars are campfires, I would like to visit those other hunterfolk - the ones who wander.Then I feel good about falling up.But if the stars are holes in a skin, I become afraid.1 don’t want to fall up through a hole and into the flame of power.I wish I knew which was true.I don’t like not knowing.I do not imagine that many members of a hunter/gatherer group had thoughts like these about the stars.Perhaps, over the ages, a few did, but never all these thoughts in the same person.Yet, sophisticated ideas are common in such communities.For example, the !Kung* Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana have an explanation for the Milky Way, which at their latitude is often overhead.They call it ‘the backbone of night,’ as if the sky were some great beast inside which we live.Their explanation makes the Milky Way useful as well as understandable.The !Kung believe the Milky Way holds up the night; that if it were not for the Milky Way, fragments of darkness would come crashing down at our feet.It is an elegant idea.* The exclamation point is a click, made by touching the tongue against the inside of the incisors, and simultaneously pronouncing the K.Metaphors like those about celestial campfires or galactic backbones were eventually replaced in most human cultures by another idea: The powerful beings in the sky were promoted to gods.They were given names and relatives, and special responsibilities for the cosmic services they were expected to perform.There was a god or goddess for every human concern.Gods ran Nature.Nothing could happen without their direct intervention.If they were happy, there was plenty of food, and humans were happy.But if something displeased the gods - and sometimes it took very little - the consequences were awesome: droughts, storms, wars, earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics.The gods had to be propitiated, and a vast industry of priests and oracles arose to make the gods less angry.But because the gods were capricious, you could not be sure what they would do.Nature was a mystery.It was hard to understand the world.Little remains of the Heraion on the Aegean isle of Samos, one of the wonders of the ancient world, a great temple dedicated to Hera, who began her career as goddess of the sky.She was the patron deity of Samos, playing the same role there as Athena did in Athens.Much later she married Zeus, the chief of the Olympian gods.They honeymooned on Samos, the old stories tell us.The Greek religion explained that diffuse band of light in the night sky as the milk of Hera, squirted from her breast across the heavens, a legend that is the origin of the phrase Westerners still use - the Milky Way.Perhaps it originally represented the important insight that the sky nurtures the Earth; if so, that meaning seems to have been forgotten millennia ago.We are, almost all of us, descended from people who responded to the dangers of existence by inventing stories about unpredictable or disgruntled deities.For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations, as in ancient Greece in the time of Homer, where there were gods of the sky and the Earth, the thunderstorm, the oceans and the underworld, fire and time and love and war; where every tree and meadow had its dryad and maenad.For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable.Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia: on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea.* Suddenly there were people who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from simpler forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun.And that the stars were very far away.* As an aid to confusion, Ionia is not in the Ionian Sea; it was named by colonists from the coast of the Ionian Sea.This revolution made Cosmos and Chaos.The early Greeks had believed that the first being was Chaos, corresponding to the phrase in Genesis in the same context, ‘without form’.Chaos created and then mated with a goddess called Night, and their offspring eventually produced all the gods and men.A universe created from Chaos was in perfect keeping with the Greek belief in an unpredictable Nature run by capricious gods.But in the sixth century B.C., in Ionia, a new concept developed, one of the great ideas of the human species.The universe is knowable, the ancient Ionians argued, because it exhibits an internal order: there are regularities in Nature that permit its secrets to be uncovered.Nature is not entirely unpredictable; there are rules even she must obey.This ordered and admirable character of the universe was called Cosmos.But why Ionia, why in these unassuming and pastoral landscapes, these remote islands and inlets of the Eastern Mediterranean? Why not in the great cities of India or Egypt, Babylonia, China or Mesoamerica? China had an astronomical tradition millennia old; it invented paper and printing, rockets, clocks, silk, porcelain, and ocean-going navies.Some historians argue it was nevertheless too traditionalist a society, too unwilling to adopt innovations.Why not India, an extremely rich, mathematically gifted culture? Because, some historians maintain, of a rigid fascination with the idea of an infinitely old universe condemned to an endless cycle of deaths and rebirths, of souls and universes, in which nothing fundamentally new could ever happen [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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