Thoughts Beyond The Milky Way

What is it about the night sky? The cloudless night sky. The “starry, starry night” sky.

If it inspired Vincent van Gogh, then it’s obviously not just me. I think it’s a lot of people. In fact, it’d be a lot more people if they just stopped paying attention to clickbait news for a moment. Imagine the awe they’d experience if they spent a clear night on the highest hill well above the tree line.

Their minds free, they’d see what Plato saw so many centuries ago. A wonder so great can’t help but focus one’s thoughts on pure, unadulterated introspection.

Would that calm frayed nerves? Or would it only make things worse?

I’ve always fallen into the first category. Do you?

For as long as I can remember, the stars have captivated me. Not just the stars. Not just the space between the stars. But what was beyond those stars.

Think of it as the moral equivalent of thoughts evoked when contemplating what lies beyond the mountain, beyond the horizon, beyond the very dimension in which we reside.

OK, settle down. I’m not going to go full Rod Serling on you. (You don’t ever want to go full Rod Serling.)

The point is, the other day, while skimming the interweb, I passed by a picture of a landscape at night. My eyes bypassed the land and went straight to the glistening points of light in the black sky. They sparkled like gems.

Yes, even in a still picture I could see them twinkle. And that’s not because of cataracts. I just went to the eye doctor, and my orbs are fine (although the right one likes to wander).

Anyway, the image threw me back to 1979 and a clear, crystalline sky in the wee hours of a winter morning in Vermont. I was driving back to New Haven. Got pulled over by a cop because the truck ahead of me was speeding. The cop didn’t care. I did.

As he walked back to his car, I held the ticket tightly and looked toward the dark horizon.

Instinct told me to look up.

There they were. More stars than I had ever seen before.

I went to school in the city. You can only see a few dozen stars above the city lights.

I grew up in the suburbs. I was used to seeing hundreds of stars on the clearest nights. In addition, with no moon, I could see an open cluster (the Pleiades), a nebula (the Orion Nebula), and a galaxy (the Andromeda Galaxy—at 2.5 million light-years, the most distant object easily visible to the naked eye).

But in unpopulated rural Vermont, I could see thousands of stars. It was like being in a planetarium. I felt like I had entered a different dimension. Not just a physical one. Something of metaphysical importance.

That’s what Plato wrote. And what Aristotle echoed. Plato saw the heavens as a means of understanding the order of the universe. Aristotle took things further, studying the heavens to understand the physical world and man’s place within it.

Centuries later, Immanuel Kant brought the discussion back to the individual. He connected the starry heavens above with the moral law within.

Some might say that’s metaphysics.

Which brings us back to Rod Serling. Picture (if you will) the first-season opening of The Twilight Zone with the camera cascading down a starry night sky.

Now recall the omnipresent star field during the opening of Star Trek.

Once upon a time, our culture shared the same television experiences. Millions watched the same programs, saw the same images, and heard the same stories. The ancients had something similar, except their screen was the night sky. For thousands of years, people gazed at the same Pleiades, Orion, and Andromeda, yet imagined remarkably different stories among their stars.

Then there’s the Milky Way. That river of stars that meanders across the darkness from one horizon to another.

It’s hard to miss. That night in the valley below the Green Mountains, it shimmered brightly like spilled silvery glitter.

At least that’s what I saw. It was winter. The snowy fields echoed a bluish tint. You know what I mean. Like the kind you see in Christmas cards. I remember making Christmas decorations in Cub Scouts. We sprinkled liberal amounts of silver (and gold) glitter. Ergo, I saw silver glitter in the Vermont sky.

The Greeks saw spilled milk (from the goddess Hera). They called it “galaxias kyklos,” or “milky circle.” That’s where we get the word “galaxy.”

The Romans, as usual, stole from the Greeks. They called this milky river “Via Lactea,” or “Milk Road.” That’s where we get the name “Milky Way.”

Before the Greeks and the Romans, the ancient Egyptians saw not the breast milk of a goddess, but perhaps the goddess Nut herself. At least that’s what some modern researchers believe.

The Chinese called it the Silver River (Yinhe). It separated the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, two lovers who would reunite once a year.

Hindu traditions kept the river theme but stayed practical. They called it “Akash Ganga,” and it represented the celestial version of the Ganges River.

Farther south and east, some Aboriginal Australian traditions focused not on the streaming stars but on the dark patches within that bright flow. Today, astronomers know these are clouds of interstellar dust that block the light of the stars behind them. Within those dark patches, Aboriginal observers recognized the shape of a giant emu.

Things were just as creative in the Western Hemisphere. The Inca seemed to have a little of both. They saw a river in the sky and called it “Mayu.” They also saw the dark patches as animal figures like a llama.

Closer to our home, the Cherokee had perhaps the oddest interpretation. They didn’t see a river or anything liquid. Rather, the individual stars represented cornmeal. But the story gets better. The story explains who scattered the cornmeal in the sky. The culprit: a dog that stole the cornmeal.

The nighttime sky—and especially the Milky Way—acts like a celestial Rorschach test. What each culture sees tells us more about that culture than it does about what’s actually there.

The Greeks saw milk. The Chinese saw a river. The Cherokee saw cornmeal.

On a cold Vermont night in 1979, I saw silver glitter.

What do you see?