“Are you really lucky enough to miss out on a few shooting stars?”, my witch asks as I try to fall asleep. Well, who of us ever is? We had seen 6 very bright shooting stars, but I was getting cold and tired. Can I afford to sleep during the peak of the perseids?
I want to say that this year would have felt quite meaningful in the past, but it honestly also feels so today. A partial solar eclipse falling on the same day as the peak of the Perseids, while a drought kills the harvest and stops rivers. Can there be anymore signs out there?
“Signs for what?”, Layla giggles, and I have to think. You came up with the idea that making a wish upon a shooting stars makes them come true? Is it just that they are so rare that seeing them makes people belief in other rare but desired things to also come true? This is more of an open question, since the response would be too broad for this post. There are cultures in (central) Asia where shooting stars do not mean luck at all. In the European tradition, the idea of luck and shooting stars seems to stem from spiritual ideas in ancient Greek and thus experienced a revival in Christian medieval thought.
“Probably a sign to gather the strength to hold on for just a little longer.
As you have noticed, interacting with the stars brings out a strange part of me. Except from talking to my witch, I have never been spiritual at all. I am a person of science, I have a logical math brain! Yes, I do! Here, I have built three camera obscura simplifications for me and my friends to watch the eclipse without any side effects!
But if you look back into the history of science, there are quite a few examples of great scientists having an irrational side to themselves.
Johannes Kepler, who formulated a law successfully describing the planets movements around the sun (which happens in a complex circle movement, to say the least), and thus put forward a change from the geocentric model (putting the earth at the center of the whole universe) to the heliocentric model (with the sun as the center of our planet’s movements), believed in astrology! He was convinced that the formation of stars had an effect on our world, the matter in it, and on our fate. Someone who solved a complex physics problem without any of the modern methods available was able to fall for such an idea. Of course, in the early modern period, this was a lot more common, and the idea of astrology was also supported by e.g. the humoral theory in medicine at the time. But still. This irrationality haunts me in a good way.
Even wilder does it get if you take a look at Isaac Newton, the one with the falling apple formulating the law of gravity that is still valid today (also in its mathematical details, and not just because things fall down when you let go), believed in all kinds of weird things. Honestly, I can’t put it into one sentence. There are diary entries where he tried to decode hidden messages in other books and writings to calculate the date the world would end. Besides his basic laws of physics, he was believing in the weirdest conspiracies. When he practiced alchemy, which he did, he did not just try to turn any metal into gold (which was a kind of common dream at the time), he also dreamed of the heavy things. From artificial humans to the secret code of the universe.
It can seem puzzling for these great minds capable of so much logical thinking to fall for these ideas.
When I used my little cameras to watch the moon cover part of the sun, however, I suddenly understood how this might have happened. However logical and purely scientific I try to handle this event, it causes something else inside of me. I feel moved and magical, whimsical, in touch with something greater than me, and that is a wonderful feeling.
Back to those shooting stars, I think wishing upon them matters so much for several reasons. It says a lot about our gut feeling what we think of first, as we see the flash of light on the night sky. There will be dominant thoughts, and that is something to deal with. Another thing is that wishing upon them might cause thoughts and ideas to finally get us going to achieve them. Some wishes might be hopeless, but pondering in the dark and eventually wishing them might help to get an idea of where to start.
I wish on things to get an idea of where to start when I don’t know what to do anymore.
Studying the night sky is such a magical experience.
Mistress witch writes 