Astrology

 

In a region now desert in modern-day southern Turkey, aerial photography hinted at geometric patterns and regularities not ordinarily found in nature. Freshly revealed by random wind patterns and increasing aridity, the patterns interrupted the natural lie of the land and suggested the influence of ancient humanity. The positions and estimated age of these traces led to theories of the existence of another Neolithic community far from the warrens of Catal Huyuk, the city of vulture-worship founded in 7000 B.C. Excited by reports of these from his colleagues, and by articles in the archaeological journals, a young professor assembled a team of local experts to explore these mysteries more fully. Previous expeditions had failed: the desert, desolate, not overbearingly hot but without water, was inimical to the activities of men. Working under such conditions without success in the short term was discouraging. It was also said that there was an oppressive air about the place, a sense of eternal stillness that stifled the archaeological zeal of those sifting through gravel for clues of a past forgotten for millennia.

 

It was not in the nature of the professor to allow the past to remain forgotten. His parents were wealthy and inclined to support their only son. Their friends, also wealthy, knew the world did not always remember the names of the rich. They knew too that patrons of such expeditions in the past had attained some manner of reflected glory. If the expedition was unsuccessful, what of it? They lost only money, which they were expert at accumulating, and gained the esteem of the professor’s family, respected and influential in their circle. Their sponsorship was graciously accepted.

 

The desert was stubborn. The professor’s team splintered, and some months after their arrival only the professor and a depleted core of four others remained to work the excavation site. He had stayed despite the desert’s forbidding nature, despite the scepticism of his peers, and despite the comfortable life waiting for him back at home, until he had stayed so long he was there because of everything encouraging him to leave. What fool would spend so much money on a dream in the desert for months on end, to return empty-handed? He could not leave. His money seemed to spend itself, day by day, and he knew if he stayed there much longer his pride would never allow him to return to the derision gathering for him at home. He worked on.

 

The desert was vast, and he could only choose the most promising selection of those hints to excavate. Each hint turned out to yield nearly nothing - tantalising fragments of stone not native to the area, or unidentifiable organic residue long ossified by the transformation of swampland to desert by the passing centuries. But no human remains, no shards of pottery, no concrete artefacts of ancient human life.

 

Then, one day, a strange occurrence. He found a patch of darker earth that, when excavated in layers, revealed a circle bordered by stone. It was a deliberate arrangement. He sent samples to be dated, but found little else close by.

 

A week later, another circle, and the delivery of a sketch of an image found in Catal Huyuk, sent by a friend. The people of that city never developed writing, instead displaying scenes of their life, their religious practices, and their goddess on the walls of their religious and civic buildings. How they lived was necessarily inferred from these images and the ruins they left behind.

 

The sketch showed a human figure dancing in a circle, watched far above by a multitude of tiny single eyes, set apart from each other in patterns he thought to recognise. He sent for books, telescopes, and more money. There were no other sketches like this found in the ruins of Catal Huyuk. He mapped the positions of his two circles and waited impatiently for a response.

 

The sketch haunted him. He had photographs of the image sent to him and pored over them, thinking he detected emotion among the eyes, or agony in the dancer. He knew he was imagining seeing his own frustrations in the images. He routinely fell asleep surrounded by them. The desert worked at him, changing his colour and turning his frame gaunt. He did not sleep well. His sponsors refused more money.

 

The laboratory results returned, declaring the samples to be ancient. The books and telescopes followed, and with these tools he mapped the night sky as it would have been at the time the soil samples were last exposed to the air. He took his sky map, and after hours of deliberation, mapped two of the stars to the circles he had so carefully revealed.

 

Then, to prove his conjecture, he predicted the location of a third circle, in a location he had not thought to dig before. He cajoled his companions into digging there. They had nothing to lose. The professor’s money was soon to be gone, perhaps in as little as a week. They concentrated on the professor’s new site.

 

Incredibly, a new circle was found. His workers displayed a guarded interest.

 

The professor was elated. He had also exhausted his funds. He could not afford to test his conjecture again, and reveal another circle. He knew what he had found ranked only as a curiosity, nothing more, and the best he could hope for was for somebody else to follow up his results, perhaps discover more circles, and share the glory that the professor felt was his, by right. Dismayed at the prospect, and made brash by his discovery, he decided that the entire range of his suppositions, formed during the sleepless nights in the inhospitable desert, were true. He broadcast these despite his companions’ warnings.

 

He had discovered a new people, he declared, with a belief system unlike another other. They predicated the continued existence of the earth on the whim of the stars.

 

The stars were eternal; a human life was a blink of an eye, ephemeral in comparison. It was clear to this people that the stars were incapable of quick action on human terms. They saw what an ant accomplished during its lifetime, and compared this to the destruction a wolf could bring. They looked at themselves and how they had little to fear from even a pack of wolves. On such a scale, what powers did a being as eternal as a star possess? They feared what cataclysms might result from conflict between such gods, and so acted out tales of the folly of war, for fear warring stars would fill the heavens with a fire that would consume the earth.

 

The dancers came to believe that this was why they were put upon the earth. The stars had put them there to act out their conflicts and wars on their behalf; ants playing at the life of the gods. Their stories would appal the stars, driving them to avoiding the course laid out for them by the dancers, they reasoned, and so they inhabited this role completely. They embraced transience. They spurned possessions, beyond what utensils were necessary for their daily existence. They burned their dead, with their survivors crushing those utensils and mixing the dust with the ashes of the departed, then casting the mixture into the swamplands.

 

They danced beneath the stars, telling the classic stories of human life: love, betrayal, conflict, death. The stars spun on overhead, unchanging, constant observers of the tableau played out for their benefit below. The dancers danced to educate the stars, teaching the folly of passion, hoping to keep the gods from war.

 

Perhaps the stars learned the lesson. The people died out, with nothing to show for their beliefs beyond the shadow of their stages on the earth, and millennia of peace in heaven.

 

The world did not believe the professor. Such colourful theories, founded on such evidence, were hard to accept, and the derision he had feared sharpened into outright incredulity. He stayed in Turkey, growing old, refusing the entreaties of his family, inhabiting a country he did not love, rising at dawn, eating basic food, staring deliberately, obsessively, at the same eternal rock and sand, retiring at dusk, repeating the same pattern, day in, day out. He thought of his ancient civilisation, staring at that land, seeking through repetition to compress his life into a single, expressible, unchanging thought; the one thought he had missed his people trying to tell him.

 

 

Oliver Mooney

April 2005