Star
It does not prevent me from having a terrible need of, shall I say the word- of religion- then I go outside in the night to paint the stars... Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo, Arles, September 1888.
Twinkling in the more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe, the sheer numbers of stars are almost unimaginable. The stars of deep space that we see through telescopes on a clear, dark night are so ancient and so far away that their light has taken millions, even billions of years to travel to us. There are no people in the world who have not projected into the starry heavens the preeminent forces and myths of their cosmos. The great goddess- Inanna, Ishtar, Aphrodite- was everywhere the radiant evening- and- morning star, the arc of the mysteries of sleep, dream, death, and regeneration. We watch and wish on stars, pray to stars and see in them the phosphors of our psychic firmament. For thousands of years, stars have oriented the wanderer, sailor, and pilgrim just as consciousness navigating its unknown darkness takes its bearings from the scintillations of psyche's imaginal forms. Stars tell us of the infinite, the visionary, of something in ourselves that is starlike, star stuff. In the loss, we look up and find in the beckoning incandescence of a single star the longed- for soul of the departed.
Starry Night, Arsles, by Vincent van Gogh,
oil on canvas, 1888, France.
Out of galactic clouds of gas and dust, a star forms over millions of years into an immense ball, self-luminous with radiation from trillions of nuclear reactions at its core, and is held intact and bound to other stars and planets within its galaxy by the gravitational pull of dark matter (Greene, 295). Though Plato described it as " the moving likeness of eternity," a star eventually implodes under its own weight when its nuclear fuel is exhausted. If it is a massive star, its death can create a supernova, a series of explosions that blow off the star's outer layers in a radioactive cloud that causes a brilliance equal to a billion suns and finally ends as a black hole where the gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape it.
Long before we knew the phenomenal nature of a star, it suggested a nuclear, enigmatic "point" or " monad" whose source of gravity was mysterious and abysmal. Egyptian Nut, the lovely goddess of the night sky, was depicted as giving birth to the stars and talking them up against her dark belly (Clark, 50), the way unconscious gives birth to consciousness and darkly encompasses the luster of its individual spark. In the Pyramid Texts, the deceased was directed to become an "imperishable star" and so live forever (Quirke,50). Alchemy adopted the theme in its goal of bringing the conflicting "many" of the self into a luminous and unified "one." Evocative of the magnetic "center" and its capacity to order and synthesize, the pole star, in Egypt known as "that place" or "the great city," was perceived as the node of the universe, the center of its regulation and the seat of the high god who presides over the cosmic circuit of stars (Clark, 58). In unmoving solitude in the midst of the heavens as at the center of a mandala, the pole star appeared to the Chinese as the stillness of an emperor surrounded by his glittering court, and alchemy described it as the fiery heart of its spirit Mercurius.
Five-pointed stars as emblem of gods and immortal souls.
Painting from the tomb of Iry-nufer, 1305-1200 B.C.E.
Theban Necropolis, Egypt.
Stars are also felt as ambivalent; we speak of our good stars and evil stars. The ancients discovered in the "wheel of the stars" a divinatory map, or zodiac, based on the orbits of the sun, moon, and planets in relation to the fixed star constellations. Astrology brought the outer heavens into correspondence with the inner by calculating the position of the heavenly bodies at the moment of an individual's birth. The "writing in the heavens" could seem fated, however. Heimarmene, the " compulsion of the stars," referred to unconscious patterns of behavior that felt unalterable and determinative; it was a goal of religious rites and of healing process even in their oldest forms to bring these patterns under a conscious agency, thereby breaking their compulsive power.
Stars continue to stir us at the deepest levels. the black hole has been compared to alchemy's "black blacker than black" of psychic fragmentation and absolute despair. M.L. von Franz thought of it as an image of the soul outside the "event horizon" of space and time- existing beyond death in a state of unextended intensity, or "specifications" (p.139). Alchemists called the imagination a celestial or super-celestial star because of its ability to shed light on, transform and transcend the fetters of existence ( CW 12:394). Paracelsus used the term for the numinous "light of nature," which he believed was innate uniquely in each individual and also in animals an inborn spirit. Only self-knowledge, he believed, can teach us of this "quintessence," and the learning is unconventional, engaging intuition, feeling, fantasy and dreams: "As the light of nature cannot speak, it buildeth shapes in sleep" (CW 8:90-391). These, too, are like stars, reflections of eternity in the dark pool of our being.
~Bella
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