Conversing with the Planets: How Science and Myth Invented the Cosmos - Hardcover

Aveni, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812919750 ISBN 13: 9780812919752

Publisher: Crown, 1992

Synopsis

Tells how ancient cultures viewed the sky and used it in their mythology, showing that people from the ancient Mayans to the thinkers of the Renaissance had made accurate records of celestial phenomena

About this title

About the Author

The Russell Colgate Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate University, Anthony Aveni pioneered the study of astronomical anthropology and archaeoastronomy. The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education selected him as 1982 Professor the Year; in 1991, Rolling Stone named him one of America’s top ten college professors. He is the author of Empires of Time, Behind the Crystal Ball, and Uncommon Sense: Understanding Nature's Truths Across Time and Culture, and several other books, as well as co-editor (with Gabrielle Vail) of The Madrid Codex.

From Kirkus Reviews

How ``the common sense of one era becomes the superstition of another,'' by Aveni, astronomer-anthropologist at Cornell and author of Empires of Time (1989). Aveni wants to understand how our ancestors made scientific discoveries, in order to know how we make them. The key is imagination, which ``makes visible that which before was invisible.'' In the minds of ancient Greece and Maya, he contends, nature was not compartmentalized, and humans and nature were intimately linked. Aveni traces this worldview through the history of naked-eye astronomy, focusing on the planets, especially Venus. He shows how ancient astronomers were first-rate observers, able to trace the strange motions of our sister planet through the skies. But unlike modern astronomers, who describe these motions in mechanical terms, the ancients saw them through the lenses of metaphor and analogy. The movements of Venus were those of a goddess, wanton or chaste according to the season, and intimately allied to cycles of human gestations, rainfall, the lives of bees, and so on. In time, this understanding gave rise to the queen of ancient sciences, astrology. Aveni acknowledges that such thinking seems antiquated today (he calls astrology a ``misfit''), but he does lend a sympathetic ear to the Gaia hypothesis, which perceives the earth as a single living being, analogous to an ancient Greek goddess. Aveni suggests that truth, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, and that modern science may well be yet another mythology. As this troubling conclusion indicates, his is a brilliant effort, bubbling with ideas and showing unusual sympathy for outmoded points of view. (Thirty b&w illustrations--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0812919750
• ISBN 13: 9780812919752
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 255