comprehend the world as a live, pulsating animal; and it appalls by its unholy mix-up of allegorical and physical statements, by its pedantic variations on the inspired Platonic leg-pull. The contrast between navel and heart is witty but unconvincing; it does not explain why two planets should revolve round the heart and the other three round the navel. Did Theon and his readers believe in this sort of thing? The answer is, apparently, that one compartment of their minds did, the other did not; the process of divorcement was nearly completed. Observational astronomy was still progressing; but what a regression in philosophy compared to the Pythagorean, and even the Ionian, school of seven centuries before!
5.
The New Mythology
It looks as if the wheel had come full circle, back to the early Babylonians. They too had been highly competent observers and calendar-makers, who combined their exact science with a mythological dream-world. In the universe of Ptolemy, interlocking canals of perfect circles have replaced the heavenly waterways, along which the star-gods sail their barges on their precisely charted journeys. The Platonic mythology of the sky was more abstract and less colourful, but as irrational and dreamborn as the older one.
The three fundamental conceits of this new mythology were: the dualism of the celestial and sub-lunary worlds; the immobility of the earth in the centre; and the circularity of all heavenly motion. I have tried to show that the common denominator of the three, and the secret of their unconscious appeal, was the fear of change, the craving for stability and permanence in a disintegrating culture. A modicum of split-mindedness and double-think was perhaps not too high a price to pay for allaying the fear of the unknown.
But whether the price was high or low, it had to be paid: the universe was put into the deep freeze, science was paralyzed, and the manufacture of artificial moons and nuclear warheads was delayed by a millennium or more. Whether, sub specie aeternitatis , this was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, we shall never know; but as far as our limited topic is concerned, it was clearly a bad thing. The earth-centred, dualistic, circular view of the cosmos excluded all progress and all compromise for fear of endangering its main principle, stability. Thus, it could not even be admitted that the two inner planets circled round the sun, because once you gave way on this apparently harmless minor point, the next logical step would be to extend the idea to the outer planets and to the earth itself – as the development of the Herakleidian deviation had clearly shown. The frightened mind, always on the defensive, is particularly aware of the dangers of yielding an inch to the devil.
The anxiety complex of the late Greek cosmologists becomes almost palpable in a curious passage 20 by Ptolemy himself, in which he defends the immobility of the earth. He starts with the usual commonsense argument that if the earth moved, "all the animals and all separate weights would be left behind floating on the air" – which sounds plausible enough, though the Pythagoreans and atomists had long before Ptolemy realized its fallacious nature. But then Ptolemy continues to say that if the earth were really moving, it would "at its great speed, have fallen completely out of the universe itself". Now this is not plausible even on a naive level, for the only motion attributed to the earth was a circular motion round the sun, which entailed no risk of falling out of the universe, just as the sun incurred no such risk by circling the earth. Ptolemy, of course, knew this quite well – or, more precisely, one compartment of his mind knew it, while the other was hypnotized by the fear that once the earth's stability was shaken, the world would fly to pieces.
The myth of the perfect circle had an equally deep-rooted, spell-binding power. It is, after all, one of the oldest symbols; the ritual of drawing a magic circle
5.
The New Mythology
It looks as if the wheel had come full circle, back to the early Babylonians. They too had been highly competent observers and calendar-makers, who combined their exact science with a mythological dream-world. In the universe of Ptolemy, interlocking canals of perfect circles have replaced the heavenly waterways, along which the star-gods sail their barges on their precisely charted journeys. The Platonic mythology of the sky was more abstract and less colourful, but as irrational and dreamborn as the older one.
The three fundamental conceits of this new mythology were: the dualism of the celestial and sub-lunary worlds; the immobility of the earth in the centre; and the circularity of all heavenly motion. I have tried to show that the common denominator of the three, and the secret of their unconscious appeal, was the fear of change, the craving for stability and permanence in a disintegrating culture. A modicum of split-mindedness and double-think was perhaps not too high a price to pay for allaying the fear of the unknown.
But whether the price was high or low, it had to be paid: the universe was put into the deep freeze, science was paralyzed, and the manufacture of artificial moons and nuclear warheads was delayed by a millennium or more. Whether, sub specie aeternitatis , this was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, we shall never know; but as far as our limited topic is concerned, it was clearly a bad thing. The earth-centred, dualistic, circular view of the cosmos excluded all progress and all compromise for fear of endangering its main principle, stability. Thus, it could not even be admitted that the two inner planets circled round the sun, because once you gave way on this apparently harmless minor point, the next logical step would be to extend the idea to the outer planets and to the earth itself – as the development of the Herakleidian deviation had clearly shown. The frightened mind, always on the defensive, is particularly aware of the dangers of yielding an inch to the devil.
The anxiety complex of the late Greek cosmologists becomes almost palpable in a curious passage 20 by Ptolemy himself, in which he defends the immobility of the earth. He starts with the usual commonsense argument that if the earth moved, "all the animals and all separate weights would be left behind floating on the air" – which sounds plausible enough, though the Pythagoreans and atomists had long before Ptolemy realized its fallacious nature. But then Ptolemy continues to say that if the earth were really moving, it would "at its great speed, have fallen completely out of the universe itself". Now this is not plausible even on a naive level, for the only motion attributed to the earth was a circular motion round the sun, which entailed no risk of falling out of the universe, just as the sun incurred no such risk by circling the earth. Ptolemy, of course, knew this quite well – or, more precisely, one compartment of his mind knew it, while the other was hypnotized by the fear that once the earth's stability was shaken, the world would fly to pieces.
The myth of the perfect circle had an equally deep-rooted, spell-binding power. It is, after all, one of the oldest symbols; the ritual of drawing a magic circle
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