Journey to the stars: Prelude to primary and secondary naming of stars

GAZING the starry heavens has always fascinated and ignited the imagination of various communities on earth. The sheer unfathomable numbers and age stars are overwhelming as they are beyond numerical determination and comprehension. Equally, their brightness is both astonishing and astounding. The attendant velocity and rhythm resulting from movement did set curious minds ablaze. Days and nights are regular occurrences that have informed the various routines of humankind and indeed animals.

The sleep-wake patterns of varying species of animals and birds are in tandem with celestial movements. In the absence of artificial lighting, these have determined the work routines with some species going to sleep when the sun no longer shines to facilitate vision. For other animals, the setting of the sun jolts them into activity and sets them hunting and prowling in darkness where their visual attributes allow them to see at night.

Depending on the type of spiritual endowment, there are human beings that embark on flight-borne nocturnal and malevolent movements. Here, the human beings, generally known as purveyors of Ancient African Science (AAS) have come to be known as wizards and witches. Both in North America and Europe there was a time when such human beings were identified and as spreaders of social curses and abomination.

Many of them were identified through witch-hunting, arrested, persecuted, thousands of them put to death before advances in science, and health came to their rescue. The intricacies, underpinnings and complexities of the anti-social activities will be left to the time when we embark on the “Journey to Ancient African Science” which was universal and is today only believed in some parts of the world. Advances in science and health have led to the abandonment of entertainment of belief in witchcraft though in Africa the practice continues. However, as gatekeepers of academy and scholarship have moved on, the African practice is viewed as pagan, devilish and associated with primitive peoples.

At the time of colonisation, there was the coming together of perceptually different societies whose relationships were characterised by and associated with superiority and inferiority complexes based on race and military capabilities. Africans in the colonies found themselves having to cope with inimical pieces of legislation referred to as, for example, the Suppression of Witchcraft Act, based on total ignorance on the part of colonisers regarding the nature, philosophy and practice of witchcraft. People, who held different ideas and practices, on coming to power, retained the Acts in the statute books beyond independence as indicators of enduring colonial convictions, conversions and adherence to the colonial past. That, however, is for the next journey series.

Heavenly bodies have been given generic names because of their individual characteristics. They appear as light-giving bodies that light up the night sky. However, in the absence of the sun, they are not, in their collegiality, able to replace the darkness heralded by the absence of the sun. The moon, itself not a star but a cosmic body that reflects light emitted by the sun, does give more light in relative terms. It has, depending on its stage of development or decline, assisted humans to navigate movement during the absence of the sun.

The sun has, because through being assisted by both planets and the moon, managed to give light when it is not visible. Its power and potency are reckoned and measured in terms of the bodies that continue to reflect its emitted energy and potency. As will be seen later, the moon has, through indirect association and link with the sun, continued to influence activities of a social, economic and spiritual nature on earth. Reflected solar energy and potency continue to exert influences on human cultural and natural activities even in the absence of the sun.

In subsequent articles, the attributes and roles of heavenly bodies will be rendered. What emerges quite clearly is that there are generic qualities that pertain globally to the stars. The various African names for the stars bear testimony to this universal character of stars. Almost without exception, the brightness of stars is their first quality that gave them names that, upon scrutiny, reveal the basic-underlying attribute. The next article will deal with names for stars among the various communities in Southern Africa.

It is light that they emit because of chemical reactions taking place within them that influence naming, resulting in names that point in the direction of common attributes. Stars are bright because of their high temperatures that emit various energy forms including heat and light. Some stars twinkle as happens in the case of the Morning Star, actually a planet.

Stars emit light while planets and moons reflect the light that they receive from the sun. It is reflected glory of inglorious heavenly bodies. This collective attribute has informed the generic name for stars in the various languages. The phenomenon embraces light as emitted or reflected. Consequently, all nonstellar heavenly bodies have been termed ‘stars,’ when in reality they are not stars but planets and moons and even asteroids. However, ancient Africans knew about, differentiated between stars and light-reflecting bodies in the firmament, and gave them appropriate names. The Zulu/Ndebele names for planets will be furnished.

At the second level, stellar movements and their relative positions in relation to the earth were noted. Through association, the various stars were observed to be linked to occurrences on earth. The various communities created cultural activities that were in tandem with positon of stars in the firmament. Knowledge and cosmologies were created in light of movements and positons of particular stars in the heavens.

It thus made sense for the communities to keep track of the movements in which the stars constituted the calendars for the creation and timing of rituals and related ceremonies. Astronomical observatories were built out of megalithic stone circles as found at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England; Namoratunga in Kenya, Nabta Playa in Egypt and David’s Calendar in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa.

The megalithic stone circles monitored movements of celestial bodies along elliptical orbits in the firmament. The movements created micro-time but also macro-time as in the case of annual seasons. Diurnal and seasonal units of time both told time and were used to determine the timing of economic, social and spiritual rituals and ceremonies.

The heavens informed the various cultural events on earth. The equator demarcated the differing impacts and timing of solar impacts on earth. The changing positions resulting from migrations and tilt of the earth’s axis resulted in opposite seasons in places north and south of the equator.

Thus, beyond the collective attributes of stars, their movements, positions in the firmament were observed to portend or bring about in their wake some consistent and constant occurrences on the earth plane. This led to the other secondary naming of stars. For example, the Pleiades or ‘Seven Sisters’ were sometimes referred to as the ‘hoeing stars.’ Following their appearance in the night sky, it was time to start preparations for the tilling of the land in readiness for the impending rain season.

Whereas there was one common name for the stars, several names were given in view of what individual stars and constellations portended. The study of astronomy in culture is what has come to be termed cultural astronomy. Where this relates to African experiences, there is reference to African Cultural Astronomy.

In virtually all ancient communities of the world, there were renditions of celestial phenomena on cultural planes. Indeed, our thrust in this series of articles will focus on astronomy within the context of African culture rather that dealing with related myths as contained in Greek mythology, Hebrew, Chinese, Roman and other mythologies. The question we shall seek to answer is, “what were/are African ideas regarding the stars in the lived experiences within the world of Africans?”

Before we turn to that we shall look at the generic names given to the stars by the differing language communities in Southern Africa. Links among the various ethnic groups should become apparent and identify related groups of languages.