Chaldea

My article, “From Babylon to Jerusalem: The Roots of Jewish Astrological Symbolism” has now been published in Sky and Symbol (Eds. Nicholas Campion and Liz Greene). The book may be ordered here, at Amazon.com if interested.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Nicholas Campion and Liz Greene

Part One: The Nature of Symbols
Is Astrology a Symbolic Language?
Nicholas Campion

Art, Astronomy, and Symbolism in the Age of Science
Gary Wells

Ritual Ornamentation—From the Secular to the Religious
Pamela Armstrong

Part Two: Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Expressions
The Burning Sun and the Killing Resheph: Proto-Astrological Symbolism and Ugaritic Epic
Ola Wikander

From Babylon to Jerusalem: The Roots of Jewish Astrological Symbolism
Andrea D. Lobel

The Perugia Fountain: An Encyclopaedia of Sky, Culture, and Society
Darrelyn Gunzburg

Theosis, Vision, and the Astral Body in Medieval German Pietism and the Spanish Kabbalah
Elliot Wolfson

‘Chemistry, That Starry Science’: Early Modern Conjunctions of Astrology and Alchemy
Peter Forshaw

Part Three: Astrological Symbols and Modernity
Katherine Maltwood, H. P. Blavatsky, and the Origins of the Glastonbury Landscape Zodiac
Anthony Thorley

The Celestial Imaginary in Weimar Cinema
Jennifer Zahrt

Reading the Future in the Landscape: Astrology in Zanadroandrenaland, Central East Madagascar
Christel Mattheeuws

Receiving the ‘Messengers’: The Astrology of Jung’s Liber Novus
Liz Greene

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, Astronomy, history of astrology, History of Astronomy, Judaism, Liz Greene, Nicholas Campion

The tenth Oxford International Symposium on Archaeoastronomy for academics working in the field of cultural astronomy will take place in Cape Town, South Africa in July 2014.

For more information and updates, please visit the ISAAC web site.

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, archaeoastronomy, Conferences, cultural astronomy, ethnoastronomy, History of Astronomy

New Book Announcement:

Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature
Edited by Jonathan Ben-Dov, Seth L. Sanders

This new book (August, 2013), emerged from the 2011 conference held at NYU, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Among the contributors to this volume are Jonathan Ben-Dov, Seth L. Sanders, and Annette Yoshiko Reed.  Of special note with respect to astronomy and early Judaism is the article “Networks of Scholars: The Transmission of Astronomical and Astrological Learning between Babylonians, Greeks and Jews”, by Mladen Popović.

I’ve ordered my copy, and greatly look forward to reading the book. I’ll be sure to review it here. (N.B. As of October, 2013,  Amazon lists the book as being available on December 15th.)

Wish I could be at this lecture by Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ of the Vatican Observatory. If any of my readers attend and feel inspired to describe the event, please feel free to do so here. The lecture takes place at the Lauriston Jesuit Centre, Lauriston Street, Edinburgh EH3 9DJ at 7.30pm on Saturday 14 September.

When a virus hit the web host for this blog, it corrupted the WordPress code, and I decided to cancel the hosting account and focus on my Ph.D. Happily, I kept backups, was able to clean up and import the data, and the blog is now, at long last, restored.

And so, welcome back to Chaldea. If you come across any academic studies or interesting media links related to astronomy or cosmology and religion, please consider sending them to me at a_lobel@live.concordia.ca

Wishing you a good week, and clear skies!

Solar and lunar eclipses have captured both the popular and religious imagination through the millennia. Eclipse records — and myths inspired by eclipses — date back to the earliest historical epochs. These include a multitude of cuneiform tablet eclipse calculations from Mesopotamia, where total solar eclipses served not merely as awe-inspiring events, but as vital religious omens as well.

Today, eclipses are well understood from a scientific standpoint. However, folk traditions surrounding eclipses remain a part of many cultures around the world, as the following articles in the Globe and Mail (Canada) and The New York times attest. In India, for example, one belief is that pregnant women should remain indoors during an eclipse, so as to avoid any harmful effects upon the fetus.

This week’s solar eclipse will begin on July 22nd at 00:51:17 (Universal Time) off the Indian coast, and is notable due to its extremely long maximum totality period of 6 minutes and 39 seconds. That won’t happen again for nearly 150 years.

Those interested in following the eclipse path may be interested in the following sites:

http://www.hermit.org/Eclipse/2009-07-22/

http://www.markstravelnotes.com/travelogues/2009/total_eclipse/eclipse_path/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z59WVrCxAR8

This upcoming conference on Astronomy and Civilisation is part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy series of events. It will be held August 10th-13th in Budapest, Hungary. The conference has as its goal the exploration of the connections that exist between the natural sciences, astronomy, and civilization — interdisciplinarity at its best.

The conference will include sessions on various topics spanning areas as diverse as physics, human cognition, art, astronomy, and religion. For those who wish to submit a paper for consideration, the call is open until May 30th, 2009.

More information may be found here.

[Edited to add that the early registration deadline, including the call for abstracts, has been changed to June 15, 2009, and the deadline for registration is now July 1, 2009. Thank you to Attila Grandpierre for this information.]

While this is decidedly closer to the popular culture pole, I thought that news of a relevant upcoming film might be of interest to many of you. Entitled Agora, it’s the story of the Pagan astronomer and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, daughter of Theon, who lived and died according to her beliefs and ideals. The film promises to be quite the epic, with both ample exposition of fifth century Christian-Pagan relations and — I would imagine — some ancient astronomical content. Either way, it certainly seems promising.

For those who are in, or close to, Gloucestershire, England, you may be interested in a lecture on archaeoastronomy to be given at the Corinium Museum by Professor Clive Ruggles on Thursday, March 26th, from 7-8:30 p.m.

Dr. Ruggles is an Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester. Among his books are ‘Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopedia of Cosmologies and Myth’ and ‘Skywatching in the Ancient World: New Perspectives in Cultural Astronomy’.

For more information, including contacts and the price of admission, please visit the British Science Association site, located here.

Because tempus fugit, here’s some information for those who want to make plans to attend the upcoming 17th annual conference of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC).

An IYA-related conference, the meeting will be held between October 25th and 31st, 2009 at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.

You can find a list of scheduled speakers here, and the registration section and other important items are listed in the menu to the left. For more information about the SEAC, please visit their homepage.