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

This online article on research conducted by Dr. Benno van Dalen of the Institute for the History of Science at LMU Munich is a few years old, but too fascinating to gloss over.

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, Astronomy, Benno van Dalen, cultural astronomy, ethnoastronomy, History of Astronomy, Islam, Medieval China

Recent Publication:

Living the Lunar Calendar
Edited by Jonathan Ben-Dov, Wayne Horowitz, and John M Steele

This 2012 publication is a rich collection of papers by the editors, as well as Lawrence Schiffman, Sacha Stern, Robert Hannah, and others on the topic of lunar calandars in cultures including the ancient Near East, Christianity, Judaism, China, Japan, ancient Greece, America, and Russia. These papers engage topics including the variability of the lunar calendar, and the effects of this variability and the changing beginning of the month upon religious holiday planning, record keeping, etc. The table of contents of this excellent volume may be found here.

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, cultural astronomy, ethnoastronomy, History of Astronomy, history of calendar, history of time, Jewish, Judaism, rabbinic calendar, second temple Judaism

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.

Vatican Observatory Telescope on the roof of the Ponticial Palace in Castel Gandolfo (Wikimedia Commons)

This online article, an edited version of a talk by Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ, is well worth reading. Here, he addresses his encounters with God while observing the heavens.

This brief but well-sourced web site may be of some interest to students of astronomy and cosmology in Tibetan Buddhism. The graphics are visually compelling.

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