Star Travel
by
Jansen Estrup
I spent years at sea. It is often quite dark there.
Stationed off the DMZ (a gunfire support mission), I manned the big-eye on a destroyer’s signal bridge and watched (vainly) for a glimpse of the lunar lander as it made that first touchdown on the moon and understood instinctively why sailors (as airmen) had been chosen to set sail upon the cosmic sea.
Only much later, retired and living on an isolated mountaintop, did I make an ancient connection to those wonderful myths of my youth. It was a clear desert night, similar I suppose to thousands of summer nights over humankind’s short history.
Call it hallucination or self hypnosis (I’ve never been a drug user), I saw the outline and vacuous form of a great serpent, a hooded cobra complete with gold-red ‘eye’. With a shock I realized that I was looking at the constellation Leo.
How could that be possible? And yet, night after night, the stars were still there and so, super-imposed upon Leo (rather, I realized later, hidden within) was the cobra Egyptians at various places along the Nile called Amaunet, Kebechet, Renenutet, Tefrut and even Heket, all of them having to do with hidden mystery, fertility, moisture, serpents, the annual flooding and replenishment of the soil, and even Neith, the red crown of war*. This star form is hidden in that it can only be seen when the night is dark enough for smaller stars to show themselves, as they do all along the Milky Way and elsewhere. When the moon, Sin, is full it is too bright to make out the more subtle shapes and detail. New, the moon's glare is absent. Like connect-a-dots, a child's game, all manner of things reveal themselves.
So I began studying the heavens, not as an astronomer, although I had followed their work over the years with interest, nor as an astrologer-priest, for I had never been interested in divining the future. I was more interested in story-telling and the roots of our world’s diverse, yet strangely convergent cultures.
It is my hope that you will enjoy these journeys, and that it will stimulate your own personal meanderings within the vast seas of human perception, that your discoveries will be scientific and mystical, emotional and icily clear, and that you will gain an appreciation for your capacity to be dazzled and deceived, manipulated and inspired.
Perhaps, if you are fortunate, you will find your own way to entertain yourself, for along with food and shelter and propagation of the species, entertainment, not tool-making or language, might be our most human trait, that which singles us out from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is not that other creatures don’t play or sing or watch the world go ‘round, but none come close to our obsession with it. Nor do I propose that entertainment is always fun ... it takes but a single step to turn comedy into tragedy or a game into warfare.
Entertainment covers the entire scope of our lives. Work is more bearable when we can make it interesting and ‘rewarding’. Religions are but intensely structured, rigorously enforced theater. Government, too. We construct our homes to make them pleasant, as much as functional, and are thankful that our love-making is also a source of ecstasy, lest it otherwise be just another mundane activity. We make games of everything imaginable, from food gathering to eating, family role-playing to naval maneuvers.
Some things we take with a grain of salt, others we treat as if the fate of the Universe depended upon us. But neither is true . Salt is more important than we usually realize. We take it for granted. And that which we think is so vital we’d kill (or die) to achieve it is taken far too seriously virtually all of the time.
Life and death are a game. It is only entertainment. If we watch and listen closely we can hear the Great Mother murmur softly, across the ages, “Play nice”.
*War because at this time of year, flooding, farmers were freed up to become warriors, or when at peace, laborers on various civic projects.
Reworked from the Author's notes of Tales of a Clear, Dark Night
