Find Your Space in the Universe with a Medieval Astrology Diagram

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

[Rising, meditative music]

Lilit Sadoyan: Today we’re exploring a medieval manuscript with a focus on astrology.

[Theme music begins]

 Welcome to Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation podcast, or OMMM. Part art history and part meditation, we use works of art from the Getty collection as inspiration for mindfulness and deep reflection.

Hello—I’m Lilit Sadoyan. I’m a longtime meditation practitioner and museum educator at Getty. Thanks for joining me as we bring mindfulness out of the gallery and into our daily lives.

Today, we’re exploring time and our place in the universe, inspired by an astrological calendar page from a German manuscript created shortly after 1464. This episode begins with a breathing exercise to help relax your body and mind. We’ll then give a bit of history and context for this medieval manuscript, and we’ll close with a longer meditation on our place in time and space. This series is also available as an audio podcast. If you’d like to step away from a screen for a few minutes, listen on your favorite podcast app. Now, if you’re ready, let’s jump in.

 [Gong chimes]

[Slow, meditative music begins]

Go ahead and find a comfortable meditation posture, whatever that means for you today. Maybe you’re sitting, lying down, something that allows you to feel relaxed yet alert.

Let’s start by taking a few deep breaths together.

In through the nose.

Out through the mouth.

 Deep breath in.

 Deep breath out.

 Inhale.

 Exhale.

  I invite you to let your breathing resume its natural rhythm as we explore today’s work of art. [bells chime]

What if you could optimize your daily schedule to increase your productivity and ensure alignment with your goals? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of structure and intentionality to your day? In the 15th century, Germans and many other Europeans structured their days and hours according to planetary bodies.

[Slow music plays]

Today, we’re exploring a 15th-century miscellany, which is a manuscript that contains a collection of different texts. This one in particular contains work related to medicine, magical practices like divination for telling the future, astronomy, and astrology. Though these subjects feel divergent today, they were related for the medieval people.

Astronomy was understood as the observation of celestial bodies and astrology as the interpretation of what they mean on Earth. People believe that the movement of celestial bodies impacted the physical body and health, along with many other things.

Though we don’t know who wrote this manuscript, curators suspect the scribe was educated, but an amateur. The handwriting is quite idiosyncratic, and while the texts and images have been planned out, they aren’t quite as expertly executed as in other manuscripts. The paper used for this volume is handmade from wet cloth strips, which was labor-intensive to make, but still less expensive than parchment, a more common material for high-end manuscripts. Together, these clues suggest that this manuscript was likely made for someone who had a high understanding of, and reverence, for the subjects collected here, but who was not a member of the elite.

[Music continues]

Take a moment to picture a page from this manuscript. The sheet of yellowed paper is slightly larger than letter size. The top half contains a circular diagram with the moon at the center. The moon is personified with a greenish face, bulbous cheeks, and two yellowish halo-like rings around it, like part of the moon is reflecting light. It features a caring or nurturing facial expression and a downcast gaze. This is the page for Monday, the moon’s day. Surrounding the moon are two concentric rings, each divided into 24 sections, representing the hours of the day. The outer ring is divided into 12 daylight hours and 12 night hours, listed in Roman numerals one to 12 twice over. To help determine whether it is the daytime or nighttime hour, we find the word Morgen, German for morning, to the left of the circular diagram, Mittag, or afternoon, at the top, Abend, evening, at right, and Mitnacht, midnight, at the bottom.In the inner ring of the diagram, each section is colored in black, white, silver, gold, red, green, or blue.

Below this diagram is a block of text in German explaining what to do during the day based on associations related to the moon. And since the zodiac sign Cancer is ruled by the moon, at the bottom left corner, in a gold-colored roundel, we find the image of Cancer, which here looks more like a lobster or scorpion than a crab. It’s surrounded by 18 red stars that may represent the constellation, although they’re not drawn in the right order.

Other sheets in this manuscript contain equally detailed illustrations for the other days of the week and their associated planetary body. The sun for Sunday, the moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, Mercury for Wednesday, Jupiter for Thursday, Venus for Friday, and Saturn for Saturday. As with the Monday page, many also contain depictions of the zodiac sign overseen by that day’s planetary ruler. For example, Sagittarius, ruled by Jupiter, appears on Thursday’s page as a figure drawing his arrow across a bow. And Capricorn, ruled by Saturn on Saturday, is represented as the sea goat.

Yes, time was relative and quantitative in the medieval period, but it was also qualitative, meaning it had a specific quality or character. Each hour of the day was believed to be ruled by one of the seven planetary bodies in a set sequence that changed based on which day it was. The daily diagrams with the planet at the center of two concentric rings use colors to chart the celestial body that governs a specific hour of the day: gold for the sun, green for the moon, silver for Mercury, white for Venus, red for Mars, blue for Jupiter, and black for Saturn.

Why did people care to know which planet ruled which hour? This was, for some, a theoretical exercise to understand the universe. But it could also be used as a tool to help inform important decisions, like medical care in particular. Each hour of the day was considered astrologically optimal for certain tasks or activities ruled by the sign that governed that hour. For example, for hours ruled by the moon, which is related to Cancer, water-based activities like bathing or boating were particularly advantageous. So before undertaking important water related activities, one could look for the hours in green. Here on Monday, that’s 8am, 3pm, and 10pm.

There’s something about the beauty of a system here that jumps off the page. When everything is organized and ordered, there’s a kind of elegance. It’s efficient, it’s practical, it’s aligned. Planning your activities around the movements in the heavens may all seem extreme to some of us today, but medieval philosophy inherited a belief from the ancient Greek philosopher Hermes Trismegistus that the microcosm of the individual and the soul reflects the macrocosm of the universe and cosmos.

As above, so below.

Planets mark time and influenced human activity. As we move into our meditation, consider what it means to locate yourself within something vast, your own relationship to time, rhythm, and place within the larger universe.

[Gong chimes and slow, meditative music begins]

Take a moment now to set yourself up for relaxation. Find ease in your body, whatever you need today. If you feel comfortable, I invite you to close your eyes. Use this time to go inward.

Let’s begin by taking a few deep breaths together.

In through the nose. [inhales]

Out through the mouth. [exhales]

Deep inhale.

Deep exhale.

One more deep breath in. [inhales]

And a deep breath out. [exhales]

And just let your breathing resume its natural rhythm. No need to force or extend anything here. Let your body do what it does very naturally.

Maybe even a silent thank you to your body for doing its job, for keeping you going.

And let’s bring our awareness to our breath. Notice the way that the breath moves in and out of the body. You can get very specific and granular here, sensing the temperature around your nostrils. Is it warm or cool on the inhale and exhale? What’s the texture like today?

And see if you can follow that breath down your nasal passage and into your chest. Notice the rise and fall of your chest. Every time you take a breath in and let it out. And if your breath is deeper than that, again, no need to force it. Let’s see if you can feel into your soft belly here. With each inhale and exhale:

swelling and subsiding,

inflating and deflating,

expanding and collapsing.

And as you focus on your breath, the mind may wander. That’s okay. Your brain is doing its job. The objective in meditation is never to clear or empty the mind. That’s a misconception. Rather, it’s to become aware of those thoughts as they arise, and then to let them go, and gently guide your awareness back to your breath.

Use your breath as an anchor to the present moment.

[Silence]

In our lives, we are constantly going, going, and going, constantly doing. See if you can shift from doing to being. Simply rest in being.

[Slow, meditative music begins]

Now gently bring your awareness to time. Not clock time or schedules, but this moment in time. Notice how each breath marks a moment in time. Each inhale like a beginning and each exhale like an ending.

And it repeats.

This moment does not rush. This moment simply unfolds.

Notice how time and space meet right here in your breath, in your body, in your awareness. Notice how your body comes into contact with the earth. Maybe you’re seated directly on the ground. Maybe there are layers of furniture or built structure between you and the planet. Wherever you are, feel into the support of the planet. Notice how the earth holds you effortlessly. And how far out, around, and into our Earth can you bring your focus into soil, stone, water? Connected to oceans and other continents.

Here we are: floating on this living and ever-evolving sphere within an ever-expanding universe. Carried by the quiet daily rotation year after year around the sun. One small star among billions.

Feel the immensity of scale. Tune into the expansion of your awareness. Allow time to widen here. You are here on Earth in a vast expanding universe. And the same elements that form distant stars exist right here, right now in your body.

You are literally made of stardust. You are not separate from the cosmos, but a part of it.

Begin to introduce some gentle movement in your body. Wiggle your fingers and toes. Stretch. And if your eyes are closed, I invite you to gently open them. Come back to your environment.

As we return to our day, let’s carry this sense of present moment awareness with us. And I want us to see if we can find opportunities to pause in our day and to drop into the here and now. I invite you to stretch your awareness from time to time. Remember the immensity of the cosmos, the vastness beyond our pale blue dot, and the billions of galaxies beyond our own Milky Way.

It’s hard not to feel like a tiny insignificant speck, and yet our lives here, in this moment, matter and make us feel big in a different way. Let’s embrace it.

Let’s return to our breath and close our practice by taking a full deep breath together.

Inhale.

Sigh it out. [heavy exhale]

Thank you so much for joining me.

[Meditative music slowly fades out]