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As October nights gather themselves, cold, slow and silent in central Maine, Cassiopeia rolls into the darkness over the cedars and pointed firs behind my house. Blue-white stars and nebulae surround her like jewels.

She was the queen of Ethiopia, wife of Cepheus. She once bragged that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the daughters of Nereus, and her vanity enraged Poseidon, who sent a monster to ravage her territories. An oracle told Cepheus the way to appease Poseidon was to sacrifice Andromeda, so he had her chained naked to a rock and left to be eaten. Perseus, who had recently killed the Gorgon Medusa, flew by and rescued Andromeda. Under the circumstances Cassiopeia and Cepheus agreed to let Perseus marry her, but after some intrigue, Cassiopeia double-crossed Perseus and tried to have him killed. Perseus turned the attackers into stone with the Gorgon's head, and Poseidon threw Cassiopeia into the sky to punish her - she whirls around up there on her throne for eternity, a reminder of the misery that comes to those who defy the gods.

Her beauty glimmers there worlds away in Maine, even when she's upside down, and it makes you wonder what the daughters of Nereus could have looked like. In her seat she resembles a sort of cubist W. These five stars all shine, astronomers inform us, at about magnitude 2.5, except for e (epsilon) Cassiopeia, the star that shoots out at an angle and throws the W out of balance, at her feet. That star, called Segin, is fainter than the other four, but even when scudding clouds commit erasures in the heavens and you can't quite distinguish, your eye supplies it, knowing where it's supposed to be.

Cassiopeia's knee bends at the star above Segin, d (delta) Cassiopeia, which is called Ruchbah, from the Arabic Al Ruchbah, the knee. In some texts the name is given as Ksora. As you work your way carefully back along the W, she's seated on her throne at the central star, g (gamma), known sometimes as Cih, which Robert Burnham explains went from magnitude 2.25 to about 1.6 in the late 1930s, then decreased to 3 by 1940, and returned to about 2.3, as though it was sending signals. So far no one has a clue why it might have varied like that.

Above g Cassiopeia, at the apex of the symmetric part of the W, is the a (alpha) star, known as Schedir or Schedar from the Arabic Al Sadr, the breast. And at her shoulder is b (beta) Cassiopeia, called Caph from an Arabic name for the constellation, Kaff al Hadib, which one source gives as meaning "hand stained with henna." Arab astronomers also called Cassiopeia Al Dhat al Kursiyy, meaning "the lady in the chair," similar to another Greek name, meaning "she of the chair."

The longer you stare at Cassiopeia, the more beautiful she seems, despite her enormous, lonely distance. The stars of her chair range from about 50 to about 590 light-years away. You can imagine, not spatial distances that flagrant, but what it would be like to ride starlight from there to Earth, or beams of light converging from galactic nebulae and clusters of burning stars. They shine there all night, year after year, backward and forward across the millennia. It all glitters with some inescapable meaning.

***

Let me tell you about my cat. He's an unusual specimen, not so much because of his physical beauty - though being a Maine coon cat he has thick orange and white fur, a full, symmetrical face, green eyes, strong-looking paws, horselike shoulders, and a fat striped tail like a raccoon's - but unusual because of his intelligence. He knows his household chores exceptionally well and eliminates the mice and red squirrels who chew our log walls to pieces, sometimes lining up their dead bodies tidily on the porch for us to inspect. He sleeps on the chair by the bay window during off-hours. He's very neat and clean, even for a cat, and his petitions for breakfast and departure by the front door are straightforward and reasonable. He lives in our world comfortably and purposefully.

When he was young he watched television, and particularly liked basketball games. His head moved back and forth with the game, and sometimes he tapped the screen with his paw to snag whatever was moving there. What did he see? Human shapes in glints of light? I imagine the TV perplexed him because there was motion, but only glass to touch, darkly as it were. Despite his intelligence, he couldn't catch anything as concrete as a squirrel and finally desisted from trying. A prudent cat too, maybe, although saying so is tricky because it's not clear how, or if, his sense of reality intersects with ours.

He keenly understands that the crackle of a metal pull-tab means food. He recognizes the unique rumble of our cars and runs out to greet us when we drive up, and also hides when strange vehicles pull in. We and he find similar meanings in certain sounds, at least.

On the other hand, he pretty surely has no concept of pre-packaging, or of transport. He doesn't know that every day I drive away to the elementary school to pick up my son. He's never seen a school, and even if he saw one he'd have no conception of what happens there - no sense, of any kind, of children laughing about a picture in a book, or of arithmetic problems, or of a young man with cockeyed glasses bringing his guitar each week and singing Christmas songs. As far as the cat is concerned, the school and its activities are in another dimension completely, like lights moving on a dark screen. You could say he and we experience realities so radically different that for all intents and purposes, we inhabit separate universes.

I wonder what he thinks books are. They surround him, piled on tables, crammed into shelves, stacked on the floor. Inside, where a cat has never been, letters of the alphabet represent words and groups of words - not only of Roman alphabets, but of Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Chinese characters too - in practically unlimited combinations that have dazzling effects on the mind. To Sparky words themselves are only vaguely meaningful sounds, like the crackling of a pull-tab.

Copies of Moby Dick, Robert Graves's Greek Myths, Burnham's Celestial Handbook (three volumes), a translation of Ibn Arabi's Journey to the Lord of Power, and The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual are stacked on the desk. These books not only contain their own texts, but they allude to each other and to millions of other books at both conscious and intuitive levels, coalescing meaning from individual and collective memories of many kinds - meaning that develops from intimate relations between the words and the mind that can recognize them.

There is no evidence Sparky has any notion of this reality, even as a dream or a fantasy in his individual, isolated cat mind. Even though it lies within inches of where he sleeps, the experience of language in books is as remote and invisible to him as the remnants of Tycho's Star 10,000 light-years away are to us. More so. Sparky can't learn to read, and I doubt if he'd presume to try.

I think he sees stars, but I can't imagine what they are to him. For a cat, outer space is in a very real sense another world, unknown and unguessed. He's aware of the Sun, certainly, but doesn't know it's a thermonuclear fireball 93 million miles windward. He's aware of moonlight but has no way of knowing footprints mark the solid reflecting surface of that light. He doesn't know that planets travel elliptical paths around the Sun, or that moons of rock and ice orbit planets. He has no idea that comets whirl around the solar system like a cloud of gnats, or that ancient human beings believed planets were gods. He has no sense that his own body is made of stardust, or that his life originated billions of years ago from organic molecules that dropped from space on comet debris like spermatozoa. To him, this universe is gone. He doesn't live in this dimension, even though he's in it.

***

Light burns down through space carrying information about the size, brightness and heat of stars, and maybe their distance. Ruchbah, d Cassiopeia, shines at magnitude 2.68, or thereabouts. It's a spectrum A5 V star, 11 or 12 times as luminous as the Sun, and floats in space about 88 light-years from Earth. Caph, b Cassiopeia, shines at about magnitude 2.5, with a luminosity 22 times the Sun's; it's a spectrum F2 IV or III star, 45 or 49 light-years away. Segin: magnitude 3.38; luminosity 1000 times the Sun's; spectrum B3 IV or III; distance 520 to 590 light-years.

These facts are sorted from starlight. It is very precise information, even though some of it, especially the distances, is approximated. It's as if the stars were speaking and astronomers found the right way to listen - with, mathematics, computers, telescopes and other light-gathering and sorting equipment - to understand what they say.

Now, the ancient mythologers were listening to the stars in Cassiopeia, too. There has been great interest in the yearly motions of the constellations for millennia at least, and for practically that long, people have been calculating and recalculating the distance of the Sun and Moon from the Earth. By the second century AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria had refined the maps of the planetary motions so thoroughly that his calculations - although showing a few vexing discrepancies, especially in the orbits of Mars and Mercury - were the standard for astrologers and astronomers in European and Arab learned circles for about 1,400 years.

Ptolemy was looking for a kind of information different from what astronomers seek today. He and, much later, Kepler and Galileo were all interested in precise mathematics of planetary motion, but not as an end in itself: They wanted to know the details so they could hear what the stars are saying - what they mean.

In the ancient world myriads of ideas circulated about the possible meanings of the stars, expressed in everything from mythological tales to astrological tables to careful metaphysical speculation. Plato warned the speculators: Make sure you preserve the phenomena. It was a fourth-century BC way of saying: Make sure you don't depart from the observable facts, in your interpretation of planet and star light.

It turned out, as Ptolemy and then Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Einstein looked closer and closer, that the phenomena were minutely detailed and that - as Edwin Hubble revealed by 1925 - the universe itself was much physically bigger than anyone had ever imagined. Ten to 20 billion light-years from here to there, a long way, though where "here" and "there" are is a matter of some uncertainty. It also turned out, by the end of the twentieth century, that 90 percent of the matter that calculations show must exist, cannot be seen - it's missing.

In the twenty-first century the sheer quantity of data available to astronomers is mind-boggling, especially in comparison to what was available just a hundred years ago. And yet, despite the gargantuan catalogs of star facts and established astrophysical theory, planetary information returned by Apollo, Viking, Voyager, Mars Pathfinder, the Galileo probe, the Hubble Space Telescope, and so on, all astronomers are well aware of the other fact that, relatively speaking, hardly anything is known about outer space.

There are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand in the beaches of the world, and there are planets riding rough and smooth around most of those stars. And on those planets, what?

What are we supposed to do with the fact that r (rho) Cassiopeia is 11,000 light-years away from us, shines at magnitude 4.6, shows a spectrum in a category called F8 Ia, and is 125,000 times as luminous as the Sun? This is curious but superficial information, really. Not much different from a cat seeing lights on a television screen and putting a paw to the glass.

***

Johannes Kepler set out in the sixteenth century to reach behind the glass, the way Newton and Einstein later wanted to see what makes the universe tick. In Kepler's time the sky was thought to be an image of heaven: The stars, planets, Sun and Moon moved so regularly and precisely, they were understood as the moving picture of divine order. If God could be glimpsed, it was in the sky. The planets orbited infallibly, even if the exact mathematics of their motions seemed a few fractions beyond human understanding. Everything had remained the same in the sky for as long as anyone could remember, which was a long, long time in human terms. In the same century Kepler was born, after all, Copernicus made a model of a Sun-centered universe which tried to improve on Ptolemy's 1,400-year-old, viable but flawed depiction of sky phenomena. The sky and its inhabitants are that stable.

But in November 1572, a year after Kepler was born, something extremely unsettling happened. A new star appeared in Cassiopeia which had not been there before. For a couple of weeks it was so bright it was visible during the day. This was utterly shocking. The traditional European philosophies were rocked by the "nova" sometimes called Tycho's Star (after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe) near the star we now call k (kappa) Cassiopeia. Speaking from a religious view, it could not be happening. The firmament was God's figure of eternity, which unlike the world, existed in total impermeable harmony.

The anomaly had to be explained, somehow, and Kepler's lifelong pursuit, which took form in the decades after the explosion that created the new star, was to demonstrate the mathematical detail of God's perfection in the planetary motions. His Harmonies of the World was his titanic effort to reveal God's unfoldment of the material world according to mathematical principles. While things are not quite right here on Earth, the perfection of the heavens could be revealed through mathematics.

Numbers, after all, were from at least the time of Pythagoras expressions of divine power. You can see this depicted in the great cosmological structures of Western and Middle Eastern cultures. Multiples of 3, 7 and 9 abound in these structures, corresponding to observations of the sky. Before the invention of the telescope, there were seven celestial bodies: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, implying seven realms of reality. Eudoxus and later Aristotle gave the clearest early shape to this in a description of the universe as a series of concentric spheres. How many spheres there were depended on how the philosopher explained the complexities of the planets' motions within the spheres. And then beyond the planets, obviously, are the fixed stars, another visible realm. And something moved them all - a force intimate with or identical to God. Nine worlds. "Your body's about 6 feet or so," the great Persian poet and mystic Rumi says, "but your soul rises through nine levels of sky."

About the same time as Rumi, St. Thomas Aquinas, working with the writings of the "pseudo-Dionysius," showed there were nine orders of angels, and a bit later Dante showed how these orders inhabited and qualified the nine spheres of heaven, which by that time were capped by the Empyrean, the transcendent realm of God. Ibn Arabi, a predecessor of Rumi, described spectacular journeys through states and stations of consciousness unseen in the physical world.

None of these people were small-minded or superstitious. They turned enormous intellectual energy on the problem of who and where we are. They used the available data - the phenomena - to shape their understanding of their observations and experience.

Kepler worked squarely in their tradition, but lived at a moment of profound philosophical and epistemological change. The new, short-lived star (now referred to as B Cassiopeia) told a story different from anything Aristotle, Ibn Arabi, Aquinas, Rumi or Dante had ever imagined. From here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the nova in Cassiopeia can be read like a symbol, as a harbinger of things to come. Galileo was only 8 years old when the new star appeared, but within a few decades he corroborated that the heavens are not as stable as they appear when he saw for the first time moons orbiting Jupiter and spots disfiguring the Sun. His effort was not to debunk God, as centuries later those who followed him would attempt to do. His effort was to note what was there and try to propose a physical explanation. In those days, it was still taken more or less for granted by Galileo and Kepler, and in the next century by Newton, that God is manifest in the physical world. The possibility that physical explanations could be formulated conflicted with few people's acceptance of God's existence, really.

Kepler undertook one of the most intense intellectual labors in human history trying to make a mathematical map of the orbits of the planets. His work laid the foundations of modern planetary science, but it did not yield the result he wanted. The problem was that the new star, the moons of Jupiter, the sunspots all suggested that God and the world were not what scriptures said they were. This discrepancy caused trouble for Kepler's plan to reveal God's heavenly mathematics; because the authority of the Bible was so powerful, and because scientific methods showed a world different from what the Bible described, a split developed in popular consciousness between the religious depiction of reality and the scientific depiction of reality. Kepler's mathematical approach to the planets, while convincing, revealed not God's perfection, but God's imperfection - the planetary orbits were not perfect circles, but ellipses.

Despite their intentions, Kepler's and Galileo's revelations only caused trouble for religion and philosophy, and eventually for society in general. The more data were collected about where we actually are, the more it came to look like we are nowhere. Across the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, distances in space grew bigger and bigger - too big to comprehend. And naturally enough, as space expanded, so did time. Victorian scientists proposed the universe was several million years old, which sat badly enough with the clerics who believed on biblical evidence that it was 4007 years old. In the twentieth century, millions of years expanded to billions, and eventually it became clear that the Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old, but younger than the universe at large by 10 billion years or more.

A hundred years or so after the explosion of B Cassiopeia, another star, Cassiopeia A, exploded, halfway to Cepheus. No one knew it. Kepler was dead by then and Newton was culling Harmonies of the World for his predecessor's powerful planetary insights, totally unaware of Cassiopeia A. No one, in fact, had any idea that Cassiopeia A even existed, until in 1944 a strong source of radio waves was noticed in that region of the sky. By compiling more and more data over about 14 years, astronomers eventually concluded the activity they were detecting came from the remnants of an exploded star. Their painstaking analysis led them to believe a star had gone supernova there in about 1680.

No one ever saw the star Cassiopeia A. We know it existed, though, because a form of light invisible to the eye carries information to us which astronomers can analyze to create a factual picture of what never touched human senses. In one way of looking, some things can be seen behind the glass.

***

But the meaning of it, at least to me, is dark. What do I make of the fact that the remnant of a supernova in Cassiopeia is emitting radio waves?

In some scientific lexicons, the waves are referred to as "signals." But this can't be the right word for it. Are the shreds and filaments of Cassiopeia A's remains signaling us, as if with some kind of intention?

Do the darting lights on the television screen signal the cat? Certainly, a human being watching a basketball game or a drama on television makes something meaningful of it, even though the cat doesn't. The light signals the human mind that can understand it. Apparently it does not signal the cat, though - he gave up.

I keep looking at the stars. I know meaning is being assembled from starlight, but somehow, the factual meanings - distance, luminosity, spectral class - do not say much to me. It's like light flickering on a screen: Despite its high rational order, the light's factual reality speaks to me little more than the images of basketball players spoke to the cat. It's tempting to just give up and take a nap.

But I keep thinking of Kepler gazing night after night at the sky, and measuring, calculating for years to find the mathematical mirror that would identify - not God, but the presence and mechanism of God's perfection. That would be true meaning. A fact, Thoreau observes in his essay "A Natural History of Massachusetts," is meaningless until it blossoms into a truth.

Meaning does not inhere in the objective presence of matter. It does not reside in planet rocks or star fires. Meaning inheres in relations. The way, for example, certain stars relate to each other visually in the sky, together with the eye that recognizes, or makes, the pattern. The eye catches the details, notices repeated motions, and focuses them in minute detail. The detail turns out to be not only visual or auditory, but also unseen, or as we say in the scientific world, abstract - as in mathematics, and in the processes of inductive logic.

There are other orders of unseen detail - emotions, and when you test the waters of certain kinds of religious experience, you discover evidence of inner "states and stations," as the Sufis say, that are as refined as any mathematics, but of a totally different order of existence.

What is hard to grasp, here in the age of science, is that the Sufi world of emotions, psychic states, or stations of consciousness, has any reality at all. Since there is no factual evidence for the objective existence of psychic states - for the reality of a dream, for instance - then there is no evidence the state or dream has any existence outside the chemical-driven fantasies of an isolated, individual mind. No objective facts seem to signal their existence. Starlight, on the other hand, comes to the eye in spectra and magnitude.

Or does it?

About 90 percent of the matter in the universe has never been detected. When you look at the sky, are you like a young, virile cat watching a TV screen? Or have you given up looking, and go with a hum about your business with no sense of what's happening in the astrophysics department of the university 50 miles away?

Up there, on autumn nights behind my house in the Maine woods, stars cover the black sky, and only a tiny fraction of all that throws light is visible. I understand some rudimentary astronomy, I have a general picture, thanks to Kepler, of how the planets move, and I can say sentences that contain facts about the length and breadth of the universe. But I can only dream of what's at work inside and beyond those spheres.

The constellations look to me like a sphere of reality. In outer space, worlds circulate within worlds - moons within planetary orbits, planets within star orbits, stars within swirling galactic flows. Inside those lights, what is happening?

Cassiopeia speaks. This much I know. When she rolls slowly in the northeast over the cedars and pointed firs a few feet from my bed, a sense of a relation ripples through me and blossoms. She troubles my sleep, whatever sleep it is. In my unconscious state, her beauty arises like smoldering fires. I have the sense that this is her data and it is virtually unreadable. To believe it is, may be arrogance of disastrous potential. She spins there for something like eternity.

What elementary schools are conducting their cheerful business at this very moment out behind the stars of Cassiopeia?