I have this curious notion, entirely unprovable of course, that being from the far North of the Earth does something to your worldview, because of how the sky looks at night.

consider that near the Equator, you can see almost every constellation, almost every star. the entire celestial vault revolves into view, from North to South celestial poles.

but near the North Pole, you see the Pole Star high up, and the entire sky wheels around it—and you don't see most of the stars in the Southern celestial hemisphere. I feel like...growing up with that, and knowing only half the stars in the sky...I think that does something to the human mind. something subtle but lasting.

it's not fashionable to think of the stars as having any effect on the human mind or human behavior. the "skeptical" and "rational" crowd, the Neil Tyson crowd, scoff at the idea that the Moon or the stars or any other celestial bodies can exert any influence on humanity—even though people see all these celestial bodies, use them to navigate, use them for timekeeping...

...so why the fixed denial? why assert that the Moon can't possibly do anything to people, even though it's bright and obvious in the sky--even though the Moon causes most of our tides, and causes the entire Earth to change shape periodically, altering its surface gravity?

astronomy and astrology consider themselves to be bitter enemies, and I don't like that. astrology was based on empiricism—that is to say, the astrologers began with something that they could measure and keep track of, namely the clockwork motions of celestial objects. if the old astrologers thought that they discerned a pattern in human events that corresponded with the motions of the heavens, then they must have discerned that through experience.

"pareidolia", the skeptic might sneer—as if that explained anything at all. "pareidolia" is a neutral word, or it ought to be neutral anyway; the human mind naturally seeks patterns and correspondences in things. it requires effort, investigation and inquiry and above all time and patience, to determine whether such patterns are meaningful.

turning "pareidolia" into a mere skeptical sneer is to say that pattern-matching is BAD, and that humans are fools for detecting patterns or coincidences in things...and that's to the liking of authoritarians, as it happens. they don't want people noticing patterns.

Neil Tyson is an authoritarian; he wants you to think that he and his friends (like fellow sexual assailant Michael Shermer) have everything worked out. they have all the knowledge, all the answers; we the people are meant to be mere passive consumers of their wisdom.. (we're also meant to believe that all reports about their sexual misdeeds are mere lies, and that we're fools to discern any pattern of behavior from Shermer and Tyson—more "pareidolia" at work, they might say.)

Tyson, ultimately, doesn't want us looking at the sky. he doesn't want us to see these things for ourselves, to have our own feelings about the Moon and the planets and the stars; he doesn't want us to derive our own sense of meaning from these things. he and his "skeptical" friends wish to be the sole authorities on the sky.

above all we're not supposed to think that there's anything mysterious or poetical or (heaven help us) anything mystical about the celestial sphere. the "skeptical" way is to reduce everything to mere matter, mere things, mere data: the Moon is only a ball of stuff.

everything's already settled and explained away, in the Tyson / Shermer "rationalist" mindset—the STEM-lord mindset. we're not supposed to have feelings about the Moon or the stars, any more than we're supposed to have feelings about arithmetic, or about electrons.

but what if they're wrong?

what if the celestial vault really is mystical? maybe arithmetic is full of cosmic mystery? maybe electrons bear not merely electric charges, but also divine enigmas?

what if the stars aren't just matter? what if they...matter?

~Chara of Pnictogen