In traditional cosmology, what is to be "read" is the sky itself: the "lights in the firmament of heaven," which were given to us not only for seasons, and for days and years, but above all for signs. Modern "cosmology" tells us nothing about anything. https://twitter.com/Real_Xi_Jinping/status/1327249591897559043?s=20

Ancient feats often seem miraculous. "How did x low-tech society ever devise y?" Here is a question not merely of epistemology but of phenomenology and even biology. Ancient peoples saw the world completely differently, and it's safe to presume their brains operated thus.

What is crucial for archaic astronomy is what Oscar Hinze terms "successive Gestalt," that is, Gestalt given in the successive positions of a body over some span of time. This kind of Gestalt is still perceivable for us, provided the corresponding time span is sufficiently short.

The most relatable case is with a dance. We don't admire a single pose in a dance. Instead there is a "melody" of a dance that persists in memory or what Hinze terms "presence-time." But for archaic astronomers, astonishingly, this applied also to their vision of the heavens.

Clearly there are perceptions which fill out a span of time without a loss of unity. The dancer — say, a stripper — dances to a Pantera song, while the patron sits with a familiar stone-faced awe of titties. This perception is not of an image, but a moving image "in time."

In other words, there is not so hard of a distinction between memory and perception. Indeed if we can so easily envisage the dancer, or the sonata, then "the sky is the limit": the same capacity can be applied with much greater parameters to something like astronomy!

The ancient observers of the sky must have been equipped with an extraordinarily vital perceiving memory, with the capacity to view together in a present unity phenomena which, today for us, lie temporally too far apart to be still perceived as belonging together.

Without this facility, we can't conceive how ancient astronomy could have otherwise been devised. Concomitantly, we must think they were also better able to breach the bounds of "discrete" senses, which today we consider as a peculiar mental condition (synesthesia).

We know that we have the innate capacity for this because we can achieve it easily with something like mescaline. "I saw, felt, tasted, and heard the music. I was myself...music." They say such things in utmost sobriety and total conviction.

Civilization confers a loss of this faculty. Hinze says: The further one recedes back in the development, the more the individual areas of sense, which in the culturally formed man (Kulturmensch) of today are clearly differentiated from one another, are found still united.

A single frame of a dancer's contorted figure means nothing. What stands at issue, in the dance as in the heavens, is the miracle of semanticity. It is a question of reading the Book of Nature, of perceiving "the invisible things of God in the things that are made."

The archaic priests who watched the heavens comprehended, at the highest stage of their graphological
interpretation of the sky, the stars and their movements as cosmic symbols which, when thus deciphered, provide explanation concerning the most essential questions of human life.