One of the most prolific meteor showers of the year happens on Saturday this week, on the date referred to centuries ago by the English John Donne as the deep midnight of both the year and the day.
The meteor shower is known as the Geminids, and it peaks every year overnight on December 13th to 14th. This meteor shower is great because it gets active before midnight, once the constellation Gemini rises in the East not long after sunset, and the early meteors often leave long, beautiful trails as they graze the top of the atmosphere. As Gemini rises higher, the meteors get more active, but now they lose their arc and seem to come straight on toward us, shorter and quicker, but more abundant.
December 13 is also the Feast of St. Lucy, to whom John Donne wrote his 17th century nocturnal. St. Lucy was martyred in the 4th century, and is regarded as the patron saint of eyesight. She is also the patroness of Dante. In fact, Lucy is one of the three feminine divine that stand as guardian over Dante’s epic journey through the inferno, the purgatory, and the paradise. And in that sublime way of penetrating life’s mysteries that is reserved for poets and initiates, Dante describes how, when he mounts up to the starry worlds after moving through the planetary spheres of the paradise, he does so at the region of Gemini stars.
So let’s look closer. What are these poets and this saint pointing at? And where does the science meet this poetic intimation?
The Geminid Meteor Shower first appeared in 1862, long after John Donne, Dante, and Saint Lucy. Curiously, the parent body of this meteor shower is not a comet, but an asteroid, which bears the name 3200 Phaethon. Unlike a comet, when Phaethon passes the Sun, it doesn’t develop a cometary-like tail, it’s rock, not ice and dust. Because of this, the so-called “debris” trail it leaves at it dives sunward is not dust at all, like comets, but sodium. So this is interesting. In old alchemical texts, sodium, or salt, is one of three elements needed for crossing the threshold.
Now let’s consider the asteroid’s name: Phaethon, which it was only given in 1985 after astronomers examined its behavior more closely. If you know your Greek mythology, then you know that Phaethon is the mortal son of Helius, the Sun. To confirm his parentage, Phaethon is given the right to travel to the palace of Helius, and ask whatever he will of his Father God. He asks for his father’s chariot, and the right to drive his horses for one day. Helius tries to dissuade him, and here’s where, in my mind, ancient myth informs medieval poetry. Helius warns Phaethon that not even Zeus could drive his chariot of fire, for the first part of the road is steep and difficult; the mid-way is extremely high; and the last part, being precipitous, requires an assured control. Further, all phases of the journey have to be performed while the vault of the heavens spins round in constant motion. The first part could be imagined as Dante’s Inferno, the mid-way, as the liminal space of Purgatory, which is imagined as a high mountain, and the final stage is akin to the Paradise, where the vault of the heavens whirl about, unless one has achieved assured control, or inner stillness.
If ever there was a story to warn human begins about passing through the threshold to the spiritual word unprepared, this is it. And it’s not happenstance that it comes to mind at this point in the cycle of the year, when the daylight wanes in the northern hemisphere, and we prepare to cross from one period of time onto the next.
There’s more in the description of Helius’ warning to Phaethon, that he must not take the straight way through the five zones of heaven, but he must follow the path which runs slantwise, with a wide curve ~ this is like the path of the Sun in this season, and the meteors. Helius tells Phaethon to stay within the limits of the three heavenly zones, which I imagine to be the region of the inner planets (Moon, Mercury, Venus), which aligns the journey to one’s own destiny forces ~ and to avoid going too far north or south. In other words, don’t go beyond where you have yet to begin!
Take my counsel while you stand on solid ground, Helius warns, for it is one thing to look at the constellations from the ground, it is another to travel through or near them.
It is the year’s midnight, and the day’s, the sunlight is waning, and yet St. Lucy is there, patron of Dante, and of eyesight, as if she were a beacon, that with truth and steadiness we can find our way through this threshold of time. And the meteors of Phaethon, streaming through the night from the constellation region of the Gemini twins affirms that we, each of us, have a choice ~ to heed the warning to not go unprepared, or to take up the reins as we will, come what may.
Look for the Geminid Meteor Shower overnight Saturday, December 13 to 14. The constellation rises about 8:30 pm local time, which is a few hours after sunset in the northern hemisphere. This shower is the call to make ready, the year’s midnight is upon us, what path will we take, what future will we make?
~Mary
Hear this episode of The Storyteller’s Night Sky on podcast here, and wherever you listen. Cover image of the sodium vaporizing from the asteroid, or “rock comet” 3200 Phaethon as it hurtles sunward, from NASA.