The historic astral event of July 1054

It was a significant month for all the world

Petroglyph at Peñasco Blanco in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.

I’m taking this Holy Week again to write about something excruciating. As I’ve mentioned recently, my life as a Western convert to the Orthodox Church, even twenty-five years in as of this Lazarus Saturday, is a living schism. By the grace of God I have access by faith to the walled garden wherein is planted the Tree of Life — but my family, nation, and local community (the percentage of which is Orthodox being negligible) all reside outside those walls. Love for neighbor requires me to straddle a fence the way only an apostle of Christ can. But let’s also freely admit that this rendition of my situation merely tells in external terms what within me is an internal struggle. I am a man of unclean lips and dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. In Church, I am brought in the midst of angels, in a house filled with smoke, the pillars of which shake at the voice of the seraphim, crying, “Holy, holy, holy” — one of which approaches me with tongs holding a burning coal from nowhere else but the very altar of God. Woe is me, I am undone!

Guest star

The Great Schism is an epic event that of course did not happen all at once like magic. In July 1054, papal legates, sent to Constantinople by a since-deceased and yet-to-be-replaced Pope of Rome, exchanged bulls of excommunication with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Catechisms usually downplay the historical role of this event as its immediate effect was limited to the individual parties involved, and it was hardly the first time Rome and the Eastern Church had been out of communion with each other. It’s not like members of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in Anglo-Saxon England were suddenly deprived of grace at this moment. Give the Holy Spirit some credit; Christian ecclesiology doesn’t work that way. The Holy Spirit, the Lord, is not controlled by our actions, even if He does respond to them lovingly, in respect of the natural free will that He perfects in us. No, in 1066, the Anglo-Saxons in England received visitation by William the Conqueror and the Normans, and that’s a whole different providential response to a whole different arena of human activity. But looking at the schism of 1054 merely through an historical lens does not at all do it justice. What happened at that time, in that month, bears profound symbolical meaning in all its details.

And the event was simultaneously marked in the heavens by an extraordinary event testified to by astral observers all over the world. Off the tip of the horn of Taurus, at a time when the sun was not far away, only on the other side of Gemini at the edge of Cancer, there appeared a new, terrible light, brighter than any other body in the sky, save the sun and moon. This “guest star,” as the Chinese call it (a handy moniker), was visible even during daylight for the space of some three weeks. It remained visible at night some two years after. To peoples who still knew that the heavens bear meaning for our lives, this phenomenon must have struck them as portentous, perhaps dreadful, a divine visitation that pricked their hearts.

It was not the only such event within living memory at the time, moreover. In 1006, forty-eight years prior, there had been such a “guest star” low in the southern sky, in the constellation of Lupus (near the wolf’s belly actually, right where the constellation Centaurus is spearing it). Due to the astral event’s proximity to us in the Milky Way Galaxy, it must have been even brighter than the one in 1054 — the brightest, in fact, known to history. It first appeared on May 1, 1006 and traveled above the southern horizon along a low, short arc almost entirely at night, rising at dusk in more southerly lands such as Egypt, but for most of the Northern Hemisphere not appearing above the horizon before the end of day for a good four weeks into its existence. But there are reports of it being visible in daylight, and at night it would have been so bright you might have been able to read by it. The magnitude of its brightness would have been about halfway between the brightest planet and the moon.

So in 1054, we have to understand, the older generations would have remembered the earlier event from their childhood, almost five decades prior. The memory would have been buried so deeply in their psyche, all but forgotten, hidden somewhere along with a deceased parent, perhaps, or a lost sibling, or the moment in their lives when innocence was first lost; it was so, so long ago. Yet suddenly, in the waning years of their life, the star was back, not low in the southern nighttime sky, popping up and right back down again, but now high in the sky, along the path of the sun, leading the sun across the summer daytime sky from east to west. The effect must have been terrifying, or at least some kind of sublime. Who is this intruder preceding the sun? What does it portend? I’ve experienced two total solar eclipses in my days. When you believe in divinity, especially when you believe in the Incarnate God, these kinds of things that occur in the heavens — in all sobriety — are psychotropic events.

Here’s a snapshot of the sky on the morning of the second day of the guest star’s appearance, as calculated by the software program Stellarium. Not pictured is the guest star, but the four brackets forming a square mark the space in heaven where the guest star was seen (in New Mexico at 6:59 AM). The light blue line extending down to it from above traces the horn of Taurus down to Zeta Tauri, a star on the extreme edge of the constellation. Nearby on this day is the moon in its toenail crescent phase.

I chose these coordinates in New Mexico because there is a petroglyph in that region believed to be commemorating the astronomical event, at the Peñasco Blanco great house in Chaco Canyon. The image, a pictograph, was made on the underside of a rock ledge sixteen feet high, intended to be seen from below. I opened the article with a close-up image of this pictograph above, but here is a wider shot to give you a sense of scale:

And here is the close-up again, this time with the image flipped, as though your back is against the wall and you are looking up, which is how you would use the pictograph to match its characters with the heavenly bodies you were looking out at:

Comparing this photograph with the Stellarium image above, you can see how the crescent moon faces the sun, symbolized by a left handprint (perhaps with the rays pointing downwards toward earth), and how next to the moon is a starburst which would symbolize the guest star. I haven’t visited this site and am unsure of its directional orientation, but if the wall faces east, this would all make perfect sense as a depiction of the spectacular event as seen on July 5, 1054.

It also bears mentioning that on the wall directly below this rock ledge, there is another pictograph, thought to be a depiction of Halley’s Comet, which made its octogenary appearance just twelve years after the guest star, in 1066, famously preceding the Norman invasion of England. This pictograph is faded and does not photograph well. You can barely see in the photograph above three concentric circles; there’s also a long, colorful tail that you can’t see. Astrophotographer Rob Pettengill (the happy man standing by the pictograph sign above) has produced this image with enhanced saturation of the original colors (source):

You have to wonder what the artist or artists of these remarkable drawings were thinking when they made them. Did they know what these events signified? Did they perhaps align with particular events in local history, events analogous to what was going on in Europe? Or did they not know what they meant, only that they must be meaningful? And maybe then they marked them down for posterity so that one day their descendants might bring together knowledge of the signs with knowledge of their meaning. Either way it can be said: these Native American images mark the genesis of the apostate European culture that in time will come to conquer all the peoples of this land and annihilate their way of life. What the post-Schism Normans did to the Anglo-Saxons was but the overture. Behind the simple beauty of the petroglyph lies a true omen of death.

The Peñasco Blanco pictograph depicts the moon’s position and phase as it would have been observed on July 5, 1054, but historians peg that as the second day of the guest star’s life in the heavens. The date of its first appearing was July 4th, a harbinger perhaps of the revolutionary age that crowned this new millennium brought in by the guest stars of 1006 and 1054 — the revolutionary age which itself was bookended by the Declaration of Independence in America (July 4, 1776) and the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in Russia (July 4, 1918, o.s.). Then the star’s brightness persisted such that it was visible during the day for up to twenty-three days, which is how long Chinese records have it (which records are the most detailed in this instance).

Meanwhile, it was on July 16, 1054 that the papal legates from Rome dumped a bull on the altar of Hagia Sophia excommunicating Ecumenical Patriarch Michael Cerularius. A synod was convened in response, and on July 20, 1054, the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated the papal legates back, a group that included a cardinal, a cardinal deacon who served as papal secretary, and an archbishop. All of this occurred during the three-week period when the ominous guest star was at the peak of its brightness.

An image of the Crab Nebula adapted from infrared data obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Crab Nebula

The wild thing is no theological teacher ever told me this. I only learned of the 1054 supernova while casually perusing pop astrophysics. Scientists now understand the 1006 and 1054 guest stars as supernovas, the explosive light of dying stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and the two brightest known supernovas ever seen from Earth.

Moreover, in 1758, when Western astronomers were anticipating the return of Halley’s Comet, one of them mistakenly predicted to find it in the region of Taurus. Using a telescope, he found the Crab Nebula instead, at first thinking it was Halley’s Comet. Some eighty-five years later, an astronomer made a crude drawing of it that looked like a crab; using a better telescope a few years later, he no longer thought it looked like a crab, but that’s how it got its name nonetheless. The Crab Nebula is not visible to the eye. Through their telescopes, astronomers at this time could only see it as a nebula, a cloud of light. They did not yet understand what it was in any more detail.

Then in the early twentieth century, analysis of photographs taken years apart suggested the Crab Nebula was expanding. In the 1910s and 1920s, working on either side of the Great War, astronomers found data in the electromagnetic spectrum radiating from the nebula that confirmed it was expanding. Working backwards mathematically, it was estimated to have begun expanding in the chronological neighborhood of 1054. Temporally and spatially, based on historical records, all the circumstantial evidence was there, and in 1928 Edwin Hubble suggested we all just accept that the Crab Nebula is the supernova remnant of the 1054 guest star. It was the first identification of a supernova remnant with an historic supernova (to be followed by several others), and subsequent investigation has only confirmed the finding.

What we see in the Crab Nebula when we look into it with modern instruments is two pulsars. Pulsars are sources of electromagnetic radiation that pulse at regular intervals. In the 1960s it was uncertain what exactly pulsars are, but close inspection of the Crab Nebula in particular determined that they are rotating neutron stars. Neutron stars are the cores left over from stars that have collapsed in on themselves, the leftover kernels of supernovas, in other words. So there are two rotating neutron stars at the center of the Crab Nebula, but only one of them, it can be ascertained from the data, was the one responsible for the historic supernova. So in 1054 there were two sister stars at this location in the Galaxy when one of them which was ailing went supernova and took the other one with it. That culpable star is the Crab Pulsar today. It is known for its emission of highly dangerous gamma rays — at a magnitude higher than anything else in our heavens (the kind of thing we can thank Earth’s magnetosphere for protecting us from, at least in terms of material causation).

The implications of these findings for the symbolic meaning of the Great Schism of 1054 are, to me, stunning. I’ve always refrained from writing about them in essay-form, however, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression about symbolic knowledge acquired from above, particularly in regard to such a polemical issue. Everything in the heavens bears meaning for us on earth, but interpretation of such astral phenomena is a matter of conjecture, of epithymetically gaping for knowledge that we do not possess. It cannot be presented as though with conviction, as though with thymic control of the facts.

That’s why the first time I wrote about this supernova and its remnant was in a screenplay, in Climate Change (the opening scene of which I’ve shared in this Journal). In a fictional context, and moreover in a satirical context where many ridiculous things occur and the truth is slippery and elusive on the surface, a writer is free to present all kinds of conjectural knowledge with minimal danger of it being understood as a matter of conviction, readers being given ample freedom to understand things in any manner of ways. And so, in a more or less isolated scene, I have a fictional German Pope with a thick accent (Werner Herzog would be my dream casting), standing on the steps of an Ethiopian Cathedral in Addis Ababa, surrounded by certain fictional Orthodox Patriarchs (ideally played by other venerable filmmakers: Sokurov, Kovačević, Puiu, Gerima), and speaking to an immense crowd of people via a Jamaican sound system set up by Rastafarians, being televised live globally besides. This Pope opens his speech by describing the 1054 supernova and resultant Crab Nebula. He identifies his church, the Roman Catholic Church, as the neutron star responsible for the breach, the pulsar operating as the most dangerous source of gamma rays on earth for the past millennium. He repents of the apostasy that caused the Schism and reverts to the Orthodox Church, causing a worldwide upheaval. Then, further to underline the unreality of the scene, as an allusion to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, he accidentally knocks over a conspicuously placed vase while prostrating himself before the Russian Patriarch — except the vase unrealistically doesn’t break, and the Ethiopian Patriarch picks it up and put its back on its pedestal.

It’s a fun scene. I think so, at least. The Schism is such a horrifyingly awful, painful, and terrible thing, like the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise or, indeed, like the Crucifixion of Jesus. I feel the tragedy of it in my gut, my bones, my marrow. Artistically I can only respond to it with excruciating satire, making fun of it, like Dr. Strangelove or Network, or like Serbian screenwriter Dušan Kovačević, the greatest political satirist to work in cinema and a primary influence.

But I haven’t yet summarized for you the whole scene.

“A Hubble Space Telescope image of the starburst galaxy NGC 2146 showing the position of the supernova SN 2018zd (large white dot on right), which was first detected in 2018. The stellar explosion is a smoking gun for the existence of electron-capture supernovae, a third type of exploding star. (Composite image courtesy of NASA/STScI/J. DePasquale and Las Cumbres Observatory)” (source).

Electron-capture supernova

Up until very recently, there have only been two main types of supernova known to astrophysicists. It’s not at all a given that a dying star will go out with a bang and not a whimper. There is a way in which small stars can die that produces a supernova, and there is a way in which large stars can die that produces a supernova. Those mechanisms only work for those two respective sizes. It was not known whether mid-sized stars upon dying could produce a supernova at all. There was hypothesized a third type of supernova, entailing electron capture, a mechanism by which a mid-range star could do it, but there had not been any instances of it observed in the heavens. From evidence observed in the Crab Nebula, it was postulated that the 1054 supernova could have been this third type, but it could not be proven.

Then 2018 came around. In 2018, from the distance of the Dusty Hand Galaxy, in our heavens near the North Star, there appeared to the technologically enhanced eyes of scientists the light of a supernova in a region of space that had been previously documented by the Hubble telescope. Using the before and after data, they found this supernova did not fit either model of the two known supernova types, but it did fit all the characteristics postulated for the hypothesized electron-capture supernova pertaining to mid-sized stars. (These findings were first published in June 2021.) The data also correlates with what has been observed in the Crab Nebula. It has since been deemed reasonable to induce, at least with more certainty than ever before, that the electron-capture type of supernova does exist, and that the Crab Nebula is the remnant of this kind of supernova.

Here’s all that information again, in more digestible form, from a more knowledgeable source, the popular astrophysicist YouTuber Dr. Becky (yes, she has a personality based on the TV show Friends, but she also holds a doctorate and is employed as a researcher of black holes at Oxford University). Queue the video to the 19:21 mark:

(But before you click, it has to be acknowledged how quickly and hilariously this thumbnail has aged. If you follow astrophysics even casually, you know what I mean. No, 2021, the crisis in cosmology has not been ended — but I’m glad you fixed Hubble!)

March 2018 was when this electron-capture supernova from a distant galaxy was first observed. It was not visible to the eye, but it was visible to our observatories. Likewise the church schism in October that same year between Constantinople and Moscow was not visible to most Westerners, but it was visible to the Orthodox. These are the kind of heavenly events — some of them simply terrible — which determine things on earth.

Back in my screenplay, at the event in Ethiopia where my German Pope reverts to Orthodoxy, there are no Greeks present. It’s set in 2021 (when I wrote it), and the Pope is picking sides of the ongoing schism between Constantinople and Moscow. Again, this scenario does not express any conviction regarding real events, but is arbitrary and open-ended, like a dream. It all occurs after Greece, in the beginning of the movie, opportunistically invades Turkey after a major earthquake there and retakes Constantinople. I wrote this before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (authentic news footage of fighting in the Donbass comprises the most earnest scene in the movie), but the invasion I invented rhymes with the real one that happened in a way completely analogous to other dreamlike ambiguous backflips my screenplay is performing. Anyways, the Pope notes the link between supernovas and schisms and issues a warning to the Ecumenical Patriarch not to continue down the road he has set out on, citing his own ecclesial experience of having done so and regretted it.

That there would be a supernova in the same year of this latest schism, one that links it with the supernova of 1054 and the Great Schism, I find simply terrifying. I don’t pretend to know what it all means with any iota of conviction, or what will happen next, but it seems to me a reminder that the Lord’s judgment is upon us; the Lord is keeping score. Will we cease to sin? Will we lay aside our pride? Will we learn to fear the Lord above all? To desire nothing but Him and His will? Will we sell Him out to be crucified every single goddamned chance we get? The Lord bleeds. He is penetrated by nails and stabbed with a spear, abandoned by those who pledged to be with Him. And when He forgives us even for this, will we be able to accept His forgiveness, with love and gratitude, to allow it to transform us so that we are no longer undone by our weaknesses, to be made over in His likeness, no longer to abandon Him, or crucify Him, or sell Him out to be crucified, but at last to do what He does, such that we are called His Body, such that His Spirit becomes our Spirit, as He has always intended, if only we could stop making love to our sinful thoughts for, like, two seconds? May the Lord have mercy on us all. May the Lord have mercy on me, the sinner. May He strike the fear of Him in my heart. That I should make a good beginning, that I might love Him the way I need to. That I might live, and not die. Neither with a bang nor a whimper — said the dim and fading star yet present in the Lord’s firmament.