Records: Imperfection of the Heavens

Most often, when there is a change in the way people think, it's said they've broken with tradition. It was unheard of that tradition itself would break from the way people think. As of the last few years, with the *Incidence of Incidents*, that had become the rule – especially in the myths and legends that tied together history and identity.

Some said that humanity struck first by "inventing" (or discovering) magic. Others said it was the rise of Natural Philosophy, where questioning the universe was questioning God and tantamount to repeating the Original Sin.

By 1380, the **Rise of Astronomy** marked finding "flaws" in the heavens. The celestial bodies, formerly locked in their own spheres, were likely planets, whole other worlds. In another timeline, to an authority whose credibility was based on infallibility, that may have been marginally worse than actually being gods.

The discoveries and theories coming out of the Royal Academy, in branches across the CMC, would've once earned the hat-trick of apostasy, heresy and blasphemy. That wasn't the case in this timeline, where the evolution of astronomy had been accelerated into a modern natural science by magic itself.

As of the 1382 *Altercation of the Angels*, the very nature of the heavenly was called into question. After that, it wasn't that the Church tolerated questions, rather they sought answers to the angelic warning that the "heavens" were different from "heaven."

By the 1383 *Discord of Heaven*, and the now-ongoing *War of the Celestials*, the Church echoed a world desperate for illumination on why the archangels had gone mad. In the Jewish Talmud, in the book Avodah Zarah, God was alleged to supervise 18,000 other worlds. It was now of critical, existential importance to know if that was true, and if so, did these planets have their own archangels or was there one set for all of them? If there were other archangels, had they gone mad as well?

## **Redefining Reality**

The angels were all too real, that much was clear. Healing miracles were real, that much was demonstrated. However, the death and destruction that the archangels had reigned down created a hostile separation from the divine. While the Church already endorsed parable and metaphor above literalism, the cognitive dissonance had reached toxic levels.
The Church had gone from infallibility to the embodiment of humility, but in that respect, drew in people by keeping to the message. It asked the questions that had no answers, and provided what answers it could.
The Jesuit-led Church, along with the learned-mystic Sufi and now others, held on to their non-arcane miracles, their healing, and their relationship to the "normal" angels, as they blazed trails in the RANP. There was a growing claim of the divine on the mundane, and no place was that more clear than seeking knowledge of the cosmos.

Given the war raging across the skies, it was hard for some to see why the Crown of the Commonwealth even cared about things like the nature of the planets. To really see the CrownCom strategy, one had to follow the discoveries and developments of the last few years...

### **The Astronomical Acceleration**

The rise of optics, both mundane and arcane – and especially the hybrids – had given man ne insight into the skies. Decried by some as “…a giant eye to peer up God’s robes…” the bigger harm, the doubters realized, was a thousand more little eyes doing the same. In that case, there were multiple witnesses to the same phenomena. Often, that meant a multiple witnesses to finding the flaws in the celestial sphere.

It was epistemologically upsetting that telescopes a mere fraction of the power of the one in Cambridge were able to resolve these same observations, for burgeoning astronomers to repeat these observations on their own and see that the math actually worked (and how). It was physical, observable truth for which the literalists had no answer.

It had started with the realization that "the gods" traversing the skies were likely whole other worlds, planets unto themselves rather than simply unblinking stars. Once they were accepted as worlds, that opened a whole new set of problems.

## **The Imperfections of the Orbits**

The heavens supposedly had perfect circles in the celestial sphere. In the original timeline, it would've been Johannes Kepler that made precision measurements of the times and placements of the planets in their orbits. In this timeline, it was a group effort that discovered the orbital ellipses. Also acknowledged: *the Babylonian and Indians noted the same thing as early as the first millennium BCE*.

After the discovery of the nature of the planets, the imperfections of their orbits had been... totally insignificant to many, and absolutey fighting words to others. Most had little idea of the nature of the planets beyond their lack of "twinkle." A few thought that recognizing the fact that there were imperfections, or really data of any sort "out there," was . It was better to live in blissful ignorance that risk that discovery might bring the wrath of god (or whomever).

That notion made a widespread comeback during the War of the Celestials.

### **The Center of It All**

Once the orbits were in question, nothing was sacred. By 1381, there were new theories of celestial motion.

At the time, it had been geocentric, as based on the rise and fall of the sun and moon. This was confirmed by Christian Holy Scripture by way of Joshua 10:12-13, in which Joshua made the Sun stand still. Additionally, the classical greats of Aristotle and Ptolemy also advanced geocentric models of the universe.

In March of 1381, Royal Astronomers in Cambridge broke ground, proposing the [Tychonic] model of stellar motion. The hypothesis was that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (the visible planets) actually orbited the sun, which in turn orbited the earth. The math fit considerably better and the observations made sense given the path of the planets across the sky.

This wasn’t quite the heresy of Aristarchus some 15 centuries earlier, but it was close. In this new model, the sun still revolved around the earth. However, this had opened the door dangerous questions to be asked. Some of the old school old school took a stand, countering the observations by citing passages from Acts 1:11; "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" as well several more arguments relying on a literal interpretation of Scripture. This included 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1, 96:10, Psalm 104:5, and Ecclesiastes 1:5.

By then, the Jesuits had already invoked the looser interpretation of Job 26:7 – and quickly followed that up with a confirmation of the validity of the observations. The Vatican itself was onboard with more metaphorical and parable-based interpretations.

### **Falling From Grace**

By 1382, the Altercation of the Angels had already firmly booted any though of an anthropocentric universe off a cliff.  Astronomy helped give it a shove over the edge. By this point, astronomers proposed a revised heliocentric system that dared the impiety of putting the Earth in motion.

There was already classical precedent: Philolaus (4th century BCE) was one of the first to hypothesize movement of the Earth, probably inspired by Pythagoras' theories about a spherical globe. Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BCE had developed some theories of Heraclides Ponticus (speaking of a revolution by Earth on its axis) to propose what was, so far as is known, the first serious model of a heliocentric solar system.

Though the original text had been lost, a reference in Archimedes' book *The Sand Reckoner* (*Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius & Dimensio Circuli*) described a work by Aristarchus in which he advanced the heliocentric model.

### **Final Discoveries Pending Endorsement**

By 1383, the math of astronomy had progressed *hundreds*of years, matching the arcane-enhanced optics and observations. It took the discovery and confirmation of the aberration of light to confirm heliocentric models (something that required close guesstimations of the speed of light and wouldn't have otherwise been done until 1727).

It was the late 1383 confirmation of near stellar parallax (sometimes confused with the aberration of light) that started to put the War of the Celestials into perspective. The first of the observations had actually been made as early as 1380, when the Cambridge telescope had first light, and it had taken the wide, 6-month swings of the earth's relative position on opposite sides of the sun to make a big enough difference to actually note the relative change in positions between close stars.

What had otherwise taken until 1806 to observe and report the parallax of α-Lyrae (Vega), it was confirmed by other observatories throught the CMC by the end of December 1383.

When the realization that a few stars could be seen in parallax, but most couldn't, it actually had a somewhat divine-inspiration effect as interstellar distances started to come into context. The universe was *big!* Even more, assuming there really were 18,000 other worlds – and they weren't in some ethereal or astral (or God-only-knows) alternate state, then the angels traveled *a looooong way*.

By 1384, armed with the observations and the math alike, the Crown of the Commonwealth recognized the discoveries as valid and moved to incorporate the data into *Book of Learning* curricula, especially with those who would otherwise be creating policy to either combatting *Foreign threats* or finding places to escape should humanity be threatened on earth.