On celebrities as the heirs of the gods of old (1.1, 1.5, 1.6) and modernity’s secularization (1.16, 1.18, 2.12, 2.15):

In 1940, A.P. Herbert—English writer and member of parliament who shared a literary agent with W.B. Yeats—published a pamphlet with a curious and revealing proposal: to rename the stars no longer with Latin, Greek and Arabic names but with those of historical figures. In A Better Sky, or, Name That Star, the title of the pamphlet, Herbert

concentrates heavily on the literary and philosophical personnages who had come to define modernity—or, at least, had come to define an account of the development of the modern world understood from a particular mid-twentieth century point of view (i.e. firmly Eurocentric, male, Anglophone). Not restricting himself to individual stars, Herbert saw fit to rewrite the familiar constellations as more modern groupings: statesmen (Charlemagne, Cromwell, etc), scientists (Euclid, Einstein), poets (Milton, Byron), and more, also forming geographical districts of modern nations, cities and islands, reflections of planet Earth’s own divisions. His decisions were systematic: thus the constellation Orion, long navigational beacon, becomes “The Sailor” (Columbus, Cook). Herbert published A Better Sky as a pamphlet that included a foldout, redrawn star map.¹

Constellations according to A.P Herbert in A Better Sky

If we were to write this sort of pamphlet today, which stars would we choose for our postmodernist pantheon, the new firmament of the contemporary psyche: Beyonce or Rihanna for Venus?, Rafael Nadal or, even better, Pete Hegseth for Mars?, George W. Bush or Donald Trump for Jupiter? or, will the corporations be the ones that name all sorts of stellar objects? Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club:

…when deep-space exploration ramps up, it will probably be the megatonic corporations that discover all the new planets and map them.

The IBM Stellar Sphere.

The Philip Morris Galaxy.

Planet Denny’s.

Every planet will take on the corporate identity of whoever rapes it first.

Budweiser world.

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1. Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan Goldman, eds. Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture. ↩︎