Word Finder - heavens

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The sky, specifically:

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The abode of God or the gods, traditionally conceived as beyond the sky; especially:

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The afterlife of the blessed dead, traditionally conceived as opposed to an afterlife of the wicked and unjust (compare hell); specifically:

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(by extension) Any paradise; any blissful place or experience.

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(by extension) A state of bliss; a peaceful ecstasy.

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(with a modifier) Similarly blissful afterlives, places, or states for particular people, animals, or objects.

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To transport to the abode of God, the gods, or the blessed.

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To beatify, enchant, or please greatly.

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To beautify, to make into a paradise.

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(often with 'the') The distant sky of the sun, moon, and stars.

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An expression of surprise, contempt, outrage, disgust, boredom, or frustration.

I mean, he's a twenty eight year old man, for heavens' sake.

Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.

The Greeks identified this constellation with the nymph Callisto, placed in the heavens by Zeus in the form of a bear together with her son Arcas as " bear-warder," or Arcturus; they named it Arctos, the she-bear, Helice, from its turning round the pole-star.

The first part of the epistle deals generally with magnetic attractions and repulsions, with the polarity of the stone, and with the supposed influence of the poles of the heavens upon the poles of the stone.

The conceptions connected with Nusku are of distinctly popular origin, as is shown by his prominence in incantations, which represent the popular element in the cult, and it is significant that in the astro-theological system of the Babylonian priests Nusku-Girru is not assigned to any particular place in the heavens.

This interpretation of the popular tales, according to which the career of the hero can be followed in its entirety and in detail in the movements in the heavens, in time, with the growing predominance of the astral-mythological system, overshadowed the other factors involved, and it is in this form, as an astral myth, that it passes through the ancient world and leaves its traces in the folk-tales and myths of Hebrews, Phoenicians, Syrians, Greeks and Romans throughout Asia Minor and even in India.

Sometimes the god received a distinguishing attribute which indicates an association not with any particular place, but with some special characteristic; the most common forms are Ba'al-bamman, the chief deity of Punic north Africa, perhaps " the glowing Ba'al," the god of fertilizing warmth, and Baal-shamem, " Baal of the heavens."

Later Buddhism has, however, a doctrine of many heavens and hells.

Further, we know that in the 8th century B.C., there were observatories in most of the large cities in the valley of the Euphrates, and that professional astronomers regularly took observations of the heavens, copies of which were sent to the king of Assyria; and from a cuneiform inscription found in the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, the text of which is given by George Smith,5 we learn that at that time the epochs of eclipses of both sun and moon were predicted as possible - probably by means of the cycle of 223 lunations or Chaldaean Saros - and that observations were made accordingly.

Compare also an-sud-dam, " like the heavens," where the ending dam stands for a usual dim, being changed to a hard dam under the influence of the hard vowels in an-sud.

In works of art he is represented as carrying the heavens or the terrestrial globe.

A figure of Atlas supporting the heavens is often found as a frontispiece in early collections of maps, and is said to have been first thus used by Mercator.

Another treatise relates the destruction of mankind, and the circumstances that led to the creation of the heavens in the form of a cow.

Outside its walls there was a huge brick model of the solar bark in which the god daily traversed the heavens.

According to a widely-spread doctrine of great age the deceased Egyptian was translated to the heavens, where he lived on in the form of a star.

His sphere of influence was the nocturnal heavens, thunderstorms at night being attributed to him, those by day to Jupiter.

Buffon, in a cautious, tentative fashion, suggested rather than stated the mutability of species and the influence of the forces of nature in moulding organisms. Immanuel Kant, in his Theory of the Heavens (1755), foreshadowed a theory of the development of unformed matter into the highest types of animals and plants, and suggested that the gradations of structure revealed by comparative anatomy pointed to the existence of blood relationship of all organisms, due to derivation from a common ancestor.

He returned to England in November 1678, having by the registration of 341 stars won the title of the "Southern Tycho," and by the translation to the heavens of the "Royal Oak," earned a degree of master of arts, conferred at Oxford by the king's command on the 3rd of December 1678, almost simultaneously with his election as fellow of the Royal Society.

These passages certainly prove that Bacon had very nearly, if not perfectly, arrived at theoretical proof of the possibility of constructing a telescope and a microscope; but his writings give no account of the trial of an actual telescope, nor any detailed results of the application of a telescope to an examination of the heavens.

Huygens contrived some ingenious arrangements for directing such telescopes towards any object visible in the heavens - the focal adjustment and centring of the eyepiece being preserved by a braced rod connecting the objectglass and eye-piece.

Freedom from tremor, ease and delicacy of movement and facility of directing the instrument to any desired object in the heavens are the primary qualifications.

Where accurate differential observations or photographs involving other than instantaneous exposures have to be made, the additional condition is required that the optical axis of the telescope shall accurately and automatically follow the object under observation in spite of the apparent diurnal motion of the heavens, or in some cases even of the apparent motion of the object relative to neighbouring fixed stars.

While Anu, with whom there was associated as a pale reflection a consort Antum, assigned to him under the influence of the widely prevalent view among the early Semites which conceived of gods always in pairs, remained more or less of an abstraction during the various periods of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion and taking little part in the active cult of the temples, his unique position as the chief god of the highest heavens was always recognized in the theological system developed by the priests, which found an expression in making him the first figure of a triad, consisting of Anu, Bel and Ea, among whom the priests divided the three divisions of the universe, the heavens, the earth with the atmosphere above it, and the watery expanse respectively.

As the first triad symbolized the three divisions of the universe - the heavens, earth and the watery element - so the second represented the three great forces of nature - the sun, the moon and the life-giving power.

The essential feature of this astral theology is the assumption of a close link between the movements going on in the heavens and occurrences on earth, which led to identifying the gods and goddesses with heavenly bodies - planets and stars, besides sun and moon - and to assigning the seats of all the deities in the heavens.

Starting with this belief the priests built up the theory of the close correspondence between occurrences on earth and phenomena in the heavens.

The heavens presenting a constant change even to the superficial observer, the conclusion was drawn of a connexion between the changes and the everchanging movement in the fate of individuals and of nature as well as in the appearance of nature.

To read the signs of the heavens was therefore to understand the meaning of occurrences on earth, and with this accomplished it was also possible to foretell what events were portended by the position and relationship to one another of sun, moon, planets and certain stars.

Myths that symbolized changes in season or occurrences in nature were projected on the heavens, which were mapped out to correspond to the divisions of the earth.

All the gods, great and small, had their places assigned to them in the heavens, and facts, including such as fell within the domain of political history, were interpreted in terms of astral theology.

It left its trace in incantations, omens and hymns, and it gave birth to astronomy, which was assiduously cultivated because a knowledge of the heavens was the very foundation of the system of belief unfolded by the priests of Babylonia and Assyria.

Disassociating these gods from all local connexions, Anu became the power presiding over the heavens, to Bel was assigned the earth and the atmosphere immediately above it, while Ea ruled over the deep. With the transfer of all the gods to the heavens, and under the influence of the doctrine of the correspondence between the heavens and the earth, Anu, Bel and Ea became the three "ways" (as they are called) on the heavens.

The most noteworthy outcome of this system in the realm of religious practice was, as already intimated, the growth of an elaborate and complicated method of divining the future by the observation of the phenomena in the heavens.

There are also indications that the extensive texts dealing with divination through the liver of sacrificial animals, which represents a more popular origin than divination through the observations of the heavens, based as it is on the primitive view which regarded the liver as the seat of life and of the soul, were brought into connexion with astral divination.

At the same time, since the invoking of the divine powers was the essential element in the incantations, in order to make the magic formulae as effective as possible, a large number of the old local deities are introduced to add their power to the chief ones; and it is here that the astral system comes into play through the introduction of names of stars, as well as through assigning attributes to the gods which clearly reflect the conception that they have their seats in the heavens.

In another division of the religious literature of Babylonia which is largely represented in Assur-bani-pal's collection - the myths and legends - tales which originally symbolized the change of seasons, or in which historical occurrences are overcast with more or less copious admixture of legend and myth, were transferred to the heavens, and so it happens that creation myths, and the accounts of wanderings and adventures of heroes of the past, are referred to movements among the planets and stars as well as to occurrences or supposed occurrences on earth.

The ultimate root is unknown, but may be connected with that meaning " to strew," and the word would thus mean the points of light scattered over the heavens.

In the next two days it reached zero magnitude, thus becoming the brightest star in the northern heavens, but after that it rapidly decreased.

More accurate determinations have shown that this star, which is the third brightest star in the heavens, has a parallax of 0.75", this indicates that its distance is 25,000,000,000,000 m.

Brightness is particularly deceptive; thus Canopus, the second brightest star in the heavens, has probably a parallax of less than 0.01 ", and so also has Rigel.

It is greatly to be desired that a general survey of the heavens, or cf typical regions of the heavens, should be made with a view to determining all the stars which have an appreciable parallax.

The following table shows the density with which stars brighter than the ninth magnitude are distributed in each of nine zones into which Seeliger divided the heavens and more generally recognized that the stars are not unrelated; they are parts of a greater system, and we have to deal with, not merely the history of a number of independent units, but with a far vaster conception, the evolution and development of an ordered universe.

Devoted to astronomy from his earliest years, he eagerly observed the heavens at a garret window with a telescope made by himself, and at nineteen began his career with the publication of a short work on the solar eclipse of the 5th of August 1766.

These orders were supposed to occupy 365 heavens, each fashioned like, but inferior to that above it; and the lowest of the heavens was thought to be the abode of the spirits who formed the earth and its inhabitants, and to whom was committed the administration of its affairs.

Here he devoted three years to a survey of the zone of the heavens within 9 degrees of the North Pole, the results of which are contained in his Redhill Catalogue of 3735 Stars.

Above man on earth rose rank after rank of angels in the seven heavens.

Buddhism conceived men as constantly making their own world for good and ill; it took over from Brahmanism a whole series of heavens and hells to provide an exact adjustment in the future for the virtue or vice of the present; and its eschatologic confidence was one of the potent instruments of its success in countries which, like China and Japan, had developed no theories of retribution or reward beyond the grave.

His most memorable work, however, was the inauguration of international operations for charting the heavens.

The residue that remains in original purity with its tension yet undiminished is the ether in the highest sphere of the visible heavens, encircling the world of which it is lord and head.

Blount adopted and expanded Hobbes's arguments against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and, mainly in the words of Burnet's Archeologiae philosophicae, he asserts the total inconsistency of the Mosaic Hexaemeron with the Copernican theory of the heavens, dwelling with emphasis on the impossibility of admitting the view developed in Genesis, that the earth is the most important part of the universe.