Caelum recusat

Caelum recusat (Latin: "the heavens decline") was the motto of the Aetheric Concord, adopted at its founding in 1855 and adapted—without acknowledgement, and apparently without research—from lumen recusat ("the light declines"), the motto and epitaph of the Bavarian optician Hieronymus Unlonn.^[1]

Where Unlonn's lumen recusat held that light arrives where it pleases, the Concord's caelum recusat enlarges the claim from a single ray to the whole firmament: the heavens themselves decline—to move, to curve, or to be other than a flat plane beneath a still aether.^[2] The historian Thomas Vogel notes that the Concord, borrowing the construction, did not look up its source, and so adopted as a banner of confidence a phrase first cut as a dead man's epitaph.

Meaning

In the Concord's usage the phrase asserts that the sky is settled: its apparent motions real, its bodies exactly where they appear, and its refusal to behave as a globe requiring no explanation beyond the plane.^[2] It is lumen recusat promoted—the same resignation, enlarged to a cosmology.

Use

The motto appears on the Concord's serial Communications, beneath the device of a flat disc under a starred dome, and on the cutaway plate of the Concordant Orrery.^[1] Josiah Grimble, who chose it, is said to have preferred Latin to plain English on the ground that it "settled the matter"—a property he valued in mottoes as in members.

See also

• Lumen recusat — the original, and an epitaph
• Firmament — the sky this motto says declines to curve
• The Aetheric Concord
• Hieronymus Unlonn
• Reluctant light

References

1. ^ Adopted 1855; it appears on the Concord's Communications and on the Concordant Orrery plate.
2. ^ On the adaptation from lumen recusat and the failure to look it up, see Thomas Vogel.