ASTRAL DEITIES. — The natural tendency to animate things has also populated the heavens, in their planetary and astral manifestations, with divine beings and woven around them an extensive web of myths. The principal celestial bodies that have always been the object of worship and the subject of myths are the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Their septenary list, derived from ancient Babylon, the cradle of astrology, has passed into and remains in the naming of the days of the week in Western civilization, though excluded from liturgical usage in the Church, which names them, beginning with Sunday, according to their progressive order (feria II, etc.), up to Saturday, which retains its Hebrew name, while feria I is Sunday, the day par excellence of the Lord.
The eminent place that the stars have occupied in the pantheon of all peoples is explained by considering their noble and luminous appearance, their periodic appearance and disappearance, daily, monthly, annually, their sudden darkening (eclipses), and their periodic conjunction with the sun (zodiac). Although the Moon is the planet that, in consideration of the monthly periodicity of its phases—origin of the first calendar—has given rise to the oldest and most varied flourishing of myths, it is the Sun that, in the great civilizations of the ancient East, Babylon and Egypt, under the names respectively of Marduk and Rie (Ra, Re), soon took the first place, occupying the center of those theological systems.
From Babylon, the cult of astral deities spread to the West during the Hellenistic age, spiritually reclaiming, to the benefit of the ancient Chaldean capital, what it had politically lost with the conquest of Alexander. The scientific study of the planets begins in Babylon in the 7th century B.C., and immediately there is an identification of them with as many deities of the Chaldean pantheon: the Moon with Sin, Mars with Nergal, Mercury with Nabu, Marduk with Jupiter, Ishtar with Venus, Ninib with Saturn, Shamash with the Sun. Hellenistic philosophy and religious thought, from Thales through Pythagoras to Aristotle and then to Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, increasingly oriented themselves toward considering the divine nature as astral and the stars as the blessed abode of souls after their earthly pilgrimage (v. CATASTERISM).
And since the stars have a fixed and immutable trajectory, it was concluded that the influence they exert on nature and on humans can be known and foreseen through the principles of a particular science (v. ASTROLOGY), but cannot be avoided, whence a fatalistic view of life (v. MANILIUS), to which the Stoic resigns himself but from which the common people seek to escape by resorting to the arts of magic.
A synthesis of this astral religious philosophy was, during the Roman imperial age, the so-called solar theology, which is precisely the cult of the Chaldean astronomical science, arrived in the West through the filter of Stoic thought, and which consists in considering all the deities as so many particular aspects of the Sun and the Sun itself as the highest manifestation of the ineffable Supreme Being. Thus, by its tendency to unify the divine world, it ended up constituting the religious synthesis of paganism in the face of Christian thought.