ASTRALI, DIVINITÀ. — The natural tendency to animate things populated the heavens as well, in their planetary and astral manifestations, with divine beings, and wove around them a vast network of myths. The principal heavenly bodies, which have always been objects of worship and subjects of myth, are the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Their sevenfold enumeration, originating in ancient Babylon, the homeland of astrology, has been transmitted and is still preserved in the naming of the days of the week in Western civilization, with the exception, however, of the liturgical usage of 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 can be explained by considering their noble and luminous appearance; their periodic daily, monthly, and annual appearance and disappearance; their sudden darkening (eclipses); and their periodic conjunction with the sun (zodiac). Although the moon is the planet that, in view of the monthly periodicity of its phases—the primary origin of the calendar—gave rise to the oldest and most varied flowering of myths, it was the sun that, in the great civilizations of the ancient East, Babylon and Egypt, under the names Marduk and Rie (Ra, Rè), respectively, soon assumed first place, becoming the center of those theological systems.
From Babylon, the worship of the a. d. spread into the West during the Hellenistic age, spiritually reconquering, for the benefit of the ancient Chaldean capital, what it had politically lost through Alexander’s conquest. The scientific study of the planets began in Babylon in the seventh century B.C., and their identification with corresponding divinities of the Chaldean pantheon was immediately established there: the moon with Sin, Mars with Nergal, Mercury with Nabú, Marduk with Jupiter, Istar with Venus, Ninib with Saturn, and Samáš with the Sun. Hellenistic philosophy and religious thought, from Thales through Pythagoras to Aristotle and thereafter to Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, increasingly and decisively tended to regard the nature of divinity as astral and to consider the stars the blessed dwelling place of souls after their earthly pilgrimage (v. CATASTERISMO).
And since the stars have a fixed and immutable trajectory, the conclusion was drawn that the influence they exert on nature and on human beings can be known and predicted through the principles of a particular science (v. ASTROLOGIA), but cannot be avoided, whence a fatalistic view of life (v. MAXILIO), 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 during the Roman imperial period was the so-called solar theology, which was precisely the worship of the astronomical science of the Chaldeans, reaching the West through the filter of Stoic thought. It consisted in regarding all divinities as particular aspects of the sun and the sun itself as the highest manifestation of the ineffable Supreme Being. Thus, through its tendency to unify the divine world, it ultimately became the religious synthesis of paganism in opposition to Christian thought.
BIRL.: F. X. Kugler, Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel, Münster 1907–24; F. Cumont, La théologie solaire du paganisme romain, in Mém. Acad. Inscript., Paris 1912; E. Maas, Die Tagengüter in Rom und den Provinzen, Berlin 1912; L. Thorndike, A history of magic and experimental science, New York 1923; C. Bezold, Fr. Boll, W. Gundel, Sternglaube und Sterndeutung, 4th ed., Leipzig 1931; Fr. Boll, W. Gundel, Sternbilder, Sternglaube und Sternsymbolik bei Griechen und Römern, in Roscher, Lexikon der Mythologie, VI, Nachtr. A-Z, cols. 867–1071. Nicola Turchi