ASTRAL DEITIES. - The natural tendency to animate things has also populated the sky, in its planetary and astral manifestations, with divine beings, and woven around them a vast web of myths. The principal celestial bodies, which have always been objects of worship and themes of myth, are the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, whose sevenfold list, coming from ancient Babylon, the homeland of astrology, has passed into and is still maintained in the naming of the days of the week in Western civilization, except however for the liturgical use of the Church, which names them, beginning with Sunday, according to their progressive order (feria II, etc.), down to Saturday, which keeps its Hebrew name, while feria I is Sunday, the day par excellence of the Lord.
The eminent place that the stars have taken in the pantheon of all peoples is explained by considering their noble and luminous appearance, their periodic appearing and disappearing—daily, monthly, yearly—their sudden darkening (eclipses), their presenting themselves in periodic conjunction with the sun (the zodiac). Although the moon is the planet which, in view of the monthly periodicity of its phases—the primary origin of the calendar—gave occasion for the most ancient and most varied flowering of myths, it is the sun which, in the great civilizations of the ancient East, Babylon and Egypt, under the names respectively of Marduk and Rie (Ra, Rè), soon took first place, placing itself at the center of those theological systems.
From Babylon the cult of the astral deities radiated into the West during the Hellenistic age, spiritually reconquering, 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 takes place the identification of them with as many divinities of the Chaldean pantheon: the moon with Sin, Mars with Nergal, Mercury with Nabú, 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, oriented themselves ever more decisively toward considering the nature of divinity as astral and toward considering the stars as the blessed dwelling of souls after their earthly pilgrimage (v. CATASTERISM).
And since the stars have a fixed and immutable trajectory, the consequence was drawn that the influence they exercise on nature and on men can be known and foreseen thanks to the principles of a particular science (v. ASTROLOGY), but cannot be avoided, whence a fatalistic vision of life (v. MAXILIUS), to which the Stoic resigns himself but from which the common people seek to escape by resorting to the arts of magic.
The synthesis of this astral religious philosophy during the Roman imperial era was the so-called solar theology, which is precisely the cult of the astronomical science of the Chaldeans, having reached the West through the filter of Stoic thought, and which consists in considering all divinities as so many particular aspects of the sun and in considering the sun itself as the highest manifestation of the ineffable supreme Being. Thus, because of its tendency to unify the divine world, it ended up constituting the religious synthesis of paganism in the face of Christian thought.
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Nicola Turchi