'It was Babylonian astronomers, for instance, who first decided that the planets they observed in the night sky should each be sacred to a specific deity.'

Many years ago, when I was an adolescent with an irritating habit of showing off my shallow erudition on various obscure subjects, my classmates would tease me by pretending to pontificate about ‘Ancient Babylonian Astrology’.

Naturally this was a randomly-selected topic, which my school friends and I knew virtually nothing about.

It could as easily have been super string theory, or rainfall patterns in Papua New Guinea.

Amusingly, however, I’ve since fulfilled the stereotype by finding the cosmological ideas of ancient Babylon unexpectedly fascinating.

It was Babylonian astronomers, for instance, who first decided that the planets they observed in the night sky should each be sacred to a specific deity – a scheme from which even our names for days of the week derive.

In dedicating the brightest planet to Ishtar, their goddess of love and sex, and the reddest to Nergal, a war-god, the Babylonians created associations of seductive femininity and macho belligerence which would survive for millennia.

Venus and Mars are still named in English after Ishtar and Nergal’s Roman equivalents (with the related Norse gods Frigg and Tiw standing in to give us ‘Friday’ and ‘Tuesday’).

Seven of Nine

The Babylonians’ seven-planet model, counting the Sun and Moon alongside Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, survived until the Middle Ages, by which time it had been thoroughly incorporated into orthodox Christian cosmology.

Michael Ward’s book Planet Narnia, which I recently reviewed for Surefish, argues that CS Lewis drew on this long-discredited tradition when writing his Narnia books, as he certainly did in his Cosmic Trilogy.

By then more accurate models had long since reduced the seven planets to six, dismissing the Sun and Moon but incorporating a surprise new entry, the Earth.

The discoveries of Uranus (in 1781), Neptune (1846) and Pluto (1930) had raised the figure further. The ancient associations persisted, and will be recognised by listeners to Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite – composed some 15 years before Pluto’s discovery, but inventing its own themes for Uranus and Neptune.

The nine-planet solar system, from fiery Mercury to Pluto’s frozen outpost, became one of the core myths of science fiction.

It, too, preserved many of the familiar planetary characteristics, most obviously in a hundred tales of warlike Martian invaders.

Now the number of planets (in our solar system, at least) is eight again, we may have to construct a new myth.

Up and Aten

The planets may have been objects of veneration throughout recorded history, but there’s ample evidence (the gigantic solar calendars at Stonehenge and Newgrange, for instance) to suggest that Sun-worship is even older.

Solar religion may indeed be so old that its imagery permeates all extant faiths.

Christianity’s dualism of light and darkness, its narrative of death and resurrection, almost certainly relate to ancient myth-structures arising from the solar cycles of day and night, summer and winter.

After all, the Sun is – in a far more visible and concrete way than God – the source of all the light, life and energy in the world.

The revolutionary Pharaoh Akhenaten went so far as to identify the two, founding a short-lived religion around the sun-disc, or Aten, which has been called the oldest form of monotheism.

Distant and unapproachable, yet warm and nurturing; blinding to look at, but illuminating our lives with its light; the source both of Earth’s physical matter and of the energy which nourishes everything living here; the Sun is an appropriate image of the deity.

Of course it is just an image – but I would hope that any worship offered to the Sun or planets by a modern Akhenaten would be accepted in good part by the God who created them.

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