Planet names and Ancient gods

Factual Questions
1

The answer to this question has been hard for me to find. When I was reading The Da Vinci Code, it talked about the worship of Venus in ancient times, and then talked about the motion of the planet.

So, I started wondering - to an ancient worshipper of Venus, Jupiter, Mars, etc. I can see how you’d be interested in all the mythology. The stories of these gods and their heroic deeds. But it doesn’t follow that you’d begin to associate these gods and godesses with planets in the sky. I mean, what does a morning star have to do with love and beauty?

What about the gods residing on Mt. Olympus? (I know, Greek vs. Roman) If you think gods live on mountaintops, how did they get to be dots of light in the sky?

So the GQ is, when, in terms of history, did folks begin to name planets after gods? Was there a time when people worshipped Venus (and others) without regard to planets?

2

Unlike stars, planets move.

This suggests animation, which implies life.

The jump to the Gods is short.

Mercury moves quickly through the sky, & was assigned to the Messenger God.

Mars has a reddish hue, the color of blood.

Some of the others are a stretch.

3

Not that much of a stretch, at least for the planets known to the ancient Greeks. You’ve already got Mercury and Mars. Venus is the brightest and most beautiful, as befitting the goddess of love. Jupiter is also very bright and prominent, so for the chief of the gods. Saturn is bright, but dimmer, like an eclipsed king, hence the name. Neptune, Uranus and Pluto were named in the modern era (i.e., since the Renaissance), so don’t have the same connotations of belief that the OP is talking about.

4

[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
Unlike stars, planets move. This suggests animation, which implies life. The jump to the Gods is short.
[/QUOTE]
Are you saying that they believed that those points of light are the gods, and not that they were merely named for the gods?

5

The association between the gods and the planets goes back at least to the Sumerians in 3000 B.C.:

Incidentally, you may assume that everything you read in The Da Vinci Code is nonsense.

6

I have never heard that the Romans or Greeks actually thought that the various gods were wandering around the heavens as points of light. I was under the impression that the names were given in honor of or as representative of the gods, making an association rather than identifying their location.

7

tomndebb, I think you’re the only one who gets the gist of my OP.

To an ancient stablebum, I can see where the stories of the gods of war, or godess of love might be important to me. That can be information important to whether I go to war, or I get laid soon. But the idea that this dot of light in the sky has any significance to me seems to be a huge stretch. It would seem to be of interest only to folks who have nothing better to do than stay up all night plotting the courses of stars. I would guess that the only myth of interest to me is the one about Apollo driving the sun across the sky each day.

So, I’ll ask in another way - how did the gods that lived on mountaintops become lights in the sky?

The explanation that makes sense to me is that astronomers gave the planets names of gods as a secondary feature - long after the general population accepted the mythology.

8

I think you’re underestimating the importance of the sky to ancient people. Until pretty recently, people paid attention to the movements of the stars and planets much more commonly–they often needed to know the sky in order to get around, and everyone knew the phase of the moon as a matter of course.

9

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
I have never heard that the Romans or Greeks actually thought that the various gods were wandering around the heavens as points of light. I was under the impression that the names were given in honor of or as representative of the gods, making an association rather than identifying their location.
[/QUOTE]

Pliny the Elder’s answer to the question is in keeping with this. From Book II of his Natural History (in John Healy’s translation; the passage is in Chapter VII of Philemon Holland 1601 translation):

But Pliny didn’t have much time for astrology and the like and his attitude here may not have been universal, though I can’t think of any counterexamples.

10

I think the OP has been answered fairly well, but it’s worth extending the discussion from planets to stars. The named constellations represent gods, heroes, and monsters from Greco-Roman mythology (though some of them are shared with / taken from other ancient cultures). There are many ancient myths that talk about the way a figure from story was placed into the heavens as a constellation, but I don’t get the sense that Orion, say, existed for the ancients as that physical cluster of stars and only those stars. Rather, it seems to be a way of matching significant parts of the heavens with significant figures from myth, aligning the characteristics (shape, brightness, seasonal position, etc.) with the stories but not necessarily understanding them as the actual, physical being, even though the myths sometimes say exactly that. (Literal-mindedness and myth are very poor companions.) I thought jayjay’s explanation of this for the planets was excellent.

11

[QUOTE=dangermom]
I think you’re underestimating the importance of the sky to ancient people. Until pretty recently, people paid attention to the movements of the stars and planets much more commonly–they often needed to know the sky in order to get around, and everyone knew the phase of the moon as a matter of course.
[/QUOTE]
However, you will note that as far as we can tell, (and I think our records are that accurate), neither the Greeks not the Romans (nor the Sumerians or Babylonians) made any effort to assign every one of their gods to a heavenly body. I think “the heavens” were important, but as far as I can tell, they each named “that point of light”/star/wanderer/planet for this god, but did not actually believe the point of light was either the god or the home of the god.

12

I suspect that all of this is part of a larger question of mythology, associations and the meanings and values that various cultures applied to the elements of their worlds.

In Maori mythology, Maui was a god/ancestral figure who fished up the North Island of New Zealand. (So says the legend.) He used his grandmother’s jawbone for a fish hook and baited it with his own blood after striking his nose.
The constellation Scorpio with its striking curve of bright stars in Maori is named for Maui’s fish-hook.

Now, I don’t think any pre-european Maori actually believed that the bright dot pattern in the sky actually was a fish hook. Nor do I think they actually thought that they were living on the back of a fish. But the association was useful to honour the character, remember the story and cement important social and cultural values and customs.

I am guessing that the same kinds of associations are common in many cultures and for similar reasons.

13

My working hypothesis has been that long ago the Greeks did think of the planets as the literal gods, and as the constellations as the characters they were supposed to represent. By the time of Periclean Athens, I seriously doubt that educated Greeks felt that way about them, although that may reflect folk beliefs and peasant religion for a long time afterwards.

It’s worth noting that the oldest sources we have, Homer and Hesiod, recognize Orion, for instance, as a constellation, and Hesiod explicitly says that Orion pursues the Pleiades because the constellation in the sky in the sky follows after the Pleiades. It’s also stated that Orion hides when the Scorpion (Scorpio) rises, and this explains why in the myth the Scorpion kills Orion. Certainly Hesiod understood that the elements of the myth were related to the behavior of the stars in the sky. But I think the earlier Greeks had the same awareness, and that this was not, to them, inconsistent with seeing the constellations and planets as beings and gods as well. Certainly they didn’t think of planets as spherical worlds like our own and the stars as balls of inconceivably hot gas.

Incidentally, I believe the question anbout the association of Jupiter with the large gas giant has come up on this Board before, quite a long time ago. It seems at first glancde appropriate that the largest of these “Wanderers” (which is what “planet” means) should be associated with the King of the Gods – but there’s no way that the Greeks and Romans would have known that Jupiter was the largest. They had no telescopes, and Venus is brighter than Jupiter. Saturn is farther out, and has a longer orbit. Why Jupiter was associated with the Head God isn’t clear to me.

14

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
My working hypothesis has been that long ago the Greeks did think of the planets as the literal gods, and as the constellations as the characters they were supposed to represent…
[/QUOTE]
This seems to require the assumption that people were especially ignorant in the period when mythology was generated, and less so once literacy and education came together. It is a common assumption, because myths are so weird, but I’m not sure it’s reliable. In the late nineteenth century, the dominant explanation for ALL mythology was that the stories originally explained the behavior of the sun, the moon, and the stars. This idea has largely been discarded. That said, there’s nothing to suggest that once the connection has been made, even a metaphorical connection, the stars’ behavior cannot influence the direction of the myth.
I’ve had a brief look through some reference works on Classical myth and on the folklore associated with astrology, and no one seems to address this question directly (though I suspect a closer reading of Jean-Paul Vernant would reveal something useful).

15

Not at all. It requires thinking that they thought and considered things in a different way than we do – not that they’re more ignorant.

And it’s not literacy itself that made the Greek philosiphers think that the planets and stars might not be beings, but the growth of philosophy and a mechanical view of the universe.

It’s not necessary to subscribe to a type of Whig History that sees thinking going from poor, ignorant, unwashed savages through the rudiments of philosophy to the way we think (“We will keep lifting China Up and Up until it is like Akron, Ohio,” said an Ohio politician in the 19th century, supposedly) to yet recognize that there have been different ways of seeing the world and seeing views of it evolving in different ways.
Thales of Miletus was supposedly in danger for his life, by the way, for suggesting that the sun was a red hot rock. Sometimes it doesn’t do to be too vocal about your beliefs.

16

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Incidentally, I believe the question anbout the association of Jupiter with the large gas giant has come up on this Board before, quite a long time ago. It seems at first glancde appropriate that the largest of these “Wanderers” (which is what “planet” means) should be associated with the King of the Gods – but there’s no way that the Greeks and Romans would have known that Jupiter was the largest. They had no telescopes, and Venus is brighter than Jupiter. Saturn is farther out, and has a longer orbit. Why Jupiter was associated with the Head God isn’t clear to me.
[/QUOTE]

Venus is brighter, but its appearance is limited to a certain distance above the horizon and a certain time after sunset and before sunrise. Jupiter can appear high in the sky for the entire night. That seems like the most straightforward explanation for why Jupiter got tagged with the name of the king of the gods.

17

You sure it wasn’t Canton, Ohio? That would seem to fit better.

jsum1, I presume that Antares would then be the drop of blood on the fishhook? That would certainly accout for the color.

18

Stars weren’t just pretty things in the sky. They were essential for navigation. In order to navigate by stars (or by agreed-upon clusters of stars), people identified and named them in a nicely mnemonic way. Remember that Orion was the hunter that could not defeat the Scorpion, and you know that Orion and Scorpio never appear together in the sky.

I don’t think they were named because they were mnemonics, but because they were nice symbols that became mnemonics through repetition of use.

19

I don’t think the Greeks believed the planets were gods. People have already mentioned that several mythological figures were immortalized by being made into stars, Orion and Kallisto, for example, but this is a pretty far connection - these are constellations which have a related shape, and they’re not divine or heroic figures and therefore recieve no worship.

Just looked up some interesting information in the OCD. The first Greek we know to have identified all five was Eudoxus in the 4th c. BCE - pretty darn late. I have a whole whackload of books out currently on Greek religion and none have mentioned planets at all. It’s impossible to prove a negative, obviously, but there you go.

On the other hand, the planets did play a part in later religions, although not so much as gods - the seven Mithraic ranks were given planet names as well as role names.

20

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Incidentally, I believe the question anbout the association of Jupiter with the large gas giant has come up on this Board before, quite a long time ago. It seems at first glancde appropriate that the largest of these “Wanderers” (which is what “planet” means) should be associated with the King of the Gods – but there’s no way that the Greeks and Romans would have known that Jupiter was the largest. They had no telescopes, and Venus is brighter than Jupiter. Saturn is farther out, and has a longer orbit. Why Jupiter was associated with the Head God isn’t clear to me.
[/QUOTE]

Per the Greek cosmology, the planets, Sun, and Moon all orbited the Earth in the following order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon (Sun and Moon were considered planets, not–as they are today–separate cosmic phenomena). The Greeks deduced this order under the general principle that the length of time it took a planet to return to the same point in the sky was proportional to its distance from Earth. For the inferior planets (which the Greeks noted never strayed too far from the Sun), this was understood to be the planet’s position relative to the Sun, so they naturally assumed, since Mercury was faster than Venus, it was closer to Earth.

According to Pliny (II.8), this view was supported by the observation that Venus was the brightest of the planets (because it was so near the Sun) and that Mars was the hottest (because of its bright red color). Saturn was the furthest planet from the sun, and so was the coldest. “And so it is, that by the exceeding heat of Mars and the terrible cold of Saturn, Jupiter, who is placed betwixt, is well tempered of them both, and so becomes good and comfortable.”

This notion of balance between extremes may seem quaint to us today, but it is a foundational tenet of classical civilization; Zeus/Jove was more than just the most powerful of the gods, he was considered a judge and moderating force among the divinities.

One final note. It’s been pointed out that the “wandering” of the planets in the night sky was a reason to think of them as divine. This is true, but one should also note that the planets regularly change in magnitude, which would make a Greek observer believe the planet is moving closer to or farther away from the Earth or Sun. This, in fact, was one of the reasons Ptolemy’s epicycle theory (wrong as it is) was so appealing; it didn’t just explain retrograde motion, but also explained why the planets varied in magnitude. Like many ancient theories, the details weren’t pressed too hard, and obviously no further progress could be made until the whole notion of an Earth-centric system was abandoned.

I state this only because, as commonplace as the notions of planetary orbit are to us today, we sometimes fail to realize they are the result of more detailed investigation and appear at first glance counter-intuitive. The ancients weren’t stupid, or slavish in preserving certain cosmological beliefs, they simply arrived at different conclusions based on their own observations–ones that seemed reasonable given their limited knowledge–and didn’t think to scrutinize beyond common sense.