PLATO’S COSMIC THEOLOGY: André Henriques
A RATIONALE FOR POLYTHEISTIC ASTROLOGY?
University of Wales Trinity Saint David
Plato’s cosmology had a decisive impact on the history and development of classical astronomy and religion, and determined the shape of European cosmology until the seventeenth century.[1] Throughout his many texts, including the cosmological treatise Timaeus, or the discussions on the soul in the Phaedrus, Plato (c.428-c.348 BCE) established what can be generalised as Platonic cosmological thought. The Timaeus discusses the concepts of Being and Becoming (Being as an unchangeable eternal realm differentiated from the perishable material world of Becoming), the revolution of the Different, or of the planets, defining temporal existence, and the Demiurge (a divine craftsman, fashioning an ordered, beautiful universe).[2] While in the Laws Plato defended astronomical observation as a practice that would support the belief that the sun, moon and stars were gods, the Epinomis relates for the first time the five visible planets with Greek deities. [3] The traditional Homeric polytheistic view, similar to the Babylonian, was that natural processes are basically irregular and unpredictable, and that gods could interfere and manipulate them as they pleased.*4+ To Plato, knowledge of the gods would only be probable, due to man’s limitation, and belief in these matters was more adapted to the realm of Becoming: ‘what being is to becoming, so truth is to belief’.*5+ With a theoretical reasoned model it was possible to be closer to true knowledge, and Hellenistic astrology developed such a theoretical model, with the planets still bearing the names of deities, though now the Roman ones. Ptolemy’s astrological work Tetrabiblos, from the second century CE, was influenced by Platonist, Aristotelian and Stoic theories, and displayed a structured theoretical model for the movements of the planets and stars and their implications on earth.[6] In the Phaedrus, Plato mentions circuits of the gods that souls would join, defining the character a person would display once living on earth, a similar concept that Ptolemy explores through the position of the planets.[7] However, Ptolemy with his naturalist model goes further, linking the planets with the human body, personal events, crops, weather, and states and their inhabitants.[8] This was similar to a Greek traditional view, where all these things were ruled by different gods and goddesses. The planets with their wandering positions in the heavens, as gods with their whims, were related to the changes in the material world, the world of mortal man. However, Ptolemy’s astronomy had the mathematical tools to predict those positions, and the astrological theoretical model of cosmic order as to what those positions meant. Ptolemy’s discourse was supposed to be very rational and devoid of religious overtones.[9] Nevertheless, there is a mythical and narrative background dimension to his astrology which, if looked at closely, pervades the whole system. Plato’s theological views were influenced by the polytheistic cultural context in which he lived, a context that shaped and pervaded later astrological thought. An exploration of the theological and mythical dimensions of Plato’s thought provides some understanding of the continuity of polytheistic concepts through the development of astronomical and astrological ideas in antiquity. References
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ARCHAEOASTRONOMICAL VOYAGES IN ANTIQUITY, EGYPT, MIDDLE EAST AND MEDITERRANEAN