As a comment on https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/the-last-battle-revisited , I find it interesting to think, or try to think, of how much of medieval thought Galileo's astronomy upset. A crucial part of medieval education was learning the names of the visible stars and planets. Stars were used as reference points for navigation, so knowing what little was known about them had its practical benefit. They were also believed to have ruling spirits, the gods Pagans worshipped and medieval Christians merely respected as something more like angels. The planets were characterized as what seemed to be stages in life. If you read or translate medieval literature you find constant references to the archetypes associated with the planets. The medieval writers could not say how the planets related to these archetypes because, as we see things, they don't; but neither could they break the habit of referring to the archetypes they saw everywhere in life.
Earth was not seen as a planet in medieval cosmology. Earth was the center and foundation. Earth was "Mother" and "matter"; these words were connected, which was how sediment in wine came to be called "mother" and dead human flesh "mummy." Medieval thinkers could not deny the importance of "mundane" work, often "earth work" (gardening and farming), for survival, but they were always trying to get beyond it, as growing children try to move beyond the family nest. Earth was the starting point on the journey to maturity, death, and resurrection.
Earth's Sun and Moon, however, were regarded as planets. "Brother" Sun was "the great light" of education and enlightenment. "Sister" Moon was "the lesser light" of solitary reflection. Too much of either one was dangerous. Everyone knew about the effects of sunburn and sleep deprivation.
Mercury, the smallest and fastest moving planet, seems to have represented the youth or apprentice stage of life. As a Pagan god Mercurius was the errand boy to the others, not imagined to have much power of his own. Though definitely male (a "herm" was a pillar perceived as a male symbol; Hermes was the Greek name for Mercurius) he was not usually seen as having a wife or children. Impatience, restlessness, and quick changes of mood associated with attention deficits, were "mercurial" qualities. The physical substance called mercury fascinated medieval thinkers even after they learned how toxic it is.
Venus represented the young adult, emotional, hormone-ridden stage. As a goddess Venus had her cult, but it was considered unimportant except to people unfortunate enough to be "in love" with someone to whom their parents had not betrothed them. Venus was said to rule over all experiences of Love and Beauty but when people referred to "the act of Venus" they were not talking about the appreciation of music or landscapes. (Hunting, however, was considered similar enough to courtship that several medieval words for hunting were derived from "Venus." Deer meat is still called venison.)
Mars, the god of war, may have been actually worshipped by soldiers. As a planetary archetype he represented the military or military-style discipline recommended to counteract the sentimentality associated with Venus. Many conflicting stories about Mars' and Venus' relationship to each other were metaphoric ways to describe the relationship between marital and martial obligations in a young man's life. The predominant story about Mars as a mythological person was that he was married, at least for a while, and had two horrid sons whose names meant Fear and Terror.
Jupiter, the king said to rule the biggest planet, represented the successful mature man. In the Greek and Roman world he was the god most often worshipped, with sacrifices of animas whose meat was then sold in the markets. Early Christians, whose failure to buy edible animals for sacrifice to this god was seen as tax evasion, disagreed about the morality of eating this "meat that had been offered to idols" because buying it gave more money to the cult of Jupiter. Ancient writers spelled and pronounced his name in several ways that all seem to have meant "God (Zeus) Father." Many stories were told about him and, though they show him to have been a bully, cheater, traitor, murderer, rapist, adulterer, and even patricide if read literally, they seem to have been metaphors that confused the spread of imperial power with the observed facts of life. In stories where Zeus killed one or both of his parents, or killed one to protect or avenge the other, his father's name was Time; Zeus "killed" mortality by being immortal. In stories where he forgot all about his wife and pursued other women, there seem to have been historical references to his cult spreading through colonies where people had previously worshipped ancestor goddesses. So the early Christians were inconsistent, even individually confused, about whether they could approve of some aspects of the Jupiter cult as showing a primitive understanding of the One God--the name form "Jove" surely reflected some attempt to associate Jupiter with the Hebrew name for God. When Jupiter was explained as the angel ruling the giant planet, his "influence" was thought to explain the "jovial" mood produced by good health and prosperity.
(The adjective "jovial" doesn't look or sound much like the name Jupiter in English, but in the ancient world the names Jove, Zeus, theos, deus, divus, deva, and Jehovah, were "cognates"--different dialectal words that all basically meant "God." "Jupiter" was understood to be a contracted form of any of those names for God plus pater, "the Father." In Greek and Roman mythology neither Zeus nor Jupiter was seen as the One God, but as local gods who had fought their way to a dominant position among other local gods. Nevertheless their worshippers sometimes praised and prayed to Zeus or Jupiter as if they thought those gods were something like what we understand the word "God" to mean. The Hebrew idea of One God, Ruler of the Universe, had more influence on other ancient cultures than non-Hebrew writers cared to admit.)
Saturn, the most remote planet the medieval astrologers could see, was a complex character in ancient lore. His complexity seems basically to represent old age, and also the historical fact that he was actually worshipped in rural Italy before the Jupiter cult spread out from Rome. He was seen primarily as the god of good harvests and satisfaction, but he was the Grim Reaper as well as the merry reaper, presiding over poor harvests as well as good ones. A "saturnine" personality is not necessarily unhealthy, but is older, calmer, sometimes wiser than a "jovial" personality, soberer, on more familiar terms with harsh reality. The jovial archetype is cheerful in the way people can "party hearty" and forget that they're going to grow old and die, or even to have to pay the bills, later. The saturnine archetype has thought about the bills, probably paid in advance, and can now enjoy as much of a part ad the person can afford. Old age is obviously a time of misery for some people and of mature, productive joy for other people. Saturn's influence was seen as evil, even fatal, for some people and desirable for others. Mars was the planet properly blamed for war, but Saturn could be blamed for damage to the land and economic depressions that came after war--or thanked for peace and prosperity. Though the god of an Italian cult was not directly related to the Greek god or personification of Time, Chronos, Saturn was sometimes thought to represent the same archetype as Chronos. Chronos was the father Zeus had killed, though of course he didn't stay dead; he doesn't seem to have been worshipped, but he was seen as immortal and, of course, very much a power of influence on mortals.
Two physical types are observed in European populations. The basic human type that seems to be the majority everywhere is smaller and darker than what might be called the extreme White type. Medieval thinkers associated tall, muscular, big-boned, sometimes even fat, pale-skinned or even florid, fair-haired, and blue-eyed genotypes with Jupiter, and shorter, darker-complexioned types with Saturn, possibly because those differences were observed between the imperial family and the rural peasants who still worshipped Saturn. The contrast between the types is found in the Bible, where already the types were not seen as distinct "races" but as differences observed between brothers. In the Bible Jacob was definitely preferred to Esau. In Roman and medieval thought the extreme White type was seen as preferable in every way. Writers raved about characters' blond hair; if the characters were real people who had black hair, writers tactfully didn't mention it. (Satirists and political enemies, however, taunted people like Anne Boleyn about their non-blondeness.) But it remained for nineteenth and early twentieth century sociologists to identify the different types as "Nordic" and Southern European "race" types and, ultimately, decide that the "Nordic" or "Germanic" type ought to take over all of Europe. Medieval thinking about the influences of the passing planets, all crossing and interacting with one another, blamed unwanted traits on people's horoscopes and gave people credit for their voluntary behavior. If you were blond you had been blessed by Jupiter at birth; if dark you had missed out on that blessing, but other blessings and benefits might still come to you.
C.S. Lewis, who made his literary reputation as a medieval scholar before he presumed to write Christian books, was an interesting study of the interplay of the Jupiter and Saturn archetypes. By the time he wrote the Narnia books he was old enough to be considered saturnine. The introvert temperament of which he wrote so well, the taste for remote and wintry landscapes and solitary reading, are saturnine qualities. He does seem to have had fair hair in youth, but it darkened; he was not blond. If he lamented the Saturnian hard times in which he lived, he also attracted some fans by having apparently been born somewhat saturnine, in a good way.
Nevertheless he was successful enough, because of his Christian books and radio broadcasts as well as his teaching medieval and Renaissance literature, that during years of economic hardship he took it as his Christian duty to be jovial. He didn't write about having more money and food than other people and feeling obligated to share what he had; other people agree that in fact he did give and share generously. In Narnia, a mostly peaceable place, he described the duty of the king as being "to laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in Narnia." Though Jupiter's influence was supposed to bring wealth, the idea of revelling over a scanty meal must surely be considered jovial. It surprises some readers, who are attracted to Lewis's expression and celebration of Highly Sensory Perceptive introversion, that in real life Lewis was neither ascetic nor monastic. He wrote of his distaste for extroverts' chatter, but when he had food to share and they didn't have enough, personal taste made no difference; they had to be invited to dinner. In fact, when legal drugs were still available and encouraged as short-term substitutes for food, Lewis used coffee, tea, wine, beer, and cigars liberally. He shared those, too. Dinner with him would not have been the sort of strictly intellectual feast some of his health-conscious posthumous fans might prefer, nor would it have been an extravagant "Roman feast." Joviality is the quality that would have made it a feast, anyway.
Some references:
The Oxford English Dictionary--you could, and I once did, get material for an A+ undergraduate paper from the O.E.D. alone.
C.S. Lewis's Allegory of Love and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama.
Robert Graves' Greek Myths and White Goddess.
Barbara Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths & Secrets.
And of course any medieval literature you find. I buy, read, and sell medieval literature when I find it.
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