The Worship of Saturn

The Worship of Saturn

http://www.varchive.org/itb/satwor.htm

Saturn, so active in the cosmic changes, was regarded by all mankind as the supreme god. Seneca says that Epigenes, who studied astronomy among the Chaldeans, “estimates that the planet Saturn exerts the greatest influence upon all the movements of celestial bodies.” ⁽¹⁾

On becoming a nova, it ejected filaments in all directions and the solar system became illuminated as if by a hundred suns. It subsided rather quickly and retreated into far-away regions.

Peoples that remembered early tragedies enacted in the sky by the heavenly bodies asserted that Jupiter drove Saturn away from its place in the sky. Before Jupiter (Zeus) became the chief god, Saturn (Kronos) occupied the celestial throne. In all ancient religions the dominion passes from Saturn to Jupiter.⁽²⁾ In Greek mythology, Kronos is presented as the father and Zeus as his son who dethrones him. Kronos devours some of his children. After this act Zeus overpowers his father, puts him in chains, and drives him from his royal station in the sky. In Egyptian folklore or religion the participants of the drama are said to be Osiris-Saturn, brother and husband of Isis-Jupiter.

The cult of Osiris and the mysteries associated with it dominated the Egyptian religion as nothing else. Every dead man or woman was entombed with observances honoring Osiris; the city of Abydos in the desert west of the Nile and north-west of Thebes was sacred to him; Sais in the Delta used to commemorate the floating of Osiris’ body carried by the Nile into the Mediterranean. What made Osiris so deeply ingrained in the religious memory of the nation that his cult pervaded mythology and religion?

Osiris’ dominion, before his murder by Seth, was remembered as a time of bliss. According to the legend Seth, Osiris’ brother, killed and dismembered him, whereupon Isis, Osiris’ wife, went on peregrinations to collect his dispersed members. Having gathered them and wrapped them together with swathings, she brought Osiris back to life. The memory of this event was a matter of yearly jubilation among the Egyptians.⁽³⁾ Osiris became lord of the netherworld, the land of the dead. A legend, a prominent part of the Osiris cycle, tells that Isis gave birth to Horus, whom she conceived from the already dead Osiris,⁽⁴⁾

and that Horus grew up to avenge his father by engaging Seth in mortal combat.

In Egyptology the meaning of these occurrences stands as an unresolved mystery. The myth of Osiris “is too remarkable and occurs in too many divergent forms not to contain a considerable element of historic truth,” wrote Sir Alan Gardiner, the leading scholar in these fields;⁽⁵⁾ but what historical truth is it? Could it be of “an ancient king upon whose tragic death the entire legend hinged” ? wondered Gardiner.⁽⁶⁾ But of such a king “not a trace has been found before the time of the Pyramid texts,” and in these texts Osiris is spoken of without end. There he appears as a dead god or king or judge of the dead. But who was Osiris in his life? asked Gardiner. At times “he is represented to us as the vegetation which perishes in the flood-water mysteriously issuing from himself. . . .” ⁽⁷⁾ He is associated with brilliant light.⁽⁸⁾

After a life of studying Egyptian history and religion Gardiner confessed that he remained unaware of whom Osiris represented or memorialized: “The origin of Osiris remains from me an insoluble mystery.” ⁽⁹⁾ Nor could others in his field help him find an answer.

The Egyptologist John Wilson wrote that it is an admission of failure that the chief cultural content of Egyptian civilization, its religion, its mythological features again and again narrated and alluded to in texts and represented in statues and temple reliefs, is not understood.⁽¹⁰⁾ The astral meaning of Egyptian deities was not realized and the cosmic events their activities represent were not thought of.

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The prophet Ezekiel in the Babylonian exile had a vision—the likeness of a man, but made of fire and amber who lifted him by the lock of his hair and brought him to some darkened chamber where the ancients of the house of Israel with censers in their hands were worshipping idols portrayed upon the wall round about. Then the angel of the vision told him: “Thou shalt see greater abominations that they do"—and he brought the prophet to the door of the gate of the Lord’s house—"and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.” Next he showed him also Jews in the inner court of the Lord’s house “with their back toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east.” ⁽¹¹⁾

The worship of the sun and the planets was decried by Jeremiah, a contemporary of Ezekiel. But what was this weeping for Tammuz?

Tammuz was a Babylonian god; one of the months of the year, approximately coinciding with July, in the summer, was named in his honor; and by this very name it is known in the present-day Hebrew calendar. Tammuz was a god that died and was then hidden in the underworld; his death was the reason for a fast, accompanied by lamentations of the women of the land. His finding or his return to life in resurrection were the motifs of the passion.⁽¹²⁾

Tammuz was a god of vegetation, of the flood, and of seeds: “The god Tammuz came from Armenia every year in his ark in the overflowing river, blessing the alluvium with new growth.” ⁽¹³⁾ In the month of Tammuz he was “bound, and the liturgies speak of his having been drowned among flowers which were thrown upon him as he sank beneath the waves of the Euphrates.” ⁽¹⁴⁾ The drowning of Tammuz was an occasion for wailing by women: “The flood has taken Tammuz, the raging storm has brought him low.” ⁽¹⁵⁾

Of Tammuz it also is narrated that he was associated with brilliant light,⁽¹⁶⁾ with descent into the nether world, visited there by Ishtar, his spouse. Tammuz’ death, his subsequent resurrection, or his discovery in the far reaches, but no longer brilliant, were the themes of the cult that was not just one of the mysteries, but the chief and paramount cult.

The Osirian mysteries, the wailing for Tammuz, all refer to the transformation of Saturn during and following the Deluge. Osiris was not a king but the planet Saturn, Kronos of the Greeks, Tammuz of the Babylonians. The Babylonians called Saturn “the Star of Tammuz.” ⁽¹⁷⁾ After the Deluge Saturn was invisible (the sky was covered for a long time by clouds of volcanic dust) and the Egyptians cried for Osiris, and the Babylonians cried for Tammuz. Isis (Jupiter at that time) went in search of her husband, and Ishtar (also Jupiter at that early time) went to the netherworld to find her husband Tammuz. For a time Saturn disappeared, driven away by Jupiter, and when it reappeared it was no longer the same planet: it moved very slowly. The disappearance of the planet Saturn in the “nether world” became the theme of many religious observances, comprising liturgies, mystery plays, lamentations, and fasts. When Osiris was seen again in the sky, though greatly diminished, the people were frenzied by the return of Osiris from death; nevertheless he became king of the netherworld. In the Egyptian way of seeing the celestial drama, Isis (Jupiter), the spouse of Osiris (Saturn) wrapped him in swathings. Osiris was known as “the swathed"—the way the dead came to be dressed for their journey to the world of the dead, over which Osiris reigns. Similar rites were celebrated in honor of Adonis, who died and was resurrected after a stay in the netherland⁽¹⁸⁾, in the mysteries of Orpheus.⁽¹⁹⁾

Sir James G. Frazer, the collector of folklore, came to regard Osiris as a vegetation god⁽²⁰⁾; likewise he saw in the Babylonian Tammuz, an equivalent of the Egyptian Osiris, a vegetation god and, carried away by this concept, wrote his The Golden Bough,⁽²¹⁾ built around the idea of the vegetation god that dies and is resurrected the following year.

A few peoples through consecutive planetary ages kept fidelity to the ancient Saturn, or Kronos, or Brahma,⁽²²⁾ whose age was previous to that of Jupiter. Thus the Scythians were called Umman-Manda by the Chaldeans⁽²³⁾—"People of Manda"—and Manda is the name of Saturn.⁽²⁴⁾ The Phoenicians regarded El-Saturn as their chief deity; Eusebius informs us that El, a name used also in the Bible as a name for God, was the name of Saturn.⁽²⁵⁾ In Persia Saturn was known as Kevan or Kaivan.⁽²⁶⁾

The different names for God in the Bible reflect the process of going through the many ages in which one planet superseded another and was again superseded by the next one in the celestial war. El was the name of Saturn; Adonis of the Syrians, the bewailed deity, was also, like Osiris, the planet Saturn; but in the period of the contest between the two major planets, Jupiter and Saturn, the apellative of the dual gods became Adonai, which means “my lords” ; then, with the victory of Jupiter, it came to be applied to him alone.

SATURN in Myth and Occult Philosophy

http://www.skyscript.co.uk/saturnmyth.html

Ancient Mythology

In ancient Mesopotamia the planets were seen as gods in their own right. The Babylonian name for Saturn was Sagush and the associated god was Ninurta. When the Tablets of Fate, which held the laws of the universe, were stolen by a dragon, it was Ninutra who rescued them and was henceforth placed in charge of fate and law. Sagush was therefore the star of law and order. This does not conflict with the role of Jupiter: order is not quite the same thing as justice. In the same myth, Ninurta is said to have imposed his rule upon the minerals, who had sided with the dragon, and allotted to them their natures and duties: some 3000 years later Lilly also recorded that Saturn rules mines and those who work with earth or stone. Since the dragon was a beast of the air, the myth may depict the imposition of divine order on the universe, both above and below the earth. Unfortunately, most of the tablets relating to the omens of Saturn have yet to be found, so we know less about his position in Mesopotamian astrology than that of the other planets.
The Greeks equated Ninurta with their own Kronos. He was one of the Titans, the children of Gaia and Ouranos, Earth and Sky. Kronos seized power from his father after castrating him, because Ouranos had prevented Gaia from giving birth to her children. The explanation of the latter can probably be found in an Egyptian myth, which stated that the sky goddess Nut and the earth god Geb had refused to cease coupling: their forcible separation enabled the creation of our world. This is not just a question of making a space in which mankind could live, but of creating the differentiations which distinguish cosmos from chaos. The very word cosmos originally meant appropriate arrangement and good order, its use in the sense of the universe apparently having been introduced by Pythagoras. Thus Kronos made the initial separation of heaven and earth, male and female, just as the astrological Saturn creates order and makes distinctions.
The name Kronos is not Greek, and the account of his deeds, like many Greek myths, came from Asia Minor. The Hurrians (mentioned in the Bible as the Horites) had a sky god Anu (perhaps the same as the Sumerian An) who was castrated and overthrown by his son, Kumarbi. He, being a barbarian, accomplished the deed with his teeth, only to find himself pregnant with the storm god in consequence. In the Greek version, Kronos also became pregnant, but by swallowing his own children as fast as they were born, having been warned that he would be dethroned by one them just as he had supplanted his own father. His wife, Rhea, somewhat distressed by the loss of the first five, substituted a stone for the next, the storm god Zeus, who was then raised in secret. After liberating his brothers and sisters, Zeus led their rebellion - as they had been reborn, he was now the eldest - and so became king of the gods. Perhaps understandably, after these alarming adventures, Kronos had few duties: he was chiefly a patron of agriculture. It was probably this which led him to be equated with the Etruscan god Satres, whom the Romans borrowed as Saturnus. The Greek harvest festival called the Cronia and the Roman midwinter Saturnalia both involved a relaxation of established order, with slaves free to mock their masters.

Cabbalism

In the Jewish theosophy known as cabbalism, Saturn is the third sphere of divine activity, called Binah - Understanding or Intelligence.
This is the power which organises the creative forces and imposes form on the universe. It is thus the root of matter. It is also the female principle, for it is through conception and birth that we acquire material form.

Tarot

In the greater arcana of the tarot cards, the magical order of the Golden Dawn assigned Saturn to the World. This was presumably because Saturn, as the most earthy planet, rules life on earth. But the card refers rather to the ideal world, or the world to come, and other suitable images can be found: the Hermit (originally called Time), symbolising wisdom and prudence; Fortune, since Saturn represents fate; the Emperor or the Pope, as secular and spiritual authorities; even Death or the Devil.
Among the lesser arcana, Saturn is assigned to the threes on cabbalistic grounds. Since the restrictions of Saturn fall hardest on the element air, the three of swords is unfavourable and called Sorrow. With the other elements, Saturn consolidates their powers and so the three of coins (earth) is Material Works, the three of cups (water) is Abundance, and the three of wands (fire) is Established Strength.

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David McCann, who lives in London, is an expert on the history and philosophy of astrology. His articles have been published in many international journals of astrology and he was a regular contributor to the Traditional Astrologer magazine, where this article first appeared.