i.e. the god. Campion argues that the Sumerians considered the planets and stars to
be under the power or authority of specific deities, but that they were not understood
as the planet itself. This is one of the reasons why the sun-god is not the most central
figure in the Mesopotamian mythologies nor of that of the Greeks who mapped much
of their Pantheon onto the sky religion of the Babylonians. Another related explana-
tion, as Robert Powell points out, is that the Babylonians noted that none of the
planets were always visible in the sky, therefore no single deity could have supreme
authority. Instead they governed through a council made up of all seven gods. During
the Babylonian history, Marduk (the deity associated with the planet Jupiter) estab-
lished himself as the president of the Council, but the Moon god, Sin, had also been
known as “lord of the gods” in a time before the rulership of Marduk. Similarly dur-
ing the Old Babylonian period of the Amorite king Hammurabi (1792–1750 B.C.E.),
the sun god Shamash was considered the “king of the gods.” In fact “Hammu” was
the old Semitic name for the sun-god and thus, according to Powell, points to the
worship of the solar deity.Shamash was the son of Sin (a male lunar deity) and brother of Ishtar (associ-
ated with the planet Venus). He was the great benefactor to humanity because he
ignited and supported the growth of life through his light and warmth. However, the
early civilizations of the arid Mediterranean and Middle East, were all too aware of the
Sun’s scorching rays and his ability to burn up crops and dry up rivers and lakes. In
Hellenistic and Hindu astrology this translated into a negative influence of the Sun
when it was positioned too close to one of the other planets. The planet was designat-
ed as “combust” (within 8° from the Sun) or “under the Sun’s beams” (within 17°)
and was either interpreted as being hidden or operating in secrecy (out of sight),
according to Hellenistic astrology, or as weak and ineffective in the Jyotish tradition.
This concept of light translating into a higher degree of “sight” finds an echo in the
Greek sun-god Helios who was also the god of seeing and often invoked to heal blind-
ness. Medieval astrology, which was largely an Arabic evolution of the Hellenistic tra-
dition, regarded combustion as especially detrimental. Guido Bonatti (thirteenth cen-
tury) says: “A corporal conjunction with the Sun is the greatest misfortune that can
befall a planet.” To William Lilly, the Sun is associated with eyesight, cataracts, eye
diseases and the brain—and an echo of this can be found in Vedic astrology.
One of the more notable characteristics of the Babylonian sun-god was that he
was the arbiter of justice, a role associated with Jupiter in modern astrology. Powell
explains this perspective in terms of the interpretation of the Sun’s regularity as “infal-
libility,” a desirable trait in the arbitration of justice. In Jacobsen, it is Utu’s ability to
“enlighten” or to have “clarity of vision” which is considered when he says Utu is the
“power in light, the foe of darkness. On the social place he therefore becomes a power
for justice and equality.... He is therefore the judge of god and men, presiding in the
morning in courts such as the one we know from the Bathhouse Ritual, where demons
and other evil doers are sued by their human victims. At night he judges disputes
among the dead of the netherworld. He is the last appeal of the wronged who can
obtain no justice from their fellow men, and their cry of despair to him, ‘i-Utu!’ was
feared as possessing supernatural power” (as noted in Nick Campion’s Cosmos: A Cul-
tural History of Astrology.Sun
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