Читать книгу The Human Cosmos - Jo Marchant - Страница 12
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FAITH
On 28 October 312, two armies clashed just outside Rome. Two brothers-in-law, Maxentius and Constantine, were fighting for control of the western Roman Empire, which stretched from Britain to north Africa. Maxentius held Rome, while Constantine advanced across the Alps from Gaul. On the eve of the battle, he set up camp a few kilometres north of the city walls.
What happened to Constantine that day, described by ancient authors such as Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, has acquired legendary status as one of history’s great turning points. At around noon, the power-hungry emperor saw a divine vision: a flaming cross of light above the sun, emblazoned with the words ‘Conquer by this’. It was enough to convert Constantine from paganism to Christianity. He ordered the sign – made from the first two letters of Christ’s name, Chi and Rho, superimposed – to be painted on his soldiers’ shields.
Maxentius, meanwhile, claimed protection from Mars, the Roman god of war. Rattled by his rival’s military victories, Maxentius had tried everything he could think of to halt Constantine’s progress, from conducting temple rituals and sacrifices to reading animal entrails and omens in the sky. He prepared for a siege behind the capital’s impregnable walls, stockpiling grain and destroying the stone arches of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine’s route across the Tiber into Rome. But he wasn’t sure the citizens would remain loyal; at chariot races in the Circus Maximus on 27 October the crowds shouted Constantine’s name. The next day, after consulting a collection of oracles called the Sibylline Books, Maxentius chose instead to meet his rival in open battle.
With the bridge disabled, Maxentius’s men crossed the Tiber on a temporary platform made from wooden boats, meeting Constantine’s army a few kilometres north of its banks. The attacking forces, though much smaller in number, pushed Maxentius’s troops back. With no escape route, thousands of his soldiers were forced into the river and drowned, until, according to one account, the water could barely penetrate the piles of bodies. Maxentius perished too as he tried to flee, weighed down by his armour. Constantine fished his body out of the mud and paraded his severed head through the streets.
The victory gave Constantine undisputed control of Rome’s western territories. Fighting under the Chi-Rho symbol, he later gained its eastern lands too – from Macedonia as far as Syria and Egypt. After generations of instability and civil war, he finally united the Roman Empire. Although the west fell within a century or two as Rome’s political influence over its vast territory gradually disintegrated, the eastern empire, ruled from his new capital Constantinople, lasted for another thousand years.
The significance of Constantine’s victory goes far beyond geopolitics. Throughout his reign, the emperor broke with centuries of religious tradition, single-handedly transforming his chosen faith from a minor, persecuted sect into a hugely powerful church. His conversion paved the way for Christianity, rather than the old planet-based gods, to become the dominant religion not just for Rome but the entire western world. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge, then, marks a key moment in an even greater clash in human history: between the sky worship of early civilisations and the monotheistic religions that dominate today.
To commemorate his victory over Maxentius, Constantine built a huge stone arch near the Colosseum in Rome. It still stands, spanning the grand, ceremonial route taken by emperors as they entered the city in triumph, and it features a giant inscription, originally cast in bronze, that attributes his success to ‘divine inspiration’. Many historians have taken that phrase as referring to Constantine’s epic moment of conversion on witnessing the flaming cross in the sky. But over the last few years, scholars like the art historian Elizabeth Marlowe have pointed out that the marble sculptures and reliefs that cover the arch include no Christian symbols.
Instead, they show the Roman sun god, Sol. On the eastern side of the arch, Sol rises from the ocean in his four-horse chariot, balanced on the west side by the descent of Luna, goddess of the moon. Sol is identifiable elsewhere on the arch, too, from a band of light rays around his head – known as a radiate crown – and a raised right hand; in several places Constantine mirrors this pose. What’s more, Marlowe has shown that the arch was carefully offset from the road so that for approaching crowds, the view beyond it centred on a colossal bronze statue dedicated to the sun. Far from affirming Constantine’s Christianity, she says, ‘the favoured deity is unambiguously Sol’.
In other words, the emperor’s famous conversion isn’t everything it first appears. But then, neither is the victory of monotheism over the gods of the sky.
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Most early societies worshipped the sky in some form, or associated their gods with celestial bodies. There are earthly gods too, of course, representing everything from animals and ancestors to rivers and crops. But the vast majority of religions – from all periods of history, anywhere in the world – have a prominent role for celestial beings. The very word ‘deity’ derives from a root that means ‘shining in the sky’.1
According to the twentieth-century Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, who surveyed hundreds of religions around the world, the sheer size and power of the sky drives spiritual experiences. Simply by being there, the heavens reveal how tiny we are in the cosmos at the same time as putting us in touch with the vast, unimaginable whole. ‘The sky, of its very nature, as a starry vault and atmospheric region has a wealth of mythological and religious significance,’ he wrote. ‘Atmospheric and meteorological “life” appears to be an unending myth.’
Some sky gods are associated with specific celestial bodies, such as Babylonia’s Marduk and Ishtar, or the Egyptian sun god, Ra. Others are supreme creator beings that are embodied by or live in the heavens. The goddess Mawu, worshipped in Benin, West Africa, wears the blue sky as a veil and clouds for clothes. Debata, known in Sumatra, releases lightning when he opens his mouth to smile. Qat, supreme being of the Banks Islands in Melanesia, created the dawn when he cut into night’s darkness with a red obsidian knife. But with the rise of the three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – this wealth of celestial personalities was swept away. Their divine dramas were replaced, for much of humanity, by the concept of one, unchanging God.
It’s a revolution that started in Canaan, a region centred on Palestine, between the Jordan Valley and Mediterranean Sea. Ruled by the Egyptians for much of the Late Bronze Age, a people called the Israelites emerged here around 1250 BC. Texts and archaeological evidence suggest that early on the Israelites worshipped celestial bodies among a pantheon of gods, led by Yahweh (linked by some scholars to the sun) and his wife Asherah (associated with trees, and later Venus).
The region split into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The Assyrians destroyed Israel in 722 BC and exiled thousands of its people; in 586 BC, the Babylonians did the same to Judah. After Israel’s fall, a religious group emerged in Judah, centred in Jerusalem, which recognised Yahweh alone as the sole creator of the universe: a deity who couldn’t be depicted, and who forbade worship of all other gods. Surveys of religious texts from the period suggest this was initially a minority view, but that such ‘Yahweh-alone’ beliefs then strengthened among the exiles in Babylon.
In 538 BC, Babylon was in turn conquered by the Persians, who helped the exiles to return home and rebuild their Temple of Jerusalem. With Persian support, this monotheistic group came to control Judaean religious institutions, and they assembled and edited the documents that became the Hebrew Bible. It has been suggested that the Persians were sympathetic because they recognised in the exiles’ religion aspects of their own Zoroastrianism, with its supreme creator-god, Ahura Mazda, opposed by the hostile Angra Mainyu. Early Judaism was certainly influenced by Zoroastrianism, particularly its notion of the cosmos as an epic struggle between good and evil.
Although historians’ understanding of these events is murky, scholars generally agree that the rise of Yahweh among the Jews at this time was linked to their experiences of exile and loss. They also saw the powerful empires of Assyria and Babylonia destroyed within one lifetime, points out David Aberbach, a professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University. Perhaps that encouraged them to see material gods and territorial identity as weak and transient, and to choose instead ‘an abstract and indestructible God, rather than gods of wood and stone’.
All nations claimed that their own chief god was supreme, but this new deity was different. Unlike the Greek Zeus, say, who despite being the most powerful god in the universe still faced limits to his actions and could be thwarted by other gods, Yahweh was transcendent: not within the cosmos but above it, and no longer bound by its rules. According to Eliade, this ‘notion of God’s “power” as the only absolute reality’ was ‘the jumping-off point for all later mystical thought and speculation on the freedom of man’.
It was an idea so powerful, it would change the spiritual face of humanity: Judaism, Christianity and Islam are now followed by more than half the world’s population. Initially, Yahweh had little influence beyond Israel. Then, in the first century AD, a Jewish sect emerged led by a teacher from Nazareth called Jesus Christ, who claimed to be the son of God. Converts such as Paul the Apostle brought the story of his death and resurrection to Rome. The faith was slow to take hold; when Constantine, the son of a high-ranking Roman army officer, was born in Naissus, modern-day Serbia, in 272, the tide of change was still lapping at the shore.
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Constantine grew up in what the historian A. H. M. Jones described as ‘evil times’. Roman rule had expanded fast since it first rolled into Greek territories in the second century BC. Five hundred years later, the huge, unmanageable empire was on the brink of collapse, threatened by invasions, civil wars, famines and plagues, with rival armies proclaiming new emperors almost too fast to keep count.
Religion was also in flux. The traditional Roman gods had long since merged with the Greek pantheon: Rome’s chief god, Jupiter, was identified with the Greek Zeus, while the goddess Aphrodite took on attributes of Venus, and the Greek solar deity Helios became associated with the Roman sun god, Sol. These planetary gods occupied a central position in daily life, not just for religious rituals and sacrifices but fortune-telling, too, as astrology, imported from Babylon, became popular across the Greco-Roman world.
By the first century the planets even ruled over the calendar, with the introduction of a seven-day week – also probably originating in Babylon – starting with Saturn (Saturday), followed by the sun (Sunday), moon (Monday), Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus.2 As Rome’s empire grew, however, so did its pantheon, as the Romans happily adopted the gods of the provinces they conquered. The new faith of Christianity had to carve out a place in a society already ‘crammed full of deities’, as one historian put it, from the mother-goddesses Artemis of Ephesus and Isis of Egypt (associated with the star Sirius) to the Persian sun god, Mithras.
It took the iron hand of Diocletian, an ex-commander of the imperial bodyguard, to restore order. After becoming emperor in 284, he emphasised Rome’s traditional gods, and punished the Christians who refused to worship them. He also divided the sprawling empire into two parts, each led by senior and junior partners in a four-emperor system known as the Tetrarchy. Diocletian and Maximian (Maxentius’s father) ruled the east and west, respectively. They both retired in 305; Constantine’s father, Constantius, took over from Maximian, and when he died in England the next year, his army proclaimed Constantine his successor. But the Tetrarchy system had created multiple claimants for the various thrones, including Maxentius, and over the next few years Constantine had to negotiate his way through a series of battles and betrayals as the rivals vied for power.
In 310, after he defeated Maximian in Marseille, Constantine ordered his army to march off the main road to visit a temple sanctuary.3 There, according to one contemporary account, the emperor had a divine vision in which he was promised military victories and a long rule. The bearer of the message wasn’t a flaming cross, though, but the classical god Apollo, who was often associated with the sun.
Roman leaders traditionally insisted that their power came from Jupiter, a deity with origins in the older Indo-European sky-god Dyaus. But some claimed links with a supreme solar deity, seeing themselves as a kind of conduit that reflected the sun’s rays on Earth. According to Jonathan Bardill, author of Constantine, Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age, it’s a tradition that goes back to the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic kings who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great, in turn influenced by the ancient Egyptian pharaohs and their worship of the sun god Ra. In the first century BC, Julius Caesar wore a radiate crown; his heir Augustus (Rome’s first emperor) erected an obelisk brought from Egypt as a giant sundial. In the first century AD, Nero erected a colossal bronze statue of himself as the sun.
These efforts did not generally end well. When Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, a teenager from Emesa, Syria, succeeded the throne through family connections in 218, he was a priest at his local temple, where worship of the Syrian sun god Elagabalus centred on a large, cone-shaped meteorite. He took the stone to Rome and worshipped it daily, ‘dressed in silk robes, a lofty tiara, and cheeks painted red and white’. He was assassinated four years later, and his mutilated corpse was dragged through the streets. Aurelian, who became emperor in 270, had slightly more success when he tried to replace Jupiter with the cult of Sol Invictus, the ‘Unconquered Sun’.4 Its central festival was Sol’s birthday, 25 December, a few days after winter solstice, when the sun resumes its journey north and the days start to lengthen towards spring. Aurelian was assassinated too, five years into his reign, but the cult of Sol Invictus survived him.
It’s not clear why Constantine chose to follow his ill-fated predecessors with his solar vision; perhaps he wanted to distance himself from the traditional religion of the Tetrarchy. But from 310, all of Constantine’s mints produced coins that featured Sol, described as ‘companion of the emperor’, in his characteristic pose: standing naked with his right hand raised and wearing a radiate crown. When Constantine set out to liberate Rome in 312, says Bardill, ‘it was with the sun-god as his guardian’.
Did he then have a second vision that converted him to Christianity? Some researchers have suggested that the ‘flaming cross’ Constantine reportedly saw was a solar effect called a sun dog, which occurs when sunlight is refracted by ice crystals in the atmosphere and can make the sun appear cross-shaped. But there doesn’t necessarily have to be a meteorological explanation. Roman leaders often used reports of dreams and visions to encourage their troops or claim divine support. (When Augustus entered Rome following Caesar’s murder, it was said that a circular rainbow formed around the sun.) Constantine’s cross in the sky is probably just another version of the Apollo story, retold later with a Christian spin.
Nonetheless, after Constantine defeated Maxentius, his religious policies did shift. Christians had been targeted on and off since Nero’s time, culminating in Diocletian’s ‘Great Persecution’, during which anyone who refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods was imprisoned or executed. Constantine reversed that in 313, allowing the empire’s inhabitants to worship whichever god they chose. In 321, he decreed that the Christian day of worship (Sunday) would be an official day of rest for Roman citizens, and after he gained sole control of the empire in 324, he started using Christian symbols on his coins. He removed or repurposed pagan statues and built a series of important Christian churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, over the supposed locations of Jesus’s crucifixion and empty tomb, still seen as Christianity’s most holy site.
Constantine also supported Christians financially and involved himself intimately in the running of their church. In May 325, he convened hundreds of bishops from across the empire for the First Council of Nicaea, the first attempt to agree a common doctrine for all of Christianity. The early Christian bishop and historian Eusebius describes him sitting in the middle of the great hall in purple and gold robes, ‘like some heavenly messenger of God, clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light’. He bullied the squabbling bishops into near unanimity, helping to build a powerful, unified ‘Catholic’ church.5
This conventional history, however, is mostly gleaned from accounts by Christian authors such as Eusebius. Other sources reveal that there’s more to the story, just as with Constantine’s vision and victory arch. For years after his defeat of Maxentius, for example, Constantine kept making coins that featured Sol, though he eventually stopped around 324. And although Christians observed a rest day on Sunday, in his decree Constantine didn’t refer to it as ‘the Lord’s Day’, as Christians did. He introduced the law ‘in veneration of the sun’. In 330, at his new, supposedly Christian, capital of Constantinople, Constantine erected a giant statue of himself on a 37-metre-high column of purple porphyry. It depicted him naked with a radiate crown, facing east towards sunrise. The statue was felled by high winds in 1106, but literary sources preserve the inscription: ‘For Constantine who is shining like the sun.’
In other words, Constantine didn’t give up his solar beliefs. But how could he follow both religions, when Christianity expressly forbids the worship of other gods? Some clues come from his letters, in which he describes, for example, the saving power of God’s ‘most brilliant beams’, and says that God ‘held up a pure light’ through his son. Historians such as Bardill argue that Constantine never really converted from paganism to Christianity at all. Instead, he simply joined the two, seeing the Christian God as a sort of supreme solar deity whose rays were spread on Earth by Christ. By deliberately blurring the boundaries between the two faiths, he could embrace his new beliefs without having to give up the old.
He wouldn’t have been the first, of course. For centuries, Christians had been drawing on the power and radiance of our star.
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In the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi refers to the coming messiah as ‘the Sun of Righteousness’; Christ later described himself as ‘the light of the world’. Before Jesus was crucified, his Roman captors mocked him by giving him a radiate crown, made of thorns. But during the first couple of centuries AD, as Christians in the Roman Empire tried to attract followers and distinguish themselves from their parent Jewish faith, they increasingly borrowed the rituals and trappings of sun worship.
Instead of praying towards Jerusalem as the Jews did, they faced east towards sunrise. And instead of keeping the Jewish Sabbath, they moved their main day of worship to Sunday, in line with pagan sun cults. In the second century, the Christian author Tertullian denied that this choice of day had anything to do with its solar connotations. But by Constantine’s time, Eusebius was happy to recognise a direct link, explaining that ‘the Saviour’s day . . . derives its name from the light, and from the sun’.
The major Christian festivals were also scheduled according to the sun’s movements. Easter, the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection, was originally based on the Jewish Passover, itself a direct descendant of the Babylonian new year festival, Akitu, and celebrated on the first full moon after the spring equinox; under Constantine, bishops at the First Council of Nicaea voted to move Easter to the following Sunday. And from at least the fourth century, Jesus’s birth was celebrated on 25 December, the birthday of Sol Invictus, which pagans marked by lighting candles and torches, and decorating small trees.
The result, points out historian and writer Marina Warner, was that Christ’s life became intimately identified with the annual cycle of the sun; his birth is still celebrated just after the winter solstice, when the sun begins to rise towards the spring, and his return from the dead just after the spring equinox, when the sun finally triumphs over darkness and the days last longer than the nights. Other Christian imagery reinforced the metaphor. As early as the first century, the twelve Apostles were widely regarded as representing the twelve signs of the zodiac, through which the sun passes in the sky.
Meanwhile the moon became linked with first, the Church, and eventually the Virgin Mary. In her book Alone of All Her Sex, Warner notes that in the regions where Christianity first took hold, the sun represented ferocious energy and power. It was the gentler moonlight, associated with precious moisture-giving dew, which nourished life. She argues that this inspired the idea of the grace of God mediated through Mary, just as the light of the sun reflects off the disc of the moon. ‘Had Christianity not taken root in the sun-baked east,’ says Warner, ‘the astral images it employs might have been very different.’
Using the sun as a symbol for God made switching to Christianity relatively easy, because converts didn’t have to give up their familiar rituals and festivals. But it also meant that, even as Christians furiously denied links to paganism, with many choosing to die rather than sacrifice to pagan gods, aspects of solar worship were becoming embedded in their faith. As the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes puts it: ‘With the malicious irony so often apparent in history, even while they fought heroically on one front, their position was infiltrated from another.’
Constantine took that merging even further, identifying Christ not only with the sun, but with himself. Just as Christ spread divine rays of light on Earth, so did the emperor. One fifth-century description of his sun statue in Constantinople describes how even the city’s Christians laid sacrifices at its base: ‘They venerate it with incense and candles, and they worship it like a god.’ Whether intended or not, Constantine’s original choice to follow Sol was a political ‘masterstroke’. It provided the bridge he needed to link sky worship with Christianity, allowing both pagans and Christians in his empire to unite behind one ruler and one supreme solar god.
This blending had profound consequences not just for Constantine’s image but for how Christians saw their saviour. The earliest known depictions of Jesus come from a private house converted into a Christian church around 235, in the city of Dura-Europos in today’s Syria. Described as the only church walls to survive from before Constantine’s rule, they show a figure in a simple tunic healing a paralysed man; walking on water; tending his sheep. After Constantine’s time, though, typical Catholic depictions were quite different. In the fifth-century church of Hosios David in Thessaloniki, for example, Christ sits on a celestial throne made of rainbows, dressed in purple robes, with a golden halo and his right hand raised.
Although now associated with Christianity, the halo (specifically, a disc behind the head called a ‘nimbus’) was originally used by pagan cults such as Mithraism to depict the divine nature and radiance of the sun god. Then Constantine depicted himself with one on his victory arch in Rome, a first for a Roman emperor. Only after that did Christians start using halos too, and in doing so triggered a transformation in which Christ took on more and more imperial features. Thanks to Constantine, the humble teacher became a cosmic emperor, ruling over the universe with the radiance of the sun.
It’s an image that remained powerful throughout the Middle Ages. Scholars argue about whether Christians who borrowed the halo intended to show their messiah as a powerful emperor, or whether they simply hoped to communicate the radiance and lucidity of the sun. Either way, once it was adopted, the image took hold, says the art historian Thomas Mathews: ‘He became what people pictured him to be.’
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Worship of the sun and stars didn’t just shape ideas about Jesus Christ. It is also at the root of modern western beliefs about heaven and the fate of human souls. In a children’s book called What’s Heaven? author and former First lady of California Maria Shriver describes the afterlife as ‘a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds . . . when your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you to heaven to be with him.’ The idea that after we die our disembodied souls float up to live with angels in the sky is popular among many Christians today. It would have shocked the ancient Israelites.
According to Judaic historian J. Edward Wright, people in ancient Israel believed – as Palaeolithic and Neolithic societies seem to have done – that the cosmos had three tiers: a flat Earth with the underworld beneath it and the sky above. The Hebrew Bible (repurposed in the Christian Old Testament) describes the sky as a tent or canopy stretched over the Earth, but also as a solid ‘firmament’, with a stone floor and storehouses for meteorological phenomena such as wind, snow and hail. These descriptions use the imagery of earthly cities and palaces: heaven has entry gates, for example, and a central throne room, from which Yahweh rules the universe surrounded by a council of holy beings.
But just as commoners weren’t welcome in the royal palace, this heaven was not for ordinary humans. The Hebrew Bible doesn’t say much about what comes after death, notes historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in A History of Christianity. What it does suggest is that ‘human life comes to an end and, for all but a few exceptional people, that is it.’ Neighbouring societies had similar beliefs. In Gilgamesh, the inn-keeper Siduri counsels the hero to give up his search for immortality, telling him that the gods keep eternal life for themselves. Similarly, the epics of Homer – our earliest literary record of Greek thought, dating from around the eighth century BC – include no recognisable heaven for the vast majority of people. The true ‘self’ was the physical body, and although a soul or psyche was thought to survive after death in a dark, dusty underworld, this was a mere shadow of the living person. In the Odyssey, it’s a fate that horrifies the hero Achilles: ‘Never try to reconcile me to death,’ he tells Odysseus, adding that he would rather be a poor man’s servant on Earth than be ‘lord over all the dead that have perished’.
After the sixth century BC that changed. When Greek philosophers broke from mythological accounts and looked instead for physical explanations of the cosmos, their models also fed into religious beliefs, not just in Greece but in the Near East as well. We heard in chapter 3 how Aristotle set out a system of concentric celestial spheres carrying the sun, moon and planets around the Earth; this idea inspired the ‘seven heavens’ described in many Jewish and Christian (and later Islamic) texts. But in an earlier and even more fundamental shift, Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, revolutionised ideas about the soul.
One of Plato’s most famous teachings, written in the fourth century BC, is a story in his dialogue The Republic in which prisoners are chained in a cave facing the wall, so that all they can see are shadows on the rock. The captives believe that these shadows represent real things, but in fact they are just reflections of reality, which exists in the light outside the cave. Likewise, Plato argued, material things that we perceive in our lives and believe to be real are mere reflections of the unchanging ideas or ‘Forms’ that lie behind them. It’s a philosophy in which matter is secondary to consciousness, and physical objects are derived from ideas.
Not surprisingly, then, Plato thought that souls are more important than bodies. In another dialogue, Timaeus, one of his characters describes a benevolent god who shaped the chaos of the cosmos into an ordered system of celestial spheres, crafting first its soul, and only then its physical form. Plato suggested that humans, too, have immortal souls which originate in the divine realm of the stars. Each soul descends through the planetary spheres towards Earth, where it becomes joined with a physical body at birth. When we die, our soul is released from that body and is either reincarnated or, if we’re virtuous enough, ascends through the spheres to return to its place in the stars. ‘We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can,’ he wrote, ‘and to fly away is to become like God.’ (It’s an idea later echoed by the painter Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother of 1888: ‘As we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen,’ he mused, ‘so we take death to come to a star.’)
We each have within us a divine spark, a perfect soul inside our frail, mortal body that can travel to the heavens and live eternally among the stars. It’s a remarkable, inspiring idea. So where did Plato get it from? That’s a story that was hidden for thousands of years.
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On the edge of the Egyptian desert south of Cairo, near the village of Saqqara, there’s a collection of half-ruined pyramids. Part of a vast royal burial ground for the ancient capital of Memphis, they are smaller and for the most part younger than the famous pyramids of nearby Giza. They were built from blocks of limestone around a core of rubble, but the limestone itself has long since been stolen. Once more than 50 metres tall, they now resemble low, crumbling hills.
On 4 January 1881, two brothers from Berlin – Heinrich and Émile Brugsch – visited these rubble piles, hoping to explore the underground chambers hidden beneath. The ancient entrance passage of the first pyramid they tackled was sealed by a heavy granite trapdoor, so they squeezed on their bellies through a narrow tunnel cut by looters centuries earlier. Heinrich was terrified that the huge, ruined stones suspended precariously above would fall and crush them, but eventually they dropped unscathed into a subterranean corridor. ‘What a surprise awaited me, what reward to my efforts!’ he wrote. ‘Wherever I looked, right and left, the smooth limestone walls were covered in innumerable texts.’
The hieroglyphs were expertly carved and arranged in columns. Stooping low, stepping over stones and boulders, the brothers clambered along the corridor and into a wider chamber. It had a peaked limestone ceiling, which was painted black and covered with white, five-pointed stars. Here, too, the walls were covered with hieroglyphs. In the dim candlelight, they read the same name over and over: Merenre, Beloved of the Sun.
During the nineteenth century, just as in Mesopotamia, the colonial powers were enthusiastically combing Egypt for ancient treasures. Near Luxor in the south, European explorers were opening royal tombs dug into cliffs in the Valley of the Kings. Although the tombs had almost invariably been emptied by looters, the art and inscriptions painted on their walls yielded invaluable information about the history of this mysterious civilisation. Disappointingly, though, the chambers of the much older pyramids at Giza were completely blank.
Auguste Mariette, the aging Frenchman in charge of Egypt’s antiquities department, became convinced that all of the pyramids were ‘mute’. It wasn’t even worth the trouble of opening the smaller ones, he argued. But the French government disagreed, and in the summer of 1880, a team of local workmen burrowed into one of the Saqqara pyramids and reported finding hieroglyphics inside. Mariette refused to believe it, insisting they must have entered a nobleman’s tomb by mistake. But in December that year, when he was seriously ill in Cairo, news came of a second pyramid apparently full of texts. With his health fading fast, he sent his long-time colleagues, the Brugsch brothers, to check.
So, on the morning of 4 January, Heinrich and Émile took a train south from Cairo, then a two-hour donkey ride to reach the newly entered pyramid. To the west of the star-painted room was another chamber, also with a peaked, starry ceiling. The walls here, too, were covered in columns of rich inscriptions. And in the corner they saw a sarcophagus made from red-speckled granite, with a shoved-back lid. It was carved with more hieroglyphics, which Heinrich roughly translated: ‘The Great God and Lord of the Light Zone, Living Like the Sun.’
On the floor beside the coffin lay the embalmed body of a young man. Originally wrapped in fine linen, the mummy’s bindings had been torn off by looters, and the shreds were strewn around it like cobwebs. The body had been stripped of amulets and jewellery, but from the high quality of the embalming, with the mummy’s delicate facial features still recognisable, Heinrich concluded it belonged to the pyramid’s owner, King Merenre.
The brothers determined to take the 4,000-year-old pharaoh to Mariette that same evening. ‘Perhaps, I said to myself, it will afford the dying friend a last pleasure,’ Heinrich wrote, ‘to be able to see with his own eyes the mummy of one of the oldest kings of Egypt and indeed of the world.’ They put the mummy in a wooden coffin and strapped it to a donkey for the two-hour ride to the station, then heaved it into the baggage car of the Cairo train, telling the surprised guard they were accompanying an embalmed mayor of Saqqara. Damage to the rails meant the train stopped short of the city, and as the sun set, they had to walk the last few kilometres. ‘To lighten the load, we left the coffin behind and held his dead Majesty at the head end and at the feet,’ recalled Brugsch. ‘Then the Pharaoh broke through the middle and each of us took his half under his arm.’ They finally delivered the mummy to Mariette (who was reportedly horrified by the sight of the battered king) just a few days before the old man died.
It wasn’t the mummy, though, but the newly discovered ‘Pyramid Texts’, as Brugsch called them, that turned out to be the most important find. Similar inscriptions have now been discovered in ten Saqqara pyramids owned by kings and queens of the fifth and sixth dynasties, dating from the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries BC. They don’t contain historical details, but they are the oldest and most extensive source of information we have about ancient Egyptian religious beliefs. They show that while other Near East civilisations held that heaven was just for the gods, Egypt was different.
The Egyptians’ view of the cosmos was complex and full of mixed metaphors. They imagined the sky as an ocean, crossed by the sun god Ra in his celestial barge, but also as the belly of an enormous falcon, or of the goddess Nut, either in the form of a cow or a woman, who arched over the Earth god Geb on her hands and feet, eating the celestial bodies each night and giving birth to them in the morning. Life was a daily cycle, which revolved around Ra’s repeated death and resurrection. At sunset, Ra died and passed into the netherworld below the Earth. During the night, he merged with the body of Osiris, depicted as a mummy lying deep in the netherworld. Through this union, he received the power of new life, and at sunrise was reborn.
The pyramids were built to enable the pharaohs to mirror this journey. They were made from stone to last for eternity, says Egyptologist John Taylor, and were intended as ‘not simply the resting place for the corpse, but the interface between the world of the living and the resurrected dead’. It’s an intriguing echo of theories about Neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge, which was in use at about the same time. As with the sun, the pharaoh’s soul was believed to merge each night with his physical body – the mummy in the tomb – in order to be reborn the next day, and the Pyramid Texts were a collection of spells and incantations to help the process. They describe various stages, culminating in the king rising up with the sun and taking his place among the stars. ‘I row in the sky in your boat, Sun,’ declares one inscription, while another reads: ‘A footpath to the sky is laid down for me, that I might go up on it to the sky.’
The Saqqara pyramid chambers were laid out to reflect this daily journey, with the resurrected king initially travelling east out of the burial chamber towards the rising sun. The exit corridor then turns north, perhaps to point towards the circumpolar stars, which rotate around the northern celestial pole. The Egyptians associated these constellations with immortality, calling them the ‘Imperishable Stars’ because they never set. In several places, the Pyramid Texts name them as the deceased king’s ultimate destination, although other stars feature prominently too, including Orion’s Belt (associated with Osiris), Sirius (the goddess Isis) and the Lone and Morning stars (both thought to be the planet Venus, which appears as a lone, bright star at dawn and dusk).
Although the bigger, older Giza pyramids have no inscriptions, the kings who built them may well have shared similar beliefs. The Pyramid Texts are thought to have already been ancient by the time they were written down. And Giza’s three main pyramids all face due north, towards the celestial pole. The oldest and largest, Khufu’s pyramid, built in the twenty-sixth century BC, is oriented to within a twentieth of a degree. That’s ‘maniacal precision’, says Italian astrophysicist and archaeo-astronomer Giulio Magli, who has studied the pyramid, and strongly suggests an ‘obsessive interest in the circumpolar stars’. This pyramid also has internal shafts running north and south from the main burial chamber. Astronomers have calculated that at the time the pyramid was built, the two shafts pointed accurately towards the circumpolar stars, and to the highest rising point of Osiris (Orion’s Belt). Perhaps they were ‘symbolic pathways’, suggests Magli, to propel the king’s soul into the sky.
The Pyramid Texts were only available to the king and his family, who had their own pyramids. In later centuries, though, similar spells were written inside coffins and on papyri for non-royals too. The Book of the Dead, which emerged around 1600 BC, appears to have been commonly used, and included spells to help the owner pass a test in which his or her heart was weighed to judge whether they deserved to enter heaven. The Egyptians didn’t invent the idea of a divine realm in the sky – that seems to be an almost universal belief – but they are the first we know of to see it as an ultimate destination for virtuous human souls.
Egyptian beliefs are often seen as a historical dead end: a lost religion, fascinating but barely relevant to today’s concepts of the afterlife. But historian Nicholas Campion argues that in fact this is where it all started; that it was probably the Egyptians who inspired the concept of the immortal soul in Greece. The Greek author Herodotus said as much, Campion points out, writing that the Egyptians were ‘the first people to put forward the doctrine of the immortality of the soul’. That’s not proof in itself – Herodotus got a lot of things wrong – but the link is plausible. In the sixth century BC, Greece and Egypt came under the common rule of Persia, providing the opportunity for Greek philosophers to mix with Egyptian priests. Ancient biographies of the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras – who is thought to have been among the first in Greece to propose the idea of an immortal soul and who heavily influenced Plato – claim that he studied at temples in Egypt before opening a school in southern Italy.
The Egyptians are often sidelined in the history of astronomy; from a scientific point of view they were nowhere near as advanced as their Mesopotamian neighbours. Nonetheless, says Campion, they were fundamental to the development of western cosmological ideas. While the Babylonians provided the maths, he says, the Egyptian contribution was metaphysical: ‘the inclusion of the soul’. Thanks to Pythagoras and Plato, the idea that our souls belong in the stars became popular throughout the Greek and then the Roman world, including the belief that contemplating the cosmos therefore draws us closer to God. ‘Observe the movement of the stars as if you were running their courses with them,’ advised the second-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. ‘Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.’ Plato’s ideas also contributed to a variety of ‘mystery’ cults, still popular in Constantine’s time, such as Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Mithraism. All promised to impart secret knowledge about how to prepare the soul for its journey to heavenly realms. Whereas the Jewish God was passionate and interventionist, these religions worshipped ‘the one’, an unchanging, immaterial deity that radiated knowledge and light.
Platonic concepts seeped into Judaism. The idea that the faithful could expect to join God in heaven is hinted at in the Hebrew Bible twice, but only in later books. Ecclesiastes, composed in the Persian period, is unconvinced, asking: ‘Who knows if a man’s spirit rises upward?’ But Daniel, written after the conquests of Alexander the Great, comes down in favour: ‘Those who are wise will shine like the brilliant expanse of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness will be like the stars.’ Centuries later, Islam inherited similar ideas about an eternal afterlife in the sky.
Plato’s biggest influence, though, was on the newborn faith of Christianity. ‘By the time Christians were beginning to construct their own literature, their writers clearly found such talk of the individual soul and resurrection completely natural,’ says MacCulloch, ‘and it became the basis of that Christian concern with the afterlife which sometimes has bordered on the obsessional.’
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Shortly after Easter 337, while preparing to invade Persia, Constantine fell ill. He visited a spa at his mother’s city of Helenopolis, then, too sick to make it back to Constantinople, he travelled instead to nearby Nicomedia, where he summoned a group of bishops. He switched his royal purple gown for a pure white robe and was finally baptised, just a few days before he died.
His body was taken home in a golden coffin, and placed in the sumptuously decorated Church of the Holy Apostles, where he had prepared himself a sarcophagus. It was surrounded by twelve empty tombs which were intended to hold the remains of Jesus’s disciples.6 Some historians see this as perhaps the clearest indication that Constantine really did equate himself with Christ. Others have suggested that as the Apostles symbolised the twelve signs of the zodiac, the emperor could equally have been presenting himself as the sun. Constantine’s official memorial coin, issued shortly after his death, featured him rising to the sky, like Sol, in a four-horse chariot and radiate crown.
Most likely, it was both at once. Constantine fixed Christianity into history as a major global force; scholars agree that he ensured the future of the Catholic Church and is largely responsible for the reach of Christianity around the globe today. But to do it, he embedded within the faith the image of his divine, radiant sun. It’s a story that reflects the broader religious ambiguities of his time, during which the changing fortunes of rival empires brought together clashing worldviews about the nature of the universe and our place in it. In many cases, monotheism didn’t eliminate old beliefs about gods in the sky as much as assimilate and adapt them. Christian concepts such as heaven, the soul and an eternal afterlife were woven over centuries, out of ancient and multicoloured threads from Egypt, Persia, Israel, Greece, Rome and beyond.
Not in every case, though. In the eighteenth century, the political writer Thomas Paine, known among other things for his searing attacks on religion (we’ll meet him again in chapter 8), described Christianity as ‘a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the sun’. The early Christians certainly did take symbols and rituals from the rival sun cult. But there is a fundamental difference between the two that Paine’s criticism doesn’t acknowledge; an aspect of Plato’s thought that mainstream Christianity did not ultimately accept.
Plato’s creator existed within the universe, fashioning the celestial spheres from the material he had available. ‘Out of disorder he brought order,’ Plato wrote in Timaeus, shaping a world that was ‘as far as possible a perfect whole and of perfect parts’. By contrast, the Jews believed in a transcendent God above and beyond the cosmos, who made the world from nothing. ‘The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool,’ says the Hebrew Bible’s book of Isaiah.
In general, Christians stuck with the latter view. Eusebius, for example, was happy to liken Constantine to the sun: ‘As the sun . . . liberally imparts his rays of light to all,’ he wrote, ‘so did Constantine, proceeding at early dawn from the imperial palace, and rising as it were with the heavenly luminary, impart the rays of his own beneficence to all who came into his presence.’ But at the same time he made clear that even the sun is not divine in itself, but just part of God’s creation. Constantine might have been loyal to Sol, but for Eusebius, the ultimate focus of worship was outside the universe. The emperor’s support of Christianity meant that men were no longer ‘to look with awe upon the sun or moon or stars and attribute miracles to these, but rather to acknowledge the one above these, the invincible and imperceptible Universal Creator, having learned to worship him alone’.
That’s the position still held by the Catholic Church. Guy Consolmagno, chief astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, put it clearly in 2013: ‘The God I believe in is not of the universe, but existed before the universe began; not a part of nature, but supernatural.’ It’s a belief that allows for an all-powerful God, unlimited by the universe’s existing rules or resources. But that’s not all. It also has profound consequences for the cosmos itself. Plato’s cosmos was a living, intelligent creature, divine in its own right, with its own soul that spread through all of reality. Consequently everything within the universe shared in that soul: from animals and people, with our mortal bodies, to the stars, which Plato described as ‘divine and eternal animals’. Largely thanks to him, such beliefs were common in the classical world. Five centuries later, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder described the sun as ‘the soul or . . . the mind of the whole world’. Earlier societies with celestial gods, such as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, whatever their views on the post-mortem fate of human beings, would also have seen the universe as an interconnected, living system. When they made the sun, moon and planets into gods, they were really worshipping the cosmos itself.
The significance of the switch to monotheism, then, goes beyond the reduction from many gods to one. It’s really a transformation in the kind of universe in which we live. The fifth-century theologian Augustine of Hippo cemented the mainstream Christian view. He had huge respect for Plato: ‘None come nearer to us [Christians] than the Platonists,’ he writes. But he dismissed the idea of a cosmos infused with God’s soul. ‘Who cannot see what impious and irreligious consequences follow, such as that whatever one may trample, he must trample a part of God, and in slaying any living creature, a part of God must be slaughtered?’ In effect, says Campion, Augustine ‘rejected the notion of the universe as a living creature . . . Instead, some parts of the world were no longer alive and were distinguished from those that were.’
I’m not sure that Constantine himself would have seen it that way. But his conversion marks the moment, for western civilisation at least, when humanity rejected the cosmos as a divine, living being, as all that there was. Instead, it became merely the product of a separate creator. Where once humanity’s fate was determined by the movements of the celestial bodies, and the stars gave home to the gods, now we were no longer at the centre of a universe that encompassed everything. It was possible to imagine stepping outside it and looking down.
Our religious beliefs remain steeped with the influences of the sun, moon and stars. But one more tie with the cosmos was cut.
1 From the Hittite dsius, or Sanskrit dyaus; later ‘Zeus’ in Greek and ‘Jupiter’ in Latin.
2 Archaeologists have seen the planetary calendar everywhere from ruined baths of the first-century emperor Titan to the wall of a house buried by the volcano Vesuvius in AD 79.
3 This was probably the sanctuary at Grand, origin of the astrological tablets mentioned in chapter 3.
4 Historians disagree about whether Sol Invictus was a rebranding of Elagabalus, or the traditional Greco-Roman Sol, or a completely new solar deity.
5 The term ‘Catholic’ comes from the Latin catholicus (or katholikós in Greek), meaning universal.
6 The Apostles’ tombs and relics were removed by his son, Constantius. Constantine is now seen not as a deity, but as a saint.
