Caelus or Coelus (; ) was a primordial god of the sky in Roman mythology and theology, Roman art, and Latin literature (compare 'sky', 'heaven', whence English celestial). The deity's name usually appears in masculine grammatical form when he is conceived of as a male generative force.
Identity
The name of Caelus indicates that he was the Roman counterpart of the
Greek mythology Uranus (Οὐρανός,
Ouranos), who was of major importance in the
theogony of the Greeks, and the Jewish god
Yahweh.
[Floro, Epitome 1.40 (3.5.30): "The Judaism tried to defend Jerusalem; but he Pompeius entered this city also and saw that grand Holy of Holies of an impious people exposed, Caelum under a golden vine" (Hierosolymam defendere temptavere Iudaei; verum haec quoque et intravit et vidit illud grande inpiae gentis arcanum patens, sub aurea vite Caelum). Finbarr Barry Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Brill, 2001), pp. 81 and 83 (note 118). El Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, 1985 reprinting), p. 252, entry on caelum, cita a Juvenal, Petronio, and Floro como ejemplos de Caelus o Caelum "with reference to Yahweh; also, to some symbolization of Jehovah."] Varro couples him with Terra (Earth) as
pater et mater (father and mother), and says that they are "great deities" (
dei magni) in the theology of the mysteries at
Samothrace.
[Varro, De lingua Latina 5.58.] Although Caelus is not known to have had a cult at Rome,
[Pierre Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Blackwell, 1986, 1996, originally published 1951 in French), pp. 83–84.] not all scholars consider him a Greek import given a Latin name; he has been associated with
Summanus, the god of nocturnal thunder, as "purely Roman."
[Marion Lawrence, "The Velletri Sarcophagus," American Journal of Archaeology 69.3 (1965), p. 220.]
Caelus begins to appear regularly in Augustus art and in connection with the cult of Mithras during the Roman Empire. Vitruvius includes him among celestial gods whose temple-buildings (aedes) should be built open to the sky.[Other gods for whom this aedes design was appropriate are Jupiter, Sol and Luna. Vitruvius, De architectura 1.2.5; John E. Stambaugh, "The Functions of Roman Temples," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.16.1 (1978), p. 561.] As a sky god, he became identified with Jupiter, as indicated by an inscription that reads Optimus Maximus Caelus Aeternus Iupter.[ CIL 6.81.2.]
Genealogy
According to
Cicero and Hyginus, Caelus was the son of Aether and Dies ("Day" or "Daylight").
[Cicero, De natura deorum 3.44, as cited by E.J. Kenney, Apuleius: Cupid and Psyche (Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2001), note to 6.6.4, p. 198; Hyginus, preface. This is not the theogony that Hesiod presents.] Caelus and Dies were in this tradition the parents of Mercury.
[Cicero, De natura Deorum 3.56; also Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 4.14.] With Trivia, Caelus was the father of the distinctively Roman god Janus, as well as of Saturn and
Ops.
[Ennius, Annales 27 (edition of Vahlen); Varro, as cited by Nonius Marcellus, p. 197M; Cicero, Timaeus ; Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 2.71, 3.29.] Caelus was also the father of one of the three Jupiters, the fathers of the other two being Aether and Saturn instead.
[Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 4.14.] In one tradition, Caelus was the father with Tellus of the
Muses, though this was probably a mere translation of
Ouranos from a Greek source.
[Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 3.37, citing Mnaseas as his source.]
Myth and allegory
Caelus substituted for Uranus in Latin versions of the myth of Saturn (
Cronus) castrating his heavenly father, from whose severed genitals, cast upon the sea, the goddess Venus (
Aphrodite) was born.
[Cicero, De nature Deorum; Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 4.24.] In his work
On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero presents a
Stoicism allegory of the myth in which the castration signifies "that the highest heavenly aether, that seed-fire which generates all things, did not require the equivalent of human genitals to proceed in its generative work."
[Cicero, De natura Deorum 2.64. Isidore of Seville says similarly that Saturn "cut off the genitalia of his father Caelus, because nothing is born in the heavens from seeds" ( Etymologies 9.11.32). Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433–1177 (University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 27 and 142.] For
Macrobius, the severing marks off Chaos from fixed and measured
Chronos (Saturn) as determined by the revolving Heavens (Caelum). The
semina rerum ("seeds" of things that exist physically) come from Caelum and are the elements which create the world.
[Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.8.6–9; Chance, Medieval Mythography, p. 72.]
The divine spatial abstraction Caelum is a for Mount Olympus as a heavenly abode of the divine, both identified with and distinguished from the Mount Olympus named as the home of the gods. Varro says that the Greeks call Caelum (or Caelus) "Olympus."[Varro, De lingua latina 7.20; likewise Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 14.8.9. The noun Caelum appears in the accusative case, which obscures any distinction between masculine and neuter. Servius, note to Aeneid 6.268, says that "Olympus" is the name for both the Macedonian mountain and for caelum. Citations and discussion by Michel Huhm, "Le mundus et le Comitium: Représentations symboliques de l'espace de la cité," Histoire urbaine 10 (2004), p. 54.] As a representation of space, Caelum is one of the components of the mundus, the "world" or cosmos, along with terra (earth), mare (sea), and aer (air).[Servius, note to Aeneid 3.134; Huhm, "Le mundus et le Comitium," p. 53, notes 36 and 37.] In his work on the cosmology systems of antiquity, the Dutch Renaissance humanist Gerardus Vossius deals extensively with Caelus and his duality as both a god and a place that the other gods inhabit.[Gerardus Vossius, Idolatriae 3.59 online et passim, in Gerardi Joan. Vossii Operum, vol. 5, De idololatria gentili. See also Giovanni Santinello and Francesco Bottin, Models of the History of Philosophy: From Its Origins in the Renaissance to the "Historia Philosophica" (Kluwer, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 222–235.]
The ante-Nicene Christian writer Lactantius routinely uses the Latin Caelus, Saturn, and Jupiter to refer to the three divine hypostases of the Neoplatonic school of Plotinus: the First God (Caelus), Intellect (Saturn), and Soul, son of the Intelligible (Jupiter).[Elizabeth De Palma Digeser, "Religion, Law and the Roman Polity: The Era of the Great Persecution," in Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome (Franz Steiner, 2006), pp. 78–79.]
In art
It is generally, though not universally, agreed that Caelus is depicted on the
muscle cuirass of the
Augustus of Prima Porta,
[Jane Clark Reeder, "The Statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, the Underground Complex, and the Omen of the Gallina Alba," American Journal of Philology 118.1 (1997), p. 109; Charles Brian Rose, "The Parthians in Augustan Rome," American Journal of Archaeology 109.1 (2005), p. 27.] at the very top above the four horses of the Sun god's
quadriga. He is a mature, bearded man who holds a cloak over his head so that it billows in the form of an arch, a conventional sign of deity
(velificatio) that "recalls the vault of the
firmament."
[Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 158 and 321.] He is balanced and paired with the personification of Earth at the bottom of the cuirass.
[Reeder, "The Statue of Augustus," p. 109.] (These two figures have also been identified as Saturn and the
Magna Mater, to represent the new Saturnian "
Golden Age" of Augustan ideology.)
[Specifically, Juppiter Optimus Maximus Saturnus Augustus: Reeder, "The Statue of Augustus," p. 109 and 111.] On an altar of the
Lares now held by the
Vatican Museums, Caelus in his chariot appears along with
Apollo-Sol above the figure of
Augustus.
[Reeder, "The Statue of Augustus," p. 103; Lily Ross Taylor, "The Mother of the Lares," American Journal of Archaeology 29.3 (1925), p. 308.]
Nocturnus and the templum
As
Caelus Nocturnus, he was the god of the night-time, starry sky. In a passage from
Plautus, Nocturnus is regarded as the opposite of Sol, the Sun god.
[Plautus, Amphytrion 272.] Nocturnus appears in several inscriptions found in
Dalmatia and
Italy, in the company of other deities who are found also in the
cosmology schema of Martianus Capella, based on the Etruscan tradition.
[Including CIL 3.1956 = ILS 4887, 9753, 142432, CIL 5.4287 = ILS 4888, as cited and discussed by Mario Torelli, Studies in the Romanization of Italy (University of Alberta Press, 1995), pp. 108–109.] In the Etruscan discipline of divination, Caelus Nocturnus was placed in the sunless north opposite to Sol to represent the polar extremities of the axis (see
cardo). This alignment was fundamental to the drawing of a
templum (sacred space) for the practice of
.
[Torelli, Studies, p. 110. See also Huhm, "Le mundus et le Comitium," pp. 52–53, on the relation of templum, mundus, and caelum.]
Mithraic syncretism
The name
Caelus occurs in dedicatory inscriptions in connection to the cult of
Mithras.
The Mithraic Caelus is sometimes depicted
allegory as an eagle bending over the sphere of heaven marked with symbols of the planets or the
zodiac.
[Doro Levi, "Aion," Hesperia (1944), p. 302.] In a Mithraic context he is associated with
Cautes[M.J. Vermaseren, Mithraica I: The Mithraeum at S. Maria Capua Vetere (Brill, 1971), p. 14; Jaime Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation, and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras, translated by Richard Gordon (Brill, 2008), p. 86.] and can appear as
Caelus Aeternus ("Eternal Sky").
[R. Beck in response to I.P. Culianu, "L'«Ascension de l'Âme» dans les mystères et hors des mystères," in La Soteriologia dei culti orientali nell' impero romano (Brill, 1982), p. 302.] A form of
Ahura-Mazda is invoked in Latin as
Caelus Aeternus Iupiter.
[Levi, "Aion," p. 302. This was the view also of Salomon Reinach, Orpheus: A General History of Religions, translated by Florence Simmonds (London: Heinemann, 1909), p. 68.] The walls of some
mithraeum feature allegorical depictions of the cosmos with
Oceanus and Caelus. The mithraeum of
Dieburg represents the tripartite world with Caelus, Oceanus, and Tellus below
Phaethon-Heliodromus.
[Vermaseren, Mithraica I, p. 14.]
Jewish syncretism
Some Roman writers used Caelus or Caelum
[The word does not appear in the nominative case in any of the passages, and so its intended gender cannot be distinguished; see above.] as a way to express the
monotheism god of Judaism (
Yahweh).
Juvenal identifies the Jewish God with Caelus as the highest heaven
(summum caelum), saying that
Jews worship the
numen of Caelus;
[Juvenal, Satires 14.97; Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 41, 79–80.] Petronius uses similar language.
[Petronius, frg. 37.2; Schäfer, Judeophobia, pp. 77–78.] Florus has a passage describing the Holy of Holies in the
Second Temple as housing a "sky"
(caelum) under a golden vine. A golden vine, perhaps the one mentioned, was sent by the
Hasmonean king
Aristobulus II to Pompeius Magnus after his defeat of
Jerusalem, and was later displayed in the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.
[Florus, Epitome 1.40 (3.5.30): "The Jews tried to defend Jerusalem; but he Pompeius entered this city also and saw that grand Holy of Holies of an impious people exposed, Caelum under a golden vine" (Hierosolymam defendere temptavere Iudaei; verum haec quoque et intravit et vidit illud grande inpiae gentis arcanum patens, sub aurea vite Caelum). Finbarr Barry Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Brill, 2001), pp. 81 and 83 (note 118). The Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, 1985 reprinting), p. 252, entry on caelum, cites Juvenal, Petronius, and Florus as examples of Caelus or Caelum "with reference to Jehovah; also, to some symbolization of Jehovah."]
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