Caelus

Caelus, Caelo or Coelus (from Latin cælus, "sky" or "the heavens" and hence "celestial") was an early sky god in Roman mythology and theology, also appearing in their iconography and literature.

The deity's name usually appears in the grammatical masculine form when conceived of as a masculine generative force, but the neutral form Caelum also occurs as a divine personification.

Identity

The name Caelus indicates that he was the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Urano ((Οὐρανός, Ouranos), who was of great importance in the theogony and mythology of the Greeks) and of the Jewish god Yahweh. Varro unites him with Terra (Earth) as pater and mater (father and mother), and says that they are 'great deities' (dei magni ) in the theology of the mysteries in Samothrace Although it is unknown if he had a cult in Rome, not all scholars consider him to be a Greek import given his Latin name. He has been associated with Summanus, the god of night thunder, as 'purely Roman'.

Caelus begins to appear regularly in Augustan art and in connection with the cult of Mithras during the Imperial era. Vitruvius includes it among the celestial gods whose temples (aedes) had to be built open to the sky. Other gods for whom this type of aedes design was appropriate were Jupiter, Sun, and Moon. As the sky god, he was identified with Jupiter, as indicated by an inscription reading: Optimus Maximus Caelus Aeternus Iup<pi>ter.

Genealogy

According to Cicero and Hyginus, Caelus was the son of Aether and Dies ('Day' or 'Daylight'). Caelus and Dies were in this tradition the parents of Mercury.

With Trivia, Caelus was the father of the distinctively Roman god Janus, as well as Saturn and Ops. Caelus was also the father of one of three forms of Jupiter, the other two being Aether and Saturn. According to tradition, Caelus was the father, with Tellus, of the Muses, although this was probably a mere translation of Ouranos from a Greek source.

Myth and allegory

Caelus replaced Ouranos in the Latin versions of the myth of Saturn (Cronus) castrating his heavenly father, from whose severed genitalia, thrown into the sea, the goddess Venus (Aphrodite) was born. In his work On the nature of the gods, Cicero presents a Stoic allegory of myth in which castration signifies 'that the highest celestial ether, that seed-fire which generates all things, did not require the equivalent of the gods'. human genitalia to proceed in their generative work'. For Macrobius, the separation marks the Chaos of Time (Saturn) fixed and measured as determined by the revolving Heavens (Caelum). The semina rerum ('seeds' of things that exist physically) come from Caelum and are the elements that create the world.

The divine spatial abstraction Caelum is synonymous with Olympus as a metaphorical celestial abode of the divine, identified and distinguished from the ancient Greek mountain home of the gods. Varro says that the Greeks call Caelum (or Caelus) 'Olympus'. As a representation of space, Caelum is one of the components of the mundus, 'the ' 39;world' or cosmos, along with terra (earth), mare (sea), and aer (air). In his work on cosmological systems of In antiquity, the Dutch Renaissance humanist Gérard Vossius deals extensively with Caelus and his duality as both a god and a place in which the other gods dwell.

The Christian writer of the pre-Nicene period, Lactantius, habitually uses the Latin theonyms Caelus, Saturn and Jupiter to refer to the three divine hypostases of the Neoplatonic school of Plotinus: the First God (Caelus), the Intellect (Saturn) and Soul, son of the Intelligible (Jupiter).

Augusto de Prima Porta carrying a possible representation of Caelus in his armour.

In art

Generally, though not universally accepted, Caelus is depicted on the breastplate of the Augustus of Prima Porta, on top above the four horses of the Sun god's chariot. He appears as a mature, bearded man wearing a cape on his head that billows in an arc, a conventional sign of deity (velificatio) that 'recalls the vault of the firmament'. He is balanced and paired with the personification of the Earth at the bottom of the shell. Another interpretation is that these two figures could be identified with Saturn and the Magna Mater, to represent the new "Golden Age" of Saturn of the Augustan ideology.

On an altar in the Lares now in the Vatican Museum, Caelus appears in his chariot with Apollo-Sol above the figure of Augustus.