Since we’re now getting friendly with Jupiter, here’s what humans have been saying
From a deity who dug animal sacrifice to proof that science can explain the cosmos
Published in
3 min readJul 6, 2016
“I’m ready to unlock all your secrets, #Jupiter,” tweeted NASA, speaking as its Juno spacecraft.
After five years and 540 million miles, Juno is finally in position to get “up close and personal” with the biggest planet in the solar system. Jupiter has long held a mythical place in human culture, and science is about to bust all those myths. Here’s what humans have been saying about Jupiter for the last 3,000 years or so.
- In ancient Roman mythology, Jupiter’s size led stargazers to the conclusion that it was the biggest, brightest and most important god of all. Jupiter was the Roman equivalent of Zeus — the god of sky and thunder and lightning, as well as the “divine witness of oaths.” Romans believed that the success of their empire was all due to their intense and rigorous worship of him (as far as animal sacrifices went, Jupiter preferred castrated white bulls). Today’s political inaugurations harken back to a tradition in which Roman statesmen would be sanctioned by ancient augurs, or interpreters of Jupiter’s will.
- In Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, Jupiter is no longer the head honcho. In fact, Jupiter is not a god at all, because 14th century Italians were Catholics. But there are traces of Roman mythology in Dante’s worldview. Instead of being a deity, Jupiter was a heavenly sphere — the sphere of Justice. Jupiter may have been taken down a notch, but it still represented oath-keeping, responsible citizenship, and the noblest manifestations of the state, just as in ancient Rome. Astrology was practiced throughout Europe even as Christianity prevailed, and in astrological traditions Jupiter governed law.
- As scientific astronomy started to mature, Jupiter was increasingly understood as a physical planet, not a god or a heavenly sphere. Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter using a telescope — which he didn’t exactly invent, but may as well have, since he was the first to turn it toward the stars. The discovery of Jupiter’s moons was enormously consequential: for the first time, celestial bodies were found to be orbiting other celestial bodies, which supported a heliocentric worldview. By the mid-17th century, Jupiter was a far cry from a bearded god who demanded the sacrifice of neutered animals: it was evidence that the earth orbited the sun, and that physical laws ruled the cosmos.
- With the ascent of science came another mythic tradition, this time more speculative and less dogmatic: science fiction. The first fictional account set on Jupiter was probably Voltaire’s 1752 short story Micromégas. Like much sci-fi, Micromégas was a commentary on earthly conditions: the protagonists land on Jupiter and “remained there a year, during which they learned some very remarkable secrets which would now be appearing in the press, were it not for certain censors who find them too hard to swallow.”
- Since Micromégas, sci-fi writers have attempted — both earnestly and tongue-in-cheek — to elaborate the secrets of Jupiter. In 1894, John Jacob Astor IV portrayed Jupiter as “a jungle world teeming with flesh-eating plants, blood-sucking bats, giant snakes and flying lizards.” By the time Isaac Asimov wrote “Victory Unintentional” in 1942, much more was known about Jupiter’s atmospheric composition. Asimov described an “impenetrable Jovian murk… three thousand miles of liquid-dense gas, so that one could not speak of day and night.”
Changes in human perception of Jupiter over the last three millennia reflect corresponding trends in science and religion. And the evolution of Jupiter in human culture isn’t complete — after all, we’ve only just arrived. Who knows what we’ll learn, and what new era of Jupiter our findings might usher in?
