astral spirits

In mythology and ancient religions, spirits associated with the heavenly bodies, believed to cause their movements in the sky and to exercise influence on human affairs.

Many of the major older religions, such as the Babylonian and the Mexican, believed the heavenly bodies to be deities or powers. Later Christian beliefs held that astral spirits were fallen angels, or human souls on their way to heaven, or demons.

Not only religion and mythology, but also metaphysics, as it developed among the Greeks, saw analogies between the human soul and the astral divinities, using such analogies as the basis for a doctrine of immortality. European scholasticism, the renewed Platonism of Renaissance times, speculative thinkers like Paracelsus, and mystics like Jacob Bohme inherited and elaborated this tradition. Belief in astral spirits did not always easily accord with orthodox Christianity, and several popular notions developed accommodating it to, or contrasting it with, orthodoxy. As physics developed from older (meta)physical notions of moving spirits that account for the motions of heavenly bodies, so also religious belief began to dismiss the idea of astral spirits.