Aion: God of Time, Eternity and Zodiac

God of Time, Eternity and Zodiac and Member of the Primordial Gods
Roman equivalent of Aeternitas

(In ancient Roman religion, Aeternitas was the divine personification of eternity. She was particularly associated with Imperial cult as a virtue of the deified emperor (divus). The religious maintenance of abstract deities such as Aeternitas was characteristic of official Roman cult from the time of the Julio-Claudians to the Severans.

Like the more familiar anthropomorphic deities, Aeternitas and other abstractions were cultivated with sacrifices and temples, both in Rome and in the provinces. The temple of Aeternitas Augusta at Tarraco in Roman Spain was pictured on a coin.

The divinity sometimes appears as Aeternitas Imperii (the "Eternity of Roman rule"), where the Latin word imperium ("command, power") points toward the meaning "empire," the English word derived from it. Aeternitas Imperii was among the deities who received sacrifices from the Arval Brethren in a thanksgiving when Nero survived conspiracy and attempted assassination. New bronze coinage was issued at this time, on which various virtues were represented.

Aeternitas was among the many virtues depicted on coinage issued under Vespasian, Titus, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Septimius Severus. The coins issued 75–79 AD under Vespasian show Aeternitas holding a head in each hand representing Sol and Luna. On the coins of Titus (80–81 AD), Aeternitas holds a cornucopia, leans on a scepter, and has one foot placed on a globe, imagery that links the concepts of eternity, prosperity, and world dominion. From the 2nd to the mid-3rd century, the iconography of Aeternitas includes the globe, celestial bodies (stars, or sun and moon), and the phoenix, a symbol of cyclical time, since the phoenix was reborn in flames every 500 years. Aeternitas sometimes holds the globe on which the phoenix perches.

In The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, Martianus Capella says that Aeternitas is among the more honored of Jupiter's daughters. He mentions her diadem, the circular shape of which represents eternity. The male equivalent of Aeternitas is Aion, the god of limitless time)

Aion, god of eternity, in a celestial sphere decorated with zodiacal signs, between a green and a dismantled tree (summer and winter). Before him is the mother-earth Tellus (Roman Gaia) with four children, the four seasons personified

Aion (Greek: Αἰών) is a Hellenistic deity associated with time, the orb or circle encompassing the universe, and the zodiac. The "time" represented by Aion is unbounded, in contrast to Chronos as empirical time divided into past, present, and future. He is thus a god of eternity, associated with mystery religions concerned with the afterlife, such as the mysteries of Cybele, Dionysus, Orpheus, and Mithras. In Latin the concept of the deity may appear as Aevum or Saeculum. He is typically in the company of an earth or mother goddess such as Tellus or Cybele, as on the Parabiago plate.

Iconography and symbolism

Detail from the Parabiago plate depicting Aion; Tellus (not shown) appears at the bottom of the plate, which centers on the chariot of Cybele

Aion is usually identified as the nude or semi-nude young man within a circle representing the zodiac, or eternal and cyclical time. Examples include two Roman mosaics from Sentinum (modern–day Sassoferrato) and Hippo Regius in Roman Africa, and the Parabiago plate. But because he represents time as a cycle, he may also be imagined as an old man. In the Dionysiaca, Nonnus associates Aion with the Horae and says that he:

"changes the burden of old age like a snake who sloughs off the coils of the useless old scales, rejuvenescing while washing in the swells of the laws [of time]."

The imagery of the twining serpent is connected to the hoop or wheel through the ouroboros, a ring formed by a snake holding the tip of its tail in its mouth. The 4th-century AD Latin commentator Servius notes that the image of a snake biting its tail represents the cyclical nature of the year. In his 5th-century work on hieroglyphics, Horapollo makes a further distinction between a serpent that hides its tail under the rest of its body, which represents Aion, and the ouroboros that represents the kosmos, which is the serpent devouring its tail.

Identifications

Martianus Capella (5th century AD) identified Aion with Cronus (Latin Saturnus), whose name caused him to be theologically conflated with Chronos ("Time"), in the way that the Greek ruler of the underworld Plouton (Pluto) was conflated with Ploutos (Plutus, "Wealth"). Martianus presents Cronus-Aion as the consort of Rhea (Latin Ops) as identified with Physis.

In his highly speculative reconstruction of Mithraic cosmogony, Franz Cumont positioned Aion as Unlimited Time (sometimes represented as Saeculum, Cronus, or Saturn) as the god who emerged from primordial Chaos, and who in turn generated Heaven and Earth. This deity is represented as the leontocephaline, the winged lion-headed male figure whose nude torso is entwined by a serpent. He typically holds a sceptre, keys, or a thunderbolt. The figure of Time "played a considerable, though to us completely obscure, role" in Mithraic theology.

Aion is identified with Dionysus in Christian and Neoplatonic writers, but there are no references to Dionysus as Aion before the Christian era. Euripides, however, calls Aion the son of Zeus.

The Suda identifies Aion with Osiris. In Ptolemaic Alexandria, at the site of a dream oracle, the Hellenistic syncretic god Serapis was identified as Aion Plutonius. The epithet Plutonius marks functional aspects shared with Pluto, consort of Persephone and ruler of the underworld in the Eleusinian tradition. Epiphanius says that at Alexandria Aion's birth from Kore the Virgin was celebrated January 6: "On this day and at this hour the Virgin gave birth to Aion." The date, which coincides with Epiphany, brought new year's celebrations to a close, completing the cycle of time that Aion embodies. The Alexandrian Aion may be a form of Osiris-Dionysus, reborn annually. His image was marked with crosses on his hands, knees, and forehead. Gilles Quispel conjectured that the figure resulted from integrating the Orphic Phanes, who like Aion is associated with a coiling serpent, into Mithraic religion at Alexandria, and that he "assures the eternity of the city."

Roman Empire

This syncretic Aion became a symbol and guarantor of the perpetuity of Roman rule, and emperors such as Antoninus Pius issued coins with the legend Aion, whose female Roman counterpart was Aeternitas. Roman coins associate both Aion and Aeternitas with the phoenix as a symbol of rebirth and cyclical renewal.

Aion was among the virtues and divine personifications that were part of late Hellenic discourse, in which they figure as "creative agents in grand cosmological schemes." The significance of Aion lies in his malleability: he is a "fluid conception" through which various ideas about time and divinity converge in the Hellenistic era, in the context of monotheistic tendencies.