Coelum Stellatum Christianum: a Christianized Celestial Globe after Cellarius (1660)

Julius Schiller, a lawyer from Augsburg, published the Coelum Stellatum Christianum in 1627. It was an audacious attempt to redraw the inherited sky. The Greco-Roman constellations were replaced by a Christian iconographic system: the zodiac became the Twelve Apostles; the northern constellations were assigned to figures from the New Testament; the southern constellations were reimagined through the Old Testament. Even the Sun and the Moon were Christianized, as Christ and the Virgin Mary.

As astronomy, the reform did not prevail. Astronomers needed stable names and figures in order to compare observations, identify stars and relate new measurements to earlier catalogues. A complete symbolic replacement of the heavens made that work harder rather than easier. The classical constellations survived; Schiller’s sky remained a remarkable historical detour.

The visual afterlife of that detour was secured by Andreas Cellarius, who included two magnificent Christianized celestial hemispheres in his Harmonia Macrocosmica, published in Amsterdam in 1660/1661. This paper globe reconstructs a 250 mm celestial sphere from those two hemispheres, converting Cellarius’ printed sky into twelve printable gores.