The name Astraea
The starry maiden who embodied justice, the last of the immortals to leave the earth, and the promise of her return.
The last to leave
The Greek poets told of a sequence of ages, each harder than the one before: an age of gold, when people lived without laws because they needed none, then ages of silver, of bronze and finally of iron. In the age of gold the gods walked among people. As the world grew greedy and violent, they withdrew one by one.
Astraea, “the starry one”, in one account a daughter of Zeus and of Themis, the goddess of divine order, was the last of them to go. Justice, in other words, stayed with humankind longer than any other gift of the gods, and left only when it had nowhere left to stand. The Greek poet Aratus tells the story of a maiden called Dike, justice itself, and the Roman poets gave her Astraea’s name.
Victa iacet pietas, et virgo caede madentis ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit.
Piety lay defeated, and the maiden Astraea, last of the immortals, left the earth, wet with slaughter.
A place among the stars
She did not disappear. According to the poets she rose into the night sky and became the constellation Virgo, the maiden. In many depictions she holds an ear of wheat, marked by Spica, Latin for the ear of grain and the brightest star of the figure. Beside her lies Libra, the scales, read in some tellings as the balance she carried.
Virgo is one of the largest constellations, best seen from Berlin on spring evenings, low in the southern sky. The seven named stars of its figure mark the seven pillars on this site.
In 1845 a German amateur astronomer, Karl Ludwig Hencke, found a small body orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, and it was given the name Astraea. It was only the fifth asteroid ever discovered, and the first new one in almost forty years.
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna.
Now the Maiden returns, and the reign of Saturn returns.
The promised return
Virgil turned the story around. In his fourth Eclogue the Maiden comes back, and with her a new golden age. Over the following centuries poets returned to the image again and again: in Renaissance England, Elizabeth I was celebrated as Astraea, the bringer of a just and peaceful age.
For a group of Freemasons, the name carries a quiet reminder. Justice is not something anyone possesses once and for all, an institution or a person or a creed. It is a direction to keep facing. As the Triangle’s own text puts it, justice is less a possession than a horizon.