Some early, Pre-Newtonian astronomers to observe and study luminaries include Pythagoras, Aristotle, Claudius Ptolemy, al-Khwarizmi, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler.
The luminaries can be found in the Bible: In modern Western astrology, the importance of the Moon and the Sun has even come to outweigh all the other celestial factors.
In the early history of all people we find the Sun and Moon regarded as human beings, connected with the daily life of mankind, and influencing in some mysterious way man's existence, and controlling his/her destiny.
In Australia, the Moon was considered to be a man, the Sun a woman, who appears at dawn in a coat of red kangaroo skins.
In early modern England, the medical effects of the Sun and the Moon had been traditionally explained by a vast symbolic system of "analogies, correspondences, and relations among apparently discrete elements in man and the universe," which had its conceptual origins in the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen.
The ultimate causes of planetary emanations had been considered "occult," an Aristotelian and early modern term utilized when distinguishing "qualities which were evident to the senses from those which were hidden" After the Restoration, many physicians attempted to rid the natural world of occult causes and to explain invisible forces solar and lunar emanations via mechanical, chemical, and mathematical systems.
To explain the medical effects of the luminaries, the English physicians Richard Mead (1673-1754) and James Gibbs (d. 1724) utilized iatromechanism, which regarded the body as a Cartesian machine, conforming in its functions to mechanical laws.
In De imperio solis ac lunae in corpora humana et morbis inde oriundis [A treatise concerning the influence of the Sun and moon on human bodies and the diseases thereby produced] (1704), Mead stressed the mechanical effects of solar and lunar emanations, especially the gravitational effects of the tides, on the pressure of vessels and fluids within the human body.