Myths of Babylonia and Assyria — 15 - Chapter 13: Astrology and Astronomy (Part 1)

The empire builders of old who enriched themselves with the spoils of war and the tribute of subject States, not only satisfied personal ambition and afforded protection for industrious traders and workers, but also incidentally promoted culture and endowed research.

When a conqueror returned to his capital laden with treasure, he made generous gifts to the temples.

He believed that his successes were rewards for his piety, that his battles were won for him by his god or goddess of war.

It was necessary, therefore, that he should continue to find favour in the eyes of the deity who had been proved to be more powerful than the god of his enemies.

Besides, he had to make provision during his absence on long campaigns, or while absorbed in administrative work, for the constant performance of religious rites, so that the various deities of water, earth, weather, and corn might be sustained or propitiated with sacrificial offerings, or held in magical control by the performance of ceremonial rites.

Consequently an endowed priesthood became a necessity in all powerful and well-organized states.

Thus came into existence in Babylonia, as elsewhere, as a result of the accumulation of wealth, a leisured official class, whose duties tended to promote intellectual activity, although they were primarily directed to perpetuate gross superstitious practices.

Culture was really a by-product of temple activities; it flowed forth like pure gold from furnaces of thought which were walled up by the crude ores of magic and immemorial tradition.

No doubt in ancient Babylonia, as in Europe during the Middle Ages, the men of refinement and intellect among the upper classes were attracted to the temples, while the more robust types preferred the outdoor life, and especially the life of the soldier.

[302] The permanent triumphs of Babylonian civilization were achieved either by the priests, or in consequence of the influence they exercised.

They were the grammarians and the scribes, the mathematicians and the philosophers of that ancient country, the teachers of the young, and the patrons of the arts and crafts.

It was because the temples were centres of intellectual activity that the Sumerian language remained the language of culture for long centuries after it ceased to be the everyday speech of the people.

Reference has already been made to the growth of art, and the probability that all the arts had their origin in magical practices, and to the growth of popular education necessitated by the centralization of business in the temples.

It remains with us to deal now with priestly contributions to the more abstruse sciences.

In India the ritualists among the Brahmans, who concerned themselves greatly regarding the exact construction and measurements of altars, gave the world algebra; the pyramid builders of Egypt, who erected vast tombs to protect royal mummies, had perforce to lay the groundwork of the science of geometry; and the Babylonian priests who elaborated the study of astrology became great astronomers because they found it necessary to observe and record accurately the movements of the heavenly bodies.

From the earliest times of which we have knowledge, the religious beliefs of the Sumerians had vague stellar associations.

But it does not follow that their myths were star myths to begin with.

A people who called constellations "the ram", "the bull", "the lion", or "the scorpion", did not do so because astral groups suggested the forms of animals, but rather because the animals had an earlier connection with their religious life.

At the same time it should be recognized that the mystery of the stars must ever have haunted the minds of primitive men.

Night with all its terrors appealed more strongly to their imaginations than refulgent day when they felt more secure; they were concerned most regarding what they feared most.

Brooding in darkness regarding their fate, they evidently associated the stars with the forces which influenced their lives--the ghosts of ancestors, of totems, the spirits that brought food or famine and controlled the seasons.

As children see images in a fire, so they saw human life reflected in the starry sky.

To the simple minds of early folks the great moon seemed to be the parent of the numerous twinkling and moving orbs.

In Babylon, indeed, the moon was regarded as the father not only of the stars but of the sun also;

there, as elsewhere, lunar worship was older than solar worship.

Primitive beliefs regarding the stars were of similar character in various parts of the world.

But the importance which they assumed in local mythologies depended in the first place on local phenomena.

On the northern Eur-Asian steppes, for instance, where stars vanished during summer's blue nights, and were often obscured by clouds in winter, they did not impress men's minds so persistently and deeply as in Babylonia, where for the greater part of the year they gleamed in darkness through a dry transparent atmosphere with awesome intensity.

The development of an elaborate system of astral myths, besides, was only possible in a country where the people had attained to a high degree of civilization, and men enjoyed leisure and security to make observations and compile records.

It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Babylonia was the cradle of astronomy.

But before this science had destroyed the theory which it was fostered to prove, it lay smothered for long ages in the debris of immemorial beliefs.

It is necessary, therefore, in dealing with Babylonian astral myths to endeavour to approach within reasonable distance of the point of view, or points of view, of the people who framed them.

Babylonian religious thought was of highly complex character.

Its progress was ever hampered by blended traditions.

The earliest settlers in the Tigro-Euphrates valley no doubt imported many crude beliefs which they had inherited from their Palaeolithic ancestors--the modes of thought which were the moulds of new theories arising from new experiences.

When consideration is given to the existing religious beliefs of various peoples throughout the world, in low stages of culture, it is found that the highly developed creeds of Babylonia, Egypt and other countries where civilization flourished were never divested wholly of their primitive traits.

Among savage peoples two grades of religious ideas have been identified, and classified as Naturalism and Animism.

In the plane of Naturalism the belief obtains that a vague impersonal force, which may have more than one manifestation and is yet manifested in everything, controls the world and the lives of human beings.

An illustration of this stage of religious consciousness is afforded by Mr. Risley, who, in dealing with the religion of the jungle dwellers of Chota Nagpur, India, says that "in most cases the indefinite something which they fear and attempt to propitiate is not a person at all in any sense of the word; if one must state the case in positive terms, I should say that the idea which lies at the root of their religion is that of a power rather than many powers".

[303] Traces of Naturalism appear to have survived in Sumeria in the belief that "the spiritual, the Zi, was that which manifested life....

The test of the manifestation of life was movement."

[304] All things that moved, it was conceived in the plane of Naturalism, possessed "self power"; the river was a living thing, as was also the fountain; a stone that fell from a hill fell of its own accord; a tree groaned because the wind caused it to suffer pain.

This idea that inanimate objects had conscious existence survived in the religion of the Aryo-Indians.

In the Nala story of the Indian epic, the _Mahabharata_, the disconsolate wife Damayanti addresses a mountain when searching for her lost husband: "This, the monarch of all mountains, ask I of the king of men;

O all-honoured Prince of Mountains, with thy heavenward soaring peaks ...

Hast thou seen the kingly Nala in this dark and awful wood....

Why repliest thou not, O Mountain?"

She similarly addresses the Asoka tree: "Hast thou seen Nishadha's monarch, hast thou seen my only love?...

That I may depart ungrieving, fair Asoka, answer me...."

Many a tree she stood and gazed on....

[305] It will be recognized that when primitive men gave names to mountains, rivers, or the ocean, these possessed for them a deeper significance than they do for us at the present day.

The earliest peoples of Indo-European speech who called the sky "dyeus", and those of Sumerian speech who called it "ana", regarded it not as the sky "and nothing more", but as something which had conscious existence and "self power".

Our remote ancestors resembled, in this respect, those imaginative children who hold conversations with articles of furniture, and administer punishment to stones which, they believe, have tripped them up voluntarily and with desire to commit an offence.

In this early stage of development the widespread totemic beliefs appear to have had origin.

Families or tribes believed that they were descended from mountains, trees, or wild animals.

Aesop's fable about the mountain which gave birth to a mouse may be a relic of Totemism; so also may be the mountain symbols on the standards of Egyptian ships which appear on pre-dynastic pottery; the black dwarfs of Teutonic mythology were earth children.

[306] Adonis sprang from a tree; his mother may have, according to primitive belief, been simply a tree; Dagda, the patriarchal Irish corn god, was an oak; indeed, the idea of a "world tree", which occurs in Sumerian, Vedic-Indian, Teutonic, and other mythologies, was probably a product of Totemism.

Wild animals were considered to be other forms of human beings who could marry princes and princesses as they do in so many fairy tales.

Damayanti addressed the tiger, as well as the mountain and tree, saying: I approach him without fear.

"Of the beasts art thou the monarch, all this forest thy domain;...

Thou, O king of beasts, console me, if my Nala thou hast seen."

[307] A tribal totem exercised sway over a tribal district.

In Egypt, as Herodotus recorded, the crocodile was worshipped in one district and hunted down in another.

Tribes fought against tribes when totemic animals were slain.

The Babylonian and Indian myths about the conflicts between eagles and serpents may have originated as records of battles between eagle clans and serpent clans.

Totemic animals were tabooed.

The Set pig of Egypt and the devil pig of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were not eaten except sacrificially.

Families were supposed to be descended from swans and were named Swans, or from seals and were named Seals, like the Gaelic "Mac Codrums", whose surname signifies "son of the seal"; the nickname of the Campbells, "sons of the pig", may refer to their totemic boar's head crest, which commemorated the slaying, perhaps the sacrificial slaying, of the boar by their ancestor Diarmid.

Mr. Garstang, in _The Syrian Goddess_, thinks it possible that the boar which killed Adonis was of totemic origin.

So may have been the fish form of the Sumerian god Ea.

When an animal totem was sacrificed once a year, and eaten sacrificially so that the strength of the clan might be maintained, the priest who wrapped himself in its skin was supposed to have transmitted to him certain magical powers; he became identified with the totem and prophesied and gave instruction as the totem.

Ea was depicted clad in the fish's skin.

Animism, the other early stage of human development, also produced distinctive modes of thought.

Men conceived that the world swarmed with spirits, that a spirit groaned in the wind-shaken tree, that the howling wind was an invisible spirit, that there were spirits in fountains, rivers, valleys, hills, and in ocean, and in all animals;

and that a hostile spirit might possess an individual and change his nature.

The sun and the moon were the abodes of spirits, or the vessels in which great spirits sailed over the sea of the sky; the stars were all spirits, the "host of heaven".

These spirits existed in groups of seven, or groups of three, and the multiple of three, or in pairs, or operated as single individuals.

Although certain spirits might confer gifts upon mankind, they were at certain seasons and in certain localities hostile and vengeful, like the grass-green fairies in winter, or the earth-black elves when their gold was sought for in forbidden and secret places.

These spirits were the artisans of creation and vegetation, like the Egyptian Khnumu and the Indian Rhibus; they fashioned the grass blades and the stalks of corn, but at times of seasonal change they might ride on their tempest steeds, or issue forth from flooding rivers and lakes.

Man was greatly concerned about striking bargains with them to secure their services, and about propitiating them, or warding off their attacks with protective charms, and by performing "ceremonies of riddance".

The ghosts of the dead, being spirits, were similarly propitious or harmful on occasion; as emissaries of Fate they could injure the living.

Ancestor worship, the worship of ghosts, had origin in the stage of Animism.

But ancestor worship was not developed in Babylonia as in China, for instance, although traces of it survived in the worship of stars as ghosts, in the deification of kings, and the worship of patriarchs, who might be exalted as gods or identified with a supreme god.

The Egyptian Pharaoh Unas became the sun god and the constellation of Orion by devouring his predecessors[308].

He ate his god as a tribe ate its animal totem; he became the "bull of heaven".

There were star totems as well as mountain totems.

A St. Andrew's cross sign, on one of the Egyptian ship standards referred to, may represent a star.

The Babylonian goddess Ishtar was symbolized as a star, and she was the "world mother".

Many primitive currents of thought shaped the fretted rocks of ancient mythologies.

In various countries all round the globe the belief prevailed that the stars were ghosts of the mighty dead--of giants, kings, or princes, or princesses, or of pious people whom the gods loved, or of animals which were worshipped.

A few instances may be selected at random.

When the Teutonic gods slew the giant Thjasse, he appeared in the heavens as Sirius.

In India the ghosts of the "seven Rishis", who were semi-divine Patriarchs, formed the constellation of the Great Bear, which in Vedic times was called the "seven bears".

The wives of the seven Rishis were the stars of the Pleiades.

In Greece the Pleiades were the ghosts of the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, and in Australia they were and are a queen and six handmaidens.

In these countries, as elsewhere, stories were told to account for the "lost Pleiad", a fact which suggests that primitive men were more constant observers of the heavenly bodies than might otherwise be supposed.

The Arcadians believed that they were descended, as Hesiod recorded, from a princess who was transformed by Zeus into a bear; in this form Artemis slew her and she became the "Great Bear" of the sky.

The Egyptian Isis was the star Sirius, whose rising coincided with the beginning of the Nile inundation.

Her first tear for the dead Osiris fell into the river on "the night of the drop".

The flood which ensued brought the food supply.

Thus the star was not only the Great Mother of all, but the sustainer of all.

The brightest stars were regarded as being the greatest and most influential.

In Babylonia all the planets were identified with great deities.

Jupiter, for instance, was Merodach, and one of the astral forms of Ishtar was Venus.

Merodach was also connected with "the fish of Ea" (Pisces), so that it is not improbable that Ea worship had stellar associations.

Constellations were given recognition before the planets were identified.

A strange blending of primitive beliefs occurred when the deities were given astral forms.

As has been shown (Chapter III) gods were supposed to die annually.

The Egyptian priests pointed out to Herodotus the grave of Osiris and also his star.

There are "giants' graves" also in those countries in which the gods were simply ferocious giants.

A god might assume various forms; he might take the form of an insect, like Indra, and hide in a plant, or become a mouse, or a serpent, like the gods of Erech in the Gilgamesh epic.

The further theory that a god could exist in various forms at one and the same time suggests that it had its origin among a people who accepted the idea of a personal god while yet in the stage of Naturalism.

In Egypt Osiris, for instance, was the moon, which came as a beautiful child each month and was devoured as the wasting "old moon" by the demon Set; he was the young god who was slain in his prime each year; he was at once the father, husband, and son of Isis; he was the Patriarch who reigned over men and became the Judge of the Dead; he was the earth spirit, he was the bisexual Nile spirit, he was the spring sun; he was the Apis bull of Memphis, and the ram of Mendes; he was the reigning Pharaoh.

In his fusion with Ra, who was threefold--Khepera, Ra, and Tum--he died each day as an old man; he appeared in heaven at night as the constellation Orion, which was his ghost, or was, perhaps, rather the Sumerian Zi, the spiritual essence of life.

Osiris, who resembled Tammuz, a god of many forms also, was addressed as follows in one of the Isis chants: There proceedeth from thee the strong Orion in heaven at evening, at the resting of every day!

Lo it is I (Isis), at the approach of the Sothis (Sirius) period, who doth watch for him (the child Osiris), Nor will I leave off watching for him; for that which proceedeth from thee (the living Osiris) is revered.

An emanation from thee causeth life to gods and men, reptiles and animals, and they live by means thereof.

Come thou to us from thy chamber, in the day when thy soul begetteth emanations,-- The day when offerings upon offerings are made to thy spirit, which causeth the gods and men likewise to live.

[309] This extract emphasizes how unsafe it is to confine certain deities within narrow limits by terming them simply "solar gods", "lunar gods", "astral gods", or "earth gods".

One deity may have been simultaneously a sun god and moon god, an air god and an earth god, one who was dead and also alive, unborn and also old.

The priests of Babylonia and Egypt were less accustomed to concrete and logical definitions than their critics and expositors of the twentieth century.

Simple explanations of ancient beliefs are often by reason of their very simplicity highly improbable.

Recognition must ever be given to the puzzling complexity of religious thought in Babylonia and Egypt, and to the possibility that even to the priests the doctrines of a particular cult, which embraced the accumulated ideas of centuries, were invariably confusing and vague, and full of inconsistencies; they were mystical in the sense that the understanding could not grasp them although it permitted their acceptance.

A god, for instance, might be addressed at once in the singular and plural, perhaps because he had developed from an animistic group of spirits, or, perhaps, for reasons we cannot discover.

This is shown clearly by the following pregnant extract from a Babylonian tablet: "_Powerful, O Sevenfold, one are ye_".

Mr. L. W.

King, the translator, comments upon it as follows: "There is no doubt that the name was applied to a group of gods who were so closely connected that, though addressed in the plural, they could in the same sentence be regarded as forming a single personality".

[310] Like the Egyptian Osiris, the Babylonian Merodach was a highly complex deity.

He was the son of Ea, god of the deep; he died to give origin to human life when he commanded that his head should be cut off so that the first human beings might be fashioned by mixing his blood with the earth; he was the wind god, who gave "the air of life"; he was the deity of thunder and the sky; he was the sun of spring in his Tammuz character; he was the daily sun, and the planets Jupiter and Mercury as well as Sharru (Regulus); he had various astral associations at various seasons.

Ishtar, the goddess, was Iku (Capella), the water channel star, in January-February, and Merodach was Iku in May-June.

This strange system of identifying the chief deity with different stars at different periods, or simultaneously, must not be confused with the monotheistic identification of him with other gods.

Merodach changed his forms with Ishtar, and had similarly many forms.

This goddess, for instance, was, even when connected with one particular heavenly body, liable to change.

According to a tablet fragment she was, as the planet Venus, "a female at sunset and a male at sunrise[311]"--that is, a bisexual deity like Nannar of Ur, the father and mother deity combined, and Isis of Egypt.

Nannar is addressed in a famous hymn: Father Nannar, Lord, God Sin, ruler among the gods....

_Mother body which produceth all things_....

Merciful, gracious Father, in whose hand the life of the whole land is contained.

One of the Isis chants of Egypt sets forth, addressing Osiris: There cometh unto thee Isis, lady of the horizon, who hath begotten herself alone in the image of the gods....

She hath taken vengeance before Horus, _the woman who was made a male by her father Osiris_.

[312] Merodach, like Osiris-Sokar, was a "lord of many existences", and likewise "the mysterious one, he who is unknown to mankind[313]".

It was impossible for the human mind "a greater than itself to know".

Evidence has not yet been forthcoming to enable us to determine the period at which the chief Babylonian deities were identified with the planets, but it is clear that Merodach's ascendancy in astral form could not have occurred prior to the rise of that city god of Babylon as chief of the pantheon by displacing Enlil.

At the same time it must be recognized that long before the Hammurabi age the star-gazers of the Tigro-Euphrates valley must have been acquainted with the movements of the chief planets and stars, and, no doubt, they connected them with seasonal changes as in Egypt, where Isis was identified with Sirius long before the Ptolemaic age, when Babylonian astronomy was imported.

Horus was identified not only with the sun but also with Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

[314] Even the primitive Australians, as has been indicated, have their star myths; they refer to the stars Castor and Pollux as two young men, like the ancient Greeks, while the African Bushmen assert that these stars are two girls.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the prehistoric Sumerians were exact astronomers.

Probably they were, like the Aryo-Indians of the Vedic period, "not very accurate observers".

[315] It is of special interest to find that the stars were grouped by the Babylonians at the earliest period in companies of seven.

The importance of this magical number is emphasized by the group of seven demons which rose from the deep to rage over the land (p. 71).

Perhaps the sanctity of Seven was suggested by Orion, the Bears, and the Pleiad, one of which constellations may have been the "Sevenfold" deity addressed as "one".

At any rate arbitrary groupings of other stars into companies of seven took place, for references are made to the seven Tikshi, the seven Lumashi, and the seven Mashi, which are older than the signs of the Zodiac; so far as can be ascertained these groups were selected from various constellations.

When the five planets were identified, they were associated with the sun and moon and connected with the chief gods of the Hammurabi pantheon.

A

bilingual list in the British Museum arranges the sevenfold planetary group in the following order:-- The moon, Sin.

The sun, Shamash.

Jupiter, Merodach.

Venus, Ishtar.

Saturn, Ninip (Nirig).

Mercury, Nebo.

Mars, Nergal.

An ancient name of the moon was Aa, Â, or Ai, which recalls the Egyptian Aâh or Ah.

The Sumerian moon was Aku, "the measurer", like Thoth of Egypt, who in his lunar character as a Fate measured out the lives of men, and was a god of architects, mathematicians, and scribes.

The moon was the parent of the sun or its spouse; and might be male, or female, or both as a bisexual deity.

As the "bull of light" Jupiter had solar associations; he was also the shepherd of the stars, a title shared by Tammuz as Orion; Nin-Girsu, a developed form of Tammuz, was identified with both Orion and Jupiter.

Ishtar's identification with Venus is of special interest.

When that planet was at its brightest phase, its rays were referred to as "the beard" of the goddess; she was the "bearded Aphrodite"--a bisexual deity evidently.

The astrologers regarded the bright Venus as lucky and the rayless Venus as unlucky.

Saturn was Nirig, who is best known as Ninip, a deity who was displaced by Enlil, the elder Bel, and afterwards regarded as his son.

His story has not been recovered, but from the references made to it there is little doubt that it was a version of the widespread myth about the elder deity who was slain by his son, as Saturn was by Jupiter and Dyaus by Indra.

It may have resembled the lost Egyptian myth which explained the existence of the two Horuses--Horus the elder, and Horus, the posthumous son of Osiris.

At any rate, it is of interest to find in this connection that in Egypt the planet Saturn was Her-Ka, "Horus the Bull".

Ninip was also identified with the bull.

Both deities were also connected with the spring sun, like Tammuz, and were terrible slayers of their enemies.

Ninip raged through Babylonia like a storm flood, and Horus swept down the Nile, slaying the followers of Set.

As the divine sower of seed, Ninip may have developed from Tammuz as Horus did from Osiris.

Each were at once the father and the son, different forms of the same deity at various seasons of the year.

The elder god was displaced by the son (spring), and when the son grew old his son slew him in turn.

As the planet Saturn, Ninip was the ghost of the elder god, and as the son of Bel he was the solar war god of spring, the great wild bull, the god of fertility.

He was also as Ber "lord of the wild boar", an animal associated with Rimmon[316].

Nebo (Nabu), who was identified with Mercury, was a god of Borsippa.

He was a messenger and "announcer" of the gods, as the Egyptian Horus in his connection with Jupiter was Her-ap-sheta, "Horus the opener of that which is secret[317]".

Nebo's original character is obscure.

He appears to have been a highly developed deity of a people well advanced in civilization when he was exalted as the divine patron of Borsippa.

Although Hammurabi ignored him, he was subsequently invoked with Merodach, and had probably much in common with Merodach.

Indeed, Merodach was also identified with the planet Mercury.

Like the Greek Hermes, Nebo was a messenger of the gods and an instructor of mankind.

Jastrow regards him as "a counterpart of Ea", and says: "Like Ea, he is the embodiment and source of wisdom.

The art of writing--and therefore of all literature--is more particularly associated with him.

A common form of his name designates him as the 'god of the stylus'."

[318] He appears also to have been a developed form of Tammuz, who was an incarnation of Ea.

Professor Pinches shows that one of his names, Mermer, was also a non-Semitic name of Ramman.

[319] Tammuz resembled Ramman in his character as a spring god of war.

It would seem that Merodach as Jupiter displaced at Babylon Nebo as Saturn, the elder god, as Bel Enlil displaced the elder Ninip at Nippur.

The god of Mars was Nergal, the patron deity of Cuthah,[320] who descended into the Underworld and forced into submission Eresh-ki-gal (Persephone), with whom he was afterwards associated.

His "name", says Professor Pinches, "is supposed to mean 'lord of the great habitation', which would be a parallel to that of his spouse, Eresh-ki-gal".

[321] At Erech he symbolized the destroying influence of the sun, and was accompanied by the demons of pestilence.

Mars was a planet of evil, plague, and death; its animal form was the wolf.

In Egypt it was called Herdesher, "the Red Horus", and in Greece it was associated with Ares (the Roman Mars), the war god, who assumed his boar form to slay Adonis (Tammuz).

Nergal was also a fire god like the Aryo-Indian Agni, who, as has been shown, links with Tammuz as a demon slayer and a god of fertility.

It may be that Nergal was a specialized form of Tammuz, who, in a version of the myth, was reputed to have entered the Underworld as a conqueror when claimed by Eresh-ki-gal, and to have become, like Osiris, the lord of the dead.

If so, Nergal was at once the slayer and the slain.

The various Babylonian deities who were identified with the planets had their characters sharply defined as members of an organized pantheon.

But before this development took place certain of the prominent heavenly bodies, perhaps all the planets, were evidently regarded as manifestations of one deity, the primeval Tammuz, who was a form of Ea, or of the twin deities Ea and Anu.

Tammuz may have been the "sevenfold one" of the hymns.

At a still earlier period the stars were manifestations of the Power whom the jungle dwellers of Chota Nagpur attempt to propitiate--the "world soul" of the cultured Brahmans of the post-Vedic Indian Age.

As much is suggested by the resemblances which the conventionalized planetary deities bear to Tammuz, whose attributes they symbolized, and by the Egyptian conception that the sun, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars were manifestations of Horus.

Tammuz and Horus may have been personifications of the Power or World Soul vaguely recognized in the stage of Naturalism.

The influence of animistic modes of thought may be traced in the idea that the planets and stars were the ghosts of gods who were superseded by their sons.

These sons were identical with their fathers; they became, as in Egypt, "husbands of their mothers".

This idea was perpetuated in the Aryo-Indian _Laws of Manu_, in which it is set forth that "the husband, after conception by his wife, becomes an embryo and is born again of her[322]".

The deities died every year, but death was simply change.

Yet they remained in the separate forms they assumed in their progress round "the wide circle of necessity".

Horus was remembered as various planets--as the falcon, as the elder sun god, and as the son of Osiris; and Tammuz was the spring sun, the child, youth, warrior, the deity of fertility, and the lord of death (Orion-Nergal), and, as has been suggested, all the planets.

The stars were also the ghosts of deities who died daily.

When the sun perished as an old man at evening, it rose in the heavens as Orion, or went out and in among the stars as the shepherd of the flock, Jupiter, the planet of Merodach in Babylonia, and Attis in Asia Minor.

The flock was the group of heavenly spirits invisible by day, the "host of heaven"--manifestations or ghosts of the emissaries of the controlling power or powers.

The planets presided over various months of the year.

Sin (the moon) was associated with the third month; it also controlled the calendar;

Ninip (Saturn) was associated with the fourth month, Ishtar (Venus) with the sixth, Shamash (the sun) with the seventh, Merodach (Jupiter) with the eighth, Nergal (Mars) with the ninth, and a messenger of the gods, probably Nebo (Mercury), with the tenth.

Each month was also controlled by a zodiacal constellation.

In the Creation myth of Babylon it is stated that when Merodach engaged in the work of setting the Universe in order he "set all the great gods in their several stations", and "also created their images, the stars of the Zodiac,[323] and fixed them all" (p. 147).

Our signs of the Zodiac are of Babylonian origin.

They were passed on to the Greeks by the Phoenicians and Hittites.

"There was a time ", says Professor Sayce, "when the Hittites were profoundly affected by Babylonian civilization, religion, and art...."

They "carried the time-worn civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt to the furthest boundary of Egypt, and there handed them over to the West in the grey dawn of European history....

Greek traditions affirmed that the rulers of Mykenae had come from Lydia, bringing with them the civilization and treasures of Asia Minor.

The tradition has been confirmed by modern research.

While certain elements belonging to the prehistoric culture of Greece, as revealed at Mykenae and elsewhere, were derived from Egypt and Phoenicia, there are others which point to Asia Minor as their source.

And the culture of Asia Minor was Hittite."

[324] The early Babylonian astronomers did not know, of course, that the earth revolved round the sun.

They believed that the sun travelled across the heavens flying like a bird or sailing like a boat.

[325] In studying its movements they observed that it always travelled from west to east along a broad path, swinging from side to side of it in the course of the year.

This path is the Zodiac--the celestial "circle of necessity".

The middle line of the sun's path is the Ecliptic.

The Babylonian scientists divided the Ecliptic into twelve equal parts, and grouped in each part the stars which formed their constellations;

these are also called "Signs of the Zodiac".

Each month had thus its sign or constellation.

The names borne at the present day by the signs of the Zodiac are easily remembered even by children, who are encouraged to repeat the following familiar lines: The _Ram_, the _Bull_, the heavenly _Twins_, And next the _Crab_, the _Lion_ shines.

The _Virgin_ and the _Scales_;

The _Scorpion, Archer_, and _Sea goat_, The man that holds the _water pot_, And _Fish_ with glitt'ring[326] tails.

The table on p. 308 shows that our signs are derived from ancient Babylonia.

The celestial regions were also divided into three or more parts.

Three "fields" were allotted to the ancient triad formed by Ea, Anu, and Bel.

The zodiacal "path" ran through these "fields".

Ea's field was in the west, and was associated with Amurru, the land of the Amorites; Anu's field was in the south, and was associated with Elam;

and Bel's central "field" was associated with the land of Akkad.

When the rulers of Akkad called themselves "kings of the four quarters", the reference was to the countries associated with the three divine fields and to Gutium[327](east = our north-east).

Was Gutium associated with demons, as in Scandinavia the north-east was associated with the giants against whom Thor waged war?

+---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | Date of Sun's Entry | | |Constellations.

|(Babylonian Month in | Babylonian Equivalent.

| | | brackets).

| | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Aries (the |20th March (Nisan = |The Labourer or Messenger.

| |Ram).

|March-April) | | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Taurus (the |20th April (Iyyar = |A divine figure and the "bull | |Bull).

|April-May) |of heaven".

| |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Gemini (the |21st May (Sivan = |The Faithful Shepherd and Twins| |Twins).

|May-June).

|side by side, or head to head | | | |and feet to teet.

| |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Cancer (the |21st June (Tammuz = |Crab or Scorpion.

| |Crab).

|June-July).

| | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Leo (the Lion).

|22nd July (Ab = |The big dog (Lion).

| | |July-August).

| | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Virgo (the |23rd August (Elul = |Ishtar, the Virgin's ear of | |Virgin).

|August-Sept.

).

|corn.

| |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Libra (the |23rd September (Tisri|The Balance.

| |Balance).

|= Sept.

-Oct.

).

| | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Scorpio (the |23rd October | | |Scorpion).

|(Marcheswan = |Scorpion of darkness.

| | |Oct.

-Nov.

).

| | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Sagittarius |22nd November |Man or man-horse with bow, or | |(the Archer).

|(Chisleu = |an arrow symbol.

| | |Nov.

-Dec.

).

| | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Capricornus |21st December (Tebet |Ea's goat-fish.

| |(the Goat).

|= Dec.

-Jan.

).

| | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Aquarius (the |19th January (Sebat =|God with water urn.

| |Water Carrier).

|Jan.

-Feb.

).

| | |---------------+---------------------+-------------------------------| |Pisces (the |18th February (Adar =|Fish tails in canal.

| |Fishes).

|Feb.

-March).

| | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+