In the Chaldaean signs fragments of several distinct strata of thought appear to be embedded. From one point of view they shadow out the great epic of the destinies of the human race, again, the universal solar myth claims a share in them, hoary traditions were brought into ex post facto connexion with them, or they served to commemorate simple meteorological and astronomical facts.
The first Babylonian month Nisan, dedicated to Anu and Bel,
was that of “sacrifice”; and its association with the Ram
as the chief primitive object of sacrifice Is thus intelligible.[1]
According to an alternative explanation, the heavenly Ram,
placed as leader in front of the flock of the stars, merely embodied
a spontaneous figure of the popular imagination. An
antique persuasion, that the grand cycle of creation opened under
the first sign, has been transmitted to modern cognizance by
Dante (Inf. i. 38). The human race, on the other hand, was
Taurus.
Gemini.
Cancer.
Leo.
Virgo.
supposed to have come into being under Taurus. The
solar interpretation of the sign goes back to the far-off
time when the year began with Taurus, and the sun
was conceived of as a bull entering upon the great furrow of
heaven as he ploughed his way among the stars. In the third
month and sign the building of the first city and the
fratricidal brothers—the Romulus and Remus of Roman
legend—were brought to mind. The appropriate symbol was
at first indifferently a pile of bricks or two male children, always
on early monuments placed feet to feet. The retrograde
movement of a crab typified, by an easy association
of ideas, the retreat of the sun from his farthest
northern excursion, and Cancer was constituted the sign of the
summer solstice. The Lion, as the symbol of fire,
represented the culmination of the solar heat. In
the sixth month, the descent of Ishtar to Hades in search
of her lost husband Tammuz was celebrated, and
the sign of the Virgin had thus a purely mythological
signification.
The history of the seventh sign is somewhat complicated. The earlier Greek writers—Eudoxus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus—knew of only eleven zodiacal symbols, but made one do double duty, extending the Scorpion across the seventh and eighth divisions. The Balance, obviously indicating the equality of day and night, is first mentioned as the sign of the Libra and Scorpio. autumnal equinox by Geminus and Varro, and obtained, through Sosigenes of Alexandria, official recognition in the Julian calendar. Nevertheless, Virgil (Georg. i. 32) regarded the space it presided over as so much waste land, provisionally occupied by the “Claws” of the Scorpion, but readily available for the apotheosis of Augustus. Libra was not of Greek invention. Ptolemy, who himself chiefly used the “Claws” (Χηλαί), speaks of it as a distinctively Chaldaean sign,[2] and it occurs as an extra-zodiacal asterism in the Chinese sphere. An ancient Chinese law, moreover, prescribed the regularization of weights and measures at the spring equinox.[3] No representation of the seventh sign has yet been discovered on any Euphratean monument; but it is noticeable that the eighth is frequently doubled,[4] and it is difficult to avoid seeing in the pair of zodiacal scorpions carved on Assyrian cylinders the prototype of the Greek scorpion and claws. Both Libra and the sign it eventually superseded thus owned a Chaldaean birthplace. The struggle of rival systems of nomenclature, from which our zodiacal series resulted, is plainly visible in their alternations; and the claims of the competing signs were long sought to be conciliated by representing the Balance as held between the claws of the Scorpion.
The definitive decline of the sun’s power after the autumnal
equinox was typified by placing a Scorpion as the symbol of
darkness in the eighth sign. Sagittarius, figured later as a
Centaur, stood for the Babylonian Mars. Capricornus
the sign of the winter solstice, is plausibly connectedSagittarius.
Capricornius.
Aquarius.
with the caprine nurse of the young solar god in Oriental
legends, of which that of Zeus and Amalthia is a
variant.[5] The fish-tailed Goat of the zodiac presents
a close analogy with the Mexican calendar sign Cipactli,
a kind of marine monster resembling a narwhal.[6] Aquarius is
a still more exclusively meteorological sign than Leo. The
eleventh month was known in Euphratean regions as
that of “want and rain.” The deluge was traditionally
associated with it. It was represented in zodiacal
symbolism by the god Ramman, crowned with a tiara and
pouring water from a vase, or more generally by the vase and
water without the god. The resumption of agricultural labours
after the deluge was commemorated in the twelfth month, and
a mystical association of the fishes, which were its
sign, with the life after death is evident in a monument
of Assyrian origin described by Clermont-Ganneau,
showing a corpse guarded by a pair of fish-gods.[7] The doubling
of the sign of Pisces still recalls, according to Sayce,[8] the arrangementPisces.
of the Babylonian calendar, in which a year of 360 days
was supplemented once in six years by a thirteenth month, a
second Adar. To the double month corresponded the double
sign of the “Fishes of Hea.”[9]
Cyclical Meaning of the Succession of Signs.—The cyclical meaning of the succession of zodiacal signs, though now obscured by interpolations and substitutions, was probably once clear and entire. It is curiously reflected in the adventures of the Babylonian Hercules, the solar hero Gilgamesh (see Gilgamesh, Epic of). They were recorded in the comparatively late surviving version of the 7th century B.C., on twelve tablets, with an obvious design of correlation with the twelve divisions of the sun’s annual course. Gilgamesh’s conquest of the divine bull was placed under Taurus, his slaying of the tyrant Khumbaba (the prototype of Geryon) in the fifth month typified the victory of light over darkness, represented in plastic art by the group of a lion killing a bull, which is the form ordinarily given to the sign Leo on Ninevite cylinders.[10] The wooing of Ishtar by the hero of the epic falls under Virgo, and his encounter with two scorpion men, guardians of the rising and the setting sun, under Scorpio. The eleventh tablet narrates the deluge; the twelfth associates the apotheosis of Eabani with the zodiacal emblems of the resurrection.
In the formation of the constellations of the zodiac little regard was paid to stellar configurations. The Chaldaeans chose three stars in each sign to be the “councillor gods” of the planets.[11] These were called by the Greeks “decans,” because ten degrees of the ecliptic and ten days of the year were presided over by each. The college of the decans was conceived as moving, by their annual risings and settings, in an “eternal circuit” between the infernal and supernal regions. Modern asterisms first appear in the Phaenomena of Eudoxus about 370 B.C. But Eudoxus, there is reason to believe, consulted, not the heavens, but a celestial globe of an anterior epoch, on which the stars and the signs were forced into unnatural agreement. The representation thus handed down (in the verses of Aratus) has been thought to tally best with the state of the sky about 2000 B.C.;[12] and the mention of a polestar, for which Eudoxus was rebuked by Hipparchus, seems, as W. T. Lynn pointed out,[13] to refer to the time when a Draconis
- ↑ Sayce, Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, iii. 162.
- ↑ In citing a Chaldaean observation of Mercury dating from 235 B.C. (Almagest, ii. 170, ed. Halma).
- ↑ See Uranographie Chinoise, by Gustav Schlegel, who, however, claims an extravagant antiquity for the Chinese constellational system.
- ↑ Lenormant, Origines, i. 267.
- ↑ Lenormant, Origines, i. 267.
- ↑ Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères (1810), p. 157.
- ↑ Rev. Archéol. (1879), p. 344.
- ↑ Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archaeol., iii. 166.
- ↑ The god Ea or Hea, the Oannes of Berossus, equivalent to the fish-god Dagon, came to the rescue of the protagonist in the Chaldaean drama of the deluge.
- ↑ Lenormant, Origines, i. 240.
- ↑ Diod. Sic., Hist., ii. 30, where, however, by an obvious mistake the number of “councillor gods” is stated at only thirty.
- ↑ R. Brown, Babylonian Record, No. 3, p. 34.
- ↑ Babylonian Record, No. 5, p. 79.
