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XXII. The Babylonian Universe Newly Interpreted
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
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Few studies in ancient cosmology can more entertain or instruct the investigator of to-day than a careful comparison of the seven diagrams published as correct pictures of the Babylonian universe in the works named below. No two of the seven agree. Moreover, the first represents the Zodiac as at a vast distance above the sphere of the fixed stars, a proceeding which at the start disarranges all ordinary astronomic ideas. Equally unpicturable in my imagination is the seventh of the series, the world sketched by Radau. Again and again have I tried to construct it in thought, but every time have failed. Even Jensen in his great work gives us for “the place of the Convocation of the Gods” (Du-azag), only a pitch-dark cavern in the thin crust of his sea-filled hemispherical earth, and has no place for Hades but another cavern located in the same thin crust and oddly enough far above the cave of the gods. Surely there is a call for new attempts to think the thoughts of these ancient Semites after them.
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References
page 977 note 1 The reader is earnestly requested to turn to these diagrams and to note their striking divergencies.
(1) Myer, Isaac, Qabalah, Phil., 1888, p. 448.Google Scholar
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Professor Hommel's second is a marked improvement on his first. In connection with it he prints a generous reference to the present writer.
page 978 note 1 diagram, Jensen's, anglicised in terminology and much enlarged, may be seen in Worcester's Genesis in the Light of Modern Knowledge, opposite p. 109.Google Scholar
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page 978 note 3 “Identisch ist also Süden und Unterwelt auch hier wie bei unserer kosmischen Ausrichtung der Erdachse” (p. 24).
page 978 note 4 Gifford Lectures, 1903, p. 374.Google Scholar See also Boscawen, , in the Oriental and Biblical Journal, Chicago, 1884, p. 118.Google Scholar For interesting parallels see Letherby, , Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, London, 1892.Google Scholar The existence in Egypt of a type of pyramid with sloping stages, and the clear traces in India of a conception of the earth as spheroidal in figure despite a series of rising zones or retreating mountain-terraces upon its surface, suggest that the stages of the Babylonian earth should not be mentally pictured as necessarily implying their possession of the sharply angular outline presented by a staged temple, or by the figure in our diagram. It is quite possible that in Babylonian thought the quadrangularity of the earth was largely a conscious and deliberate emphasizing of the cardinal points of the heavens and earth, and that its pyramidal form in architecture was as conscious and deliberate a deviation from supposed reality as are with us the parallel meridians and flat zones of a Mercator's Chart of the world. Moreover, as the celestial spheres are of a substance so crystalline as to be absolutely invisible to men, so the rising stages of the earth are to be viewed as less and less grossly material, until at length all appearance of materiality vanishes, leaving the highest as invisible (save in the case of a divinely sent trance, Genesis xxviii, 12),Google Scholar as are the heavens in which they are lost.
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page 980 note 5 See Winckler, , p. 34.Google Scholar“In immer grösserem Abstand von der Erde” is the language of Hommel in his Insel der Seligen, p. 38.Google Scholar
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page 983 note 1 The ‘lunar mansions’ of astrology are all within the Zodiac.
page 983 note 2 The often misunderstood 
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