Avatars of the Astrological Zodiac – by Patrice Guinard

The appearance of the Zodiac composed of 12 equal signs has been dated from the middle of the 6th century BCE. [2] In his recent work on the birth of astrology in Mesopotamia, Giovanni Pettinato reports the discovery of a tablet from the library of Sippar, unearthed not long ago by Iraqi archeologists: one finds in it, attested at about 600 BCE, a Zodiac divided into twelve sections. [3] The twelve Zodiacal signs of 30 degrees each, delimited on the ecliptic and without reference to the stellar constellations, are quite clearly attested in a tablet dating from 419 BCE. So it was during the 6th and 5th centuries BCE that the reforms of Babylonian astronomical and astrological conceptions of the heavens came into place, and were then passed to the Greeks, who about the same time invented metaphysics.

I don’t believe in astrology, but I find it very interesting how cultural traditions get passed on from generation to generation and sometimes even from civilization to civilization. In 1998 I worked on a video representation of the world view of the Assyrians with professor Simo Parpola and learned quite a lot about this fascinating era. After some digging in my archives I found a couple of images from that video. The picture on the right is probably the King or one of the Gods (which was almost the same thing during those days, since King was seen as the earthly representative of the Gods). Some people are even claiming that the Zodiac originates from the Babylonians or the Assyrians all the way back from about 5000 years ago. I’m not sure about that, but astrology itself certainly dates back a long, long time.

The appearance of the Zodiac does not necessarily include the usage of the astrological interpretations later attributed to the twelve Zodiacal signs when the stellar distribution came approximately to correspond to the months of the seasons. As Florisoone notes, quite appropriately: “Contrary to what one might think, the Zodiac was not an invention exclusively inspired by astrology, but also represents one of the first manifestations of the ‘scientific’ spirit and the birth of a true astronomy in Mesopotamia.”

An important difference between scientific practice in those times and the modern world is that the ancient scientists had the luxury of working in a world view that combined religion, science and everything into a single and omnipresent tradition that explained the trajectories of distant stars and the life of little insects with a unified idea about Gods and the way the world simply works. Although many of their scientific concepts were clearly wrong, I do think that many modern cosmologists have a lot to learn from these old traditions. World may have indeed born from an egg.. it’s just up to the scientists to find out what kind of egg it was.

Posted by api in Blast from the past

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