ANCIENT BABYLONIAN ASTROGONY. 395 



events should, after being for ages so interpreted, require now 

 for its correct interpretation to be regarded as an account of 

 a series of visions. If the explanation were reconcilable in 

 any way with the words of Genesis, there yet seems some- 

 thing of profanity in imagining that men's minds had thus 

 been played with by a narrative purporting to be of one 

 sort yet in reality of quite a different character. But what- 

 ever possibility there may be (and it can be but the barest 

 possibility) that the Genesis narrative admits of the vision 

 interpretation, no one can reasonably attempt to extend 

 that interpretation to the Babylonian account So that 

 either a narrative from which the Genesis account was pre- 

 sumably derived was certainly intended to describe a series 

 of events, or else a narrative very nearly as early as the 

 Genesis account, and presumably derived from it at a time 

 when its true meaning must have been known, presents the 

 sun, moon, and stars as objects expressly created and set 

 in the sky after the earth had been formed, and for the 

 special benefit of man as yet uncreated. 



I am not concerned, however, either to dwell upon this 

 point, or to insist on any of its consequences. Let us return 

 to the consideration of the Babylonian narrative as it stands. 



We find twelve constellations or signs of the zodiac are 

 mentioned as set to fix the year. I am inclined to consider 

 that the preceding words, " stars, their appearance in figures 

 of animals he arranged," relate specially to the stars of the 

 zodiac. The inventor of this astrogony probably regarded 

 the stars as originally scattered in an irregular manner over 

 the heavens, rather as chaotic material from which con- 

 stellations might be formed, than as objects separately and 

 expressly created. Then they were taken and formed into 

 figures of animals, set in such a way as to fix the year 

 through the observation of these constellations. It is hardly 

 necessary, perhaps, to remind the reader that the word 

 zodiac is derived from a Greek word signifying an animal, 

 the original name of the zone being the zodiacal way, or 

 the pathway of the animals. Our older navigators called it 



