But before we look at this second half, let us glance at the dominant symbols, especially at the symbols of number. The whole scheme is so entirely based on the numbers of seven, four and three, that we may as well try to find out what these numbers meant to the ancient mind.
Three was the sacred number: it is still, for it is the number of the Trinity: it is the number of the nature of God. It is perhaps from the scientists, or the very early philosophers, that we get the most revealing suggestions of the ancient beliefs. The early scientists took the extant religious symbol-ideas and transmuted them into true ‘ideas’. We know that the ancients saw number concrete — in dots or in rows of pebbles. And the number three was held by the Pythagoreans to be the perfect number, in their primitive arithmetic, because you could not divide it and leave a gap in the middle. This is obviously true of three pebbles. You cannot destroy the integrity of the three. If you remove one pebble on each side, it still leaves the central stone poised and in perfect balance between the two, like the body of a bird between the two wings. And even as late as the third century, this was felt as the perfect or divine condition of being.
Again, we know that Anaximander, in the fifth century, conceived of the Boundless, the infinite substance, as having its two ‘elements’, the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist, or fire and the dark, the great ‘pair’, on either side of it, in the first primordial creation. These three were the beginning of all things. This idea lies at the back of the very ancient division of the living cosmos into three, before the idea of God was separated out.
In parenthesis let us remark that the very ancient world was entirely religious and godless. While men still lived in close physical unison, like flocks of birds on the wing, in a close physical oneness, an ancient tribal unison in which the individual was hardly separated out, then the tribe lived breast to breast, as it were, with the cosmos, in naked contact with the cosmos, the whole cosmos was alive and in contact with the flesh of man, there was no room for the intrusion of the god idea. It was not till the individual began to feel separated off, not till he fell into awareness of himself, and hence into apartness; not, mythologically, till he ate of the Tree of Knowledge instead of the Tree of Life, and knew himself apart and separate, that the conception of a God arose, to intervene between man and the cosmos. The very oldest ideas of man are purely religious, and there is no notion of any sort of god or gods. God and gods enter when man has ‘fallen’ into a sense of separateness and loneliness. The oldest philosophers, Anaximander with his divine Boundless and the divine two elements, and Anaxi- menes with his divine ‘air’, are going back to the great conception of the naked cosmos, before there was God. At the same time, they know all about the gods of the sixth century: but they are not strictly interested in them. Even the first Pythagoreans, who were religious in the conventional way, were more profoundly religious in their conceptions of the two primary forms, Fire and the Night, or Fire and Dark, dark being conceived of as a kind of thick air or vapour. These two were the Limit and the Unlimited, Night, the Unlimited, finding its Limit in Fire. These two primary forms, being in a tension of opposition, prove their oneness by their very opposedness. Herakleitos says that all things are an exchange for fire: and that the sun is new every day. The limit of dawn and evening is the Bear: and opposite the Bear is the boundary of bright Zeus.’ Bright Zeus is here supposed to be the bright blue sky, so his boundary is the horizon, and Herakleitos means probably that opposite the Bear, that is down, down in the antipodes, it is always night, and Night lives the death of Day, as Day lives the death of Night.
This is the state of mind of great men in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, strange and fascinating and a revelation of the old symbolic mind. Religion was already turning moralistic or ecstatic, with the Orphics the tedious idea of ‘escaping the wheel of birth’ had begun to abstract men from life. But early science is a source of the purest and oldest religion. The mind of man recoiled, there in Ionia, to the oldest religious conception of the cosmos, from which to start thinking out the scientific cosmos. And the thing the oldest philosophers disliked was the new sort of religious conception, with its ecstasies and its escape and its purely personal nature: its loss of the cosmos.
So the first philosophers took up the sacred three-part cosmos of the ancients. It is paralleled in Genesis, where we have a god creation, in the division into heaven, and earth, and water: the first three created elements, presupposing a God who creates. The ancient threefold division of the living heavens, the Chaldean, is made when the heavens themselves are divine, and not merely God-inhabited. Before men felt any need of God or gods, while the vast heavens lived of themselves and lived breast to breast with man, the Chaldeans gazed up in religious rapture. And then by some strange intuition, they divided the heavens into three sections. And then they really knew the stars as the stars have never been known since.
Later, when a God or Maker or Ruler of the skies was invented or discovered, then the heavens were divided into the four quarters, the old four quarters that lasted so long. And then, gradually with the invention of a God or a Demiurge, the old star-knowledge and true worship declined with the Babylonians into magic and astrology, the whole system was ‘worked’. But still the old Chaldean cosmic knowledge persisted, and this the Ionians must have picked up again.
Even during the four-quarter centuries, the heavens still had three primary rulers, sun, moon, and morning-star. But the Bible says, sun, moon, and stars.
The morning-star was always a god, from the time when gods began. But when the cult of dying and reborn gods started all over the old world, about 600 b.c., he became symbolic of the new god, because he rules in the twilight, between day and night, and for the same reason he is supposed to be lord of both, and to stand gleaming with one foot on the flood of night and one foot on the world of day, one foot on sea and one on shore. We know that night was a form of vapour or flood.