C. The Mythological Component and the Meaning of “Destinies” in “The Tablets of Destinies”
One of the most
significant clues as to what the Tablets of Destinies were may lie
in the second term of the phrase used to describe them,
“Destinies.” This term strongly suggests some connection to the
pervasive role that astrology played in the ancient Mesopotamian
cultures. The movements of the stars and planets, after all, were
the movements of the “gods” themselves, decreeing the fates or
“destinies” of things on earth below. But where does this belief
come from, and why? No one really knows, but the famed Egyptologist
E.A. Wallis Budge does provide a significant clue in his books
Amulets and Superstitions, a study of
ancient Middle Eastern magical artifacts.
The Sumerians and Babylonians believed that the will of the gods in respect to man and his affairs could be learned by watching the motions of the stars and planets, and that skilled star-gazers could obtain from the motions of and varying aspects of the heavenly bodies indications of future prosperity and calamity. They therefore caused observations to be made and recorded on tablets, which they interpreted from a magical and not astronomical point of view, and these observations and their comments on them, and interpretations of them, have formed the foundation of the astrology in use in the world for the last 5,000 years. According to ancient traditions preserved by Greek writers, the Babylonians made these observations for some hundreds of thousands of years, and though we must reject such fabulous statements, we are bound to believe that the period during which observations of the heavens were made on the plains of Babylonia comprised many thousands of years.445
It is the pervasive
habit of recording these astrological observations, and the sheer
amount of such tablets, that surely led Assyriologists and
translators to translate the term “Me” and “Me Gal Gal” as “Tablets
of Destinies.” And their educated guess, as will be seen in this
chapter, was much more appropriate than they might have cared to
know!
But notice something
else that Budge brings to our attention: there is a tradition in
the cultures of the Middle East that these observations extend back
to a period of time hundreds of thousands of years before the
advent of Sumer and Egypt themselves! The Sumerian and Babylonian
astrological sciences, in other words, were a legacy, and a declined
legacy at that, of something far older, and as we shall see,
something far more sophisticated.
This last point may
be more fully understood by asking a very obvious question:
Why was astrology such a pervasive
“scientific” presence in almost all the great cultures of antiquity
- Sumer, Egypt, Greece, the Vedic and Hindu, the Chinese, the
Mayan, the Aztec, the Incan? Mainstream and even alternative
scholars have labored over this question for decades, and have come
to essentially the same conclusion: the ancients observed the
motions of the heavens, were occasionally victims of some sort of
celestial catastrophe, needed to know when to plant and harvest
their crops, and so on, and felt awe and religious reverence for
these tremendous powers that clothed, fed, and sometimes destroyed
them, and embodied it all in the astrological lore we know today.
De Santillana and Von Dechind’s classic study Hamlet’s Mill is perhaps the prime example of this
line of thinking, but there are many, many others. One is left, in
other words, with a well-footnoted reassertion of the old paradigm
that the ancients were primitive and superstitious peoples and that
this sort of thing is just the sort of thing that they did. The
standard line is that one need not look further into the
possibility that their knowledge is a residue of an actual
science left over, misunderstood - or
understood as best as they could - by the cultures that were
legacies of an incomparably more sophisticated civilization.
According to that standard school of interpretation, therefore, one
must not take those civilizations’ own assertions that they are the
legacies of that much older, much more ancient, and much more
sophisticated culture at their word.
But Budge presents
information - tantalizing information - that something more must
have been going on. He notes that the Babylonian zodiac in use
throughout Babylon was “set up by Marduk” after his defeat of Tiamat, and that its signs
“were different from the old ones, which he had disbanded...”446 Indeed, Budge even
produces the previous zodiac in use by
Tiamat, Kingu and their associates prior to the war that destroyed
her.447 In other words, in
addition to the Enuma Elish’s statement
that after the war and the explosion of the Planet Tiamat, Marduk
“measured the structure of the deep,” there was also the
introduction of a new zodiac, which is precisely a new “measure of
the structure of the deep.”
So we may draw our
first tentative answer, our first clue,
to unraveling the enigma of what exactly the Tablets of Destinies
were: They concerned “astrological”
information, written or transcribed on “tablets.” But since
we know the consistent belief of astrology is that the positions
and motions of the stars have subtle influences on life, emotions,
and consciousness, we must add that this information was somehow
included in whatever the Tablets of Destinies were.
So far, so
good.