The Sleepwalkers Read Free

became convinced that the dancers were God and henceforth addressed my prayers to them, asking for their protection against the terrors of day and night. Much in the same manner, I like to imagine, did the luminous figures on the dark ceiling of the world appear as living divinities to Babylonians and Egyptians. The Twins, the Bear, the Serpent were as familiar to them as my fluted dancers to me; they were thought to be not very far away, and they held power of life and death, harvest and rain.
    The world of the Babylonians, Egyptians and Hebrews was an oyster, with water underneath, and more water overhead, supported by the solid firmament. It was of moderate dimensions, and as safely closed in on all sides as a cot in the nursery or a babe in the womb. The Babylonians' oyster was round, the earth was a hollow mountain, placed in its centre, floating on the waters of the deep; above it was a solid dome, covered by the upper waters. The upper waters seeped through the dome as rain, and the lower waters rose in fountains and springs. Sun, moon and stars progressed in a slow dance across the dome, entering the scene through doors in the East and vanishing through doors in the West.
    The universe of the Egyptians was a more rectangular oyster or box; the earth was its floor, the sky was either a cow whose feet rested on the four corners of the earth, or a woman supporting herself on her elbows and knees; later, a vaulted metal lid. Around the inner walls of the box, on a kind of elevated gallery, flowed a river on which the sun and moon gods sailed their barques, entering and vanishing through various stage doors. The fixed stars were lamps, suspended from the vault, or carried by other gods. The planets sailed their own boats along canals originating in the Milky Way, the celestial twin of the Nile. Towards the fifteenth of each month, the moon god was attacked by a ferocious sow, and devoured in a fortnight of agony; then he was re-born again. Sometimes the sow swallowed him whole, causing a lunar eclipse; sometimes a serpent swallowed the sun, causing a solar eclipse. But these tragedies were, like those in a dream, both real and not; inside his box or womb, the dreamer felt fairly safe.
    This feeling of safety was derived from the discovery that, in spite of the tumultuous private lives of the sun and moon gods, their appearances and movements remained utterly dependable and predictable. They brought night and day, the seasons and the rain, harvest and sowing time, in regular cycles. The mother leaning over the cradle is an unpredictable goddess; but her feeding breast can be depended on to appear when needed. The dreaming mind may go through wild adventures, it may travel through Olympus and Tartarus, but the pulse of the dreamer has a regular beat that can be counted. The first to learn counting the pulse of the stars were the Babylonians.
    Some six thousand years ago, when the human mind was still half asleep, Chaldean priests were standing on watch-towers, scanning the stars, making maps and time-tables of their motions. Clay tablets dating from the reign of Sargon of Akkad, around 3800 B.C., show an already old-established astronomical tradition. 1 The time-tables became calendars which regulated organized activity, from the growing of crops to religious ceremonies. Their observations became amazingly precise: they computed the length of the year with a deviation of less than 1.001 per cent from the correct value, 2 and their figures relating to the motions of sun and moon have only three times the margin of error of nineteenth-century astronomers armed with mammoth telescopes. 3 In this respect, theirs was an Exact Science; their observations were verifiable, and enabled them to make precise predictions of astronomical events; though based on mythological assumptions, the theory "worked". Thus at the very beginning of this long journey, Science emerges in the shape of Janus, the double-faced god, guardian of doors and