The Sleepwalkers Read Free Page A

gates: the face in front alert and observant, while the other, dreamy and glassy-eyed, stares in the opposite direction.
    The most fascinating objects in the sky – from both points of view – were the planets, or vagabond stars. Only seven of these existed among the thousands of lights suspended from the firmament. They were the Sun, the Moon, Nebo – Mercury, Ishtar – Venus, Nergal – Mars, Marduk – Jupiter, and Ninib-Saturn. All other stars remained stationary, fixed in the pattern of the firmament, revolving once a day round the earth-mountain, but never changing their places in the pattern. The seven vagabond stars revolved with them, but at the same time they had a motion of their own, like flies wandering over the surface of a spinning globe. Yet they did not wander all across the sky: their movements were confined to a narrow lane, or belt, which was looped around the firmament at an angle of about twenty-three degrees to the equator. This belt – the Zodiac – was divided into twelve sections, and each section was named after a constellation of fixed stars in the neighbourhood. The Zodiac was the lovers' lane in the skies, along which the planets ambled. The passing of a planet through one of the sections had a double significance: it yielded figures for the observer's time-table, and symbolic messages of the mythological drama played out behind the scenes. Astrology and Astronomy remain to this day complementary fields of vision of Janus sapiens.
    2.
Ionian Fever
    Where Babylon and Egypt left off, Greece took over. At the beginning, Greek cosmology moved much on the same lines – Homer's world is another, more colourful oyster, a floating disc surrounded by Okeanus. But about the time when the texts of the Odyssey and Iliad became consolidated in their final version, a new development started in Ionia on the Aegean coast. The sixth pre-Christian century – the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius and Lâo-Tse, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras – was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across this planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath in Adam's nostrils. In the Ionian school of philosophy, rational thought was emerging from the mythological dream-world. It was the beginning of the great adventure: the Promethean quest for natural explanations and rational causes, which, within the next two thousand years, would transform the species more radically than the previous two hundred thousand had done.
    Thales of Miletos, who brought abstract geometry to Greece, and predicted an eclipse of the sun, believed, like Homer, that the earth was a circular disc floating on water, but he did not stop there; discarding the explanations of mythology, he asked the revolutionary question out of what basic raw material, and by what process of nature, the universe was formed. His answer was, that the basic stuff or element must be water, because all things are born from moisture, including air, which is water evaporated. Others taught that the prime material was not water, but air or fire; however, their answers were less important than the fact that they were learning to ask a new type of question, which was addressed not to an oracle, but to dumb nature. It was a wildly exhilarating game; to appreciate it, one must again travel back along one's own private time-track to the fantasies of early adolescence when the brain, intoxicated with its newly discovered powers, let speculation run riot. "A case in point," Plato reports, "is that of Thales, who, when he was star-gazing and looking upward, fell into a well, and was rallied (so it is said) by a clever and pretty maidservant from Thrace because he was eager to know what went on in the heaven, but did not notice what was in front of him, nay, at his very feet." 4
    The second of the Ionian philosophers, Anaximander, displays all the symptoms of the intellectual fever spreading through Greece. His