Lecture X. Astro-Theology And The Moral
Element In Babylonian Religion.
A hundred years ago, writers on the history or philosophy of
religion had much to say about what they called Sabaism. The
earliest form of idolatry was supposed to have been a worship
of the heavenly bodies. A passage in the Book of Job was
invoked in support of the fact, and beautifully executed drawings
of Babylonian seal-cylinders were made for the sake of the
pictures of the sun and moon and stars that were upon them. Sir
William Drummond resolved the sons of Jacob into the signs of
the Zodiac;^386 Dupuis derived Christianity itself from a sort of
allegorical astronomy.
“Sabaism”has long since fallen into disrepute. Anthropology
has long since taught us that primitive religion is not confined to
a worship of the stars. The cult of the heavenly bodies was not the
source of polytheism; indeed, there are systems of polytheism in
which it has never existed at all. Of late the tendency has been to
discount it altogether as a factor in the history of religion.
But the tendency has gone too far. There was one religion,
at all events, in which it played an important part. This was
the religion of ancient Babylonia and of those other countries
which were influenced by Babylonian culture. But even here the
[480] decipherment of the inscriptions seemed to show that it belonged
to a late age, and was an artificial product which never affected
the people as a whole. When I delivered my Hibbert Lectures, I
believed that I could dismiss it in a few words as merely a kind of
subsidiary chapter added to the religion of the State by pedants
and scholars.
Certain it is that the elaborate system of astro-theology which
characterised Babylonian religion was an artificial creation. It
was the result of a combination of religion with astronomy which
(^386) Ædipus Judaicus(London, 1811).