Origins of Star Wisdom

Unearthed in the mid-nineteenth century from ancient Ninevah, capital of Assyria in northern
Mesopotamia, by British Museum archaeologists Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam, the Mul
Apin, two clay tablets, named from the first line of a text describing the stars was just one of some 10,000
cuneiform texts collected by Ashurbanipal (the last great king of ancient Assyria) in the seventh century BC
into the world's first library. The Enuma Elish creation account, which reached back to the dawn of time,
also came from the excavations in the long undisturbed mounds on the eastern bank of the river Tigris,
near the modern city of Mosul. In these broken and worn clay bricks fashioned twenty-five centuries ago,
there were extraordinary tales of gods and goddesses, and of stars and planets. Indeed, as in ancient
Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the Babylonian gods were always associated with the stars, including the
"wandering stars," or planets (Greek planetos). The cuneiform tablets clearly showed that the Babylonian
astronomers noticed five stars that moved in relation to the background of the fixed stars.
1
They connected
these five stars with the five gods belonging to the Babylonian
pantheon: Ninib, Marduk, Nergal, Nebo and Ishtar.
From Babylonian cuneiform texts we know the characteristics of these five gods:
2
Ninib, the god of
justice; Marduk, the lord of wisdom; Nergal, the god of war; Nebo, the divine scribe; and Ishtar, the
goddess of love. In addition to the five wandering stars visible to the naked eye, the movements of the Sun
(Shamash) and Moon (Sin) were also observed against the background of the fixed stars (in the case of
the Sun, this movement was deduced), making a total of seven planets.
Characteristics Babylonian Greek Roman
Characteristics Babylonian Greek Roman
"god of justice" Ninib Chronos Saturn
"lord of wisdom" Marduk Zeus Jupiter
"god of war" Nergal Ares Mars
"divine scribe" Nebo Hermes Mercury
"goddess of love" Ishtar Aphrodite Venus

The Mul Apin tablets showed that the Babylonian astronomers observed that these seven planets always
move within a belt through the same groupings of fixed stars, and that there were seventeen such
groupings (constellations). Twelve of those constellations make up what we know today as the zodiac, or
"circle of animals":
Mul Apin text name Translation Greek Zodiac Name
Mul Lu Hung Ga
3
The "Hired Man" Aries (the Ram)
Mul Gud An Na The "Bull of Heaven" Taurus (the Bull)
Mul Mash Tab Ba Gal Ga The "Great Twins" Gemini (the Twins)
Mul Al Lul The "Crab" Cancer (the Crab)
Mul Ur Gu La The "Lion" Leo (the Lion)
Mul Ab Sin The "Furrow" Virgo (the Virgin)
Mul Zi Ba Ni Tum The "Scales of Heaven" Libra (the Scales)
Mul Gir Tab The "Scorpion" Scorpio (the Scorpion)
Mul Pa Bil Sag The "Grandfather" Sagittarius (the Archer)
Mul Suhur Mash The "Goat Fish" Capricorn (the Goat)
Mul Gu La The "Great One" Aquarius (the Water-Carrier)
Mul Sim Mah The "Swallow" Pisces (the Fish)

The Mul Apin text included two other star paths - the "path of Anu," and the "path of Ea." As Anu was the
Babylonian "God of the Sky," Ea was the "God of the Ocean," and Enlilwas "Lord of the Wind," the fixed
stars (forming the paths of Enlil, Anu, and Ea) were first and foremost seen by the Babylonians as the
abode of divine beings.
4
It is quite normal for the modern person to assume that - as with
contemporaneous Egyptian, Australian, African, Oceanic, Asian, or later Greek and Roman mythology -
the identification of the Babylonian pantheon with objects in the sky is a kind of innocent but erroneous
imagination. This would be the gravest of errors, for both the mythic texts and the records of the
Babylonian astronomers are testaments to an entirely different mode of consciousness and perception.
These texts were made by individuals who possessed clairvoyance for the spiritual world. Though faded
and continuing to fade amongst their peers at the moment when the scribes created these cuneiform
tablets, the ancient clairvoyance allowed Babylonian priest-astronomers (for indeed, the inseparability of
the divine deeds from the doings of the stars meant that the official Babylonian stargazers were
simultaneously priests and astronomers) to see far beyond the physical realm, into the invisible world of
the gods. Like the Orphic Hymns, the Enuma Elish is a cosmogony and cosmology, detailing the sequence
of events involved in the creation of the cosmos - including the star path of the zodiac and the planetary
wanderers upon that path.
Looking at the table above, it is striking how the ancient Babylonians gave almost exactly the same names
to the zodiacal constellations as did the Greeks. One must refrain from assuming that the Babylonian
priest-astronomers imposed these patterns and their associated myths upon the heavens. Although when
we look to the night sky we see only the constellational patterns that we have learned from years of seeing
"connect-the-dots" drawings, this in no way can be thought of as similar to what the ancient Babylonians
experienced. Their clairvoyance afforded them an actual supersensory experience of the intrinsic essence
or "beings" of the stars, with all of their variegated qualities, capacities, and "physiognomies."
Some twenty-five centuries ago, the Babylonian stargazers became the world's first real astronomers, in
the sense that their stargazing shifted from a strictly devotional activity to one whose systematic practice
allowed them to make empirical descriptions - detailing the motion of the planets and the composition of
the zodiacal path traveled by those planets - that would serve as the foundation for all subsequent
astronomical science. The Mul Apin clay tablets from Ashurbanipal's great seventh century BC library were
permanent remembrances of a vast accumulation of astronomical knowledge from many centuries before
700 BC, while also, in their transition to a mathematical/empirical astronomy, already representing an
unfolding "forgetting" of the stars and planets as actual "gods" or beings.
The Zodiac and the World's First Horoscope
Within two centuries after King Ashurbanipal collected the Enuma Elish, Enuma Anu Enlil, Mul Apin, and
other cuneiform texts into his great library, the Babylonian priest-astronomers had made a further
refinement of their picture of the "Paths of the Gods." In two cuneiform texts dating from 475 BC and
excavated from Babylon, the zodiacal constellations are divided into twelve 30-degree signs.
5
This is the
original or sidereal zodiac (sidereal means "pertaining to the stars"). The sidereal zodiac is defined in such
a way that: the star Aldebaran ("Bull's eye"), at the center (15 degrees) of the constellation of Taurus, is in
the middle of the sign of Taurus; and the star Antares ("Scorpion's heart"), at the heart of the constellation
of Scorpio, is at 15 degrees Scorpio, in the middle of the sign of Scorpio (see Figure - central star in
Taurus is Aldebaran, and central star in Scorpio is Antares - both, as first magnitude stars, appear larger in
the figure).
These two stars comprise the fiducial axis, the defining axis of the sidereal zodiac given by the
remarkable fact that Aldebaran and Antares lie diametrically opposite one another in the zodiac and are
located at the center of their respective zodiacal signs. The stellar longitudes of other zodiacal fixed stars
are determined in relation to this axis. For example, the beautiful star cluster in the neck of the Bull, the
Pleiades, is at 5 degrees Taurus; the two bright stars marking the heads of the twins, Castor and Pollux,
are at 25 degrees and 28 degrees Gemini; the first magnitude star Regulus, marking the heart of the
Lion, is at 5 degrees Leo; the first magnitude star Spica, marking the tip of the sheath of wheat held by the
Virgin, is at 29 degrees Virgo, etc. A Babylonian star catalog thought to date from the fourth century BC
lists the bright zodiacal stars in terms of the twelve signs of the sidereal zodiac.
This refinement of the zodiac into twelve equal signs might seem at first glance to be a convenient and
arbitrary scheme, but the sidereal zodiac that they codified is anything but arbitrary. The 30-degree
divisions reflect the clairvoyant perception of the exact extent of the influence of the spiritual beings
underlying the twelve constellations of the zodiac. The Babylonian stargazers learned this arrangement not
in abstract, geometrical terms, but as living pictures of the cosmic beings standing behind the stars. Those
pictures were originally imparted to them by their teacher Zaratas (Greek: Zoroaster). The Persian-born
Zaratas was a relative of King Cyrus the Great (sixth century BC) and came to Babylon in the wake of
Cyrus' conquest of the city in 539 BC. He was soon acknowledged as a great teacher by the Babylonian
priesthood. His fame was such that Pythagoras came to Babylon to receive initiation from him.
6

Initiated by the sublime Being of the Sun, Ahura Mazdao, so that his clairvoyance extended beyond the
Sun to the mighty beings of the zodiac, Zaratas spoke of four "royal stars" - Aldeberan, the Bull's Eye, the
central star of Mul Gud An Na, the "Bull of Heaven"; Regulus, the Lion's Heart, shining from Mul Ur Gu La,
the Lion; Antares, the glowing red ember of Mul Gir Tab's (Scorpio's) heart; and Fomalhaut, beneath the
stream of water spilling from the urn of Mul Gu La, "The Great One" (Aquarius). To his clairvoyant
perception, raised up from the shifting seasonal zodiacal patterns as seen from the earth, the four royal
stars and their enveloping constellations marked for Zaratas the cosmic directions of space. Aldeberan he
knew as the "watcher in the East"; Antares the "watcher in the West"; Regulus, the "watcher in the North";
and Fomalhaut was the "watcher in the South." Thus, Taurus - Scorpio marked the East-West (fiducial)
axis, while Leo - Aquarius marked the North-South. Each of these Holy Beings was flanked on either side
by other majestic spiritual beings, embodied in the zodiacal images of the Crab, the Twins, and so on.
7

Zaratas's clairvoyance allowed him a panoramic vision of Time as well as Space, and he saw the imminent
arrival of a period when humanity would no longer see these Holy Beings of the cosmos, nor even accept
that such Beings existed. He understood that in this approaching period of spiritual darkness, humanity
would need a science of the cosmos that would in veiled form express the cosmic mysteries, since the
spiritual reality standing behind them would be lost. The mathematical exactitude that emerges from the
astronomical texts of this period of ancient Babylon shows that Zaratas succeeded in this, the heart of his
task as a teacher of the Babylonian astronomer-priests.
For many centuries before Zaratas's time, the Babylonian astronomers had concerned themselves with
reading omens in the sky for the benefit of royalty. Inspired by his knowledge of the future unfolding of
human history, into an age of increasing individualism and materialism, Zaratas introduced an entirely new
art of prophecy, one that sought to describe the destiny of every individual human being. His clairvoyance
permitted him to see the descent of the soul from cosmic heights, down through the planetary spheres, to
Earth. Zaratas could also see that the planetary configurations at birth held the secret of the soul's destiny.
Through a divinely inspired suite of initiation practices, he taught the Babylonian stargazers this faculty of
beholding the voyage of the soul into incarnation.
Especially significant for the Babylonian astronomer-priests was the passage of the Moon around the
zodiac. They regarded the Moon as the gateway for the soul on its voyage into incarnation, and they could
behold the "descent of the stork" at the moment of conception, descending from the Moon to unite with the
seed of the quickened embryo. By focusing their spiritual gaze on the Moon they could gain awareness of
the moment of birth of the incarnating soul.
8
With this threefold knowledge of the sidereal zodiac of twelve
equal signs, the moment of conception, and the planetary configurations at birth, the Babylonian
astronomer-priests could read the "omens" for an individual's birth. Thus originated the world's first
horoscopes. The oldest known horoscope - preserved on another clay tablet dug up from Babylon by
British archaeologists in the middle of the nineteenth century - has been dated to April 29, 410 BC, and is
cast in terms of the geocentric planetary positions in the sidereal zodiac.
9

Ancient Astrology in a New Form
The modern continuation of the ancient Babylonian astrological practices - but now including modern
astronomical knowledge - constitutes what could be called The Astrological Revolution, which is the title of
the book by Kevin Dann and Robert Powell from which the foregoing sections The Origin of Star
Wisdom and The Zodiac and the World's First Horoscope are drawn. This website is intended to give
an expanded perception of the deeper significance of this new approach to the stars, and to enable
interested readers to follow up on this new approach with horoscopes, as outlined in the
section Horoscopes Old and New. By way of a summary, the present-day dates of passage of the Sun
through the twelve signs of the zodiac originally defined by the Babylonians are as follows:
View Zodiac Dates
1. The term "fixed stars" was used because they believed these stars never change their position in relation to one another, therefore appearing to be fixed upon
the globe of the heavens. Modern astronomy has shown that the fixed stars are subject to minute shifts in position over tens of thousands of years. But this
movement is so slight that during the course of the last five thousand years there has been very little change from the patterns of the constellations as they were
at the time of the Babylonians.

2. Robert Powell, History of the Planets.

3. The convention in reproducing the cuneiform character translation from the ancient Akkadian is to use upper-case letters, separated by a period. The "Bull of
Heaven," (Taurus) for example, is written: MUL.GUD.AN.NA. For ease of reading, we have dropped the period notations, and ital icized the letters: Mul Gud An
Na.

4. Babylonian mythology largely derived from the older Sumerian mythology, and was written in Akkadian, a Semitic language using the cuneiform script.

5. The reader is referred to the foundational work by Robert Powell, History of the Zodiac for all references to the history of the zodiac.

6. In his The Life of Pythagoras, Porphyry says: "In Babylon [Pythagoras] associated with the other Chaldeans, especially attaching himself to Zaratas
[=Zoroaster], by whom he was purified from the pollutions of his past life." The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, p. 125.

7. Robert Powell, Christian Hermetic Astrology: The Star of the Magi and the Life of Christ, pp. 15-24.

8. Robert Powell, Christian Hermetic Astrology, pp. 22-23.

9. Abraham Sachs, "Babylonian Horoscopes," Journal of Cuneiform Studies 6, 1952, pp. 49-65.



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