"Personifications and Metaphors in Babylonian Celestial Omina" - Rochberg

Personifications and Metaphors in Babylonian Celestial OminaAuthor(s): Francesca RochbergSource: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 116, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1996), pp. 475-485Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/605149 .Accessed: 14/05/2014 11:54

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PERSONIFICATIONS AND METAPHORS IN BABYLONIAN CELESTIAL OMINA

FRANCESCA ROCHBERG UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

Within the protases of the Babylonian celestial omen series Enuma Anu Enlil, a number of celestial phenomena are referred to by means of anthropomorphic tropes whose referents are the gods associated with the celestial body in question. For example, a lunar eclipse is referred to as "the moon god in mourning." Metaphor and its implications for abstract relational thought in the language of Babylonian divination can be established on the basis of the function of the attested metaphorical expressions, which was to represent a physical phenomenon deemed ominous. This evidence sheds light on the conception of natural phenomena and the relation between nature and the gods in ancient Mesopotamia, underscoring the religious component of Mesopotamian science. A culture's capacity or incapacity for the use of metaphor has been used as a criterion for differentiating ancient/traditional from modern/scientific thought in a substantial literature that includes studies in the history of Greek and Renaissance science and magic as well as in anthropology. Establishing the existence and identifying the function of metaphorical language in Meso- potamian celestial divination introduces evidence which tempers such dichotomous schemes of culture and thought.

Savage, whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, His soul proud Science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or milky way; Yet simple nature to his hope have giv'n Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler Heav'n.

Pope, Essay on Man, bk. I, 11. 90-95

IN THE PROTASES OF THE Babylonian celestial omens of the series Enfma Anu Enlil, as well as in the reports from the Neo-Assyrian court astrologers in which these omens are regularly quoted, descriptions of the appearances of celestial bodies are sometimes couched in apparently metaphorical terms. Specifically, the moon, sun, and Venus are personified in protases calling upon anthropomorphic images, and referring in each case to the particular deity of which the particular heavenly body is considered to be a manifestation. This article' explores both the nature of the tropes found in the omen protases and its implications for our understanding the Babylo-

1 The substance of this paper was presented at the 205th meeting of the American Oriental Society on March 27, 1995, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Text references are abbreviated in accordance with Erica Reiner, ed., The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, vol. 17: ?, part II (Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1992), ix-xxvi.

I wish to thank the Trustees of the British Museum for permission to cite the unpublished text BM 22696. My thanks go also to Alan C. Bowen, Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science, for his helpful comments on a draft of this paper.

nian conception of the relation of the divine to the celestial bodies and their phenomena, the signs.2

The use of metaphor in the context of Babylonian celestial divination is of interest on a number of levels. On the surface, identification of the references conveyed by the metaphors helps us come to terms with the range of physical (celestial) phenomena regularly observed and viewed as ominous in Babylonian celestial divination.

2 For the purposes of this paper, I accept and assume metaphor to be a feature of language use, without entering into the murky waters of establishing a basis for a definition of "metaphorical language," or the question of whether or in what way metaphorical language may be distinguished from literal language. And whereas I also recognize that there are linguists and philosophers of science who will argue that all language, liter- ary and scientific, is tropological, and who will say that, when it comes to constructing meaning in context, the distinction between the metaphorical and the literal can be challenged, I maintain the distinction throughout this paper. For an im- pressive array of views and approaches to the problems of language, perception, and thought as raised by metaphor, see Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed. (Cam- bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).

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Journal of the American Oriental Society 116.3 (1996)

The use of metaphorical expressions in omen protases makes it clear that the scholars employed a variety of ways to convey physical descriptions of phenomena deemed ominous, not only literal, but figurative descriptions of what was observed, or observable.

Metaphors, reflecting implicit comparisons between things conceptually linked, contain clues to the way things are conceived. Because it is the nature of the tropes in the Babylonian omina to personify certain celestial bodies and to connect them with deities, the deeper implication of our recognition of such use of metaphor lies in the often inaccessible area of Babylo- nian thought concerning the relation between nature and the gods. It is in the instances of the personifications used in metaphorical descriptions of phenomena that we have access to how the heavenly bodies, and their behavior as represented in their phenomena, could be con- ceptualized. In view of the conceptualization of some of the heavenly bodies as manifestations of gods, and the importance of the behavior of these divine manifestations for predicting the political and economic future of the kingdom, the "religious" context of celestial observation, hence of scientific inquiry, in ancient Mesopota- mia comes into sharper focus. The political context for Babylonian celestial divination, particularly as evidenced in the Neo-Assyrian letters and reports from scholars to the Sargonid kings, has long been understood. The evidence of the divine metaphors within celestial divination underscores the integration of the religious and the political in Mesopotamian scribal learning and science.

The relationship between the study of the heavens and the concept of the divine, and the relation of both to the political world of humankind expressed by celestial divination, carry wider implications for the study of the nature of ancient Mesopotamian science. Within the scope of Babylonian interest in natural phenomena, broadly defined, were those social and intellectual phenomena that would much later come to be distinguished as magic and religion. In this early period, however, the scribes differentiated these activities only in terms of a variety of text genres with different aims, e.g., hymns and prayers, as distinguished from spells and incantations. The activity of science, i.e., of the study of nature and formation of the body of knowledge appropriate to it, as represented here by the knowledge of astronomical phenomena incorporated within celestial divination, is seen to be fully integrated with these other bodies of knowledge and systems of ideas, viz., those of Babylonian theology and magic.

Divination is by definition bound up with beliefs about gods and their effect on humankind and the world. Mesopotamian scholarly divination focussed on signs

collected in the lists of omina. Many of these signs were seen in natural phenomena, not generated or manipu- lated by diviners, but just simply observed.3 For a clear statement of the belief that the gods were directly linked to the signs observed by the diviners, we must rely on non-divinatory texts, for example, the following passage from a prayer to Sin and Samas.

[ana tamar]tikunu irisks miattu The lands rejoice at your

[urra u mui]sa ipaqqidd BAR.MES-Si-in4

[ana supt]ur ittdti sa same u erseti attunuma tazzizd

anaku aradkunu ndsirkunu

sa umisamma anattalu panikun

appearance. Day and night they entrust

(to you) their ability to see. You stand by to let loose

the omens of heaven and earth.

I, your servant, who keep watch for you,

who look upon your faces each day,

3 For a definition of the two categories of Mespotamian divination, see A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia (Chicago: Univ. of,Chicago Press, 1977), 207, where he assigns to them the terms "operational and magical." The two categories refer to methods of obtaining communications from the divine. The forms in which divination is solicited by the diviner, as in oil or smoke divination, require the manipulation of the means of divination by the diviner, such as dropping oil into water or releasing smoke from a censer, hence "operational" divination. The unsolicited kind, in which the omens are observed without the manipulation of anything by a diviner, e.g., celestial divination, follows from the premise that nature is a field within which the activity and influence of gods may be seen and "read" by those specially qualified by possession of such knowledge (called miidu, "the one who knows"). A different way of classifying Mesopotamian divination is given by Jean Bott6ro in his Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, tr. Z. Bahrani and M. Van De Mieroop (Chicago: Univ. of Chi- cago Press, 1992), 106. Bott6ro's terminology focuses on the difference between "prophecy" or direct divine communication, on the one hand, and indirect, or "deductive," divination such as is found in the written corpus of omens of all kinds, on the other. Bott6ro's classification is derived from the subjective- versus-inductive categories of divination defined in A. Bouche- Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l'antiquite, 4 vols. (Paris: Leroux, 1879-82), 107-9.

4 The reading BAR = nitlu is suggested in E. Ebeling, "Be-

schworungen gegen den Feind und den bosen Blick aus dem Zweistromlande," ArOr 17 (1949; Symbolae Hrozny): 179, with a question mark. The sense of plural MES is unclear, although the idea of attributing an ability to see to the luminaries of day and night is certainly convincing.

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ROCHBERG: Personifications and Metaphors in Babylonian Celestial Omina

ana tamartikunu nastd indja5 who am attentive to your appearance,

ittatija lemneti ahitamma subi'a make my evil omens pass away from me.

ittati damqati u tasme^ ukna Set for me propitious and ana zumrija favorable omens.6

In this prayer, the celestial deities Samas and Sin are addressed as though they were the celestial bodies. The speaker seems to believe that to watch for the sun and moon in the sky is to await the appearance of Samas and Sin. With reference to the appearances of the celestial bodies as omens, the speaker views the deities as having agency in nature to produce or take away celestial omens for his benefit.

The scribal tradition preserved in a catalogue of texts which places the origin of the series Enuma Anu Enlil with the god Ea7 also points to the idea of the omens as signs produced and communicated from the gods. This is consistent with evidence from incantations that describe the gods as "the ones who determine the nature of things, who draw the cosmic designs, who assign the lots for heaven and earth" (musimmu simtti mussiru usurdti mus- siqu isqeti sa same u ersetim).8 But the relation between the gods, the celestial bodies, and the phenomena that constitute the omens in any more precise definition still warrants clarification beyond the evidence of prayers, incantations, or scholia. In attempting to characterize how the Babylonians conceived of this relationship, however, we enter the speculative realm of cognitive-historical analysis where definitions of the cultural and historical mode of Babylonian thought rest on incomplete and scat- tered evidence. Early attempts to understand the ancient

5 The copy appears to read ba-sd-a GE?TUII-a-a (basa uzndja) "(I, whose) mind is set (on your appearance)," but Ebeling's suggestion ("Beschworungen," 182) of IGII and an emendation na!-sd-a, literally "cast the eye," better suits the sense of the context.

6 Lutz, PBS 1/2 106 r. 13-21; edition by E. Ebeling, "Bes- chwirungen," 179-81. For other translations, see A. Falken- stein and W. von Soden, Sumerische und akkadische Hymnen und Gebete (Zurich: Bibliothek der Alten Welt, 1953), 342- 43, no. 68; M.-J. Seux, Hymnes et prieres aux dieux de Baby- lonie et d'Assyrie (Paris: Les editions du Cerf, 1976), 490-91; and Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 1993), 2:684 (where the line numbers do not correspond to those of the text).

7 W. G. Lambert, "A Catalogue of Texts and Authors," JCS 16 (1962): 64, i (K.2248):1-4.

8 Epithets of Ea, Samas, and Marduk in the incantation LKA 109 obv. 3-5.

Mesopotamian conception of the gods and nature have not held up under scrutiny of the sources.

There are, for example, no longer many adherents of the "mythopoeic thought" thesis, proposed in the once in- fluential Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man.9 In his interpretation, Frankfort alleged

9 Henri Frankfort, Mrs. H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946; Pelican reprint, 1961). Outside the field of Assyriology, in the history of science, it is surprising to see how much this work is still relied on. See, for example, David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Con- text, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), chapter one "Science and its Origins," where assertions are made about traditions concerning nature characteristic of "prehistoric cultures and contemporary preliterate societies" (pp. 6-13). Lindberg neither acknowledges the problems of retrojecting traditions about nature to prehistoric(!) times on the basis of myths preserved in writing from highly literate civilizations (his examples coming from Babylonia [sic]-the myth referred to [n. 9] is Sumerian-and Egypt) nor does he justify conflating Mesopotamian and Egyptian cosmographic mythology with contemporary equatorial African (Kuba) oral tradition. The influence of Frankfort's generalized category "primitive man," and his notion that "in the ancient Near East, as in present-day primitive society, thought does not operate autonomously" (Before Philosophy, 13), pervades Lindberg's discussion and is even specifically adduced (p. 7) to define the kind of causality allegedly reflected in these cultures' thinking, i.e., one devoid of generality or abstraction from particular instances. Similarly, John G. Burke, senior editor of a work de- signed for university students of Western civilization, Science and Culture in the Western Tradition: Sources and Interpreta- tions (Scottsdale, Ariz.: Gorsuch Scarisbrick Publishers, 1987), approaches the question, "was there really something new, different, and important about the ways in which the Greeks approached questions about the natural world?" (p. 1), as compared with Mesopotamia and Egypt. The material offered for Mesopotamia, by means of which this complex question is to be discussed, is a four-page passage from Frankfort, Before Philosophy, prefaced with the note that "we need to have some feeling for what the prescientific universe of early Mediterra- nean cultures was like" (p. 6). The "essence of prescientific cultures in the personal and particular character of human in- teractions with the natural world," as articulated by Frankfort (Before Philosophy, 6), is accepted there without question as the foundation for the analysis of science in the ancient Mediterranean cultural sphere.

477



an incapacity (or an unwillingness'?) in the "ancient mind" for analogical or metaphorical thought. His thesis erased any distinction between subjective perception and objective conception in this ancient mode of thought, and, regarding signs or omens, Frankfort argued that the ancient observer "can no more conceive them as signi- fying, yet separate from, the gods or powers than he can consider a relationship established in his mind- such as resemblance-as connecting, and yet separate from, the objects compared. Hence there is coalescence of the symbol and what it signifies, as there is coalescence of two objects compared so that one may stand for the other."" Before Philosophy declared the inabil- ity to separate the realms of "the symbol and what it signified" (de Saussure's signifier and signified) to be characteristic of a mode of "mythical" thought opposed to theoretical logical thought.12 While the "mythopoeic thought" thesis was criticized on many levels, and much work has been done to demonstrate the capacity of the ancient Mesopotamians to think abstractly and theoreti- cally,'3 the issue of relational metaphorical thinking as a useful indication of how the Babylonians thought about physical phenomena in relation to the divine has not been specifically examined, certainly not in the context of celestial omens where the relation between celestial bodies, their phenomena, and the gods can be studied.

The laconic, formal, and repetitive nature of omen texts places limitations on the use of the divination literature as evidence for how the Babylonians perceived the celestial bodies vis-a-vis the gods, i.e., how they understood the gods to relate to the celestial omens, and

10 In Before Philosophy, Frankfort did not claim that ancient Near Eastern thought was illogical, or even pre-logical. His view on this is expressed rather in the statement: "They could reason logically; but they did not often care to do it" (p. 19).

11 Before Philosophy, 21. 12 Although published somewhat later, see also E. Cassirer,

Language and Myth, tr. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953) for the evolutionary scheme of thought from the mythical to the theoretical.

13 See M. T. Larsen, "The Mesopotamian Lukewarm Mind: Reflections on Science, Divination, and Literacy," in Lan- guage Literature and History: Philological and Historical Studies Presented to Erica Reiner, AOS 67, ed. F. Rochberg (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 1987), 203- 25, citing previous literature. See also the remarks of S. J. Tambiah, Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropo- logical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 30-35, from a paper originally published as "The Mag- ical Power of Words," Man, n.s., 3 (1968): 175-208.

by extension, to the physical world. Of course, our only way of knowing what Babylonian perceptions might have been is by means of their descriptions of things. In the following discussion, therefore, I focus not so much on the kinds of phenomena observed in the celestial omen texts, as on the way in which some of these are described.

The bulk of the omen protases in the series Enuma Anu Enlil describes celestial phenomena directly, e.g., "(if) the moon's appearance is red" (ACh Sin IX:1) or "(if) on the eleventh day of Arabsamna Venus disappeared in the east" (BPO 1:2) or "Saturn is bright" (ACh Istar 25:41). Whereas most of these omens betray no explicit conception of the involvement of the deities in the phenomena, we shall now focus on the expressions found in omen protases that refer to actions or appearances appropriate, not to inanimate objects, such as we believe the planets and stars to be, but to anthropomorphic beings with agency and feeling. The anthropomorphizing of deities, while not the exclusive conception of divine form in ancient Mesopotamia, is a feature of Mesopotamian religion attested from the earliest periods, and as will be clear in the following analysis, the anthropomorphic references in the celestial omens are to gods.

If the tropes found in the celestial omen protases are indeed metaphors, and not statements about anthropomorphic deities, we should understand that the metaphor places two things in relation: one, the divine, serving as a vehicle for the description of the other, the phenomenon. For example, instead of simply stating there was a lunar eclipse, normally expressed by the term attalu "eclipse," we sometimes find that the moon, in anthropomorphic guise, "mourns" or "feels distress." Such anthropomorphic expressions are attested already in the Old Babylonian lunar omens, in which, moreover, the moon is referred to explicitly as "the god."'4 The protasis reads: DINGIR-IUm ina lu-mu-un ?A it-ba-al "The god set (lit. "disappeared") in distress (meaning "in the state of being eclipsed")."15 The lunar eclipse is understood in terms of the distress of the moon god, which thus serves as a metaphor for the state of being eclipsed. The metaphor implies a conception of the physical moon as a representation of the god Sin, otherwise descriptive language about the god Sin would have no necessary connection to the moon. What becomes apparent in the

14 Note that in other contexts, viz., lexical texts, Nuzi documents, and Old Assyrian, the moon can be referred to simply as ilu "the god." See the references in CAD, s.v. ilu mng.2 a.

15 BM 22696:22.

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celestial omens is that empirical investigation of physical phenomena was not incompatible with a conception of the objects of investigations being manifestations of gods. The systematic inquiry into the physical phenomena of nature represented by Babylonian celestial divination and astronomy was not pursued in spite of, but because of, the belief that the celestial bodies mani- fested deities.

The anthropomorphic trope of emotional distress for the state of being eclipsed is expressed by the term ?A.yUL, Akkadian lumun libbi, "distress of heart," which is said in the lexical literature to be synonymous with the nouns adirtu "mourning" and marustu "distress."16 In astrological contexts, lumun libbi often occurs with the verb adaru, which primarily means "to be worried or distressed." By extension, adaru can mean "to become darkened." While the noun libbu "heart" is constructed in compounds to describe states of mind and feeling, the derivation of the synonyms of lumun libbi, viz., adirtu from addru "to be darkened," and marustu from (m)arsu "dirty," also suggests darkness of color. Hence lumun libbi, too, has a purely descriptive, visual sense, i.e., "darkened," when said of the moon in eclipse.

The Old Babylonian omen was explicit in its reference to the moon as "the god" experiencing distress, and similarly in the bilingual account of the demons causing the lunar eclipse, the demons make the moon god Sin disturbed, with the S-stem of addru. dEN.zU.na [an].sa.ta su.mu.ug.ga.ge.es: dSin ina [qereb] same usadiru "they (the evil demons) caused the disturbance of the god Sin (= eclipse of the moon) in the sky" (CT 16 22:238f.). These passages make dual reference to the moon god and the lunar disk, but particularly in the context of the omens, where the heavenly body is the object of discourse, the referent should be the moon observable in the sky. Because the name of the moon is indistinguishable from the name of the moon god, only context can disentangle the two possible interpretations this language presents to us; the first being the moon god in an emotionally disturbed state, and the second being a physical description, i.e., the lunar disk darkened in eclipse. Celestial omens require that one correlate a physical phenomenon (real or imaginary) in the protasis to an event in the apodosis. While a "literal" reference to a grieving god would not correlate in a

16 In an Old Babylonian bilingual enumerating attributes of Istar, see ka-la ne-in-gi-ga sa-bu-ul-gi (= kala nig.gig.ga sa.bul.gig): edirtum marustu lumun(!) libbim "fear, hardship, distress" Sumer 13 73:5 and 7; see CAD, s.v. lumun libbi lexical section.

meaningful way with an apodosis in Enima Anu Enlil, a metaphorical reference to a grieving god, the purpose of which was to convey a physical description of a lunar eclipse, does constitute a meaningful correlation.

Figurative language seems to be applied more often with respect to the moon than other celestial bodies. In other lunar omens we can see the moon set "with un- washed feet," (Thompson Rep. 272A = SAA 8 103:7), "wear a crown" at first visibility (Thompson Rep. 7 = SAA 8 10:5, also SAA 8 113:5; Thompson Rep. 43 = SAA 8 57:1),17 or "ride a chariot" (Thompson Rep. 49 = SAA 8 298:1; Thompson Rep. 104 = SAA 8 364:6). The anthropomorphic image of Sin in the standard seventh-century omens is also manifest in the reference to the moon occasionally as "the god" (ilu), in the man- ner of the Old Babylonian example.'8 This designa- tion is fully interchangeable with that of the name dSin or d30, and so does not necessarily point any more strongly in the direction of the god than it does the lunar disk. Since the relation between the god and the heavenly body called by the same name is never given to us directly, a reasonable approach to this question seems to lie in further examination of the nature of the figurative language of the omens, i.e., to establish, if possible, whether its use is indeed metaphorical, or merely substitutive.

If the heavenly bodies were thought of as gods-not manifestations of gods, but identical and synonymous with gods-we ought not regard the anthropomorphic descriptions of their movements and appearances as metaphorical. To say, in a mythological context that a god mourns, or rides a chariot,19 is not metaphorical. We see, for example, in texts like Enima Elis or in some Assyrian and Babylonian royal inscriptions, that gods such as Marduk and Assur ride chariots, and we do not consider these to be figurative expressions. But what of the omen "the moon rides a chariot"? This protasis is attested only in the astrologers' reports, i.e., not in Enuma Anu Enlil itself. It is, however, included in a report in which all the protases refer to lunar haloes. An astrological report

17 See CAD, s.v. agi A mng.2 a. 18 See F Rochberg, Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divi-

nation: The Lunar Eclipse Tablets of Enuma Anu Enlil, AfO Beiheft, 22 (Horn, Austria: Verlag Ferdinand Berger, 1988), Enuma Anu Enlil, 20 et passim.

19 See GIS.GIGIR imu la mahri galittu irkab "he mounted the chariot, the storm which has no equal," En.el. IV 50; ina GIS.GIGIR sa rakbu "(Agsur) who rides in a chariot," OIP 2 140:7 (Senn.); or Nbn. VAB 4 260 ii 33, where Bunene is the rakib narkabti "charioteer."

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consists typically of an observation, followed by the citation from Enuma Anu Enlil of a number of omens, all referring to the same observed phenomenon, and by means of which a prediction, favorable or unfavorable, may be determined for what has been observed. The omens cited in a report will therefore be thematically related and the inclusion of the moon (god) riding the chariot in the context of haloes points to an interpretation of this trope as some sort of halo.20

In the omen protases, the ominous phenomena described in the first example as a god in mourning and in the second as a god riding a chariot, refer, not to imag- ined mythological events, but to observable lunar phenomena, and thus, I would argue, the use of the language is metaphorical. These tropes functioned to describe particular visible effects-the former, a lunar eclipse represented by the mournful darkened face of the moon; the latter, apparently some type of halo, which was represented as a chariot.

Even in the cases where the celestial bodies' names duplicate the names of gods, i.e., moon, sun, or Venus, the celestial bodies cannot themselves be one and the same as the gods their namesakes. Were this the case, the personifications in the omen protases would be non- sensical and the figurative references merely substitutive. Saying the moon rides a chariot would be of no help in describing the appearance of the moon if indeed no distinction were made between the lunar manifestation of the moon god and the deity itself. The fact that other names besides those of the gods are used to des- ignate the planets, e.g., d30 instead of Sin for the moon, or dSAG.ME.GAR instead of Marduk for Jupiter, underscores the conceptual nuance that allows the deity and the physical object in the sky that represented or mani- fested the deity to be spoken of in different ways.

20 Another possibility is to interpret the chariot here as the constellation MUL.GIGIR / narkabtu. According to BPO 2, pp. 11-12, s.v. GIS.GIGIR and EN.ME.?AR.RA, the constellation of the chariot represents a number of stars in the constellations Per- seus and Taurus ((, o + Persei + northern stars of Taurus). But as the determinative MUL before GIGIR seems invariably to be written in the places where the star name is intended, and does not appear in the omen "the moon rides a chariot," the identification as a star name here is not at all secure. Elsewhere in Enama Anu Enlil, the verb rakabu means "(celestial bodies) conjoin," i.e., one star may "ride" or "mount" another: BPO 2 XII 12-13 [DIg MUL.MES-SuJ AN.TA r]it-ku-su KI.MIN U5.ME?, "If its upper stars are conjoined, variant: ride one on the other." Without indication that the GIGIR here is a star name, however, we are left with an image of the moon surrounded by a halo, expressed figuratively by reference to the moon god riding a chariot.

It should further be clear that in the case of the moon's chariot, the metaphor refers, not to the moon, but to the halo, just as, in the protasis "if the moon is surrounded by a river" (DIg 30 fD NIGIN Thompson Rep. 91:5 = SAA 8 93), a halo is described as having the appearance of a river. Similarly, extispicy abounds with metaphoric language whose referents stem from the appearance of the exta, e.g., the "finger," the "palace," or the "weapon," which denote certain features of the liver.21 In the example of the eclipse, however, the celestial body itself is anthropomorphized by the language used to describe its appearance.

The use of metaphor in the omens seems in every case to be an attempt to convey the appearance of something observed, likening the appearance of one thing to another that has visual associations. Some common understanding of the image of the moon god riding a chariot must underlie the use of that image to convey some feature of the moon's appearance. At least this is the limited extent to which we can determine the meaning of these metaphors. Any semantic extension beyond the merely descriptive depends upon recognition of culturally de- pendent elements to which we have little access (such as: why a chariot and not a wagon?).

In another example, a commentary to a protasis where the planet Venus "sports a beard" (ziqnu zaqnat) explains that su6 (ziqnu) is also readable as nabdtu "to become radiant." In this case, the scribes sought to explain the anthropomorphic image of a bearded goddess as an optical description, i.e., as the planet radiating brightness as though with a "beard" of light.22 By the

21 The metaphorical language in extispicy has its own special usage, however, in that the features of the liver designated by reference to objects in the physical world (e.g., palace, weapon, path, foot) seem to be so designated in order to correlate these features with certain predictions, such as the suc- cess of the king on campaign (based on the correlation "path" = troops on campaign). See M. T. Larsen, "The Mesopotamian Lukewarm Mind," 213-15, with literature given in the notes.

22 The "beard" of light in the Samas Hymn is problematic. Lambert BWL 126:18 reads mu-sah-mit ziq-nat ur-ri as "who sets aglow the beard of light," the interpretation duly recorded in CAD, s.v. ziqnu. However, E. Reiner, Your Thwarts in Pieces Your Mooring Rope Cut: Poetry from Babylonia and Assyria (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1985), 70, translates "Hastener of dawn's [.. .]," reading mugahmit as the S-participle of bamitu A "to hasten, be quick" (although according to CAD, the S-stem ought to be interpreted as "to send quickly, to be or deliver in good time," not impossible in the context), not as Lambert from hamaitu B "to burn, to set aglow."

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scribes' own testimony, the figurative language of the omen text is interpreted descriptively. The effective- ness of these tropes in descriptive usage depends upon a common understanding or a common conceptualization of what is being described. The tropes therefore function for us as indicators of an underlying conception of what is being observed. In each case where there is a personification, we can see that an appeal to the image of a deity can act as a means to physical description of a heavenly body. An attribute of a god, such as the beard of Istar, can be said of the celestial body which represents the god, namely Venus. The beard of Venus is therefore a figurative description for a radiance of the planet. Similarly, the image of the chariot of the moon god Sin is applied figuratively to the description of a lunar halo. The descriptive statement makes no sense in the context of celestial omens if it is interpreted literally, for then it no longer makes dual reference to the god and the phenomenon, but refers directly and singly to an attribute or an activity of a god. To be meaningful as an omen protasis, such a statement must refer in some way to a physical phenomenon.

One final argument for the metaphorical rather than substitutive, or literal, interpretation of the examples presented is based on the late occurrence of the metaphor of the moon god in mourning for a lunar eclipse. This time, the context is the Seleucid eclipse reports, which are strictly astronomical and have no overt connection with omens. In the eclipse reports alongside the term attalu (AN.GE6) "eclipse," the darkening of the moon is not infrequently expressed with the verb baku "to mourn" or "to weep." The expression for the du- ration of an eclipse occurs sometimes in the form baku u namaru (fR U ZALAG-ru), translatable as "darkening (lit. 'mourning') and clearing (lit. 'becoming light')."23 A parallel to this use of baku is found in the solar section of Enuma Anu Enlil, where Samas is said to "mourn," i.e., be in eclipse, at the end of the month.24 The relation of baku to lumun libbi and the words associated with psychological or emotional disturbance, e.g., addru and dalahu,25 used in the eclipse omens, is unmistakable.

23 See LBAT 1426 i 7'; LBAT 1427 obv. 4'; LBAT 1417 obv. iv 5; cf. LBAT 1421: 6'. See also, in the expression GAR fR U ZALAG "onset, totality (lit. "mourning"), and clearing," Sachs- Hunger, Diaries, vol. 1, no. 304 obv. 7'.

24 ACh Supp. 2 Samas 40:6 and ibid. 1, written IR. 25 Again in the bilingual about the demons causing a lunar

eclipse, see [... ib.t]a.lh sig.sig.ga.bi ba.ti: [.. . nal]-mir'-tum id-da-li-ih-ma sd-qu-um-mes i-me "his (Sin's) bright light became disturbed and he became mute" CT 16 20:96f., cited in CAD, s.v. dalahu mng.5.

Whether the mental image of the mourning of the moon god and/or sun god attested in the seventh-century omens persisted as far as the Seleucid period in Babylonian astronomy, or whether "mourning" had become a dead metaphor, one cannot say. The image of the moon god in mourning need not have survived for the metaphorical language, in this case the term baku (iR), to have continued as an idiomatic expression for the darkening of the moon. Idioms have traditionally been regarded as dead or frozen metaphors, and perhaps this is how we should understand this isolated term in the vocabulary of Late Babylonian astronomy, which no longer osten- sibly had anything to do with gods.26 If the expression for lunar or solar eclipse using terms linked with anthropomorphic feeling had not been metaphorical in the omen texts, i.e., did not refer to the phenomenon "eclipse" as a celestial manifestation of either Sin or Samas, but, rather, literally to the state of mind of those gods, I fail to see how such an expression would have had a meaningful survival in astronomical technical terminology.

The aim of this paper to this point has been to discuss -some aspects of the use of language in the omens that I see as bearing on the question of how the Babylonians perceived the celestial bodies vis-'a-vis the gods. My intention was to show through the analysis of a number of anthropomorphic tropes occurring in celestial omens that these figurative expressions, containing references to the actions or appearances of gods, functioned as metaphors to aid in the description of physical phenomena of celestial bodies.

I should acknowledge that I have made use here only of the so-called "comparison theory" of metaphor, the theory traceable to Aristotelian rhetoric and poetics, which some language philosophers think inadequate as a general theory of metaphor, insofar as the conditions for the comparison theory are necessary but not suffi- cient and therefore do not encompass the entire range of metaphor kinds.27 The Aristotelian definition of metaphor implies principles of analogy at work in the es- tablishment of a metaphorical connection between two

26 See Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., "Making Sense of Tropes," in Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 272.

27 See John R. Searle, "Metaphor," in Metaphor and Thought, 83-111. Discussion of what Searle regards as problematic about this theory, as an adequate "theory of metaphor," is on pp. 90-102. He sees the comparison theory as "muddled about the referential character of expressions used metaphorically" (p. 91).

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things. Metaphorical statements, at least according to the comparison theory, "involve a comparison or similarity between two or more objects"28 (emphasis in the ori- ginal), thereby presupposing the conceptual distinction between a perceived phenomenon and any other imag- ined or real phenomenon in terms of which it might be compared, described, and understood.

Analysis on this basis indicates that the expressions found in the omen protases discussed above are not statements about gods which substitute for statements about celestial phenomena, based on some putative interchangeable nature of the gods and the phenomena. The metaphorical expressions are better interpreted as referring to the phenomena in terms of the gods. Im- plied also is the necessary conceptual distinction between the phenomena and the gods, without which there can be no possibility of analogical relationships underlying the attested metaphorical references, such as the crown of Sin and the first visibility of the moon, Sin riding a chariot and the lunar halo, or the beard of Istar and the radiance of Venus.

The omens of Enuma Anu Enlil attest to the fact that the domain of natural phenomena was the subject of systematic empirical consideration, and usually without overt reference to gods. The descriptions of phenomena in the celestial divination corpus that make metaphorical references to deities suggest, however, that the heavenly bodies also had identities within the divine realm. Metaphors referring to Sin, Samas, or Istar to describe the appearance of the moon, sun, and Venus, respectively, evidence a view of the heavenly bodies as physical manifestations of gods, but evidence outside of the divination corpus attests to the fact that the conception of these Babylonians gods was not limited to those astral manifestations alone. Epithets referring, for example, to Sin as an astral manifestation, dkakkabu rabu "great star," or asib same elluti "one who dwells in the pure heavens," constitute but a small fraction of the range of epithets attested for this deity.29

The appearance of a celestial body could be described by appealing to an anthropomorphic image of the god

28 Ibid., p. 90, citing Language, Thought, and Culture, ed. P. Henle (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965). Aristotle, Rhetoric, tr. W. R. Roberts, and Poetics, tr. I. By- water, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 11: Rhetorica; De rhetorica ad Alexandrum; Poetica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

29 See K. Tallqvist, Akkadische Gotterepitheta (Studia Orien- talia, 7 (Helsinki: Societas Orientalis Fennica, 1938; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), 442-48.

with which it was associated without implying isomor- phic identity between celestial body and the god mani- fested by it. In the fact that the personifications and metaphors show a distinction between celestial bodies with their appearances as discrete phenomena on the one hand, and gods on the other, we find a persuasive argument for a claim that has often been made in studies of Mesopotamian divination, viz., that natural phenomena in omen protases were not viewed as agents but as indicators of the change predicted by the omen apo- doses.30 This claim may be explained in terms of the attribution of agency only to the gods, who were therefore not viewed as constituting the signs, but as produc- ing the signs.

On the basis of the evidence of the use of metaphors in celestial omina to describe physical phenomena, the possibility was raised above of our gaining some in- sight into the nature of Babylonian thought about nature and the gods and, by extension, into the conception of the world within which celestial divination provided the principal context for intellectual inquiry about nature, i.e., what we term science. The consideration of what the use of metaphor may mean for science and the history of scientific thought is not new. Thus Ortony states in his introduction to Metaphor and Thought: "A cen- tral presupposition of our culture is that the description and explanation of physical reality is a respectable and worthwhile enterprise-an enterprise that we call 'science.' Science is supposed to be characterized by pre- cision and the absence of ambiguity, and the language of science is assumed to be correspondingly precise and unambiguous-in short, literal."3' By such a criterion of language use, Babylonian celestial divination with its metaphorical descriptions of phenomena in terms of gods and the conception of nature implied by such use of language will not qualify as science.

But such a claim about science, in particular that it should have a special language, derives from the extreme position regarding language and science held by logical positivists, which even while it rapidly passed out of fashion continued to influence modern philosophy of science. Today, however, the extremely limited

30 This claim is usually made on the basis that if apotropaic rituals (namburbi) can undo the misfortune predicted by omens, the omens should not be thought of as bound by causality to their predicted events, but merely as indicators of the predicted events. Implied here too is that the appeal to change "fate" is made directly to the gods.

31 A. Ortony, "Metaphor, Language, and Thought," in Meta- phor and Thought, 1.

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notion that non-literal uses of language were inappro- priate to science because they were not clear, objective, or empirical, and that, consequently, metaphor had no place in science, is no longer maintained by philosophers of science; but the discussion of the nature and function of metaphor in the creation of scientific models and theories continues.32 This discussion bears on the history of science in terms of the fact that if metaphor functions in certain ways within science, then the nature of its use can become a criterion in differentiating science from other forms of intellectual activity in a variety of historical contexts.

Because most discussion of the history of science begins with the Greeks, the relation between language and thought as a means of defining where science di- verges from magic took shape with reference to Greek sources.33 And just as the extreme position on the function of metaphor in (modern) scientific discourse was modified over the course of the history of its discussion within the philosophy of science, G. E. R. Lloyd commented on the danger of exaggerated distinctions as absolute criteria applied in the analysis of historical texts as well, especially on the basis of modern categories such as magic, myth, and science, as well as the distinctions in the mentalities that supposedly correspond to them. He points out that

the Greek concepts [science, magic, myth, and the opposition between the literal and the metaphorical] in question were often, even generally, made to play a distinct and explicit polemical role. Once that is taken into account we can appreciate that the contrasts drawn for the purposes of polemic were often over-drawn. This is true

32 See Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1966); D. Gentner, "Are Scientific Analogies Metaphors?" in Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives, ed. D. Miall (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1982), 106-32; J. Martin and R. Harre, "Metaphor in Sci- ence," ibid., 89-105; N. Nersessian, Faraday to Einstein: Con- structing Meaning in Scientific Theories (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer, 1984); and D. Gentner and M. Jeziorski, "Historical Shifts in the Use of Analogy in Science," in The Psychology of Science and Metascience, ed. B. Gholson, A. Houts, R. A. Niemeyer, and W. R. Shadish (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).

33 G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979); idem, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), esp. chs. 1, "Men- talities, Metaphors and the Foundations of Science," and 2, "Magic and Science, Ancient and Modern."

of the opposition between the literal and metaphorical, for instance, and again of the contrast between myth and magic on the one hand, and science and philosophy on the other. Certainly what, in practice, emerging Greek science and philosophy continued to have in common with the traditional forms of knowledge that they were aiming to replace is often quite as striking as the points where they diverged from previous modes of thought, even though in one respect, the degree of explicitness and self-consciousness of the inquiries concerned, those differences were considerable.34

The criterion of metaphorical language has been employed in Brian Vickers' study of analogy in Renaissance magic, in which he claimed that in the "scientific," as opposed to the "magical" tradition, "a clear distinction is made between words and things and between literal and metaphorical language."35 In Vickers' terms, "the occult sciences' double process of reification and substi- tution, formulating ideas as essences, then making them identical and exchangeable, inevitably broke down the distinction between metaphorical and literal."36 Vickers juxtaposes a "modern" ability to distinguish "mental activities" and "material things"37 and a consequent ability to relate the two, on the one hand, with "traditional thought," on the other, in which "everything in the universe is underpinned by spiritual forces, 'words and things' are both part of a single reality, neither material nor immaterial,'"38 and within which no analogies but only concrete (literal) identities are possible. On this basis, an extrapolation from forms of intellectual culture to modes of thought was made such that practitioners of magic were seen as not recognizing the discrete entities basic to relational metaphorical thought, but as merging the ingredients of metaphors into literal identities. He illustrates this claim with reference to Para- celsus, explaining: "It is generally recognized that the whole of Paracelsus' system is based on the distinction between macrocosm and microcosm. Yet where many thinkers treated the relationship analogically, Paracelsus

34 G. E. R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities, 7-8. 35 Brian Vickers, "Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580-1680," in Occult and Scientific Men- talities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984; repr. 1986), 95.

36 Ibid., 127. 37 Ibid., 96. 38 Ibid., in which he is quoting from R. Horton, "African

Traditional Thought and Modern Science," Africa 37 (1967), repr. in B. R. Wilson, Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), 157.

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collapsed the two poles into one. Man does not merely resemble the macrocosm, he is the macrocosm. The move from analogy to identity is total."39

The dichotomous and often evolutionary scheme of magical versus scientific modes of thought underlying Vickers' argument parallels the speculation of Frankfort in Before Philosophy, both of which turn on the question of whether or not there is evidence for relational thought in myths and magic. The dichotomy of "mentalities," with its long intellectual patrimony, from J. G. Frazer, L. Levy-Bruhl, and B. Malinowski to E. Cas- sirer,40 has been criticized from an anthropological perspective precisely on the grounds that it is a mistake to view traditional (magical) thought as incapable of making analogies or of expressing relations by the use of metaphors. This criticism has been best articulated by Tambiah:

Insofar as Levi-Strauss has demonstrated the logical and relational character of mythic thought, Cassirer's basic dichotomy of modes of thought disappears. And if it can be demonstrated that primitive magic is based on true relational metaphorical thinking, we shall ex- plode the classical theory which postulates that magic is based on the belief in a real identity between word and thing. The basic fallacy of linguists and philosophers who search for the origins of the magical attitude to words is their prior assumption and acceptance that the primitive has in fact such an attitude. This axiom they have derived principally from Frazer, and indeed from Malinowski, who had affirmed the truth of this classical assertion on the basis of his fieldwork. It would perhaps have been safer for the linguists to have held fast to their knowledge of how language works and to have questioned whether anthropologists had correctly re- ported primitive thought.41

I have attempted in this paper to argue for the use of metaphorical language, and the implications of that use

39 Ibid., 126. 40 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and

Religion, part I, vol. 1: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, 3rd ed. (London: MacMillan, 1911); L. L6vy-Bruhl, La Mentalite primitive (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1922), tr. Lilian Clare as Primitive Mentality (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923); B. Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954); E. Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1953).

41 S. J. Tambiah, Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), ch. 1, "The Magical Power of Words," 34.

for abstract analogical thinking, in Babylonian celestial omina. The anthropomorphic character of the Baby- lonian metaphors bears relation to elements of Greco- Roman and later astrology. In my view, however, the way in which the metaphors are constituted in the Baby- lonian omina is not consistent with Vickers' description of metaphors in the Renaissance material, in which, according to his reading, their true metaphorical status is diminished by literal identifications between the referents within the metaphors.42 Were the Babylonian metaphors consistent with this interpretation, the distinction between the elements in the metaphors referring, for example, to lunar phenomena would be lost. Sin, the moon god, as the divine force associated with the moon, would be regarded as identical and indistinguishable from Sin the moon, that is, the visible lunar disk in the sky. Interpreted this way, the omen protasis in which the first visibility of the moon is referred to as the moon god Sin wearing a crown (Sin aga apir) cannot be speak- ing (or thinking) metaphorically, but only literally, and consequently, the protasis would no longer refer to the phenomenon of first visibility but only to the anthropomorphic image of the moon god with his crown. This is precisely the position regarding metaphor and relational thought held by Frankfort in Before Philosophy, which is contravened by the requirements of celestial omina to describe in the protases those physical phenomena considered ominous.

The construction of metaphors relating two discrete entities by virtue of some connection between them attests both to the capacity for relational, abstract thought, and to the particular context within which such connec- tions have meaning. The contexts in which the Babylo-

42 In a more recent treatment, however, Vickers loosened his position on metaphor in magic, at least in so far as he takes as given for the occult sciences (astrology, alchemy, numerol- ogy, iatromathematics, and natural magic) the "use of analogies, correspondences, and relations among apparently discrete elements in man and the universe." Brian Vickers, "On the Function of Analogy in the Occult," in Hermeticism qnd the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (Wash- ington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library; London: Asso- ciated University Presses, 1988), 265-92 (the quotation is from p. 265). Here he focuses on the nature and function of these metaphors, but his analysis reflects the positivistic ten- dency, emerging in contemporary (the period between 1580 and 1680) critics of the practitioners of the occult, to view the language of magic as misguided and confused and the form of thought reflected in the magical tradition as irrational and inferior to that of empirical science.

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nian metaphors were meaningful are both small, as for example that which would explain the particular accou- trements of gods, such as the crown and the chariot, and large, as that which represents the conception of the universe in which associations between anthropomorphic images of deities and certain celestial bodies is possible. The present state of our research into Mesopotamian divination, magic, and cosmology affords us only par- tial and fragmentary understanding of either the smaller or the larger systems of ideas reflected in the omen

texts. In basic terms, however, it seems sure that the conception of the world forming the context for the metaphors attested in Enima Anu Enlil is one of gods and their associated domains in nature (Sin with the moon and lunar phenomena, Istar with Venus, and so on). Any attempt to correlate this "magical" cosmology to a particular mode of thought or "mentality" must take into account the function of the attested metaphors, which was principally to describe observed realities in the physical world.

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"Personifications and Metaphors in Babylonian Celestial Omina" - Rochberg

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