in Babylonia, where for the greater part of the year they gleamed in
darkness through a dry transparent atmosphere with awesome intensity.
The development of an elaborate system of astral myths, besides, was
only possible in a country where the people had attained to a high
degree of civilization, and men enjoyed leisure and security to make
observations and compile records. It is not surprising, therefore, to
find that Babylonia was the cradle of astronomy. But before this
science had destroyed the theory which it was fostered to prove, it
lay smothered for long ages in the debris of immemorial beliefs. It is
necessary, therefore, in dealing with Babylonian astral myths to
endeavour to approach within reasonable distance of the point of view,
or points of view, of the people who framed them.

Babylonian religious thought was of highly complex character. Its
progress was ever hampered by blended traditions. The earliest
settlers in the Tigro-Euphrates valley no doubt imported many crude
beliefs which they had inherited from their Palaeolithic
ancestors--the modes of thought which were the moulds of new theories
arising from new experiences. When consideration is given to the
existing religious beliefs of various peoples throughout the world, in
low stages of culture, it is found that the highly developed creeds of
Babylonia, Egypt and other countries where civilization flourished
were never divested wholly of their primitive traits.

Among savage peoples two grades of religious ideas have been
identified, and classified as Naturalism and Animism. In the plane of
Naturalism the belief obtains that a vague impersonal force, which may
have more than one manifestation and is yet manifested in everything,
controls the world and the lives of human beings. An illustration of
this stage of religious consciousness is afforded by Mr. Risley, who,
in dealing with the religion of the jungle dwellers of Chota Nagpur,
India, says that "in most cases the indefinite something which they
fear and attempt to propitiate is not a person at all in any sense of
the word; if one must state the case in positive terms, I should say
that the idea which lies at the root of their religion is that of a
power rather than many powers".[303]

Traces of Naturalism appear to have survived in Sumeria in the belief
that "the spiritual, the Zi, was that which manifested life.... The
test of the manifestation of life was movement."[304] All things that
m