Message #33862

[Bianca]

This syntactical form occurs in the majority of divinatory and "scientific" treatises, including the "codes of law," that of Hammurabi notwithstanding, in which the protasis announces the crime and the apodosis the corresponding punishment. One reads in a Babylonian manual, "Celestial signs, like those which appear on earth, give us indications." [19] 

The interpretative statement is at first an observation, that of the experience accumulated by generations of experts and observers. Then it becomes a law and an imperative, to which the community and the sovereign himself must become subject. Above all, it is a possibility which reserves to the domain of experts a margin of latitude in its application and interpretation.

      The astrologer of that time, the tupshar Enûma Anu Enlil, was a sort of magistrate in the service of Enlil, charged with interpreting the divine mysteries. He did not believe in a strict astral influence. Moreover, Anu is a mysterious god, inscrutable, hardly accessible.

The astrologer-astronomer was in addition complemented by the ashipu, a conjurer-healer dependent on Ea, whose function was to engage procedures for exorcism designed to mitigate the ineluctable quality of destiny.

A millenium and a half before the Carneadean polemic, the first Akkadian astrology was already well on the way to putting into place the fatalistic character ascribed to astrological doctrines which followed later.