CHAPTER V

CHALDEA
/^HALDEA — that is to say, Babylonia and \^4 Assyria — is, like Persia, the land of the Magi and is commonly regarded as the classic home of occultism; but here again, as we saw in the case of Egypt, the legend is hardly in agree- ment with the historic reality.
It seems a priori that Chaldea should pos- sess a peculiar interest for us; not because it is likely to teach us anything that we have not learned from India, Egypt, or Persia, to which it was tributary, but because it was probably the principal source of the cabala, which was itself the great fountainhead from which the occultism of the middle ages, as it has come down to us, was fed.
It was hoped that the discovery of the key to the cuneiform inscriptions — a discovery scarcely more than fifty years old, — and the deciphering of the inscriptions of Nineveh and Babylon, would result in valuable revelations concerning the mysteries of the Chaldean reli- gion. But these inscriptions, which date from 2000, 3750, and in one instance (preserved in 121
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the British Museum) 4000 years before Christ, and whose interpretation moreover is far more uncertain and controversial than that of the hieroglyphs or the Sanskrit texts, have yielded us only royal biographies, inventories of con- quests, incantatory formulas, litanies, and psalms which served as models for the Hebrew psalms. From these we perceive that the basis of the very primitive religion of the Su- mirs or Sumerians and the Accads or Acca- dians who peopled lower Chaldea before the Semitic conquest was one of magic and sorcery. This was followed by a naturalistic polytheism, which the conquering Semites, less civilized than those whom they had conquered, adopted in part, until, about two thousand years before our era, having won the upper hand, they grad- ually reduced the primitive gods to the rank of mere attributes of Baal, the supreme divi- nity, the sun-god.
These inscriptions, then, have taught us noth- ing concerning the secret — if there is a secret — of the Chaldean religion, and have not con- tributed anything of any value to the informa- tion already in our possession, thanks to cer- tain fragments of Berosus, whose accuracy they have more than once enabled us to verify.
Berosus, as the reader may remember, was a Chaldean astromer, a priest of Belus in Baby- lon, who about the year 280 B. c. — shortly, 122
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that, is, after the death of Alexander — wrote in Greek a history of his country. As he could read cuneiform characters he was able to profit by the archives of the temple of Babylon. Un- fortunately the work of Berosus is almost en- tirely lost; all that is left of it is a few frag- ments collected by Josephus, Eusebius, Tatian, Pliny, Vitruvius, and Seneca. This loss is all the more regrettable in that Berosus, who seems to have been a serious and conscientious his- torian, declared that he had had access to doc- uments attributed to the beings who preceded the appearance of man on the earth; and his history, according to Eusebius, covered 2,150,- ooo years. We have also lost his cosmogony, and with it all the astronomical and astrologi- cal science of Chaldea, which was the great secret of the Babylonian Magi, whose zodiac dates back 6700 years. We have only the treatise known as "Observations of Bel," trans- lated into Greek by Berosus, though the text that has come down to us is of much later date.
The few pages that are all that is left us of the Chaldean cosmology contain a sort of anti- cipation of the Darwinian theories of the origin of the world and of man. The first god and the first man were a fish-god and a fish-man — which is, by the way, confirmed by embry- ology— born of the vast cosmic ocean; and na- 123
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ture, when she attempted to create, produced at first anomalous monsters unable to repro- duce themselves. As for their astrology, ac- cording to Professor Sayce, the learned profes- sor of Assyriology at Oxford, it seems to be chiefly based on the axiom, post hoc ergo prop- ter hoc; which is to say that when two events oc- cur in sequence the second is regarded as the re- sult of the first; hence the care with which the astrologers used to observe celestial pheno- mena in order that they might empirically fore- tell the future.
To sum up, we are very imperfectly ac- quainted with the official religion of Assyria and Babylonia, whose gods appear to be rather barbaric. This religion does not become more enlightened or more interesting until after the conquest of Cyrus, which brought into the coun- try the Zoroastrian and Hindu doctrines, or confirmed and completed those that had, in all probability, already found their way into the secrecy of the temples; for Chaldea had al- ways been the great crossroads on which the theologies of India, Egypt, and Persia were of necessity wont to meet. Thus it was that these doctrines found their way into the Bible and the cabala, and thence into Christianity.
But as far as the origin of religion is con- cerned, we must admit that the authentic docu- ments recently discovered teach us virtually 124
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nothing, and that all that has been said of the esoterism and the mysteries of Chaldea is based merely upon legends or writings that are no- toriously apocryphal.
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