Now we leave the prehistoric era to enter one of the earliest parts of the human historical record. Ur was a great city, but its Moon deity was not a woman…
They live in a great city on the banks of the River Euphrates, near its mouth at the coast. It’s one of the very first human cities, and they dedicate it to me, Nanna, the god of the Moon. I’m an old man with a long beard, yet also the number 30 – nights in the lunar month during which I travel in my nocturnal barge from east to west. Sometimes I ride on the back of a winged bull, sometimes upon the crescent moon. I’m wise, enigmatic, high born. They call me shining and radiant.
I’m important to them still, after so many Ice Age millennia, despite the profound changes their societies have recently undergone. I, the Moon, provide the name of their new city. I, the Moon, mark the beginning of their year, which is set at the first new Moon after the spring equinox. In due course the lunar month is divided by Babylonians into four quarters called shabbattu, from which the Hebrews derive their Sabbath every seven days. The week is the eventual consequence…
Twenty thousand years before Ur, in a different land on a different continent, they gaze in awe at my full, blood red face. Their planet lies precisely between Sun and Moon. In Ur, such eclipses are regarded as a bad omen, causing distress. To recognise and remember such terrible events they write the myth of the eclipse. This they title the Seven Deadly Sins, because I’m attacked by seven evil demons, making me appear discoloured and cloudy: red, pink, unwholesome in the sky. At lunar eclipse they sing prayers and make sacrifices in order to stop me from being attacked again. But those prayers never work.
Their deities are like them in form: human shaped. Gods and goddesses may have awesome powers of the storm, of lightning and thunder, of flood, fire and destruction, but they always have an incarnation formed as a man or a woman. This anthropomorphism indicates that the people of Ur see the world in terms of themselves. Theirs is a selfish view, limited to comparatively small mental horizons, albeit that such selfishness is an accident of evolution and psychological development.
And they are no longer at one with the natural world. Moreover, they know they have lost something. An inexplicable cultural yearning affects them, seeping into the heart of their legends. Deep in myth and fireside tale they know they were united with nature in the past, during the golden age. Then, they felt that aurochs, ibex, deer and mouflons were their siblings. Now they see herds of domesticated animals in wooden pens, and it feels so different. Somehow, the systematic cultivation of grains and grapes, and the domestication of animals in their vicinity has introduced a disjunction between themselves and the wilderness. A new opposition exists in their minds which never existed before: wild/civilised. Before, in the golden age, there was no gulf between sacred and profane, since every act, object and being was both. So now there’s another opposition: sacred/profane. This separation troubles them. To try to understand it, they tell tales of a paradise in the distant past from which they have departed. It’s their tragic, profound comment on the changes in their cultures and societies since the end of the Ice Age.
In that golden age, I was the Moon: feminine, perpetual, always in motion. Now I’m a man: masculine, a bull, the keeper of fates and wisdom – a male, possessing the word, that wonderful, transformative invention.
