This reduces the area in which seven is thought to have sacred power to a single continuous tract comprising Europe, the culturally advanced portions of Asia and the East Indies, and such parts of Africa as have come under Eur-Asiatic influence. It is significant that seven was devoid of special significance in ancient Egypt. This circumscribed distribution suggests diffusion from a single originating center. Where this may have been, there is no direct evidence to show, but there are indications that it lay in Babylonia. Here mathematics, astrology, and divination flourished at an early time. Since the art of foretelling the issue of events from examination of a victim’s liver spread from Babylonia to Italy on one side and to Borneo on the other, it is the more likely that the equally ancient attribution of mystic virtue to seven may have undergone the same diffusion. In fact, the two practices may have traveled as part of a “complex.” The Greeks and Hebrews are virtually out of question as originators because they were already thinking in terms of seven at a time when they were only receiving culture elements from Babylonia without giving anything in return.
123. Babylonian Discovery of the Planets
The Babylonians, together with the Egyptians, were also the first astronomers. The Egyptians turned their interest to the sun and the year, and devised the earliest accurate solar calendar. The Babylonians lagged behind in this respect, adhering to a cumbersome lunar-solar calendar. But they acquired more information as to other heavenly phenomena: the phases of the moon, eclipses, the courses of the planets. They devised the zodiac and learned to half predict eclipses. It is true that their interest in these realms was not scientific in the modern sense, but sacerdotal and magical. An eclipse was a misfortune, an expected eclipse that did not “come off,” a cause for rejoicing. Yet this superstitious interest did lead the Babylonians to genuine astronomical discoveries.
Among these was the observation that five luminaries besides the sun and moon move regularly across the heavens, visible to the naked eye and independent of the host of fixed stars: the planets that we call Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This impressive fact must have significance, they felt, and from anthropocentric reasons they found the significance in the influence of these bodies on the fortunes of men. This was the beginning of astrology, which charlatans and dupes still practise among ourselves, but which in its youth represented one of the triumphs of civilized knowledge. The planets were identified with gods by the Babylonians, at any rate named after gods.
It is even probable that the ancient priest-astronomer-magicians were driven to distinguish the full set of observable planets by their desire to attain the full number seven. It is not an obvious thing by any means that the all-illuminating sun should be set on a par with moving stars that at times are no more conspicuous than some fixed ones. No people unaffected by the Babylonian precedent has ever hit upon the strange device of reckoning sun and moon as stars. Then, too, Mercury is perceptible with difficulty, on account of its proximity to the sun. It is said that great astronomers of a few centuries ago sometimes never in their lives saw this innermost of the planets with naked eye, at least in northern latitudes. It seems possible therefore that its Babylonian discovery may have been hastened by an eagerness to attain the perfect seven for the number of the traveling bodies.
124. Greek and Egyptian Contributions: the Astrological Combination
After the conquest of western Asia by Alexander, the Hellenistic Greeks took over the undifferentiated Babylonian astrology-astronomy and developed it into a science. They for the first time determined the distance or order of the seven luminaries from the earth, and determined it as correctly as was possible as long as it was assumed that our earth formed the center of the universe. Ptolemy—the astronomer, not the king—placed Saturn as the most outward, next Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon.
This scientific advance, the west Asiatic astrologers again took hold of and brought into connection with the hours of the day. For this purpose they employed not the old Babylonian division of the day and night into twelve hours—which had long since passed over to the Greeks—but the Egyptian reckoning of twenty-four. This was possible because the Greek discoveries were made in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.
Each of the twenty-four hours in turn was assigned by the astrologers to a planet in the Ptolemaic order, beginning with Saturn. As there were only the seven, the cycle began over again on the eighth hour, and in the same way the fifteenth and twenty-second were “dominated” by Saturn. This gave the twenty-third to Jupiter, the twenty-fourth to Mars, and the twenty-fifth—the first of the next day, to the Sun. This second day was thought to be specially under the influence of the planet of its initial hour, the Sun, as the first was under the influence of its initial hour, that of Saturn. With the continuance of the count, the Moon would become dominant of the first hour of the third day, and so on through the repeated series, the remaining planets emerging in the sequence Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus; whereupon, the cycle having been exhausted, it would begin all over again with Saturn’s day—Saturday, as we still call it—and its successors Sun’s day and Moon’s day.