The cosmogonical significance of the Babylonian myth may have been an after-thought, the early philosophers picturing the creation of the world on the analogy of the change from winter to summer.
But if the combat of Marduk and Tiamat was primarily a mythical description of the Babylonian spring, it would seem that its cosmogonical significance as an account of creation must have been an after-thought. The early philosophers who meditated on the origin of things may have pictured to themselves the creation or evolution of the world on the analogy of the great changes which outside the tropics pass over the face of nature every year. In these changes it is not hard to discern or to imagine a conflict between two hostile forces or principles, the principle of construction or of life and the principle of destruction or of death, victory inclining now to the one and now to the other, according as winter yields to spring or summer fades into autumn. It would be natural enough to suppose that the same mighty rivals which still wage war on each other had done so from the beginning, and that the formation of the universe as it now exists had resulted from the shock of their battle. On this theory the creation of the world is repeated every spring, and its dissolution is threatened every autumn: the one is proclaimed by summer's gay heralds, the opening flowers; the other is whispered by winter's sad harbingers, the yellow leaves. Here as elsewhere the old creed is echoed by the poet's fancy:—
“Non alios prima crescentis origine mundi
Inluxisse dies aliumve habuisse tenorem
Crediderim: ver illud erat, ver magnus agebat
Orbis, et hibernis parcebant flatibus Euri:
Cum primae lucem pecudes hausere, virumque
Ferrea progenies duris caput extulit arvis,
Inmissaeque ferae silvis et sidera caelo.”[336]
Thus ceremonies intended to hasten the departure of winter are in a sense attempts to repeat the creation of the world.