How the Babylonians Protected Themselves against Calamities Announced by Omens

The Babylonians believed that they could detect indications of positive or negative future events in both unusual as well as everyday occurrences in the behaviour of animals, the appearance of plants or men, the movements of the stars and the planets, the condition of the sun and the moon, and all manner of metereological phenomena. Thousands of such omens were set down in countless works which drew on observations, experiences, and traditions, which themselves were centuries, perhaps even millennia old. To each omen a meaning was assigned. Now we should not, as Bruno Meissner once did, brand this 'prophetic science' as 'horrible superstition'. For such collections of omens helped to save the individual's future as well as that of the community from the dominion of acts which were uncontrollable, incomprehensible, and thus incapable of being provided against, in brief from the forces of chaos, which the Babylonians feared more than anything else. Omens of all kinds allowed them to extend into the future the certainty of a reality, which for us only the present possesses. The psychological effects which the forecasting of the future had on those who believed must by no means be underestimated: an ill-defined apprehensiveness in the face of the menaces of an uncertain future wherein at its worst one is at the mercy of every chaotic power imaginable, gives way to a delimited fear of a known and hence understandable threat. Such fear can be controlled since it refers to concrete, familiar, perhaps even already experienced events.