Primitive beliefs regarding the stars were of similar character in various parts of the world.  But the importance which they assumed in local mythologies depended in the first place on local phenomena.  On the northern Eur-Asian steppes, for instance, where stars vanished during summer’s blue nights, and were often obscured by clouds in winter, they did not impress men’s minds so persistently and deeply as in Babylonia, where for the greater part of the year they gleamed in darkness through a dry transparent atmosphere with awesome intensity.  The development of an elaborate system of astral myths, besides, was only possible in a country where the people had attained to a high degree of civilization, and men enjoyed leisure and security to make observations and compile records.  It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Babylonia was the cradle of astronomy.  But before this science had destroyed the theory which it was fostered to prove, it lay smothered for long ages in the debris of immemorial beliefs.  It is necessary, therefore, in dealing with Babylonian astral myths to endeavour to approach within reasonable distance of the point of view, or points of view, of the people who framed them.

Babylonian religious thought was of highly complex character.  Its progress was ever hampered by blended traditions.  The earliest settlers in the Tigro-Euphrates valley no doubt imported many crude beliefs which they had inherited from their Palaeolithic ancestors—­the modes of thought which were the moulds of new theories arising from new experiences.  When consideration is given to the existing religious beliefs of various peoples throughout the world, in low stages of culture, it is found that the highly developed creeds of Babylonia, Egypt and other countries where civilization flourished were never divested wholly of their primitive traits.

Among savage peoples two grades of religious ideas have been identified, and classified as Naturalism and Animism.  In the plane of Naturalism the belief obtains that a vague impersonal force, which may have more than one manifestation and is yet manifested in everything, controls the world and the lives of human beings.  An illustration of this stage of religious consciousness is afforded by Mr. Risley, who, in dealing with the religion of the jungle dwellers of Chota Nagpur, India, says that “in most cases the indefinite something which they fear and attempt to propitiate is not a person at all in any sense of the word; if one must state the case in positive terms, I should say that the idea which lies at the root of their religion is that of a power rather than many powers".[303]

Traces of Naturalism appear to have survived in Sumeria in the belief that “the spiritual, the Zi, was that which manifested life....  The test of the manifestation of life was movement."[304] All things that moved, it was conceived in the plane of Naturalism, possessed “self power”; the river was a living thing, as was also the fountain; a stone that fell from a hill fell of its own accord; a tree groaned because the wind caused it to suffer pain.  This idea that inanimate objects had conscious existence survived in the religion of the Aryo-Indians.  In the Nala story of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the disconsolate wife Damayanti addresses a mountain when searching for her lost husband: