Like the Egyptian Osiris, the Babylonian Merodach was a highly complex deity.  He was the son of Ea, god of the deep; he died to give origin to human life when he commanded that his head should be cut off so that the first human beings might be fashioned by mixing his blood with the earth; he was the wind god, who gave “the air of life”; he was the deity of thunder and the sky; he was the sun of spring in his Tammuz character; he was the daily sun, and the planets Jupiter and Mercury as well as Sharru (Regulus); he had various astral associations at various seasons.  Ishtar, the goddess, was Iku (Capella), the water channel star, in January-February, and Merodach was Iku in May-June.  This strange system of identifying the chief deity with different stars at different periods, or simultaneously, must not be confused with the monotheistic identification of him with other gods.  Merodach changed his forms with Ishtar, and had similarly many forms.  This goddess, for instance, was, even when connected with one particular heavenly body, liable to change.  According to a tablet fragment she was, as the planet Venus, “a female at sunset and a male at sunrise[311]”—­that is, a bisexual deity like Nannar of Ur, the father and mother deity combined, and Isis of Egypt.  Nannar is addressed in a famous hymn: 

    Father Nannar, Lord, God Sin, ruler among the gods....
    Mother body which produceth all things.... 
    Merciful, gracious Father, in whose hand the life of the whole
        land is contained.

One of the Isis chants of Egypt sets forth, addressing Osiris: 

    There cometh unto thee Isis, lady of the horizon, who hath
        begotten herself alone in the image of the gods.... 
    She hath taken vengeance before Horus, the woman who was made a
        male by her father Osiris.[312]

Merodach, like Osiris-Sokar, was a “lord of many existences”, and likewise “the mysterious one, he who is unknown to mankind[313]”.  It was impossible for the human mind “a greater than itself to know”.

Evidence has not yet been forthcoming to enable us to determine the period at which the chief Babylonian deities were identified with the planets, but it is clear that Merodach’s ascendancy in astral form could not have occurred prior to the rise of that city god of Babylon as chief of the pantheon by displacing Enlil.  At the same time it must be recognized that long before the Hammurabi age the star-gazers of the Tigro-Euphrates valley must have been acquainted with the movements of the chief planets and stars, and, no doubt, they connected them with seasonal changes as in Egypt, where Isis was identified with Sirius long before the Ptolemaic age, when Babylonian astronomy was imported.  Horus was identified not only with the sun but also with Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.[314] Even the primitive Australians, as has been indicated, have their star myths; they refer to the stars Castor and Pollux as two young men, like the ancient Greeks, while the African Bushmen assert that these stars are two girls.  It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the prehistoric Sumerians were exact astronomers.  Probably they were, like the Aryo-Indians of the Vedic period, “not very accurate observers".[315]