The various Babylonian deities who were identified with the planets had their characters sharply defined as members of an organized pantheon.  But before this development took place certain of the prominent heavenly bodies, perhaps all the planets, were evidently regarded as manifestations of one deity, the primeval Tammuz, who was a form of Ea, or of the twin deities Ea and Anu.  Tammuz may have been the “sevenfold one” of the hymns.  At a still earlier period the stars were manifestations of the Power whom the jungle dwellers of Chota Nagpur attempt to propitiate—­the “world soul” of the cultured Brahmans of the post-Vedic Indian Age.  As much is suggested by the resemblances which the conventionalized planetary deities bear to Tammuz, whose attributes they symbolized, and by the Egyptian conception that the sun, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars were manifestations of Horus.  Tammuz and Horus may have been personifications of the Power or World Soul vaguely recognized in the stage of Naturalism.

The influence of animistic modes of thought may be traced in the idea that the planets and stars were the ghosts of gods who were superseded by their sons.  These sons were identical with their fathers; they became, as in Egypt, “husbands of their mothers”.  This idea was perpetuated in the Aryo-Indian Laws of Manu, in which it is set forth that “the husband, after conception by his wife, becomes an embryo and is born again of her[322]”.  The deities died every year, but death was simply change.  Yet they remained in the separate forms they assumed in their progress round “the wide circle of necessity”.  Horus was remembered as various planets—­as the falcon, as the elder sun god, and as the son of Osiris; and Tammuz was the spring sun, the child, youth, warrior, the deity of fertility, and the lord of death (Orion-Nergal), and, as has been suggested, all the planets.

The stars were also the ghosts of deities who died daily.  When the sun perished as an old man at evening, it rose in the heavens as Orion, or went out and in among the stars as the shepherd of the flock, Jupiter, the planet of Merodach in Babylonia, and Attis in Asia Minor.  The flock was the group of heavenly spirits invisible by day, the “host of heaven”—­manifestations or ghosts of the emissaries of the controlling power or powers.

The planets presided over various months of the year.  Sin (the moon) was associated with the third month; it also controlled the calendar; Ninip (Saturn) was associated with the fourth month, Ishtar (Venus) with the sixth, Shamash (the sun) with the seventh, Merodach (Jupiter) with the eighth, Nergal (Mars) with the ninth, and a messenger of the gods, probably Nebo (Mercury), with the tenth.

Each month was also controlled by a zodiacal constellation.  In the Creation myth of Babylon it is stated that when Merodach engaged in the work of setting the Universe in order he “set all the great gods in their several stations”, and “also created their images, the stars of the Zodiac,[323] and fixed them all” (p. 147).