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122 the Mahhu “who could read the signs,” and the Baru— “Truth-tellers’—who “understood mysteries and divine signs.” A special priest, the Zagiqu, was charged with con- veying the divine words to the king. Then at the head of those astronomer-astrologer priests was the Urigallu, the Great Priest, who was a holy man, a magician, and a physi- cian, whose white vestments were elaborately color-trimmed at the hems. The discovery of some seventy tablets that formed a con- tinuous series of observations and their meaning, named after the opening words Enuma Anu Enlil, revealed both the transition from Sumerian astronomy and the existence of oracular formulas that dictated what a phenomenon meant. In time a host of diviners, dream interpreters, fortune-tell- ers, and the like joined the hierarchy, but they were in the king’s rather than the gods’ service. In time the celestial observations degraded to astrological omens for king and country—predicting war, tranquility, overthrows, long life or death, abundance or pestilences, divine blessings or godly wrath. But in the beginning the celestial observations were purely astronomical and were of prime interest to the god— Marduk—and only derivatively to king and people. It was not by chance that a Kalu priest specialized in watching Enlil’s Constellation of the Bull for any untoward phenomena, for the main purpose of the Esagil-as-observa- tory was to track the heavens zodiacally and keep an eye on Celestial Time. The fact that significant events prior to the nuclear blast happened in seventy-two-year intervals, and continued to do so afterward (see above and earlier chapters), suggests that the zodiacal clock, in which it took seventy-two years for a Precessional shift of one degree, continued to be observed and adhered to. It is clear from all the astronomical (and astrological) texts from Babylon that its astronomer-priests retained the Sume- rian division of the heavens into three Ways or paths, each occupying sixty degrees of the celestial arc: the Way of Enlil for the northern skies, the Way of Ea for the southern skies, and the Way of Anu as the central band (Fig. 53). It was in THE END OF DAYS