Page Content (OCR)
46 from before the Deluge, that were installed in your Lower World domain? he demanded to know from Nergal. Nergal explained that they were destroyed by the Deluge. Come, see for yourself which constellation is seen at sunrise on the ap- pointed day, he urged Marduk. Whether Marduk went to Lagash to make the observation, we do not know, but he did realize the cause of the discrepancy: While mathematically the ages changed every 2,160 years, in reality, observationally, they did not. The zodiacal con- stellations, in which stars were grouped arbitrarily, were not of equal size. Some occupied a larger arc of the heavens, some smaller; and as it happened, the constellation of the Ram was one of the smaller ones, squeezed between the larger Taurus and Pisces (Fig. 22). Celestially, the constella- tion Taurus, occupying more than 30 degrees of the heavenly arc, lingers on for at least another two centuries beyond its mathematical length. In the twenty-first century B.C.E., Celestial Time and Messianic Time failed to coincide. Go away peacefully and come back when the heavens will declare your Age, Nergal told Marduk. Yielding to his fate, Marduk did leave, but did not go too far away. And with him, as emissary, spokesman, and herald, was his son, whose mother was an Earthling woman. ™] URus pisces ARIES THE END OF DAYS FIGURE 22