The cosmology

THE COSMOLOGY

He supposes that the beginning of all things was a dark and condensed windy air, or a breeze of thick air and a Chaos turbid and black as Erebus: and that these were unbounded, and for a long series of ages destitute of form. But when this wind became enamoured of its own first principles (the Chaos), and an intimate union took place, that connexion was called Pothos: and it was the beginning of the creation of all things. And it (the Chaos) knew not its own production; but from its embrace with the wind was generated Môt; which some call Ilus (Mud), but others the putrefaction of a watery mixture. And from this sprung all the seed of the creation, and the generation of the universe.

Gad Yaton: Here is the first principle of Phœnician philosophy, and it is not a myth. The dark windy air is the primordial atmosphere. The Chaos turbid and black is the unformed matter that existed before the separation of the elements. Pothos—Desire—is the force that brings them together. This is not the work of a god who speaks the world into being, as the Hebrews later imagined in their Genesis (a text composed more than a thousand years after the Phœnician cosmogony was recorded). It is a natural process: wind, water, and the desire of the elements for one another.

The Greeks, when they later encountered this account, misunderstood it and produced their own version: Hesiod's Theogony, in which Chaos gives birth to Erebus and Night, and desire (Eros) appears as a beautiful god who "loosens the limbs." What in the Phœnician original is a sober description of physical processes—the interaction of air and water producing life—becomes in Greek hands a genealogy of divine persons engaged in violent and amorous adventures. The difference is the difference between philosophy and poetry, between observation and fancy, between the Phœnician mind and the Greek.

The Hebrews, too, borrowed from this older cosmogony. The spirit of God moving over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2) is a late, monotheised version of the wind embracing the Chaos. The Hebrew ruach elohim—the wind of God—is the Phœnician wind Colpias, stripped of his consort Baau and subordinated to a single deity. The borrowing is unmistakable, and it proves the priority of the Phœnician account.

And there were certain animals without sensation, from which intelligent animals were produced, and these were called Zophasemin, that is, the overseers of the heavens; and they were formed in the shape of an egg: and from Môt shone forth the sun, and the moon, the less and the greater stars.

Gad Yaton: The Zophasemin—"overseers of the heavens"—are the first intelligent beings, produced from the primordial mud after the separation of the waters. Their shape is an egg, the universal symbol of the origin of life, found in the cosmogonies of Egypt, India, and the Orphic Greeks—all of whom, I suspect, borrowed it from this earlier source. The sun, moon, and stars are not gods here. They are bodies of fire that shine forth from the cosmic matter. This is astronomy, not astrology. It precedes the Greek philosophers Thales and Anaximander by perhaps a thousand years.

And when the air began to send forth light, by its fiery influence on the sea and earth, winds were produced, and clouds, and very great defluxions and torrents of the heavenly waters. And when they were thus separated, and carried out of their proper places by the heat of the sun, and all met again in the air, and were dashed against each other, thunder and lightnings were the result: and at the sound of the thunder, the before-mentioned intelligent animals were aroused, and startled by the noise, and moved upon the earth and in the sea, male and female.

Gad Yaton: I draw the reader's attention to the naturalism of this account. Thunder and lightning are not the weapons of a sky-god, as the Greeks imagined Zeus, the Hurrians Teshub, and the Mesopotamians Adad. They are the product of the collision of winds and clouds—exactly as modern science understands them. The Phœnician scribe who recorded this from the observations of Taautus was not a myth-maker. He was a natural philosopher. The Greeks, who never produced anything comparable before the Ionian school, were the myth-makers. The Hebrews, whose Yahweh "thunders from heaven" (1 Samuel 2:10), were the borrowers.

(After this our author proceeds to say:)

These things were found written in the Cosmogony of Taautus, and in his commentaries, and were drawn from his observations and the natural signs which by his penetration he perceived and discovered, and with which he has enlightened us.

(Afterwards, declaring the names of the winds Notus, Boreas, and the rest, he makes this epilogue:)

But these first men consecrated the productions of the earth, and judged them gods, and worshipped those things, upon which they themselves lived, and all their posterity, and all before them; to these they made libations and sacrifices.

Gad Yaton: Here Sanchuniathon, with characteristic honesty, acknowledges the origin of worship: men worshipped what fed them. The earth's productions were deified because men depended upon them. This is not a flattering account of religion, but it is a true one. The Greeks, ashamed of such origins, later invented their Olympian gods—beautiful, remote, and wholly imaginary. The Hebrews went further and declared the worship of created things an abomination, while simultaneously borrowing the Phœnician names for divinity—El, Elyon, Shaddai—and applying them to their own god. Both the Greek and Hebrew accounts are late reformations of this earlier, universal pattern: men worshipped what sustained them, and only later did priests invent more abstract gods.

(Then he proceeds:)

Such were the devices of their worship in accordance with the imbecility and narrowness of their souls.

Gad Yaton: "The imbecility and narrowness of their souls." These are strong words, and they are Sanchuniathon's own. He does not spare his own ancestors. He acknowledges that the worship of the productions of the earth was born of ignorance. But he records it without allegory, without mystification, and without apology. This is the true Phœnician spirit: to look upon the past with clear eyes, and to tell the truth, even when it is unflattering.