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Theories of the Universe
 The Egyptian's conception of the universe was naively anthropomorphic: the goddess of the heavens, Nut, arched her starry body over the solid Earth and let the ship of the Sun glide over her back. When the Sun sank below the horizon at night, it disappeared into the realm of the dead beneath the Earth; next morning, newborn, it began its day's journey once more. Out of this childlike myth, however, there evolved something permanent and great: nothing less than faith in the resurrection of man.The Babylonian view was far more realistic. It attempted to explain natural phenomena. The sky was a bell-shaped dome constantly whirling around, pasted with stars, and enveloped in a· mantle of water that extended down below the Earth. These were the waters over which the spirit of God hovered before the Creation, and out of which the Deluge poured when "the windows of heaven were opened." The universal waters also trickled through the Milky Way to feed the clouds. The Jews took over this idea, called the dome the "firmament," and reasoned that the Tower of Babel had been built in order to bore into the sky and see whether it was of day, bronze, or iron.
Men of the Middle Ages in Europe apparently had no comprehensive picture of the universe. They borrowed one from the Arabs, nomads who conceived of the sky as a great tent spread out overhead. in processions Catholic priests carried an image of this. tent, a canopy of black velvet with stars sewed onto it.
The three impulses underlying the formation of myths-anthropomorphism, the urge to interpret natural phenomena, and the storytelling impulse-were present in remarkable equilibrium among the Greeks. Their view of the universe was founded upon realism, upon frank delight in the visible world. The sky was a curved, brazen shield, but it was not enveloped in a mantle of water. Rather, it was surrounded by primal fire which blazed through innumerable holes of different sizes, sometimes flamed in the lightnings, and shone milky-white through the crack between the two arched halves of the shield. The Greeks took it for granted that rain came not from the sky but from nearby clouds. The clouds rose up from the sea, Oceanus, which bounded the round disc of the Earth and at the distant horizon touched the shield of the sky.
The poetic imagination of the Greeks soon added colorful anthropomorphic details, animating this picture with fabulous and symbolic ideas. The Milky Way became the trace of the heavenly conflagration Phaethon had unleashed when his father Helios gave him permission that one fateful time to drive the wild steeds which drew the chariot of the Sun. The highest mountain that Greek seafarers observed at the rim of the inhabited world became the Titan Atlas, forced by Zeus to hold up the vault of heaven, the same Atlas whom Hercules had briefly released so that he could steal the golden apples of the Hesperides.
In this concept the stars' relationship to human beings persisted, but exerted no magical influence upon them. For every newborn child a tiny light was ignited in the sky, and this light went out at his death.
The Greeks had as great a talent as the Babylonians for imagining recognizable figures among the stars. They found such shapes in a whole segment of the sky-the one which was important for their seafaring activities. The Swan, the Lyre, and the Eagle formed the summer triangle; along with the Crown, the Arrow, and the Dolphin, these are unquestionably the constellations most easy to distinguish. Once they have been identified as such images, they cannot be seen otherwise.
To each figure the Greek poetic spirit linked a character out of mythology, or else created a new one. The Twins could be none other than the classical brothers Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda by the Swan. Castor was mortal like his mother, Pollux immortal like his father Zeus. The two brothers were inseparable, underwent all adventures together, and even renounced possession of the beautiful Helen rather than leave one of them unsatisfied; instead, they preferred to kidnap the two daughters of Leucippus. Castor was killed in this adventure, and the immortal Pollux, refusing to accept a seat beside his father on Olympus, followed his brother to Hades. Moved by this loyalty, Zeus placed the two, in close embrace, in the firmament.
Remarkably, the capacity for creating myths was never entirely extinguished in Greece. In the post-Alexander, Hellenistic period, when the Babylonian zodiac and astrological ideas had become current among the Greeks, more myths of the stars were devised. They were more than fables; they were religious poetry whose themes were illustrated by examples from the heavens. Almost everyone knew and loved these myths. The poet Aratus filled the entire firmament. with demigods and their beasts, and his verses were quoted and recited everywhere. Never again were the stars at once so transfigured and brought so much down to earth. With a unique combination of brashness and reverence, the Greeks transformed the universe into a picture book.
The Greek temperament, however, was also capable of confining the multitudinous characters of the mythology within a neat, coherent system. This they did in their most unique creation: their cosmogony. Since the days of the Babylonians a myth of the origin of the world was a necessary part of a complete picture of the universe. Among the Greeks, a poet rather than an astronomer set forth the cosmogony. Alongside Homer, the Greeks had their Hesiod, the Dante of the Hellenes, who sang of the origin of all things.
For Hesiod, divinity was not the beginning. While the Babylonians started with their trinity, "Lord of the Sky, Lord of the Earth, and Lord of the Underworld," Hesiod considered the maternal womb of Earth as the alpha and omega. "I invoke the Earth who generates and nourishes and takes back to herself all things, like the ocean its waves." According to Hesiod, Earth arose first out of chaos, and was at first dark and bare. Longing for light, she let herself be fructified by Eros, the creative principle, and then gave birth to the sky. It is noteworthy that this culture, the most human culture that ever existed, saw generation as the principle of creation and believed that even the sky could arise only as the result of love.
The newborn sky bent down to the maternal Earth, and out of their passionate embrace came the Titans, creatures intermediary between god and man. There were also two spiritual beings, Themis and Cronos, female Order and male Time. This conception, too, sprang from a typical Greek impulse: to confer tangible form upon ideas, and to suggest that two of the most abstract ideas preceded everything else, including the very gods. For Zeus, Father of the Gods, descended from Mother Earth in the third generation. He had to overcome the Titans in order to win dominion, and dethrone Time in order to become immortal.
This cosmogony rivals the Judaeo-Christian in profundity. For all its sensuality and earthiness, it gave a spiritual cast to the traditional beliefs in a whole horde of gods. It made Order and Time the ancestors of the gods, and assumed that even the sky was of later origin than the creative principle of love.
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