Re-wilding the Planets: Babylonian Cosmology and the Wild Sheep

Lately I’ve been thinking about Babylonian cosmology and the way that the planets weren’t necessarily fixed to certain mythological deities and how that compares to our system. The planetary archetypes are nuanced and dynamic even wild in their expressions, but our system tries to tame them. There is no space in an orderly white supremacist capitalist world for unpredictable planets who resist strict categorization. In Akkadian, the word for planet means “wild sheep”: “while fixed stars are a peacefully pasturing flock, planets as “traveling” stars are wild sheep or even beasts lurking for sheep.”1 In Akkadian cosmology, the archetypal energies associated with the planets in the…