Understanding the Past

This past week I wrote a paper on namburbi rituals, which were these Mesopotamian rituals that they used to undo bad omens (knowing this is rather useless without understanding the extent to which the Mesopotamians pain-stakingly recording and compiled omen compendia.  To them it was a science).

Anyway, thinking about how we lived their lives and how they lived their lives got me to thinking - I always assumed people were people, and you could drop me off in Assyria and once I knew the language and stuff, I would be just like them.

Really though, that is not true, because they must have looked at things in such a completely different way. First, you have all these omens.  Every event could have possible repercussions, so you would pretty much see everything as important, and perhaps terrifying.

Also, as I was walking back to my room the other day I realized another thing.  Mesopotamians, and they were not alone in this, literally thought their Gods were living in the sky.  They thought the sun and moon gave them life and watched them.  They thought they could win their sympathy with offerings.  What would it be like to look into the sky, and see Gods there?  To look at the moon and imagine not a chunk of space rock, but a radiant being that had watched you like a parent, to look at the constellations as something more than mere assemblages of stars (which, by the way, I can hardly identify with the exception of the Big Dipper, Orion, and Cassiopeia.  I will work on it).  I don't know what I'm getting at.  Maybe just how different our lives would be as animists, or something.  Could we look at the sky in the same way ever again?