The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 14

The ancient conception of the Zi lingered long among the Babylonian population. But, as the Semitic element became predominant, it fell more and more into the background, and survived-so far at least as the official religion was concerned-only in a few old formulae and names. One of the fixed stars, for example, was called Sib-zi-Anna, "the Shepherd of the Life of Heaven," and a common form of oath was by "the life of the G.o.ds"

or "king" (_nis ilani_, _nis sarri_). Even Sennacherib swears by "the life of a.s.sur"; but it is questionable whether either he or any of his contemporaries remembered the original meaning and history of the phrase.

The Sumerian Zi had received a Semitic translation, and therewith a Semitic connotation. The ideas attached to the Semitic _nesu_ were not those which had once cl.u.s.tered around the Zi. On the lips of the Semite even the word Zi itself meant "life" and little more. When Pur-Sin II. of Ur, a century or two before Abraham, addresses a dedication in Sumerian to the moon-G.o.d, he calls himself "the divine _Zi_ of his country"(220)-in other words, a "G.o.d who gives life to his land." There is no question here of a vital force which is the counterpart of a man or G.o.d; we have, on the contrary, the Semitic conception of a divine father from whom his people derive their life. The Semite has transferred his own ideas to the language of his Sumerian predecessors, and "life" for him is no materialised reflection of an individual thing, but a principle which is diffused, as it were, from a divine centre. The "Zi of heaven" has become the abstract life, which the G.o.d can communicate to those about him.

It is only in the dim background of history, therefore, that we find in Babylonia a belief a.n.a.logous to that which created the Egyptian doctrine of the Ka. It was foreign to the Semitic mind, and with the rise of Semitic supremacy, accordingly, it disappeared from the religion of Babylonia. We have to look for its fossilised relics in the old magical texts, which, like the spells and charms of modern folk-lore, have preserved so many of the beliefs and superst.i.tions of an otherwise forgotten past, or else in divine names and epithets which go back to a remote antiquity. The animism of the Sumerian is difficult to discover and trace, for it was already buried under Semitic modes of thought when the first libraries of Babylonia were being formed.

It was another Sumerian belief which exercised a greater influence upon the Semitic mind. This was the belief in ghosts. The _lil_ or ghost was distinct from the _Zi_; while the _Zi_ belonged to the world of the living, the _lil_ belonged to the world of the dead. The _lil_ consequently was no counterpart or double of either man or G.o.d, but a being with an independent existence of its own. Its home was beneath the earth, where the dead had their dwelling; but it visited this upper world under the shadow of night, or in desert places to which nothing living came.(221) It was essentially a spirit of darkness, and one of the names by which it was known was that of "the light-despoiler."(222) It came in the raging wind which darkens the heaven with clouds, or in the cloud of dust which betokens the approach of the storm. The _lil_, in fact, was essentially a demon, "without husband or wife," one of those evil spirits who tormented and perplexed mankind.

The s.e.xless Lil was waited on by "a maid," who under the cover of night enticed men to their destruction, or seduced them in their dreams. She was a veritable vampire, providing the Lil she served with its human food.

When the Semite succeeded to the heritage of the Sumerian, the s.e.xless Lil disappeared. Semitic grammar demanded that there should be a distinction between masculine and feminine, and Semitic modes of thought equally demanded that a female Lilit should take her place by the side of a male Lilu. The attributes of the "serving-maid" of the Sumerian Lil were transferred to the new creation of the Semitic mind, and the siren who lured men to their destruction ceased to be a serving-maid, and became the female Lilit herself. But the origin of the powers she exercised was never forgotten. When the name and character of the Babylonian Lilit were borrowed by the Hebrews under the form of Lilith, she was conceived of as a single individual spirit rather than as a cla.s.s. Isaiah (x.x.xiv. 14) tells us how Lilith shall haunt the desolate ruins of Edom, and find among them "a place of rest"; while, according to the Rabbis, Lilith had been the first wife of man, in appearance the fairest of women, but in reality a vampire demon who sucked at night the blood of her victims.

The lord and ruler of the Lils was the G.o.d who was worshipped at Nippur.

He bore, accordingly, the t.i.tle of En-lil, "the lord of the ghost-world,"

and his temple was one of the oldest sanctuaries of Sumerian Babylonia.(223) It was a centre of primeval civilisation, and the source of the magical arts which gathered round the belief in the spirits of the underworld. But the lordship of the underworld implied also a lordship over the earth, of which it formed a part. En-lil, "the lord of the ghost-world," thus became in time the ruler, not only of the dead, but also of the living. His empire ceased to be confined to the realms of darkness, and was extended to this upper world of light and of mankind. Up to the last, however, his primitive character was never forgotten. In the story of the Deluge he appears as the destroyer of men; Namtar, the plague-demon, is his minister; and like Kingu, the demon-G.o.d of chaos, he wore the tablets of destiny, which determine when men shall die.(224)

En-lil was accordingly the sovereign of the dead as well as of the spirits of the underworld. The Sumerian _lil_ must therefore have once included the ghosts of men as well as other ghosts which never had a material existence in the flesh. The _lil_ must once have meant that immaterial part of man which, after death, had its home in the underworld, from whence it issued at night to satisfy its cravings for food with the garbage of the streets. By the side of the Zi there must also have been the Lil; but we must wait till more monuments of Sumerian antiquity are discovered before we can define the exact relationship between them.(225)

In the Epic of Gilgames it is said that when the shade of Ea-bani was called up from the dead, like that of the shade of Samuel by the Witch of Endor, "it arose from the earth like a cloud of dust."(226) It was fitting that the ghost should be likened to a dust-storm. Its home was in the ground; and there, in the dark underworld, its food, we are told, was dust. But the word used by the poet for the ghost of Ea-bani is not _lil_.

It is another word, utukku, which occurs frequently in the magical texts.

Here the _utukku_ is a general name for a demon, and we hear of the _utukku_ "of the field," "of the mountain," "of the sea," and "of the grave." The "_utukku_ of the grave" must be the restless ghost of some dead man which has become a spirit of darkness, working evil to mankind.

The ordinary _utukku_, however, had no human ancestry; it was a demon pure and simple, which sat upon the neck of the sufferer and inflicted upon him pain and death. It corresponded with the vampire of European folk-lore; and just as the ranks of the vampire might be recruited from the dead, so too might the cla.s.s of demons whom the Babylonians termed _utukki_.

It was the same with another species of demon, the _ekimmu_, which hovered around the tomb and attacked the loins of those who fell in its way. But the _ekimmu_ was a being whose origin was known. It was the spirit of an unburied corpse over whose unsanctified remains the funeral rites had never been performed. The mystic ceremonies and magical words which consigned the dead to their last resting-place had been neglected, and the hapless spirit was left unprovided with the talismans that would enable him to cross the river of death, or join his comrades in the pa.s.sive tranquillity of the lower world. Restlessly, therefore, it wandered about the desert places of the earth, finding at times a shelter in the bodies of the living, whom it plagued with sore diseases, and seeking to satiate its hunger under the cover of night with the refuse it could pick up "in the street." The food and drink which pious hands laid in the tomb were denied to the tombless ghost, and it had to search for them where it could. The Epic of Gilgames concludes with a description of it, which paints in vivid colours the old Babylonian belief-

"He whose body lies forsaken in the field, As thou and I alike have seen, His _ekimmu_ rests not in the earth.

He whose _ekimmu_ has none to care for him, As thou and I alike have seen, The garbage of the pot, the refuse of food, Which is thrown into the street, must he eat."

It is no wonder that a Babylonian king prays that the body of his enemy may be "cast aside, and no grave allowed to him,"(227) or that a.s.sur-bani-pal should have torn the bodies of the Elamite kings from their tombs at Susa. Sennacherib similarly desecrated the burial-places of the ancestors of Merodach-baladan; and one of the oldest of Babylonian monuments, the so-called Stela of the Vultures, depicts the bodies of the slaughtered enemy exposed to the vultures that feed upon them, while the slain Babylonians themselves are buried by their companions under a tumulus of earth.

The _ekimmu_ was thus, properly speaking, the ghost of the unburied corpse; whereas the _utukku_ was the ghost of a corpse which had obtained burial, but through some accident or other had escaped from the realms of the dead. While, therefore, the _ekimmu_ necessarily had a human origin, the _utukku_ was only accidentally a human ghost. The rites with which its body had been laid in the grave, ought to have confined it to the underground regions of the dead; and the "pure water" and food with which it had been provided were sufficient to sustain it in its existence below.

If it returned to the upper world it could only have been through the arts of the necromancer, and the sufferings it may have inflicted upon men were but the revenge it took for being disturbed. The _utukku_, like the _lil_, belonged to a cla.s.s of supernatural beings who manifested their presence in a particular way, and it was only as it were accidentally that the ghost of a dead man came to be included among them.

But it must be noticed that no distinction was drawn in the mind of the Babylonian between these supernatural beings and the ghosts of the dead, at all events so far as their nature and to a certain extent their powers were concerned. The ghost might become an _ekimmu_ just as it might become a _lil_; all were alike denizens of the underground world, and in primeval times obeyed the rule of the En-lil, "the lord of ghosts."

The same belief must once have prevailed in Palestine. When the spirit of Samuel was called up from the dead, the witch declared she saw Elohim rising up from the earth in the form of an old man clothed in a mantle.

Now Elohim or "G.o.ds" was the general term under which the Canaanite included all the beings of the spiritual world in whom he believed; and in calling the spirit of Samuel "Elohim," the witch was accordingly a.s.serting that the human ghost she had evoked had become thereby one of them. As the ghost of Ea-bani when summoned from its resting-place became an _utukku_, so the ghost of Samuel for the same reason became one of the Elohim.

The ghost, like the body to which it had belonged, was dependent for its existence upon food and drink. The legend of the descent of Istar into Hades describes the ghosts of the dead as flitting like winged bats through their gloomy prison-house, drinking dust and eating clay. The bread and dates and water offered at the tombs of the dead were a welcome subst.i.tute for such nauseous food. Food, however, of some kind it was necessary for the ghost to have, otherwise it would have suffered from the pangs of hunger, or died the second death for want of nourishment.

Like the Egyptian Ka, consequently, the Babylonian ghost was conceived of as a semi-material counterpart of the body, needing, like the body, drink and food; and if recalled to the upper world in the form of an _utukku_ or an _ekimmu_, resembling the body in every detail, even to the clothes it wore. Moreover, as in Egypt, the doctrine of the double must be extended to inanimate objects as well as to living things. The offerings deposited with the dead included not only poultry and fish, but also dates and grain, wine and water. The objects, too, which the dead had loved in his life were laid in his grave-toys for the child, mirrors and jewellery for the woman, the staff and the seal for the man. It must have been the doubles of the food and drink upon which the ghost fed in the world below, and the doubles of the other objects buried with the corpse, which it enjoyed in its new mode of existence. There must have been ghosts of things as well as ghosts of men.

The overlaying of primitive Sumerian animism by Semitic conceptions and beliefs naturally introduced new elements into the views held about the imperishable part of man, and profoundly modified the old theories regarding it. The Zi, as we have seen, became synonymous with the vital principle; the _lil_, the _utukku_, and the _ekimmu_ were banished to the domain of the magician and witch. The words survived, like "ghost" in English, but the ideas connected with them insensibly changed. In place of En-lil, "the lord of the ghost-world," a new conception arose, that of Bilu or Baal, "the lord" of mankind and the visible universe, whose symbol was the flaming sun.(228) The ghosts had to make way for living men, the underground world of darkness for the world of light. En-lil became a Semitic Baal, and man himself became "the son of his G.o.d."(229)

With the rise of Semitic influence came also the influence of the culture that emanated from Eridu. The character of Ea of Eridu lent itself more readily to Semitic conceptions than did the character of En-lil. There was no need for violent change; the old Sumerian G.o.d (or rather "spirit") retained his name and therewith many of his ancient attributes. He remained the G.o.d of wisdom and culture, the father of A?ari, "who does good to man."

When Asari was identified with Merodach the sun-G.o.d of Babylon, Semitic influence was already in the ascendant. Merodach was already a Semitic Baal; the supremacy of his city made him the supreme Baal of Babylonia.

The older Baal of Nippur was absorbed by the younger Baal of Babylon, and the official cult almost ceased to remember what his attributes and character had originally been. Even the reciter of the magical texts probably forgot that the G.o.d had once been a chief _lil_ or ghost and nothing more.

This altered conception of the G.o.d of Nippur was necessarily accompanied by an altered conception of the ghost-world over which he had ruled. It was handed over to other G.o.ds in the State religion, or else pa.s.sed into the possession of the wizard and necromancer. Nergal of Cutha became the lord of Hades, which he shared with the G.o.ddess Eris-kigal or Allat.

Legend told how at the command of the G.o.ds of light, Nergal had forced his way into the dark recesses of the underworld, and there compelled the G.o.ddess to become his bride. From henceforward Hades was a realm under the control of the G.o.ds of heaven, and part of that orderly universe which they governed and directed.

The conquest of Hades by the G.o.ds of light implied the conquest by them of death. The dead was no longer a mere ghost, beyond the reach of the lords of heaven, and able to play havoc in their own sphere when darkness had swallowed up the light. The lords of heaven now claimed the power of "raising the dead to life." It is an epithet that is applied more especially to Merodach, the minister and interpreter of his father Ea, through whose magic words and wise teaching he heals the diseases of mankind, and even brings them again from the world of the dead.

It is evident that we here have a new conception before us of the imperishable part of man. The G.o.ds are with man beyond the grave as they are on this side of it. There is no inexorable destiny forbidding them to bring him back to life. In other words, there is a life in the next world as well as in this. It may be a very inferior and shadowy kind of life, but it is a life nevertheless, and not the existence of a bloodless ghost which would perish if it could not satisfy its cravings with food and drink. The religious consciousness has pa.s.sed beyond the stage when the future world is peopled with the doubles and counterparts of existing things, and it has attained to the conception of a spiritual life which man can share with the immortal G.o.ds. Animism has made way for polytheism.

How close this connection between the G.o.ds and the souls of men became in later days, may be seen from the fact that when a.s.sur-bani-pal visited the tombs of his forefathers, he poured out a libation in their honour and addressed to them his prayers. They had, in short, become G.o.ds, like the G.o.ds of light to whom temples were erected and offerings made. The change in point of view had doubtless been quickened by that deification of the king of which I shall have to speak in a future lecture, and which seems to have been of Semitic origin. When the king became a G.o.d, to whom priests and temples were dedicated both in his lifetime and after his death, it was inevitable that new ideas should arise in regard to the nature of the soul. The spirit who was addressed as a G.o.d, and set on a level with the divine lords of heaven, was no powerless and starveling ghost in the underworld of En-lil, but a spirit in the more modern sense of the word, who dwelt in the realms of light, where he could hear and answer the prayers that were laid before him. The ghost had been transformed into a soul, whose nature was the same as that of the G.o.ds themselves, and which, like them accordingly, could move freely where it would, listening to the pet.i.tions of those on earth, and interceding for them.

This conception of the soul had already been arrived at in the age of Sargon of Akkad, the earliest to which at present anything like full contemporaneous records reach back. But it was an age in which Semitic influence was already dominant; Sargon was the founder of a Semitic empire which extended to the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, and the Sumerian epoch of Babylonian civilisation had long since pa.s.sed away. Remote as the age seems to us of to-day, it was comparatively late in the history of Chaldaean culture. And deification was not confined to the person of the king. The high priests of the Babylonian cities who owned allegiance to him were similarly deified by their subjects. The daily offering was made, for instance, to the deified Gudea, the Sumerian governor of Lagas; he who had ruled on earth, whether Semite or Sumerian, was adjudged worthy of a place among the G.o.ds of the official creed. King and n.o.ble alike could be raised to the rank of a divinity; and we even find Gimil-Sin, the king of Ur, erecting a temple to his own G.o.dhead.(230) We are reminded of the shrines built by the later Pharaohs in honour of their own Kas.

The deification of man, and therewith a belief in the higher destinies of the human soul, can thus be traced back to an early period of Semitic supremacy in Babylonia. Unfortunately our evidences for this belief in the higher destinies of the soul are still but scanty. In this respect Babylonia offers a striking contrast to Egypt. There the larger part of the monumental records we possess are derived from tombs; and Egyptian belief in regard to the future life is abundantly described not only on the tombstones, but also on the inscribed and pictured walls of the sepulchre itself. We know almost more of what the Egyptian thought about the imperishable part of man and its lot hereafter, than we do about any other portion of his creed. In Babylonia and a.s.syria, on the contrary, there are no tombstones, no pictured and inscribed tombs. The literature we possess tells us but little concerning the future life and the beliefs connected with it. The ritual and the hymns to the G.o.ds are concerned with this life, not with the next, and we have to grope our way, as it were, through obscure allusions and ambiguous phrases if we would find in them any references to the world beyond the grave. To fall back on mythological poems and heroic epics is dangerous and misleading. The literary myth will give us as false an idea of the psychology of a people as it will of their theology; at most it will express the beliefs of the individual writer, or enshrine old terms and phrases, the primitive meaning of which has pa.s.sed away. To extract a psychology from literary legends is as difficult as to extract from them sober history. The poets who depicted Hades, with its batlike ghosts that fed upon dust, were using the language of the past rather than of the age in which they lived. We might as well infer that the Englishman of the eighteenth century believed in the Muses whom his poets invoked, as infer from the language of the poets of Babylonia that the Hades they described was the Hades of popular belief. The cult of the kings and n.o.bles is sufficient of itself to prove that such could not have been the case. And when primitive conceptions become the commonplaces of literature, their true signification is lost or blurred.

Still less help can be obtained from the magical texts. And by an unfortunate accident the magical texts const.i.tute a very undue proportion of those which have hitherto been examined. Until recently we have been dependent for our knowledge of Babylonian literature on the relics of the library of Nineveh, the greater part of which was collected by a.s.sur-bani-pal, and a.s.sur-bani-pal had a special predilection for charms and exorcisms, and the pseudo-science of the augur or astrologist. The world of the magical texts was a world that stood apart by itself. Magic was only half recognised by the orthodox faith; its beliefs and practices had come down from an age when that orthodox faith did not as yet exist, and its professors were looked upon with suspicion by the official priesthood. The creed upon which it rested, therefore, was a creed of the remote past rather than of the present. Its G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses were not those of the State religion except in name; the Istar who patronised the witch and superintended the mixture of the poisonous philtre under the cloak of night, was a very different Istar from the G.o.ddess of love and war who promised help and comfort to Esar-haddon in his need, and was known to be "the mother" of mankind. The State religion, indeed, wisely temporising, had recognised magic so far as it could be regulated, and placed, as it were, under the supervision of the priesthood; "the black art" was never a heresy to be suppressed by force, as in ancient Israel; but for all that it stood outside the official faith, and embodied principles and conceptions which could be harmonised but imperfectly with the higher and more enlightened ideas of the historical period. We may find in the magical texts survivals from the primeval age of animism, if only we know how to interpret them rightly, for the religious conceptions of a later age we shall look in vain. They offer us magic and not religion, the wizard or witch and not the priest.

Such, then, are the reasons why it is impossible for the present to describe the psychology of the Babylonians with the same accuracy and fulness as that of the Egyptians, or to trace its history with the same detail. The materials are wanting, and probably we shall never have them in the same abundance as in Egypt. But one thing is clear. Behind the polytheistic view of the human spirit which prevailed in later times, there lay an animistic view which closely resembled the primitive Egyptian doctrine of the Ka. The animistic view pa.s.sed away with the rise of Semitic supremacy and the deification of man, and to discover and define it must be largely a matter of inference. The doctrine of the double was superseded by the doctrine of the soul-that is to say, of an immortal element which after death was reunited with the G.o.ds. The Zi, with the Lil and the Ekimmu, had to make way for a higher and purer conception of the spirit of man. The old names, indeed, still remained, but more and more emptied of their earlier meaning, or banished to the outer darkness of the magician and witch. The water and food that once served to nourish the ghost in the world below, became offerings to the dead man, and to the G.o.ds under whose protection he continued to be. "All the furniture that befitteth the grave," says an a.s.syrian king, "the due right of his sovereignty, I displayed before the sun-G.o.d, and beside the father who begat me I set them in the grave. Gifts unto the princes, even the spirits of earth, and unto the G.o.ds who inhabit the grave, I then presented."(231) The gifts, it will be noticed, are not only set by the side of the dead, but are also presented to the sun-G.o.d, who is thus a.s.sociated with the deceased king. They are consecrated to the G.o.d of light, who judged mankind, before they can be claimed by the G.o.ds of the grave.

But with all this it must be allowed that a great contrast exists between the Babylonian and the later Egyptian view of the imperishable part of man and its lot in the other world. And this difference of view results from a further difference in the view taken of this present life. To the Egyptian the present life was but a preparation for the next; not only the spiritual elements of which he was composed, but, as he hoped, his body itself would survive beyond the grave. It was otherwise in Babylonia. No traces of mummification are to be found there; at most we hear of the corpse being anointed for death, as it were, with oil or honey; and cremation, partial or complete, seems to have been practised. The thoughts of the Babylonian were fixed rather on this world than on the next; his horizon, speaking generally, was bounded by death. It was in this world that he had relations with the G.o.ds and duties towards them, and it was here that he was punished or rewarded for the deeds committed in the flesh. The practical character of the Babylonians did not lend itself to dreams and speculations about the future; the elaborate map of the other world, which is drawn in the sacred books of Egypt, would have been impossible for them. They were too much absorbed in commerce and trade and the practical pursuit of wealth, to have leisure for theories that concerned themselves with a doubtful future and an invisible world. The shadow of the old religion of Nippur, moreover, with its underground Hades of darkness and gloom, rested to the last on the mind of the Babylonian people. The brighter views which had emanated from Eridu never succeeded in overcoming it altogether. The G.o.ds of light ruled, indeed, over a world that had once belonged to the demons of night, but their victory never extended further. The land of Hades still continued to be a land of darkness, even though the waters of life gushed up from below the golden throne of the spirits who dwelt there. We find no conception in Babylonian literature parallel to the Egyptian fields of Alu, no judgment-hall of Hades before which the conscience of the dead man is arraigned. The Babylonian was judged in this life and not in the next, and the G.o.d who judged him was the sun-G.o.d of day, and not the dead sun-G.o.d of the other world.

It is usually the fashion to ascribe this concentration of religion upon the present world, with its repellent views of Hades and limitation of divine rewards and punishments to this life, to the inherent peculiarities of the Semitic mind. But for this there is no justification. There is nothing in the Semitic mind which would necessitate such a theological system. It is true that the sun-G.o.d was the central object of the Semitic Babylonian faith, and that to the nomads of Arabia the satisfaction of their daily wants was the practical end of existence. But it is not among the nomads of Arabia that we find anything corresponding with the Babylonian idea of Hades and the conceptions a.s.sociated with it. The idea was, in fact, of Babylonian origin. If the Hebrew Sheol resembles the Hades of Babylonia, or the Hebrew conception of rewards and punishments is like that of the a.s.syrians and Babylonians, it is because the Hebrew beliefs were derived from the civilisation of the Euphrates. Historically we know that the Israelites traced their origin from Ur of the Chaldees, and that in days long before Abraham, Canaan formed part of a Babylonian empire, and was permeated by Babylonian culture; on the theological side the derivation of the Hebrew doctrines is equally clear. The Hebrew Sheol is too exactly a counterpart of the Babylonian world of the dead not to have been borrowed from it, like Lilith and the other spirits whose home it was, and the theology which taught that the sun-G.o.d was the supreme judge of men, punishing in this life their sins or rewarding their good deeds, was part of the culture which came from Babylonia to the West. It was no inherent heritage of Semitic nature, but the product of a civilisation whose roots went back to a non-Semitic race. The ruling caste in Egypt were of Semitic extraction, but their religion contains little or no trace of the ideas which underlay the Babylonian doctrines of divine retribution and the future life of the soul.

It is to Babylonia, therefore, that we must look for the origin of those views of the future world and of the punishment of sin in this life which have left so deep an impression on the pages of the Old Testament. They belonged primarily to Babylonia, and were part of the price which the Semites of the West had to pay for the inestimable gift of culture that came to them from the banks of the Euphrates. They were views from which the Israelite was long in emanc.i.p.ating himself. The inner history of the Old Testament is, in fact, in large measure a history of the gradual widening of the religious consciousness of Israel in regard to them, and their supersession by a higher and more spiritual form of faith. The old belief, that misfortune implies sin and prosperity righteousness, is never, indeed, entirely eradicated, and Sheol long continues to be a land of shadow and unsubstantiality, where good and bad share the same fate, and the things of this life are forgotten; but little by little newer and purer views make their way into the religion of the people, and the higher message which Israel was destined to receive takes the place of the teaching of the old culture of Babylonia. Babylonia had done its part; new forces were needed for the education of mankind.

Lecture III. The G.o.ds Of Babylonia.

I have already had occasion to refer to one of the G.o.ds of Babylonia, En-lil or El-lil of Nippur.(232) His worship goes back to the earliest period of Babylonian history; his sanctuary at Nippur was one of the oldest in the land. He belongs to the period when the Sumerian was still supreme, and the name he bore was the Sumerian t.i.tle of En-lil, "the lord of the ghost-world." But it was a t.i.tle only; the "lord of the ghosts" was himself a ghost, albeit the chief among them.

The fact must be kept carefully in mind. As yet there was no G.o.d in the proper sense of the term. The superhuman powers that were dreaded and propitiated were ghosts only, like the ghosts of dead men; and, like the latter, they were denizens of the grave and the underground world. It was only at night that they emerged from their retreat, and terrified the pa.s.ser-by. Primitive man fears the dark as much as does the child; it is then that the powers of evil are active, and spiritual or supernatural foes lurk behind every corner ready to injure or destroy him. The ghosts of the night are accordingly objects of terror, harmful beings from whom all forms of sickness and insanity are derived.

But even these ghosts can be controlled by those who know the magic words or the mystic rites which they are compelled to obey. Between the ghost and his victim the sorcerer or medicine-man can interpose, and by means of his spells force the spirit to quit the body of the sufferer or enter the body of an enemy. By the side of the ghost, therefore, stands the sorcerer, who is at once the master and the minister of the spirit-world.

With the progress of civilisation an organised body of sorcerers necessarily grows up. But an organised body of sorcerers also implies an organised body of spirits, and an organised system of controlling them.

The spells and charms which have been handed down from the past are formed into a system, and the spirits themselves are cla.s.sified and defined, while special functions are a.s.signed to them. The old unorganised animism pa.s.ses into an organised shamanism, such as still prevails among certain Siberian tribes. The sorcerer is on the high road to becoming a priest.

Between the sorcerer and the priest, however, there is a gulf too wide to be spanned. The religious conceptions presupposed by them differ in kind as well as in degree. The nature of the superhuman beings by whom man is surrounded, and the relations which he bears to them, are essentially different in the two cases. The priest may also be a sorcerer, but the sorcerer cannot be a priest.

Can shamanism develop naturally into theism, and the sorcerer into the priest? Or is there need of foreign influences and of contact with other ideas and religious beliefs? I should myself be inclined to adopt the second alternative. Theism may absorb shamanism, and the priest throw the aegis of his authority over the sorcerer, but the natural development of the one into the other is contrary to the facts of psychology as well as to those of history. The evolution of a G.o.d out of the shaman's ghost may be conceivable, but no evidence for it exists. The superst.i.tions and beliefs of shamanism linger, indeed, under a theistic religion, and the polytheism of Babylonia was no exception to the rule. Up to the last the magician flourished there, and the spells he worked were recognised by the religion of the State. But for all that they stood outside the religion of the State, harmonising with it just as little as the superst.i.tions of popular folk-lore harmonise with the religion we profess. No one would a.s.sert that the Christianity of to-day has grown out of beliefs like that in the vampire which still holds such sway in some of the Christian countries of Europe; and there is just as little reason for a.s.serting that the vampire of the primitive Sumerian developed into a Babylonian deity.

They represent two diverse currents of belief, which may for a time run side by side, but never actually coalesce.

Babylonian tradition itself bore witness to the fact. The Chaldaean historian Berossos tells us that the elements of culture, and therewith of the organised religion of a later day, were brought to Babylonia from abroad. Oannes or Ea, the culture-G.o.d, had risen morning by morning out of the waters of the Persian Gulf, and instructed the savage races of the sh.o.r.e in the arts of life. It was not from Nippur and the worshippers of En-lil, but from that mysterious deep which connected Babylonia with other lands, that its civilisation had come. It was Ea who had taught men "to found the temple" in which the G.o.ds of aftertimes were to be adored. The culture-G.o.d of Babylonia was Ea, and the home of Ea was not in Babylonia, but in the deep.

There is no mistaking the significance of the legend. The culture of Babylonia originated on the seacoast, and was brought to it across the sea. The elements of civilisation were due to intercourse with other lands. And this civilisation was a.s.sociated with a G.o.d-with a G.o.d, too, who represented all the higher aspects of Babylonian religion, and was regarded as the author of its sacred books. The impulse which transformed the "lord of the ghost-world" into a G.o.d, and replaced the sorcerer by a priest, came not from within, but from without.

The impulse went back to that primitive age when Sumerian supremacy was still unquestioned in the land. Other races, so the legend averred, were already settled there, but they were all alike rude and savage "as the beasts of the field." How far distant it may have been in the night of time we can but dimly conjecture. At the rate at which the northern coast of the Persian Gulf is being slowly silted up, it would be at least eight thousand years ago when the old seaport of Eridu and the sanctuary of its G.o.d Ea stood on the sh.o.r.es of the sea. But the influence of the Semite was already beginning to be felt, though indirectly, through maritime trade.

New ideas came from the south. Ea was a G.o.d, and like the G.o.ds of the Semitic race he had a wife and son. While he himself was lord of the deep, Dam-kina, his wife, was the mistress of the land. His son was A?ari, "the prince who does good to man,"(233) and who, in contradistinction to the night-demons of Nippur, brought knowledge and healing to the men whom Ea had created. The Sumerian might indeed speak of the "Zi"-"the spirit"-of Ea, or rather of the deep, but to the Semite he was a veritable G.o.d.