The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 20

Destructive whirlwinds are they.

Wife they have not, child they beget not; compa.s.sion and mercy they do not know.

Prayer and supplication hear they not.

Horses bred in the mountains are they.

Unto Ea are they hostile.

The throne-bearers of the G.o.ds are they.

To work mischief in the street they settle in the highway.

Evil are they, evil are they!

Seven are they, seven are they, seven twice again are they!"

The seven evil spirits played an important part in the demonology of ancient Eridu, and echoes of it survive in the later literature. They were even trans.m.u.ted into a G.o.d, and unified in his person under the name of "the divine seven";(317) while the last month of the year, the stormy Adar, was dedicated to them. But in earlier days it needed all the wisdom of Ea to counteract their wicked devices. The fire-G.o.d himself was sent to drive them from their victims, and to disclose their nature and origin-

"In the mountain of the sunset, it is said, "those seven were born;"

in the mountain of the sunrise those seven grew up; in the hollows of the earth they have their dwelling; on the high-places of the earth their names are proclaimed.

As for them, in heaven and earth they have no dwelling, hidden is their name.

Among the sentient G.o.ds they are not known.

Their name in heaven and earth exists not.

Those seven from the mountain of the sunset gallop forth, those seven in the mountain of the sunrise are bound to rest.

In the hollows of the earth they set the foot; on the high-places of the earth they lift the neck.

They by nought are known; in heaven and earth there is no knowledge of them."

The hymn or incantation which thus describes them belongs to a late period in the history of Babylonian religion. The animism of primitive times has been replaced by the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of the later official faith. But the belief in the seven evil spirits still lingered, not only in the popular mind, but also in the ranks of the official hierarchy; and it was still remembered that they had been at the outset the spirits of the tempest, born in the clefts of the ravine or on the stormy mountain-top, from whence they issued like wild horses. The flame of sacrifice could alone avert their onset, and incantations were still composed under official sanction, with the help of which they might be driven away. The fact shows to how late an epoch the composition of spells and incantatory hymns may come down, even when the atmosphere they breathe is still that of Eridu, and the language in which they are written is still the sacred Sumerian. But there are collections of magical hymns and formulae which are even yet later in date. The eight books of the so-called Maqlu or "Burning" collection are written throughout in Semitic Babylonian;(318) and though two out of the nine books of another collection-that of the Surpu or "Consuming Fever"-are bilingual, they have been clearly translated from the more original Babylonian into Sumerian, like the Latin exercises of to-day.(319) The official canon of the magical texts, in fact, was long in formation, and did not a.s.sume its final shape until the age of Khammurabi or later, even though its roots go back to the earliest period of Babylonia, to the age of animism and the medicine-man, when the Sumerian was still dominant in the land, and the Semitic nomad or trader was content to learn from him the elements of civilisation.

The official canon had been collected together from all sides. Most of the great sanctuaries of the country had probably contributed to it; in most, if not in all, of them there must have been magical rituals which had grown up under the care and supervision of the priesthood, and in which the old beliefs of the people were disciplined and harmonised with the dogmas of the State creed. Up to the last, one of the cla.s.ses into which the priesthood was divided was known as the eni or "Chanters," whose name was derived from the Sumerian _en_, "an incantation." It is this word which is prefixed to the charms and incantatory hymns that const.i.tute so integral a part of the magical texts; and though in course of time it came to denote little more than "recitation," it was a recitation which possessed magical powers, and for which, therefore, a special training was necessary. A single mistake in p.r.o.nunciation or intonation, a single subst.i.tution of one word for another, was sufficient to destroy the charm and necessitate the repet.i.tion of the ceremony. Some of the incantations had even to be recited in a whisper, like certain parts of the Roman missal; and a whole series or collection is accordingly termed the ritual of "the whispered charm," reminding us of the pa.s.sage in the Book of Isaiah where the prophet refers to "the wizards that peep and that mutter."(320)

By the side of the "Book of Incantations"-whether it ever existed or not-there was another sacred book containing hymns to the G.o.ds. Here, again, it is more than doubtful whether the various collections of hymns compiled for use in the great sanctuaries of the country were ever combined together and incorporated into a single volume. The tendency to religious centralisation and unification in Babylonia was arrested before it could produce in religion what the seventy-two books of the "Illumination of Bel" were for astronomy and astrology, a compilation in which the observations of the past were collected and brought together.(321) Babylon, despite its political predominance, never succeeded in absorbing the religious cults of the more venerable sanctuaries of the country; the historical conservatism of the people was too strong, and even Nabonidos was forced to lavish gifts on the shrine of the sun-G.o.d at Sippara as well as upon that of Merodach at Babylon. The priesthood of Babylon were content to be chief among their peers; there was no monotheistic zeal to sweep away the rival temples, and the intensely localised character of Babylonian religion prevented the rise of monotheism. And without religious centralisation a common service-book and canon are not very probable. Perhaps, moreover, the hymns to the G.o.ds were too long in detaching themselves from the magical ritual, and too late in acquiring a sacred character of their own, to attain the same degree of divine authority as the incantations. Many of them are not only in Semitic a.s.syrian, but were composed as late as the reigns of the last a.s.syrian kings, while even those which are bilingual seem to have been in many cases the work of Semitic poets, the Sumerian text being a translation from the Semitic into the sacred language of theology.

At the same time, Lenormant was not far wrong in comparing the religious hymns of Chaldaea with those of the Rig-Veda. Like the latter, they belong to different periods of time, and comprise poems as unlike one another as war-songs and incantations and philosophic addresses to the G.o.ds.

Moreover, as in the case of the incantations, there were collections of hymns addressed to the G.o.d or G.o.ds of the sanctuary in whose service they were used. Thus many of them belong to a collection that must have been made for the temple of the sun-G.o.d at Sippara or Larsa; all alike are addressed to the sun-G.o.d, the supreme judge of mankind; and the language that is used of him is the same in each. Other hymns celebrate the moon-G.o.d of Ur, while others belong to Nippur or to the sanctuary of Merodach at Babylon. The hymn to the G.o.d was as much a necessary portion of divine service as the incantation or the ceremonial rite.

The ritual texts tell us how and when it was employed. Thus on the festival of the New Year the service in the temple of Bel-Merodach was opened by a hymn in honour of his ark; and on the second of Nisan the priest was ordered to go down to the Euphrates at the beginning of the first hour of the night, and then, after putting on the prescribed vestment, and taking the waters of the river in his hand, to "enter into the presence of Bel," and there recite a long hymn in praise of the G.o.d.

The hymn closed with a prayer-

"Show mercy to thy city of Babylon; to e-Saggil thy temple incline thy face; grant the prayers of thy people the sons of Babylon!"

But there is yet another proof of the sacred character that attached itself to the hymns. Many of them were employed as incantations. Not only were they introduced into the magical texts, like the verses of the Bible when used as charms, but the magical element was inserted in the hymn itself. The address to the deity was combined with spells and incantations, producing a confused medley of spiritual expressions and grovelling superst.i.tion that is at once repellent and grotesque to our modern notions. The hymn, moreover, is prefaced by the word _en_ or "incantation," which makes its words as authoritative and unalterable as the rest of the magical ritual. The same sacredness that invests the latter invests also the hymn. The hymn, in short, is as much verbally inspired as the incantation or spell; indeed, between the hymn and the incantation no clear line of demarcation was drawn by the Babylonian, and it is questionable whether he would have recognised that there was any such line at all.

It was in the use that was made of them, and not in their essential nature, that the hymn to the G.o.d and the incantation differed from one another. And as animism preceded the official religion of Babylonia, and the belief in spirits preceded the worship of the G.o.ds, so too did the incantation precede the hymn. The sacredness that was acquired by the hymn was originally reflected from the incantation; it was not the contents of the hymn, but the actual words of which it was composed, that gave it its sacred and authoritative character, and consecrated its employment by the priestly caste.

It is accordingly with good reason that I have described the hymns, like the incantations proper, as verbally inspired. The inspiration lay in the words more than in the sense they conveyed; an error of p.r.o.nunciation was more fatal than a misunderstanding of their meaning. As long as the words were recited correctly, it mattered little whether either priest or people understood precisely what they meant.

I have already in an earlier lecture quoted some lines from the hymn to the moon-G.o.d which was probably composed for the services in the great temple of Ur. The hymns in honour of the sun-G.o.d are much more numerous, and formed part of a collection which seems to have been made by the priests of Bit-Uri, the temple of the sun-G.o.d at Sippara. The sun-G.o.d they celebrate is the incorruptible "judge of mankind," the rewarder of the innocent and the punisher of the guilty, who sees all that is done on earth, and acts towards those who call upon him with justice and mercy.

"O lord, we read in one of them,(322) "illuminator of the darkness, opener of the sickly face,"

merciful G.o.d, who setteth up the fallen, who helpeth the weak, unto thy light look the great G.o.ds, the spirits of earth all gaze upon thy face.

Tongues in unison like a single word thou directest, smiting their heads they look to the light of the mid-day sun.

Like a wife thou standest, glad and gladdening.

Thou art their light in the vault of the far-off heaven.

Thou art the object of their gaze in the broad earth.

Men far and near behold thee and rejoice!"

The language of another hymn is in a similar strain-

"Direct the law of the mult.i.tudes of mankind!

Thou art eternal righteousness in the heavens!

Thou art of faithful judgment towards all the world!

Thou knowest what is right, thou knowest what is wrong.

O sun-G.o.d, righteousness hath lifted up its foot!

O sun-G.o.d, wickedness hath been cut down as with a knife!

O sun-G.o.d, the minister of Anu and Bel art thou!

O sun-G.o.d, the judge supreme of heaven and earth art thou!

O lord of the living creation, the pitiful one (who directest) the world!

O sun-G.o.d, on this day purify and illumine the king the son of his G.o.d!

Whatever worketh evil in his body let it be taken away!

Cleanse him like the goblet of the Zoganes!

Illumine him like a cup of ghee; like the copper of a polished tablet let him be made bright!

Release him from the ban!"(323)

The last words ill.u.s.trate that strange mixture of spiritual thought and the arts of the sorcerer to which I have more than once alluded. The hymns to the sun-G.o.d were not yet emanc.i.p.ated from the magical beliefs and ceremonies in which they had had their origin; they were still incantations rather than hymns in the modern sense of the word. The collection to which they belonged must have been used by the cla.s.s of priests known as "Chanters" or "Enchanters," who had succeeded to the sorcerers and medicine-men of the pre-Semitic past; and the fact explains how it is that in many of them we have an alternating antiphonal service, portions of them being recited by the priest and other portions by the worshipper. In some instances, indeed, the verses seem to have been alternately intoned by the priest and the a.s.sistant ministers, like the canticles or psalms in the Christian worship of to-day. The practice had its origin in the magical ritual, where the sorcerer first recited the incantation, and then called upon the individual to repeat it once or oftener after him. It is another proof of the intimate connection that existed between the hymns and the incantations out of which they had sprung; like the Veda or the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of ancient Chaldaea mixed magic and the spiritual worship of the G.o.ds together in a confusion which seems to us difficult to understand.

It was the same with the penitential psalms which const.i.tute the third division of the sacred literature of Babylonia. In many respects they resemble the psalms of the Old Testament. Like them they are intended for public use, in spite of their individualistic form; the individual represents the community, and at times it is the national calamity and the national sin to which reference is made. After the revolt and reconquest of Babylon by a.s.sur-bani-pal, when the city was still polluted by the corpses of those who had perished by famine or the sword, the prophets(324) ordered that its shrines and temple-roads should be purified, that its "wrathful G.o.ds and angry G.o.ddesses" should be "appeased by prayers and penitential psalms," and that then, and only then, the daily sacrifices in the temples should be offered once more.(325) Doubtless the penitential psalms were in the first instance the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of the individual; it was his sufferings that they depicted, and his sins that they deplored; but as soon as they had been introduced into the worship of the temple, and become part of the public cult, the individual element in them fell into the background, and in the sins and sufferings of the individual both priest and laity saw those of the whole community.

Like the Hebrew psalms, again, they express the belief that sin is the cause of suffering and calamity, and that it can be removed by penitence and prayer to the offended deity. But whereas the Hebrew monotheist knew of one G.o.d only who could inflict punishment and listen to the repentant words of the sinner, the Babylonian polytheist was distracted by the uncertainty as to what particular divinity he had offended, and to whom, therefore, his penitent appeal should be addressed. In the penitential psalms, accordingly, it is the vague and general "G.o.d" and "G.o.ddess" that are invoked, rather than a particular deity. It is only occasionally that the names of special G.o.ds are introduced, and then a long list of them is sometimes given, in the hope that among them might be the divinity whose anger had been excited, and whose wrath the sufferer was eager to appease.

Sin, it must be remembered, in the eyes of the Babylonian included a good deal more than moral wrong-doing. There were ritual sins as well as moral sins, offences against the ceremonial law as well as against the moral or spiritual code. The sin was not unfrequently involuntary, and the sufferer did not even know in what particular respect he had offended against the divine laws. It may have been the eating of forbidden food, such as that which drove Adam and Eve from the sinless garden of Paradise. Or, again, it may have been a real sin, a sin of thought and word committed in the secrecy of the heart. "Was he frank in speaking," it is asked in a confession which is put into the mouth of a suppliant, "but false in heart? Was it 'yes' with his mouth, but 'no' in his heart?" So far as the punishment was concerned, little distinction was made between moral and ceremonial sin; both were visited alike, and the sin of ignorance was punished as severely as the sin that was committed with deliberate intent.

The recitation of the penitential psalms was accompanied by fasting. "Food I have not eaten," the penitent is made to say, "pure water I have not drunk." And, as in the case of the incantations and hymns, the recitation was antiphonal. Portions of the psalms were recited by the priest, who acted as the mediator between the penitent and the offended deity; other portions by the penitent himself, or a choir of attendant ministers. The ideas which had been a.s.sociated with the use of the incantations still dominated the public cult. Indeed, the penitential psalm sometimes very nearly approaches the incantation in character. On the one side, it is difficult to distinguish from the psalm a confession like that from which I quoted just now, and which nevertheless forms part of a magical ritual; on the other side, the psalm itself at times degenerates into the language of magic. Babylonia never shook off the influence of those collections of incantations which const.i.tuted its first sacred book, and gave it its first conception of a divinely-inspired literature; up to the last the descendants of the old medicine-man occupied a recognised place in the priestly hierarchy, and the "Chanter" and "Augur" stood on the same footing as the "prophet" and the "priest."

Perhaps it was the same influence which demanded that the language of the penitential psalm should be the extinct Sumerian. That some of the psalms went back to Sumerian times and were composed by Sumerians in their own tongue, I have little doubt; but it seems also unquestionable that many of the psalms which have come down to us were of Semitic origin, the Sumerian version attached to them being really a translation of the original Semitic text. At all events, penitential psalms were written in later times in a.s.syria, whose authors either did not care or did not know how to provide them with a Sumerian text. It may be that they did not possess the same sacred authority as the older psalms, but, like the latter, they were used in the public services of the northern kingdom with the authorisation of the king. The king in a.s.syria, it must be remembered, exercised the influence that was wielded by the priesthood in the southern kingdom. The a.s.syrian psalms, in fact, were like our modern hymns; the sanct.i.ty that surrounded the older penitential psalms of Babylonia was indeed denied them, but they better suited the newer age and the character of the a.s.syrian people, and there was no omnipotent priesthood to forbid their introduction into the public cult. They stood, it is true, outside the sacred canon of Babylonia, in the sense that no dogmas of religion could be built on them, and it is probable that they never received the sanction of the Babylonian priests; but for all that the spirit they breathe is that of the older psalms; and had the a.s.syrian empire lasted longer, it is possible that they too might have become a sacred book.

I will conclude my lecture with one of the penitential psalms, which, we are told, might be addressed "to any G.o.d"-

"The heart of my lord is wroth; may it be appeased!

May the G.o.d that I know not be pacified!

May the G.o.ddess whom I know not be pacified!

May the G.o.d I know and (the G.o.d) I know not be pacified!

May the G.o.ddess I know and (the G.o.ddess) I know not be pacified!

May the heart of my G.o.d be appeased!

May the heart of my G.o.ddess be appeased!