It is imperative to try to understand the original purpose or significance of the Semitic and Anatolian rites that we have been dealing with. To regard them as the early Christian and some modern writers have done, as mere examples of unbridled Oriental lust masquerading in the guise of religion, is a false and unjust view. According to Herodotus, the same society that ordained this sacrifice of virginity upon the daughters of families maintained in other respects a high standard of virtue, which appears also attested by Babylonian religious and secular documents. Modern anthropology has handled the problem with greater insight and seriousness; but certain current explanations are not convincing. To take the rite described by Herodotus first, which is always to be distinguished from the permanent institution of “hierodulai” in the sense of temple-harlots: Mannhardt, who was the first to apply modern science to the problem, explained it as a development of vegetation-ritual.276.1Aphrodite and Adonis, Ishtar and Tammuz, represent vegetation, and their yearly union causes general fertility; the women are playing the part of the goddess, and the stranger represents Adonis! The Babylonian rite, then, is partly religious μιμησις, the human acting of a divine drama, partly religious magic good for the crops. But in spite of Mannhardt’s great and real services to science, his vegetation-theory leads him often astray, and only one who was desperately defending a thesis would explain that stranger, a necessary personage in the ritual at Babylon, Byblos, Cyprus, and Baalbec, as the native god. There is no kind of reason for connecting the Babylonian rite with Tammuz, or for supposing that the women were representingthe goddess,277.1or that their act directly influenced the crops, except in the sense that all due performance of religious ceremonies has been considered at certain stages of belief as favouring the prosperity of the land. Sir William Ramsay, in hisCities and Bishoprics of Phrygia,277.2would explain the custom as preserving the tradition of the communism of women before regular marriage was instituted. Dr. Frazer, who has dealt more fully with the question, accepts this explanation,277.3as he also accepts Mannhardt’s in full; and, while he associates—as I think, wrongly—the Babylonian rite with general temple-prostitution, he adds a third suggestion, prompted by his theory of kingship: the king himself might have to mate with one or more of the temple-harlots “who played Astarte to his Adonis”:277.4such unions might serve to maintain the supply of human deities, one of whom might succeed to the throne, and another might be sacrificed in his father’s stead when religion demanded the life of the royal man-god. I do not find this theory coherent even with itself; and, like the others, it fails to explain all the facts, and, on the other hand, it imagines data which are not given us by the records.
That state of communism when sexual union was entirely promiscuous is receding further and further into the anthropological background: it is dangerous to predicate it of the most backward Anatolian State in any period which can come into our ken. When the Byzantine Sokrates gravely tells us that the men of Heliopolishad their wives in common, he does not know what he is saying. And if this sacrifice of virginity before marriage was a recognition of the original rights of all the males of the community, why did not some representative of the community take the virginity, the priest or some head-man? This ill-considered sociologic hypothesis shipwrecks on that mysterious stranger.278.1
Prof. Westermarck, in hisOrigin and Development of the Moral Ideas,278.2regards the Mylitta-rite as intended to ensure fertility in women through direct appeal to the goddess of fertility, and he explains the formula which the stranger uttered—ἐπικαλέω τοι τὴν θεὸν Μύλιττα—as signifying generally “May the goddess Mylitta prosper thee.” Obviously the phrase, “I invoke the goddess for thee,” could as naturally mean, “I claim thee in the name of the goddess,” the stranger basing his right to the woman on this appeal. But his general theory appears not so unsound as those which have just been noted.
The comparative method ought to help us here; and though we have no exact parallel, as far as I am aware, recorded of any people outside the Mediterranean area to the Babylonian custom, we find usages reported elsewhere that agree with it in one essential. Lubbock quotes instances from modern India of the rule imposed upon women of presenting themselves before marriage in the temple of Juggernaut for the purpose—as he implies—of offering up their virginity, though no such custom is recorded in the Vedic period of religion;278.3cases also are chronicled of the rule prevailing amonguncultured or semi-cultured tribes that the medicine-man or the priest should take the virginity of the bride before the marriage ceremony.279.1These are probably illustrations of the working of the same idea as that which inspired the Babylonian custom. Marriage involves the entering upon a new state; change of life is generally dangerous, and must be safeguarded by what Van Gennep has called “rites de passage”; more especially is the sexual union with a virgin dangerous and liable to be regarded with awe by primitive sentiment; before it is safe to marry her, the tabu that is upon her must first be removed by a religious act securing the divinity’s sanction for the removal; just as the ripe cornfield must not be reaped before religious rites, such as the consecration of first-fruits, have loosened the tabu upon it: we may believe that Hellenic marriage ritual secured the same end as the Babylonian by what seems to us the more innocent method of offering the προτέλεια. So the Babylonian safeguards the coming marriage by offering the first-fruits of his daughter to the goddess who presides over the powers and processes of life and birth. Under her protection, after appeal to her, the process loses its special danger; or if there is danger still, it falls upon the head of the stranger.279.2For I can find no other way of accountingfor his presence as a necessary agent, in the ritual of at least four widely separate communities of Semitic race: this comparative ubiquity prevents us explaining it as due to some capricious accidental impulse of delicacy, as if the act would become less indelicate if a stranger who would not continue in the place participated in it.
In his essay on the question, Mr. Hartland explains the Babylonian rite as belonging to the class of puberty-ceremonies; nor would this account of it conflict with the view here put forth, if, as he maintains, primitive puberty-ceremonies to which girls are subjected are usually preliminary to the marriage which speedily follows.280.1But puberty-ceremonies are generally performed at initiation-mysteries, and none of the rites that we are considering appear to have been associated with mysteries except, perhaps, at Cyprus, where the late record speaks of mysteries instituted by Kinyras that had a sexual significance, and which may have been the occasion of the consecration of virginity that Justin describes;280.2but the institution of mysteries has notyet been proved for any purely Semitic religion. In any case, Mr. Hartland’s statement does not explain why the loss of virginity should be considered desirable in a puberty-ceremony or as a preliminary to marriage.
The significance of the action, as I have interpreted it, is negative rather than positive, the avoidance of a vague peril or the removal of a tabu rather than the attainment of the blessing of fertility, as Dr. Westermarck would regard it. And this idea, the removal of a tabu, seems expressed in the phrase of Herodotus281.1by which he describes the state of the woman after the ceremony—ἀποσιωσαμένη τῇ θεῷ; and the parallel that I have suggested, the consecration of the first-fruits of the harvest to remove the tabu from the rest of the crop, is somewhat justified by the words of Justin already quoted—“pro reliqua pudicitia libamenta Veneri soluturas.”
As regards the other institution, the maintenance of “hierodoulai” in temples as “consecrated” women, “kadeschim,” unmarried, who for a period of years indulged in sexual intercourse with visitors, the original intention and significance of it is hard to decide. We may be sure that it did not originate in mere profligacy, and the inscription of Tralles shows that even in the later Roman period it had not lost its religious prestige.281.2Such a custom could naturally arise in a society that allowed freedom of sexual intercourse among young unmarried persons—and this is not uncommonly found at a primitive level of culture—and that was devoted to the worship of a goddess of sexual fertility. The rituals in the temples of Ishtar of Erech, Anaitis ofArmenia, Mā of Comana, must have been instituted for some national and social purpose; therefore Mr. Hartland’s suggestion, that the original object of the Armenian rite was to give the maidens a chance of securing themselves a suitable husband by experience, seems insufficient. Dr. Frazer’s theory, that connects the institution with some of the mystic purposes of kingship,282.1floats in the air; for there is not a particle of evidence showing any relation between these women and the monarch or the royal harem or the monarchical succession or the death of a royal victim. A simpler suggestion is that the “hierodoulai,” or temple-women, were the human vehicles for diffusing through the community the peculiar virtue or potency of the goddess, the much-coveted blessing of human fertility. Thus to consecrate slaves or even daughters to this service was a pious social act.
The significance of the facts that we have been examining is of the highest for the history of religious morality, especially for the varied history of the idea of purity. We call this temple-harlotry vile and impure; the civilised Babylonian, who in private life valued purity and morality, called the women “kadistu,” that is, “pure” or clean in the ritualistic sense, or as Zimmern interprets the ideogram, “not unclean.”282.2In fact, the Mediterranean old-world religions, all save the Hebraic, agreed in regarding the processes of the propagation of life as divine, at least as something not alien or abhorrent to godhead. But the early Christian propagandists, working here on Hebraic lines, intensified the isolation of God from the simple phenomena of birth, thereby engendering at times an anti-sexual bias, and preparing a discord between any possible biologicalview and the current religious dogma, and modern ethical thought has not been wholly a gainer thereby.
The subject that has been discussed at some length is also connected with the whole question of ritual-purity and purification. The primitive conception of purity had at an early stage in its evolution been adopted by higher religion; and the essential effect of impurity was to debar a person from intercourse with God and with his fellow-men. Hence arises a code of rules to regulate temple-ritual. So far as I am aware, the Babylonian rules for safeguarding the purity of the shrines were not conspicuously different from the Greek or the Hebraic.283.1The taint of bloodshed and other physical impurities was kept aloof; and it is in the highest degree probable that the function of the “hetairai” was only performed outside the temple, for Herodotus specially tells us that this rule was observed in the Mylitta-rite. The cathartic methods of East and West agree in many points. The use of holy water for purifying purposes was known to the early Greeks.283.2It was still more in evidence in the Babylonian ritual: the holy water of the Euphrates or Tigris was used for a variety of purposes, for the washing of the king’s hands before he touched the statues, for the washing of the idol’s mouths,283.3perhaps also for baptism. For we hear of some such rite in a hymn to Enlil translated by Dr. Langdon284.1—the line that he renders “Son whom in the sacred bowl she baptized,” seems to refer to a human child. Ablution was prominent also in the exorcism-ritual, and the “House of Washing” or “House of Baptism” was the centre of a liturgy that had for its object deliverance from demons.284.2The whole State was at times purified by water.284.3And in all this ritual the water must itself be of a peculiar purity—rain-water, for instance,284.4or the water of the Euphrates, whence came probably the Water of Life that was kept in Marduk’s temple with which the Gods and the Annunaki washed their faces, and which was used in the feast of the Doom-fixing.284.5According to the Babylonian view ordinary water was naturally impure (we may well believe that it was so at Babylon, where the river and canals were so pressed into the service of man), and a person incurred impurity by stepping over a puddle or other unpurified water.284.6The Greek did not need to be so scrupulous, for most water in his land was naturally pure, being spring or brook; yet in his cathartic rules we find often that only a special water was suitable for the religious purpose, running water especially, or sea-water, or in a particular locality one sacred fountain only.284.7But though it was to him as to mostpeoples, the simple and natural means of purification, he did not apply it to such various cathartic purposes as the Babylonian. Nor as far as we can discover had he developed in old days the interesting rite of baptism: we hear of it first in the records of the fifth century, and in relation to alien cults like that of the Thracian goddess Kotytto.285.1
Equally prominent in the cathartic ritual of Mesopotamia was the element of fire: in the prayer that followed upon the purification-ceremonies we find the formula, “May the torch of the gleaming Fire-God cleanse me.”285.2The Fire-God, Nusku, is implored “to burn away the evil magicians,”285.3and we may believe that he owes his development and exalted position as a high spiritual god to the ritual use of fire, just as in the Vedic religion did Agni. The conception of fire as a mighty purifying element, which appears in the Old and New Testaments and in Christian eschatology, has arisen, no doubt, from the cathartic ritual of the ancient Semites. Doubtless also the spiritual or magic potency of this element was known in ancient Europe: it is clearly revealed in the primitive ceremonies of the old German “Notfeuer,” with which the cattle, fields, and men were purified in time of pestilence.285.4And there are several indications of its use in Greek cathartic ritual; a noteworthy example is the purification of Lemnos by the bringing of holy fire from Delos;285.5the curious Attic ritual of running with the new-born babe round thehearth, called the Amphidromia, may have had a similar intention;286.1even the holy water, the χέρνιψ, seems to have been hallowed by the insertion of a torch;286.2and in the later records fire is often mentioned among the usual implements of cleansing.286.3The Eleusinian myth concerning Demeter holding the infant Demophon in the flame to make him immortal was suggested probably by some purificatory rite in which fire was used. Finally, the fire-ordeal, which was practised both in Babylonia and Greece,286.4may have been associated at a certain period with the cathartic properties of fire. Nevertheless, the Hellenic divinities specially concerned with this element, Hestia and Hephaistos, had little personal interest in this ritual, and did not rise to the same height in the national theology as Nusku rose in the Babylonian.
We might find other coincidences in detail between Hellenic and Assyrian ritual, such as the purificatory employment of salt, onions, and the sacrificial skin of the animal-victim.286.5One of the most interesting phenomena presented by the cathartic law of old Babyloniais a rule that possessed an obvious moral value; we find, namely, on one of the cylinders of Gudea, that during the period when Gudea was purifying the city the master must not strike the slave, and no action at law must be brought against any one; for seven days perfect equality reigned, no bad word was uttered, the widow and the orphan went free from wrong.287.1The conception underlying this rule is intelligible: all quarrelling and oppression, being often accompanied with bloodshed and death, disturbs the general purity which is desired to prevail; and I have indicated elsewhere a similar law regulating the conduct of the Eleusinian mysteries and the Dionysiac festival at Athens, both ceremonies of cathartic value,287.2and I have pointed out a similar ordinance observed recently by a North-American Indian tribe, and formerly by the Peruvians; to these instances may be added the statement by Livy,287.3that in the Roman “lectisternia,” when a table with offerings was laid before the gods, no quarrelling was allowed and prisoners were released, and the historian gives to the institution of the lectisternia a piacular significance.
We must also bear in mind certain striking differences between the Hellenic and the Babylonian cathartic systems. In certain purification-ceremonies of Hellas, those in which the homicide was purged from his stain, the washing with the blood of the piacular victim was the most potent means of grace.287.4We may find analogies in Vedic, Roman, and Hebraic ritual, but hitherto none have been presented by the religious documentsof Babylon, where, as has been already pointed out, scarcely any mystic use appears to have been made of the blood of the victim.288.1Again, the Babylonian purification included the confession of sins, a purgation unknown and apparently unnatural to the Hellene;288.2and generally the Babylonian, while most of its methods, like the Hellenic, are modes of transference or physical riddance of impurity, had a higher spiritual and religious significance; for it includes lamentations for sin and prayers to the divinity that are not mentioned in the record of any Greek “katharsis.”
A long ritual-document is preserved containing the details of the purification of the king:288.3certain forms agree with the Hellenic, but one who was only versed in the latter would find much that was strange and unintelligible both in the particulars and in general atmosphere. We discern an interesting mixture of magic and religion. The gods are partly entreated, partly bribed, partly constrained; and at the end the evil is physically expelled from the palace. The purifier puts on dark garments, just as the ministers of the underworld-deities did occasionally in Greece. The king himself performs much of the ceremony, and utters words of power: “May my sins be rent away, may I be pure and live before Shamash.” The ordering of the cathartic apparatus is guided partly by astrology. It is curious also to find that every article used in the process is identified by name with some divinity: the cypress is the god Adad, the fragrant spices the god Ninib, the censer the god Ib, etc.; and the commentary that accompanies the ritual-text explains that thesesubstances compel the deities thus associated with them to come and give aid.
In fact, the differences between East and West in this religious sphere are so important that we should not be able to believe that the cathartic system of Greece was borrowed from Babylonia, even if the points of resemblance were much more numerous and striking than they are. For it would be possible to draw up a striking list of coincidences between Hellenic and Vedic cathartic rites, and yet no one would be able on the strength of it to establish a hypothesis of borrowing.
In any case, it may be said, the question of borrowing does not arise within the narrow limits of our inquiry, which is limited to the pre-Homeric period, since all Greek “katharsis” is post-Homeric. The latter dictum is obviously not literally true, as a glance through the Homeric poems will prove. Homer is aware of the necessity of purification by water before making prayer or libation to the gods: Achilles washes his hands and the cups before he pours forth wine and prays to Zeus,289.1Telemachos washes his hands in sea-water before he prays to Athena289.2; and there is a significant account of the purification of the whole Achaean host after the plague;289.3as the later Greeks would have done, the Achaeans throw away into the sea their λύματα, the infected implements of purification, wool or whatever they used, that absorbed the evil from them. But it has been generally observed that Homer does not appear to have been aware of any need for purification from the stain of bloodshed or from the ghostly contagion of death. It is true that Odysseus purifies his hall with fire and sulphur after slaying the suitors, but we are not sure that the act had any further significance thanthe riddance of the smell of blood from the house. Sulphur is there called κακῶν ἄκος,290.1“a remedy against evil things”; but we cannot attach any moral or spiritual sense to κακὰ, nor is Homeric κάθαρσις related, as far as we can see, to any animistic belief. There is one passage where Homer’s silence is valuable and gives positive evidence; Theoklumenos, who has slain a man of his own tribe and fled from his home, in consequence approaches Telemachos when the latter is sacrificing and implores and receives his protection: there is no hint of any feeling that there is a stain upon him, or that he needs purification, or that his presence pollutes the sacrifice.290.2All this would have been felt by the later Greek; and in the post-Homeric period we have to reckon with a momentous growth of the idea of impurity and of a complex system of purification, especially in regard to homicide, leading to important developments in the sphere of law and morality which I have tried to trace out on other occasions.290.3But Homer may well be regarded as the spokesman of a gifted race, the Achaeans, as we call them, on whom the burden of the doctrine of purification lay lightly, and for whom the ghostly world had comparatively little terror or interest. Besides the Achaeans, however, and their kindred races there was the submerged population of the older culture who enter into the composition of the various Hellenes of history. Therefore the varied development in the post-Homeric period of cathartic ideas may be only a renaissance, a recrudescence of forces that were active enough in the second millennium.Attica may have been the home where the old tradition survived, and cathartic rites such as the Thargelia and the trial of the axe for murder in the Bouphonia have the savour of great antiquity. May not the Minoan religion of Crete have been permeated with the ideas of the impurity of bloodshed and the craving for purification from sin? For at the beginning of the historic period Crete seems to have been the centre of what may be called the cathartic mission; from this island came Apollo Delphinios, the divine purifierpar excellence, to this island the god came to be purified from the death of Python; and in later times, Crete lent to Athens its purifying prophet Epimenides.291.1If we believe, then, that the post-Homeric blood-purification was really a recrudescence of the tradition of an older indigenous culture, we should use this as another argument for the view that the Greece of the second millennium was untouched or scarcely touched by Babylonian influence. For, as we have seen, purification by blood or from blood appears to have been wholly alien to Babylonian religious and legal practice.
The ritual of purification belongs as much to the history of magic as religion. Now, the student of religion is not permitted to refuse to touch the domain of magic; nor can we exclude its consideration even from the highest topics of religious speculation. Some general remarks have already been made291.2concerning the part played by magic both in the worship and in thesocial life of the peoples that we are comparing. Any exact and detailed comparison would be fruitless for our present purpose; for, while the knowledge of early Babylonian magic is beginning to be considerable, we cannot say that we know anything definite concerning the practices in this department of the Hellenic and adjacent peoples in the early period with which we are dealing. From the Homeric poems we can gather little more than that magic of some kind existed; and that Homer and his gifted audience probably despised it as they despised ghosts and demons. It is only by inference that we can venture to ascribe to the earliest period of the Greek race some of the magic rites that are recorded by the later writers. It would require a lengthy investigation and treatise to range through the whole of Greek ritual and to disentangle and expose the magic element which was undoubtedly there, and which in some measure is latent in the ritual of every higher religion yet examined. By way of salient illustration we may quote the ceremonies of the scapegoat and the φαρμακός,292.1modes of the magic-transference of sin and evil; the strewing of sacred food-stuff that is instinct with divine potency over the fields in the Thesmophoria; the rain magic performed by the priests of Zeus Lykaios;292.2we hear at Kleonai of an official class of “Magi” who controlled the wind and the weather by spells, and occasionally in their excitement gashed their own hands, like the priests of Baal;292.3such blood-magic being explicable as a violent mode of discharging personal energy upon the outer objects which one wishes to subdue to one’s will. Another and morethrilling example of blood-magic is the process of water-finding by pouring human blood about the earth, a method revealed by an old legend of Haliartos in Boeotia about the man who desired water, and in order to find it consulted Delphi, and was recommended by the oracle to slay the first person who met him on his return; his own young son met him first, and the father stabbed him with his sword; the wounded youth ran round about, and wherever the blood dripped water sprang up from the earth.293.1No one will now venture to say that all these things are post-Homeric; the natural view is that they were an inheritance of crude and primitive thought indigenous to the land. Many of them belong to world-wide custom; on the other hand, some of the striking and specialised rites, such as the blood-magic and the ritual of the φαρμακός, are not found at Babylon.
But before prejudging the question, some salient and peculiar developments of Babylonian magic ought to be considered. One great achievement of Mesopotamian civilisation was the early development of astrology, to which perhaps the whole world has been indebted for good and for evil, and which was associated with magic and put to magic uses. Astrological observation led to the attachment of a magic value to numbers and to certain special numbers, such as number seven. Whether the Judaic name and institution of the Sabbath is of Babylonian origin or not, does not concern our question. But it concerns us to know that the seventh days, the 14th, the 21st, and 28th of certain months, if not of all, were sacred at Babylon, and were days of penance and piacular duties when ordinary occupation was suspended.293.2We can discern the origin of the sanctity of this number: the observation of theseven planets, and the division of the lunar month into four quarters of seven days. The early Greeks, doubtless, had their astrological superstitions, as most races have had; the new moon is naturally lucky, the waning moon unlucky; but no one can discover any numerical or other principle in the Hesiodic system, which is our earliest evidence of Hellenic lucky and unlucky days. His scheme is presented in naïve confusion, and he concludes humorously, “one man praises one day, one another, and few know anything about it.”294.1His page of verse reflects the anarchy of the Greek calendars; and we should find it hard to credit that either Hesiod or the legislators that drew up those had sat attentively at the feet of Babylonian teachers. But a few coincidences may be noted. Hesiod puts a special tabu on the fifth day of the month; in fact, it is the only one in his list that is wholly unlucky, a day when it would seem to be best to do nothing at all, at least outside the house, for on this day the Erinyes are wandering about.294.2Now, a Babylonian text published by Dr. Langdon contains the dogma that on the fifth day of Nisan “he who fears Marduk and Zarpanit shall not go out to work.”294.3This Babylonian rule is the earliest example of what may be strictly called Sabbatarianism, abstinence from work through fear of offending the high god. Such would probably not be the true account of Hellenic feeling concerning the “forbidden days,” which were called ἀποφράδες or μιαραί.294.4The high god had issued to the Hellene no moral commandment about “keeping the Sabbath-day holy”; his reluctance to do certain work on certain days rested on a more primitive sentimentconcerning them. Thus it was unlucky both for himself and the city that Alcibiades should return to the Piraeus when the Plynteria were going on; for this latter was a cathartic ceremony, and evil influences were abroad. Nor, as Xenophon declares, would any one venture to engage in a serious work on this day.295.1Nor were these μιαραὶ ᾑμέραι, like the seventh days of the Babylonian months, necessarily days of gloom when offended deities had to be propitiated; on the contrary, the day of Χόες was a day of merry drinking and yet μιαρά: in fact, we best understand the latter phrase by translating it “tabooed,” rather than “sad” or “gloomy.”295.2
Another coincidence that may arrest attention is that in Hesiod’s scheme the seventh day of the month was sacred because Apollo was born on it; and throughout the later period this god maintains his connection with the seventh day, also apparently with the first, the fourteenth, and the twentieth of the month.295.3This almost coincides with the Sabbatical division of the Babylonian months. But we cannot suppose that in Hellas these were days of mortification as they were in the East; else they would not have been associated with the bright deity Apollo.
Such dubious coincidences, balanced by still more striking diversities, are but frail supports for the hypothesis of race-contact.
In Babylonian thaumaturgy nothing is more significant than the magic power of the Word, whether spoken or written: and the Word, as we have noted, was raised to a cosmic divine power and possessed inherent creative force.295.4This is only a reflection upon the heavens of the human use of the magical or mesmeric word or setof words. This use of them is found, indeed, all round the globe. What seems unique in the Mesopotamian culture is that religion, religious literature, and poetry should have reached so high a pitch and yet never have risen above or shaken off the magic which is its constant accompaniment. Men and gods equally use magic against the demons; the most fervid hymn of praise, the most pathetic litany, is only part of an exorcism-ritual; and so inevitably does the shadow of magic dog religion here that Dr. Langdon is justified in his conjecture296.1that in a great hymn to Enlil, which contains scarcely a prayer but chiefly ecstatic description of his power, the worshipper is really endeavouring to charge himself with higher religious magic by this outpouring. In fact, here and elsewhere, a magic origin for the practice of theologic exegesis may be obscurely traced; narrative might acquire an apotropaeic effect; thus tablets containing the narrative of the achievements of the plague-god, hung up before the houses, could avert pestilence,296.2or, again, the reading aloud the tablet narrating the victory of Shamash and Ramman over the seven demons who attacked the moon-god Sin served to defeat the seven demons by the same sympathetic magic as would be worked by a dramatic representation of that event.296.3
There is no record or hint that the Hellenes recited hymns to Demeter or wrote up passages of Homer to avert demons.
It belongs to the magic use of formulae that minute exactness in respect of every syllable is necessary to the power of the spell or the spell-prayer. An Assyrianking who is consulting the sun-god concerning success in a war with which he is threatened, prays that the ritual which the enemy may be employing may go wrong and fail; and in this context occurs the curious petition, “May the lips of the priest’s son hurry and stumble over a word.”297.1The idea seems to be that a single slip in the ritual-formulae destroyed their whole value; and such a view belongs to magic rather than to religion.
Now it is probable that in his earliest mental stage the Hellene had been in bondage to the religious magic of sacred formulae and sacred names; and as a tradition of that stage, the divine epithet whereby he appealed to his deities according to his needs retained always for him a mysterious potency; but otherwise we have no proof that he worked word-magic by means of his sacred texts.
Babylonian sorcery, whether legitimate or illegitimate, was intended to work upon or through demons; and its familiarity with the names and special qualities of demons is its peculiar mark. In the ritual of exorcism of the demons, idols play a prominent and often singular rôle. The following performance is probably unique: in the exorcism of disease two idols, male and female, were set up before the sick man, then the evil spirits of sickness are invited thus: “Oh ye all wicked, all evil, who pursue so-and-so, if thou art male, here is thy wife; if thou art female, here is thy husband.”297.2The intent of the exorciser seems to be to attract the demon of disease, of whose sex he is not sure, into one or the other of these images, and he lures it by amorous enticement into the figure of opposite sex to its own;having got the demon into the image, he doubtless takes it out and burns or buries it. Or the evil spirit may be attracted from the patient by means of its own image placed near him. One document prescribes various images of bestial form, all of which are to be taken by night to the bank of the river, probably that they may be thrown in and carry the impurity of sickness away.298.1Another shows us how to deal with Labartu, the daughter of Anu;298.2her image, made of clay, is placed above the head of the sick man, so as to draw her or her power out from him; it is then taken out, slain, and buried. And this exorcism is all the more notable because Labartu is rather an evil goddess than a mere demon, being styled in another text “August lady,” “Mistress of the dark-haired men.”298.3Such magical drama, in which the demon-image might be slain to annul its potency, seems characteristically Babylonian: it entered also into the ritual of the high gods. For, at the feast of the New Year, when Nebo arrived from Borsippa, two images are brought before him and in his presence decapitated with the sword. Dr. Langdon interprets them298.4as representing probably “the demons who aided the dragon in her fight with Marduk; they are the captive gods of darkness which ends with the Equinox.” This is dramatic magic helpful to the gods.
The elaboration of exorcism must have led to a minuter articulation of the demon-world; the exorciser is most anxious to know and discover all about his unseen foes: he gives them a name, a sex if possible, and a number: he says of the powerful storm-demonsUtuk “they are seven, they are seven, they are neither male nor female, they take no wife and beget no children;”299.1for knowledge of the name or nature of the personality gives magic power.
Many of these examples, which might easily be multiplied, show us magic applied to private but beneficent purposes, the healing of disease, the exorcism of spirits of moral and physical evil. It was also in vogue for national purposes—for instance, for the destruction of the enemies of the king; one of our documents describes such a process as the making of a tallow-image of the enemy of the king and binding his face with a cord, so as to render the living foe impotent of will and speech.299.2
We have already noticed that the Babylonian gods themselves work magic, and that it was also worked on behalf of the gods.299.3And in the ritual-records much that might be interpreted as religion may find its truer account from the other point of view; for instance, the ritual of placing by the bedside of a sick man the image of Nergal or those of the “twins who overthrow the wicked Gallu”299.4might appear at first sight as a religious appeal to the deities to come to his aid; but as in form it is exactly similar to the use made on the same occasion, as noted above, of the images of demons, we may rather suppose that the intention was magical in this act also, and that the divine idols were supposed to combat the demon of sickness by their magical influence. Or, again, in part of the ritual of exorcism we find acts that bear the semblance of sacrifice, such as throwing onions and dates into the fire; but they were charged with a curse before thrown, and the actis more naturally interpreted as a magic transference of evil.300.1
For the purpose of the exorcism, to deliver a “banned” person, the high god, Marduk or another, might be called in; but Marduk also works the effect by magic: a rope is woven by Ishtar’s maidens, which Marduk (or his priest) turns round the head of the sufferer, then breaks it through and throws it out into the desert.300.2This looks like symbolic magic; the knotted rope represents the ban, which is then broken and thrown away.
There are many features in these methods of exorcism, such as the apotropaeic use of idols, that are common to other peoples at a certain stage of culture; there remains much also that seems peculiar to Babylon.
But what is uniquely characteristic of this Mesopotamian people, and at the same time most un-Hellenic, is the all-pervading atmosphere of magic, which colours their view of life and their theory of the visible and invisible world. Babylonia, at least, was the one salient exception to the historic induction that a distinguished writer300.3has recently sanctioned—“religion once firmly established invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to discredit the magician.” The psalmody of Babylon, with its occasional outburstsof inspiration and its gleams of spiritual insight, would have appealed to an Isaiah; its magic would have appealed to many a modern African. The Babylonian prophet does not frown on it; the high gods accept it, the priest is its skilled and beneficent practitioner. And at no other point, perhaps, is the contrast between the Hellenic and the Mesopotamian religions so glaring as at this.
This comparison of Eastern and Western ritual may close with some observations on another religious function that may be of some value for the question of early ethnic influence.
It has been remarked that divination played an important, perhaps a dominant part in the Babylonian ritual of sacrifice, divination, that is, by inspection of the victim’s entrails, especially the liver; and that this method was adopted in Greece only in the later centuries.301.1But there are other salient differences between the Babylonian and the more ancient mantic art of Hellas.301.2Another method much in vogue in the former was a curious mode of divining by mixing oil and water and watching the movements and behaviour of the two liquids.301.3The first and only indication of a similar practice in Hellas is a passage in theAgamemnonof Æschylus, of which the true meaning has hitherto escaped the interpreters.301.4And here, as usual, an obvious example of Mesopotamian influence on Hellenic custom belongs only to a late epoch. It is also truethat the ancient divination of the two peoples agreed in certain respects, namely, in that both used, like most communities at a certain stage of culture, the auguries of birds and the revelations of dreams. As regards the facts relating to the former, we know more about Greece than at present about Babylon. But in the matter of dream-oracles, it is manifest that the Hellenic phenomena are entirely independent of Mesopotamian fashion. The Assyrian and Babylonian documents reveal the fashion of dream-prophecy in its simplest and highest form: the high deity of his own pleasure sends a dream, and the divining priest or skilled interpreter interprets it. No hint has so far been detected of that artificial method of provoking prophetic dreams by “incubation” or ἐγκοίμησις, the fashion of laying oneself down in some sacred shrine and sleeping with one’s ear to the ground, that was much in vogue in ancient Hellas and still survives in parts of the modern Greek world and which may be regarded as an immemorial tradition. In this divination, the divine spokesman was the power of the underworld. And this was the most important difference between the Western and the Eastern society in respect of the divine agency. In an early period of Hellenic history that may be called pre-Apolline, the earth-mother was conspicuously oracular by the vehicle of dreams; and this power of hers was generally shared by the nether god and buried heroes. Nor could the religion of Apollo suppress this “chthonian” divination. But in Mesopotamia the earth-powers and the nether world have no part or lot in this matter. It is almost the prerogative of Shamash, the sun-god, though Adad is sometimes associated with him;302.1both being designated as “Bēlē-Biri” or “Lords of Oracles.”303.1
Another remarkable distinction is the fact that the ecstatic or enthusiastic form of prophecy, that of the Shaman or Pythoness possessed and maddened by the inworking spirit of god, is not found in the Babylonian record, which only attests the cool and scientific method of interpreting by signs and dreams and the stars. Perhaps Mesopotamia from the third millennium onward was too civilised to admit the mad prophet and prophetess to its counsels. But such characters were attached to certain Anatolian cults, especially to those of Kybele,303.2and also to the Syrian goddess at Hierapolis;303.3we have evidence of them also in a record of the Cretan Phaistos in the service of the Great Mother.303.4Some scholars have supposed that prophetic ecstasy was only a late phenomenon in Hellas, because Homer is silent about it. But there are reasons for suspecting that demoniac possession was occasionally found in the pre-Homeric divination of Hellas,303.5an inheritance perhaps from the pre-Hellenic period.
In any case, the theory that primitive Hellas was indebted to Babylonia for its divination-system is strongly repugnant to the facts.
Thiscomparative exposition of the Sumerian-Babylonian and the most complex and developed pre-Christian religion of Europe cannot claim to be complete or at any point finally decisive, but it may at least have helped to reveal the high value and interest of these phenomena for the workers in this broad field of inquiry. This was one of the main objects of this course. The other was the discussion of a question of religious ethnology, concerning the possible influence of Mesopotamia on the earliest development of Hellenic religion. The verdict must still remain an open one, awaiting the light of the new evidence that the future will gather. But the evidence at present available—and it may be hoped that none of first importance has been missed—constrains us to a negative answer or at least a negative attitude of mind.
Confining ourselves generally to the second millennium B.C., we have surveyed the religions of the adjacent peoples between the valley of the Euphrates and the western shores of the Aegean; and have observed that morphologically they are generally on the same plane of polytheism, but that those of Mesopotamia and Hellas reveal inner differences, striking and vital enough to be serious stumbling-blocks to a theory of affiliation. These differences concern thepersonality of the divinities and their relations to the various parts of the world of nature; the most salient being the different attitude of the two peoples to the divine luminaries of heaven and to the chthonian powers of the lower world. They concern the cosmogonies of East and West, their views of the creation of the world, and the origin of man; on these matters, certain myths which are easily diffused do not appear to have reached Hellas in this early period. They concern the religious temperaments of the Babylonian and Hellene, which appear as separate as the opposite points of the pole; the rapturous fanatic and self-abasing spirit of the East contrasting vividly with the coolness, civic sobriety, and self-confidence of the West. They concern the eschatologic ideas of the two peoples: the cult of the dead and some idea of a posthumous judgment being found in early Hellas, while the former was rare, and the latter is scarcely discoverable, in Mesopotamia. They concern, finally, the ritual; and here the salient points of contrast are the different views of the sacrifice, of the sacrificial victim, and the sacrificial blood; the different methods of purification and the expulsion of sin; the ritual of sorrow associated with the death of the god, so powerful in Babylonia and so insignificant (by comparison) in Hellas; the un-Hellenic Mylitta-rite, and the service of the “hierodoulai”; and, to conclude with the most vital difference of all, the manifestations of magic and its relation to the national religions, so complex, so pregnant for thought and faith, and so dominant in Mesopotamia; on the other hand, so insignificant and unobtrusive in Hellas.
Two other points have been incidentally noticed in our general survey, but it is well in a final summing up to emphasise their great importance as negativeevidence. The first concerns the higher history of European religion: the establishment of religious mysteries, a phenomenon of dateless antiquity, and of powerful working in Hellenic and Aegean society, has not yet been discovered in the Mesopotamian culture. The second is a small point that concerns commerce and the trivialities of ritual: the use of incense, universal from immemorial times in Mesopotamia, and proved by the earliest documents, begins in Greece not earlier than the eighth century B.C. This little product, afterwards everywhere in great demand, for it is pleasant to the sense, soothing to the mind, and among the harmless amenities of worship, was much easier to import than Babylonian theology or more complex ritual. It might have come without these, but they could scarcely have come without it. Yet it did not come to Hellenic shores in the second millennium. And this trifling negative fact is worth a volume of the higher criticism for the decision of our question.
Those who still cling to the faith that Babylonia was the centre whence emanated much Mediterranean religion, may urge that the negative value of the facts exposed above may be destroyed by future discoveries. This is true, but our preliminary hypotheses should be framed on the facts that are already known. Or they may urge that the generic resemblances of the two religious systems with which we have been mainly concerned are also great. But, as has been observed, the same generic resemblance exists between Greek and Vedic polytheism. And for the question of religious origin general resemblances are far less decisive than specific points of identity, such, for instance, as the identity of divine names or of some peculiar divine attribute. Later we can trace the migrations of Isisand Mithras throughout Europe by their names or by the sistrum or by the type of the fallen bull, of the Hittite god Teschub in the Graeco-Roman guise of Jupiter Dolichenos as far as Hungary, perhaps as far as Scandinavia, by the attribute of the hammer. It is just this sort of evidence of any trace of Babylonian influence that is lacking among the records of early Greece. No single Babylonian name is recognisable in its religious or mythologic nomenclature; just as no characteristically Babylonian fashion is found in its ritual or in the appurtenances of its religion. This well accords with what is already known of the Mediterranean history of the second millennium. For long centuries the Hittite empire was a barrier between the Babylonian power and the coastlands of Asia Minor.
So far, then, as our knowledge goes at present, there is no reason for believing that nascent Hellenism, wherever else arose the streams that nourished its spiritual life, was fertilised by the deep springs of Babylonian religion or theosophy.
Adad (Ramman),62,101-102,142,143.
Adonis,251,255,273-274.
Alilat,44.
Allatu,57,206,218.
Aniconic worship,225-230.
Animism,43.
Anthropomorphism, in Greece,10-12,75-80; in Mesopotamia,51-52,55-57; in Canaan,57-58; in Hittite religion,60-61; in Phrygia,63-64; in Crete,64-75.
Aphrodite, Cretan-Mycenaean,96; in Cyprus,261; Ourania,272-273.
Apollo,49,295; theory of Lycian origin,90; Agyieus,136; Delphinios,291; Lykeios,76.
Arabian divinities,85,263.
Aramaic divinities,85.
Artemis, of Brauron,244; in Cilicia,89; at Ephesos,91; aboriginal Mediterranean goddess,96.
Aryan migration into Greece,34.
Asshur,58,225.
Astarte,57,58,59,86,107.
Astral cults, in Mesopotamia,102; in Greece,111-114.
Atargatis (Derketo),57.
Athena, aboriginal Mediterranean goddess,96.
Athtar, Arabian deity,85,263.
Attar, in Arabia,168.
Attis,91,254-258,266; Παπαῖος,95.
Axe-cult, in Crete,70,93.
Baalbec,273-274.
Baptism,284.
Bau, Babylonian goddess,263.
Belit, Babylonian goddess,83,84,104.
Birds, cult of,63,69-73.
Boghaz-Keui, reliefs of,47,60,125; cuneiform texts at,61.
Borrowing, tests of, in religion,37.
Boundaries, sanctity of,127-128.
Bouphonia, in Attica,237-238.
Britomartis,170.
Bull, Hittite worship of,252-253.
Burial-customs,208-210.
Byblos, Adonis-rites at,273-274.
Chemosh, of Moab,59,86.
Cilicia, Assyrian conquests in,35(videTyphoeus).
Cities, religious origin of,118.
Communion-service with dead,209.
Confessional-service in Mesopotamia,151,288.
Convent-system in Mesopotamia,268-269.
Cook, Mr.,66,69,73.