History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 3 — 17 - Ch. 2: The Temples and the Gods of Chaldaea, pt. 4

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the Chaldaean intaglio reproduced in Heuzey-Sarzec, _Decouvertes en Chaldee_, pl.

30bis, No. 13b.

More frequently a priest, accustomed from childhood to the office, possessed the privilege of asking the desired questions and of interpreting to the faithful the various signs by means of which the divine will was made known.

The spirit of the god inspired, moreover, whatever seemed good to him, and frequently entered into objects where we should least have expected to find it.

It animated stones, particularly such as fell from heaven; also trees, as, for example, the tree of Eridu which pronounced oracles; and, besides the battle-mace, with a granite head fixed on a wooden handle, the axe of Ramman, lances made on the model of Gilgames’ fairy javelin, which came and went at its master’s orders, without needing to be touched.

Such objects, when it was once ascertained that they were imbued with the divine spirit, were placed upon the altar and worshipped with as much veneration as were the statues themselves.

[Illustration: 153. jpg A protecting amulet.

] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the terra-cotta figurine of Assyrian date now in the Louvre.

Animals never became objects of habitual worship as in Egypt: some of them, however, such as the bull and lion, were closely allied to the gods, and birds unconsciously betrayed by their flight or cries the secrets of futurity.

* In addition to all these, each family possessed its household gods, to whom its members recited prayers and poured libations night and morning, and whose statues set up over the domestic hearth defended it from the snares of the evil ones.

** The State religion, which all the inhabitants of the same city, from the king down to the lowest slave, were solemnly bound to observe, really represented to the Chaldaeans but a tithe of their religious life: it included some dozen gods, no doubt the most important, but it more or less left out of account all the others, whose anger, if aroused by neglect, might become dangerous.

The private devotion of individuals supplemented the State religion by furnishing worshippers for most of the neglected divinities, and thus compensated for what was lacking in the official public worship of the community.

* Animal forms are almost always restricted either to the genii, the constellations, or the secondary forms of the greater divinities: Ea, however, is represented by a man with a fish’s tail, or as a man clothed with a fish-skin, which would appear to indicate that at the outset he was considered to be an actual fish.

** The images of these gods acted as amulets, and the fact of their presence alone repelled the evil spirits.

At Khorsabad they were found buried under the threshold of the city gates.

A bilingual tablet in the British Museum has preserved for us the formula of consecration which was supposed to invest these protecting statuettes with divine powers.

If the idea of uniting all these divine beings into a single supreme one, who would combine within himself all their elements and the whole of their powers, ever for a moment crossed the mind of some Chaldaean theologian, it never spread to the people as a whole.

Among all the thousands of tablets or inscribed stones on which we find recorded prayers and magical formulas, we have as yet discovered no document treating of the existence of a supreme god, or even containing the faintest allusion to a divine unity.

We meet indeed with many passages in which this or that divinity boasts of his power, eloquently depreciating that of his rivals, and ending his discourse with the injunction to worship him alone: “Man who shall come after, trust in Nebo, trust in no other god!

” The very expressions which are used, commanding future races to abandon the rest of the immortals in favour of Nebo, prove that even those who prided themselves on being worshippers of one god realized how far they were from believing in the unity of God.

They strenuously asserted that the idol of their choice was far superior to many others, but it never occurred to them to proclaim that he had absorbed them all into himself, and that he remained alone in his glory, contemplating the world, his creature.

Side by side with those who expressed this belief in Nebo, an inhabitant of Babylon would say as much and more of Merodach, the patron of his birthplace, without, however, ceasing to believe in the actual independence and royalty of Nebo.

“When thy power manifests itself, who can withdraw himself from it?

--Thy word is a powerful net which thou spreadest in heaven and over the earth:--it falls upon the sea, and the sea retires,--it falls upon the plain, and the fields make great mourning,--it falls upon the upper waters of the Euphrates, and the word of Merodach stirs up the flood in them.

--O Lord, thou art sovereign, who can resist thee?

--Merodach, among the gods who bear a name, thou art sovereign.

” Merodach is for his worshippers the king of the gods, he is not the sole god.

Each of the chief divinities received in a similar manner the assurance of his omnipotence, but, for all that, his most zealous followers never regarded them as the only God, beside whom there was none other, and whose existence and rule precluded those of any other.

The simultaneous elevation of certain divinities to the supreme rank had a reactionary influence on the ideas held with regard to the nature of each.

Anu, Bel, and Ea, not to mention others, had enjoyed at the outset but a limited and incomplete personality, confined to a single concept, and were regarded as possessing only such attributes as were indispensable to the exercise of their power within a prescribed sphere, whether in heaven, or on the earth, or in the waters; as each in his turn gained the ascendency over his rivals, he became invested with the qualities which were exercised by the others in their own domain.

His personality became enlarged, and instead of remaining merely a god of heaven or earth or of the waters, he became god of all three simultaneously.

Anu reigned in the province of Bel or of Ea as he ruled in his own; Bel joined to his own authority that of Anu and Ea; Ea treated Anu and Bel with the same absence of ceremony which they had shown to him, and added their supremacy to his own.

The personality of each god was thenceforward composed of many divers elements: each preserved a nucleus of his original being, but superadded to this were the peculiar characteristics of all the gods above whom he had been successively raised.

Anu took to himself somewhat of the temperaments of Bel and of Ea, and the latter in exchange borrowed from him many personal traits.

The same work of levelling which altered the characteristics of the Egyptian divinities, and transformed them little by little into local variants of Osiris and the Sun, went on as vigorously among the Chaldaean gods: those who were incarnations of the earth, the waters, the stars, or the heavens, became thenceforth so nearly allied to each other that we are tempted to consider them as being doubles of a single god, worshipped under different names in different localities.

Their primitive forms can only be clearly distinguished when they are stripped of the uniform in which they are all clothed.

The sky-gods and the earth-gods had been more numerous at the outset than they were subsequently.

We recognize as such Anu, the immovable firmament, and the ancient Bel, the lord of men and of the soil on which they live, and into whose bosom they return after, death; but there were others, who in historic times had partially or entirely lost their primitive character,--such as Nergal, Ninib, Dumuzi; or, among the goddesses, Damkina, Esharra, and even Ishtar herself, who, at the beginning of their existence, had represented only the earth, or one of its most striking aspects.

For instance, Nergal and Ninib were the patrons of agriculture and protectors of the soil, Dumuzi was the ground in spring whose garment withered at the first approach of summer, Damkina was the leafy mould in union with fertilizing moisture, Esharra was the field whence sprang the crops, Ishtar was the clod which again grew green after the heat of the dog days and the winter frosts.

All these beings had been forced to submit in a greater or less degree to the fate which among most primitive races awaits those older earth-gods, whose manifestations are usually too vague and shadowy to admit of their being grasped or represented by any precise imagery without limiting and curtailing their spheres.

New deities had arisen of a more definite and tangible kind, and hence more easily understood, and having a real or supposed province which could be more easily realized, such as the sun, the moon, and the fixed or wandering stars.

The moon is the measure of time; it determines the months, leads the course of the years, and the entire life of mankind and of great cities depends upon the regularity of its movements: the Chaldaeans, therefore, made it, or rather the spirit which animated it, the father and king of the gods; but its suzerainty was everywhere a conventional rather than an actual superiority, and the sun, which in theory was its vassal, attracted more worshippers than the pale and frigid luminary.

Some adored the sun under its ordinary title of Shamash, corresponding to the Egyptian Ra; others designated it as Merodach, Ninib, Nergal, Dumuzi, not to mention other less usual appellations.

Nergal in the beginning had nothing in common with Ninib, and Merodach differed alike from Shamash, Ninib, Nergal, and Dumuzi; but the same movement which instigated the fusion of so many Egyptian divinities of diverse nature, led the gods of the Chaldaeans to divest themselves little by little of their individuality and to lose themselves in the sun.

Each one at first became a complete sun, and united in himself all the innate virtues of the sun--its brilliancy and its dominion over the world, its gentle and beneficent heat, its fertilizing warmth, its goodness and justice, its emblematic character of truth and peace; besides the incontestable vices which darken certain phases of its being--the fierceness of its rays at midday and in summer, the inexorable strength of its will, its combative temperament, its irresistible harshness and cruelty.

By degrees they lost this uniform character, and distributed the various attributes among themselves.

If Shamash continued to be the sun in general, Ninib restricted himself, after the example of the Egyptian Harmakhis, to being merely the rising and setting sun, the sun on the two horizons.

Nergal became the feverish and destructive summer sun.

* Merodach was transformed into the youthful sun of spring and early morning;** Dumuzi, like Merodach, became the sun before the summer.

Their moral qualities naturally were affected by the process of restriction which had been applied to their physical being, and the external aspect now assigned to each in accordance with their several functions differed considerably from that formerly attributed to the unique type from which they had sprung.

Ninib was represented as valiant, bold, and combative; he was a soldier who dreamed but of battle and great feats of arms.

Nergal united a crafty fierceness to his bravery: not content with being lord of battles, he became the pestilence which breaks out unexpectedly in a country, the death which comes like a thief, and carries off his prey before there is time to take up arms against him.

Merodach united wisdom with courage and strength: he attacked the wicked, protected the good, and used his power in the cause of order and justice.

A very ancient legend, which was subsequently fully developed among the Canaanites, related the story of the unhappy passion of Ishtar for Dumuzi.

The goddess broke out yearly into a fresh frenzy, but the tragic death of the hero finally moderated the ardour of her devotion.

She wept distractedly for him, went to beg the lords of the infernal regions for his return, and brought him back triumphantly to the earth: every year there was a repetition of the same passionate infatuation, suddenly interrupted by the same mourning.

The earth was united to the young sun with every recurring spring, and under the influence of his caresses became covered with verdure; then followed autumn and winter, and the sun, grown old, sank into the tomb, from whence his mistress had to call him up, in order to plunge afresh with him by a common impulse into the joys and sorrows of another year.

* The solar character of Nergal, at least in later times, is admitted, but with restrictions, by all Assyriologists.

The evident connection between him and Ninib, of which we have proofs, was the ground of Delitzsch’s theory that he was likewise the burning and destructive sun, and also of Jensen’s analogous concept of a midday and summer sun.

** Pr.

Lenormant seems to have been the first to distinguish in Merodach, besides the god of the planet Jupiter, a solar personage.

This notion, which has been generally admitted by most Assyriologists, has been defined with greater exactitude by Jensen, who is inclined to see in Merodach both the morning sun and the spring sun; and this is the opinion held at present.