The suppliant then introduces himself and his petition: I, Balasu, son of his god, whose god is Nabu, whose goddess is Tashmeturn . . . I am one who is weary, disturbed, whose body is very sick, I bow before thee . . . O lord, Wise One 5 George A. Barton, The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), p. 113.
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of the gods, by thy mouth command good for me; O Nabu, Wise O n e of the gods, by thy mouth may I come forth alive.6
The general form of prayer, beginning with emphatic praise of the god and ending with a personal petition, has not really changed since Mesopotamian times. The very exaltation of the god, and indeed the very idea of divine worship, is in contrast to the more matter-of-fact everyday relationship of god and man a thousand years earlier.
An Origin of Angels
In the so-called Neo-Sumerian period, at the end of the third millennium B.C., graphics, particularly cylinder seals, are full of
'presentation' scenes: a minor god, often female, introduces an individual, presumably the owner of the seal, to a major god.
This is entirely consistent with what we have suggested was likely in a bicameral kingdom, namely that each individual had his personal god who seemed to intercede with higher gods on the person's behalf. And this type of presentation or intercession scene continues well into the second millennium B.C.
But then a dramatic change occurs. First, the major gods disappear from such scenes, even as from the altar of Tukulti-Ninurta. There then occurs a period where the individual's personal god is shown presenting him to the god's symbol only. And then, at the end of the second millennium B.C., we have the beginning of hybrid human-animal beings as the intermediaries and messengers between the vanished gods and their forlorn followers. Such messengers were always part bird and part human, sometimes like a bearded man with two sets of wings, crowned like a god, and often holding a kind of purse supposedly containing ingredients for a purification ceremony. These supposed personnel of the celestial courts are found with increasing 6 Translated by H. W. F. Saggs in his The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), p. 312.
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frequency in Assyrian cylinder seals and carvings. In early instances, such angels, or genii, as Assyriologists more often call them, are seen introducing an individual to the symbol of a god as in the old presentation scenes. But soon even this is abandoned.
And by the beginning of the first millennium B.C., we find such angels in a countless diversity of scenes, sometimes with humans, sometimes in various struggles with other hybrid beings.
Sometimes they have the heads of birds. Or they are winged bulls or winged lions with human heads to act as wardens for such palaces as that at Nimrud in the ninth century or guarding the gates of Khorsabad in the eighth century B.C. Or, hawk-headed and broad-winged, they may be seen following around behind a king, with a cone which has been dipped in a small pail, as in a wall carving of Assurnasirpal in the ninth century B.C., a scene like the anointing of baptism. In none of these depictions does the angel seem to be speaking or the human listening. It is a silent visual scene in which the auditory actuality of the earlier bicameral act is becoming a supposed and assumed silent relationship. It becomes what we would call mythological.
Demons
But angels were not enough to fill in the initiative vacuum left by the retreating gods. And besides, being messengers from the great gods, they were usually associated with the king and his lords. For the common people, whose personal gods no longer help them, a very different kind of semidivine being now casts a terrible shadow over everyday life.
Why should malevolent demons have entered human history at this particular time? Speech, even if incomprehensible, is man’s chief way of greeting others. And if the other does not reply to an initiated greeting, a readiness for the other’s hostility will follow. Because the personal gods are silent, they must be angry and hostile. Such logic is the origin of the idea of evil
232 The Witness of History which first appears in the history of mankind during the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Since there is no doubt whatever that the gods rule over us as they will, what can we do to appease their wishes to harm us, and propitiate them into friendship once again? Thus the prayer and sacrifice that we have referred to earlier in this chapter, and thus the virtue of humility before a god.
As the gods recede into special people called prophets or oracles, or are reduced to darkly communicating with men in angels and omen, there whooshes into this power vacuum a belief in demons. The very air of Mesopotamia became darkened with them. Natural phenomena took on their characteristics of hostility toward men, a raging demon in the sandstorm sweeping the desert, a demon of fire, scorpion-men guarding the rising sun beyond the mountains, Pazuzu the monstrous wind demon, the evil Croucher, plague demons, and the horrible Asapper demons that could be warded off by dogs. Demons stood ready to seize a man or woman in lonely places, while sleeping or eating or drinking, or particularly at childbirth. They attached themselves to men as all the illnesses of mankind. Even the gods could be attacked by demons, and this sometimes explained their absence from the control of human affairs.
Protection against these evil divinities — something inconceivable in the bicameral age — took many forms. Dating from early in the first millennium B.C. are many thousands of prophylactic amulets, to be worn around the neck or wrist. They usually depict the particular demon whose power is to be inhibited, surmounted perhaps by gesticulating priests shooing the evil away, and often underwritten with an incantation invoking the great gods against the threatened horror, such as:
Incantation. That one that has approached the house scares me from my bed, rends me, makes me see nightmares. To the god Bine, gatekeeper of the underworld, may they appoint him,
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by the decree of Ninurta prince of the underworld. By the decree of Marduk who dwells in Esagilia in Babylon. Let door and bolt know that I am under the protection of the two Lords.
Incantation.7
Innumerable rituals were devoutly mumbled and mimed all over Mesopotamia throughout the first millennium B.C. to counteract these malign forces. The higher gods were beseeched to intercede. All illnesses, aches, and pains were ascribed to malevolent demons until medicine became exorcism. Most of our knowledge of these antidemoniac practices and their extent comes from the huge collection made about 630 B.C. by Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.
Literally thousands of extant tablets from this library describe such exorcisms, and thousands more list omen after omen, depicting a decaying civilization as black with demons as a piece of rotting meat with flies.
A New Heaven
As we have seen in earlier chapters, the gods customarily had locations, even though their voices were ubiquitously heard by their servants. These were often dwellings such as ziggurats or household shrines. And while some gods could be associated with celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, or stars, and the greatest, such as Anu, lived in the sky, the majority of gods were earth-dwellers along with men.
All this changes as we enter the first millennium B.C., when, as we are proposing, the gods’ voices are no longer heard. As the earth has been left to angels and demons, so it seems to be accepted that the dwelling place of the now absent gods is with Anu in the sky. And this is why the forms of angels are always winged: they are messengers from the sky where the gods live.8