The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

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

But even these ghosts can be controlled by those who [pg 298] know the magic words or the mystic rites which they are compelled to obey. Between the ghost and his victim the sorcerer or medicine-man can interpose, and by means of his spells force the spirit to quit the body of the sufferer or enter the body of an enemy. By the side of the ghost, therefore, stands the sorcerer, who is at once the master and the minister of the spirit-world.

With the progress of civilisation an organised body of sorcerers necessarily grows up. But an organised body of sorcerers also implies an organised body of spirits, and an organised system of controlling them. The spells and charms which have been handed down from the past are formed into a system, and the spirits themselves are classified and defined, while special functions are assigned to them. The old unorganised animism passes into an organised shamanism, such as still prevails among certain Siberian tribes. The sorcerer is on the high road to becoming a priest.

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

Can shamanism develop naturally into theism, and the sorcerer into the priest? Or is there need of foreign influences and of contact with other ideas and religious beliefs? I should myself be inclined to adopt the second alternative. Theism may absorb shamanism, and the priest throw the ægis of his authority over the sorcerer, but the natural development of the one into the other is contrary to the facts of psychology as well as to those of history. The evolution of a god out of the [pg 299] shaman's ghost may be conceivable, but no evidence for it exists. The superstitions and beliefs of shamanism linger, indeed, under a theistic religion, and the polytheism of Babylonia was no exception to the rule. Up to the last the magician flourished there, and the spells he worked were recognised by the religion of the State. But for all that they stood outside the religion of the State, harmonising with it just as little as the superstitions of popular folk-lore harmonise with the religion we profess. No one would assert that the Christianity of to-day has grown out of beliefs like that in the vampire which still holds such sway in some of the Christian countries of Europe; and there is just as little reason for asserting that the vampire of the primitive Sumerian developed into a Babylonian deity. They represent two diverse currents of belief, which may for a time run side by side, but never actually coalesce.

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

There is no mistaking the significance of the legend. The culture of Babylonia originated on the seacoast, and was brought to it across the sea. The elements of civilisation were due to intercourse with other lands. [pg 300] And this civilisation was associated with a god—with a god, too, who represented all the higher aspects of Babylonian religion, and was regarded as the author of its sacred books. The impulse which transformed the “lord of the ghost-world” into a god, and replaced the sorcerer by a priest, came not from within, but from without.

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

New ideas came from the south. Ea was a god, and like the gods of the Semitic race he had a wife and son. While he himself was lord of the deep, Dam-kina, his wife, was the mistress of the land. His son was Aṡari, “the prince who does good to man,”[233] and who, in contradistinction to the night-demons of Nippur, brought knowledge and healing to the men whom Ea had created. The Sumerian might indeed speak of the “Zi”—“the spirit”—of Ea, or rather of the deep, but to the Semite he was a veritable god.

At the same time it was the conception only of Ea and his family which we need trace to a foreign source. Their names are purely Sumerian, and their origin consequently [pg 301] must be Sumerian too. Doubtless they had once been mere lils or ghosts, belonging to the ghost-world of the god of Nippur, and the spells taught by Ea to mankind were survivals from the day when the sorcerer was still his priest.[234] But under Semitic influence the lil had been transformed into a god; the sacred book took the place of the charm, and the priest of the magician. The charm and the magician were still recognised, but it was on the condition that they adapted themselves to the new ideas. Sumerian shamanism was overlaid by Semitic polytheism, and in process of time was absorbed into it.