In fact, Hellenic tabus and purification-laws, except, indeed, the law concerning purification from bloodshed, had only this contact with religion, that the breach of them might offend an irritable divinity, which it would be unwise to do; they were not religious, so far as we can discern, in the sense that they were associated with a vivid belief in evil spirits, as they were in the Babylonian and Persian creeds. There were germs indeed which might have developed into a vigorous daimonistic theory in early Hellas. We hear even in Homer of such unpleasant things as “a black Kér”; and a mythic hero of Megara kills a monster called a ποινή, almost, we may say, a devil. Certain days, according to Hesiod, might be unlucky, because perhaps Erinyes or ghosts were walking about, though that popular poet is not clear about this. But certainly not in early nor often in later Greece were men habitually devil-ridden: nor did they see devils in food or blood or mud. Therefore, on the whole and comparatively, early Greek religion, when we first catch a glimpse of it, appears bright and sane, a religion of the healthy-minded and of men in the open air. And therefore, when secular philosophy arose, Greek moral theory made no use of evil spirits except in certain Pythagorean circles where we may detect Oriental influence. Superstition and magic must have been more rife in ancient Greece than the Homeric picture would lead us to suppose: yet the higher culture of the people, in the earliest period which we are considering, was comparatively free from these influences and refused to develop by religious speculation or anxious brooding the germs of daimonism always embedded in the lower stratum of the national mind. The Universe could not, therefore, be viewed by the Hellene as it was by the Zarathustrian, and to some extent by the Babylonian, as the arena of a cosmic struggle between the powers of good and the powers of evil. Nor could the Hellene personify the power of evil majestically, in such a guise as Ahriman or Satan; he only was aware of certain little daemon-figures of death and disease, ghostly shadows rather than fully outlined personages; or such vaguely conceived personal agencies as Ate and Eris, which belonged not to religion, but to the poetic-moral thought of the people. When we compare the various rituals, we shall discern that the Hellenic was by no means wholly bright or shallow, but that some of its most ancient forms were gloomy and inspired by a sense of sin or sorrow: nevertheless, it is just in respect of the comparative weakness of this sense that it differed most markedly from the Babylonian.
There are other aspects of the divine character interesting to compare in the religious theory of East and West. Despite the apparent grimness of the Babylonian-Assyrian theology, no divine trait is more movingly insisted on in the liturgies than the mercifulness of the deity: Nebo is “the merciful, the gracious”;[159.1] Ishtar is “the mighty lady of the world, queen of humanity, merciful one, whose favour is propitious, who hath received my prayer”;[159.2] Sarpanitum is addressed as “the intercessor, the protectress of the captive”;[159.3] Shamash as “the merciful god, who liftest up those that are bowed down and protectest the weak”;[159.4] Sin as “the compassionate, gracious Father”; and “Gamlat the merciful” is mentioned as a descriptive general epithet of an unknown Assyrian deity.[159.5]
These phrases may attest in the end a genuine and fervent faith; but originally they were probably inspired by the word-magic of penitence, the sinner believing that he can make the deity merciful by repeatedly calling him so. At any rate, Babylonian religion catches thus the glow of a high ethical ideal; and as the deities were invoked and regarded as by nature merciful, so the private man was required at certain times to show mercy, as the confessional formula proves. The same idea, though a less fervent and ecstatic expression is given to it, is found in the oldest record of Greek religion: “Even the gods are moved to pity… them men turn aside from wrath by sacrifice, libation, and gentle prayers, when a man hath sinned and trespassed against them. For prayers are the daughters of great God,… and if a man do them honour when they come anigh him, to him they bring great blessings, and hear him when he prayeth.” This Homeric utterance in the great speech of Phoenix[160.1] is the voice of a high and civilised religion; and the idea inspires the ancient cults of Zeus μειλίχιος and ἱκέσιος.
The Babylonian conception of divine mercy gave rise to an interesting phrase which is attached as a quasi-liturgical formula to many of the leading gods and goddesses—“the awakener of the dead,” “thou who raisest up the dead”: a phrase which has erroneously been supposed to refer to an actual resurrection of the dead:[160.2] various contexts attest its real significance as an expression of the divine grace shown in restoring the sick to health, in saving men from the hand of death. Hellenic religious vocabulary affords no parallel to this formula nor to that title of Enlil—“Lord of the breath of life of Sumer”;[160.3] or that of Bel, “Lord of the life of the Land.”[160.4] In some passages of Babylonian literature we mark the glimmering of the idea that life in its varied forms on the earth is a divine substance sustained by the personal deity. Ishtar is described as the protectress of all animate existence, and all life languishes when she descends to the nether regions.[160.5] The goddess of Erech, identified with Ishtar, speaking of her own functions, exclaims, “In the place of giving birth in the house of the begetting mother, guardian of the home am I.”[160.6] It is specially Tammuz who, by the side of Ishtar, impersonates the life of the soil, as appears in the striking refrain recurring in his hymn of lament: “When he slumbers, the sheep and the lambs slumber also; when he slumbers, the she-goats and the kids slumber also”;[161.1] and the same thought may have inspired a phrase that is doubtfully translated at the end of the hymn: “In the meadows, verily, verily, the soul of life perishes.” Still more explicit is another Tammuz hymn, in which, while bewailing the departed god, they wail for all the life of the earth, “the wailing is for the herbs;… they are not produced: the wailing is for the grain, ears are not produced: the wailing is for the habitations, for the flocks, the flocks bring forth no more. The wailing is for the perishing wedded ones, for the perishing children; the dark-headed people create no more.”
In all this we see the reflection of a pantheistic feeling that links the living world and the personal divine power in a mystic sympathy. Now the idea of divinity immanent in living nature is inconsistent with a severely defined anthropomorphic religion; hence we scarcely find it in the earlier religion of Hellas. Zeus is called the father of men and gods, but in a reverential rather than in any literal creative sense: nor is there found any trace of the idea that divine power is immanent in the life or soul of man, till we come to the later period of philosophic speculation and Orphism. Only here and there behind the anthropomorphism we discern in Hellenic myth or cult the vaguer thought of diffused and immanent divinity; this reveals itself more than once in the myth and cult of Demeter, whose anger and sorrow at the loss of her daughter causes a sympathetic disappearance of the crops and the fruits of the earth; and it is embodied in the Attic cult on the Akropolis of Demeter Χλόη,[161.2] which title expresses the immanence in the verdure of the life-giving potency of the goddess. The ancient folklore of Greece, and a few cult-records of the primitive village-communities, reveal figures that recall faintly the lineaments of Tammuz, Eunostos of Tanagra, Skephros of Tegea, who may belong, as Linos certainly did, to that group of heroes of crop and harvest, who die and are bewailed in the fall of the year, and whose life is sympathetically linked with the life of the earth. But we find this type of personage in other parts of Europe, and there is every reason for believing that the western shores of the Mediterranean had not been touched by the Tammuz-myth and service in the second millennium B.C.
The evidence then suggests that the pregnant idea of the godhead as the source of life was more prominent and more articulate in Babylonian than in Hellenic religion.
CHAPTER IX.
Purity a Divine Attribute.
We may next consider the attribute of purity as a divine characteristic, to see whether in this respect the East differed markedly from the West. As regards ritual-law, all the religions of the old world agree in demanding ritual-purity: the worshipper who approaches the deities must be free from physical taint and impurity: this idea is so world-wide and so deeply embedded in primitive thought, that the mere presence of it is of no service for proving the interdependence of any religions in the historic period. From this ritual-law the concept naturally arises of “pure gods,” deities who themselves are believed to be pure because they insist on purity in their worshippers. Marduk is called “the purifier” in one of the incantation-texts, in allusion to his power of exorcising the evil demon of sickness by cleansing processes.[163.1] The cathartic rules that the law of ritual prescribes will differ according to the instincts and prejudices of different societies. But the Babylonian service demanded more than mere ritual-purity; for instance, in a fragment of a striking text published by Delitsch, we find this injunction: “In the sight of thy God thou shalt be pure of heart, for that is the distinction of the Godhead.”[163.2]
As regards the moral and spiritual sense of purity, the sense in which we speak of “purity of heart,” we should naturally include purity in respect of sexual indulgence. But in applying this test to the Mesopotamian religion we are confronted with a singular difficulty. In the first place, the mythology is strikingly pure in our modern sense of the word, so far as the materials have as yet been put before us. It agrees in this respect with the Hebraic, and differs markedly from the Hellenic; the gods live in monogamic marriage with their respective goddesses, and we have as yet found no licentious stories of their intrigues. It may be that generally the Babylonian imagination was restrained by an austerity and shy reverence that did not control the more reckless and lighter spirit of the Hellene; or it may be that the priestly and royal scribes, to whom we owe the whole of the Babylonian religious literature that has come down to us, deliberately excluded any element of licentiousness that they may have found in the lower folklore. But there is one curious exception. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero repulses the proffered love of Ishtar, and taunts her with her cruel amours, giving a long list of her lovers whom she had ruined: one of these is Tammuz, “the spouse of thy youth,” upon whom “thou didst lay affliction every year”: then he mentions her other lovers who suffered at her hands—a singular list: a bird, a lion, a horse, a shepherd of the flock, some Babylonian Paris or Anchises, whom Ishtar treated as Artemis treated Aktaion. We must suppose these allusions are drawn from Babylonian folklore, of which nothing else has survived, concerning the amorous adventures of the goddess. Hence modern accounts are apt to impute a licentious character to Ishtar, as a goddess of violent and lawless passion, and to connect with this aspect of her the institution in her temple at Erech of the service of sacred prostitutes, attested by certain cuneiform texts. In comparing the ritual of East and West, I shall give some consideration to this phenomenal practice. But this view of Ishtar is utterly contrary to that presented of her in the hymns and liturgies. Not only are certain hymns to Ishtar transcendently noble and spiritual in tone, surpassing most of the greatest works of Babylonian religious poetry, but certain phrases specially exalt her as the virgin-goddess. In one of the lamentations we read, “Virgin, virgin, in the temple of my riches, am I.”[165.1] “The spirit-maid, glory of Heaven: the Maiden Ishtar, glory of Heaven.”[165.2] In a psalm to Nana, one of the by-names of Ishtar, she is called “Virgin-goddess of Heaven”;[165.3] in another she speaks of herself, “she of the pure heart, she without fear was I.”[165.4] This virgin-character of hers must then be regarded as fixed by such epithets and phrases, of which more examples might no doubt be found. Therefore the phrase attached to her in the Epic of Gilgamesh,[165.5] “Kadisti Ilani,” must not be translated as Dhorme would translate it,[165.6] “the courtesan of the Gods,” merely on the ground that the same word is applied to her temple-harlots: for the word properly means “pure” from stain, hence “holy,”[165.7] and in this latter sense it could be applied to her consecrated votaries, in spite of their service, which seems to us impure: the same word “Kedesh” is used for the votaries of the same ritual in Phoenicia and Syria. This apparent contradiction in the conception of Ishtar’s character is sometimes explained[166.1] by the suggestion that she was really a combination of two distinct goddesses, a voluptuous and effeminate goddess of Erech, and a pure and warlike Assyrian goddess of Nineveh. But there is no real contradiction; for in Babylonian religious and liturgical literature the lower view of Ishtar is never presented at all. She is always worshipped as pure and holy; the licentiousness of folklore, if there was any such in vogue, was not allowed to intrude into the temple-service. Therefore Ishtar is no real exception to the rule that purity, even in our sense, is a prevailing characteristic of Babylonian divinity, as it was of the Hebraic.
But now another phenomenon claims our interest: while being a virgin-goddess, she is sometimes addressed as a mother. In the inscription of Sargon (722-705 B.C.) she is described as “the Lady of the Heavenly Crown, the Mother of the Gods”;[166.2] and in some of the older hymns, which have already been quoted, she speaks of herself at one time as mother and at another as maid: “Mother who knows lamentation,” and “I am the Virgin-Goddess.”[166.3] Similarly, in the hymn to Nana she is called in one place “the Virgin-Goddess of Heaven”; in another, “Mother of the faithful breasts.”[166.4] Another goddess, Bau, who is eminently the mother or the wife-goddess, the spouse of Ningirsu or Ninib, is characterised in a hymn to the latter god as “thy spouse, the maid, the Lady of Nippur.”[166.5]