In thus comparing the two religions according to their respective conceptions of divine power, we note two striking phenomena in the Eastern world. The Mesopotamian gods are magicians, and part of their work is worked by magic. Marduk and Ea, the wise deity of Eridu, serve as exorcisers of demons in behalf of the other gods.[176.1] In a panegyric on the former, the strange phrase occurs, “the spittle of life is thine,”[176.2] which probably alludes to the well-known magical qualities of the saliva. Eridu, the home of Ea, was also the original home of Chaldean magic. When in the early cosmic struggle between the powers of light and darkness, Tiamat, the mother and queen of the latter, selects her champion Qingou as leader, she proclaims, “I have pronounced thy magic formula, in the assembly of the gods I have made thee great.”[176.3] In magic, great is the power of the spoken word, the λόγος; and the Word, of which the efficacious force arose in the domain of magic, has been exalted, as we are well aware, by higher religion to a great cosmic divine agency, sometimes personified. It was so exalted in early Babylonian religion. The deity acts and controls the order of the world by the divine Word. Many of the Sumerian hymns lay stress on its quasi-personal virtue or “mana”; and often on its terrible and destructive operation; and in one, as we have seen, the goddess Nana is identified with the Word of Enlil.[176.4] In a great hymn to Sin,[176.5] the might of his Word is glorified in verses that recall the Psalmist’s phrase: “The voice of the Lord is mighty in operation.” The Word of Bel-Marduk is said to be stronger than any exorciser or diviner, and is the theme of a special hymn.[177.1] It is described in another as “a net of majesty that encompasseth heaven and earth.” The Word of Marduk shakes the sea,[177.2] as the Hebrew poet declares that “the voice of the Lord shaketh the cedar-trees.” “The spirit of the Word is Enlil… the Word which stilleth the heavens above… a prophet it hath not, a magician it hath not,”[177.3]—that is, no prophet can fully interpret, no magician can control, the Word. A most potent word is the name of the divinity, and the partial apotheosis of the name itself is a strange religious phenomenon, which also originated in the domain of magic, and has played a momentous part in the Egyptian, Judaic, Christian, and other high religions.[177.4] It appears also in Mesopotamian religion. In a hymn to Enlil we find the phrase: “at thy name, which created the world, the heavens were hushed of themselves.”[177.5] In the Babylonian poem of creation the primal state of Chaos is thus described, “no god had yet been created, no name had yet been named, no destiny fixed.”[177.6] The gods name the fifty names of Ninib, and the name of fifty becomes sacred to him, so that even in the time of Gudea a temple was actually dedicated to Number Fifty.[177.7]
Now, in the respects just considered, the earliest aspect of Greek religion that is revealed to us presents a striking contrast. The relations between magic and religion are markedly different.[178.1] Magic had doubtless the same hold on early Greece as it has on most societies at a certain stage of culture. We can conclude this from the glimpses of it revealed by Homer and some ancient myths, such as the story of Salmoneus, as well as by the evidence of its practice in later Greece, and as such phenomena are not of sudden growth we can safely believe that they were part of an ancient tradition always alive among the people. But while Babylonian magic proclaims itself loudly in the great religious literature and highest temple ritual, Greek magic is barely mentioned in the older literature of Greece, plays no part at all in the hymns, and can only with difficulty be discovered as latent in the higher ritual. Again, Babylonian magic is essentially demoniac; but we have no evidence suggesting that the pre-Homeric Greek was demon-ridden, or that demonology and exorcism were leading factors of his consciousness and practice: the earliest mythology does not suggest that he habitually imputed his physical or moral disorders to demons, nor does it convey any hint of the existence in the early society of that terrible functionary, the witch-finder, or of the institution of witch-trials.
Had Greek religion and mythology been deeply impregnated with Babylonian influences we should find it difficult to account for this momentous difference.
The same reflection is forced upon us when we observe that the Λόγος or Divine Word conceived as a cosmic power plays no part in the earliest Hellenic theology of which we have any cognisance (we are not here concerned with the later history of the concept): nor can we find in the earliest Greek period the name of God exalted into the position of a divine creative force; although, as I have shown elsewhere, the earliest Hellene, as the later, was fully sensitive to the magico-divine efficacy of names.[179.1]
We may also gather something for our present purpose from a comparison between the cosmogony or cosmic myths of East and West. Of these it is only the Babylonian and Hebraic that can claim a great antiquity of record. What is reported of Phoenician belief concerning these matters is of late authority, Eusebios quoting from Sanchuniathon or Philo Byblios, and this is too much permeated with later elements to be useful here. As regards the Hellenic theory of the origin of the world and of man, putting aside a few scattered hints in the Homeric poems, we have Hesiod for our first and insufficient witness. If we can detect Babylonian influence in the Hesiodic system, we must not hastily conclude that this was already rife in the second millennium: on the other hand, if Hesiod seems to have escaped it, it is far less likely that it was strong upon the proto-Hellenes.
For early Babylonian cosmogony our main evidence is the epic poem of creation, preserved on tablets found in the library of King Assurbanipal, which elucidates, and in the main corroborates, the fragments of the story given by Berosos in the third century B.C. Our earliest record, then, is actually of the seventh century, but Assyriologists have given reasons for the view that the epic copied for Assurbanipal descends from a period as early as B.C. 2000; for part of it accords with an old Babylonian hymn that has been discovered.[179.2] The document is therefore ancient enough for the purposes of our comparison. It is well known through various publications, and can be read conveniently in the detailed exposition of King in his handbook on Babylonian religion.[180.1]
When we consider carefully the more significant features in this cosmogony, we are struck with its almost total unlikeness to anything that we can discover or surmise in early Hellenic thought. It is true that the Babylonian theory starts with the dogma that the earliest cosmic fact was the element of water. Apsu and Tiâmat are the first powers in an unordered universe, and these seem to be the personal forms of the upper and lower waters, the fresh and the salt. We find the parallel thought in Homer, who speaks of Okeanos as “the source of all things,”[180.2] including even the gods. But the value of such a parallelism is of the slightest, for the vague theory of a watery origin of created things appears widely diffused in the myths of remote peoples, for instance, North-American Indians, Aztecs, the Vedic Aryans, and there is a glimmer of it in the old Norse.[180.3] No conclusion, then, can be drawn from so slight a coincidence. If we know anything of the cosmogony of the pre-Homeric society we know it from Hesiod, for Homer himself shows no interest and makes no revelation on the subject. With certain reservations and after careful criticism we may be able to regard some parts of the Hesiodic statement as reflecting the thought of an age anterior to Homer’s. Therefore it is of some present value to observe how little of characteristically Babylonian speculation appears in the Hesiodic Theogony or Works and Days. Both systems agree with each other, and—it may be said—with all theogonies and religious cosmogonies, in regarding the primeval creative forces as personal powers who work either by the method of sexual generation or through mechanical processes of creation: the first of these methods, which though mythical in form has more affinity with organic science, is predominant over the other in the Hesiodic narrative. But the personal powers are different in the two systems. In the Babylonian the greatest of the primeval dynasts is Tiâmat, the sea, the mother of the gods and also of all monsters: in the Hesiodic it is Gaia, the Earth-mother, who does not appear at all in the Eastern cosmogony, but who claimed this position in the Hellenic through her deep-seated influence in the ancient religion. We note also that the Babylonian Sea is decidedly evil, the aboriginal foe of the gods of light, a conception alien to ordinary Hellenic thought. Again, the Babylonian creation of an ordered cosmos is a result of the great struggle between Marduk and Tiâmat, the power of light and the sovereign of chaos: it is preceded by hate and terror. In the Hellenic account the generation of the heavens, the mountains, the sea, and the early dynasty of Titan-powers is peaceful and is stimulated by the power of love, Eros, who has his obvious double in the Kāma or principle of desire in a cosmogonic hymn of the Rig-Veda, but is not mentioned by the Babylonian poet. (Nor does it concern us for the moment that this Eros is in respect of mere literary tradition post-Homeric: we may surmise at least that he was a pre-Homeric power in Boeotia.) Again, when we come to the theomachy in Hesiod, as an event it has no cosmogonic value at all: it has the air merely of a dynastic struggle between elder and younger divinities, and the myth may really have arisen in part from the religious history of a shifting of cults corresponding to a shifting of population: nor are the Titans more representative of evil or of a lower order of things than the Olympian deities; and cosmic creation, so far as Hesiod treats of it at all, seems over before the struggle begins. On the other hand, after Marduk has destroyed Tiâmat he constructs his cosmos out of her limbs, and then proceeds to assign their various stations to the great gods, his compeers. Thus the struggle of the god with the principle of disorder has a cosmic significance which is not expressed in the Titanomachy. The curious conception also that the universe was compacted out of the dismembered limbs of a divine personage, which reminds us of the Vedic story of the giant Purusa[182.1] and of the Norse legend of Ymir, is not clearly discoverable in Hellenic mythology: for the Hesiodic myth of the forms and growths that spring from the blood of the mutilated Ouranos is no real parallel. And there is another trait in the Babylonian theory of a world-conflict that distinguishes it from the Hellenic myths of a Titanomachy or Gigantomachy; it was sometimes regarded not as a single event, finished with once for all, but as a struggle liable to be repeated at certain periods.[182.2] On the other hand, Hesiod’s narrative of the oppression of Gaia’s children by Ouranos and the outrage inflicted on him by Kronos has its parallels in Maori and savage legend,[182.3] but none in Mesopotamian, so far as our knowledge goes at present.
A different Babylonian mythological text from the library of Assurbanipal speaks of another battle waged by Marduk against Labbu, a male monster imagined mainly as a huge snake; and Marduk is described as descending to the conflict in clouds and lightning:[183.1] the legend has no obvious significance for cosmogony, for it places the event after the creation of the world and of men and cities. But it has this interest for us, that it may be the prototype for the legend of Zeus’ struggle with Typhoeus, which is known to Homer, and which he places in the country of the Arimoi, regarded by many of the ancient interpreters, including Pindar, as Cilicia.[183.2] Now, the story of this conflict in Hesiod’s theogony has no connections with the Titanomachy or the Gigantomachy, nor is it there linked by any device to any known Hellenic myth; nor is it derived, like the legend of Apollo and Python, from genuine Hellenic cult-history. It has an alien air and character. Typhoeus is on the whole regarded as a monstrous dragon, but one of his voices is that of a lion, another that of a bull. The resemblance of this narrative to the Babylonian one just mentioned is striking, and becomes all the more salient when we compare certain Babylonian cylinders which picture Marduk in combat with a monster, sometimes of serpent form, sometimes with the body of a lion or a bull.[183.3] The Typhoeus-legend belongs also essentially to the Asia-Minor shores, and if Cilicia was really the country whence it came to the knowledge of the Homeric Greeks, it is a significant fact that it was just this corner of the Asia-Minor coast that felt the arms of the earliest Assyrian conquerors in the fourteenth century B.C.; and it is just such myths that travel fast and far.
If the hypothesis of Assyrian origin is reasonable here, many will regard it as still more reasonable in regard to the Deukalion flood-story. Certain details in it remind us, no doubt, of the Babylonian flood-myth; and as this latter was far diffused through Asia Minor, it was quite easy for it to wander across the Aegean and touch Hellas. But if it did, we have no indication that it reached the Hellenes in the early period with which we are here concerned, as Hesiod is our earliest authority for it.
The last theme of high interest in the cosmogonic theory of ancient Babylonia is the creation of man. According to Berosos, this momentous act was attributed to Bel, who, after the victory over Chaos, commanded one of the gods to cut off his head and to make men and animals out of earth mixed with his own blood, and this story is partly corroborated by an old cuneiform text that is derived from the beginning of the second millennium.[184.1] This interesting theory was not universally accepted, for another and independent text ascribes the creation of man to Marduk and a goddess called Aruru, simply as a mechanical act of power.[184.2] The idea implicit in the former account, of the blood-relationship of man to god, is of the greater potentiality for religious metaphysic, and a similar notion is found, developed into a high spiritual doctrine, in the later Orphic Zagreus-mystery. But there is no trace of it in genuine Hellenic thought or literature. We have no provedly early Greek version of the origin of man: only, in the Works and Days, we are told that the Immortals or Zeus made the men of the five ages, the third generation, out of ash-trees: it may be that the story of Prometheus forming them out of clay was known to Hesiod, as Lactantius Placidus attests;[185.1] in any case we may judge it to be of great antiquity on account of its wide vogue in the later period, and its occurrence in other primitive folklore. But nothing like it has as yet been found in the ἱερὸς λόγος of Mesopotamia.