[CHAPTER VI.]
The Deities as Nature-Powers.
Shamash the sun-god derives his personal character from the nature-phenomenon; but the Babylonian deities develop their personality independently of their nature-origin, which is often doubtful—Importance of Sin, the moon-god—Star-worship in Babylonian cult—No clear recognition of an earth-goddess—Tammuz a vegetation-power—Western Canaanites worship nature-deities in the second millennium, probably with moral attributes—The Hittites a thunder-god and corn-god—The Phrygians a mother-goddess of the earth and lower world—On the whole, pre-Homeric Hellas worships ethical personalities rather than nature-powers—Distinguished from Mesopotamia by comparative insignificance of solar, lunar, astral cults—Also by the great prominence of the earth-goddess and the association of certain eschatological ideas with her
[CHAPTER VII.]
The Deities as Social-Powers.
The religious origin of the city—Slight evidence from Mesopotamia, more from early Greece—Early Mesopotamian kingship of divine type—The king inspired and occasionally worshipped—The Hittite monuments show the divine associations of the king—Proto-Hellenic kingship probably of similar character—Social usages protected by religion in the whole of this area—No family cult of the hearth at Babylon—The code of Hammurabi—Comparatively secular in its enactments concerning homicide—Religious feeling perceptible in the laws concerning incest—The legal system attached to religion at certain points, but on the whole, independent of it—In early Hellas the religion an equally strong social force, but many of its social manifestations different—Religion tribal and “phratric” in Greece; not so in Babylon—Purification from bloodshed could not have been borrowed from Mesopotamia
[CHAPTER VIII.]
Religion and Morality.
The deity conceived on the whole as beneficent and righteous, but the divine destructive power more emphasised in Babylonia—Every Babylonian deity moralised, not every Hellenic—In both societies perjury a sin, untruthfulness only in Babylonian religious theory—International morality—The ethics of the family very vital in both societies, but more complex in Babylonia—Ritualistic tabus a heavier burden on the Babylonian conscience—Morality more daimonistic than in Greece—In the Babylonian confessional stress laid on unknown involuntary sin, hence tendency to pessimism—In Greece less timidity of conscience, less prominence of magic—Mercifulness a prominent divine attribute in both religions—More pantheistic thought and a clearer sense of the divinity of all life in Babylonian theology, as in the Tammuz-myth
[CHAPTER IX.]
Purity a Divine Attribute.
Ritual purity generally demanded—Babylonian mythology far purer than the Greek—Character of Ishtar—Virginity a divine attribute—Mystic conception of a virgin-mother, the evidence examined in East and West
[CHAPTER X.]
Concept of Divine Power and Ancient Cosmogonies.
Neither in Babylon nor Greece any clear and consistently maintained dogma of divine omnipotence—Yet the divinities collectively the strongest power in the universe—No developed theory of dualism—The divine power combined with magic in Babylonia, but not in Greece—No early Hellenic consciousness of the Word as a creative force—The magic power of the divine name felt by the Hellenes, but not realised as a creative force—Babylonian cosmogonies not traceable in the earliest Greek mythology, nor in Hesiod, but the myth of Typhoeus probably from Babylonian sources—Babylonian myths concerning creation of man not known in early Greece—Organisation of the polytheism into divine groups—Evidence of Trinitarian idea and of monotheistic tendency—No proof here of Greek indebtedness to Mesopotamia