There are many features in these methods of exorcism, such as the apotropaeic use of idols, that are common to other peoples at a certain stage of culture; there remains much also that seems peculiar to Babylon.
But what is uniquely characteristic of this Mesopotamian people, and at the same time most un-Hellenic, is the all-pervading atmosphere of magic, which colours their view of life and their theory of the visible and invisible world. Babylonia, at least, was the one salient exception to the historic induction that a distinguished writer[300.3] has recently sanctioned—“religion once firmly established invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to discredit the magician.” The psalmody of Babylon, with its occasional outbursts of inspiration and its gleams of spiritual insight, would have appealed to an Isaiah; its magic would have appealed to many a modern African. The Babylonian prophet does not frown on it; the high gods accept it, the priest is its skilled and beneficent practitioner. And at no other point, perhaps, is the contrast between the Hellenic and the Mesopotamian religions so glaring as at this.
This comparison of Eastern and Western ritual may close with some observations on another religious function that may be of some value for the question of early ethnic influence.
It has been remarked that divination played an important, perhaps a dominant part in the Babylonian ritual of sacrifice, divination, that is, by inspection of the victim’s entrails, especially the liver; and that this method was adopted in Greece only in the later centuries.[301.1] But there are other salient differences between the Babylonian and the more ancient mantic art of Hellas.[301.2] Another method much in vogue in the former was a curious mode of divining by mixing oil and water and watching the movements and behaviour of the two liquids.[301.3] The first and only indication of a similar practice in Hellas is a passage in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, of which the true meaning has hitherto escaped the interpreters.[301.4] And here, as usual, an obvious example of Mesopotamian influence on Hellenic custom belongs only to a late epoch. It is also true that the ancient divination of the two peoples agreed in certain respects, namely, in that both used, like most communities at a certain stage of culture, the auguries of birds and the revelations of dreams. As regards the facts relating to the former, we know more about Greece than at present about Babylon. But in the matter of dream-oracles, it is manifest that the Hellenic phenomena are entirely independent of Mesopotamian fashion. The Assyrian and Babylonian documents reveal the fashion of dream-prophecy in its simplest and highest form: the high deity of his own pleasure sends a dream, and the divining priest or skilled interpreter interprets it. No hint has so far been detected of that artificial method of provoking prophetic dreams by “incubation” or ἐγκοίμησις, the fashion of laying oneself down in some sacred shrine and sleeping with one’s ear to the ground, that was much in vogue in ancient Hellas and still survives in parts of the modern Greek world and which may be regarded as an immemorial tradition. In this divination, the divine spokesman was the power of the underworld. And this was the most important difference between the Western and the Eastern society in respect of the divine agency. In an early period of Hellenic history that may be called pre-Apolline, the earth-mother was conspicuously oracular by the vehicle of dreams; and this power of hers was generally shared by the nether god and buried heroes. Nor could the religion of Apollo suppress this “chthonian” divination. But in Mesopotamia the earth-powers and the nether world have no part or lot in this matter. It is almost the prerogative of Shamash, the sun-god, though Adad is sometimes associated with him;[302.1] both being designated as “Bēlē-Biri” or “Lords of Oracles.”[303.1]
Another remarkable distinction is the fact that the ecstatic or enthusiastic form of prophecy, that of the Shaman or Pythoness possessed and maddened by the inworking spirit of god, is not found in the Babylonian record, which only attests the cool and scientific method of interpreting by signs and dreams and the stars. Perhaps Mesopotamia from the third millennium onward was too civilised to admit the mad prophet and prophetess to its counsels. But such characters were attached to certain Anatolian cults, especially to those of Kybele,[303.2] and also to the Syrian goddess at Hierapolis;[303.3] we have evidence of them also in a record of the Cretan Phaistos in the service of the Great Mother.[303.4] Some scholars have supposed that prophetic ecstasy was only a late phenomenon in Hellas, because Homer is silent about it. But there are reasons for suspecting that demoniac possession was occasionally found in the pre-Homeric divination of Hellas,[303.5] an inheritance perhaps from the pre-Hellenic period.
In any case, the theory that primitive Hellas was indebted to Babylonia for its divination-system is strongly repugnant to the facts.
CHAPTER XIV.
Summary of Results.
This comparative exposition of the Sumerian-Babylonian and the most complex and developed pre-Christian religion of Europe cannot claim to be complete or at any point finally decisive, but it may at least have helped to reveal the high value and interest of these phenomena for the workers in this broad field of inquiry. This was one of the main objects of this course. The other was the discussion of a question of religious ethnology, concerning the possible influence of Mesopotamia on the earliest development of Hellenic religion. The verdict must still remain an open one, awaiting the light of the new evidence that the future will gather. But the evidence at present available—and it may be hoped that none of first importance has been missed—constrains us to a negative answer or at least a negative attitude of mind.
Confining ourselves generally to the second millennium B.C., we have surveyed the religions of the adjacent peoples between the valley of the Euphrates and the western shores of the Aegean; and have observed that morphologically they are generally on the same plane of polytheism, but that those of Mesopotamia and Hellas reveal inner differences, striking and vital enough to be serious stumbling-blocks to a theory of affiliation. These differences concern the personality of the divinities and their relations to the various parts of the world of nature; the most salient being the different attitude of the two peoples to the divine luminaries of heaven and to the chthonian powers of the lower world. They concern the cosmogonies of East and West, their views of the creation of the world, and the origin of man; on these matters, certain myths which are easily diffused do not appear to have reached Hellas in this early period. They concern the religious temperaments of the Babylonian and Hellene, which appear as separate as the opposite points of the pole; the rapturous fanatic and self-abasing spirit of the East contrasting vividly with the coolness, civic sobriety, and self-confidence of the West. They concern the eschatologic ideas of the two peoples: the cult of the dead and some idea of a posthumous judgment being found in early Hellas, while the former was rare, and the latter is scarcely discoverable, in Mesopotamia. They concern, finally, the ritual; and here the salient points of contrast are the different views of the sacrifice, of the sacrificial victim, and the sacrificial blood; the different methods of purification and the expulsion of sin; the ritual of sorrow associated with the death of the god, so powerful in Babylonia and so insignificant (by comparison) in Hellas; the un-Hellenic Mylitta-rite, and the service of the “hierodoulai”; and, to conclude with the most vital difference of all, the manifestations of magic and its relation to the national religions, so complex, so pregnant for thought and faith, and so dominant in Mesopotamia; on the other hand, so insignificant and unobtrusive in Hellas.
Two other points have been incidentally noticed in our general survey, but it is well in a final summing up to emphasise their great importance as negative evidence. The first concerns the higher history of European religion: the establishment of religious mysteries, a phenomenon of dateless antiquity, and of powerful working in Hellenic and Aegean society, has not yet been discovered in the Mesopotamian culture. The second is a small point that concerns commerce and the trivialities of ritual: the use of incense, universal from immemorial times in Mesopotamia, and proved by the earliest documents, begins in Greece not earlier than the eighth century B.C. This little product, afterwards everywhere in great demand, for it is pleasant to the sense, soothing to the mind, and among the harmless amenities of worship, was much easier to import than Babylonian theology or more complex ritual. It might have come without these, but they could scarcely have come without it. Yet it did not come to Hellenic shores in the second millennium. And this trifling negative fact is worth a volume of the higher criticism for the decision of our question.