The next triad is more distinctly astronomical. It consists of Uruk the moon, Ud the sun, and Mermer the god of the air, of rain and tempest. These are the old Accadian names, but they are better known by the Semitic translations of Sin, Shamash, and Raman. The next group of gods is purely astronomical, consisting of the five planets, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, personified as Nergal, Nebo, Marduk, Ishtar, and Nindar. The number of gods was further increased by introducing the primary polarity of sex, and assigning a wife to each male deity. Thus Belit, or "the Lady," was the wife of Bel, he representing the masculine element of Nature, strength and courage; she the feminine principle of tenderness and maternity. So also Nana the earth was the wife of Anu, the god of the strong heavens; Annunit the moon the wife of Shamash the sun; and Ishtar (Astarte, Astoreth, or Aphrodite), the planet Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, though a great goddess in her own right, was fabled to have had Tammuz or Thammuz, one of the names of the sun, as a husband, whence in later times came the myth of Nature mourning for the sun-god, slain by the envious boar, winter.
But of these only Belit and Istar were admitted into the circle of the twelve great gods, consisting of the two triads and the planets, who held the foremost place in the Chaldæan and Assyrian mythology. Of the minor gods, Meri-dug or Marduk, the Merodach of the Bible, is the most remarkable, for he represents the idea which, some 5000 years later, became the fundamental one of the Christian religion; that of a Son of God, "being of one substance with the Father," who acts the part of Mediator and friend of man. He is the son of Ea and Damkina, i.e. of heaven and earth, and an emanation from the Supreme Spirit considered in its attribute of benevolence. The tablets are full of inscriptions on which he is represented as applying to his father Ea for aid and advice to assist suffering humanity, most commonly by teaching the spells which will drive away the demons who are supposed to be the cause of all misfortunes and illness. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that he and Istar, the lovely goddess, were the favourite deities, and occupied much the same position as Jesus and the Virgin Mary do in the Catholic religion of the present day, while the other deities were local gods attached to separate cities where their temples stood, and where they occupied a position not unlike that of the patron saints and holy relics of which almost every considerable town and cathedral boasted in mediæval Christianity. Thus they rose and fell in rank with the ascendancy or decline of their respective cities, just as Pthah and Ammon did in Egypt according as the seat of empire was at Memphis or Thebes. In one instance only in later times, in Assyria, which had become exclusively Semitic, do we find the idea of one supreme god, who was national and not local, and who overshadowed all other gods, as Jahve in the later days of the Jewish monarchy, and in the conception of the Hebrew prophets, did the gods of the surrounding nations. Assur, the local god of the city of Assur, the first capital of Assyria, became, with the growth of the Assyrian Empire, the one supreme god, in whose name wars were undertaken, cities destroyed, and captives massacred or mutilated. In fact the resemblance is very close between Assur and the ferocious and vindictive Jahve of the Israelites during the rude times of the Judges. They are both jealous gods, delighting in the massacre and torture of prisoners, women and children, and enjoining the extermination of nations who insult their dignity by worshipping other gods. We almost seem to see, when we read the records of Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib and the Books of Judges and of Samuel, the origin of religious wars, and the spirit of cold-blooded cruelty inspired by a gloomy fanaticism, which is so characteristic of the Semitic nature, and which in later times led to the propagation of Mahometanism by the sword. With the Hebrews this conception of a cruel and vindictive Jahve was beaten out of them by persecutions and sufferings, and that of a one merciful god evolved from it, but Assyria went through no such schooling and retained its arrogant prosperity down to the era of its disappearance from history with the fall of Nineveh; but it is easy to see that the course of events might have been different, and Monotheism might have been evolved from the conception of Assur. These, however, are speculations relating to a much later period than the primitive religion with which we are principally concerned.
It is remarkable how many of our modern religious conceptions find an almost exact counterpart in those of this immensely remote period. Incarnations, emanations, atonements, personifications of Divine attributes, are all there, and also the subtle metaphysical theories by which the human intellect, striving to penetrate the mysteries of the unknowable, endeavours to account for the existence of good and evil, and to reconcile multiplicity of manifestation with unity of essence. If Wordsworth sings of a
"sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interposed,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,