Chapter X

The Concept of Divine Power and the Ancient Cosmogonies.

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We may profitably compare the Eastern and Western peoples according to their respective conceptions of the divine power. Looking carefully at the Babylonian hymns and liturgies, we cannot say that the idea of divine omnipotence was ever an assured dogma, vividly present to the mind and clearly expressed. Any particular hymn may so exalt the potency of the particular deity to whom it is addressed that, in the ecstasy of prayer and adoration, the worshipper may speak as if he believed him or her to be powerful over all things in heaven and earth. But this faith was temporary and illusive. The power of the deity in the popular creed, and indeed in the hieratic system, was bound up with his temple and altar. When Sanherib laid waste Babylon and the temples, the “gods must flee like birds up to heaven.” In the Babylonian epic the deities themselves are greatly alarmed by the flood. In one of the hymns of lamentation, Ishtar laments her own overthrow in her ruined city, where she “is as a helpless stranger in her streets.”[173.1] It is probable that the popular belief of Babylon agreed in this respect with that of all other nations of the same type of religion; for the popular religious mind is incapable of fully {174} realising or logically applying the idea of divine omnipotence. But this at least is clear in the Babylonian system, that the higher divinities acting as a group are stronger than any other alien principle in the Universe, from the period when Marduk, or originally, perhaps Ninib, won his victory over Tiamit.[174.1] The evil power embodied in the demons remains indeed active and strong, and much of the divine agency is devoted to combating them. And the demons are impressive beings, impersonating often the immoral principle, but they do not assume the grandeur of an Ahriman, or rise to his position as compeers of the high god. Thus the Babylonian theology escapes the duality of the Zarathustrian; the god can always exorcise and overpower the demon if the demon-ridden man repents and returns to communion with his deity by penance and confession.

Furthermore, the ancient documents reveal the Babylonian deities as the arbiters of destiny. Marduk is named by King Neriglassar “the Leader of Destiny”;[174.2] and we have frequent allusions to the gods fixing the yearly fates at an annual meeting. Nebo the scribe is the writer and the keeper of the “Doomsbook” of Heaven, and this book is called “the tablets that cannot be altered, that determine the bounds (or cycle) of Heaven and Earth.”[174.3] Fate is neither personified nor magnified into a transcendent cosmic force overpowering and shaping the will of the gods.

How the other religions of polytheistic Asia Minor dealt with these matters is not revealed; and the {175} comparison here, as in many other points, must be immediate between Mesopotamia and Hellas. Much that has just been said of the former may be affirmed of the latter in this respect. In Homer the pre-eminence, even the omnipotence, of Zeus is occasionally expressed as a dogma, and we must believe that this deity had risen to this commanding position before the Homeric period, at least among the progressive tribes;[175.1] and throughout the systematised theology of Greece his sovereignty was maintained more consistently than, owing to the shifting of the powers of the cities, was that of Marduk or Bel or Enlil in the Sumerian-Babylonian system. Probably the high idea of divine omnipotence was as vaguely and feebly realised by the average primitive Hellene as we have reason to suspect that it was by the average Babylonian. Also, as Hellas was far less centralised than Babylonia, the efficacy of the local or village god or goddess or daimon might often transcend the influence of Zeus. But at least we have no Hellenic evidence of so narrow a theory, as that the deity’s power depended upon his temple or his image, or even upon his sacrifice.

It has often been popularly and lightly maintained that the Hellenic deities were subordinate to a power called Fate. This is a shallow misjudgment, based on a misinterpretation of a few phrases in Homer; we may be certain that the aboriginal Hellene was incapable of so gloomy an abstraction, which would sap the vitality of personal polytheism, and which only appears in strength in the latter periods of religious decay. Were it, indeed, a root-principle of Hellenic religion, it would strongly differentiate it from the Mesopotamian.

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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 {177} 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 {178} 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; {179} 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 {180} 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 {181} _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, {182} 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 {183} 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.

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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 {185} 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.

Generally we may say that the Hesiodic cosmogony bears no significant resemblance to the Babylonian, and this negative fact makes against the theory of Mesopotamian influence upon pre-Homeric Hellas.

As a divine cosmogony implies some organic theory of the Universe, so the polytheisms that attempted such speculations would be confronted also with the problem of finding some principle of order by which they might regulate the relations of the various divinities, one to the other. We find such attempts in Mesopotamian religion. Certain deities are affiliated to others, Marduk to Ea, Nebo to Marduk, though such divine relationships are less clear and less insisted on than in Hellenic theology; and the grouping of divinities shifts according to the political vicissitudes of the peoples and cities. We may discern a tendency at times to use the triad as a unifying principle, giving us such trinities as Anu, Bel, Ea, or Sin, Shamash, Adad;[185.2] we have glimpses of a trinitarian cult in early Carthage,[185.3] and slight indications of it in the Minoan-Mycenaean pillar-ritual.[185.4] But I cannot find anything to suggest that among the cultured or uncultured Semites it was ever in the ancient period a powerful and constructive idea, able {186} to beget a living dogma that might capture the popular mind and spread and germinate in adjacent lands.[186.1] We have perhaps as much right to regard the number seven as a grouping principle of Babylonian polytheism, in the later period at least, when we find a group of seven high deities corresponding to the seven planets.[186.2] We might discover a Hittite trinity of Father, Mother, and Son if we concentrated our attention on the Boghaz-Keui reliefs; but the other Hittite evidence, both literary and monumental, gives no hint of this as a working idea in the religion. In fact, in most polytheisms of the Mediterranean type it is easy to discover trinities and easy to deceive oneself about them.

The human family reflected into the heavens naturally suggests the divine trio of Father, Mother, Child. And this may be found on the Asia-Minor shore and in Hellas. It would be more important if we could discover the worship of this triad in an indissoluble union from which the mystic idea of a triune godhead might arise. This is not discernible clearly in the older period on either side of the Aegean. The cult-complex of Zeus, Semele, and Dionysos does not belong to ancient Hellas and is rare at any period; that of Hades Demeter Kore is occasionally found in cults of doubtful antiquity, but usually the mother and daughter were worshipped without the male deity. The Homeric triad so often invoked in adjurations of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo, which misled Mr. Gladstone, is due probably to the exigencies of hexameter verse, and is not guaranteed by genuine cult. No divine triad in Hellas can be proved to have descended from the earliest period of {187} Greek religion, except probably that of the Charites at Orchomenos.[187.1] We have later evidence of a trinity of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, expressing the triad that Nature presents to us of sky, sea, and earth. But probably one of these figures is an emanation of Zeus himself; the sky-god having become “chthonian” in a very early period.[187.2] We cannot say, then, that the earliest period of Hellenic religion shows a trinitarian tendency; and if it were so, we could not impute it to early Mesopotamian influence, for the idea of a trinity does not appear in the Eastern religion with such force and strength as to be likely to travel far.

As for the artificial group of the twelve Olympians, we should certainly have been tempted to connect this with Babylonian lore, the number twelve being of importance in astronomical numeration; only that the divine group of twelve does not happen to occur in Babylonian religious records at all. Nor does the complex cult of the Δώδεκα θεοί appear to belong to the earliest period of Greek religion.[187.3] And so far I have been able to discern nothing that justifies the suggestion[187.4] that the principle of unification or divine grouping in early Mediterranean polytheism came from Babylon.

A severely organised polytheism with one chief divinity, to whom all the others were in definite degrees subordinated, might evolve a monotheism. And in Babylonian literature we can mark certain tendencies making in this direction. One tablet contains an inscription proclaiming all the high gods to be forms of Marduk, Nergal the Marduk of war, Nebo the Marduk {188} of land.[188.1] That all the deities were mere forms or emanations of the Eternal might have been an esoteric doctrine of certain gifted minds, though it was difficult thus to explain away and to de-individualise the powerful self-asserting personality of Ishtar, for an attractive goddess-cult is always a strong obstacle to pure monotheism. A particular king might wish at times to exalt the cult of a particular god into a monotheistic ideal; the attempt was seriously made in Egypt and failed. It may have been seriously intended by King Rammannirari III. (B.C. 811-782), who introduced the cult of Nebo, always one of the most spiritual figures of the Pantheon, into Kelach; hence comes a long inscription on two statues now in the British Museum, set up by a governor in honour of the king, which is valuable for its ethical import, and still more interesting for its monotheistic exhortation at the close:[188.2] “Oh man, yet to be born, believe in Nebo, and trust in no other gods but him.” Here is the seed that might have been developed by a powerful prophet into pure monotheism. But the ecstatic Babylonian votary is always falling into contradiction, for in the earlier part of this hymn he has called Nebo, “The beloved of Bel, the Lord of Lords.” What, then, must the congregation think of Bel?

In Greek religion the germs of monotheistic thought were still weaker and still less likely to fructify. The earliest Hellenic tribes had already certain deities in common, and the leading stocks at least must have regarded Zeus as the supreme god. They must have also adopted many indigenous deities that they found powerful in their new homes, whose cult could not be {189} uprooted even if they wished to do so. We must therefore imagine the pre-Homeric societies as maintaining a complex polytheism, with some principle of divine hierarchy struggling to assert itself. Homer, if it is ever true to speak of him as preaching, seems certainly the preacher of the supremacy of Zeus. How far this idea was accepted in the various localities of cult we have not sufficient material for deciding: much would depend on the degree to which the individuals were penetrated by the higher literature, which from Homer onwards proclaimed the same religious tenet.[189.1] We can at the same time be sure that in many localities the countryfolk would be more under the spell of some ancient deity of the place than of the sky-father of the Aryan Hellenes. And though his cult was high placed by the progressive races, and his personality powerfully pervading in the realm of nature and human society, so that the higher thinkers entered on a track of speculation that leads to monotheism, the masses did not and could not follow them, having, in fact, the contrary bias. The popular polytheism showed itself most tenacious of divine personalities; and owing partly to the sacred power of divine names, the various titles of a single divinity tend occasionally to engender distinct divine entities. I have also already indicated that art contributed to the same effect through multiplying idols. So far, then, from displaying monotheistic potentialities, Greek polytheism, from the pre-Homeric period we may suspect, and certainly after the Homeric age, tended to become more polytheistic.