Chapter XII: Eschatologic Ideas of East and West

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Religions are often found to differ fundamentally in their conceptions of the fate of the departed spirit of man, and in the prominence and importance they assign to the posthumous life. There is, in fact, a group of religions which we might term “other-worldly,” because certain dogmas concerning the world after death are made the basis on which their aspirations and ideals of conduct are constructed; to this group belong Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and the old Egyptian creed. There are other religions, also of a highly developed type, in which eschatologic doctrine plays no forcible or constructive part either in the theology or in the ethics. Such were the Mesopotamian, primitive Judaism, and the early Hellenic.

Our question concerning the evidences in the second millennium of Mesopotamian influences on the Western Aegean demands, then, at least a brief comparison of the Sumerian-Babylonian, and Hellenic eschatology. Our knowledge of the former is derived from certain epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh, “The Descent of Ishtar,” and the poem dealing with the marriage of Nergal and Erishkigal, the Queen of the dead; secondly, from a few inscriptions of various periods, alluding to burial or the status of the dead; thirdly, and this is the most important source, from the recent excavations {205} of certain “necropoleis.”[205.1] The Hellenic facts have been sufficiently set forth for the present purpose in a former series of lectures.

In the picture of the lower world presented by the two literatures, a certain general agreement is discoverable, but none closer than they reveal with the conceptions of other peoples. Both accept as an undoubted fact the continued existence of the soul after death, and both imagine this existence as shadowy, profitless, and gloomy. Both also vaguely locate the abode of the soul under the earth, with a downward entrance somewhere in the west.[205.2] In both we find the idea of a nether river to be crossed, or “the waters of death”;[205.3] of a porter at the gates of “hell,” and of a god and goddess as rulers of the lower world; while the mountain of the Babylonian underworld on which the gods were supposed to have been born was unknown to Hellenic mythology.[205.4] Such coincidences are no criterion of a common origin of belief; for these traits recur in the death-lore of many and widely scattered races.

As against them, we must take into account certain salient differences. The lot of the departed in the Babylonian epic account appears drearier even than {206} in the Homeric, just as the Babylonian religious poetry inclines to the more sombre tones and the more violent pathos. The dead inhabit “the house wherein he who enters is excluded from the light, the place where dust is their bread, and mud their food. They behold not the light, they dwell in darkness, and are clothed, like birds, in a garment of feathers; and over door and bolt the dust is scattered.”[206.1] This is more hopeless than the Homeric meadow of Asphodel, where the souls still pursue the shadow of their former interests, and some tidings of the earth may penetrate to give them joy. Also, the demoniac terrors of the lower world are more vividly presented in Babylonian than in Hellenic literature and art. The demons of disease that perform the bidding of Allatu, the Queen of Hell, are closely connected with the ghost-world; we learn from the formulae of exorcism that the haunting demon that destroyed a man’s vital energies might be a wandering spectre. “O Shamash, a horrible spectre for many days hath fastened itself on my back, and will not loose its hold upon me.… he sendeth forth pollution, he maketh the hair of my head to stand up, he taketh the power from my body, he maketh my eyes to start out, he plagueth my back, he poisoneth my flesh, he plagueth my whole body… whether it be the spectre of my own family and kindred, or the spectre of one who was murdered, or whether it be the spectre of any other man that haunteth me.”[206.2]

Now it is possible that the curse of the demon was powerful both in the earlier and later periods of ancient, as it is powerful to-day in modern, Greece; the demon might be a ghost or a _revenant_. And it has {207} been the ambition of a small group of scholars in this country to prove that the higher literature and art of Greece, that reveals so fair and sane an imagination of the unseen world, is only a thin veil drawn over much that was grotesque and ghastly in the popular superstition. Even Homer reveals forms of terror in Hades; and we have ugly tales of demons sucking blood, and ravaging the land like the Ποινή of Megara. It is not necessary to labour this point. Probably every ancient race has been sorely tried at one time or other by the burden of demonology; even our hardy ancient kinsmen of Iceland had their vampires and strangling ghosts, that figure occasionally in their saga. But the great peoples of our Western civilisation are those who have struggled free from this obsession into the light of progressive secular life. Such also--we have the right to believe--was the early Greek. To draw the distinction too sharply between the cultured and the uncultured strata may be a source of fallacy, especially when it is ancient Hellas that we are dealing with, where the artist was usually a man of the people and the people certainly delighted in the work of their poets, and were strangely susceptible to the healing influences of music. If Greek poetry, then, and art strove to banish the ugliest forms of the demon-world, and thereby worked with purifying and tranquillising influence on the temperament, so much the better for the Greek peasant. It is probably wrong, therefore, to regard the average Hellene as a nightmare-ridden man. But we might dare to say this of the Babylonian; and his imaginary terrors were fostered by his religious liturgical poetry, and to some extent by his art. For most of his hymns are formulae of exorcisms, incantations against demons and spectres. But such liturgy played relatively a very small part in {208} Greek ritual; and this is one of the strongest facts that can be brought to witness against the theory of early Babylonian influence.

Yet both the Greek and the Babylonian feared the miasma of the dead. Ishtar’s threats at the portal of Hell, a tremendous outburst of infernal poetry, is a strong witness to this feeling: “Thou warder, open thy door, open thy door that I may enter in. If thou openest not thy door that I may not enter, I will crash thy door into splinters, I will burst the bolt, I will splinter the threshold and tear up the wings of the door: I will lead forth the dead that they shall eat and drink: the dead shall keep company with the living.” What lends part of its force to this great passage is the dreadful thought that the living should be haunted by the multitude of the ghosts that would pollute the living person and the light of day.

Shamash the sun-god is the natural enemy of ghosts, and is therefore appealed to in the incantation quoted just above to drive away the demon-spectres. He seems to stand here in the same relation of antipathy to the ghost-world as the “pure” Apollo stood for the Greek.

The mode and the place of burial will often throw light on the feelings of the living in regard to the departed. The peoples of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture interred their dead, Homeric society cremated them, while the recent excavations have revealed that both systems were in vogue side by side throughout an indefinite period in Mesopotamia;[208.1] and such being the facts, we cannot safely deduce from them any marked difference in spiritual beliefs. More illuminating is the fact that the pre-Homeric society in Greek lands appears generally to have buried its dead in or near their habitations, {209} as if they desired the companionship of the spirits, agreeing in this respect with the people of Gezer in Palestine.[209.1] In Mesopotamia, though in very ancient times the dead were sometimes buried in temples, the fashion generally prevailed of establishing a necropolis outside the city, as was the rule also in post-Homeric Greece. This difference alone suggests that the fear of the ghost was less powerful in pre-Homeric Greece than in Mesopotamia.

It is clear, however, that the Babylonian, like the Hellene, desired at times to enter into communion with the departed family-ghost; for in Mesopotamia, as in Hellas, we have clear trace of “parentalia,” communion-meals to which the ancestral spirits were invited to feast with the family. In the Babylonian phrase this was called “breaking bread with” the dead:[209.2] the parallel facts in Hellas are familiar to students.

Moreover, a certain general resemblance in the funeral ceremonies can be detected between the Eastern and Western peoples whom we are comparing. When we examine these, we discover that neither the Homeric nor the Babylonian epic-picture of the desolateness and futility of the life in Hades corresponded altogether with the popular faith as expressed in tomb-ritual. It is true to say of all races that burial customs and eschatological theory are never wholly harmonised by any coherent logic, and generally reveal discord between the dogma and the ritual. We can note this in ancient Hellas and among ourselves; and the discovery of Babylonian graves reveals it in Mesopotamia. The things found in these, toys for children, cosmetics for girls,[209.3] {210} show that the ideas so powerfully expressed in “The Descent of Ishtar” about the barrenness and nakedness of the land of the dead were either not universally admitted or not acted upon.

Those who equip the dead with some of the things that were of use and delight to the living must believe that the departed soul preserves a certain energy and power of enjoyment, though a gloomy poet among them may enlarge impressively on the emptiness of death. The unknown Assyrian king who describes in an inscription the sumptuous burial that he gave his father may not have been of the same mind as the poet of the Ishtar-epic concerning the laws of the Queen of Hell:

“Within the grave The secret place In kingly oil I gently laid him. The grave-stone Marketh his resting-place. With mighty bronze I sealed its [entrance], I protected it with an incantation. Vessels of gold and silver, Such as my father loved, All the furniture that befitteth the grave, The due right of his sovereignty, I displayed before the Sun-God, And beside the father who begat me, I set them in the grave. Gifts unto the princes, Unto the spirits of the earth And unto the gods who inhabit the grave, I then presented.”[210.1]

What is the meaning of the act of exposing the gold and silver vessels to the sun-god Shamash before placing them on the grave? Was it done to purify them by the aspect of the pure god and thus to fit them for the use {211} of the glorified dead? The evidence of the deification of kings has been collected above. But the ceremony in question is unique, as far as I am aware.

No doubt in ordinary Semitic burials there was great variety in the grave-offerings: in the graves of Gezer in Palestine, weapons, jewels, ostrich-eggs, seals, scarabs, amulets, small figures in human or animal form have been found.[211.1]

In these practices the primitive Hellene and Semite were on the same level, nor is it likely that either was the pupil of the other. One important difference, important at least for our purpose, we can mark, which is connected with the difference between Hellenic and Oriental climate. The Hellenic ghost might take water among his offerings, and the neglected soul might be pitied for being ἄνυδρος[211.2]; he might also eat his porridge in the Anthesteria; but he preferred wine, and the offerings of blood--the αἱμακουρία--and especially the sacrifice of animals. And we may gather from the painting on the Phaistos sarcophagus that the blood-oblation to the dead was part of the pre-Hellenic ritual in Crete. The triple-libation, also, that Homer mentions, of wine, honey-mead, and water, and which the later Greeks retained, may be regarded as a Minoan tradition, for its great antiquity among the Aegean people is attested by the libation-table found by Sir Arthur Evans in the cave of Zeus on Mount Dickte. Here there is no trace of the teaching of the Babylonian priest: nor in the blood-offerings to the dead. For the Babylonian ghost, parched with thirst in the intolerable heat of Mesopotamia, craved not blood--which, as far as I know, is never mentioned in the description of his funeral-rites--but {212} beer in the earliest period,[212.1] and in the later specially water. It is water that was supposed to make the deceased comparatively happy:

“On a couch he lieth And drinketh pure water, The man who was slain in battle. His father and his mother [support] his head, And his wife [kneeleth] at his side.”[212.2]

This is the lore that in the Epic of Gilgamesh is imparted to the hero by the ghost of his beloved Eabani, concerning the advantages of the man who gets due burial over him whose corpse is thrown out into the field, and whose soul wanders restlessly eating “the dregs of the vessel, the leavings of the feast, and that which is cast out upon the street.”

The spirit’s need of water has been an ancient tradition of Semitic grave-tendance. It is expressed on one of the cylinders of Gudea;[212.3] and in the Curse of Hammurabi, which is a postscript to his code of laws, he swears that if a man breaks them “his spirit in the world below shall lack water.”[212.4] Clay-cylinders in the museums of Paris and Berlin, that doubtless come from Mesopotamian graves, contain inscriptions expressing a blessing on the man who respects the dead, “may his departed spirit in the world below drink clear water.”[212.5] The old idea survives in the belief of modern Islam that the soul of the dead yearns for nothing so much as that the rains or dews of heaven should fall refreshingly on the grave.

These simple differences in the oblations incline {213} us to suppose that the primitive grave-ritual of Greece was developed independently of Babylon.

Again, in Greece this tendance of the spirits, in the case of the great ones of the community--the king, the hero, or the priest--was undoubtedly linked at an early period with apotheosis of the dead; and actual hero-cults and actual cults of ancestors became, as we have seen, a salient phenomenon of Greek religion.

But if this phenomenon is to be noted at all in the Babylonian, it certainly was not salient. We know that under certain circumstances the king might be worshipped in his lifetime and after, but we do not yet know that the departed head or ancestor of the family received actual cult; where this is asserted by modern scholars,[213.1] it may be that they have not paid sufficient attention to the important difference that has been defined between the tendance and the worship of the dead.[213.2] This at all events, on the evidence already placed before us, may be said: in respect of the frequency and force of hero-worship, Mesopotamia stands at the opposite pole to Greece, and in testing the question of primitive religious influences of East on West this fact must be weighed in the scale.

Evidence has been adduced pointing to an early Greek belief that the spirit of the departed ancestor might reincarnate itself in a descendant: a belief fairly common among savage peoples. I have not been able to find any indication of it in Babylonian records, nor am I aware of any trace of it among other Semitic peoples except, possibly, a late {214} Phoenician inscription from the tomb of Eshmunazar, King of Sidon about B.C. 300: in the curse which he invokes against the violator of his tomb he prays that such a man’s posterity may be rooted out: “May they have no root in the world below, nor fruit above, nor any bloom in the life under the sun.”[214.1] These strange words contain the idea of a family-tree; the fruit and the bloom are the living members who are in the light of the sun: the root are the ancestral spirits. If the figure is to be interpreted literally, we must regard these latter as the source of the life that is on the earth, and the curse would mean “may the departed ancestors no longer have the power to reappear in the living.” But we cannot feel sure how much sense we can press into the words.

So far, it appears that there was little or no communion according to Babylonian belief between the dead and the living, except at the family sacramental meal held after the funeral. Only the vexed and neglected soul of the unburied or the unhallowed dead returned to disturb the living. And perhaps at times the Babylonians, as the Israelites, resorted to “necromancy,” the evocation of the dead by spells, so as to question them concerning the future. One evidence of this is the passage in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the hero is able to evoke the spectre of his friend Eabani and question it. This was probably suggested by an actual practice, which is attested by such priestly titles as “he who leads up the dead,” “he who questions the dead.”[214.2] In ancient Greece we have the further evidence, which is lacking in the Babylonian record, of actual νεκυομαντεῖα or shrines where the dead were {215} consulted, and some of these may have descended from the pre-Homeric period; for the evocation of ghosts seems to have been specially practised in Arcadia, where so much primitive lore survived.

As regards the higher eschatology, it would seem that the Babylonian of the earlier period had not advanced even as far as the Homeric, possibly the pre-Homeric, Greek. For even in Homer’s picture of Hades and the after-life[215.1] there already is found this important trait--certain notorious sinners are punished, certain privileged persons like Menelaos may be wafted to blessedness; while in Hesiod the idea is outspoken that many of the righteous and distinguished men of the past enjoy a blessed lot hereafter.[215.2] Moreover, this important dogma of posthumous punishments and rewards is not confined to the world of mythic fancy in the Homeric epic, to personages such as Tantalos, Tityos, Menelaos: the average man in the Homeric period might not hope for happiness after death; but if Homer is his spokesman he could fear special punishment, and the threat of it was already a moral force.

There are two striking passages in the _Iliad_, of which the importance for our present question is often ignored: in iii. 278 there is reference to the two divinities whom, with Aristarchus, we must interpret as Hades and Persephone, who punish oath-breakers after death: in xix. 259 the same function of executing judgment in the nether world upon the souls of the perjured is ascribed to the Erinyes: the context in both passages {216} suggests that the poet is giving voice to a common popular belief.

And in regard to posthumous happiness, early Greece may have believed more than Homer reports. For who can determine how early this eschatologic hope came into the Eleusinian mysteries?

The “threats of hell and hopes of Paradise” were never wholly moralised even by later Greek thought; but here are the germs discernible in the earliest stage of the religion from which a higher moral teaching and a new moral force might emanate. But those who have tried to discover similar ideas in the records of Babylonian eschatology have hitherto entirely failed. Certain phrases and certain mythic data may be, and have been, pressed to support the theory that Babylonian religion and ethics were not without some belief in judgment and resurrection;[216.1] but it is overpressure, and the phrases may easily be misunderstood. No clear evidence points to Babylonian belief in posthumous judgment; the title “god of judgment” attached to Nergal might have merely a political significance. Again, “awakener of the dead” is a fairly frequent epithet of many divinities; but no context where it occurs suggests for it an eschatologic intention.[216.2] In the story of Adapa, much of which is recovered from the Tel-El-Amarna tablets, we find reference to the “Food of Life” and the “Water of Life,”[216.3] that the God of Heaven might have given to Adapa and thereby made him immortal; and in the story of Ishtar’s descent, it is said that Allatu kept the waters of life in {217} hell wherewith Ishtar was restored. But nowhere as yet has any hint been found that these waters of life were available for any mortal man, and even Adapa, the son of a god, missed getting them. In the mythology of Babylon only one mortal, Utnapishtim, the Babylonian Noah, passes without death to some happy land and becomes immortal; after the deluge Bel spake thus: “Hitherto hath Utnapishtim been of mankind, but now let Utnapishtim be like unto the gods, even us, and let Utnapishtim dwell afar off at the mouth of the river.”[217.1] Again, as the kings might be considered divine in life, there was no difficulty in supposing that they joined the company of the gods after death, as was supposed in Egypt. The prayers offered to deities of the lower world by the Assyrian king on behalf of his father, in the tablet quoted above, may be thus explained; the nether powers are entreated to offer no obstacles to his apotheosis. Other Semitic nations may have had the same belief concerning the future blessedness of the king; at least an inscription of King Panammu of North Syria, vassal of Tiglath-Pileser III., points to this, for his successor is urged to pray that “the soul of Panammu shall eat and drink with the good Adad.”[217.2]

But no evidence has as yet been gathered that the ordinary Babylonian expected any such distinguished lot. Nor does it appear that prayers were ever offered for his soul, as they might be for the king’s, and as they habitually were for the ordinary Athenian’s in the Anthesteria. For the Babylonian, on the whole, the only distinction of lot between one person and another after death was between him whose ghost was well {218} cared for by surviving relatives and him who died an outcast and was neglected. And this was no moral distinction, nor one that was likely to engender the belief in a righteous judgment. The duty to the dead was a family duty merely; nor can I find in the Mesopotamian records any indication of that tender regard of the alien dead which leads in Greece to a certain higher morality, and which informs Homer’s pregnant phrase--“it is not righteous to vaunt oneself over the slain.” We find Assyrian kings revenging themselves by mutilation and exposure of their enemies’ corpses;[218.1] and Semitic ferocity and Hellenic αἰδώς are nowhere more vividly contrasted than in this matter.

Finally, there appears a difference in character between the Mesopotamian and the Hellenic deities who were concerned with the surveillance of the world below. In the religion of the Western people, the latter are as essentially concerned with life as with death; and Demeter, Kore-Persephone, Plouton, Zeus Χθόνιος, are benign divinities whose sombre character is only the reverse of the picture; there is a chance of development for a more hopeful creed when the dead are committed to the care of the gentle earth-goddess: and it was through this double aspect of Demeter-Kore that the eschatologic promise of the Greek mysteries was confirmed. But the Babylonian Queen of Hell, Allatu, is wholly repellent in character and aspect, nor do we find that she was worshipped at all; the only indication of a softer vein in her is the passage in “The Descent of Ishtar,” which describes the sorrow of Allatu for the sufferings brought upon men through the departure of the goddess of life and love. Nergal, who is probably an usurper of the older supremacy of Allatu, has indeed a celestial character {219} as the upper god of Kutha, but even in the upper world his nature was regarded as terrible and destructive. Only once or twice is the gentler Greek conception concerning the rulers of the lower world found in Babylonian literature.[219.1] Enmesharra--a name that may be a synonym for Nergal[219.2]--is hailed as “Lord of Earth, of the land from which none returns (Aralu), great Lord, without whom Ningirsu allows nothing to sprout in field and canal, no growth to bloom.”[219.3] Tammuz himself also is once at least styled “the Lord of the lower world.”[219.4] And if Ningirsu is another name of the underworld-god, which is possible, it is significant that in an old Babylonian document the cultivator of the soil is called “the servant of Ningirsu.”[219.5] These isolated utterances, if they had penetrated the popular religious thought, might have engendered a softer and brighter sentiment concerning the world of death. But it is doubtful if they were potent enough to effect this.[219.6] If the gentle Tammuz had displaced Allatu and Nergal as the Lord of death, Babylonian eschatology might have had a different career. But it does not appear that he ever did. Deeply beloved as he was, he never reached the position of a high god either in heaven or the lower world.[219.7] Nor did his resurrection from the {220} dead evoke any faith, as far as we see at present, that might comfort the individual concerning his own lot. The personality and the rites of Attis, “the Phrygian shepherd,” are closely akin to those of Tammuz, and may be partly of Babylonian origin: and from these were evolved a higher eschatologic theory that became a powerful religious force in later Paganism. On the other hand, in Babylonia the germs of higher religion in the Tammuz-ritual seem to have remained unquickened; possibly because they were not fostered and developed by any mystic society. For it is perhaps the most salient and significant difference between Hellenic and Mesopotamian religions that in the latter we have no trace of mysteries at all, while in the former not only were they a most potent force in the popular religion, but were the chief agents for developing the eschatologic faith.

This exposition of the Eastern and Western ideas concerning death and the ritual of the dead is merely a slight sketch of a great subject; but may serve the present purpose, the testing the question of early religious contact. We have noted much general resemblance, but only such as is found among various races of the world: on the other hand, certain striking differences, both in detail and general conception, that argue strongly against the theory of contact or borrowing in the second millennium. Nor can we discover in the earliest Greek mythology a single Mesopotamian name or myth associated with the lower world.[220.1]