7

THE NUMINOUS AND THE MESOPOTAMIAN RELIGION

“Basic to all religion,” writes Professor Thorkild Jacobsen, “and so also to ancient Mesopotamian religion—is, we believe, a unique experience of confrontation with power not of this world.”1 Alone among historians of Mesopotamia, he initiates his study of religious development with this highly personal declaration of the fundamental role played by the primal, profound experience, which can be termed numinous or enlightening—in other words, a direct experience of divinity. For Professor Jacobsen, it is with such an experience that religion begins.

The expression of this unique experience must somehow be rendered coherent in order for it to be communicated and interpreted. It must be encapsulated by language into concepts, into symbols, into metaphors. And these concepts, symbols, and metaphors constitute the building blocks of myth.

The mythology of a nation can be viewed as its reflection in the mirror of the heavens, for myth mirrors the hidden side of a nation; the tales of the gods are the tales of a nation’s unconscious life expressed in symbolic form.

Through myth a culture seeks to understand and accept the reality within which it lives. These myths arise out of the very deepest layers of the masses and the individual’s psychic makeup; they are a symbolic expression of the psyche’s innermost processes.

Buried in the unconscious, both individual and collective, are energy patterns that all humankind holds in common; it is these that emerge in myth. The pioneering psychologist Dr. Carl Jung termed these energy patterns archetypes and explained that they derived from the collective unconscious—that deep psychological level that is shared equally by all.*9

Lying within this collective unconscious are primordial images, ancient patterns that cause certain resonant motifs to emerge symbolically into the conscious world as myth. The inherent strength of myth lies then in the emotional power that is released within each person through a personal recognition of, and personal resonance with, these emergent archetypal patterns.

Initially unconscious, these patterns flow beneath the surface of consciousness, yet occasionally they can erupt without warning, emerging perhaps in the form of a mass movement or in the person of a demagogue who, crystallizing this unconscious energy, manipulates the public into providing this energy with a focus, with a conduit out into the world.

A common example of this—of a nation’s unconscious erupting into the culture—is the process that often leads to war: a leader emerges to focus this national psychosis, and a scapegoat is found that can take the focus of all the ills of the society, which will quickly find itself at war. Then members of society have the chance to act the part of a national mythological war hero—most of whom, it should be recalled, get killed, dying in the arms of their friends.

The tales of heaven are, in reality, tales of earth. Mythology forever connects these two realms, and, of course, astrology’s basic premise rests upon this connection. Events in heaven foreshadow events on earth. Indeed, the art of astrology itself can be seen as a means of working with mythology in a practical way.

Without an understanding of myth and its relation to the unconscious, without any insight into the religious aspiration and expression that lies behind the mythmaking process, and without any appreciation of the power of the numinous experience, no scholar working in the field of comparative religion can hope to make any sense out of the endless variations of religious expression. In consequence, many fall into the intellectually secure charade of mere classification: they link common elements as though understanding religion were just another exercise in cross-referencing. They forget the intensely personal, yet universal, experience that is desperately seeking expression through the limitations of language and culture. One of the great historians of Mesopotamia, the University of Chicago Oriental Institute’s Professor Leo Oppenheim, scorned the creators of “smoothly written systematizations decked out in a mass of all-too-ingenious comparisons and parallels obtained by zigzagging over the globe and through the known history of man.”2 If, for example, one is looking for the moon, describing and collating the appearance of a million fingers pointing in its direction will not bring one any closer to knowledge of its appearance.

In the progressive relationship of humans with the divine, the experience of the numinous is the ultimate step. Furthermore, despite this primal experience being, by its very nature, beyond description, those who have been through it nonetheless attempt to express or communicate to others their understanding of it, often, of course, in an attempt to guide others toward it. As Apuleius writes, “At midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon,”3 or as the Hermetic text known as the “Poimandres” of Hermes Trismegistus expresses it, “Now fix your thought upon the Light . . . and learn to know it.”4 Even in Old Babylonian times this terminology was current: “Let mine eyes see the sun that I may be sated with light. Banished afar is the darkness, if the light is sufficient. May he who has died the death see the light of the sun.”5 So spoke Gilgamesh to the sun god, Shamash.

Yet despite this, without bringing some knowledge to these passages, we are no clearer. Apuleius recognized this and followed his revelations with the apology “Well, now you have heard what happened, but I fear you are still none the wiser.”6

The history of religion and literature demonstrates that the only way to overcome the severe limitations of language and communicate an experience so personally profound as that of the numinous is by use of some form of analogy or metaphor. These metaphors then become the primary link connecting this direct experience of the numinous to those secondary religious qualities of faith and a belief in some prophetic scriptural expression. As the human reaction to the numinous experience we have religion—an intellectual tradition that embraces myth, theology, cultic worship, and ritual.

In the metaphors, therefore, all that is shared by the worshippers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the Numinous is summed and crystallized. . . . In its choice of central metaphor a culture or cultural period necessarily reveals more clearly than anywhere else what it considers essential in the numinous experience and wants to recapture and transmit. . . . [It is this] which underlies and determines . . . the total character of its religion.7

A symbol is always more than it appears. Therein lies its power. It can entice our perceptions onward, toward wider horizons. Thus, religious symbols, religious metaphors, seek to draw us further and further beyond the superficial, toward the divine or the numinous.

A study of the religious metaphors and their development during a people’s cultural history—the additions and modifications that appear as the culture itself changes—can provide a matrix within which the historical record of political and economic events occurs. The history of the religious metaphors is a history of the evolution of consciousness of the culture. Indeed, to read an ancient myth is a form of archaeology; it provides a direct window into the very basis of that culture.

The divine can be experienced either as immanent, that is, as existing in all things equally without distinction, or as transcendent, that is, beyond the world, beyond the objects and forms that we see around us. In the ancient Middle East, religion, often using variations on the same mythology, embraced both experiential forms of the numinous. For the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the numinous was experienced as immanent: the power of the gods was considered to reside permanently in an object without denigrating the omnipotence of those gods. Examples of this can be found in numerous Akkadian epics in which the hero, upon confronting a divine figure that spoke through some natural object, saw both the physical object and the divine power as attributes of the one divine being.

This can be seen in the attitude adopted toward the heavenly bodies. The Sumerian word utu means both the sun and the power that motivates it—in other words, the power of the sun god is seen as immanent in the sun. Similarly in the case of Venus, the planet is worshipped as being the repository of the goddess Ishtar, who is immanent in that planet and who controls and animates it. They did not, however, believe the planets to be the god or goddess.

This belief explains the Mesopotamians’ curious attitude toward statues of their gods. The gods were held to be immanent within their images made of stone, wood, or metal. In consequence, daily rituals were performed before these statues by the priests, rituals that entailed cooking and serving elaborate meals for these images twice daily.8

During the religious festivals when the statues of the gods were carried out from the city, the population believed that they were carrying the god itself out; for that short period they believed that the god had left the city. Indeed, great calamities were believed to befall any city whose god was lost, broken, or carried off by a foreign invader.

It is perhaps not incidental that the religion of the Old Testament, which opposed astrology, also had a different attitude toward the divine. The chronicle of the Old Testament bristles with fierce denunciations of divination; it is also replete with the angry demands of a god that was experienced, not as immanent, but as transcendent. A god that would communicate through different physical forms—a pillar of fire, for example, or a dark cloud—and yet remain distinct from those forms.

In the story of Moses’s confrontation with the divine in the burning bush, it is quite clear that the divine was considered to be distinct from the bush, that the divine was held to be merely using the bush on that particular occasion for its own reasons. As Professor Jacobsen points out, a Babylonian confronted with the same experience would have seen the divine not only as all-powerful but also as being the center of the life of the bush itself.9 Thus, the Babylonian would have worshipped both the divine and the bush. Conversely, the Hebrews of the Old Testament, insofar as the text can be believed, were never in the habit of worshipping bushes, however often the deity might reside in them.

The religion of Mesopotamia did not maintain the same beliefs, the same cultic practices, or even the same gods over the many thousands of years during which civilization moved from the small Anatolian settlements to the great metropolitan conurbations that grew up on the plains. The religion grew along with the culture. While this growth was obviously slow, it is possible, through a study of the writing that emerged at various periods, to delineate several quite distinct phases in the religious development of the region.

Naturally, the edges of each phase, the transition periods, are indistinct. New literature appears incorporating certain changes without any hint of those processes that might have constituted the formative steps toward the elaboration of this new position.

The earliest type of religion in Mesopotamia, so far as we can tell, involved primarily the worship of fertility gods and goddesses, who ensured that the fields remained productive and the animals healthy. In time, perhaps reflecting the emergence of local warrior kings who ruled over the growing, hierarchically stratified urban communities, the gods also became ordered into a strict social hierarchy, each a specialist in his or her appointed task.

At some point the concept of a ruler god appeared. This god was seen as the king of heaven, who ruled, as did the kings on earth, over a court of many secondary figures.*10 And, like the kings on earth, this ruler god was appointed by election, by acclamation of all the gods meeting together in a great heavenly hall. Heaven was made, by the storytellers, to reflect the earth. Thus, the social organization and morality in the myths of the gods revealed those social factors that were so vital to the Assyrians and Babylonians.†11

Yet, curiously, once the hierarchy of heaven had been established, this then became seen as the foundation for the hierarchies upon earth. The descent of “kingship” from above meant that the “office, not the office-holder, was of superhuman origin.”10 Hence, the source of the Assyrian or Babylonian king’s authority was not by virtue of his descent or his dynasty but of his election by the gods. In practice this resulted in a choice of heir on the part of the reigning king: there was no primogeniture in operation, although there was a sense of dynasty. By use of a variety of techniques, including divination, one of the king’s sons was chosen as the “crown prince,” and until this choice was made and publicly declared, the identity of the heir would be uncertain.

Historians of religion see this development as reflecting, in myth, the social situation of the third millennium BCE. With the gods firmly installed as rulers of heaven, the ruler upon the earth—the king—came to be seen as their representative: “After kingship had descended from heaven,” begins the Sumerian king list.11

The ancient epic of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, written on twelve tablets, records his being addressed as “offspring [or child] of the gods.”12 The king was the one who carried the responsibility of supervising the various actions desired by the gods; thus, he needed to be aware of exactly what the gods required of him and his city. Here the practice of divination fulfilled a crucial civic purpose: through divination the king was able to know the gods’ will. The king had to seek omens, not only to understand portended events but also to discover what the gods required of him.

The turn of the second millennium BCE, argues Professor Jacobsen, coincided with a significant change in the religious perspective of Mesopotamia.13 During this period, for the first time in recorded history, individuals spoke directly to the gods—they pleaded, requested, begged for success, good fortune, good health—with the expectation that for a moment the gods would drop their cosmic duties and deign to involve themselves in terrestrial affairs for the benefit of the supplicant.

For the first time the ancient texts give clear examples of an emerging conception of a personal god, a god directly responsible for individual destiny.

My god, you who are my father who begot me,

lift up my face. . . .

How long will you neglect me,

leave me unprotected?14

So cried a young man in this late Sumerian poem. His prayers were answered, as the poem, with a change of style, continues,

The man—his bitter weeping was heard by his god,

When the lamentation and wailing that filled him had soothed the heart of his god for the young man,

The righteous words, the artless words uttered by him, his god accepted. . . .

His god withdrew his hand from the evil word. . . .

The demon of fate who had been placed there in accordance with his sentence, he turned aside,

He turned the young man’s suffering into joy. . . .15

Just a handful of texts of this type concerning a “personal” god have been found, dating to 2600 BCE, 2150 BCE, 2000 BCE, and the latest to 1700 BCE. There are no others found until near the end of the millennium. Beyond Mesopotamia this style of text does not occur until relatively later—around 1350 BCE in Hittite material, around 1230 BCE in Egypt, and around the turn of the millennium in Israel.

While the paucity of texts does not allow us to come to any fixed conclusions, the suspicion arises that this was a Mesopotamian religious development that took place during the years straddling the beginning of the second millennium BCE, possibly related to the increasing influence of the Semitic immigrants into the region that culminated in their dominance.

Of this change, Jacobsen says, the concept of the personal religion can be traced “to the beginnings of the second millennium in Mesopotamia” and is embedded in “and limited to the specific relationship of a man to his personal god.”16 This is directly relevant to the formation of a regular divinatory technique because divination provides a channel of communication between the gods and humankind.17

In passing it is worth noting that in the case of the culture in Israel, the personal attitude toward religion was extended from the individual to the nation.18 The nation became a “chosen one,” monopolizing the deity and constantly in touch with it through the agency of the Ark of the Covenant. From this attitude a view of history developed that was purposive and meaningful—history was moving toward a future national fulfillment, not simply repeating itself after the passing of a huge cycle of years, as the Mesopotamians believed. To the Israelites, history was linear; to the Mesopotamians, history was repetitive.

Historically there are two interesting points of coincidence between this and the rise of a systematized astrological methodology. The first is that the earliest Sumerian astrological tablets date from about the period of the early texts that describe a personal religion. The second point is that the later religious texts fall within the period of the first dynasty of Babylon, which saw the beginning of the development of astrology. Indeed, the last text discovered was dated to circa 1700 BCE, the beginning of the reign of King Ammisaduqa, whose name is mentioned in the Venus Tablet of the Enuma Anu Enlil.

In the light of this, one should be aware of the possibility of some connection between the two processes—the rise of personal religion and the rise of astrology. Psychologically there are similarities. Professor Jacobsen points out the paradoxical character of the personal approach to deity: while externally the supplicant is giving vent to dramatic expressions of humility and abasement, beneath the surface is a presumption of almost limitless self-importance.19 The supplicant, for the moment, becomes the center of the universe, demanding the sole attention of the god.

This is not without relevance to astrology, which firmly details the interest of the gods in the earth and, with the much later “natal” birth charts, symbolically details the connection of the gods with the individual. Such birth charts, however, formed no part of Assyrian or Babylonian astrology until some two hundred years after the destruction of the last Babylonian empire. Perhaps, rather, it is from this religious concept that the use of “nativity” omens developed. These had long been used in Mesopotamia.

This type of natal divination procedure inevitably came to include omens that were derived from celestial phenomena.20 Thus, it is possible that, in some manner that has not yet been discovered by the archaeologists, this led to the recording of the planetary positions at the exact moment of birth in order to determine the fate of the child. At this point was born the natal horoscope, the earliest of which dates to 410 BCE, the period of the Persian domination of Mesopotamia.21 Of course, this is a very long time after the apparent beginning of a personal religion, and this fact alone demands an explanation.

The Babylonians and Assyrians lived in a world where the past and the future continuously bled into the present. Time itself was seen as cyclical and ever-flowing. This is quite a different perception from that of our Judeo-Christian influenced modern era, where time marches, teeth clenched, onward to a stoically better future. And because of this concept, we remain prey to all manner of millenarian messianic hopes.

In such a fluid universe where past and future, good and evil all ebbed and flowed together, it is only to be expected that all should be regarded as negotiable. If an omen should portend evil, then a ritual would be performed to remove its effects and to appease the god from whom the evil derived. Evil, it was supposed, appeared because an individual or a nation had, however unwittingly, transgressed the will of a particular god or goddess. Consequently, it was necessary to apologize and undergo some form of ritual abasement to prove true contrition before the evil could be averted.

Divination presented astrologers with a conundrum: while evil might be predicted, it was not actually present at the time of the prediction. Thus, the ritual to remove the effect could not yet be applied. It was necessary for the priest and the supplicant to wait until the evil arrived. This was obviously an unsatisfactory course of events—the supplicant awaiting the evil, candles, water, and incense ready, the priest nervously pacing the floor with his magical paraphernalia. Obviously some alternative system needed to be devised.

And, of course, it was: the Namburbi ritual. This was an apotropaic ritual, that is, one designed to avert threatened evil. It enabled the supplicant to preempt the evil that was about to descend. Namburbi is a Sumerian word meaning “undoing of it,” that is, “ritual for the undoing of portended evil.”22 Its existence and use is a particular adjunct to the Mesopotamian divination technique, for without divination such a ritual would be irrelevant.

That rituals existed to avoid a portended fate requires some investigation into the Mesopotamian’s concept of fate, shimtu. This is a difficult concept, different from the deterministic view of fate held later by the Greeks and that lies behind the modern Western attitude. Shimtu refers to a disposition that comes from a god, the king, or any individual who has the specific mandate to confer power or privileges.23 The gods endow mortals with their gifts of power or success; the king can dispose of political offices, land, or privilege; and individuals can assign belongings to their heirs. Shimtu denotes that which is fixed particularly by decree and then is communicated from a higher to a lower social or divine order.24

There is though a specifically religious concept of the “establishment of the shimtu” for an individual: this is a specific action whereby each person receives from the gods—presumably at birth—their amount of good or ill fortune, thus setting the pattern for the individual’s subsequent life.25 Thus, the later natal horoscope can be seen as a record of one’s allotted shimtu.

For most of the last two thousand years, a fundamental premise lying at the heart of astrology has been that of causation: the movements of the planets directly cause specific events upon the earth. Hence, the observation of planetary movement has an immutable determinist quality; from what is observed above will appear, in due course, a series of fated events on earth. While a great many modern astrologers no longer subscribe to this premise, it is still true that it remains the most commonly held assumption.

This belief is an inheritance from the ancient Greeks. They believed in a finite universe, lesser in the hierarchy of creation than the Creator. And, due mainly to Aristotle’s influence, they believed that the planets caused direct and physical alteration of events on earth. Precisely how this effect was caused has exercised minds ever after, albeit unsuccessfully.

The Babylonians and Assyrians had no such belief. For them, the existence of celestial (and terrestrial) omens—a celestial event with a correlated terrestrial event—did not, in any way, necessitate any consequent belief either that the celestial events caused the predicted terrestrial events or that the predicted terrestrial events were, in any manner, fated, inevitable consequences of this previous celestial event.*12

The anomalous or unusual event that was considered to be significant, or “ominous,” and that portended, according to the literature, certain events on earth, was a “sign” or a “warning” of what was possible. It was an indication of what the gods, in their control of fate, had determined should be the outcome. This predicted event, though, could be avoided through magical ritual; it was never considered inevitable.

Professor Rochberg-Halton writes:

Evidence that notions of causality or fate did not lie in the background of celestial divination comes from the apparent fact that the diviners regarded the omens . . . as neither inevitable nor inexorable. Apotropaic rituals could dispel whatever evil might be predicted. . . . Such “namburbi” rituals were believed efficacious because an event presaged by a given phenomenon was not seen as rigidly bound by necessity or causation. Hence, no fundamental determinism lay at the basis of the Mesopotamian concept (or “theory”) of divination. The nature of an omen in a Babylonian text is therefore not that of an absolute cause, but of a warning or sign.26

The 140 or more Namburbi texts so far identified all date from the late eighth to the late sixth centuries BCE. Most of them were found at the cities of Nineveh and Asshur, although their language suggests an origin in the south, in Babylonia.

Each tablet provides a list of the rituals to be performed for the particular type of evil that threatens, together with the text of the prayer to be spoken in front of the god.*13

That these texts have been copied many times is a good indication of the important function that they served in daily life. These rituals also appear in the omen texts, which often have a break in the text where the relevant Namburbi ritual is detailed.

The ritual itself most commonly involved only two people: the supplicant and the priest. It took several hours to perform, although it seems to have been typical practice to perform it in parts over two consecutive days. The site for the ritual needed to be secluded, away from the general hubbub of daily life. Once a suitable site had been chosen, an altar would be prepared.

First, rites were performed to separate the site of the ritual from its surroundings: standards would be raised around the corners of the site, one to each of the four winds. A curtain, for example, or small heaps of flour, might be used to isolate the site. Generally it would seem that some species of magical separation was sought in the same way as a medieval—or modern—magician would inscribe a circle within which to perform his or her rituals.

Following the preparation of the site, the performers would then purify themselves. They washed or bathed, shaved, and then put on clean garments. Then the site itself was purified by sweeping it clean; sprinkling pure water about it; and burning incense of juniper, cedar, or myrrh.

With the site chosen and correctly prepared, the ceremony could begin. Offerings of food or drink would be made to the gods, accompanied by specific prayers to the effect that the portended evil might be destroyed before it could do any harm. These prayers were made mostly to Shamash as god of justice, to Adad as god of wild storms, or to Ea or Asalluhi, the gods of magic.

Finally, at the conclusion of the ritual prayers, the performers would again purify themselves and then perform some small symbolic act to show the “undoing” of the evil, such as the unraveling of a plant or the smashing of a small pot. Then followed a ritualized method by which the supplicant reentered daily life: he was commonly told to leave the ritual enclosure without looking behind him and to take a different road back to his home or to his city, where he should deliberately involve himself in the turmoil of daily life. Entering a tavern was recommended, so that he might drink and talk. And then for some time afterward the supplicant would obey certain dietary rules, avoiding foods such as garlic, fish, or leeks, which were prohibited by the cult, and wearing amulets inscribed with magical formulas.27

The Namburbi ritual is, of course, “magical.” Magic is a form of intercession with the gods. It relies upon the premise that however omnipotent and remote the gods might be, they too are subject to immutable universal laws. If the magician were to know these laws and be able to operate in accordance with them, then even the gods would be bound to obey.

The task of the magician is to change or redirect nature, and if the future direction of the natural world can be revealed by astrology, then the magician has every opportunity to alter the direction of events, thus creating an alternative future.

With these Namburbi rituals we have left the lofty position of the numinous experience and are within the restrictive and cultic arena of religious dogma. Magical rituals emerge from a particular Weltanschauung, or worldview, one in which universal laws of sympathetic action and reaction exist and can be used by both the gods and humankind. This doctrine of sympathetic action was important to the Babylonians and Assyrians; indeed, it formed the basis of their magical practices.

This idea of sympathetic action is also one of the bases of astrology. As the practice developed, especially under Greek and Roman patronage, each god, each planet, had his or her correct wood, metal, color, number, and image that a devotee would use to seek that god’s aid. This procedure is at the heart of the creation of magical amulets and talismanic figures. In time the disciplines of astrology and magic ceased running in parallel and joined together. It can be argued that this process began with the use of the Namburbi rituals to avert negative astrological predictions.

This symbiosis of magic and astrology was to see extensive development over three millennia or more and to end by literally changing the course of Western civilization itself. It was the widespread concept of sympathetic magic, deriving ultimately from the ancient Babylonians, that was expounded in the fifteenth century CE by the Florentine linguist and philosopher Marsilio Ficino, teacher of Botticelli, which, as we shall see, lay at the very heart of the Italian Renaissance.