Even the word “divine,” which I have used here in default of anything better, imports theological ideas into the texts which were really foreign to them. The original means nothing more than “superhuman” or perhaps “non-human”; the Sumerian term is dimmer, of which dimme, “a ghost,” and dimmea, “a spectre,” are but other forms; and the ideograph by which it is symbolised is an eight-rayed star.314 “The divine lord” and “divine lady” of the incantation are but the lil and its handmaid under another guise; they are merely the ghost-like spirits who display themselves at night in the points of light that twinkle and move through the sky.

The theologians of a later day amused themselves by cataloguing the Sumerian names of the spirits invoked in the ancient incantations, and transforming them into titles of the deities of the official pantheon. The same process had been followed in the Semitic translations which were added to the incantatory texts. The spirit of the sun became Samas, the spirit of the evening star became Istar. En-lil of Nippur was transmuted into Bel, and Nin-lil, the lady of the ghost-world, into Bilat or [pg 406] Beltis. The process was facilitated by the changes undergone at Eridu by the magical texts themselves, even before the days of Semitic influence. Maritime intercourse with other lands had already deeply affected the theology of Eridu; the crude animism of an earlier epoch had made way for the conception of a culture-god who taught men the elements of civilisation, and wrote books for their instruction. He was still a “spirit” rather than a god in the Semitic sense of the word, but he was a spirit who had emerged above the rest, who had acquired those family ties which formed the very foundation of civilised life, and to whom the creation of the world was due. Ea was not indeed a Baal, but he was already on the way to become a god in human form.

At the same time, both Ea and his son Asari still appear in animal shape. Asari is, it is true, “the benefactor of man,” but he is also “the mighty one of the princely gazelle,” and even “the gazelle” himself; while Ea is “the antelope of the deep,” or more simply “the antelope.”315 At other times he is the “lord of the earth” which he has created, or the “king” of that “holy [pg 407] mound” of waters which rose up against the sky like a mountain, and behind which the sun appeared at dawn. The titles that he bears point unmistakably to Eridu. Here alone Ea was the creator of the earth, and here too, in the temple of the god, was a likeness of that “holy mound” whereon the future destinies of mankind were declared. The oldest incantations which have come down to us must have been composed at Eridu in the days of its Sumerian animism.

There are other divine or semi-divine names in them which tell the same tale. The pure waters which heal the sick and destroy the power of witchcraft are brought by the water-spirit Nin-akha-kudda, “the mistress of spells,” whom the theologians of a later time transformed into a daughter of Ea. Bau, too, the heifer of the city of Isin,316 appears along with the water-spirit. Like Zikum, she was the mother of Ea and “the generatress of mankind,” and she shared with Asari the honours of the New Year's festival. But Bau, it would seem, was not originally from Eridu. She had come there from a neighbouring city, and her presence in the incantations is a proof that even in these oldest monuments of a sacred literature we are still far from the beginnings of Babylonian religion.

At Nippur it was the ghosts and vampires, who had their habitation beneath the ground, that were objects of terror to the men who lived upon it. At Eridu the demons were rather the raging winds and storm-clouds which lashed the waters of Ea into fury, and seemed for a time to transform his kingdom into a chaos of lawless destruction. The fisherman perished in his bark, while the salt waves inundated the land and ravaged the fields of the husbandman. It was here, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, that the story of the great flood was perhaps [pg 408] first thrown into literary form, and that conception of the universe grew up which found its last expression in the legend of the struggle between Merodach and the forces of anarchy. At any rate it was here that the spirits of evil were pictured as the seven evil demons in whom the tempest was, as it were, incarnated—

The seven evil spirits played an important part in the demonology of ancient Eridu, and echoes of it survive in the later literature. They were even transmuted into a god, and unified in his person under the name of “the divine seven”;317 while the last month of the year, the stormy Adar, was dedicated to them. But in earlier days it needed all the wisdom of Ea to counteract their wicked devices. The fire-god himself was sent to drive [pg 409] them from their victims, and to disclose their nature and origin—

The hymn or incantation which thus describes them belongs to a late period in the history of Babylonian religion. The animism of primitive times has been replaced by the gods and goddesses of the later official faith. But the belief in the seven evil spirits still lingered, not only in the popular mind, but also in the ranks of the official hierarchy; and it was still remembered that they had been at the outset the spirits of the tempest, born in the clefts of the ravine or on the stormy mountain-top, from whence they issued like wild horses. The flame of sacrifice could alone avert their onset, and incantations were still composed under official sanction, with the help of which they might be driven away. The fact shows to how late an epoch the composition of spells and incantatory hymns may come down, even when the atmosphere they breathe is still that of Eridu, and the language in which they are written is still the sacred Sumerian. But there are collections of magical hymns [pg 410] and formulÆ which are even yet later in date. The eight books of the so-called MaqlÛ or “Burning” collection are written throughout in Semitic Babylonian;318 and though two out of the nine books of another collection—that of the Surpu or “Consuming Fever”—are bilingual, they have been clearly translated from the more original Babylonian into Sumerian, like the Latin exercises of to-day.319 The official canon of the magical texts, in fact, was long in formation, and did not assume its final shape until the age of Khammurabi or later, even though its roots go back to the earliest period of Babylonia, to the age of animism and the medicine-man, when the Sumerian was still dominant in the land, and the Semitic nomad or trader was content to learn from him the elements of civilisation.

The official canon had been collected together from all sides. Most of the great sanctuaries of the country had probably contributed to it; in most, if not in all, of them there must have been magical rituals which had grown up under the care and supervision of the priesthood, and in which the old beliefs of the people were disciplined and harmonised with the dogmas of the State creed. Up to the last, one of the classes into which the priesthood was divided was known as the Êni or “Chanters,” whose name was derived from the Sumerian Ên, “an incantation.” It is this word which is prefixed to the charms and incantatory hymns that constitute so integral a part of the magical texts; and though in course of time it came to denote little more than “recitation,” it was a recitation which possessed magical powers, and for which, therefore, [pg 411] a special training was necessary. A single mistake in pronunciation or intonation, a single substitution of one word for another, was sufficient to destroy the charm and necessitate the repetition of the ceremony. Some of the incantations had even to be recited in a whisper, like certain parts of the Roman missal; and a whole series or collection is accordingly termed the ritual of “the whispered charm,” reminding us of the passage in the Book of Isaiah where the prophet refers to “the wizards that peep and that mutter.”320

By the side of the “Book of Incantations”—whether it ever existed or not—there was another sacred book containing hymns to the gods. Here, again, it is more than doubtful whether the various collections of hymns compiled for use in the great sanctuaries of the country were ever combined together and incorporated into a single volume. The tendency to religious centralisation and unification in Babylonia was arrested before it could produce in religion what the seventy-two books of the “Illumination of Bel” were for astronomy and astrology, a compilation in which the observations of the past were collected and brought together.321 Babylon, despite its political predominance, never succeeded in absorbing the religious cults of the more venerable sanctuaries of the country; the historical conservatism of the people was too strong, and even Nabonidos was forced to lavish gifts on the shrine of the sun-god at Sippara as well as upon [pg 412] that of Merodach at Babylon. The priesthood of Babylon were content to be chief among their peers; there was no monotheistic zeal to sweep away the rival temples, and the intensely localised character of Babylonian religion prevented the rise of monotheism. And without religious centralisation a common service-book and canon are not very probable. Perhaps, moreover, the hymns to the gods were too long in detaching themselves from the magical ritual, and too late in acquiring a sacred character of their own, to attain the same degree of divine authority as the incantations. Many of them are not only in Semitic Assyrian, but were composed as late as the reigns of the last Assyrian kings, while even those which are bilingual seem to have been in many cases the work of Semitic poets, the Sumerian text being a translation from the Semitic into the sacred language of theology.

At the same time, Lenormant was not far wrong in comparing the religious hymns of ChaldÆa with those of the Rig-Veda. Like the latter, they belong to different periods of time, and comprise poems as unlike one another as war-songs and incantations and philosophic addresses to the gods. Moreover, as in the case of the incantations, there were collections of hymns addressed to the god or gods of the sanctuary in whose service they were used. Thus many of them belong to a collection that must have been made for the temple of the sun-god at Sippara or Larsa; all alike are addressed to the sun-god, the supreme judge of mankind; and the language that is used of him is the same in each. Other hymns celebrate the moon-god of Ur, while others belong to Nippur or to the sanctuary of Merodach at Babylon. The hymn to the god was as much a necessary portion of divine service as the incantation or the ceremonial rite.

The ritual texts tell us how and when it was employed. Thus on the festival of the New Year the service in the [pg 413] temple of Bel-Merodach was opened by a hymn in honour of his ark; and on the second of Nisan the priest was ordered to go down to the Euphrates at the beginning of the first hour of the night, and then, after putting on the prescribed vestment, and taking the waters of the river in his hand, to “enter into the presence of Bel,” and there recite a long hymn in praise of the god. The hymn closed with a prayer—

But there is yet another proof of the sacred character that attached itself to the hymns. Many of them were employed as incantations. Not only were they introduced into the magical texts, like the verses of the Bible when used as charms, but the magical element was inserted in the hymn itself. The address to the deity was combined with spells and incantations, producing a confused medley of spiritual expressions and grovelling superstition that is at once repellent and grotesque to our modern notions. The hymn, moreover, is prefaced by the word Ên or “incantation,” which makes its words as authoritative and unalterable as the rest of the magical ritual. The same sacredness that invests the latter invests also the hymn. The hymn, in short, is as much verbally inspired as the incantation or spell; indeed, between the hymn and the incantation no clear line of demarcation was drawn by the Babylonian, and it is questionable whether he would have recognised that there was any such line at all.

It was in the use that was made of them, and not in their essential nature, that the hymn to the god and the incantation differed from one another. And as animism preceded the official religion of Babylonia, and the belief [pg 414] in spirits preceded the worship of the gods, so too did the incantation precede the hymn. The sacredness that was acquired by the hymn was originally reflected from the incantation; it was not the contents of the hymn, but the actual words of which it was composed, that gave it its sacred and authoritative character, and consecrated its employment by the priestly caste.

It is accordingly with good reason that I have described the hymns, like the incantations proper, as verbally inspired. The inspiration lay in the words more than in the sense they conveyed; an error of pronunciation was more fatal than a misunderstanding of their meaning. As long as the words were recited correctly, it mattered little whether either priest or people understood precisely what they meant.

I have already in an earlier lecture quoted some lines from the hymn to the moon-god which was probably composed for the services in the great temple of Ur. The hymns in honour of the sun-god are much more numerous, and formed part of a collection which seems to have been made by the priests of Bit-Uri, the temple of the sun-god at Sippara. The sun-god they celebrate is the incorruptible “judge of mankind,” the rewarder of the innocent and the punisher of the guilty, who sees all that is done on earth, and acts towards those who call upon him with justice and mercy.

The language of another hymn is in a similar strain—

The last words illustrate that strange mixture of spiritual thought and the arts of the sorcerer to which I have more than once alluded. The hymns to the sun-god were not yet emancipated from the magical beliefs and ceremonies in which they had had their origin; they were still incantations rather than hymns in the modern sense of the word. The collection to which they belonged must have been used by the class of priests known as “Chanters” or “Enchanters,” who had succeeded to the sorcerers and medicine-men of the pre-Semitic past; and the fact explains how it is that in many of them we [pg 416] have an alternating antiphonal service, portions of them being recited by the priest and other portions by the worshipper. In some instances, indeed, the verses seem to have been alternately intoned by the priest and the assistant ministers, like the canticles or psalms in the Christian worship of to-day. The practice had its origin in the magical ritual, where the sorcerer first recited the incantation, and then called upon the individual to repeat it once or oftener after him. It is another proof of the intimate connection that existed between the hymns and the incantations out of which they had sprung; like the Veda or the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of ancient ChaldÆa mixed magic and the spiritual worship of the gods together in a confusion which seems to us difficult to understand.

It was the same with the penitential psalms which constitute the third division of the sacred literature of Babylonia. In many respects they resemble the psalms of the Old Testament. Like them they are intended for public use, in spite of their individualistic form; the individual represents the community, and at times it is the national calamity and the national sin to which reference is made. After the revolt and reconquest of Babylon by Assur-bani-pal, when the city was still polluted by the corpses of those who had perished by famine or the sword, the prophets324 ordered that its shrines and temple-roads should be purified, that its “wrathful gods and angry goddesses” should be “appeased by prayers and penitential psalms,” and that then, and only then, the daily sacrifices in the temples should be offered once more.325 Doubtless the penitential psalms were in the first instance the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of the individual; it was his sufferings that [pg 417] they depicted, and his sins that they deplored; but as soon as they had been introduced into the worship of the temple, and become part of the public cult, the individual element in them fell into the background, and in the sins and sufferings of the individual both priest and laity saw those of the whole community.

Like the Hebrew psalms, again, they express the belief that sin is the cause of suffering and calamity, and that it can be removed by penitence and prayer to the offended deity. But whereas the Hebrew monotheist knew of one God only who could inflict punishment and listen to the repentant words of the sinner, the Babylonian polytheist was distracted by the uncertainty as to what particular divinity he had offended, and to whom, therefore, his penitent appeal should be addressed. In the penitential psalms, accordingly, it is the vague and general “god” and “goddess” that are invoked, rather than a particular deity. It is only occasionally that the names of special gods are introduced, and then a long list of them is sometimes given, in the hope that among them might be the divinity whose anger had been excited, and whose wrath the sufferer was eager to appease.

Sin, it must be remembered, in the eyes of the Babylonian included a good deal more than moral wrong-doing. There were ritual sins as well as moral sins, offences against the ceremonial law as well as against the moral or spiritual code. The sin was not unfrequently involuntary, and the sufferer did not even know in what particular respect he had offended against the divine laws. It may have been the eating of forbidden food, such as that which drove Adam and Eve from the sinless garden of Paradise. Or, again, it may have been a real sin, a sin of thought and word committed in the secrecy of the heart. “Was he frank in [pg 418] speaking,” it is asked in a confession which is put into the mouth of a suppliant, “but false in heart? Was it ‘yes’ with his mouth, but ‘no’ in his heart?” So far as the punishment was concerned, little distinction was made between moral and ceremonial sin; both were visited alike, and the sin of ignorance was punished as severely as the sin that was committed with deliberate intent.

The recitation of the penitential psalms was accompanied by fasting. “Food I have not eaten,” the penitent is made to say, “pure water I have not drunk.” And, as in the case of the incantations and hymns, the recitation was antiphonal. Portions of the psalms were recited by the priest, who acted as the mediator between the penitent and the offended deity; other portions by the penitent himself, or a choir of attendant ministers. The ideas which had been associated with the use of the incantations still dominated the public cult. Indeed, the penitential psalm sometimes very nearly approaches the incantation in character. On the one side, it is difficult to distinguish from the psalm a confession like that from which I quoted just now, and which nevertheless forms part of a magical ritual; on the other side, the psalm itself at times degenerates into the language of magic. Babylonia never shook off the influence of those collections of incantations which constituted its first sacred book, and gave it its first conception of a divinely-inspired literature; up to the last the descendants of the old medicine-man occupied a recognised place in the priestly hierarchy, and the “Chanter” and “Augur” stood on the same footing as the “prophet” and the “priest.”

Perhaps it was the same influence which demanded that the language of the penitential psalm should be the extinct Sumerian. That some of the psalms went [pg 419] back to Sumerian times and were composed by Sumerians in their own tongue, I have little doubt; but it seems also unquestionable that many of the psalms which have come down to us were of Semitic origin, the Sumerian version attached to them being really a translation of the original Semitic text. At all events, penitential psalms were written in later times in Assyria, whose authors either did not care or did not know how to provide them with a Sumerian text. It may be that they did not possess the same sacred authority as the older psalms, but, like the latter, they were used in the public services of the northern kingdom with the authorisation of the king. The king in Assyria, it must be remembered, exercised the influence that was wielded by the priesthood in the southern kingdom. The Assyrian psalms, in fact, were like our modern hymns; the sanctity that surrounded the older penitential psalms of Babylonia was indeed denied them, but they better suited the newer age and the character of the Assyrian people, and there was no omnipotent priesthood to forbid their introduction into the public cult. They stood, it is true, outside the sacred canon of Babylonia, in the sense that no dogmas of religion could be built on them, and it is probable that they never received the sanction of the Babylonian priests; but for all that the spirit they breathe is that of the older psalms; and had the Assyrian empire lasted longer, it is possible that they too might have become a sacred book.

I will conclude my lecture with one of the penitential psalms, which, we are told, might be addressed “to any god”—