A. H. Sayce

“ But they belonged to the primeval world of chaos; they were the brood of Tiamât, the dragon of lawlessness and night, the demons who had been banished into outer darkness beyond the world of light and of god-fearing men. Like the devils of medieval belief, they were the divine beings of an alien faith which the gods of the new-comers had exiled to the limbo of a dead past. Even the subterranean Hades of Semitic Babylonia recognised them not. The gods worshipped by the Semite were Baalim or “Lords,” like the men whom they protected, and whose creators they were believed to be. ”

“ The peasant, therefore, might be excused if he remained true to the superstitions and traditions of his ancestors, and left the official religion, with its one ineffable god, to those who were cultured enough to understand it. Like the peasant of modern Italy, he was content with a divinity that he could see and handle, and about whose wonder-working powers he had no doubt. Materialism is the basis of primitive religion; the horizon of primitive man is limited, and he has not yet learnt to separate thought from the senses through which alone his narrow world is known to him. ”

“ The sacred book binds a religion to its past; it is the ultimate authority to which, in matters of controversy, appeal can be made, for it enshrines those teachings of the past upon which the faith of the present professes to rest. It remains fixed and permanent amid the perpetual flow and ebb of human things; the generations of men pass quickly away, rites and ceremonies change, the meaning of symbols is forgotten, and the human memory is weak and deceitful ”

“ Babylonia; his religious horizon remained bounded by death, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continued to be the God of the living and not of the dead. It was in this world that the righteous were rewarded and the wicked punished; the world to come was the dreary shadow-land of Babylonian teaching, a land of darkness where all things are forgotten, but also a land where “the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.” ”

“ The Zi, with the Lil and the Ekimmu, had to make way for a higher and purer conception of the spirit of man. The old names, indeed, still remained, but more and more emptied of their earlier meaning, or banished to the outer darkness of the magician and witch. The water and food that once served to nourish the ghost in the world below, became offerings to the dead man, and to the gods under whose protection he continued to be. ”

“ To Merodach, my lord, I prayed, and lifted up my hand: ‘O Merodach, (my) lord, the wise one of the gods, the mighty prince, thou didst create me and hast intrusted to me the dominion over multitudes of men; as my own dear life do I love the height of thy court; among all mankind have I not built a city of the earth fairer than thy city of Babylon. ”

“ He is father because he exists, and the force of his nature is such that he is eternally begetting, without ever growing weak or exhausted. He has no need to go outside himself for this act of generation; he finds in his own bosom the material of his perpetual fatherhood. Alone in the plenitude of his being he conceives his offspring; and as in him there can be no distinction between conception and birth, from all eternity ‘he produces in himself another self.’ He is at once the divine father, mother, and son. ”

“ Everything is clear; nothing is left to the imagination; and the sense of sight is that which is most frequently brought into play. It is what the Egyptian sees rather than what he hears or handles that impresses itself upon his memory, and it is through his eyes that he recognises and remembers.
At the same time this open-air life is by no means one of leisure. The peculiar conditions of the valley of the Nile demand incessant labour on the part of its population. Fruitful as the soil is when once it is watered, without water it remains a barren desert or an unwholesome marsh. ”

“ Through the seven gates of the infernal regions did Istar descend, leaving at each some one of her adornments, until at last, stripped and helpless, she stood before the goddess of the underworld. There no mercy was shown her; the plague-demon was bidden to smite her with manifold diseases, and she was kept imprisoned in Hades like the ordinary dead. But while the goddess of love thus lay bound and buried, things in this upper world fell into confusion. Neither men nor cattle produced offspring, and the gods in heaven took counsel what should be done. ”

“ But if you pass beyond into the remotest part of the enclosure in the expectation of beholding something yet more excellent, and look for the image which dwells in the temple, a pastophorus or some other minister, singing a pæan in the Egyptian language with a pompous air, draws aside a small portion of the curtain, as if about to show us the god; and makes us burst into a loud laugh. ”

“ Thou art my Ka in my body, the god Khnum who makes strong my limbs. Come thou to the good place to which we are going. Let not our name be overthrown by the lords of Hades who cause men to stand upright! ”

“ There was chaos, it was true, but it was a chaos which had no existence apart from God, who was its absolute master to carve and fashion as He would. The deep, too, was there; but the deep was neither the impersonation of Tiamât nor the realm of Ea; the breath of the one God brooded over it, awaiting the time when the creative word should be uttered, and the breath of God should become the life of the world. The elements, indeed, of the Hebrew cosmology are all Babylonian; even the creative word itself was a Babylonian conception, as the story of Merodach has shown us ”

“ But between religion and morality there is not necessarily any close tie. Religion has to do with a power outside ourselves, morality with our conduct one to another. The civilised nations of the world have doubtless usually regarded the power that governs the universe as a moral power, and have consequently placed morality under the sanction of religion. But the power may also be conceived of as non-moral, or even as immoral; the blind law of destiny, to which, according to Greek belief, the gods themselves were subject, was necessarily non-moral ”

“ The fundamental ideas which form, as it were, its environment, are strange to us; the polytheism of Babylonia, or the animal-worship of Egypt, transports us to a world of ideas which stands wholly apart from that wherein we move. It is difficult for us to put ourselves in the place of those who saw no underlying unity in the universe, no single principle to which it could all be referred, or who believed that the dumb animals were incarnations of the divine. ”

“ Behind the sensuous appearance, behind the manifestation of the divine nature wherein the popular imagination fancied it saw that nature itself, he beheld confusedly a being obscure and sublime, a full comprehension of whom is denied him, and the feeling of this incomprehensible presence lends to his prayer a deep and thrilling accent, a sincerity of thought and emotion, a thousand times more touching than that medley of amorous puerilities, of mystic languors and morbid contrition, which is so often the substitute for religious poetry. ”

“ Ea, whose home was in the deep, among the waters of the Persian Gulf, had there his temple, and it was there that he had taught the first inhabitants of Babylonia all the elements of civilisation, writing down for them the laws they should obey, the moral code they should follow, and the healing spells that prevented disease and death. He was the author of all the arts of life, the all-wise god who knew the things that benefited man; and his son and minister Asari, who interpreted his will to his worshippers, received the title of him “who does good to mankind.” ”

“ The names and number of the gods and goddesses worshipped by the Egyptians and Babylonians is of little moment to the scientific student of religion: what he wants to know is the conception of the deity which underlay these manifold forms, and the relation in which man was believed to stand to the divine powers around him. What was it that the civilised Babylonian or Egyptian meant by the term “god”? What was the idea or belief that lay behind the polytheism of the popular cult, and in what respects is it marked off from the ideas and beliefs that rule the religions of our modern world? ”

“ Like the lower animals, man is still governed by the law which dooms the weaker to extinction or decay, and gives the palm of victory to the strong. In spite of all that moralists may say and preach, power and not morality still governs the world.
We need not wonder, therefore, that in the earliest forms of religion we find little or no traces of the moral element. What we term morality was, in fact, a slow growth. It was the necessary result of life in a community. As long as men lived apart one from the other, there was little opportunity for its display or evolution. ”

“ Has he committed sin against a god, or has he committed sin against a goddess? Has he offended a god, or has he held a goddess in light esteem? Is his sin against his own god, or is his sin against his own goddess? Has he done violence to one older than himself, or has he conceived hatred against an elder brother? ”

“ Between the deity who is human and the deity who is bestial no true reconciliation is possible.
We must therefore trace the deification of the Pharaoh back to Asia, and the Asiatic element in the Egyptian population. The Pharaonic conquerors of the valley of the Nile were those “followers of Horus” who worshipped their leader as a god. It was a god in human form who had led them to victory, and Horus accordingly continued to be represented as a man, even though the symbolism of the hieroglyphs united with the creed of the prehistoric races of Egypt in giving him the head of a hawk. ”

“ The literature we possess tells us but little concerning the future life and the beliefs connected with it. The ritual and the hymns to the gods are concerned with this life, not with the next, and we have to grope our way, as it were, through obscure allusions and ambiguous phrases if we would find in them any references to the world beyond the grave. To fall back on mythological poems and heroic epics is dangerous and misleading. The literary myth will give us as false an idea of the psychology of a people as it will of their theology ”

“ All Egypt and all lands within the circle that thou treadest in thy glory, praise thee at thy rising and at thy setting. O God, who in truth art the living one, who standest before our eyes, thou createst that which was not, thou formest it all ”

“ Up to the last the magician flourished there, and the spells he worked were recognised by the religion of the State. But for all that they stood outside the religion of the State, harmonising with it just as little as the superstitions of popular folk-lore harmonise with the religion we profess. No one would assert that the Christianity of to-day has grown out of beliefs like that in the vampire which still holds such sway in some of the Christian countries of Europe; and there is just as little reason for asserting that the vampire of the primitive Sumerian developed into a Babylonian deity. ”

“ They were too much absorbed in commerce and trade and the practical pursuit of wealth, to have leisure for theories that concerned themselves with a doubtful future and an invisible world. The shadow of the old religion of Nippur, moreover, with its underground Hades of darkness and gloom, rested to the last on the mind of the Babylonian people. The brighter views which had emanated from Eridu never succeeded in overcoming it altogether. The gods of light ruled, indeed, over a world that had once belonged to the demons of night, but their victory never extended further. ”

“ But all pioneering work is necessarily imperfect, and for many a day to come the history of Babylonian religion must be left to the pioneer. Year by year, indeed, the materials are increasing, and it may be that a discovery will yet be made, like that of the Pyramid texts in Egypt, which will reveal to us the inner religious thought and belief of Babylonia in those distant ages, when Nippur and Eridu, and not as yet Babylon, were the theological centres of the land. ”

“ Thanks to the perpetual sunshine of the valley of the Nile, the Egyptian leads an open-air life. Except for the purpose of sleep, his house is of little use to him, and in the summer months even his sleep is usually taken on the roof. He thus lives constantly in the light and warmth of a southern sun, in a land where the air is so dry and clear that the outlines of the most distant objects are sharp and distinct, and there is no melting of shadow into light, such as characterises our northern climes. ”

“ Religion, however, has an inverse history. It starts from the individual, it is extended to the community. The individual must have a sense of a power outside himself, whom he is called upon to worship or propitiate, before he can rise to the idea of tribal gods. The fetish can be adored, the ancestor addressed in prayer, before the family has become the tribe, or promiscuous intercourse has passed into polygamy.
The association of morality and religion, therefore, is not only not a necessity, but it is of comparatively late origin in the history of mankind. ”

“ On the contrary, life for the Egyptian fellah is a very real and practical thing: he knows beforehand what he has to do in order to gain his bread, and he has no time in which to theorise about it. It is, moreover, his sense of sight which is constantly being exercised. The things which he knows and remembers are the things which he sees, and he sees them clearly in the clear sunshine of his fields. ”

“ And yet, until we can do so, the religions of the two great cultured nations of the ancient world, the pioneers of the civilisation we enjoy to-day, will be for us a hopeless puzzle, a labyrinth without a clue. ”

“ At other times the animal form is relegated to that great company of demons and inferior spirits amongst whom room was found for the multitudinous ghosts of Sumerian belief. Where it is not altogether excluded from the world of gods and men, it exists only as the humble retainer of one of the human gods. As Merodach was accompanied by his four divine dogs, so Ea was attended by sacred bulls. They guarded the approach to the “field” and “house of Eden,” like the colossal figures, with bull-like bodies and the heads of men, that guarded the gates of the palace or temple. ”