Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/209

] Triad of Na or Anna, &quot; the sky,&quot; Ea, &quot; the earth,&quot; and Mulge, &quot;the lord of the underworld.&quot; The old Shamanism gradually became transformed into a religion with a host of subordinate semi-divine beings ; but so strong a hold had it upon the mind, that the new gods were still addressed by their spirits. The religion now entered upon a new phase; the various epithets applied to the same deity were crystallised into fresh divinities, and the sun-god under a multitude of forms became the central object of worship. This inevitably led to a mythology, the numerous personified attributes passing into demi-gods and heroes. A large part of the Accadian mythology was solar, and the transparency of its proper names which, as in other agglutinative languages, never disguise their primitive meaning, makes it valuable in verifying the so-called &quot; solar theory&quot; of comparative mythology. At this stage of development, however, an important change passed over the old faith. The Semitic settlers in Sumir had adopted the Accadian pantheon and belief, and after a conflict between the discordant religious conceptions of the two races, a great sacerdotal &quot; reform&quot; took place analogous to that of Brahmanism, and the official religion fused them into one whole. The magicians were taken into the priestly body, and the hierarchy of divine beings was determined. The old triad of Na, Ea, and Mulge became the trinity of Anu, Ea, and Bel the Demiurge, all children of Zicu or Zicara, &quot;the sky&quot; (the Sige of Nicolaus Damascenus) ; Ea, &quot;the god of life and knowledge,&quot; &quot; the lord of the abyss,&quot; &quot; the king of rivers and the garden,&quot; the husband of Bahu (the Bohu of Gen i. 2), whose spirit pervades the universe, being made the father of Bel-Merodach, the tutelary divinity of Babylon. In accordance with the genius of the sex-denoting Semitic idioms, each deity was furnished with a female principle, and &quot;The god&quot; in Babylonia, and the personified city of Assur, with his wife Serua, in Assyria, were placed at the head of the Pantheon. Below these four supreme divinities came a second trinity of the Moon- god, Sun-god, and Air-god, and the seven together formed &quot; the seven magnificent deities.&quot; After these were arranged &quot; the fifty great gods,&quot; and then the 300 spirits of heaven, and the 600 spirits of earth, among whom was found a place for the primeval divinities of Accad as well as for the many local deities of Chaldea. The most dreaded of &quot;the spirits of earth&quot; were &quot;the seven spirits&quot; who were born &quot; without father and mother&quot; in the encircling abyss of ocean, and carried plague and evil over the earth. An old myth told of their war against the moon, which was deputed to watch over the interests of mankind. Along with the establishment of the Babylonian official religion, an astro-theology was created by the introduction of astronomy into the religious sphere. The &quot; spirits&quot; of the various stars were identified with the gods of the new creed, Merodach, for instance, properly one of the forms of the sun-god, being identified with the planet Jupiter, and the five planetary deities were added to the seven magnificent gods, making up altogether &quot; the twelve chiefs of the gods.&quot; The elaboration of this astro-theology was also accompanied by the formation of a cosmogony. The details of the latter are to be found in the fragments of Berosus and Nicolaus Damascenus, whose statements are confirmed by the inscriptions, and they show a remarkable resemblance to the cosmogonies of Genesis and Phoenicia. It must be remembered that both Phoenicians and Hebrews profess to have migrated from. Chaldea. The resemblance is still more striking when we examine the Babylonian mythology. The sacred tree of Babylonia, with its guardian &quot; cherubs &quot; a word, by the way, which seems of Accadian origin as well as the flaming sword or thunderbolt of fifty points and seven heads, recall Biblical analogies, while the Noachian deluge differs but slightly from the Chaldean one. Indeed, the Jehovistic version of the flood story in Genesis agrees not only in details, but even in phraseology with that which forms the eleventh lay of the great Babylonian epic. The hero of the latter is Tam-zi or Tainmuz, &quot; the sun of life,&quot; the son of Ubara- tutu, &quot; the glow of sunset,&quot; and denotes the revivifying luminary of day, who sails upon his &quot; ark &quot; behind the clouds of winter to reappear when the rainy season is past. He is called Sisuthrus by Berosus, that is, Susru &quot;the founder,&quot; a synonym of Na &quot; the sky.&quot; The mountain on which his ark rested was placed, as already noticed, in Nisir, south-west of Lake Urumiyeh. Its peak, whereon the first altar was built after the deluge, was the legendary model after which the zigurats or towers of the Babylonian temples were erected. Besides the account of the flood, fragments have been met with of stories resembling those of the tower of Babel or Babylon, of the creation, of the fall, and of the sacrifice of Isaac, the latter, by the way, forming probably the first lay of the great epic. The sixth lay we possess in full. It describes the descent of Istar into Hades in pursuit of her dead husband Du-zi, &quot;the offspring,&quot; the Babylonian Adonis. Dii-zi is but another form of Tam-zi, and denotes the sun when obscured by night and winter. At each of the seven gates of Hades the goddess left some portion of her apparel, until she at last reached the abode of the dead, dark and joyless, where dust alone is the food of the unhappy shades. In the midst rose the golden throne of the spirits of earth, beneath which welled &quot; the waters of life,&quot; and here, too&amp;gt; was the seat of Bahu. Bahu, as queen of the underworld,. smote Istar with many diseases, and confined her in Hades until her brother the Sun-god complained to the Moon-god and Ea, who sent a sphinx to pour the waters of life upon the imprisoned goddess and restore her to the light of day. This myth gives a good idea of the Chaldean conception of the next world. Certain favoured individuals, however, might look forward to a happier state of existence. A psalm which invokes blessings upon the king wishes him everlasting life in &quot; the land of the silver sky,&quot; where the gods feast and know no evil. It will be observed that the Babylonian Hades (like the Hebrew Sheol) is not very dis similar to the Homeric one ; and the possibility of borrowing on the part of the Greeks is suggested by the fact, that the seven headed serpent of Hindu legend is of foreign origin, being taken from the seven-headed serpent of the Accadians, &quot; which lashes the waves of the sea,&quot; while the story of Andromeda came through Phoenician hands from a Chaldean myth which forms the subject of one of the lays of the great epic. So, too, the Oceanus of Homer finds its prototype in the encircling abysmal waters of Accadian geography, and the fravashis and mithras of Mazdaism were introduced by the Magian (or Turanian) population found in Media by the Aryan invaders. But the old Shamauistic ideas survived also in Assyria and Babylonia, and so were handed on to the Jews. Au elaborate system of augury flourished down to the last days of the empire, and omens were drawn from every event that could possibly happen. Magic formulae for warding off the attacks of demons were extensively used, and the^ bronze bowls found by Mr Layard, as well as the part played by charms and demons in the Talmud, show how strongly the belief had seized upon the Jewish mind. Through the Jews and the various Gnostic systems of early Christianity, the primitive doctrines of Accad found their way into the mediaeval church, and the features of the mediaeval devil may be traced in an Assyrian bas-relief, where a demon with horns, claws, tail, and wings, is being pursued by the god Adar. Even the phylacteries of the Jews go back to the same origin. Accadian magic ordered the sorcerer to bind the charm, twice knotted with seven 