Page:The Babylonian conception of heaven and hell - Jeremias (1902).djvu/44

 already seen that to the gods of heaven was attributed the power in certain cases to shatter the whole realm of the dead, and also that in isolated instances the spirit of a dead man might be brought forth. The narrator of the "Journey of Istar in Hades," indicates in the mystic concluding lines of the poem what his auditor must do "if deliverance is refused," and earlier in the epic we are told how the goddess Istar herself is set free after the porter has been forced to sprinkle her with the "water of life." In the "eternal palace," however, the inmost sanctuary of the Underworld, there is a spring (?) of the water of life, guarded, apparently, by the Anunaki, already known to us as demons of the sepulchral world. Only indeed by violence and with the help of a special word of power of the god Ea can this water be reached. It was owing to the feast of Tammuz, who was condemned "to weep year after year," and whose return from the Underworld was celebrated annually, that the idea of deliverance from Hades had become one of the most widely diffused notions in the popular mind. The fact also that a whole series of divinities are distinguished by the epithet "raiser of the dead," is connected with the same order of ideas. It is, indeed, the Sun and Spring gods especially that are said to love to wake the dead. The statement was, therefore, due in the first place to experience of the