date of any god's accession to supremacy there is, consequently, apart
from mortal ken. None the less that of Amon-Ra is known. At the
beginning of the earthly reign of Amonhoteph III., an edict,
scrupulously executed throughout Egypt, determined, on monument and
wall, the substitution of Amon-Ra's name for that of previously
superior gods.
The pharaohnate of Amonhoteph began about 1500 B.C. It is from that
period, therefore, that dates the divinity's accession to the
pharaohnate of the skies. There is, or should be, a reason for all
things. There is one for that. Amonhoteph regarded himself as Amon's
son. It was one of the traits of the pharaohs, as it was also of the
Incas, to believe, or at least to assert, that their fathers,
therefore themselves, were divine. As a consequence of the idea they
prayed to their own images and likened their palaces to inns.
Originally foreigners, invaders from Akkad or Sumer, the pharaohs
first conquered, then surprised. It was they that embanked the Nile,
turned morasses into meadows and piled the pyramids. More exactly, it
was by their commands that these miracles were contrived. To the
neolithic people whom they subjugated their divinity was clear. So
elsewhere was that of the kings of Akkad. Like them, like the Incas,
the pharaohs were of the solar race and so remained from the first
dynasty to the Greek conquest, when Alexander, to legitimatize his
sovereignty, had himself acknowledged as Amon's son.
The ceremony had its precedents. An inscription in eulogy of the great
Rameses states that Amon, when possessing the pharaohs august mother,
engendered him as a god. On a wall of the Temple of Luxor an earlier
inscription sets forth that the god of Thebes, incarnating himself in
the person of Thotmes IV., appeared in his divine form to the
pharaoh's queen, who, at sight of his beauty, conceived.
It was therefore not in the beast alone, but in man, that divinity
revealed itself in Egypt. That in Judea a similar revelation should
have been withheld until after the Roman occupation is hardly
explicable on the theory, general among scholars, that Moses is not a
historical character, for an identical revelation had been received in
Babylonia where Israel twice loitered. Moreover, a curious parallelism
exists between post-Mosaic prophecy and Egyptian clairvoyance. In a
papyrus of the Thotmes III. epoch--about 1600 B.C.--it is written:
"The people of the age of the son of man shall rejoice and establish
his name forever. They shall be removed from evil and the wicked shall
humble their mouths." In commenting the passage an Egyptologist noted
that the words _son of man_ are a literal translation of the original
_si-n-sa_.[15] But already in Akkad a similar prophecy had been
uttered.[16] It may be, therefore, that it was in Babylon that Israel
first heard it.
[Footnote 15: Sayce: Guifford Lectures.]
[Footnote 16: Jastrow: The Dibbara Epic.]
The doctrine of a trinity, common to almost all antique beliefs, was a
blasphemy to the Jews. The belief in immortality, also prevalent,
though less general, was to them an abomination. The miracle of divine
descent they were perhaps too practical to accept. There was no room
in their creed for the dogma of future rewards and punishments, and
that, together with other articles of the Christian faith, Egypt's
elect professed.
The slaves and mongrels that constituted the bulk of the population
were not instructed in these things and would not have understood them
if they had been. In Babylonia education was compulsory. In Egypt it
was an art, a gift, mysterious in itself, reserved to the few. To the
Egyptian, religion consisted in paraded symbols, in avenues of
sphinxes, in forests of obelisks, in pharaohs seated colossally before
the temple doors, in inscriptions that told indistinguishably of
theomorphic men and anthropomorphic gods, and in a belief in the
divinity of bulls and hawks.
These latter had their uses. In transformations elsewhere effected,
the sacred bull may have become a golden calf, the golden hawk a
sacred dove. In Egypt they were otherwise serviceable. The worship of
them, of other birds and beasts, of insects and vipers as well,
ecclesiastically indorsed, hid the myth of metempsychosis.
Of that the people knew nothing. When they died they ceased to be.
Even mummification, usually supposed to have been general, was not for
them. Down to an epoch relatively late it was a privilege reserved to
priests and princes. When the commonalty were embalmed it was with the
opulent design that, in a future existence, they should serve their
masters as they had in this. Embalming was a preparation for the
Judgment Day. Of that the people knew nothing either. It was even
unlawful that concerning it they should be apprised.
In the Louvre is a statue of Ptah-meh, high priest of Memphis. On it
are the significant words: "Nothing was hidden from him." A passage of
Zosimus states that what was hidden it was illicit to reveal, except,
Jamblicus explained, to those whose discretion a long novitiate had
assured. To such only was disclosed the secret that life is death in a
land of darkness, and death is life in a land of light.
It was because of this that the pharaohs seated themselves colossally
before the temple doors. It was because of it that their palaces were
inns and their tombs were homes. It was because of it that their
sepulchres were built for eternity and the tenements of their souls
placed there embalmed. It was because of this that the triumphs of men
were inscribed in the halls of the gods. Instead of seeking to be
absorbed, it was their own inextinguishable individuality that they
endeavoured to assert. Tombs, tenements, triumphs, these all were
preparations for the Land of Light.
The land was Alu, the asphodel meadows of the celestial Nile that
wound through the Milky Way. To reach it a passport, vise'd by Osiris,
sufficed. The first draft of that passport was held to have been
written on tablets of alabaster, in letters of lapis lazuli, by an
eidolon of Ra, who, known in Egypt as Thoth, elsewhere was Hermes
Thrice the Greatest.
At Memphis, Hermes was regarded as representing the personification of
divine wisdom, or, more exactly perhaps, the inventive power of the
human mind. A little library of forty-two books--which a patricist
saw, but not being initiate could not read--was attributed to him.[17]
The books contained the entire hieratic belief. Fragments that are
held to have survived in an extant Greek novel are obviously Egyptian,
but as obviously Alexandrine and neo-platonic. In the _editio
princeps_ Pheidias is mentioned. Mention of Michel Angelo would have
been less anachronistic. The original books are gone, all of them,
forever, perhaps, save one, chapters of which are as old as the fourth
dynasty and, it may be, are still older. Pyramid texts of the fifth
dynasty show that there then existed what to-day is termed _The Book
of the Dead_, a copy of which, put in a mummy's arms, was a talisman
for the soul in the Court of Amenti, a passport thence to the Land of
Light.
[Footnote 17: Clemens Alexandrinos: Stromata vi.]
"There is no book like it, man hath not spoken it, earth hath not
heard it"--very truthfully it recites of itself. One copy, known as
the Louvre Papyrus, presents the _Divine Comedy_, as primarily
conceived and illustrated by an archaic Dore. Text and vignettes
display the tribunal where the souls of the dead are judged.
In the foreground is an altar. Adjacent is a figure, half griffon,
half chimera, the Beast of Amenti, perhaps too of the Apocalypse.
Beyond, an ape poises a pair of scales. For balance is an ostrich
feather. Above are the spirits of fate. At the left Osiris is
enthroned. From a balcony his assessors lean. At the right is the
entrance. There the disembodied, ushered by Truth, appears and, in
homages and genuflections, affirms negatively the decalogue;
protesting before the Master of Eternity that there is no evil in him;
praying the dwellers in Amenti that he may cross the dark way;
declaring to each that he has not committed the particular sin over
which they preside.
"O Eater of Spirits gone out of the windows of Alu! O Master of the
Faces!" he variously calls. "O the One who associates the Splendours!
O the Glowing Feet gone out of the Night! I did not lie. I did not
kill. I have not been anxious. I did not talk abundantly. I made no
one weep. No heart have I harmed."
The assessors listen. "I have not been anxious. I made no one weep. No
heart have I harmed." These abstentions, graces now, were virtues
then, and so efficacious that they perhaps sufficed, as rightly they
should, for absolution.
But while the assessors listen and Osiris looks gravely on, no one
accuses. It is conscience in its nakedness, conscience exposed there
where all may see it, where for the first time perhaps it truly sees
itself, and seeing realizes what there is in it of evil and what of
good, it is that which protests.
Still the assessors listen. Orthodoxy on the part of the respondent is
to them a minor thing. What they require is that he shall have been
merciful to his fellow creatures, true to himself. Only when it is
proven that he has done his duty to man, is he permitted to show that
he has done his duty to gods.
The appeal continues: "I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, I gave
water to them that thirsted. O ye that dwell in Amenti! I am
unpolluted, I am pure."
But is it true? The scales decide. The heart of the respondent is
weighed. If heavy, out it is cast to pass with him again through
life's infernal circles. But, if light as the feather in the balance
and therefore equal with truth, it is restored to the body, which then
resurrects and, in the bark of the Sun, sails the celestial Nile to Ra
and the Land of Light.
That singer gone out of Amenti, actually, like Osiris, rose from the
dead. The picture which a papyrus forty centuries old presents, is the
dream of a vision that Michel Angelo displayed, a sketch for a papal
fresco. Such indeed was the conformity between the underlying
conceptions, that, at almost the first monition, Isis, whose veil no
mortal had raised, lifted it from her black breast and suckled there
the infant Jesus. Then, presently, in temples that had teemed, the
silence of the desert brooded. The tide of life retreated, an entire
theogony vanished, exorcised, both of them, by the sign of the cross.
At sight of the unimagined emblem, a priesthood who in secret
sanctuaries had evolved nearly all but that, flung themselves into
crypts beneath, pulled the walls down after them, burying unembalmed
the arcana of a creed whose spirit still is immortal.
In Egypt, then, only tombs and necropoles survived. But it is
legendary that, in the solitudes of the Thebaid, dispossessed eidolons
of Ra, appearing in the shape of chimeras, terrified anchorites, to
whom, with vengeful eyes, they indicated their ruined altars.
IV
BEL-MARDUK
The inscriptions of Assyrian kings have, many of them, the monotony of
hell. Made of boasts and shrieks, they recite the capture and sack of
cities; the torrents of blood with which, like wool, the streets were
dyed; the flaming pyramids of prisoners; the groans of men impaled;
the cries of ravished women.
The inscriptions are not all infernal. Those that relate to
Assurbanipal--vulgarly, Sandanapallos,--are even ornate. But
Assurbanipal, while probably fiendish and certainly crapulous, was
clearly literary besides. From the spoil of sacked cities this
bibliofilou took libraries, the myths and epics of creation, sacred
texts from Eridu and Ur, volumes in the extinct tongues of Akkad and
Sumer, first editions of the Book of God.
These, re-edited in cuneiform and kept conveniently on the second
floor of his palace, fell with Nineveh, where, until recently
recovered, for millennia they lay. Additionally, from shelves set up
in the days of Khammurabi--the Amraphel of Genesis--Nippur has yielded
ghostly tablets and Borsippa treasuries of Babylonian ken.
These, the eldest revelations of the divine, are the last that man has
deciphered. The altars and people that heard them first, the marble
temples, the ivory palaces, the murderous throngs, are dust. The
entire civilization from which they came has vanished. Yet, traced
with a wooden reed on squares of clay, are flights of little arrows,
from which, magically, it all returns. Miraculously with these books a
world revives. Fashioned, some of them, at an epoch that in biblical
chronology is anterior to man, they tell of creation, of the serpent,
the fall and the deluge. At the gates of paradise you see man dying,
poisoned by the tree of life. Before Genesis was, already it had been
written.
In the Chaldean Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in
successive acts. According to the epic of it, humanity's primal home
was a paradise where ten impressive persons--the models, it may be, of
antediluvian patriarchs--reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally
sinfully as well. In punishment a deluge swept them away. From the
flood there escaped one man who separated a mythical from an heroic
age. In the latter epoch, beings descended from demons built Nineveh
and Babylon; organized human existence; invented arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and the calendar; counted the planets; numbered the days of
the year, divided them into months and weeks; established the Sabbath;
decorated the skies with the signs of the zodiac, instituting, in the
interim, colleges of savants and priests. These speculated on the
origin of things, attributed it to spontaneous generation, the descent
of man to evolution, entertaining the vulgar meanwhile with tales of
gods and ghosts.[18]
[Footnote 18: Lenormant: Les Origines. Schrader: Die Keilenschriften.
Smith: Chaldean Genesis.]
The cosmological texts now available were not written then. They are
drawn from others that were. But there is a vignette that probably is
of that age. It represents a man and a woman stretching their hands to
a tree. Behind the woman writhes a snake. The tree, known as the holy
cedar of Eridu, the fruit of which stimulated desire, is described in
an epic that recites the adventures of Gilgames.
Gilgames was the national hero of Chaldea. The story of his loves with
Ishtar is repeated in the Samson and Delilah myth. Ishtar, described
in an Assyrian inscription as Our Lady of Girdles, was the original
Venus, as Gilgames was perhaps the prototype of Hercules. The legend
of his labours is represented on a seal of Sargon of Akkad, a king who
ruled fifty-seven hundred years ago.
In the epic, Gilgames, betrayed by Ishtar, tried to find out how not
to die. In trying he reached a garden, guarded by cherubim, where the
holy cedar was. There he learned that one being only could teach him
to be immortal, and that being, Adra-Khasis, had been translated to
the Land of the Silver Sky. Adra-Khasis, was the Chaldean Noah.
Gilgames sought him and the story of the deluge follows. But with a
difference. On the seventh day, Adra-Khasis released from his ark a
dove that returned, finally a raven that did not. Then he looked out,
and looking, shrieked. Every one had perished.
Noah was less emotional, or, if equally compassionate, the fact is not
recited. Apart from that detail and one other, the story of the flood
is common to all folklore. Even the Aztecs knew of it. Probably it
originated in the matrix of nations which the table-land of Asia was.
But only in Chaldean myth, and subsequently in Hebrew legend, was the
flood ascribed to sin.
Gilgames' quest, meanwhile, could not have been wholly vain. In an
archaic inscription it is stated that the city of Erech was built in
olden times by the deified Gilgames.[19]
[Footnote 19: Proc. S. B. A. xvi. 13-15.]
How old the olden times may have been is conjectural. Modern science
has put the advent of man sixty million years ago. Chaldean chronology
is less spacious. But its traditions stretched back a hundred thousand
years. The traditions were probably imaginary. Even so, in the morning
of the world, already there were ancient cities. There was Nippur, one
of whose gods, El Lil, was lord of ghosts. There was Eridu, where Ea
was lord of man. There was Ur, where Sin was lord of the moon. There
were other divinities. There was Enmesara, lord of the land whence
none return, and Makhir, god of dreams.
There were many more like the latter, so many that their sanctuaries
made the realm a holy land, but one which, administratively, was an
aggregate of principalities that Sargon, nearly six thousand years
ago, combined. Ultimately, from sheer age, the empire tottered. It
would have fallen had not Khammurabi surged. What Sargon made,
Khammurabi solidified. Between their colossal figures two millennia
stretch. These giants are distinct. None the less, across the ages
they seem to fuse, suggestively, not together, but into another
person.
Sargon has descended through time clothed in a little of the poetry
which garments nation builders. But the poetry is not a mantle for the
imaginary. In the British Museum is a marble ball that he dedicated to
a god. Paris has the seal of his librarian.[20] Copies of his annals
are extant.[21] In these it is related that, when a child, his mother
put him in a basket of rushes and set him adrift on the Euphrates.
Presently he was rescued. Afterward he became a leader of men.
[Footnote 20: Collection de Clerq. pl. 5, no. 46.]
[Footnote 21: Cuneiform Insc. W. A. iv. 34.]
Khammurabi was also a leader. He was a legislator as well. Sargon
united principalities, Khammurabi their shrines. From one came the
nation, from the other the god. It is in this way that they fuse. To
the composite, if it be one, history added a heightening touch.
The Khammurabi legislation came from Bel, who, originally, was a local
sun-god of Nippur. There he was regarded as the possessor of the
Chaldean Urim and Thummin, the tablets of destiny with which he cast
the fates of men. In the mythology of Babylonia these tablets were
stolen by the god of storms, who kept them in his thunder fastness.
Among the forked flames of the lightning there they were recovered by
Bel, who revealed the law to Khammurabi.
The theophany is perhaps similar to that of Sinai. But perhaps, too,
it is better attested. A diorite block, found at Susa in 1902, has the
law engraved on it. On the summit, a bas-relief displays the god
disclosing the statutes to the king.
There are other analogies. Sinai was named after Sin, who, though but
a moon-god, was previously held supreme for the reason that, in
primitive Babylonia, the lunar year preceded the solar. The sanctuary
of the moon-god was Ur, of which Abraham was emir. He was more,
perhaps. Sarratu, from which Sarai comes, was the title of the
moon-goddess. In _Genesis_, Sarai is Abraham's wife. Abraham is a
derivative of Aburamu, which was one of the moon's many names.[22]
[Footnote 22: Sayce: Guifford Lectures.]
Among these, one in particular has since been identified with Jahveh.
In addition, a clay tablet of the age of Khammurabi, now in the
British Museum, has on it:
[Illustration]
That flight of arrows, being interpreted, means: _Jave ilu_, Jahveh is
god.[23]
[Footnote 23: Delitzch: Babel und Bibel.]
Other texts show that a title of Bel was Masu, a word that letter for
letter is the same as the Hebrew Mosheh or Moses.[24]
[Footnote 24: Records of the Past, i. 91.]
It is in this way that Sargon and Khammurabi fuse. Meanwhile the title
Masu, or hero, was not confined to Bel. It was given also to Marduk,
the tutelary god of Babylon, from whom local monotheism proceeded.
That monotheism, in appearance relatively modern, actually was
archaic. The Chaldean savants knew of but one really existing god. To
them, all others were his emanations. The deus exsuperantissimus was
represented by a single stroke of the reed, a sign that in its
vagueness left him formless and incommunicable, therefore
unworshipable, hence without a temple, unless Bab-ili, Babylon, the
Gate of God, may be so construed.
The name of the deity, fastidiously concealed from the vulgar, was, in
English, One. Not after, or beneath, or above, but before him, a
trinity swung like a screen. From it, for pendant, another trinity
dangled. From the latter fell a third. Below these glories were the
coruscations of an entire nation of inferior gods. The latter, as well
as the former, all of them, were but the fireworks of One. He alone
was. The rest, like Makhir, were gods of dream. To the savants, that
is; to the magi and seers. To the people the sidereal triads and
planetary divinities throned in the Silver Sky augustly real, equally
august, and in that celestial equality remained, until Khammurabi gave
precedence to Bel, who as Marduk, Bel or Baal Marduk, Lord Marduk,
became supreme.
Before Bel, then, the other gods faded as the Elohim did before
Jahveh, with the possible difference that there were more to
fade--sixty-five thousand, Assurnatsipal, in an inscription, declared.
Over that army Bel-Marduk acquired the title, perhaps significant, of
Bel-Kissat, Lord of Hosts. Yet it was less as a usurper than as an
absorber that the ascension was achieved. Bel but mounted above his
former peers and from the superior height drew their attributes to
himself. It was sacrilege none the less. As such it alienated the
clergy and enraged the plebs. Begun under Khammurabi and completed
under Nabonidos, it was the reason why, during the latter's reign,
orthodox Babylon received Cyrus not as a foe but a friend.
From the spoliation, meanwhile, no nebulousness resulted. Bel was
distinctly anthropomorphic. His earthly plaisance was the Home of the
Height, a seven-floored mountain of masonry, a rainbow pyramid of
enamelled brick. At the top was a dome. There, in a glittering
chamber, on a dazzling couch, he appeared. Elsewhere, in the
vermillion recesses of a neighbouring chapel, that winged bulls
guarded and frescoed monsters adorned, once a year he also appeared,
and, above the mercy seat, on an alabaster throne, sat, or was
supposed to sit, contemplating the tablets of destiny, determining
when men should die.
To the Greeks, the future lay in the lap of the gods. To the
Babylonians the gods alone possessed it, as alone also they possessed
the present and the past. They had all time as all men have their day.
That day was here and it was brief. Death was a descent to Aralu, the
land whence none return, a region of the underworld, called also
Shualu, where the departed were nourished on dust. Dust they were and
to dust they returned.
Extinction was not a punishment or even a reward, it was a law.
Punishment was visited on the transgressor here, as here also the
piety of the righteous was rewarded. When death came, just and unjust
fared alike. The Aryan and Egyptian belief in immortality had no place
in this creed, and consequently it had none either in Israel, where
Sheol was a replica of Shualu. To the Semites of Babylonia and Kanaan,
the gods alone were immortal, and immortal beings would be gods. Man
could not become divine while his deities were still human.
Exceptionally, exceptional beings such as Gilgames and Adra-Khasis
might be translated to the land of the Silver Sky, as Elijah was
translated to heaven, but otherwise the only mortals that could reach
it were kings, for a king, in becoming sovereign, became, _ipso
facto_, celestial. As such, ages later, Alexander had himself
worshipped, and it was in imitation of his apotheosis that the
subsequent Caesars declared themselves gods. Yet precisely as the
latter were man-made deities, so the Babylonian Baalim were very
similar to human kings.
For their hunger was cream, oil, dates, the flesh of ewe lambs. For
their nostrils was the perfume of prayers and of psalms; for their
passions the virginity of girls. Originally the first born of men were
also given them, but while, with higher culture, that sacrifice was
abolished, the sacred harlotry, over which Ishtar presided, remained.
Judaism omitted to incorporate that, but in Kanaan, which Babylonia
profoundly influenced, it was general and, though reviled by Israel,
was tempting even, and perhaps particularly, to Solomon.[25]