The Concept of Divine Power and the
Ancient Cosmogonies.
{173}
We may profitably compare the Eastern and Western peoples according
to their respective conceptions of the divine power. Looking carefully
at the Babylonian hymns and liturgies, we cannot say that the idea of
divine omnipotence was ever an assured dogma, vividly present to the
mind and clearly expressed. Any particular hymn may so exalt the
potency of the particular deity to whom it is addressed that, in the
ecstasy of prayer and adoration, the worshipper may speak as if he
believed him or her to be powerful over all things in heaven and
earth. But this faith was temporary and illusive. The power of the
deity in the popular creed, and indeed in the hieratic system, was
bound up with his temple and altar. When Sanherib laid waste Babylon
and the temples, the “gods must flee like birds up to heaven.” In the
Babylonian epic the deities themselves are greatly alarmed by the
flood. In one of the hymns of lamentation, Ishtar laments her own
overthrow in her ruined city, where she “is as a helpless stranger in
her streets.”[173.1] It is probable that the popular belief of
Babylon agreed in this respect with that of all other nations of the
same type of religion; for the popular religious mind is incapable of
fully {174} realising or logically applying the idea of divine
omnipotence. But this at least is clear in the Babylonian system, that
the higher divinities acting as a group are stronger than any other
alien principle in the Universe, from the period when Marduk, or
originally, perhaps Ninib, won his victory over Tiamit.[174.1] The
evil power embodied in the demons remains indeed active and strong,
and much of the divine agency is devoted to combating them. And the
demons are impressive beings, impersonating often the immoral
principle, but they do not assume the grandeur of an Ahriman, or rise
to his position as compeers of the high god. Thus the Babylonian
theology escapes the duality of the Zarathustrian; the god can always
exorcise and overpower the demon if the demon-ridden man repents and
returns to communion with his deity by penance and confession.
Furthermore, the ancient documents reveal the Babylonian deities as
the arbiters of destiny. Marduk is named by King Neriglassar “the
Leader of Destiny”;[174.2] and we have frequent allusions to the gods
fixing the yearly fates at an annual meeting. Nebo the scribe is the
writer and the keeper of the “Doomsbook” of Heaven, and this book is
called “the tablets that cannot be altered, that determine the bounds
(or cycle) of Heaven and Earth.”[174.3] Fate is neither personified
nor magnified into a transcendent cosmic force overpowering and
shaping the will of the gods.
How the other religions of polytheistic Asia Minor dealt with these
matters is not revealed; and the {175} comparison here, as in many
other points, must be immediate between Mesopotamia and Hellas. Much
that has just been said of the former may be affirmed of the latter in
this respect. In Homer the pre-eminence, even the omnipotence, of Zeus
is occasionally expressed as a dogma, and we must believe that this
deity had risen to this commanding position before the Homeric period,
at least among the progressive tribes;[175.1] and throughout the
systematised theology of Greece his sovereignty was maintained more
consistently than, owing to the shifting of the powers of the cities,
was that of Marduk or Bel or Enlil in the Sumerian-Babylonian system.
Probably the high idea of divine omnipotence was as vaguely and feebly
realised by the average primitive Hellene as we have reason to suspect
that it was by the average Babylonian. Also, as Hellas was far less
centralised than Babylonia, the efficacy of the local or village god
or goddess or daimon might often transcend the influence of Zeus. But
at least we have no Hellenic evidence of so narrow a theory, as that
the deity’s power depended upon his temple or his image, or even upon
his sacrifice.
It has often been popularly and lightly maintained that the Hellenic
deities were subordinate to a power called Fate. This is a shallow
misjudgment, based on a misinterpretation of a few phrases in Homer;
we may be certain that the aboriginal Hellene was incapable of so
gloomy an abstraction, which would sap the vitality of personal
polytheism, and which only appears in strength in the latter periods
of religious decay. Were it, indeed, a root-principle of Hellenic
religion, it would strongly differentiate it from the Mesopotamian.
{176}
In thus comparing the two religions according to their respective
conceptions of divine power, we note two striking phenomena in the
Eastern world. The Mesopotamian gods are magicians, and part of their
work is worked by magic. Marduk and Ea, the wise deity of Eridu, serve
as exorcisers of demons in behalf of the other gods.[176.1] In a
panegyric on the former, the strange phrase occurs, “the spittle of
life is thine,”[176.2] which probably alludes to the well-known
magical qualities of the saliva. Eridu, the home of Ea, was also the
original home of Chaldean magic. When in the early cosmic struggle
between the powers of light and darkness, Tiamat, the mother and queen
of the latter, selects her champion Qingou as leader, she proclaims,
“I have pronounced thy magic formula, in the assembly of the gods I
have made thee great.”[176.3] In magic, great is the power of the
spoken word, the λόγος; and the Word, of which the efficacious force
arose in the domain of magic, has been exalted, as we are well aware,
by higher religion to a great cosmic divine agency, sometimes
personified. It was so exalted in early Babylonian religion. The deity
acts and controls the order of the world by the divine Word. Many of
the Sumerian hymns lay stress on its quasi-personal virtue or “mana”;
and often on its terrible and destructive operation; and in one, as we
have seen, the goddess Nana is identified with the Word of
Enlil.[176.4] In a great hymn to Sin,[176.5] the might of his Word
is glorified in verses that recall the Psalmist’s phrase: “The voice
of the Lord is mighty {177} in operation.” The Word of Bel-Marduk is
said to be stronger than any exorciser or diviner, and is the theme of
a special hymn.[177.1] It is described in another as “a net of
majesty that encompasseth heaven and earth.” The Word of Marduk shakes
the sea,[177.2] as the Hebrew poet declares that “the voice of the
Lord shaketh the cedar-trees.” “The spirit of the Word is Enlil… the
Word which stilleth the heavens above… a prophet it hath not, a
magician it hath not,”[177.3]--that is, no prophet can fully
interpret, no magician can control, the Word. A most potent word is
the name of the divinity, and the partial apotheosis of the name
itself is a strange religious phenomenon, which also originated in the
domain of magic, and has played a momentous part in the Egyptian,
Judaic, Christian, and other high religions.[177.4] It appears also
in Mesopotamian religion. In a hymn to Enlil we find the phrase: “at
thy name, which created the world, the heavens were hushed of
themselves.”[177.5] In the Babylonian poem of creation the primal
state of Chaos is thus described, “no god had yet been created, no
name had yet been named, no destiny fixed.”[177.6] The gods name the
fifty names of Ninib, and the name of fifty becomes sacred to him, so
that even in the time of Gudea a temple was actually dedicated to
Number Fifty.[177.7]
Now, in the respects just considered, the earliest aspect of Greek
religion that is revealed to us presents a striking contrast. The
relations between magic and {178} religion are markedly
different.[178.1] Magic had doubtless the same hold on early Greece
as it has on most societies at a certain stage of culture. We can
conclude this from the glimpses of it revealed by Homer and some
ancient myths, such as the story of Salmoneus, as well as by the
evidence of its practice in later Greece, and as such phenomena are
not of sudden growth we can safely believe that they were part of an
ancient tradition always alive among the people. But while Babylonian
magic proclaims itself loudly in the great religious literature and
highest temple ritual, Greek magic is barely mentioned in the older
literature of Greece, plays no part at all in the hymns, and can only
with difficulty be discovered as latent in the higher ritual. Again,
Babylonian magic is essentially demoniac; but we have no evidence
suggesting that the pre-Homeric Greek was demon-ridden, or that
demonology and exorcism were leading factors of his consciousness and
practice: the earliest mythology does not suggest that he habitually
imputed his physical or moral disorders to demons, nor does it convey
any hint of the existence in the early society of that terrible
functionary, the witch-finder, or of the institution of witch-trials.
Had Greek religion and mythology been deeply impregnated with
Babylonian influences we should find it difficult to account for this
momentous difference.
The same reflection is forced upon us when we observe that the Λόγος
or Divine Word conceived as a cosmic power plays no part in the
earliest Hellenic theology of which we have any cognisance (we are not
here concerned with the later history of the concept): nor can we find
in the earliest Greek period the name of God exalted into the position
of a divine creative force; {179} although, as I have shown elsewhere,
the earliest Hellene, as the later, was fully sensitive to the
magico-divine efficacy of names.[179.1]
We may also gather something for our present purpose from a comparison
between the cosmogony or cosmic myths of East and West. Of these it is
only the Babylonian and Hebraic that can claim a great antiquity of
record. What is reported of Phoenician belief concerning these matters
is of late authority, Eusebios quoting from Sanchuniathon or Philo
Byblios, and this is too much permeated with later elements to be
useful here. As regards the Hellenic theory of the origin of the world
and of man, putting aside a few scattered hints in the Homeric poems,
we have Hesiod for our first and insufficient witness. If we can
detect Babylonian influence in the Hesiodic system, we must not
hastily conclude that this was already rife in the second millennium:
on the other hand, if Hesiod seems to have escaped it, it is far less
likely that it was strong upon the proto-Hellenes.
For early Babylonian cosmogony our main evidence is the epic poem of
creation, preserved on tablets found in the library of King
Assurbanipal, which elucidates, and in the main corroborates, the
fragments of the story given by Berosos in the third century B.C. Our
earliest record, then, is actually of the seventh century, but
Assyriologists have given reasons for the view that the epic copied
for Assurbanipal descends from a period as early as B.C. 2000; for
part of it accords with an old Babylonian hymn that has been
discovered.[179.2] The document is therefore ancient enough for the
purposes of our comparison. It is well known through various {180}
publications, and can be read conveniently in the detailed exposition
of King in his handbook on Babylonian religion.[180.1]
When we consider carefully the more significant features in this
cosmogony, we are struck with its almost total unlikeness to anything
that we can discover or surmise in early Hellenic thought. It is true
that the Babylonian theory starts with the dogma that the earliest
cosmic fact was the element of water. Apsu and Tiâmat are the first
powers in an unordered universe, and these seem to be the personal
forms of the upper and lower waters, the fresh and the salt. We find
the parallel thought in Homer, who speaks of Okeanos as “the source of
all things,”[180.2] including even the gods. But the value of such a
parallelism is of the slightest, for the vague theory of a watery
origin of created things appears widely diffused in the myths of
remote peoples, for instance, North-American Indians, Aztecs, the
Vedic Aryans, and there is a glimmer of it in the old Norse.[180.3]
No conclusion, then, can be drawn from so slight a coincidence. If we
know anything of the cosmogony of the pre-Homeric society we know it
from Hesiod, for Homer himself shows no interest and makes no
revelation on the subject. With certain reservations and after careful
criticism we may be able to regard some parts of the Hesiodic
statement as reflecting the thought of an age anterior to Homer’s.
Therefore it is of some present value to observe how little of
characteristically Babylonian speculation appears in the Hesiodic
Theogony or {181} _Works and Days_. Both systems agree with each
other, and--it may be said--with all theogonies and religious
cosmogonies, in regarding the primeval creative forces as personal
powers who work either by the method of sexual generation or through
mechanical processes of creation: the first of these methods, which
though mythical in form has more affinity with organic science, is
predominant over the other in the Hesiodic narrative. But the personal
powers are different in the two systems. In the Babylonian the
greatest of the primeval dynasts is Tiâmat, the sea, the mother of
the gods and also of all monsters: in the Hesiodic it is Gaia, the
Earth-mother, who does not appear at all in the Eastern cosmogony, but
who claimed this position in the Hellenic through her deep-seated
influence in the ancient religion. We note also that the Babylonian
Sea is decidedly evil, the aboriginal foe of the gods of light, a
conception alien to ordinary Hellenic thought. Again, the Babylonian
creation of an ordered cosmos is a result of the great struggle
between Marduk and Tiâmat, the power of light and the sovereign of
chaos: it is preceded by hate and terror. In the Hellenic account the
generation of the heavens, the mountains, the sea, and the early
dynasty of Titan-powers is peaceful and is stimulated by the power of
love, Eros, who has his obvious double in the Kāma or principle of
desire in a cosmogonic hymn of the Rig-Veda, but is not mentioned by
the Babylonian poet. (Nor does it concern us for the moment that this
Eros is in respect of mere literary tradition post-Homeric: we may
surmise at least that he was a pre-Homeric power in Boeotia.) Again,
when we come to the theomachy in Hesiod, as an event it has no
cosmogonic value at all: it has the air merely of a dynastic struggle
between elder and younger divinities, {182} and the myth may really
have arisen in part from the religious history of a shifting of cults
corresponding to a shifting of population: nor are the Titans more
representative of evil or of a lower order of things than the Olympian
deities; and cosmic creation, so far as Hesiod treats of it at all,
seems over before the struggle begins. On the other hand, after Marduk
has destroyed Tiâmat he constructs his cosmos out of her limbs, and
then proceeds to assign their various stations to the great gods, his
compeers. Thus the struggle of the god with the principle of disorder
has a cosmic significance which is not expressed in the Titanomachy.
The curious conception also that the universe was compacted out of the
dismembered limbs of a divine personage, which reminds us of the Vedic
story of the giant Purusa[182.1] and of the Norse legend of Ymir, is
not clearly discoverable in Hellenic mythology: for the Hesiodic myth
of the forms and growths that spring from the blood of the mutilated
Ouranos is no real parallel. And there is another trait in the
Babylonian theory of a world-conflict that distinguishes it from the
Hellenic myths of a Titanomachy or Gigantomachy; it was sometimes
regarded not as a single event, finished with once for all, but as a
struggle liable to be repeated at certain periods.[182.2] On the
other hand, Hesiod’s narrative of the oppression of Gaia’s children by
Ouranos and the outrage inflicted on him by Kronos has its parallels
in Maori and savage legend,[182.3] but none in Mesopotamian, so far
as our knowledge goes at present.
A different Babylonian mythological text from the library of
Assurbanipal speaks of another battle waged {183} by Marduk against
Labbu, a male monster imagined mainly as a huge snake; and Marduk is
described as descending to the conflict in clouds and
lightning:[183.1] the legend has no obvious significance for
cosmogony, for it places the event after the creation of the world and
of men and cities. But it has this interest for us, that it may be the
prototype for the legend of Zeus’ struggle with Typhoeus, which is
known to Homer, and which he places in the country of the Arimoi,
regarded by many of the ancient interpreters, including Pindar, as
Cilicia.[183.2] Now, the story of this conflict in Hesiod’s theogony
has no connections with the Titanomachy or the Gigantomachy, nor is it
there linked by any device to any known Hellenic myth; nor is it
derived, like the legend of Apollo and Python, from genuine Hellenic
cult-history. It has an alien air and character. Typhoeus is on the
whole regarded as a monstrous dragon, but one of his voices is that of
a lion, another that of a bull. The resemblance of this narrative to
the Babylonian one just mentioned is striking, and becomes all the
more salient when we compare certain Babylonian cylinders which
picture Marduk in combat with a monster, sometimes of serpent form,
sometimes with the body of a lion or a bull.[183.3] The
Typhoeus-legend belongs also essentially to the Asia-Minor shores, and
if Cilicia was really the country whence it came to the knowledge of
the Homeric Greeks, it is a significant fact that it was just this
corner of the Asia-Minor coast that felt the arms of the earliest
Assyrian conquerors in the fourteenth century B.C.; and it is just
such myths that travel fast and far.
{184}
If the hypothesis of Assyrian origin is reasonable here, many will
regard it as still more reasonable in regard to the Deukalion
flood-story. Certain details in it remind us, no doubt, of the
Babylonian flood-myth; and as this latter was far diffused through
Asia Minor, it was quite easy for it to wander across the Aegean and
touch Hellas. But if it did, we have no indication that it reached the
Hellenes in the early period with which we are here concerned, as
Hesiod is our earliest authority for it.
The last theme of high interest in the cosmogonic theory of ancient
Babylonia is the creation of man. According to Berosos, this momentous
act was attributed to Bel, who, after the victory over Chaos,
commanded one of the gods to cut off his head and to make men and
animals out of earth mixed with his own blood, and this story is
partly corroborated by an old cuneiform text that is derived from the
beginning of the second millennium.[184.1] This interesting theory
was not universally accepted, for another and independent text
ascribes the creation of man to Marduk and a goddess called Aruru,
simply as a mechanical act of power.[184.2] The idea implicit in the
former account, of the blood-relationship of man to god, is of the
greater potentiality for religious metaphysic, and a similar notion is
found, developed into a high spiritual doctrine, in the later Orphic
Zagreus-mystery. But there is no trace of it in genuine Hellenic
thought or literature. We have no provedly early Greek version of the
origin of man: only, in the _Works and Days_, we are told that the
Immortals or Zeus made the men of the five ages, the third generation,
out of ash-trees: it may be that the story of Prometheus {185} forming
them out of clay was known to Hesiod, as Lactantius Placidus
attests;[185.1] in any case we may judge it to be of great antiquity
on account of its wide vogue in the later period, and its occurrence
in other primitive folklore. But nothing like it has as yet been found
in the ἱερὸς λόγος of Mesopotamia.
Generally we may say that the Hesiodic cosmogony bears no significant
resemblance to the Babylonian, and this negative fact makes against
the theory of Mesopotamian influence upon pre-Homeric Hellas.
As a divine cosmogony implies some organic theory of the Universe, so
the polytheisms that attempted such speculations would be confronted
also with the problem of finding some principle of order by which they
might regulate the relations of the various divinities, one to the
other. We find such attempts in Mesopotamian religion. Certain deities
are affiliated to others, Marduk to Ea, Nebo to Marduk, though such
divine relationships are less clear and less insisted on than in
Hellenic theology; and the grouping of divinities shifts according to
the political vicissitudes of the peoples and cities. We may discern a
tendency at times to use the triad as a unifying principle, giving us
such trinities as Anu, Bel, Ea, or Sin, Shamash, Adad;[185.2] we have
glimpses of a trinitarian cult in early Carthage,[185.3] and slight
indications of it in the Minoan-Mycenaean pillar-ritual.[185.4] But I
cannot find anything to suggest that among the cultured or uncultured
Semites it was ever in the ancient period a powerful and constructive
idea, able {186} to beget a living dogma that might capture the
popular mind and spread and germinate in adjacent lands.[186.1] We
have perhaps as much right to regard the number seven as a grouping
principle of Babylonian polytheism, in the later period at least, when
we find a group of seven high deities corresponding to the seven
planets.[186.2] We might discover a Hittite trinity of Father,
Mother, and Son if we concentrated our attention on the Boghaz-Keui
reliefs; but the other Hittite evidence, both literary and monumental,
gives no hint of this as a working idea in the religion. In fact, in
most polytheisms of the Mediterranean type it is easy to discover
trinities and easy to deceive oneself about them.
The human family reflected into the heavens naturally suggests the
divine trio of Father, Mother, Child. And this may be found on the
Asia-Minor shore and in Hellas. It would be more important if we could
discover the worship of this triad in an indissoluble union from which
the mystic idea of a triune godhead might arise. This is not
discernible clearly in the older period on either side of the Aegean.
The cult-complex of Zeus, Semele, and Dionysos does not belong to
ancient Hellas and is rare at any period; that of Hades Demeter Kore
is occasionally found in cults of doubtful antiquity, but usually the
mother and daughter were worshipped without the male deity. The
Homeric triad so often invoked in adjurations of Zeus, Athena, and
Apollo, which misled Mr. Gladstone, is due probably to the exigencies
of hexameter verse, and is not guaranteed by genuine cult. No divine
triad in Hellas can be proved to have descended from the earliest
period of {187} Greek religion, except probably that of the Charites
at Orchomenos.[187.1] We have later evidence of a trinity of Zeus,
Poseidon, and Hades, expressing the triad that Nature presents to us
of sky, sea, and earth. But probably one of these figures is an
emanation of Zeus himself; the sky-god having become “chthonian” in a
very early period.[187.2] We cannot say, then, that the earliest
period of Hellenic religion shows a trinitarian tendency; and if it
were so, we could not impute it to early Mesopotamian influence, for
the idea of a trinity does not appear in the Eastern religion with
such force and strength as to be likely to travel far.
As for the artificial group of the twelve Olympians, we should
certainly have been tempted to connect this with Babylonian lore, the
number twelve being of importance in astronomical numeration; only
that the divine group of twelve does not happen to occur in Babylonian
religious records at all. Nor does the complex cult of the Δώδεκα θεοί
appear to belong to the earliest period of Greek religion.[187.3] And
so far I have been able to discern nothing that justifies the
suggestion[187.4] that the principle of unification or divine
grouping in early Mediterranean polytheism came from Babylon.
A severely organised polytheism with one chief divinity, to whom all
the others were in definite degrees subordinated, might evolve a
monotheism. And in Babylonian literature we can mark certain
tendencies making in this direction. One tablet contains an
inscription proclaiming all the high gods to be forms of Marduk,
Nergal the Marduk of war, Nebo the Marduk {188} of land.[188.1] That
all the deities were mere forms or emanations of the Eternal might
have been an esoteric doctrine of certain gifted minds, though it was
difficult thus to explain away and to de-individualise the powerful
self-asserting personality of Ishtar, for an attractive goddess-cult
is always a strong obstacle to pure monotheism. A particular king
might wish at times to exalt the cult of a particular god into a
monotheistic ideal; the attempt was seriously made in Egypt and
failed. It may have been seriously intended by King Rammannirari III.
(B.C. 811-782), who introduced the cult of Nebo, always one of the
most spiritual figures of the Pantheon, into Kelach; hence comes a
long inscription on two statues now in the British Museum, set up by a
governor in honour of the king, which is valuable for its ethical
import, and still more interesting for its monotheistic exhortation at
the close:[188.2] “Oh man, yet to be born, believe in Nebo, and trust
in no other gods but him.” Here is the seed that might have been
developed by a powerful prophet into pure monotheism. But the ecstatic
Babylonian votary is always falling into contradiction, for in the
earlier part of this hymn he has called Nebo, “The beloved of Bel, the
Lord of Lords.” What, then, must the congregation think of Bel?
In Greek religion the germs of monotheistic thought were still weaker
and still less likely to fructify. The earliest Hellenic tribes had
already certain deities in common, and the leading stocks at least
must have regarded Zeus as the supreme god. They must have also
adopted many indigenous deities that they found powerful in their new
homes, whose cult could not be {189} uprooted even if they wished to
do so. We must therefore imagine the pre-Homeric societies as
maintaining a complex polytheism, with some principle of divine
hierarchy struggling to assert itself. Homer, if it is ever true to
speak of him as preaching, seems certainly the preacher of the
supremacy of Zeus. How far this idea was accepted in the various
localities of cult we have not sufficient material for deciding: much
would depend on the degree to which the individuals were penetrated by
the higher literature, which from Homer onwards proclaimed the same
religious tenet.[189.1] We can at the same time be sure that in many
localities the countryfolk would be more under the spell of some
ancient deity of the place than of the sky-father of the Aryan
Hellenes. And though his cult was high placed by the progressive
races, and his personality powerfully pervading in the realm of nature
and human society, so that the higher thinkers entered on a track of
speculation that leads to monotheism, the masses did not and could not
follow them, having, in fact, the contrary bias. The popular
polytheism showed itself most tenacious of divine personalities; and
owing partly to the sacred power of divine names, the various titles
of a single divinity tend occasionally to engender distinct divine
entities. I have also already indicated that art contributed to the
same effect through multiplying idols. So far, then, from displaying
monotheistic potentialities, Greek polytheism, from the pre-Homeric
period we may suspect, and certainly after the Homeric age, tended to
become more polytheistic.