By Benjamin Welton
There is a story (most likely untrue) that begins with a team of European archaeologists overseeing a dig in northern Iraq. They are somewhere near Mosul, the current stronghold of the Sunni extremist group ISIS in Iraq. They have come to this part of the world in order to excavate relics from the bygone empire of Assyria – a brutal, but effective state composed of warrior kings and their dreaded armies.
For the archaeologists themselves, the importance of Assyria is twofold: first, the Assyrian state ruled for a time the world’s largest and most powerful empire. They reigned by the point of the sword, and tales of their shocking inhumanity on their vanquished foes still have the ability to terrify even the sternest of imaginations.
Secondly, the Assyrians, and the empire they created, were one of the great foes of both the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. As such, Assyrian villains are sprinkled throughout the Old Testament. Indeed, the Book of Nahum details the fall of the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, the most reviled fortress city in the ancient Near East. For the Jews, the early prophecy that Nineveh, the:
“city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder” (Nahum 3:1), would fall must have seemed like a divine gift of salvation.
Besides this biblical prophecy, our European archaeologists would have undoubtedly been aware of the fact that Jesus Christ spoke the Aramaic language, the lingua franca of the Near East. This was a tongue which had been used by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, along with the older Akkadian language, as a tool for imperial unification in the realms of trade and government.
While the European archaeologists rock themselves to sleep with ideas of discovering some proof of the historical Jesus, or maybe uncovering something that had been lost to recorded history for thousands of years, their local workers, most of whom are pious Muslims, pray for the expedition to not find anything. After all, it would not be wise to upset the old gods, which to them represent powerful demons.
But in the morning, underneath the hot, arid sun of old Assyria, the workers stumble upon something large.
After frantically removing the earth, they recognize a face. The face has a long, square beard, braided with three rows of curls. Above his hair is a crown of sorts.
More digging reveals wings.
My God, they’ve uncovered a statue of Lamassu, a protective deity. They have awakened the old gods. They flee in terror.
Or so the story goes…
But you see, the old gods of Mesopotamia are not to be taken lightly. According to the famous British Egyptologist Sir E.A. Wallis Budge’s book Amulets and Superstitions, the:
“literature of the Sumerian and Babylonians…proves that the people who occupied Mesopotamia from about 3000 BC downwards attached very great importance to magic in all its branches, and that they availed themselves of the services of the magician on every possible occasion.”
A large part of this ancient magic involved protection against the many demons who plagued them, from the spirits of the angry dead to the archfiend Lamashtu, the female demon who lived in the mountains and cane brakes and preyed upon pregnant women and children.
Again, Budge was succinct when he stated that from the earliest moments of recorded time, the people of Mesopotamia, “were in perpetual fear of the attacks of hosts of hostile and evil spirits which lost no opportunity of attempting to do them harm.”
In order to understand Assyrian demonology, one must appreciate the peoples who came before, for the Assyrian religion, and even the Assyrian way of war, was inherited (although the Assyrians did add excessive cruelty, so they can be credited with at least one innovation).
It started in Sumer, the first great civilization in Mesopotamia (modern day southern Iraq). They created not only writing, but also a whole pantheon that would serve their successors up until the coming of Alexander the Great. The Sumerian gods included: Enlil, the Lord of the Storm and the heroic head of the pantheon, the air goddess Ninlil, and Inanna, the female god of fertility, war, and wisdom.
The Sumerians built impressive ziggurats, or stepped temples, for the purposes of worshipping these gods. Cities such as Uruk, Nippur, and Eridu (which the Sumerians considered ancient – thus making it arguably the world’s oldest city) served as commercial and religious centers.
There were city-specific deities, but also monsters, such as Tiamat, the primordial chaos demon of the ocean who serves as the primary antagonist in the Babylonian creation myth, The Enûma Eliš.
[Side Note: This text, along with the Neo-Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, were both re-discovered in 1849 by the British archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard at the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Ashurbanipal was the last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.]
Likewise, dark, malevolent gods were present in their cosmology… and none was more vile that Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld, or Irkalla. Along with Nergal, the plague god, Ereshkigal acted as the tyrant of Irkalla and was the chief judge of the dead.
The story of Inanna’s descent into the underworld provides a glimpse into Ereshkigal’s wickedness:
Naked and bowed low, Inanna entered the throne room.
Ereshkigal rose from her throne..
Inanna started toward the throne..
The Annuna, the judges of the underworld, surrounded her..
They passed judgment against her..
Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death..
She spoke against her the word of wrath..
She uttered against her the cry of guilt..
She struck her..
Inanna was turned into a corpse,.
A piece of rotting meat,.
And was hung from a hook on the wall… .
Inanna, who is more commonly known by
her Akkadian name of Ishtar, manages to defeat the machinations of Ereshkigal and returns to the world of the living. For her pain, Ereshkigal threatens Inanna with a show of her power, to send her army of the dead above ground as a moving pestilence bent upon destruction.
To their enemies, the Assyrian hordes must have seemed like Ereshkigal’s army of the ravenous dead; they were a nation of fearsome warriors. And although their rise was slow and their fall spectacular, the Assyrians left an indelible mark on the regions that they conquered… More than anything else, they spread fear.
Evidence of this can be found in the fact that the early Jews turned the Assyrian gods into demons. Astarte, the Assyrian version of Ishtar, became Astaroth, the Crowned Prince of Hell. Similarly, the Assyrian Bel, who would be called Baal by the Canaanites, would become Beelzebub, the demonic “Lord of the Flies.”
Although these later Judeo-Christian interpretations form the Western world’s view of the Mesopotamian religion as being thoroughly evil, the Assyrians themselves weren’t without their own demons.
(Again, most Assyrian demons were present beforehand, in the mythos of earlier Mesopotamian societies. These include the Sumerian ekimmu, a type of vampiric ghost, or the Akkadian lilu and lili, who were male and female demons that more than likely served as the inspiration behind Lilith in the Old Testament. Demons that were specific to the Assyrians – or at least more often used by them – include Ilu Limnu, the “evil god” who is never given definite characteristics, and the gallu, or bull demon.)
In The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, the Assyriologist Reginald Campbell Thompson details the various “demons, ghouls, vampires, hobgoblins, ghosts” that cursed the regions around the Tigris and Euphrates… as well as the Babylonian and Assyrian incantations that were used against them.
According to Thompson, the Assyrians held a great fear of sorcerers, whom they called the “Raiser of the Departed”.
However, they feared the ekimmu and wind spirits above all else.
The most famous Assyrian wind spirit known widely today is Pazuzu, the son of the god Hanbi and the demon of the southwestern wind. With the body of a lion or dog, a scorpion’s tail, wings, talons, and a serpentine phallus, Pazuzu brought famine and locusts during the dry seasons. In an odd twist, Pazuzu was the rival of Lamashtu (the goddess who preyed on pregnant women and children), and as such, his image was often used to combat other demons.
Of course, Pazuzu’s notoriety is the result of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. Although the film is more obvious than the book in depicting the spirit of Pazuzu as a monstrosity haunting young Regan MacNeil (neither, however, directly state that the demon is indeed Pazuzu), the message is still clear. Blatty’s decision to make the chief evil in The Exorcist a pre-Christian, Assyrian demon is in keeping with the Western tradition of seeing all things Mesopotamian as depraved.
Furthermore, by beginning his novel, and thus the film, in northern Iraq, Blatty made the conscious decision to play upon his audience’s preconceived notions…
Namely, that the land of the old Assyrians is indeed a land of demons.
4 comments
no doubt the demons have made their way to other parts of the world and are influencing many in washington while maintaining their stronghold in iraq.
My walk along the path through Sumerian and related mythology has only just begun, but I have I correctly noticed that Sumerian mythology makes a distinction between its gods and goddesses and its demons? This fascinates me precisely because of the thesis of your article, that Westerners tend to make demons out of the ancient gods and goddesses of the area, yet the peoples of that area distinguished their goddesses and gods from the demons they perceived.
Generally, I’ve adopted the interpretation that the gods and goddesses of mythologies around the globe are in some sense the fallen angels of the Hebrew and Christian Bible. My reading up on Sumerian mythology may alter that view.
In particular, the Exultation of Inanna by a high priestess, Enheduanna, fascinates me, because when she prayed to Inanna, she received the help she sought, help she did not receive when praying to the other gods, and her thankfulness to her goddess of last resort is tangible. While that is not proof of anything, for the first time I found myself asking whether or not there was an Inanna, and perhaps a whole class of beings who are neither demons nor the ultimate supreme being. Or perhaps collectively the goddesses and gods are the supreme being. Even the Hebrew Bible has the Elohim, which reportedly sometimes is a “royal We” and at others is a council or collection of divinities. And what would be, if anything, our relationship to them? Are they human fictions? Real but departed? Real and active but in more subtle ways?
I’d welcome your thoughts or an article discussing your thoughts, and I thank you for your article.
In response to Timothy: I have throughout my life been curious about the powers and principalities that the Hebrews had to contend with post-deliverance from Egypt, but like you, I never really studied up on them til this last year or so, and the prayer to Innanna that you reference struck me too, and dovetailed with some other things I was reading to generate this thought: From God’s differing orders to his people in the takeover of Canaan, and from how HARD some of these religions had their tendrils into people (so hard in fact that they kept popping up again and again like weeds WITHIN the Israelites, after their conquest of Canaan, for HUNDREDS of years!), it seems to me like some of these regional gods were THERE. As in, literally inhabiting their temples in specific cities, perhaps by inhabiting a willing member of their priest-class, perhaps fed by the sacrificial rites and the focused attention of their worshippers. Because in some cases, the orders were to kill the men, enslave the women and children, and take all the loot. But a few times the orders were (and this to me indicates that maybe these were the stronger of the gods/fallen angels/demons) to kill every living thing, man woman child beast, take no food and no loot, burn the place to the ground and sow the earth with salt so that it remain lifeless for all time…reading between the lines there (without sounding too much like a crackpot), it seems kind of like God had an enemies’ list of ACTUAL enemies and not, as my Protestant upbringing would have it, “false gods that were all fiction, propped up by a priesthood”. I guess maybe what fuels this perspective in me is that I was taught endlessly that when God does it it’s not magic, but an expression of His divine power and He’s the only one who has it and who has EVER had it (which flies in the face of the Exodus story…it’s not that the Egyptian wizards didn’t have power, it’s that it wasn’t as strong as God’s power), and everyone else ever has just been a charlatan with no extranormal access to power at all.
Why, then, would people continue to send their children through the fire to Molech? The only reason that’s even remotely plausible to me (as I don’t believe they were ravening beasts, I don’t care how long ago this was) is that doing so was immediately transactional: A display of faith and devotion of that size immediately got you a return from Molech. An investiture of power, perhaps, longevity maybe…
Anyhow, good article, and good comment!
Please label the pictures, and indicate the location of the artifacts (i.e., which museum).
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