Chapter 21

"The keeper went and opened the gate: 'Enter, O Lady, and may the halls of the Land whence there is no return be gladdened by thy presence.' At the first gate he bade her enter and laid his hand on her; he took the high headdress from her head: 'Why, O keeper, takest thou the high headdress from my head?'--'Enter, O Lady; such is Allat's command.'"

The same scene is repeated at each of the seven gates; the keeper at each strips Ishtar of some article of her attire--her earrings, her necklace, her jewelled girdle, the bracelets on her arms and the bangles at her ankles, and lastly her long flowing garment. On each occasion the same words are repeated by both. When Ishtar entered the presence of Allat, the queen looked at her and taunted her to her face: then Ishtar could not control her anger and cursed her. Allat turned to her chief minister Namtar, the god of Pestilence--meet servant of the queen of the dead!--who is also the god of Fate, and ordered him to lead Ishtar away and afflict her with sixty dire diseases,--to strike her head and her heart, and her eyes, her hands and her feet, and all her limbs. So the goddess was led away and kept in durance and in misery. Meanwhile her absence was attended with most disastrous consequences to the upper world. With her, life and love had gone out of it; there were no marriages any more, no births, either among men or animals; nature was at a standstill. Great was the commotion among the gods. They sent a messenger to Êa to expose the state of affairs to him, and, as usual, to invoke his advice and assistance. Êa, in his fathomless wisdom, revolved a scheme. He created a phantom, Uddusunamir.

"'Go,' he said to him; 'towards the Land whence there is no return direct thy face; the seven gates of the Arallu will open before thee. Allat shall see thee and rejoice at thy coming, her heart shall grow calm and her wrath shall vanish. Conjure her with the name of the great gods, stiffen thy neck and keep thy mind on the Spring of Life. Let the Lady (Ishtar) gain access to the Spring of Life and drink of its waters.'--Allat, when she heard these things, beat her breast and bit her fingers with rage. Consenting, sore against her will, she spoke:--'Go, Uddusunamir! May the great jailer place thee in durance! May the foulness of the city ditches be thy food, the waters of the city sewers thy drink! A dark dungeon be thy dwelling, a sharp pole thy seat!'"

Then she ordered Namtar to let Ishtar drink of the Spring of Life and to bear her from her sight. Namtar fulfilled her command and took the goddess through the seven enclosures, at each gate restoring to her the article of her attire that had been taken at her entrance. At the last gate he said to her:

"Thou hast paid no ransom to Allat for thy deliverance; so now return to Dumuzi, the lover of thy youth; sprinkle over him the sacred waters, clothe him in splendid garments, adorn him with gems."

26. The last lines are so badly mutilated that no efforts have as yet availed to make their sense anything but obscure, and so it must remain, unless new copies come to light. Yet so much is, at all events, evident, that they bore on the reunion of Ishtar and her young lover. The poem is thus complete in itself; but some think that it was introduced into the Izdubar epic as an independent episode, after the fashion of the Deluge narrative, and, if so, it is supposed to have been part of the seventh tablet. Whether such were really the case or no, matters little in comparison with the great importance these two poems possess as being the most ancient presentations, in a finished literary form, of the two most significant and universal nature-myths--the Solar and the Chthonic (see p. 272), the poetical fancies in which primitive mankind clothed the wonders of the heavens and the mystery of the earth, being content to admire and imagine where it could not comprehend and explain. We shall be led back continually to these, in very truth, _primary_ myths, for they not only served as groundwork to much of the most beautiful poetry of the world but suggested some of its loftiest and most cherished religious conceptions.

[For a metrical version by Prof. Dyer of the story of "Ishtar's Descent," see Appendix, p. 367.]

FOOTNOTES:

[BC] Paul Haupt, "Der Keilinschriftliche Sündfluthbericht," 1881.

[BD] There are difficulties in the way of reading this name, and scholars are not sure that this is the right pronunciation of it; but they retain it, until some new discovery helps to settle the question.

[BE] Translated from the German version of Paul Haupt, "Der Keilinschriftliche Sündfluthbericht."

[BF] The ninth king in the fabulous list of ten.

[BG] The figures unfortunately obliterated.

[BH] "Les Premières Civilisations," Vol. II., pp. 78 ff.

[BI] A. H. Sayce, "Babylonian Literature," p. 39; Fr. Lenormant, "Il Mito di Adone-Tammuz," pp. 12-13.

VIII.

RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY.--IDOLATRY AND ANTHROPOMORPHISM.--THE CHALDEAN LEGENDS AND THE BOOK OF GENESIS.--RETROSPECT.

1. In speaking of ancient nations, the words "Religion" and "Mythology" are generally used indiscriminately and convertibly. Yet the conceptions they express are essentially and radically different. The broadest difference, and the one from which all others flow, is that the one--Religion--is a thing of the feelings, while the other--Mythology--is a thing of the imagination. In other words, Religion comes from WITHIN--from that consciousness of limited power, that inborn need of superior help and guidance, forbearance and forgiveness, from that longing for absolute goodness and perfection, which make up the distinctively human attribute of "religiosity," that attribute which, together with the faculty of articulate speech, sets Man apart from and above all the rest of animated creation. (See p. 149.) Mythology, on the other hand, comes wholly from WITHOUT. It embodies impressions received by the senses from the outer world and transformed by the poetical faculty into images and stories. (See definition of "Myth" on p. 294.) Professor Max Müller of Oxford has been the first, in his standard work "The Science of Language," clearly to define this radical difference between the two conceptions, which he has never since ceased to sound as a keynote through the long series of his works devoted to the study of the religions and mythologies of various nations. A few illustrations from the one nation with which we have as yet become familiar will help once for all to establish a thorough understanding on this point, most essential as it is to the comprehension of the workings of the human mind and soul throughout the long roll of struggles, errors and triumphs, achievements and failures which we call the history of mankind.

2. There is no need to repeat here instances of the Shumiro-Accadian and Chaldean myths; the last three or four chapters have been filled with them. But the instances of religious feeling, though scattered in the same field, have to be carefully gleaned out and exhibited, for they belong to that undercurrent of the soul which pursues its way unobtrusively and is often apparently lost beneath the brilliant play of poetical fancies. But it is there nevertheless, and every now and then forces its way to the surface shining forth with a startling purity and beauty. When the Accadian poet invokes the Lord "who knows lie from truth," "who knows the truth that is in the soul of man," who "maketh lies to vanish," who "turneth wicked plots to a happy issue"--this is religion, not mythology, for this is not _a story_, it is the expression of _a feeling_. That "the Lord" whose divine omniscience and goodness is thus glorified is really the Sun, makes no difference; _that_ is an error of judgment, a want of knowledge, but the religious feeling is splendidly manifest in the invocation. But when, in the same hymn, the Sun is described as "stepping forth from the background of the skies, pushing back the bolts and opening the gate of the brilliant heaven, and raising his head above the land," etc., (see p. 172) that is only a very beautiful, imaginative description of a glorious natural phenomenon--sunrise; it is magnificent poetry, religious in so far as the sun is considered as a Being, a Divine Person, the object of an intensely devout and grateful feeling; still this is not religion, it is mythology, for it presents a material image to the mind, and one that can be easily turned into narrative, into _a story_,--which, in fact, _suggests_ a hero, a king, and a story. Take, again, the so-called "Penitential Psalms." To the specimen given on p. 178, let us add, for greater completeness, the following three remarkable fragments:

I. "God, my creator, take hold of my arms! Direct the breath of my mouth, my hands direct, O lord of light."

II. "Lord, let not thy servant sink! Amidst the tumultuous waters take hold of his hand!"

III. "He who fears not his God, will be cut off even like a reed. He who honors not his goddess, his bodily strength will waste away; like to a star of heaven, his splendor will pale; he will vanish like to the waters of the night."

3. All this is religion, of the purest, loftiest kind; fruitful, too, of good, the only real test of true religion. The deep humility, the trustful appeal, the feeling of dependence, the consciousness of weakness, of sin, and the longing for deliverance from them--these are all very different from the pompous phrases of empty praise and sterile admiration; they are things which flow from the heart, not the fancy, which lighten its weight of sorrow and self-reproach, brighten it with hope and good resolutions, in short, make it happier and better--what no mere imaginative poetry, however fine, can do.

4. The radical distinction, then, between religious feeling and the poetical faculty of mythical creation, is easy to establish and follow out. On the other hand, the two are so constantly blended, so almost inextricably interwoven in the sacred poetry of the ancients, in their views of life and the world, and in their worship, that it is no wonder they should be so generally confused. The most correct way of putting the case would be, perhaps, to say that the ancient Religions--meaning by the word the whole body of sacred poetry and legends as well as the national forms of worship--were made up originally in about equal parts of religious feeling and of mythology. In many cases the exuberance of the imagination gained the upper hand, and there was such a riotous growth of mythical imagery and stories that the religious feeling was almost stifled under them. In others, again, the myths themselves suggested religious ideas of the deepest import and loftiest sublimity. Such was particularly the case with the solar and Chthonic Myths--the poetical presentation of the career of the Sun and the Earth--as connected with the doctrine of the soul's immortality.

5. A curious and significant observation has been made in excavating the most ancient graves in the world, those of the so-called Mound-builders. This name is not that of any particular race or nation, but is given indiscriminately to all those peoples who lived, on any part of the globe, long before the earliest beginnings of even the remotest times which have been made historical by preserved monuments or inscriptions of any kind. All we know of those peoples is that they used to bury their dead--at least those of special renown or high rank--in deep and spacious stone-lined chambers dug in the ground, with a similar gallery leading to them, and covered by a mound of earth, sometimes of gigantic dimensions--a very hill. Hence the name. Of their life, their degree of civilization, what they thought and believed, we have no idea except in so far as the contents of the graves give us some indications. For, like the later, historical races, of which we find the graves in Chaldea and every other country of the ancient world, they used to bury along with the dead a multitude of things: vessels, containing food and drink; weapons, ornaments, household implements. The greater the power or renown of the dead man, the fuller and more luxurious his funeral outfit. It is indeed by no means rare to find the skeleton of a great chief surrounded by those of several women, and, at a respectful distance, more skeletons--evidently those of slaves--whose fractured skulls more than suggest the ghastly custom of killing wives and servants to do honor to an illustrious dead and to keep him company in his narrow underground mansion. Nothing but a belief in the continuation of existence after death could have prompted these practices. For what was the sense of giving him wives and slaves, and domestic articles of all kinds, food and weapons, unless it were for his service and use on his journey to the unknown land where he was to enter on a new stage of existence, which the survivors could not but imagine to be a reproduction, in its simple conditions and needs, of the one he was leaving? There is no race of men, however primitive, however untutored, in which this belief in immortality is not found deeply rooted, positive, unquestioning. The _belief_ is implanted in man by the _wish_; it answers one of the most imperative, unsilenceable longings of human nature. For, in proportion as life is pleasant and precious, death is hideous and repellent. The idea of utter destruction, of ceasing to be, is intolerable to the mind; indeed, the senses revolt against it, the mind refuses to grasp and admit it. Yet death is very real, and it is inevitable; and all human beings that come into the world have to learn to face the thought of it, and the reality too, in others, before they lie down and accept it for themselves. But what if death be _not_ destruction? If it be but a passage from this into another world,--distant, unknown and perforce mysterious, but certain nevertheless, a world on the threshold of which the earthly body is dropped as an unnecessary garment? Then were death shorn of half its terrors. Indeed, the only unpleasantness about it would be, for him who goes, the momentary pang and the uncertainty as to what he is going to; and, for those who remain, the separation and the loathsome details--the disfigurement, the corruption. But these are soon gotten over, while the separation is only for a time; for all must go the same way, and the late-comers will find, will join their lost ones gone before. Surely it must be so! It were too horrible if it were not; it _must be_--it _is_! The process of feeling which arrived at this conclusion and hardened it into absolute faith, is very plain, and we can easily, each of us, reproduce it in our own souls, independently of the teachings we receive from childhood. But the mind is naturally inquiring, and involuntarily the question presents itself: this solution, so beautiful, so acceptable, so universal,--but so abstract--what suggested it? What analogy first led up to it from the material world of the senses? To this question we find no reply in so many words, for it is one of those that go to the very roots of our being, and such generally remain unanswered. But the graves dug by those old Mound-Builders present a singular feature, which almost seems to point to the answer. The tenant of the funereal chamber is most frequently found deposited in a crouching attitude, his back leaning against the stone-lined wall, and _with his face turned towards the West, in the direction of the setting sun_.... Here, then, is the suggestion, the analogy! The career of the sun is very like that of man. His rising in the east is like the birth of man. During the hours of his power, which we call the Day, he does his allotted work, of giving light and warmth to the world, now riding radiant and triumphant across an azure sky, now obscured by clouds, struggling through mists, or overwhelmed by tempests. How like the vicissitudes that checker the somewhat greater number of hours--or days--of which the sum makes up a human life! Then when his appointed time expires, he sinks down,--lower, lower--and disappears into darkness,--dies. So does man. What is this night, death? Is it destruction, or only a rest, or an absence? It is at all events _not_ destruction. For as surely as we see the sun vanish in the west this evening, feeble and beamless, so surely shall we behold him to-morrow morning rise again in the east, glorious, vigorous and young. What happens to him in the interval? Who knows? Perhaps he sleeps, perhaps he travels through countries we know not of and does other work there; but one thing is sure: that he is not dead, for he will be up again to-morrow. Why should not man, whose career so much resembles the sun's in other respects, resemble him in this? Let the dead, then, be placed with their faces to the west, in token that theirs is but a setting like the sun's, to be followed by another rising, a renewed existence, though in another and unknown world.

6. All this is sheer poetry and mythology. But how great its beauty, how obvious its hopeful suggestiveness, if it could appeal to the groping minds of those primitive men, the old Mound-Builders, and there lay the seed of a faith which has been more and more clung to, as mankind progressed in spiritual culture! For all the noblest races have cherished and worked out the myth of the setting sun in the most manifold ways, as the symbol of the soul's immortality. The poets of ancient India, some three thousand years ago, made the Sun the leader and king of the dead, who, as they said, followed where he had gone first, "showing the way to many." The Egyptians, perhaps the wisest and most spiritual of all ancient nations, came to make this myth the keystone of their entire religion, and placed all their burying-places in the west, amidst or beyond the Libyan ridge of hills behind which the sun vanished from the eyes of those who dwelt in the valley of the Nile. The Greeks imagined a happy residence for their bravest and wisest, which they called the Islands of the Blest, and placed in the furthest West, amidst the waters of the ocean into which the sun descends for his nightly rest.

7. But the sun's course is twofold. If it is complete--beginning and ending--within the given number of hours which makes the day, it is repeated on a larger scale through the cycle of months which makes the year. The alternations of youth and age, triumph and decline, power and feebleness, are there represented and are regularly brought around by the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took the greater hold on the fancy of the scientifically inclined Chaldeans, and which we find embodied with such admirable completeness in their great epic. We shall see, later on, more exclusively imaginative and poetical races showing a marked preference for the career of the sun as the hero of a day, and making the several incidents of the solar-day myth the subject of an infinite variety of stories, brilliant or pathetic, tender or heroic. But there is in nature another order of phenomena, intimately connected with and dependent on the phases of the sun, that is, the seasons, yet very different in their individual character, though pointing the same way as regards the suggestion of resurrection and immortality--the phenomena of the Earth and the Seed. These may in a more general way be described as Nature's productive power paralyzed during the numbed trance of winter, which is as the sleep of death, when the seed lies in the ground hid from sight and cold, even as a dead thing, but awaking to new life in the good time of spring, when the seed, in which life was never extinct but only dormant, bursts its bonds and breaks into verdant loveliness and bountiful crops. This is the essence and meaning of the Chthonic or Earth-myth, as universal as the Sun-myth, but of which different features have also been unequally developed by different races according to their individual tendencies. In the Chaldean version, the "Descent of Ishtar," the particular incident of the seed is quite wanting, unless the name of Dumuzi's month, "The Boon of the Seed" ("_Le Bienfait de la Semence._" Lenormant), may be considered as alluding to it. It is her fair young bridegroom, the beautiful Sun-god, whom the widowed goddess of Nature mourns and descends to seek among the dead. This aspect of the myth is almost exclusively developed in the religions of most Canaanitic and Semitic nations of the East, where we shall meet with it often and often. And here it may be remarked, without digressing or anticipating too far, that throughout the ancient world, the Solar and Chthonic cycles of myths have been the most universal and important, the very centre and groundwork of many of the ancient mythic religions, and used as vehicles for more or less sublime religious conceptions, according to the higher or lower spiritual level of the worshipping nations.