2. Mesopotamian Gods and Pantheons

THE GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT The basic characteristic of ancient Mesopotamian religion was a tendency to a pluralistic view of the numinous (i.e., the mysterious element in the holy and the feelings of awe or fear it elicits): many different numina (or divine powers) were seen in many different phenomena, each such numen being the life force and will of its particular phenomenon, nameable from the phenomenon and wearing the external form of the phenomenon. As example of the last, representations from the Protoliterate period show that the numinous power in the rain cloud, Imdugud, was given form as an enormous lion-headed black bird, floating on outstretched wings and roaring its thunder cry. With the numina that constituted the will of phenomena vital to human survival, especially those phenomena that were essential to the economy-as flocks and herds, grain, the earth, etc.-man felt a sense of solidarity that found its expression in endeavors to ensure the "presence" of the numen by such means as cult images, temples, service, and the ritual drama. The earliest Mesopotamian religion appears to have been one of solidarity with nature and its powers, upon which man dependeq. This early tendency to give situationally determined, nonhuman form to the numinous, however, probably at no time excluded attribution also of human form. Thus the Erech vase, which dates to Protoliterate time, shows the sacred marriage between two deities in

NoTE: First published as "Religion," in the article "Babylonia and ," Encyclopaedia Britannica (1963), II, 972-978. 16 Mesopotamian Gods and Pantheons 17 human form, and so do numerous representations on seals from this period. The fact that human agents could embody the gods and take on their identity in the ritual drama also indicates that the human form as such must have been considered possible and appropriate for divinity. Nonetheless, attribution of human form to the divine did not come to dominate religious thought until Early Dynastic times. From the latter half of that period onward it is the form under which gods and goddesses ordinarily are represented. The older nonhuman forms, with their close ties to natural phenomena, tended to recede into the background as divine emblems (shu-nir) associated with the anthropomorphic god-the sun disk next to the human figure of the sun-god , the lion-headed bird accompanying Ningirsu/, the ibex accompanying , and the dog associated with Nininsina. At times animosity against the now unpopular older form even seems to have made of it an enemy vanquished by the human-shaped god; in later mythology, for example, the lion-headed bird develops into the chief opponent of the god Ningirsu/Ninurta, whose older form it is. Parallel to this process of divorcement of the older nonhuman form from the human form of the god there seems to go a similar general tendency to divorce phenomenon from god and to see it as a distinct, not divine, entity. The god comes to own or control the phenomenon, becomes a power behind it rather than in it and of it. The victory of the human form was not easy or rapid and for long periods not complete. Enannatum I at the end of the Early Dynastic period still was depicted in attitude of worship before Ningirsu's old form oflion-headed bird. As late as Old Babylonian times the goddess Nininsina was still imagined with the head of a dog, and over and over again nonhuman features vie with human ones in monumental representations: rays fl.are from the body of the sun-god, heads peep out from the shoulders of next to his human head, grain sprouts from the body of the grain-goddess. The approach to understanding of the numinous that led during the Early Dynastic period to attribution of external human form to divinity paralleled a similar new understanding of activity and function of the numinous in a human pattern, that of the" ruler." The growth and the progressive differentiation of society during Proto• literate times, and the accompanying development of governmental