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Lord of the Nether\Ųorld 6 that LORD OF THE NETHER\ØORLD also rela anc. À furt b.y coe: Giv dou the the mu wol Yet first draw near the lower halls of Dis I and through the lands ofdeep Avernus seek, for my son, a meeting with me. I am nor hin among sad Shades, in impious Tartarus; riat my home is in Elysium, among ent the gracious gatherings ofthe pious ones. to! Yirgil, Aeneid Y : 96 7-8' l .. ass( oU SLEEP THÂT YoU MAY VAKE; YoU DIE THAT YOU MAY LIVE'' SAY THE PYRAMID TEXTS \ ^T I formulating the Egyptian hope of regeneration in "archaic. brevity."' As Peter Kingsley thc Th puts it as well in discussing ritual death and descent and immortalization and ascent in early M( Greek philosoph¡ "one dies to be reborn; one descends into the depths in order to ascend."3 Mr In the Golden Ass or Metamorphoses of Apuleius, for example, "the initiation of Lucius into the tio mysteries of Isis at Kenchreai involves a free-will death, a dying of the old life, and a rebirth no culminating in his emergence in the likeness of the sun god."4 In this state of free-will death, cio the candidare is confronted by invisible powers of the netherworld in the shape of good and be evil genii. He identifies himself with them, which is the best method of getting to know them to and gaining power over rhem.t The Egyptian New Kingdom royal funerary text known as the tht Amduat,for instance, conrains formulaic sentences that emphasize a familiaricy with the beings del in the netherworld for a safe nocturnal journey.d In ancient Mesopotamia, the netherworld is usually described as a gloomy land of the ln dead. It is referred to in texts as the land of no return , erset Lt tari.7 There are many clues lie in Mesopotamian literature, however, pointing toward the idea that the netherworld is a more no .o-pl.* domain. In addition to being a grim hell, it is also the locus of a different state of \ry( existence, possibly of a transcendental character. rh, The best restimony to the complexiry of the netherworld in ancient Mesopotamian culture Fu consists of written accounts of "dream visions" that describe encounters with residents and w( conditions of rhe netherworld. Two such accounts come from the Neo-Assyrian period, the bu dream vision of Enkidu related in the SBV of The Epic of Giþamesh (YLl ú5-zro) and the Pr [Jnd.erworld. Vision of an Assyrian Prince, both examined by Kvanvig in relation to "visions" in AD general, and more specifically as a background for DanielT. Kvanvig analyzes these two Passages rel iq h., chapter "Akkadian Dream Visions," with focus on each text under the subtitles "The yo Death-Dream of Enkidu" and "The Vision of the Nether \7orld" respectively.s It is meaningful r90 LORD OF THE .NETHER'!(/'ORLD T9T that a study that examines the Mesopotamian antediluvian tradition as thoroughly as Kvanvtg s also treats rhese two visions of the netherworld within the same broad context, because the relarion benveen these two domains of inquiry directly contributes to an understanding of ancient Mesopotamian metaphysics. My goal here is not to provide a literary analysis of these two passages buc rather to highlight further their importance in the formulation of an ancient Mesopotamian sense of a world beyond - not merely in the sense of an afterlife but also in the sense of a transcendental realm coexrensive with the physical world and the way this beyond is codified by the Assyrian scholars. Given that both of these texts stem from Neo-Assyrian culture, this understanding was no doubt one that was developed by the Assyrians in accordance with what they had inherited from rhe ancient Mesopotamian tradition. In contrast to the voluminous amount of speculation on the beyond in ancient Egypr, the ancient Mesopotamian civilization seems to have favored a muçh more laconic, almost minimalistic, style of recording such thoughts, which, no doubr, would have been supplemented and explicated by oralknowledge. If the Assyrian understanding of a netherworld was merely one of a grim and dark residence for the dead, wh¡ for instance, are benign personages such as Etana, Shakkan, and Gilgamesh himselfi as the judge in rhe afterlife, present in the netherworld according to sources in Sume- rian and Akkadian? The netherworld in ancient Mesopotamian texts is further governed by an entire divine personnel consisting of a queen, Ereshkigal; her husband, Nergal; an administra- ror, Pabilsag; a gatekeeper, Neti; and a scribe, Belet-seri.e In her wo¡k, The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources, Dina Katz time and again IS asserrs that officials and offices existing in the Sumerian netherworld constitute a reflection of ey those of the state administration of the contemporary Sumerian and Babylonian city-state.'o 'Iy Throughout her work, Katz has the tendency to rationalize many of the mythical aspects of the D) Mesopotamian nerherworld through reference to the actual sociopolitical matters of ancient he Mesopotamia. Despite the important parallels between ancient Mesopotamian daily institu- th tions and the structure of the netherworld, the semantics of the netherworld can be thought h, nor to end there. The netherworld should be considered as more than a straightforward reflec- rd tion of the society and social institutions of ancient Mesopotamia, and due attention should m be placed on it as a medium through which knowledge of a restricted character is conveyed he ro the one who experiences it, as I have already argued. No doubt, in the relevant texts, all gs these notions are expressed in a stylized, formulaic, and cryptic mold that might have been deliberately meant to prevent their direct expression and dissemination. he The Neo-fusyrian texr known as the Undzrwoili Vision of an Assyrian Prince" is a case tes in point, for it may be thought to relate to a metaphysical domain of the sort oudined ear- rre lier. It describes the night vision of one Kumma, who may be Ashurbanipal, although this is of not certain.t" In the dream, for reasons that are not clear, the prince descends to the nether- world and acquires rhere a firsthand sight of some of its denizens, and the text i's as graphic in tr€ their descriprion as visual representations of Mischwesen in the Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs.'l rd Further, after viewing these denizens, the prince has a direct sight of the ruler of the nether- he world, rhe god Nergal, as he stands in his presence. Nergal is about to "kill" the prince,'a he but the godt intercessor asks the god to spare the prince's life. Nergal then admonishes the in prince ro acknowledge him: "Do not forget or neglect me! Then I will not pass a verdict of annihilarion on you. (Buc) on the command of Shamash, may distress, acts of violence and íes he rebellion together blow you down so that, by their oppressive clamour, sleep may not come to r t iul Yol,t, " r92 Nergal continues his speech with the mention of an enigmatic "corpse" of a "proud shep- herd," who is actually the princet father and who lies in the netherworld.'6 Nergal further srates that the body of this king is protected and his progeny is kept healthy by "Yabru, Hurn- ban, and Napruðu."17 One could here think of the Egyptian netherworld and how there exists in it a corpse with which the sun god Re unites every night, just as he unites with Osiris, again a king whose progeny is kept healthy by the divine world order.'8 This maintenance of the corpse could again be considered not unlike the maintenance of the Assyrian "sacred rree," which divine officials, the apkøllus, constantly keep fertile and alive. Nergal further indicates in his speech of epiphany that this dead king "scanned the plans (gið.hur.með) of the mainstay of the earth (8iÉusurafn'É íri mar-þas qaq-qø-riþi-i-tu)."'t Kvanvig draws an apt parallel berween this statement and the way che aphallus are described I in the bilingual incantation rexr btt m¿seri: I ' Ov 'They are the seven brilliant apkallu's, pur,idu-frsh of the sea, for cor [sev]en apkallut "grown" in the river, who insure the correct functioning of the the plans of heaven and earth (usurat AN-e ùKl-tim).'o an( her Hence, Kvanvig writes: Hir knt The wisdom of the king has a nearly verbatim parallel in a bilingual text (Sumerian/ l Akkadian) which is published under the name The Etiological Myth of the'Seven Sages'. of¿ The text describes the activiry of the seven semi-divine apkallu's (sages) who lived in Sumer dec in primeval time.tt ... thr spl, We do not claim that the scribe of our textfUnderwor[dVision] has quoted from this actual gib tablet, but the similarities should show that rhe king in our text is "modelled" after the an( tradition about the sages. tior This is even more convincing since at least certain Assyrian kings were described as sages." ceL oft This merging of a theme pertaining to the sages and the antediluvian tradition with a dark fire image of the netherworld in the Underworld Vision seems to be in line with the confusion that existed in the Neo-Assyrian times between the Apsû and the netherworld. The confusion, Tht howeve¡ could not have existed without any semantic affinity between the two domains, and what we see in the (Jnderworld Vision is perhaps the role of the Assyrian netherworld in the transmission of a version, or equivalent, of antediluvian knowledge to what would correspond to a postdiluvian world order.
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