RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESunexpected. Paganism survived directly among people who continued
to be pagans and who venerated the old gods and demons and sac-
rificed to them. Chaldaeans in particular preserved a well-developed,
literate, magical, and astrological tradition. Pagan practices also sur-
vived in folklore and in popular custom.GNOSTICS
The second major way paganism survived was as an element of
syncretistic sects formed under gnostic influences, which came to be
organized as religious communities. Gnostics had affinities to some of
the oldest religious traditions in Iraq. The Babylonian Creation Epic
tells how Tiamat, the primeval sea, was incited by a group of rebellious
gods to avenge the death of her consort Apsu, and how she created a
band of eleven monstrous demons and made an evil attack on the
other gods. She was defeated and killed by Marduk (Bel) who captured
the rebel gods and bound the demons. Marduk divided the body of
Tiamat, used the upper one-half of it to form the sky, and posted
guards there to prevent her waters from escaping. He made the earth
by heaping up a mountain over the lower part of Tiamat's body. He
established stations for the great gods in the heavens and fixed their
astral likenesses as constellations. Kingu, the rebel god who was ac-
cused of inciting Tiamat, was sacrificed so Marduk could make hu-
mans out of his blood to serve the gods. This myth contains two ideas
central to the gnostic view of the world and of human nature. First,
the material universe is the body of an evil, rebellious monster. Second,
humans are made out of the substance of the guilty Kingu as punish-
ment and for service, which implies that human nature is evil. But
since Kingu was a god, a divine element, albeit perverted, also exists
in human nature.7^6
Gnostics divided existence between the good, spiritual light, and the
evil, material darkness. The universe was created by sexual generation,
and the material world was organized out of a chaos of darkness by
a malevolent demiurge and was ruled by demons. In elaborate myths,
gnostics explained how part of the world of light and spirit became
mixed with darkness and was trapped in the evil world of matter.
Demons tried to keep it imprisoned there by tempting people with
worldly pleasures. The material world, including the human body, was
76 I. Mendelsohn, Religions of the Ancient Near East, Sumero-Akkadian Religious
Texts and Ugaritic Epics (New York, 1955), pp. 1"7-46.