Lecture III. The Gods Of Babylonia. 281
the waters of the Persian Gulf seemed to descend from the vault
of heaven which rested upon them; the streams which intersected
the ground were fed by the rains, and it was therefore natural to
suppose that the sea which blended with the sky was similarly
derived from it. The deep was embosomed in the heavens, and
the spirit of the deep accordingly must have been begotten by the
spirit of the sky.
But this spirit of the sky necessarily owned obedience to the
“lord of the ghost-world,”and the mother of Ea of Eridu was thus
at the same time a ministering handmaid of En-lil.^239 The Zi who
was worshipped at Eridu was also a Lil in the theology of Nippur,
and the home of the Lil was beneath the earth. In this way we
must explain how it is that Zi-Kum,“the heaven,”is also, under
another aspect, Zi-Kura,“the earth,”and as such identical with
Dam-kina and Bau.^240 That she should have coalesced with Bau
rather than with Dam-kina, was due to the fact that the one was
made the mother of Ea, while the other became his wife. But the
lineaments of the old“spirit of the sky”were soon obliterated.
As the religion of Babylonia moved further and further away
from the animism of the past, the spirit's existence faded into the [307]
background and Bau stepped into its place. Zi-Kum,“the spirit
of the sky,”ended by becoming a symbol of that primordial deep
from which Ea had derived his wisdom, and whose waters were
above the visible firmament as well as below it.^241 Ea, the god of
the mixed Babylonian race, had absorbed the spirits and ghosts
“lord of the spirits”of the earth and the underworld.
(^239) She is called“the handmaid of the spirit of E-kura”(WAI.ii. 54. 18). The
“spirit of E-kura”is En-lil, whose temple E-kura was, and consequently the
title identifies her with thekiel lillaor“handmaid of the Lil,”who eventually
became the Lilith of Jewish folk-lore.
(^240) Hence in the hymn which describes the oraculur tree of Eridu (WAI.v. 15)
the“couch”of Ea is called“the bed of Zi-Kum”in“the central place of the
earth.”
(^241) See my Hibbert Lectures on theReligion of the Ancient Babylonians, pp.
374, 375.