The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

364 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

parents, after whom they were modelled. In so far, therefore, as

the universe was divine, it too must have been evolved in the

same fashion; it was only when it ceased to partake of the divine

nature, and to assume its present form, that the god could deal

with the materials of which it consisted, as the potter dealt with his

clay; or could even create by the simple word of his mouth, like

the man who similarly created the names of things, and therewith

the things themselves which the names denoted. With the rise of

philosophic speculation the process of divine generation became

a process of emanation. The gods passed into mere symbols,

or rather cosmic principles and elements; they retained, indeed,

their double nature as male and female; but that was all. The

human element that once was in them disappeared, the concrete

became the abstract. Mummu Tiamât was explained as the world

of immature ideas,—the simple“apprehension,”we might almost

say, of the Hegelian philosophy,—and the first of the“Æons”

of the later Gnosticism was thus started on its way. Babylonian

religion had been narrowly local and anthropomorphic; under

the guidance of a cosmological philosophy it tended to become

an atheistic materialism. The poet who wrote the introduction

to the Epic of the Creation could have had but little faith in the

gods and goddesses he paraded on the scene; in the self-evolved

universe of the schools there was hardly room even for the creator

Merodach himself.

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