The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

454 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

But it must be remembered that the judgeship of the son-god

and the fatherhood of the moon-god were confined to the present

world. They were not dead gods like Osiris, whose tribunal

was in another world. There was no postponing the evil day,

therefore; a man's sins were visited upon him in this life, just

as it was also in this life that his righteousness was rewarded.

A death-bed repentance was useless; penitence, to be effective,

must be manifested on this side of the grave.

[495] Hence came the penitential ritual which forms so striking a
feature in the service-books of Babylonia. It was reduced to a
system, like the confessional in later days. The penitent was
instructed by the priest what to say, and the priest pronounced his
absolution. For the exercise of priestly absolution was another
essential feature of Babylonian religion.
Besides the consciousness of sin and the conception of
repentance, the idea of mediation must also be traced to
Babylonia. On the earliest seals the priest is represented as
acting as a mediator between the worshipper and his god. It is
only through the priest that the layman can approach the deity
and be led into the presence of the god. This idea of mediation
has a twofold origin. On the one side, it goes back to the beliefs
which saw in the magician—the predecessor of the priest—the
possessor of knowledge and powers that were hidden from the
rest of mankind; on the other side, it has grown out of the doctrine
that the priest was the vicegerent of the god. It was thus the
result of the union of two conceptions which I believe to have
been respectively Sumerian and Semitic. The deified king or
pontiff necessarily took the place of the god on earth; Gudea, for
instance, at Lagas was the representative of the god Inguriaa, and
therefore himself divine. The fact that the gods were represented
in human forms facilitated this conversion of the minister of
the deity into his adopted son and representative; the powers
and functions of the god were transferred to him, and, like the
vassal-prince in the absence of the supreme king, he acted in the