The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

268 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

as to extract from them sober history. The poets who depicted
Hades, with its batlike ghosts that fed upon dust, were using the
language of the past rather than of the age in which they lived.
We might as well infer that the Englishman of the eighteenth
century believed in the Muses whom his poets invoked, as infer
from the language of the poets of Babylonia that the Hades they
described was the Hades of popular belief. The cult of the kings
and nobles is sufficient of itself to prove that such could not
have been the case. And when primitive conceptions become
the commonplaces of literature, their true signification is lost or
blurred.
Still less help can be obtained from the magical texts. And
by an unfortunate accident the magical texts constitute a very
[292] undue proportion of those which have hitherto been examined.
Until recently we have been dependent for our knowledge of
Babylonian literature on the relics of the library of Nineveh, the
greater part of which was collected by Assur-bani-pal, and Assur-
bani-pal had a special predilection for charms and exorcisms,
and the pseudo-science of the augur or astrologist. The world of
the magical texts was a world that stood apart by itself. Magic
was only half recognised by the orthodox faith; its beliefs and
practices had come down from an age when that orthodox faith
did not as yet exist, and its professors were looked upon with
suspicion by the official priesthood. The creed upon which it
rested, therefore, was a creed of the remote past rather than of
the present. Its gods and goddesses were not those of the State
religion except in name; the Istar who patronised the witch and
superintended the mixture of the poisonous philtre under the
cloak of night, was a very different Istar from the goddess of
love and war who promised help and comfort to Esar-haddon in
his need, and was known to be“the mother”of mankind. The
State religion, indeed, wisely temporising, had recognised magic
so far as it could be regulated, and placed, as it were, under the
supervision of the priesthood;“the black art”was never a heresy