Lecture II. Primitive Animism. 271
from Eridu never succeeded in overcoming it altogether. The
gods of light ruled, indeed, over a world that had once belonged
to the demons of night, but their victory never extended further.
The land of Hades still continued to be a land of darkness,
even though the waters of life gushed up from below the golden
throne of the spirits who dwelt there. We find no conception in [295]
Babylonian literature parallel to the Egyptian fields of Alu, no
judgment-hall of Hades before which the conscience of the dead
man is arraigned. The Babylonian was judged in this life and not
in the next, and the god who judged him was the sun-god of day,
and not the dead sun-god of the other world.
It is usually the fashion to ascribe this concentration of religion
upon the present world, with its repellent views of Hades and
limitation of divine rewards and punishments to this life, to the
inherent peculiarities of the Semitic mind. But for this there is no
justification. There is nothing in the Semitic mind which would
necessitate such a theological system. It is true that the sun-god
was the central object of the Semitic Babylonian faith, and that
to the nomads of Arabia the satisfaction of their daily wants was
the practical end of existence. But it is not among the nomads of
Arabia that we find anything corresponding with the Babylonian
idea of Hades and the conceptions associated with it. The idea
was, in fact, of Babylonian origin. If the Hebrew Sheol resembles
the Hades of Babylonia, or the Hebrew conception of rewards
and punishments is like that of the Assyrians and Babylonians, it
is because the Hebrew beliefs were derived from the civilisation
of the Euphrates. Historically we know that the Israelites traced
their origin from Ur of the Chaldees, and that in days long before
Abraham, Canaan formed part of a Babylonian empire, and was
permeated by Babylonian culture; on the theological side the
derivation of the Hebrew doctrines is equally clear. The Hebrew
Sheol is too exactly a counterpart of the Babylonian world of the
dead not to have been borrowed from it, like Lilith and the other
spirits whose home it was, and the theology which taught that