Lecture III. The Gods Of Babylonia.
I have already had occasion to refer to one of the gods of
Babylonia, En-lil or El-lil of Nippur.^232 His worship goes back
to the earliest period of Babylonian history; his sanctuary at
Nippur was one of the oldest in the land. He belongs to the period
when the Sumerian was still supreme, and the name he bore was
the Sumerian title of En-lil,“the lord of the ghost-world.”But
it was a title only; the“lord of the ghosts”was himself a ghost,
albeit the chief among them.
The fact must be kept carefully in mind. As yet there was no
god in the proper sense of the term. The superhuman powers that
were dreaded and propitiated were ghosts only, like the ghosts
of dead men; and, like the latter, they were denizens of the
grave and the underground world. It was only at night that they
emerged from their retreat, and terrified the passer-by. Primitive
man fears the dark as much as does the child; it is then that the
powers of evil are active, and spiritual or supernatural foes lurk
behind every corner ready to injure or destroy him. The ghosts of
the night are accordingly objects of terror, harmful beings from
whom all forms of sickness and insanity are derived.
But even these ghosts can be controlled by those who know [298]
the magic words or the mystic rites which they are compelled to
obey. Between the ghost and his victim the sorcerer or medicine-
man can interpose, and by means of his spells force the spirit
to quit the body of the sufferer or enter the body of an enemy.
By the side of the ghost, therefore, stands the sorcerer, who is at
once the master and the minister of the spirit-world.
With the progress of civilisation an organised body of sorcerers
necessarily grows up. But an organised body of sorcerers also
implies an organised body of spirits, and an organised system
(^232) By assimilation En-lil became El-lil (and Ul-lil) in one of the Sumerian
dialects (WAI.v. 37. 21). Hence the Illinos (for which Illillos must be read) of
Damascius.