The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

320 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

whom he adopted as his son; the sun-god who rises between the
twin mountains of the dawn steps forth as a human giant to run
his course; and Istar is a woman in mind and thought as well
as in outward form. There are no animal gods in Babylonia,
no monstrous combinations of man and beast such as meet us
in the theology of Egypt. Not but that such combinations were
known to the Babylonians. But they belonged to the primeval
world of chaos; they were the brood of Tiamât, the dragon of
lawlessness and night, the demons who had been banished into
outer darkness beyond the world of light and of god-fearing men.
Like the devils of medieval belief, they were the divine beings
of an alien faith which the gods of the new-comers had exiled
to the limbo of a dead past. Even the subterranean Hades of
Semitic Babylonia recognised them not. The gods worshipped
by the Semite were Baalim or“Lords,”like the men whom they
protected, and whose creators they were believed to be.
Wherever the pure Semite is found, this belief in the
anthropomorphic character of the deity is found also. Perhaps it is
connected with that distinguishing characteristic of his grammar
which divides the world into the masculine and the feminine, the
male and the female. At any rate the Semite made his god in
the likeness of men, and taught, conversely, that men had been
[350] made in the likeness of the gods. The two beliefs are but the
counter sides of the same shield; the theomorphic man implies
an anthropomorphic god. The god, in fact, was but an amplified
man with amplified human powers; his shape was human, so too
were his passions and his thoughts. Even the life that was in
man was itself the breath of the god. That man was not immortal
like the gods, was but an accident; he had failed to eat of the
food of immortality or to drink of the waters of life, and death
therefore reigned in this lower world. The gods themselves might
die; Tammuz, the spouse of Istar, had been slain by the boar's
tusk of angry summer, and carried into the realm of Hades,^268

(^268) The origin and nature of Tammuz have been investigated in my Hibbert