The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

330 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

be herded together in the indistinguishable crowd of spirits of
heaven and earth that formed the angel-hosts of the gods of light,
or else be transformed into demons in the train of Tiamât, the
impersonation of chaos. Some of them might be set apart as
the special servants and messengers of the gods, and occupy
the place of archangels in the celestial hierarchy. But it was
also possible to call in the aid of cosmology, and turn them into
elemental powers representing successive stages in the history of
creation. They thus continued to belong to that inchoate period of
Babylonian religion when as yet the Semitic gods had not come
into existence, and at the same time they could be identified
with those gods in the exercise of their creative power. In the
language of later metaphysic, they thus became the successive
thoughts of the creator realising themselves in the successive
acts of the creation, like the æons of Gnosticism which emanate
one from the other as the realised thoughts of God. The idea is
doubtless a late one, and belongs to an age of philosophy; but it
represents an attempt to grapple with the difficulties presented
by the opposing Sumerian and Semitic elements in Babylonian
religion, and to reconcile them together. It presupposes that
identification of one god with another which the solar cult and
the Semitic conception of the goddess had made possible, and
so takes us one step further in the direction of monotheism.
The divine or superhuman beings of the Sumerian creed are not
merely identified with a particular god, but are even transformed
[361] into the male and female principles which his government of the
world or the act of creation compels him to exhibit in concrete
form.^286
Before Babylonian theosophy could arrive thus far, two things
were necessary. The gods had to be arranged in a divine
hierarchy, and the identification of one with the other had to
become possible. The hierarchical arrangement followed from

(^286) See, for example,WAI.ii. 54. 3Obv.4-14, 4. 37-45.