The Demons of Ancient Mesopotamia, Part 1

So last week we talked all about spooky trains, about locomotive horror stories, ghost trains, and the phenomenon of the Victorian railway madness. Today, we are beginning a new series on the demons and monsters of ancient Mesopotamian religion because they had some really exquisite demons, and as a concrete example to kick things off today, I wanted to start

by talking about a specific ancient artifact. For my money, one of the creepiest looking artifacts from all of antiquity, and that is a mask of Humbaba.

is a baked clay disc picting a hideous face. It's roughly three point three inches in height and in width, and it was produced during the Old Babylonian period between about eighteen hundred and sixteen hundred BCE. It was excavated by the nineteenth century Assyrian archaeologist Hormuz Ressam from the site of the ancient Babylonian city of Sipper, which is on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in modern day Iraq. Today, this artifact is held in the collection

of the British Museum. Now, this sculpture is absolutely worth looking up if you are able, but if not, I'm gonna do my best to describe it. The mask shows a humanoid face frozen in a pitiless grimace. It's got the teeth clenched. The head is rounded in shape with bulges in the outline of the head where the ears

would be, and it has wide, blank, empty gray eyes. Now, I know, in some cases these ancient Mesopotamians stay statues and sculptures would have been painted, and the paint has simply weathered away over the years, which is the reason some of these ancient statues have such unsettling blank eyes, just these empty, cloudy pools of stone with no pupil or iris. I don't know if that's the case with this clay sculpture or if this is the way it

was always intended to look. Either way, the state in which it has arrived to us in modernity is extremely unsettling looking. But I think the most interesting detail about it I haven't gotten to yet, and that is the

texture of the flesh. The entire surface of this monstrous face is molded with a pattern like a labyrinth, so it's you have a long, single thick line like a rope folded over and over upon itself to form every part of this head, the hair, the forehead, the ears, the nose, the cheeks, and the double rows of clenched killer teeth. I think you can even see where the coil is supposed to be at its midpoint, you know where it folds over on itself. It's at the left

side of the mouth, where the jaws open. Yeah.

and Gilgamesh's companion in Kidu. In Gilgamesh, Humbaba is described as a giant, terrifying humanoid creature assigned by the god in Leal, the lord of Winds, to be the guardian of the Cedar forest, and, according to the Stephanie Dally translation of Gilgamesh, This is in Tablet two. Humbaba is meant to be quote the terror of the people, Humbaba, whose shout is the flood weapon, whose utterance is fire,

and whose breath is death. And we're told that Humbaba can hear a rustling of branches in his forest from sixty leagues away. So who would dare walk inside the forbidden pines? Now, even though we've talked about Humbaba before, I do think we probably want to come back and talk about him some more. We might get into some more depth in part two of this series, but specifically in the context of this clay mask from ancient Sipper, there is a question about the way that it looks.

What is the deal with the labyrinthine design on the face is? Why is it represented as a horrific face with these deep wrinkles. The prune face look and the wrinkles seem to be formed out of a folded rope. There is an answer to this. We know conclusively why it looks that way. The rope that makes the face is not a rope. There is a cuneiform inscription on the reverse side of the mask which tells us this inscription is written by the hand of Warad Marduk, a diviner,

son of Kubarum, also a diviner. And what the diviner says is, according to the British Museum's translation quote, if the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huawa. This is an omen of Sargon who ruled the land. Oh man, oh yeah. And then there's a part with some text missing, but it says if and then there's an illision, the house of a man will expand, so

it's saying the coils of a colon. This horrifying mask is supposed to represent the piled up intestines of a slaughtered animal, which have been used in tons of cultures all throughout history as a stimulus for divination, meaning that a diviner could read signs of the future and gain access to privileged information by looking at the guts of a slaughtered animal, sometimes at the liver as well, or

sometimes the intestines. In this case, I believe the animal is supposed to be a sheep, but you know, in various usages you would get different animals, might be a sheep or a goat, or an ox or so forth. In this particular case, the inscription suggests that if the diviner sees entrails that coil to represent the face of Humbaba. This is an omen of maybe successful conquest or expanding power,

or the expansion of one's house. So according to a book we were both consulting called Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia and Illustrated Dictionary. This is by a couple of scholars named Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, British Museum Press, nineteen ninety two. According to this book, the face of Huawa seen by a diviner typically means revolution in the state, which I guess doesn't sound so great

if you are currently the king. And a lot of times these divinations would be given to a powerful person, recorded as given to a powerful person such as a king. But the authors also suggest there some evidence that clay masks representing the face of Humbaba were hung up on walls, maybe in palaces and temples as charms to ward off evil.

So as terrifying as this kind of face looks, masks like this may have been thought to have the power to ward off evil rather than bring it, which is what we today call apotropaic magic, protective or warding off magic.

The same statue also shows up two different times in the movie Legend, just in the background or in the foreground.

old Reagan McNeil. And this is the story in the original nineteen seventy one novel by William Peter Blattie, and it's carried over into the nineteen seventy three film adaptation directed by William Friedkin. Though in the original novel and movie, the demon does not run around saying I am Pazzuzu.

You get more of that in like The Exorcist to the Heretic, I think, which is, you know, there's a kind of downgrading of some of the subtleties of the original in that, but the connection with Pazuzu is established primarily through a prologue in the film in which the Catholic priest Lancaster Marrin is This is the character who ultimately leads and performs the exorcism rights in the third act of the movie, he's working at an archaeological dig

in Iraq, and in multiple contexts you see him encounter a state of a frightening, monstrous creature from ancient times. And one thing I always liked about The Exorcist is that the meaning of this confrontation is never made too explicit, so it doesn't get corny. We don't get Maren facing off against it at the beginning and saying, you know, giving some monologue like you are evil, Pazuzu, I must defeat you. You know that you don't get a direct

address till towards the end of the film. Instead, there is just this vague, powerful sense of dread that the entity depicted in these ancient artworks is somehow present now and is powerful, and its shadow has somehow fallen over our lives now. Of course, while I love The Exorcist, you know it's a great horror movie. In the modern world, you shouldn't go to the Exorcist to understand what an

entity like Pazuzu originally was and originally meant. In The Exorcist, Pazuzu is rendered as a demon in the modern Christians sense of the word, meaning a malevolent spirit, a minion of Satan which can possess the bodies of innocent humans and use them to Satanic ends. So this is a Christian demon, specifically a demon as imagined by a twentieth century Catholic author. But this leads to the question, what was Pazuzu in his original time and place. Does it

make sense to call him a demon? And if it does, should we at least modify our understanding of the English word demon a little bit for the purpose of the discussion, Maybe a little bit less the Catholic William Peter Bladdie demon and maybe more a demon in the broader Greek sense of the term.

so forth. You might also well think of the name of various names from Christian demonology, particularly those that crossed over out of theology and into popular culture for everything from horror movies to rock music. And again many of these given names, Many of these entities were appropriated from other cultures and faiths, some transformed into Christian demons, and in their original context were considered gods or some other

spiritual entities. And yet at the same time, even in discussing mythic, legendary and folkloric entities, either casually or even from like from the level of scholarship and academia, the word demon is often used instantly provides a starting point from which to potentially understand perhaps a foreign concept or

a creature or entity in another tradition you know. And you see this with other words as well, like you'll frequently if you're reading about, say, Chinese mythology and Chinese legend and law, you might read about goblins or trolls. You might read about ogres in Japanese lore and so forth.

You know, there's certain types of monsters, types of figures, types of imaginary beings that seem largely universal, and when you get into the particulars, yes, things change a bit, but in general you can often safely say, well, this is a demon from this particular faith. There's still a lot of room for error, and there is a lot of error out there when you look into especially like historic understandings of some of these entities. So yeah, we can throw out the word demon, and we can strike

close to the truth. We can strike close to perhaps the original intended meaning here. And as such we can loosely think of demons as as the following evil supernatural spirits or beings of some sort that were never human, are not mortal, and yet exist beneath the status of gods and sometimes demi gods. They are often conceived as punishers in the afterlife, though they're also frequently seen as spreaders of sin, disease, death, and temptation in the world

of the living. In Christian traditions, they are often described as fallen angels, followers of the rebel angel Lucifer now Satan, the ruler of Hell, and in other traditions they may seem at times more part of a cosmic order than

agents in rebellion against said order. But even then you'll still find room in such tradition systems for a notion of something that is seen as an agent of misfortune or temptation out there working in the world, something that is an enemy of mortal men and may be working outside of the graces of the divine. Now, the word itself in English demon derives from the Greek demos, which could be benevolent or malevolent. Like in the Greek tradition, this could be a good supernatural being or a bad

supernatural being. Just because it was demos, just because it was a demon in this context doesn't mean it's necessarily evil and out to get you.

and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. The authors here point out that the word demon works as an a is an approximate translation of a couple of different terms that refer to both good and evil spirits, so very much in the Greek sense of the word demon. These terms are in Akkadian rabisu and in Sumerian moscin, both of which again can refer to good and or evil spirits. I've also seen more head on translations that define the rabisu

as lurker and moscum as deputy or attorney. The authors point out that during the Neo Assyrian period, roughly what nine twelve through six O nine BCE, there were spells that basically said evil rabisu, please see yourself out. Good Rubisu come on in. So you'd see a lot of this sort of thing, like you want the good demons, you don't want the bad demons, but you're not just like no demons allowed, Like yes, of course the good demons can come in.

the length of his biceps, his arm. One arm says get out, evil demon, and the other one says, come in, good demon. And I was actually reading in another book, a book called Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia by the French historian Jean Botero. This is translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, and Boto argues that there really was no word in any of the ancient Mesopotamian languages that meant specifically demon in the way we use it, like specifically categorizing the

class of evil harmful spirits. Instead, these evil harmful spirits would be referred to sort of by their individual names rather than as a class of types of beings. And as far as classes of beings, you would just have this larger like, yeah, you got spirits and they could be good or bad.

specific entities. But they stress that the term demon is generally applied to any entity that is an upright human body and also has like hybrid creature elements, while full on animal combinations or something like on all fours, those are considered monsters. So, for instance, across between a lion and a duck, that would be a monster. A cross between a lion, duck and a human like where it's more or less humanoid shape, that would be a demon.

some of them under most circumstances. Though, as we've discussed already and will continue to discuss, there are cases where you really want to show that horrid face in full detail, otherwise it might endanger you to create their image. You know, you don't want to. You don't want to summon the demon into your presence, even if you were discussing it

or ultimately using it to ward off something else. But also it seems like sometimes you need an image of the demon if you are trying to ward it off. So I guess it comes down to the basic idea that visual depictions and symbolic depictions of these entities is powerful, and it can be powerful in a way that helps deter them, or it can be powerful in a way that attracts them. But they write that quote in some cases, descriptions of their appearances are so vague and inconsistent as

to suggest they were not well established. So that's the other side of the coin. It just might be well, it's not really you know, there's not really a canon for how this particular entity looked or even how it behaved. You know, we might think about in our own like pop culture world, in our own like urban legend world, you have a general idea what I mean, you have a very clear idea what some entities look like. Like Jason Vorhees. Yeah, you know what he looks like. You've

seen it in various films. There's shifts and how he's depicted, but there's there are a number of elements that need to be in place. Meanwhile, something like I don't know Bloody Mary, it seems a bit more vague, like I don't know if there's a particular canon as to how she is supposed to look.

does the horror come from? Because you know, when a monster is, like say, represented in a movie, you know what that movie representation looks like and you can picture it. But when there's a monster that is you don't even get a very clear physical description. Where is the horror based? What is it you're imagining?

that doesn't originate in a visual medium. I think if I think back on entities, unreal entities that I had varying degrees of fear of as a child, well, I can think of the Boogieyman, and I can think of gray aliens like the kind that you know are going to potentially kidnap you and probe you and so forth, And there's more of a definite idea of what a gray looks like, whereas the Boogieman, Yes, there are I mean, the big Boogeyman is sometimes depicted in certain ways, like

I remember there being a way that the real Ghostbuster's cartoon depicted the Boogieman. But for the most part, the Boogeyman is up for grabs. There's no definite way that it looks, but the fear of it. Certainly when you're young can still be palpable.

at least useful for our protection. And you know, I guess this under the line is an important reality that we have discussed in the past and the show, and that is that religion and belief transform and evolve. Over time, New ideas emerge, foreign ideas enter into a different region or a different belief system. Things change, and it impacts the exact form and function of various fantastic entities and creatures,

sometimes utterly transforming them. And this is especially the case here today because we're ultimately considering the passage of thousands of years here, and we're not only talking about like subtle changes in belief or Okay, well, this god becomes a little more popular, this demon becomes a little more popular. Sometimes we're talking about the emergence of groundbreaking new concepts and how people considered their place in the cosmos and

the structure and function of the unseen world. Now. Black and Green proposed a simplified five phase chronology for the development of gods and demons in ancient Mesopotamia. And I'm going to roll through it here real quick, because I feel like it's you may get lost in some of the dates here and the different periods, but I think the overall flow is important, all right. So first up is the formative phase.

fourteenth through eleventh centuries BCE. The human centric imagery of the Old Babylonian period gives way to mostly animal headed hybrids. And then finally we get the demonic phase. And as the name implies, this is the period during which quote individual evil demons were depicted in their full horror in Neo Assyrian and neo Babylonian art. And it's interesting too that they point out that this demonic phase lines up with the emergence of a new first millennium BCE theological model,

that of a demonically populated hell. This is of course key, the key theological invention because it foreshadows, you know, the medieval Christian image of a demonic afterlife. It also mirrors the various hell realms of Buddhism and Hinduism, and it essentially like adds this entirely different realm to one's understanding of the unseen world.

big heavenly celebration. There are a lot of dangers and entities out there, but it's also a realm of great possibility. So a person of means and power and magical ability could potentially translate all of that over into their next life in the field of reeds.

of this region. So almost every aspect of life they write was likely quite harsh compared to ancient Egypt, and this colored an equally harsh view of the afterlife. So immortality that's for the gods. Mortal man, however, is just doomed to die, passing on only into a shadowy realm, where in Sumerian traditions, the shades of the dead consume only the ashes, and in a serio Babylonian traditions, the grim afterlife is the domain of demons and monsters black

and green. Right that Eventually traditions and belief systems developed by which you can affect your arrival and status in the afterlife or that of a loved one via proper burial. But earlier on it was probably either based around a cult of the dead, via which you might you know, communicate with deceased family members, or it was just a means of preventing their spirits from haunting you after they've died.

But yeah, especially early on, there's not this sense that, oh, we need to talk to Grandma or communicate with Grandma, or have offerings for Grandma to make sure she's doing okay. Like, no, there's not really any doing okay in this afterlife. It's a world of ash and shadow. But we don't want Grandma to come back from the realm of ash and shadow and start haunting us. Things are bad enough here, we don't need her here as well.

and original significance. The various gods, demons and monsters involved were brought together into a fairly restricted visual series of this time, and for the first time they came to be treated as a group in mythological narratives. So you know, demonic avengers assembled.

known as La mache To. So I've looked up lamache To in one of my favorite sources for entities like this, spirits, fairies, Lepricaus, and Goblins and Encyclopedia by folklorist Carol Rose, and she describes lamache To as the Babylonian demoness of disease and describes depictions as often being that of a woman stripped to the waist suckling a pig and a dog, with a comb and a spinning worl in each hand, representing the gendered tasks of wife and mother, these being the

core targets of her wrath because she is a demon that attacks pregnant women and new mothers, bringing death and disease, particularly to infants. She is a daughter of the sky god, but according to Black and Green, she seems to be operating she's seldom to be operating outside of the domain of the gods, so she's not doing evil because she has been ordered to. She's doing it for her own purposes, perhaps for her own delight, like she's just pure chaotic evil,

I guess. Black and Green likewise describe her based on depictions as a humanoid creature with the head of a lion, teeth of a donkey, naked human breasts, a hairy body, blood stained hands, long fingers and nails, and taloned bird like feet. Her animal she has like a siventure animal, and she rides this animal. It is the donkey, and she sometimes holds a snake in each hand as well, and she also has a boat to travel through the underworld.

She's also sometimes depicted with donkey ears, as are other entities in Mesopotamian myth and it's less scary it does it does to us outsiders, and apparently this has caused various translations to change donkey ears to lion ears when when this entity has been taken into other cultures and regions. But the authors suspect that at the time and to the target audience, it was seen as a fitting animal to invoke with such a demon, as the wild donkey

was held to be swift footed. So I guess in the regional context, like what is like the fastest animal to traverse a rough terrain, it would perhaps be the wild donkey, and therefore it is a fitting creature for a swift demon to ride in iconography.

with a human head. But no, La mache Too is a being of intense darkness and one that again is seeming to act independently of the gods, flicks harm on

mortals for her own purposes. It's not part of a divinely orchestrated punishment system, and so we attribute to her cases of miscarriage, cases of infant mortality related illnesses that may be affecting pregnant women or new mothers, and it's said that what is happening is that she'll slip into a woman's room at night, a pregnant woman's room, and touch her stomach seven times to kill the child inside her other times and another telling she just straight up

like steals children in the night. And she is also sometimes depicted as bringing disease to men as well, So she is I guess equal an equal opportunity offender in that department. So she is an enemy to all mortals, and she is an enemy most vitally to not only our generation but the next generation, like she is like a dire threat to the enterprise of humanity.

but again it kind of creates this X shape behind him. Yeah, he has a dog like face, taloned feet, bulging eyes, scaly body, and if you look closely, there's also a snake headed penis there. He generally has the right hand held up as if you know, in pledging something, and the left hand is down, and sometimes there's a scorpion's tail as well.

lamashe tou. He has often depicted driving her and her donkey steed back into the underworld, and these images might be displayed in the home as a part of a protective plaque, and then you also have amulets of Pazuzu's head that could be worn, it seems, by pregnant women. So you would actually wear the horrific like dog like uh, you know, gorgon face of the zuzu on your body to keep lamash Tou from get close to you and reaching out to you and touching you seven times with their awful hand.

Judy Dinch and the Chronicles of Riddick. You know, she says, in normal times, evil would be fought by good, but in times like these, well it should be fought by another kind of evil.

he can also seem to control to some extent. I don't know if he's straight up controlling them or he is just like the roughest, toughest of the bunch and he can beat them into submission in the same way that like Godzilla is the king of monsters, not because there's like a detailed hierarchy, but because he can whip all the other ones.

they have some images of Pazuzu in their collection. They point out that he was associated with the cold winds that blew into present day Iraq from the Zagros Mountains on the border with present day Iran, though they also stretched into southeastern Turkey. These mountains and these winds were thought to carry pestilence. These mountain regions had long been

inhabited by humans from very early times. They were also known to have been Neanderthals that lived there at one point, and in fact, the earliest known human remains in Mesopotamia, or at least at one point. The earliest known human remains in Mesopotamia were excavated in Shaannadar Cave in the Zagros mountains, according to Black and Green in their nineteen ninety two book, But Yeah, Bazuzu is often depicted as climbing mountains in order to engage in battle against other demons,

particularly other wind demons. But who knows what kind of demon Bazuzu might battle. You might be able to to convince him to do battle against an evil demon that is coming after you. Now, it's interesting to note that when we look at some of these Pazuzu amulets, but you know that would be worn by a pregnant woman that has the face of Bazuzu, and it's all about

keeping La Machhetu away from you. If you you flip them over, you would see that they would also have inscriptions of like straight up benevolent gods on the back, the side that's facing you, that's touching your chest. Perhaps because again, Pazuzu is not your friend. He is a very dangerous wind demon, you know, master of evil winds, and at the end of the day, he's not something you want to mess with. You don't want his attention

to fall back on you. And so you know, it's like you want to keep the face of that ambulant pointing out to where your enemy may may come from, but you don't want it looking in at you. You don't want to somehow manifest his rage at you.

he can do this job for you. But you know you're making a deal with a ultimately a pretty dangerous and unsavory character, so you got to be careful. Yeah, but at least he's not the Empire, you know. So again, you know, I can't help but think Pazuzu is done dirty to a certain extent in The Exorcist. You know, I don't know, I'm not prepared to do like a full analysis of how Pazuzu would behave in the Exorcist and or of another demon would be more fitting for

the role. But yeah, it seems like if you knew how to manage your use of Pazuzu and your invocation of Pazuzu, you could very much use him to protect yourself.

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