The Lords of the Ghostland Part 4

[Footnote 23: Delitzch: Babel und Bibel.]

Other texts show that a t.i.tle of Bel was Masu, a word that letter for letter is the same as the Hebrew Mosheh or Moses.[24]

[Footnote 24: Records of the Past, i. 91.]

It is in this way that Sargon and Khammurabi fuse. Meanwhile the t.i.tle Masu, or hero, was not confined to Bel. It was given also to Marduk, the tutelary G.o.d of Babylon, from whom local monotheism proceeded.

That monotheism, in appearance relatively modern, actually was archaic. The Chaldean savants knew of but one really existing G.o.d. To them, all others were his emanations. The deus exsuperantissimus was represented by a single stroke of the reed, a sign that in its vagueness left him formless and incommunicable, therefore unwors.h.i.+pable, hence without a temple, unless Bab-ili, Babylon, the Gate of G.o.d, may be so construed.

The name of the deity, fastidiously concealed from the vulgar, was, in English, One. Not after, or beneath, or above, but before him, a trinity swung like a screen. From it, for pendant, another trinity dangled. From the latter fell a third. Below these glories were the coruscations of an entire nation of inferior G.o.ds. The latter, as well as the former, all of them, were but the fireworks of One. He alone was. The rest, like Makhir, were G.o.ds of dream. To the savants, that is; to the magi and seers. To the people the sidereal triads and planetary divinities throned in the Silver Sky augustly real, equally august, and in that celestial equality remained, until Khammurabi gave precedence to Bel, who as Marduk, Bel or Baal Marduk, Lord Marduk, became supreme.

Before Bel, then, the other G.o.ds faded as the Elohim did before Jahveh, with the possible difference that there were more to fade--sixty-five thousand, a.s.surnatsipal, in an inscription, declared.

Over that army Bel-Marduk acquired the t.i.tle, perhaps significant, of Bel-Kissat, Lord of Hosts. Yet it was less as a usurper than as an absorber that the ascension was achieved. Bel but mounted above his former peers and from the superior height drew their attributes to himself. It was sacrilege none the less. As such it alienated the clergy and enraged the plebs. Begun under Khammurabi and completed under Nabonidos, it was the reason why, during the latter's reign, orthodox Babylon received Cyrus not as a foe but a friend.

From the spoliation, meanwhile, no nebulousness resulted. Bel was distinctly anthropomorphic. His earthly plaisance was the Home of the Height, a seven-floored mountain of masonry, a rainbow pyramid of enamelled brick. At the top was a dome. There, in a glittering chamber, on a dazzling couch, he appeared. Elsewhere, in the vermillion recesses of a neighbouring chapel, that winged bulls guarded and frescoed monsters adorned, once a year he also appeared, and, above the mercy seat, on an alabaster throne, sat, or was supposed to sit, contemplating the tablets of destiny, determining when men should die.

To the Greeks, the future lay in the lap of the G.o.ds. To the Babylonians the G.o.ds alone possessed it, as alone also they possessed the present and the past. They had all time as all men have their day.

That day was here and it was brief. Death was a descent to Aralu, the land whence none return, a region of the underworld, called also Shualu, where the departed were nourished on dust. Dust they were and to dust they returned.

Extinction was not a punishment or even a reward, it was a law.

Punishment was visited on the transgressor here, as here also the piety of the righteous was rewarded. When death came, just and unjust fared alike. The Aryan and Egyptian belief in immortality had no place in this creed, and consequently it had none either in Israel, where Sheol was a replica of Shualu. To the Semites of Babylonia and Kanaan, the G.o.ds alone were immortal, and immortal beings would be G.o.ds. Man could not become divine while his deities were still human.

Exceptionally, exceptional beings such as Gilgames and Adra-Khasis might be translated to the land of the Silver Sky, as Elijah was translated to heaven, but otherwise the only mortals that could reach it were kings, for a king, in becoming sovereign, became, _ipso facto_, celestial. As such, ages later, Alexander had himself wors.h.i.+pped, and it was in imitation of his apotheosis that the subsequent Caesars declared themselves G.o.ds. Yet precisely as the latter were man-made deities, so the Babylonian Baalim were very similar to human kings.

For their hunger was cream, oil, dates, the flesh of ewe lambs. For their nostrils was the perfume of prayers and of psalms; for their pa.s.sions the virginity of girls. Originally the first born of men were also given them, but while, with higher culture, that sacrifice was abolished, the sacred harlotry, over which Ishtar presided, remained.

Judaism omitted to incorporate that, but in Kanaan, which Babylonia profoundly influenced, it was general and, though reviled by Israel, was tempting even, and perhaps particularly, to Solomon.[25]

[Footnote 25: 1 Kings xi. 5. "Solomon went after Ashtoreth."]

The latter's temple was similar to Bel's, from which the Hebraic ritual, terms of the Law, the Torah itself, may have proceeded, as, it may be, the Sabbath did also. On a tablet recovered from the library of a.s.surbanipal it is written: "The seventh day is a fast day, a lucky day, a sabbatuv"--literally, a day of rest for the heart.[26]

[Footnote 26: Cuneiform Insc. W. A. ii. 32.]

In Aralu that day never ceased; the dead there, buried, Herodotos said, in honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead to the earth, dead to the Silver Sky. Yet though that was an article of faith, through a paradox profoundly poetic, there was a belief equally general, in ghosts, in hobgoblins, in men with the faces of ravens, in others with the bodies of scorpions, and in the post-mortem persistence of girls that died pure.

These latter, in searching for someone whom they might seduce, must have afterward wandered into the presence of St. Anthony. Perhaps, too, it was they who, as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of monks.

Yet, in view of Ishtar, they could not have been very numerous in Babylon where, however, they had a queen, Lilit, the Lilith of the _Talmud_, Adam's vampire wife, who conceived with him shapes of sin.

In these also the Babylonians believed, and navely they represented them in forms so revolting that the sight of their own image alarmed them away.

From these shapes or, more exactly, from sin itself, it was very properly held that all diseases came. Medicine consequently was a branch of religion. The physician was a priest. He asked the patient: Have you shed your neighbour's blood? Have you approached your neighbour's wife? Have you stolen your neighbour's garment? Or is it that you have failed to clothe the naked? According to the responses he prescribed.[27]

[Footnote 27: IV. R. 50-53. _Cf._ Delitzch: _op. cit._]

But the priest who was a physician was also a wizard. He peeped and muttered, or, more subtly, provided enchanted philters in which simples had been dissolved. These devices failing, there was a series of incantations, the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, in which the most potent conjuration was the incommunicable name. To that all things yielded, even the G.o.ds.[28] But like the Shem of the Jews, it was probably never wholly uttered, because, save to the magi, not wholly known. In the formulae of the necromancers it is omitted, though in practice it may have been p.r.o.nounced.

[Footnote 28: Lenormant: La Magie chez les Chaldeens.]

Even that is doubtful. A knowledge of it conferred powers similar to those that have been attributed to the Christ, and which the Sadducees ascribed to his knowledge of the tetragrammation. A knowledge of the Babylonian Shem was as potent. It served not only men but G.o.ds.

Ishtar, for purposes of her own, wanted to get into Aralu. In the recovered epic of her descent, imperiously she demanded entrance:

Porter, open thy door.

Open thy door that I may enter.

If thou dost not open thy door, I will attack it, I will break down the bars, I will cause the dead to rise and devour the living.[29]

[Footnote 29: Records of the Past.]

Ishtar was admitted. But Aralu was the land whence none return. Once in, she could not get out until, ultimately, the incommunicable name was uttered. The epic says that, in the interim, there was on earth neither love nor loving. In possible connection with which incantations have been found, deprecating "the consecrated harlots with rebellious hearts that have abandoned the holy places."[30]

[Footnote 30: Lenormant: _op. cit._]

In addition to the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, there was the _Illumination of Bel_, an encyclopaedia of astrology in seventy-two volumes which the suburban library of Borsippa contained. During the captivity many Jews must have gone there. In the large light halls they were free to read whatever they liked, religion, history, science, the romance of all three. The books, catalogued and numbered, were ranged on shelves. One had but to ask. The service was gratis.

Babylon, then, prismatic and learned, was the most respectable place on earth. For ten thousand years man had there consulted the stars.

But though respectable, it was also equivocal. During a period equally long--or brief--the girls of the city had loosed their girdles for Ishtar and yielded themselves to anyone, stranger or neighbour, that asked. In the service of the G.o.ddess their brothers occasionally feigned that they too were girls. Meanwhile, from the summit of a seven-floored pyramid, mortals contemplated the divine.

Beneath was cosmopolis, the golden cup that, in the words of Jeremiah, made the whole world drunk. Seated immensely on the twin banks of the Euphrates--banks that bridges above and tunnels beneath interjoined--Babylon more nearly resembled a walled nation than a fortified town. Within the gates, in an enclosure ample and n.o.ble, a s.p.a.ce that exceeded a hundred square miles, an area sufficient for Paris quintupled, observatories and palaces rose above the roar of human tides that swept in waves through the wide boulevards, surged over the quays, flooded the gardens, eddied through the open-air lupanar, circled among statues of G.o.ds and bulls, poured out of the hundred gates, or broke against the polychrome walls and seethed back in the avenues, along which, to the high flourishes of military bands, pa.s.sed armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, cloaked bedouins, Kelts in bearskins, priests in spangled dresses, tiara'd princes, burdened slaves, kings discrowned, furtive forms--prost.i.tutes, pederasts, human wolves, vermin, sheep--the flux and reflux of the gigantic city.

In that ocean, the captive Jews, if captive they were, rolled, lost as a handful of salt spilt in the sea. Yet, from the depths, a few had swum up and, filtering adroitly, had reached the dignity of high place. One was pontiff. Others were viceroys. In addition to being pontiff, Daniel was chancellor of the realm. Ezra was rector of the university. As pontiff of a college of wizards, Daniel may have known the future. As Minister of Wisdom, Ezra may have known, what is quite as difficult, the past. For the moment there was but the present. Over it ruled Belshazzar.

Yet, ruler though he was, there were powers potenter than his own: Baalim, outraged at the elevation of a parvenu G.o.d; a priesthood consequently disaffected; and, without, at the gates, the foe.

It would have been interesting to have a.s.sisted at the final festival when, beneath cyclopean arches, in the sunlight of cl.u.s.tered candelabra, amid the glitter of gold and white teeth, among the fair sultanas that were strewn like flowers through the throne-room of the imperial court, Belshazzar lay, smiling, amused rather than annoyed at the impudent menace of Cyrus.

Babylon was impregnable. He knew it. But the subtle Jews, the indignant G.o.ds, the alienated priests to whom the Persian was a redeemer, of these he did not think. Daniel had indeed warned him and, vaguely, he had promised something which he had since forgot.

Beyond, an orchestra was playing. Further yet, columns upheld a ceiling so lofty that it was lost. On the adjacent wall was a frieze of curious and chimerical beasts. Belshazzar was looking at them. In their dumb stupidity was a suggestion of the foe. The suggestion amused. Smiling still he raised a cup. Abruptly, before it could reach his lips, it fell with a clatter on the lapis lazuli of the floor beneath. Before him, on that wall, beneath those beasts, the necromancy of the priesthood had projected an armless, fluidic hand that mounted, descended, tracing with a forefinger the three luminous hierograms of his doom.

The story, a little drama, was, with the tale concerning Nebuchadnezzar, that of Daniel, and other novels quite as strange, evolved long later in the wide leisures of Jerusalem. The fluidic hand did not appear. Even had it zigzagged there was no Belshazzar to frighten.

Only the doom was real. Cyrus was clothed with it. To the trumpetings of heralds and the sheen of angels' wings, triumphantly he came. Then, presently, by royal decree, the Jews, manumitted and released, retraced their steps, burdened with spoil; with the lore of two distinct civilizations, which, fusing in the great square letters of the Pentateuch, was to become the poetry of all mankind.

Babylon, ultimately, with her goblin G.o.ds and harlot G.o.ddess, sank into her own Aralu. Nourished there on dust, Lilit, with the sister vampires of eternal night, fed on her.

V

JEHOVAH

A camel's-hair tent set in the desert was the first cathedral, the earliest cloister of latest ideals. Set not in one desert merely but in two, in the infinite of time as well as in that of s.p.a.ce, there was about it a limitlessness in which the past could sleep, the future awake, and into which all things, the human, the divine, G.o.ds and romance, could enter.

The human came first. Then the G.o.ds. Then romance. The divine was their triple expansion. It was an after growth, in other lands, that tears had watered. In the desert it was unimagined. Only the G.o.ds had been conceived.

The G.o.ds were many and yet but one. Though plural they were singular.

The subjects of impersonal verbs, they represented the p.r.o.noun in such expressions as: it rains; it thunders. "It" was Elohim. Already among nomad Semites monotheism had begun. Yet with this distinction. Each tribe had separate sets of Its that guided, guarded, and scourged.

Omnipresent but not omnipotent, any humiliation to the family that they had in charge humiliated them. It made them angry, therefore vindictive, consequently unjust. It may be that they were not very ethical. Perhaps the bedouins were not either. Man fas.h.i.+ons his G.o.d in proportion to his intelligence. That of the nomad was slender. He lacked, what the Aryan shepherd possessed, the ability for mythological invention. The defect was due to his speech, which did not lend itself to the deification of epithets. Even had it done so, it is probable that his mode of life would have rendered the paraphernalia of polytheism impossible. People constantly moving from place to place could not be c.u.mbered with idols. The Elohim were, therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatrous monotheism a necessity which the absence of vehicles imposed. On the other hand, given every facility, it is presumable that the result would have been the same. Mythology is the mother of poetry. Idolatry is the father of art. Neither could appeal to a people to whom delicacy was an unknown G.o.d. Had it been known and a fetish, they could not have become the practical people that they are. Even then they were shrewd. Their Elohim might alarm but never delude. Israel was uncheatable even in dream.