The Gifts of the Jews

by Thomas Cahill

  But let us approach the sacred precincts of the Moon, the apparition in the night sky that, more than any other, fascinated ancient peoples. Even today, a policeman in any city on earth will tell you that crime increases under the full moon and that “lunatics”—those who are made demented by the moon (luna in Latin)—are then much more active and troublesome. Midwives and veterinarians are convinced that the full moon induces labor, and, even in the most secular of cities, hospital labor rooms are as overwhelmed with females toiling to bring their young to birth on the night of a full moon as are barns in rural hamlets. Nor can anyone deny the awesome power of attraction that the moon exercises over the tides of ocean and sea, as the great body in the night sky beams its ethereal light on the roiling waters.

  We climb the last steps to the entrance, passing sculptured serpents with glowing eyes of lapis lazuli. We pass the pillared facade of the vestibule and enter the inner courtyard, where we can see dimly, through a series of archways, the distant image of the Moon god, flickering in the lights of hundreds of votive flames. The walls of the courtyard are decorated with cones of red, black, and tan, which create precise geometric patterns—triangles, lozenges, zigzags, and spirals. At last we enter the sanctuary of Nanna-Sin, Moon god of the Sumerians, whose impassive statue now looms above us, rigid and enormous-eyed, its polychrome pupils emptily burning. Behind the statue a monumental moon is frescoed on the wall, surrounded by a slithering snake. Within the orb of the moon a gigantic black spider spreads its spindly legs. As our nostrils take in the pungent clouds of incense, our ears detect a hissing sound: around the feet of Nanna-Sin, pythons, brightly marked with black and orange lozenge patterns, coil and uncoil their scaly bodies in slow motion. We are distracted from Sin’s unyielding visage by a buzz of movement just in front of us, where on a modest waist-high altar of baked brick, surrounded by a swarm of flies, the largest python is devouring the fetus of a donkey, whose blood runs down in rivulets along neatly scooped-out gutters to collection bowls at the altar’s base. Involuntarily, we take a step backward, as the smell of warm blood and entrails combines with the suffocating incense. Gasping for air, we retreat to the courtyard.

  But tonight is the night of the full moon; and, as darkness quickly falls and the moon rises in the heavens, we hear the sounds of hundreds of priestesses, chanting dully and playing primitive pipes and drums. Dressed in elaborate ceremonial garb, they gather solemnly around the terrace on which the temple is built, looking upward to the stepped pyramid beyond the temple, which rises almost in defiance of geometry, almost (it seems) to the sky itself. At the highest platform of this ziggurat (for so the stepped pyramid is called) is a small but glowing altar of lapis lazuli, carved fantastically with snakes and giant spiders, to which an adolescent boy has been bound on his back. He is naked, though his flesh has been decorated in patterns of lozenges and zigzags to resemble the cobra. Priestesses of the highest order, also naked except for their extraordinary rings and spiral bracelets, are massaging the boy with gentle foreplay. As the moonlight illuminates his swelling member, the high priestess appears, as if from nowhere, dressed in a silver garment, which she sheds. Now naked, except for the myriad pearls that decorate her body and the painted spirals that adorn her breasts, she mounts the boy with the assistance of her sisters, who shriek their encouragement in a frenzy that only grows higher as the high priestess rides the boy, at first with rhythmic dignity, then with increasing agitation till her pearls tremble in the moonlight like so many minuscule planets, and the lozenges and spirals glisten, and both bodies, writhing in sweat, appear to be not so much earthly bodies as inhuman forces of the cosmos. All the priestesses, the lowest orders still on the terrace at the ziggurat’s base, the higher orders arranged in ascending importance on the lofty steps of the ziggurat itself, are growing wild and ecstatic. Ripping open their robes and pawing themselves, they bay upward to the event on the ziggurat’s height and to the moon itself.

  At such a moment, unnoticed visitors from another time and place might well grow lightheaded and faint. Let us suppose that by the time we revive, we are alone on a terrace illuminated by the ghostly light of the full moon. We look up at the ziggurat, surmounted by its empty altar of vivid blue, and wonder if we have imagined it all.

  What I have just attempted is a reconstruction which any scholar could fault in one detail or another. The Sumerian temples and ziggurats, exposed to the wear of millennia, are in far worse repair than the tablets; but taking an extant bit of one sacred precinct and combining it with an extant bit of another, I think I have described fairly accurately a possible Temple of the Moon and its accompanying ziggurat. As for the ceremony of the full moon, we really don’t know much about its details, though we do know that ceremonies were conducted throughout Sumer to celebrate the phases of the moon and that they were conducted with high seriousness. We know also that the Moon cult was centered on Ur, Sumer’s usual capital (though the capital moved around depending on which city was dominant at a particular time), and we know that sacred couplings (or “marriages”) were a staple of Sumerian ritual, that there were sacred priest-prostitutes both male and female, and that the en (or high priest) of a temple and the en’s retinue were always the sex opposite to the sex of the god worshiped there. Nanna-Sin, the Sumerian Moon god, was male, so his temple was staffed by priestesses. At Uruk, where Ishtar, the fickle goddess of love, was especially worshiped, her temple was staffed by male priests, and the king himself (as stand-in for Dumuzi) had congress with a sacred female prostitute or priestess (as stand-in for Ishtar) every New Year to ensure the fertility of the kingdom during the planting, growing, and harvest seasons. To this ceremony all the officials of the city bore witness in serried ranks. Whether the Mysteries of the Moon were public (open to the whole population of the city-state) or semiprivate (as I have described) or carried out in extreme privacy, we cannot say. But there is no reason to think that the Sumerians, who liked to picture the water god Enki rampant, supporting an enormous erection while ejaculating the Tigris, were shy about sexual matters; and it may well be that the rite I have described was far more orgiastic and involved multiple couplings and a large cast of both sexes. What I would really like to know more about is the ravished prostitute: was he/she bred to this fate or taken as a battle hostage? After the event was he/she made a permanent part of the temple priesthood or sacrificed like an animal—as the king of Uruk himself may have been, at least in earliest times, in liturgical imitation of the vegetation god Dumuzi? We just don’t know; but we do know that human sacrifice was not beyond the Sumerians, for archaeologists have dug up the burial chambers of dead kings who were entombed with all their family, household, and retinue.

  If we could go backward in time to ancient Sumer, like characters in a Steven Spielberg film, we would find this culture attractive and even titillating, but then alienating and even repulsive, and finally frightening and even dangerous. Human life, seen as a pale reenactment of the life of the eternal heavens, was ruled by a fate beyond the pitifully limited powers of human beings. The gods decided. The figures in the heavens, if interpreted aright by those who had access to secret priestly knowledge and whom the society supported in leisure, could give some indication of what would happen next in earthly affairs. But one’s fate was written in the stars and could not be changed.

  And no figure in the heavens was more important than the moon, that heavenly image of earthly life, which was born, waxed, waned, and died, just as we do, and then returned in new life, just as happens in the earthly realm. But I do not return, do I? This question would have had little meaning in Sumer, even though its great hero Gilgamesh tried to find an answer to the anguish that lies behind the question. There were no rounded individuals in Sumer, just temporary, earthly images of heavenly exemplars, patterns, and paradigms, which is why the two-dimensional characters of Sumerian stories display so little individuality. I do not return, of course, any more than does a stalk of grain. But fields of grain return, and so does hu
man life. This is the reason that the sacred prostitutes, the victims of the rituals, appear so disposable, why we know so little about them or their fate. What did they matter? Their high honor was that they had been chosen to enact the heavenly drama on earth. Like the potent lovers of Ishtar, they had served their purpose.

  Long before the cities of Sumer had risen above the Tigris and Euphrates, long before farming and herding had been thought of, the first earthly beings to look up at the sky with attention and intelligence had thought these thoughts. The perception of the contingent life of earth as a fleeting reflection of the eternal life of the heavens, the insight that the moon especially mirrors our earthly condition of birth, copulation, and personal death—and then regeneration of species—such thoughts express mankind’s original religious experience and form the foundation for all the world’s most ancient religions.

  For some prehistoric cultures the moon was female, for others it was male, but always was it closely associated with the bodies of women, which like the moon progressed through monthly cycles; and these were cycles of fertility, like those of the earth itself, which many cultures believed was made of the same substance as the moon, was even the moon’s child.6

  In order to appreciate the prehistoric worldview, we must start with the limitless sky and the overwhelming impression that its recurring drama, especially in the dreamtime of darkest night (“the nocturnal domain of the mind,” as Eliade calls it), made on primitive people. They wandered an earth sparsely populated by the human species but otherwise teeming with contingent life (and daily reminders of death and regeneration), an earth so obviously coupled with an unattainable and limitless heaven. What their minds saw as self-evidently so were correspondences: women are like the moon and both are like the earth; but women are born and die, whereas the moon lasts forever. The moon is, therefore, the eternal figure of mutability, the exemplar “out there.” Likewise, each of the other heavenly bodies—the sun, the constellations, the constant planets—provides us with some everlasting exemplar of corruptible earthly life, which has its seasons, its predictable deaths, and regenerations. High heaven is the realm of the father god, whose rain fertilizes like sperm. But whereas heaven is the realm of the eternal, earth is the realm of death, the realm not of exemplars but of mortal examples. The seed must die if the wheat is to grow, just as all living things grow out of corruption, just as all future life must begin with the sacrifice of present life, and all earthly life must end in death.

  We may consider naive the absolute confidence of primitive peoples in the rightness of their interpretations of reality. But we should not forget that their sense of correspondence is founded on metaphor (as in a poetic phrase like “the vault of heaven”) and that metaphor is the basis of all language and thought, as it is of all religion. Language almost certainly began as a metaphorical enterprise—probably in the human attempt to mimic certain sounds, so that, for instance, the sounds “ma-ma,” a form of which all languages use for “mother,” began as an imitation of the sucking sound a baby makes at the breast. Deep within each of us, the need for correspondence remains—which is au fond the need to perceive ourselves as belonging to the cosmos. This is why something inside us responds spontaneously to metaphor, the heart of all poetry and, finally, of all language and all meaning. When we hear unexpectedly such a phrase as “The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun” or “My love is like a red, red rose,” we experience a distinctively human thrill, the thrill of hearing language at its most concentrated.

  Perhaps the sky no longer seems, to most of us, a revolving picture of the gods; perhaps it is not, except to those who cast horoscopes, exemplary or predictive of life on earth. But it is still our principal metaphor for limitlessness and transcendence. In a fundamental, ineradicable way, we still see with the eyes of our earliest ancestors and our hearts still quicken to the same things theirs did.

  1 The great goddess of Uruk is named Ishtar in Akkadian (or Old Babylonian), the Semitic language of the text on which this translation is based, but in earlier records—in the Sumerian language—she is called Innana. This change in the names of the gods from Sumerian to Akkadian is not unlike the change that occurs in the transition from the Greek pantheon to the Roman: from Zeus to Jupiter, from Aphrodite to Venus. Throughout this chapter the gods are invoked by their Akkadian names.

  2 In addition to brackets, the translator uses parentheses to indicate where she is making the implicit explicit or engaging in speculative reconstruction.

  3 This civilizing, which only contact with a woman can accomplish, has much in common with the civilizing, brilliantly limned by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel, in which he discerns mythological dimensions in such characters as Aunt Sally in Huckleberry Finn, one of the many “civilizing” women of American literature whom all full-blooded males must escape as they head off for male bonding in the wilderness.

  4 Like all early peoples, the Sumerians delighted in puns and double entendre. This reference to the shadoof technique of irrigation is also a reference to sex.

  5 The discovery of this earlier Sumerian “Noah” in the first attempts to translate cuneiform tablets toward the end of the nineteenth century raised as much anxiety as Darwin did among Victorians, who had assumed that everything in the Bible was without antecedent because it was the “Word of God.”

  6 The theory proposed by Marija Gimbutas and other feminist archaeologists that the Great Mother was the original god of mankind is almost certainly wrong. Heaven and its spectacles were the first objects of devotion and deification. The Earth goddess, though of tremendous importance and always the complement of Heaven, probably came to special prominence with the invention of agriculture.

  TWO

  THE JOURNEY IN THE DARK

  The Unaccountable Innovation

  In the revolving drama of the heavens, primitive peoples saw an immortal, wheel-like pattern that was predictive of mortal life. At the center of this Wheel of Life they found the Hub of Death. The correspondences they discerned between earthly and heavenly realities are pictured in their earliest art—the spirals, zigzags, and lozenges, abounding almost everywhere in the most ancient monuments left to us. The spiral, ever turning, ever beginning again, is the image of the cyclical nature of reality—of the phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, the cycle of a woman’s body, the ever-turning Wheel of birth, copulation, and death. The zigzags sometimes represent lightning, which was associated with the moon, because the moon was thought to control all water and fertility—and lightning precedes a storm. But, most anciently, zigzags are the symbols of flowing water, found on neolithic pottery and among the oldest hieroglyphs of Egypt. The lozenge, or diamond shape, is the ancient symbol for the vulva, which would one day be reduced to a cleft triangle and become the aboriginal Sumerian pictograph for “woman.” Recently, there was discovered in Australia what may turn out to be the earliest human art: a series of circles engraved on a 130-foot sandstone monolith that takes us back seventy-five thousand years—archaic man’s first acknowledgment of the Great Pattern that he read everywhere, the ever-turning Wheel.

  Religion is a complex phenomenon; and the correspondences soon became more complex, requiring orders of priests and shamans for their correct interpretation and effective use. The phallic snake, which sheds its skin and also disappears for part of each year, and thus was thought to die and regenerate itself, became in many different cultures the moon’s earthly manifestation. Idols recovered from such widely distant places as the Panchan and Ngan-Yang cultures of neolithic China and the Amerindian civilization of Calchaqui show the lozenge-decorated serpent, male and female combined, symbol of dualism reintegrated and potent predictor of fertility. Another moon-creature was the spider, whose silvery, cyclical web traps its victims in an image of man’s fate, which the moon, who sways all living things, was thought to control. (To spin is to predestine; and some of the oldest words for fate, such as the Anglo-Saxon wyrd, come
from the Indo-European verb uert, meaning “to turn” or “to spin.”) The bull, whose crescent horns are the very image of the sickle moon, was sacred to Nanna-Sin, who was himself “the powerful calf with strong horns,” “the young bull of the sky.” The pearl was the Moon god’s amulet, the shining little moon contained within the vulva of the oyster. In pre-Columbian Mexico the snail, which like the moon, displays and withdraws its horns, was sacred to the moon, as was in Ice Age Europe the bear, who appears and disappears with the seasons and is the ancestor of humanity. Among peoples as widely dispersed as the African Bushmen, the Samoyed, and the Chinese, a whole series of lunar figures who were missing a hand or foot (like the incomplete moon) were characterized by their power to bring rain and subsequent fertility.