The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: Assyrian Monotheism, Part Ill

Re: Assyrian Monotheism, Part Ill
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By: Simo Parpola

The Holy Spirit

In Assyrian royal inscriptions and prophetic oracles, the king is presented as the son of the goddess Mullissu/Ištar. Born of a human mother but created by the goddess, he was a semi-divine being partly man, partly god. In an oracle the goddess declares: “I am your father and mother; I raised you between my wings.” The mother-child relationship between the goddess and the king is elaborated in the oracles by portraying the king as a baby suckled, comforted, tended, carried, reared and protected by the goddess, who now appears as his mother, now as his midwife, wet nurse, or nurse, and tenderly calls him “my calf” or “my king,” while she fiercely attacks his enemies.48

This imagery is also encountered in biblical prophecy, where it serves to describe God’s love for Israel, his “chosen one.” It has an important visual counterpart in a ubiquitous motif of the Ancient Near Eastern arts, the so-called “cow and calf” motif showing a cow licking its suckling calf, often in association with the sacred tree (Fig. 4). The interpretation of the motif is put beyond doubt by Egyptian textual evidence, which confirms that the calf-suckling cow represents Hathor (the mother of Horus and the wet nurse of pharaoh), the Egyptian counterpart of Mullissu; its ideological significance is confirmed by its prominence among the royal ivories of Nimrud and Samaria.49 The motif still survives in Christianity in its two variants, “ewe and lamb” and “mother and child,” both symbolizing Christ as God’s beloved son, cf. the ubiquitous “madonna and child” motif as well as the “Lamb of God” of John 1:37, etc.50

Mullissu, the divine mother of the king, was an aspect of Ištar, the goddess of love. In Assyria, she denoted Ištar specifically as the queen of heaven: she was the consort of Aššur, the creatress of the gods and of the universe, whose holiness and luminosity are constantly stressed in the texts: “She is glorious, most glorious, the purest of the goddesses! ... Like Aššur, she wears a beard and is clothed with brilliance. The crown on her head gleams like the stars; the sun disks on her breasts shine like the sun.”51 In Assyrian royal inscriptions she bears the epithet “wild cow,” which not only connects her with Ninsun the “Wild Cow,” the mother of Gilgamesh, the perfect king, and with the calf-licking cow of contemporary visual arts,52 but also associates her (through the horns of the cow) with the moon, and thus identifies her with the supernal aspect of Ištar, the “Daughter of the moon” or “Ištar of Wisdom” (see p. 5). Her most prominent role in real life was that of an oracular deity: she was the voice speaking through the prophets, the words emanating from their mouths.53

These characteristics of Mullissu show that she corresponds in all essential respects to the gnostic Holy Spirit, who is defined, among other things, as the female aspect and “consort” of the Father, the “Mother of the Universe, whom some call Love,” the “androgynous Mother-Father, a male Virgin by virtue of a hidden Intellect,” and “the ineffable Word, a Voice, who gradually put forth the All.”54 In the Nag Hammadi treatise Trimorphic Protennoia, the Spirit, introducing herself as the primordial “thought of the Father,” becomes flesh and reveals herself in the world as the Christ, the “Perfect Son,” thus playing the role of the Logos of John 1.55 The gnostic Holy Spirit, and hence, indirectly, Mullissu, is thus without any question the “prototype” of the Christian Holy Spirit, whose role in the immaculate conception of Christ parallels the role of Mullissu in the miraculous transformation of the Assyrian king into the son of God in his mother’s womb.56

Recognizing in Mullissu the precursor of the Holy Spirit provides a key to the manifold and seemingly contradictory figure of the goddess Ištar, which combines the image of the madonna with that of the prostitute: she is the “spirit” of God which pervades the entire universe and is at the same time present in both god and man.57 Her representation as a node in the middle of the trunk of the sacred tree (the heart of the “cosmic man”) symbolizes her as a power connecting heaven and earth and bridging the gulf between god and man. Her number (15), the sum of the numbers of Anu/heaven (1) and Nergal/netherworld (14), corresponds to her nature as a “two-faced” entity participating in two opposite worlds, reflected in her paradoxical mythological figure.

In the myth of Ishtar’s Descent to the Netherworld, the penetration of the goddess into the material world is presented allegorically by means of a stripping metaphor resembling the Neoplatonic doctrine of the gradual weakening of the cosmic soul, the farther it gets from its transcendent origin, the One.58 Up in heaven, before her descent, Ištar is the queen of heaven, the pure, chaste and prudent “daughter of the moon,” dressed in her regal attire. At each of the seven gates of the netherworld, she loses one piece of her clothing and jewelry, until she finally arrives in the netherworld completely naked, stripped of all her virtues and powers, falls sick and dies. Revived and rescued by the grace of her heavenly father, she is the penitent soul whose return to heaven mirrors her defilement: at each gate of the netherworld she gets back one piece of her clothing in reverse order of its removal.

The full moon with its immaculate, shining disk symbolized Ištar as the queen of heaven, as indicated by her number, 15, coinciding with the ideal full moon day, the darkening of the lunar disk being interpreted in terms of pollution and sin. Accordingly, the progressive loss of “purity” of the waning moon symbolized the gradual defilement, or “descent,” of the goddess; its total disappearance, spiritual “death”; and the gradual increase of “purity” after the conjunction, ascent and return to the original state of perfection.59

THE GODS AS GARMENTS OF IŠTAR

The order in which Ištar is stripped of her garments reflects the structure of the sacred tree. At Gate I, she loses her crown; at Gate II, her earrings; at Gate III, her necklace; at Gate IV, her pectorals; at Gate V, her girdle; at Gate VI, her bangles; and at Gate VII, her loincloth. Note the progression from top to bottom and the alternation of single and paired pieces of clothing. The crown corresponds to the palmette crown of the tree, the necklace, girdle and loincloth to the three nodes of its trunk, and the earrings, pectorals and bangles to the circles surrounding the trunk. Accordingly, the various garments and ornaments can be identified with the divine powers (“great gods”) constituting the tree; in the Sumerian version of the myth, they are, in fact, explicitly called “powers” (me).60

The “great gods” are thus in the Descent of Ishtar reduced into mere “garments” and “ornaments” of Ištar – abstract psychic powers, whose presence or absence in the soul determines its salvation or perdition. In terms of the functions of the “great gods,” these powers can be defined as dignity (Gate I: Anu), wisdom and prudence (Gate II: Ea and Sîn), reason (Gate III: Mummu), judgment and mercy (Gate IV: Šamaš and Marduk), love (Gate V: Ištar), honor and pride (Gate VI: Adad and Nabű), and shame (Gate VII: Nergal). The sacred tree can thus be seen as a symbolic representation of the perfect, undefiled soul in its heavenly glory, vested in all its divine powers, “garments” and “ornaments” – in other words, an image of Mullissu, the heavenly Ištar.61 This agrees with Mullissu’s identification with the date palm (the trunk and crown of the sacred tree), making her “consubstantial” with her son, the “perfect man.”62

The eight-pointed star of the goddess can similarly be interpreted to symbolize Ištar as the “bearer of all the powers,”63 the eight points of the star standing for the eight male gods surrounding Ištar in the “genealogical tree” (see p. 7 above).

THE GODS AS COLORS

Another symbol of Ištar was the “ziggurat” (the Mesopotamian temple tower), whose seven stages and mountain shape associated it with the seven-staged descent and ascent of the goddess.64 Remains of coloring on the ziggurat of the Assyrian capital city Dur-Šarruken show that each of its stages was painted in a different color, the sequence of colors corresponding to the coloring of the seven concentric walls of Ecbatana in Herodotus I 98 (white, black, purple, blue, orange, gold, silver), probably symbolizing the seven planetary spheres (Venus, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Sun, and Moon).

Descent from its silver-colored top (the moon!) through the seven stages (= the seven gates of the netherworld) would have symbolized undressing, while ascending it would have symbolized donning the colored garments. The image of a multicolored seven-staged ziggurat associated with the planetary spheres probably lies behind the Mithraic ascent of the soul described in Origen’s Contra Celsum, where the initiate climbs “a ladder with seven gates,” the first (of lead) associated with Saturn, the second (of tin) with Venus, the third (of bronze) with Jupiter, the fourth (of iron) with Mercury, the fifth (of electrum) with Mars, the sixth (of silver) with the Moon, and the seventh (of gold) with the Sun.65 In this image, the “great gods” are again reduced to mere qualities of the soul, “colors,” the full sequence of which symbolized the heavenly glory of the soul.

THE RAINBOW

Through her association with the colors of the ziggurat, Ištar was also associated with the rainbow, another important symbol relating to the ascent of the soul. The convergence of the full spectrum of colors in the rainbow symbolized Ištar’s heavenly origin – she was the “daughter” of Anu, in whom the identities of all the gods converged –, while its bow shape symbolized her as God’s weapon against sin and death.

In En?ma eliš, Marduk fashions a bow, designates it as his weapon, and defeats Tiamat with it; later Anu lifts it up, kisses it, calls it “my daughter,” and fixes it as a constellation in the sky. The constellation in question, “Bow Star,” our Canis Maior, rose in Ab (August), a month with prominent netherworld connotations, and its equation with Ištar (both as “daughter of Anu” and “daughter of the moon”) is well attested in Assyrian texts. Consequently, the weapon by which Marduk defeats Tiamat actually is Ištar.

Elsewhere in En?ma eliš, this weapon is called “Deluge,” reflecting Ištar’s well-known role in bringing about the Deluge in Gilgamesh XI. The “deluge bow,” which already occurs in Sumerian mythology as the weapon of Ninurta, is of course nothing but the rainbow, which is given as a name of Ištar in god lists; in addition, both “Bow Star” and “Rainbow Star” occur as names of Venus and are equated with Virgo in astrological texts. Broken into its components, the logogram for “rainbow,” dTIR.AN.NA, signifies “bow of Anu” or “bow of heaven.”66

With his “deluge bow,” God destroys the wicked but saves the just. In the Descent of Ištar, the ascent of the soul is made conditional upon the relinquishment of Tammuz as the substitute for the goddess in the netherworld. This is an allegory for the institution of divine kingship upon earth and an etiology for the “redemptory” death of the king. In materializing the idea of the “perfect man” in the human king, God gave mankind an example to follow and a shepherd to guide it to the path of salvation. Tammuz, the shepherd king, is the king as a “tree planted by Ištar,” the son of God who had to come to the world, take human form, and die and rise again in order to provide mankind with a living example of the perfection required for salvation.67

The dying and resurrected Tammuz thus has to be understood as one of the king’s most central roles, the savior sacrificed for man’s sake. Whereas Ninurta is the king as victorious hero who vanquishes death and disease, returns to his father in triumph and is exalted to glory in heaven, Tammuz is the shepherd dying for his flock, the felled tree, whose death is wailed bitterly. By making Ištar responsible for the death of Tammuz, the myth presents his sacrifice as an act of divine love comparable to 1 John 4:9, “For God is love; and his love was disclosed to us in this, that he sent his only Son into the world to bring us life.” This idea may lie behind the motif of the “arrow-shooting god” (Fig. 5), a familiar but enigmatic image in Assyrian imperial art, which can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of “God the father sending his son into the world,” the god sending the arrow to its target representing Enlil/Marduk, the divine king; the “arrow” representing his son, Ninurta/Nabű; the “bow,” Mullissu/Ištar; and the “monster” hit by the arrow, the world as a place of sin, darkness and death.68 Note that both Aššur and Ištar share the epithet “lover of (all) mankind.”69

The Trinity

We thus have in the Assyrian king the perfect doctrinal couterpart of the Christian savior: a word of God become flesh,70 a lamb of God sacrificed for the sake of man. What is more, his relationship to God is defined exactly in terms of the Trinitarian doctrine (“one substance – three persons”) in its Augustinian elaboration, where the Holy Spirit is “the mutual love of Father and Son, the consubstantial bond that unites them.” The king’s consubstantiality – homoousia – with God was encoded in the sacred tree, simultaneously representing the psychic structure of the “cosmic man,” the heavenly Ištar, and the king.

In the Sumerian myth Angimdimma, available in several copies in the royal libraries of Nineveh, the heavenly crown prince and savior, Ninurta, “Created like Anu,” having vanquished the forces of darkness threatening his father’s kingdom, triumphantly returns to his celestial home and, praised and blessed by his father and mother, is exalted beside them “on a holy dais in the throne room.”71 This scene, explained to refer to the king in Assyrian cultic commentaries,72 finds a graphic representation in the triad of gods occasionally riding on the winged disk of Aššur in Assyrian imperial glyptics (Fig. 6). The central figure, raising its hand in a gesture of blessing, can be identified as Enlil/Marduk; the figure on the right wing, receiving the blessing, as Ninurta/Nabű, and the figure on the left wing, likewise raising its hand in blessing, as his mother, Mullissu/Ištar.73

In some representions, the right and left hand figures are reduced to mere circles or volutes emerging from the central figure; often a single volute stands for all three figures.74 This implies not only that the accompanying figures were conceived as essentially one with the central figure, but that all three together constituted an indivisible, homogeneous whole. Hence the configuration Enlil–Mullissu–Ninurta does not just represent a triad of gods but a true “trinity-in-unity” in the Christian and Neoplatonic sense of the concept. The winged disk being the primary symbol of Aššur, and the volute or the triad of gods being found in virtually all representations of it, one is forced to conclude that a doctrine similar to the Trinitarian doctrine was an essential component of the Assyrian concept of god.

The Assyrian version of the Trinity – Father, Mother, Son – has a perfect parallel in the gnostic antecedant of the Christian Trinity. According to the treatise Trimorphic Protennoia, “the Voice that originated from the Thought [of the Logos] exists as three permanences: the Father, the Mother, the Son”;75 the treatise On the Origin of the World faithfully echoes the exaltation of Ninurta, presenting the holy spirit as a virgin seated upon a throne at the left of Sabaoth and glorifying “Jesus Christ, who resembles the savior above in the eighth heaven and who sits at his right upon a revered throne.”76

In a vision described in The Apocryphon of John, “there was a [likeness] with multiple forms in the light, and the [likenesses] appeared through each other, [and] the [likeness] had tree forms,” who said: “John, John ... do not [be] timid! – I am the one who is [with you] always. I [am the Father], I am the Mother, I am the Son.”77 This passage has a striking parallel in an Assyrian oracle where the Spirit first speaks as Marduk (the Father), then as Ištar (the Mother), and finally as Nabű (the Son), as if she were repeatedly putting on new masks to suit the changing themes of the prophecy.78

CONCLUSION / THE BIRTH OF ASSYRIAN MONOTHEISM

In summary, it may be stated that a monotheistic concept of god was an essential structural feature of Assyrian religion, philosophy and royal ideology, and was firmly rooted in a complex but coherent doctrinal system underlying the entire imperial culture from mythology to royal rituals and visual arts. The fact that this doctrinal system was elaborated and propagated by means of visual symbols, metaphors and even riddles rather than in terms of Aristotelian logic does not make it non-existent nor detract from the power of its impact upon contemporary and later religious and philosophical thought.79

The Assyrian concept of god was rooted in political and conceptual structures inherited from earlier Mesopotamian empires, and essential elements of it like the doctrine of the “perfect man” probably existed already in the early third millennium.80 It can be assumed that while the system as a whole undoubtedly underwent modifications in the course of time, its basic features remained essentially unchanged over the millennia. Nevertheless, the heavily monotheistic “bent” of Assyrian religion appears to have been a genuinely Assyrian development. The system of divine numbers which formalized the doctrine of the unity of the divine powers, the sacred tree in its triadic elaboration, as well as the equation “God” = “(all) the gods” appear only with the emergence of the Middle Assyrian empire in the 14th century BCE.81 This historical event, then, and especially the concomitant “Byzantinization” of the emperor cult, appears to have been the crucial catalyst to the birth of Assyrian monotheism.

In the course of the following 700 years, and especially under the Neo-Assyrian empire (ca. 900-600 BCE), the fundamentals of Assyrian religion and royal ideology – the concept of one almighty God, and the emperor’s status as his “son” sent for the salvation of mankind – were systematically propagated to the ruling elite and the masses by means of highly symbolic visual arts, court ceremony, religious festivals and mythology, so as to finally become a factor permanently dominating the religious ideas and attitudes of the entire Near East. Numerous centers of higher learning specializing in the relevant doctrines existed in palaces and temples throughout the empire. In addition, the esoteric doctrines of the emperor cult were transmitted all over the empire and beyond it by communities of devotees of Ištar striving for salvation and eternal life in the footsteps of the goddess. Extreme asceticism, self-mortification and even self-castration were conspicuous features of these communities, whose ideal was the androgynous saint transcending all passions of the flesh and whose goal was union with God already in this life.82

The doctrinal and structural similarities of Assyrian religion with Christianity, Gnosticism, and Jewish mysticism are such that they call for a radical reconsideration of the role of Assyria/Syria in the genesis of Jewish and Christian monotheism. Far from being a sea of polytheistic beliefs and practices surrounding (pre-) exilic Judaism and early Christianity, Assyria/Syria has finally to be recognized as an area with deep-rooted monotheistic traditions antedating by centuries the emergence of Deuteronomic monotheism. The existence of these traditions, which as a result of long-term imperial propaganda were permanently rooted in the area, accounts for the prominent role of Syria in the history of early Christianity and for the peculiar doctrinal and ascetic bent of Syriac Christianity.83 No wonder Syria and the previous areas of Assyria were so easily converted to Christianity; in the words of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook paraphrasing the Syriac Acta Martyrum, “the Assyrians were monotheists before Christ and Christians after him, and the past therefore led on to the present without a break.



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