by Benjamin Welton
October 30, 2020
from ClassicalWisdom Website

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There is a story (most likely untrue) that begins with a team of European archaeologists overseeing a dig in northern Iraq.

They are somewhere near Mosul, the current stronghold of the Sunni extremist group ISIS in Iraq...

They have come to this part of the world in order to excavate relics from the bygone empire of Assyria - a brutal, but effective state composed of warrior kings and their dreaded armies.

For the archaeologists themselves, the importance of Assyria is twofold:

First, the Assyrian state ruled for a time the world's largest and most powerful empire.

 

They reigned by the point of the sword, and tales of their shocking inhumanity on their vanquished foes still have the ability to terrify even the sternest of imaginations.

 

Secondly, the Assyrians, and the empire they created, were one of the great foes of both the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.

As such, Assyrian villains are sprinkled throughout the Old Testament.

Indeed, the Book of Nahum details the fall of the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, the most reviled fortress city in the ancient Near East.

For the Jews, the early prophecy that Nineveh, the:

"city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder" (Nahum 3:1),

...would fall must have seemed like a divine gift of salvation.

Besides this biblical prophecy, our European archaeologists would have undoubtedly been aware of the fact that Jesus Christ spoke the Aramaic language, the lingua franca of the Near East.

This was a tongue which had been used by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, along with the older Akkadian language, as a tool for imperial unification in the realms of trade and government.

While the European archaeologists rock themselves to sleep with ideas of discovering some proof of the historical Jesus, or maybe uncovering something that had been lost to recorded history for thousands of years, their local workers, most of whom are pious Muslims, pray for the expedition to not find anything.

After all, it would not be wise to upset the old gods, which to them represent powerful demons...

But in the morning, underneath the hot, arid sun of old Assyria, the workers stumble upon something large.

After frantically removing the earth,

they recognize a face.

The face has a long, square beard,

braided with three rows of curls.

Above his hair is a crown of sorts.

More digging reveals wings...

My God, they've uncovered a statue of Lamassu, a protective deity.

They have awakened the old gods.

 

They flee in terror.

Or so the story goes...

But you see, the old gods of Mesopotamia are not to be taken lightly.

According to the famous British Egyptologist Sir E.A. Wallis Budge's book Amulets and Superstitions, the:

"literature of the Sumerian and Babylonians... proves that the people who occupied Mesopotamia from about 3000 BC downwards attached very great importance to magic in all its branches, and that they availed themselves of the services of the magician on every possible occasion."

A large part of this ancient magic involved protection against the many demons who plagued them, from the spirits of the angry dead to the archfiend Lamashtu, the female demon who lived in the mountains and cane brakes and preyed upon pregnant women and children.
 

Again, Budge was succinct when he stated that from the earliest moments of recorded time, the people of Mesopotamia,

"were in perpetual fear of the attacks of hosts of hostile and evil spirits which lost no opportunity of attempting to do them harm."

In order to understand Assyrian demonology, one must appreciate the peoples who came before, for the Assyrian religion, and even the Assyrian way of war, was inherited (although the Assyrians did add excessive cruelty, so they can be credited with at least one innovation).
 

It started in Sumer, the first great civilization in Mesopotamia (modern day southern Iraq). They created not only writing, but also a whole pantheon that would serve their successors up until the coming of Alexander the Great.

The Sumerian gods included:

• Enlil, the Lord of the Storm and the heroic head of the pantheon

• the air goddess Ninlil

• Inanna, the female god of fertility, war, and wisdom...

The Sumerians built impressive ziggurats, or stepped temples, for the purposes of worshipping these gods.

Cities such as Uruk, Nippur, and Eridu (which the Sumerians considered ancient - thus making it arguably the world's oldest city) served as commercial and religious centers.

There were city-specific deities, but also monsters, such as Tiamat, the primordial chaos demon of the ocean who serves as the primary antagonist in the Babylonian creation myth, The Enûma Eliš.

[Side Note: This text, along with the Neo-Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, were both re-discovered in 1849 by the British archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard at the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Ashurbanipal was the last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.]

Likewise, dark, malevolent gods were present in their cosmology... and none was more vile that Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld, or Irkalla.

Along with Nergal, the plague god, Ereshkigal acted as the tyrant of Irkalla and was the chief judge of the dead.

The story of Inanna's descent into the underworld provides a glimpse into Ereshkigal's wickedness:

Naked and bowed low, Inanna entered the throne room.

Ereshkigal rose from her throne.

Inanna started toward the throne.

The Annuna, the judges of the underworld, surrounded her.

They passed judgment against her.

Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.

She spoke against her the word of wrath.

She uttered against her the cry of guilt.

She struck her.

Inanna was turned into a corpse,

A piece of rotting meat,

And was hung from a hook on the wall...

Inanna, who is more commonly known by her Akkadian name of Ishtar, manages to defeat the machinations of Ereshkigal and returns to the world of the living.

For her pain, Ereshkigal threatens Inanna with a show of her power, to send her army of the dead above ground as a moving pestilence bent upon destruction.
 

To their enemies, the Assyrian hordes must have seemed like Ereshkigal's army of the ravenous dead; they were a nation of fearsome warriors.

And although their rise was slow and their fall spectacular, the Assyrians left an indelible mark on the regions that they conquered... More than anything else, they spread fear.

Evidence of this can be found in the fact that the early Jews turned the Assyrian gods into demons.

Astarte, the Assyrian version of Ishtar, became Astaroth, the Crowned Prince of Hell.

 

Similarly, the Assyrian Bel, who would be called Baal by the Canaanites, would become Beelzebub, the demonic "Lord of the Flies."

Although these later Judeo-Christian interpretations form the Western world's view of the Mesopotamian religion as being thoroughly evil, the Assyrians themselves weren't without their own demons.

(Again, most Assyrian demons were present beforehand, in the mythos of earlier Mesopotamian societies.

 

These include the Sumerian ekimmu, a type of vampiric ghost, or the Akkadian lilu and lili, who were male and female demons that more than likely served as the inspiration behind Lilith in the Old Testament.

 

Demons that were specific to the Assyrians - or at least more often used by them - include Ilu Limnu, the "evil god" who is never given definite characteristics, and the gallu, or bull demon.)

In The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, the Assyriologist Reginald Campbell Thompson details the various,

"demons, ghouls, vampires, hobgoblins, ghosts",

...that cursed the regions around the Tigris and Euphrates... as well as the Babylonian and Assyrian incantations that were used against them.

According to Thompson, the Assyrians held a great fear of sorcerers, whom they called the "Raiser of the Departed".

However, they feared the ekimmu and wind spirits above all else.

 

The most famous Assyrian wind spirit known widely today is Pazuzu, the son of the god Hanbi and the demon of the southwestern wind.

With the body of a lion or dog, a scorpion's tail, wings, talons, and a serpentine phallus, Pazuzu brought famine and locusts during the dry seasons.

In an odd twist, Pazuzu was the rival of Lamashtu (the goddess who preyed on pregnant women and children), and as such, his image was often used to combat other demons.

Of course, Pazuzu's notoriety is the result of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist.

Although the film is more obvious than the book in depicting the spirit of Pazuzu as a monstrosity haunting young Regan MacNeil (neither, however, directly state that the demon is indeed Pazuzu), the message is still clear.

Blatty's decision to make the chief evil in The Exorcist a pre-Christian, Assyrian demon is in keeping with the Western tradition of seeing all things Mesopotamian as depraved.

Furthermore, by beginning his novel, and thus the film, in northern Iraq, Blatty made the conscious decision to play upon his audience's preconceived notions...

Namely, that the land of the old Assyrians is indeed a land of demons...