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Page 4
[Illustration: Babylonian Demon. [No. 93,089.]]
[THE SLAUGHTER OF THE QUEEN OF THE ABYSS.]
"The person, who presided over them, was a woman named OMUROCA; which
in the Chaldean language is THALATTH; in Greek THALASSA, the sea; but
which might equally be interpreted the Moon. All things being in this
situation, Belus came, and cut the woman asunder: and of one half of
her he formed the earth, and of the other half the heavens; and at the
same time destroyed the animals within her. All this (he says) was an
allegorical description of nature."
[THE CREATION OF MAN.]
"For, the whole universe consisting of moisture, and animals being
generated therein, the deity above-mentioned[1] took off his own head:
upon which the other gods mixed the blood, as it gushed out, with the
earth; and from whence were formed men. On this account it is that
they are rational and partake of divine knowledge."
[Footnote 1: The god whose head was taken off was not Belus, as is
commonly thought, but the god who the cuneiform texts tell us was
called "Kingu."]
[BELUS CREATES THE UNIVERSE.]
"This Belus, by whom they signify Jupiter, divided the darkness, and
separated the Heavens from the Earth, and reduced the universe to
order. But the animals not being able to bear the prevalence of light,
died. Belus upon this, seeing a vast space unoccupied, though by
nature fruitful, commanded one[1] of the gods to take off his head,
and to mix the blood with the earth; and from thence to form other men
and animals, which should be capable of bearing the air. Belus formed
also the stars, and the sun, and the moon, and the five planets. Such,
according to Polyhistor Alexander, is the account which Berosus gives
in his first book." (See Cory, _Ancient Fragments_, London, 1832,
pp. 24-26.)
[Footnote 1: The god whose head was taken off was not Belus, as is
commonly thought, but the god who the cuneiform texts tell us was
called "Kingu."]
In the sixth century of our era DAMASCIUS the SYRIAN, the last of the
Neo-Platonic philosophers, wrote in Greek in a work on the Doubts and
Solutions of the first Principles, in which he says: "But the
Babylonians, like the rest of the Barbarians, pass over in silence the
One principle of the Universe, and they conceive Two, TAUTHE and
APASON; making APASON the husband of TAUTHE, and denominating her the
mother of the gods. And from these proceeds an only-begotten son,
MOYMIS, which I conceive is no other than the Intelligible World
proceeding from the two principles. From these, also, another progeny
is derived, DACHE and DACHUS; and again, a third, KISSARE and ASSORUS,
from which last three others proceed, ANUS, and ILLINUS, and AUS. And
of AUS and DAUCE is born a son called Belus, who, they say, is the
fabricator of the world, the Demiurgus." (See Cory, _Ancient
Fragments_, London, 1832, p. 318.)
THE SEVEN TABLETS OF CREATION. DESCRIPTION OF THEIR CONTENTS.
In the beginning nothing whatever existed except APS�, which may be
described as a boundless, confused and disordered mass of watery matter;
how it came into being is unknown. Out of this mass there were evolved
two orders of beings, namely, demons and gods. The demons had hideous
forms, even as Berosus said, which were part animal, part bird, part
reptile and part human. The gods had wholly human forms, and they
represented the three layers of the comprehensible world, that is to
say, heaven or the sky, the atmosphere, and the underworld. The
atmosphere and the underworld together formed the earth as opposed to
the sky or heaven. The texts say that the first two gods to be created
were LAKHMU and LAKHAMU. Their attributes cannot at present be
described, but they seem to represent two forms of primitive matter.
They appear to have had no existence in popular religion, and it has
been thought that they may be described as theological conceptions
containing the notions of matter and some of its attributes.
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