Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss some of the more noteworthy, fascinating and potentially terrifying gods and demons from the religions and myths of the ancient Mesopotamian world. It’s a who’s who of Pazuzu-adjacent entities.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we have returned with Part two of our Halloween season series on the monsters and demons of ancient Mesopotamian religion. Now, if you haven't heard part one yet, this is really one of those series where I think you should go back and listen to part one first. I would recommend that because in that episode we have a general discussion about the connotations of the English word demon and the ways it both does and does not describe these entities from ancient Mesopotamia, and we also get into some general general trends and observations about the spirits and supernatural forces of ancient Mesopotamian religions. But in that episode we also talk about a number of specific horrifying creatures depicted in the literature and artworks of this region and time period, including Humbaba or Huahwa, whose breath is death and whose face is an omen when seen in the spilled intestines of a sheep. We talked about the terrifying oppressor Lamashtu, who threatens infants and pregnant women, And we talked about Pazuzu, the demon or perhaps god, depending on your take of the Southwest Winds, known best to modern audiences as the devil that possesses Reagan McNeil in the Exorcist. And then finally we talked about some actually quite surprising qualities of Pazuzu in his original cultural context, in which he was often seen as not just a malevolent threat in himself, but as an apotropaic protector, warding off other evil beings, the Riddic principle, if you will.
We also talked about how no one really knows for sure how to pronounce any of these words or names. We have some best practices recommended by scholars, and we try to follow that, but ultimately no one can know for sure. Like, for instance, inky do, What if it's inky do? No one ever says it like that, But it's not impossible that that was the original pronunciation, right, I think people say it like that, inky do.
Yeah, I've heard that inky do.
I don't know, it just feels wrong.
It just thinks I've said it that way.
It doesn't have the same gravitized you know, I don't know it sounds a little like preschooler educational program.
It does sound like a word my daughter would say, just one of those words she makes up.
Now. When I told my wife that we were going to do a couple of episodes about ancient Mesopotamian demons, she jokingly asked if we were going to talk about Gooser. Ah. And you know, readers of Tobin Spirit Guide know all too well that Gozer the Gazarian is said to have been an ancient extra dimensional entity worshiped in ancient Mesopotamia, attended to by two guardians, Vince Clortho the key Master and Zeel the Gatekeeper. Ah.
Yes, who can forget the frantic search of Rick moranis for the Gatekeeper. I am Vince Clortho, key Master of Gozer.
Yes, we are, of course talking about Ghostbusters again. And to be very clear, Goser and their attendance are fictional creations of Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and their names have no connection to the actual mythologies the actual religions of ancient Mesopotamia. In fact, in interviews, Ackroyd has pointed to two key inspirations for the name Gozer. In the film, he claims there was a Goser Chevrolet dealership in upstate New York, and that the name Gozer is somehow connected to her involved in an alleged Poltergeist haunting. So I don't doubt Akroyd on either of these counts. But I also couldn't find any solid evidence of either. But you know, it seems very likely on both counts, because I believe Gozer or something like it is a relatively common Turkish last name, And as far as haunting stories go, I mean sure, anything as possible.
In the realm of ghosts. You can make up whatever words you want.
Yeah. But that being said, Gozer is a pretty great fictional demonic god played by Slaves Jovin and voiced by Patty Edwards and the original Ghostbusters and Act and then in the recent Ghostbusters Afterlife played by Olivia Wilde and voice by show ray adashlu. I like both incarnations of the deity. Both both awesome in my opinion.
I haven't seen the new Ghostbusters stuff, but.
It's worth it for Gozer, worthy for Gozer. Okay, So Goser works, especially in the original Ghostbusters, in a large part because Akroyd and Ramis really had a lot of enthusiasm clearly for weird fiction acroid in particular for the occult and spiritualism. I think he said, I have like a family connection to some of that stuff, and you know, to a limited degree, I would say the idea of Gozer is a kind of guardian death god, guard of the god of the underworld, feels appropriate for ancient Mesopotamia. That being said, I believe in the film or supporting material they give a date of like six thousand BCE for Goser's worship, and that would put this figure well outside the historical framework that we've been considering in these episodes. So Gozer would in this case be like a firmly Neolithic deity.
It would be from before written sources.
Yeah, so again no actual grounding in ancient Mesopotamian myth. Though the name, as you and I were discussing off Mike the other day, does sound similar to the ancient Egyptian pharaoh that is therefore essentially a god, an individual by the name of Joser Jesser Zoser. Even often I think the primary spelling you run across in English is Djosc, but I've also seen it as Zeo z Er.
Hmm.
Okay, his name apparently refers to the ancient Egyptian symbol of stability, a kind of terrorist pillar known as the Jed.
I mainly associate the pharaoh Joser with his his pyramid, which is a step pyramid, and it's different from the pyramids on the Giza plateau. But this one is really early. It was apparently like the first of the big stone monuments of ancient Egypt. Yeah.
Yeah, So anyway, that's just a brief aside about Gozer. But and then when we may come back briefly to the idea of Gozer, but let's turn now to some more amazing actual demons and monsters from the world of ancient Mesopotamian myth and religion.
That's right, so to get to the real ones, but not to leave the movie connections. I just had another quick note on Pizuzu, which we talked about at length in the last episode. I was looking at some artifacts pictured photographed in a book that was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum that had text by Arian Thomas and Timothy Potts. This was published in twenty twenty. This book features an image of a full bronze statuette of Pazuzu, from the Neo Assyrian period, and it is depicted in the statuette much like the common Pazuzu description we talked about in the last episode, and there were lots of depictions of Pazuzu because of his common use in protective household magic. But I thought a really cool thing about this is that the statuette has an inscription on the back and it like says, here's who I am. It says, I am Pazuzu, son of Hanbu, king of the Leelu demons. I have scaled the powerful mountains. They trembled the contrary winds sometimes seen translated as enemy winds or something like that. The contrary winds were headed west one by one. I broke their wings.
Yeah, Pazuzu, the breaker of the wings of the wind.
Once again reminds me of your Godzilla comparison from last time. You know that you is like, this is the king of monsters in a sense, the breaker of other monsters.
That's right, but still dangerous in its own right.
Yeah. So this inscription mentions that Pazuzu ruled over the other demons of the wind. He was strong enough to repel and subjugate them, as in the description. One by one, I broke their wings and he says he is king of the Leelu demons. So who are these demons? Well, I decided to look them up as well, because we didn't end up talking about them by name in the last episode. We may have sort of referred to a class of wind associated demons that would include these demons. But here I'm going to refer again to a text that we brought up that we used in the last episode and will refer to again in this episode. This is God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia and illustrated dictionary from British Museum Press, written by these scholars, Jeremy Black and Antheon Green and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. So, regarding the Leelu demons, Black and Green refer to them as a family group of demons. So you got one male demon named Leelu and two female demons named Li Leitu and our dot lee Lee. The Leelu and Lilitu are associated with the wilderness. They are malicious demons who haunt the open desert in empty places, and much like the demonus lamash Tou, they pray especially on pregnant women and young children. The r dot le Lee, on the other hand, is interesting because she seems to embody something we see in a lot of monstrous imagery throughout the ages that seems to embody, especially male anxieties about womanhood.
Yeah, the are dot Lee Lee certainly betrays very strict ideals about what a woman's role or roles are in society. That she is mother and she is wife, and a woman that cannot act in these roles is essentially a monster worthy of treatment as such. In these myths Black and Green include the translated quote she is not a wife a mother, She has not known happiness, she has not undressed in front of her husband, has no milk in her breasts. And then, you know, the most monstrous creature then spreads impudence and infertility to other mortals like a curse. So real, really rough stuff. But you know, certainly you can use it as a lens to sort of see like what were like the accepted roles and limitations for people during this age.
Yeah, and the idea of a feminine entity who does not fit into any of the socially prescribed roles for a woman so such as mother or wife is in itself a terrifying thought.
Yeah. I also looked up the ar dot Lelee in one of Carol Rose's books, or Encyclopaedia of Faaries and Leprechauns, and she says that the name literally means made of desolation and describes it as a wild haired, winged creature that will entice mortals to lonely desolate places and then attack them.
Yeah. And also, you know, in this century, Black and Green compare the ar dot Lele to a figure from Hebrew folklore known as Lilith, a sort of alternate accounts of creation that are parallel to what we see in the Book of Genesis. There's this figure of Lilith that is also created that. I think there's a lot been written about Lilith as well, commenting on the ways that it reflects anxiety about socially nonconforming womanhood. I think this is not limited to the ancient world, of course. There's still a lot of men who are going to see women who are not fitting into the social roles that they believe women should fit into and thus conclude that that woman is some kind of a monster.
Yeah. I think this is always one of the interesting things about in particular, but also other trappings of myth and religion. It's like, no matter how fantastic the creature, the story is like the ideas involved, you know, often resonate across the ages, and they often do line up with some of the same problems that we have today.
Yeah, I mean monsters. They may not exist in reality, they are made up, but they reflect what people have on their minds, so they are actually I think, informative about reality. They show people, they show weird sort of like cracks and fissures in our categories, in our minds, because monsters often occur at the intersection of categories, or when we encounter a kind of being or concept that doesn't fit into our category matrix very well, then we make a monster out of it, or we simply just express what's worrying us in some kind of physical form in the form of a monster. And those worries can of course be in some cases very understandable even universal. In other cases, they can be pretty nasty. They can reflect nasty attitudes, they can reflect misogyny, they can reflect whatever is preoccupying people, understandable or not.
Yeah, well, Joe, why don't we move on to something for the men here, specifically the scorpion men.
Hey, well, I'll give a preview that these next creatures that gear tablulu are often referred to as scorpion men, but there are scorpion women as well, so we will get both. But in the previous episode we talked about the various human animal hybrids depicted in Sumerian and Tikadian literature and then depicted in artwork from throughout the region in the Neosyrian, Neo Babylonian period and so forth. In some cases, it could be debated whether it is better to call these monsters demons or some other kind of ETag, even in some cases a god. But however we classify them they are awesome. There are mermaids and mermen with the head of a human and the tail and lower body of a fish. There are centaurs half human and half horse. There are lion centaurs part lion, part human, and finally there are the geartablulu, the scorpion men or scorpion people. According to Black and Green, a scorpion man is usually depicted as follows. So it's got a human head with a majestic and luxurious beard on top of his head. He often wears a horned cap and sidebar on the horned cap because I got interested in this and it seems like an important symbol. The horned cap appears throughout Mesopotamian art beginning in the early third millennium BCE, and seems to be associated with power and godhood in different periods of history. It is associated with like different primary gods from the pantheons. So it might be be that the you know, in one period the horned cap is really the symbol of this god, and another periods the Southern God. But it remains fairly consistent as a symbol of divine status. Now, why does a horned cap mean divine status? Black and Green speculate that the godlike associations might be derived from the horns of the now extinct wild bovine Bose primogeneous, commonly known as the orux. Now the orux was a wild ancestor of today's domestic cattle, and still existed in its wild form during much of human history, probably up until the seventeenth century CE in some places, so just a few hundred years ago that it finally went globally extinct, and they were still being hunted by kings during the Neo Assyrian period in Mesopotamia. These beasts were massive and awe inspiring, larger than most domestic cattle today, with some bull oryx standing up nearly six feet tall at the shoulder and having gigantic thick horns more than eighty centimeters or about two point six feet long, with each horn having a diameter of up to between ten and eighteen centimeters, so huge horns. I sometimes mention on the show that, like, if you're not a farmer or a rancher and you only ever see domestic farm animals like cattle and horses on TV, it can be kind of shocking, like their size and power when you actually get up close to one. An example I've used before is that cattle can seem very docile and bulky and slow moving until you see one suddenly leap over a fence or start running at full speed, and then you're like, WHOA, I did not imagine that animal was capable of this. But the wild rix was even larger, more powerful, less docile, with horns like tim Curry and Legend. So just an awe and firing beast. And with that in mind, it's not that hard to imagine that the horns of the aurux could be a perfect symbol of kingly power, power, strength, and will, and thus a cap with horns on it would be a marker of divinity in art. But ultimately this is speculative. We can't know for sure exactly why this imagery was used, but seems to me like a good gas.
Okay, so not actual horns growing out of the scorpion man's head, but something more akin to a crown.
Right the horned cap. So back to the scorpion man usually depicted as I said, with the human head, thick beard, and the horned cap of divinity. The scorpion man typically had a human's upper body, so it would be kind of human shaped from the diaphragm up. This seems pretty consistent throughout representations, but then going down from here there is some variation. Sometimes you'd get what looks like a human abdomen, human pelvis, human thighs, but then going down in the lower lege into bird legs and bird feet with the talons of a raptor.
As we discussed in the last episode, this is pretty common in a lot of different demons and godlike beings in ancient Mesopotamia, and as we've talked about on the show too, like this idea of demons having the legs of a bird, this doesn't quite go away. We see perhaps the reverberations of this on through like medieval and post medieval times.
That's right now. Another variation is that sometimes beneath the chest, sort of from the bottom of the ribs on down, you would instead get a more horizontal body, kind of egg shaped body that I'm not sure if this is supposed to represent a scorpion's body enlarged or maybe a bird's body. It looks almost in some depictions, kind of like a duck with instead of a duck's neck, just a human's upper body from the chest up. And then this also descends into feet with bird claws. I don't know, Rob, you look at this, do you do you see scorpion body or bird body?
I mean it feels more bird body to me.
So whether the midsection is human or avian or iraqanid, in any case, you will get a scorpion tail. This is the promise of the premise, right. It is raised in a threatening pose, and it is ready to strike with its deadly sting.
And to be clear it does not look like the Scorpion King has portrayed by Dwayne Johnson in one of the Scorpion King sequels.
Which is a real shame. Some of the best cgi of all time.
Oh.
Also, sometimes you get wings in an X shape, like we discussed with representations of Pazuzu and other wind demons, these X shaped wings. And sometimes you get also, like we discussed with Pazuzu, a penis that has a snakehead. What is the meaning of the snakehead penis. It is hard to say exactly, but I feel like I get the gist. So scorpion men are mentioned in several of the best known works of ancient Mesopotamian literature. First of all, they appear among a catalog of demons and monsters in the inuma Aleish, the Babylonian Epic of Creation. So in the text, there is a character Tiamot, who is the personification of the primordial ocean the salt waters, and Tiamot is seeking revenge for the slaughter of her consort Opsu, who is the personification of fresh water. These two are kind of the original primordial deities. And then kind of like in the kind of like in the In the Greek stories, we get different generations of gods descending from them. In this story, Opsu gets really mad at the younger generations of gods because they are creating a commotion. I think they're being too loud and boisterous, and he wants to destroy them, but the gods kill Apsu first. And then in preparing for vengeance, Tiamat creates or gathers a bunch of monsters to her side to serve under her son and new consort, Kingu. And then I'm going to read from the inuma Elish. This is the Leonard William King translation talking about these monsters serving Tiamot with poison instead of blood. She hath filled their bodies fierce monster vipers. She hath clothed with terror, with splendor. She hath decked them. She hath made them of lofty stature. Whoever beholdeth them is overcome by terror. Their bodies rear up, and none can withstand their attack. She hath set up vipers and dragons and the monster Lehamu, and hurricanes and raging hounds and scorpion men and mighty tempests and fish men and rams. They bear cruel weapons without fear of the fight. Okay, so from this Acadian source from the second millennium BCE, we can sort of see the company they keep, right, they're among all of these monstrous beings who might run out to fight against Marduk, but other we don't get a lot of description here. However, the scorpion beings also appear in the epic of Gilgamesh, where they play a more active role in the plot, and they also, in this case appear in both male and female forms. So the scorpion beings show up in tablet nine of the Gilgamesh epic, where a lot of the text of the epic has been lost, leaving us with fragmentary and missing lines throughout, but they still make quite an impression even if some of their part of the story is gone. Now. So the context is that Gilgamesh's friend, the wild man in key Dou, has been killed by a curse from the gods in punishment for the fact that together Gilgamesh and in key Dou killed the monster Humbaba, who we talked about at the beginning of the last episode. You know, the big scary monster the guards the Cedar forest. Gilgamesh and key Dou go in there and they fight Humbaba and they kill him, and so in revenge for that, the gods kill in key Dou with a curse. And then Gilgamesh is distraught over the death of his friend, and he embraces in Keydu's body, refusing to believe that he has died, until finally maggots begin to fall from in Keyedu's face. So Gilgamash is horrified not only by the loss of his friend, but by the realization that he is going to have to die one day himself. It's in a lot of ways, it's a kind of almost humorously self focused reaction to that. He starts thinking, I can't this can't happen to me, because you know, it means he would be taken down to the gloomy, horrible nether world where dust is your food and clay is your meat, and it's just horrible to think about how this fate is unavoidable. Unavoidable that is for most mortals. But there is one man within the story who knows the secret to eternal life, and that is the aged Utnapishtim, the son of Ubaratutu, who, along with his family, was granted eternal life by the gods. Now, Utnapishtim is the protagonist of another story. He is the survivor of the Mesopotamian flood myth, of which Noah's flood story in the Book of Genesis seems to be a very close analog, so you can think of Utnapishtim and Noah as similar characters. Anyway, Utnapishtim and his family they have the gift of immortality, and so Gilgamash is going to try to get to Utnapishtim to figure out how to live forever himself. But to reach the old Man, Gilgamash has to go on along and perilous journey, and at one point in his journey he comes to the peaks of Mount Mashu, the mountain of the horizon, and there, nestled in the belly of the mountain is a great, yawning tunnel which he must pass through to meet the immortal One. But it's not just any tunnel. This tunnel is the path of the Sun. So every at sunset, the sun god Shamash must descend into one end of this tunnel and then emerge out the other side at dawn. Anyway, guarding the entrance of the path of the sun tunnel are two monstrous beings. You've got a scorpion man and a scorpion woman. So here I'm going to read from the Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet. Nine. This is the Stephanie Dally translation. And to be clear, there are some gaps in the text here and speculative words filled in. I'll try to make it smooth so it reads the name of the mountain is Mashu. When he reached the mountain Mashu, which daily guards the coming out of Shamash, their upper parts touch the sky's foundation. Below their breasts reach Aralu, meaning the underworld. They guard its gate. Scorpion men, whose aura is frightful and whose glance is death. They're terrifying. Mantles of radiance drape the mountains. They guard the sun at dawn and dusk. Gilgamesh looked at them, and fear and terror clouded his face. He took the initiative and gestured to them in greeting. A scorpion man shouted to his woman, someone has come to us. His body is the flesh of gods. The scorpion man's woman answered him to thirds of him is divine and one third of him is mortal, so I like that there. The scorpion woman is a bit more discerning in detecting mortality. Now, after this there is a section where a lot is missing. But it seems that what happens is the scorpion beings question Gilgamesh and where he's going, and he tells them he is traveling to meet his ancestor Napisht him they warn him not to try it because to reach it Napishtim, Gilgamesh has to pass through the tunnel under the mountain, which is filled with the thickest darkness. No man has ever made the journey alive, and missing text prevents us from knowing exactly what happens. But it seems that maybe the scorpion beings take pity on Gilga and then allow him to pass into the deep and he has to travel a full day in this hot, pitch blackness, but he does survive the journey and he makes it out to the other side, where he emerges into the garden of Shamash, where the trees are made of stone and they bear jewels as their fruits. So you can see different roles here in the Alish The scorpion people seem to be simply grouped among other poisonous monstrosities, the fighters of the primordial Sea, mother of Chaos, and they're going to do battle against Marduk and the younger generation of gods. But in Gilgamesh, while they are still presented as deadly and terrifying, they're more human and more humane. And though this part is speculative, one interpretation of the fragmentary text is that they allow Gilgamesh to pass the Gate of the Sun because they take pity on him. And according to Black and Green, you can see this duality in the way the image of the scorpion person is used for artistic and magical purposes. Much like Pazuzu, this horrifying entity can not only attack, he can also protect. So they chart the history of this imagery, saying that the scorpion person first appears in the Akkadian period in the third dynasty of Ur, and then the scorpion people images became more widespread during the Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian times, and in accordance with their role in Gilgamesh, they're often depicted as servants of the sun god Shamash, sometimes even bearing the up the image of the solar disc up on their bodies, and in the Neo Assyrian period, the image of the scorpion person in the form of a little wooden figurine serves for apotropaic magic, just like Pazuzu, warding off the malice of predatory demons and protecting the bearer's home from harm. So it seems interesting that this theme recurs with multiple horrible demons we've talkedalked about. Humbaba, Pazuzu, and the scorpion people are apparently all apotropaic shields at some point. While they're like some of the scariest monsters and demons that people can think of, they're also serving as protective magic.
Yeah. Yeah, it's so so fascinating to think about this again, within the trappings, and even just not in the trappings, but in the shadow cultural shadow of monotheistic religions. This is not something you tend to think about, you know. It tends to be the kind of thing that monotheistic religions have put a lot of effort into squashing, the idea that you can turn to any figure except for, you know, the supreme God, or maybe certain agents have said Supreme God but you certainly can't turn to any of the villains and ask for their help in matters.
I'm going to recruit biels above to protect me against Belisle.
Yeah, and you get into a nuanced conversation about well, I mean, one's far worse than the other. It makes sense to use the lesser evil against the greater ema. All right. Now moving on to a couple of other demons from ancient Mesopotamia. These are the two we're going to discuss here. Are both connected to some really striking imagery. Imagery from bass relief slabs found in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in what is now Iraq now. Back in the ninth century BCE, this city was known as Kalhu, and the Assyrian king Ashur Nasirpal the second had them erected, I think, to either side of the main entrance to the Temple of Minurta. According to Black and Green, one particular image from these slabs is so evocative that you just find it all over the place, and if not, you know the actual image like a recreation of it, and you'll even find it on the Wikipedia page for Ancient Mesopotamian religion. One I've seen it on the cover of textbooks. I've seen it as like a striking image for museum displays that have to do with this time and or region. And it basically depicts two figures. One is a winged, bearded humanoid with thunderbolts or some sort of like Vodra type weapons in both of his hands, like double bladed, and he's battling or chasing after some sort of fearsome monster or demon. At least in my eyes, it's uncertain how many feet this creature walks on, like is it rearing up or does it just walk on those rear feet, which of course look like the feet of a bird. This thing is sometimes described as a kind of winged lion or a monstrous griffin of some sort.
Yeah, it's like it's got bird talons on its feet. It looks like but then also clawed for Paul, like maybe a lion's pause, though I don't know. Actually they look more like hands with fingers, and then scales all over the body and what looks kind of like a lion's head, but weirdly, the neck doesn't look very leonine. It looks more like a snake rising up like a you know, venomous snake rising up and hissing with its mouth open and then feathery wings.
Yeah, without a doubt, it is fearsome looking. And apparently this is another case where we don't one hundred percent know who these entities are. There seem to be some best guesses and some some solid hypotheses, but sometimes they're just presented as chaos demon and sun god or something you know, generic like that British Museum sources. It should be pointed out the British Museum this is where you'll currently find the slabs, basically just as the god would have been. The local thunder deity Nenurta. Black and Green also present the god Adad as a possibility, but seem to focus more on this character of Nunurta and what is he battling. Well, British Museum sources suggest possibly the monster Anzu, also known as the bird Imdigod. This is a great lion headed bird that steals the Tablet of Destinies from Inki or Inlil and the pictured god then slays the monster in order to retrieve this sacred artifact. Now you might be wondering, well, okay, what's the deal with the tablet of destinies. The name like that, it's got to be important, and yes, it is important. It is essentially the most important binding legal document in the universe. According to this mythology, as Black and Green point out, the tablet was essentially a tablet of uniform writing impressed also with cylinder seals, and it would give the possessor power and authority to determine the destinies of the world everyone in the world, and linked heaven to the underworld. So I suppose you could almost think of it as the world tree in a legal document form, no doubt, you know, driving home the importance of writing in the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. So normally inlel or Inky holds the tablet close to his chest, clutching it as the guarantee of his rule. You don't want this to fall into the wrong hands after all, or the wrong clause, because that's exactly what happens, and then Ninuta has to reclaim them and then return them to their rightful owner. So in and of itself, pretty tremendous story and pretty great role for a monster or demon. But Black and Green also suggested the creature in this image could be the great demon, a sag or a Saku. Carol Rose describes the sog as a demon of disease who spreads pestilence, poisons the earth, and causes wells to dry up. Black and Green describe a demon so hideous and powerful that the fish boil alive in the rivers at his approach. Whoa, He is the offspring of the sky god, and he himself has mate it with the mountains to produce monstrous offspring, presumably the Stone warriors who follow him into battle. And this kind of ties back in with the Zagros Mountains because they write on one level the defeat of Nnuta. In this myth of the Asag and the Stones expresses the unease felt by the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian Plain about the inhabitants of the Zagros Mountains. As you'll remember in the last episode, these mountains to the west were thought to produce winds of pestilence that would roll down into the region in question.
Oh yeah, and you know when we see like what actually are the effects that demons, like malevolent demons tend to produce on human beings. It is often described in Mesopotamian texts as as like winds sort of weather phenomena and disease, and disease I think was often thought to ride on the winds.
Yeah, and I will have to add a note here that is a common occurrence when we're researching mythologies that you'll encounter some sort of like monstrous entities or a monstrous race and you're like, oh, these are really fascinating. I wonder what the origin is, and then you'll look into it and it's like, oh, it's because one people distrusted in other people and describe them as monster. One people wiped out another people and described them as monsters. So, uh, you know again it's you know, we see this in like certain aspects of Irish mythology if I recall correctly. So again you know that the shadows of humanity's failings certainly color even even some of our more fantastic and uh and and captivating myths. But uh anyway, Zog was also frequently mentioned in spells against illness, especially head fevers, and uh, you know this is this is because I guess you need to name the demon that you are saying, don't come in, don't come in here, head fever demon. And in some traditions, the asaku are said to be a group of seven demons, not so much an individual but a group of seven.
Now, rob one thing we ended up talking about in the last episode was the sort of proposed timeline of the changing role of demons in ancient Mesopotamian religions and cosmologies, and also how that affected views of the afterlife, because of course, you know, the modern Christian vision of Hell is one that is populated by demons often, but this is not necessarily the case with all visions of an embodied afterlife. You could imagine another world that doesn't really have any demons running around in it, but at least some versions of the ancient Mesopotamian underworld of the dead did have a demonic population.
Yeah, and it's sometimes the case that they're not so much just evil things that happen to live there, but they have a job, they have a role, they're kind of part of the overall cosmic order. Of course, we see shades of this when we consider sort of the wider loose and you know, it's the amorphous ideas about even you know, the Christian cosmology and heaven and hell like, okay, are the devils imprisoned in hell or do they work there, like if they torment human souls there, in which some of these beliefs would would have. What have you believe then? Is it like who signs their paycheck? Is that a Satan thing? Is that a God thing?
Like?
How does it work? You know, I don't know, big, big, tough problems of religion and theology. Certainly you get into if you follow this thread enough.
The idea of a hell with demons working in it, by the way, is as we talked about it in the last episode, that's not in the Hebrew Bible at all. That does emerge in Christian theology, but it's actually that specific idea with demons working in hell to torture the damned is not even in the Christian New Testament.
Yeah, yeah, it looks good. It looks really cool in a wood cut, but you know, for my money, you can kind of leave that on the table. Anyway, This comes to a particular type of demon though in the ancient Mesopotamian world that did have a job. So the demons in question here are the Gala or the Galu underworld demons charged with dragging people off to the underworld, they were said to number seven, and there were numerous spells that might be used to ward them away. So there's another case where at least some spells are saying like no, no, no, do not come here, Gala, We do not want you. Do not drag me into the underworld. When the goddess in Anna returns from her descent into the underworld, she's accompanied by the Gala. And while again they're generally perceived as horrific beings with a horrific purpose from our standpoint, they're also not necessarily evil, just more of a harsh part of the cosmic order, and so they could also be invoked in a positive sense. So there are references to both good Gala and evil God, you know, like good Gala, come on in, Evil Goala stay away, and and yeah, so I did wonder, like you know how much of this is about individual natures and or just their intentions, like just saying like Gala, if you're here for me, please keep on moving. But if you're here for souls that are not supposed to be here, for ghosts or whatever, then come on come on in. Do you do your job now? You might wonder, well, how often does this occur? Like, what are the stories? And there is one key story where they have a major role, and it is the story of Ananna and her descent into the underworld, which if I am understanding correctly, we don't necessarily know why she goes into the underworld. I think there have been a number of hypotheses as to, you know, why this would be. And certainly you can look at other descent into the underworld stories from other traditions that come later and you know, get some idea about, you know, why this would work. But it's essentially she finds herself in a situation where she cannot leave without some one taking her place, and so what did the Gala do? Will they venture back to our world? And they drag her young husband, Dumuzi, the shepherd god, away in the night, so she's allowed to go free. But Dumuzie dies and becomes a god of the underworld. And there are accounts of the sheep skin that he slept in was found empty, you know, because they dragged him out of it in the night and took him off to the underworld. But you know, he's a god, so it gets to be a god in the underworld, and you know, he ends up. I was reading some descriptions in Black and Green where they talk about I believe it was Black and Green talking about like his role in the underworld is kind of guardian, kind of a shepherd, and then he's you know, and then we have these these gala around him as well. And this kind of reminded me a little bit of what we're presented with with Goser and Ghostbusters. You know, some sort of entity that is supposed to you know, that is attended by monstrous beings and perhaps has some role regarding the flow in and out of the underworld, which you know in Ghostbusters, the Ghostbusters have interrupted this, they have messed with things with their ghostbusting and ghost capturing technology.
Ah, that's very good. But you know, I was actually thinking of another comparison that tied into some older episodes we did, and that would be while acknowledging many of the differences, some similarities there with the story of Osiris, who dies, goes into the underworld, and you know, is sometimes I think dubiously called like a god who dies and rises again. O Cyrus actually stays in the underworld, so sort of stays in this dead state, but is transformed and in a way transforms the underworld himself becomes an authority there.
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I'm not sure. There's a lot deeper one could go into, looking at like what does it mean to have a shepherd God become a major figure in the afterlife? And what does it say Tatus's line up too, with the emergence of this concept of a shadowy afterlife and our expectations for it, and the things we might want for ourselves in it, and the things we can do here for ourselves or for our loved ones. Certainly this idea of the divine as a shepherd does not go away, and it's with us still today in some traditions.
All right, well, you know what I promised in the last episode that we were going to come back and talk about Humbaba some more. But it seems like we're really out of time on this series, So maybe we'll have to return to Humbaba in the future, and in fact to the general category of ancient Mesopotamian demons. There's some whole other tangents I got really interested in but didn't have time to fully develop or research, maybe having to do with some connections to the Asiatic lion so maybe we'll come back and do more ancient Mesopotamian demons in the future.
Yeah, I'm totally downd for that. There's a lot we could discuss, and really there's even a lot more with the epic of Gilgamesh that we eat into. Yeah, we've covered aspects of it in the past, but it's certainly something we could do a deep dive on. All right, let's go ahead and close it out. Then, just a reminder, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We don't always talk about demons and monsters and so forth, but it is October, so you're going to find mostly that, if not only that, during the month of October, and then, like you know, thirty forty percent of the time the rest of the year. On Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. You'll again find those episodes on Fridays, and during the month of October they are all going to be you know, horror and Halloween related.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
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