Parts of Mesopotamian Ritual?

[cassius622]

Greetings all, 

Has anyone ever been able to identify a generic/basic "how to" pattern for Mesopotamian ritual? 

Something like: 

1. Preparation of altar/area for ritual. 
2. Personal cleansing/ablution. 
3. Salutation to/ invocation of deity
4. statement of purpose of the rite
5. Offering
6. Ending rite/farewell to deity

Obviously, I've just now pulled the above out of my ***, but am wondering if anyone has approached this. It has been done pretty successfully for Roman reconstructionist ritual, and it would be wonderful to see a "kinda sorta correct" basic template for approaching Mesopotamian work...

-Cassius

[us4-he2-gal2]

Hello Cassius62:






First I should point out that enenuru doesn't really focus on attempting to answer problems like 'how to.' As statements in the orientation area point out, the board has been made explicitly academic and so distinct from internet pagan and recon groups who attempt to answer those questions; who exist to answer those questions really. That said, I hope any visiting reader may benefit from the information here in some way, and that includes visiting readers who may be recons. But that particular angle isn't specific to this board.


Should someone want to perform any sort of ritual inspired by current research into Mesopotamian religious life, a major stumbling block is that nobody today really knows how private religion was observed. The problem was famously (within the field of study) stressed by A. Leo Oppenheim in his book "Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization" and see the chapter 'Why a "Mesopotamian Religion" should not be Written'. Well his explanation of why we can't really describe Mesopotamian Religion today, is that we lack any documentation from the private citizens about their personal religious practice. Indeed, private citizens were illiterate and the scribes of the time were employed by the elites, not the public. Instead, what we do have, are (imperfect) accounts of the Temple religion, prayers and rites to maintain the city god and so forth. Professional scribes never set out to create 'how to' guides, and what information they did preserve for posterity had to do with official temple cult, not private practice. Our information, therefore, doesn't explain the private religion of the common Mesopotamian man who was barred from access to the Temple (access generally was for priests only) and who likely focused his attention on his household gods, house shrine and ancestors.



The situation indicated above should probably be enough to give any Sumerian recon serious pause. Your options seem to be limited to attempting to replicate rites of the temple priests or to replicating rites of some other professional i.e. the exorcist or diviner. As for the temple cult, my feeling is that exactly the sort of information you want is exactly the sort of information that the ancients *never bothered to write down*. So for temples, we have mainly huge numbers of economic and administrative texts - these record, for example, that x number of sheep were brought to x temple for x god on x occasion. From these texts we can surmise the relative importance of one god to another, and we can glean the various names of different temple functionaries. From the names of different functionaries scholars may discern that cleanliness / purification in Mesopotamian temples because there are various priests whose professional titles seem to include sweeping or some such function. So in broad strokes aspects of temple rites can be discerned but no texts were ever written down specifying that the temple should be cleaned in x manner or x times - ritual texts do exist, but they assume that the reader already has a high degree of specialized knowledge. For example, they may state something like on x day 'perform the purification of Marduk rite x times' - (or something like that, this is ad lib) - the issue is, nobody today knows what the 'purification of Marduk rite' entailed, how specifically to do such, because the texts were not intended as 'how to' guides but as broad outlines for priests and specialists who already knew by heart all the basics. As a consequence, we will never know the basics of Mesopotamian rituals.



If you want exorcistic rituals, incantation texts sometimes also include ritual instructions. While Sumerian literature did not include ritual instructions (perhaps ritual procedures were entirely memorized in earlier periods), Akkadian texts sometimes include a ritual to accompany a given incantation. Again, the ritual instructions are not detailed and are unlikely to be duplicated today. A good discussion of exorcistic ritual is given by Prof. D. Schwemer who states the following (link to article below). These rites were about invoking divine aide in removing a contamination of one sort or another:



"The symbolic actions carried out during āšipūtu -rituals are too varied and numerous to
be summarized in a few sentences. Important elements included: (a) offerings for specific
deities arranged on and around a portable altar, a censer, and a libation vessel (Maul 1994 :
48–59 ; cf. Scurlock 2006 : 512); (b) purification rites such as washing and donning a clean
garment; (c) rites that symbolized the transfer of impurity and evil onto materials that
could be eliminated or substitutes that could be permanently removed; and (d) preventative
measures, such as amulets, apotropaic figurines, fumigations, and medicine pouches."


www.academia.edu/5659285/Magic_Rituals_Conceptualization_and_Performance

[us4-he2-gal2]

For the reconstruction of temple cult practice, so far as that is really possible, books on very late evidence are the best options. For example:


Linssen, M.J.H. 2004 The Cults of Uruk and Babylon. The temple ritual texts as evidence for Hellenistic cult practice. Leiden (Cuneiform Monographs 24)

[rummah]

Wow, that is one expensive book to purchase. Methinks I'll wait for the kindle version.