Summoning the Sacred

[us4-he2-gal2]

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Reviewing


Summoning the Sacred


By: Graham Cunningham


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Today I'm looking over Cunningham's interesting article published in SEL2 which deals with magical processes which summon divine attention to the mundane realm - or as Cunningham puts it, that establish an 'elision between the Sacred and the profane'. This paper is a direct follow up to some of the information he put forth in his 1997 Deliver Me from Evil: Mesopotamian Incantations 2500 - 1500 which has been central to the study at enenuru. If anyone has not been able to access this work but would like to go about studying it, please contact me directly for assistance.

The process of successfully summoning the sacred can be viewed as consisting of two complementary parts which together produce an elision between opposites, the profane and the sacred.

Cunningham begins by stating that the textual evidence from Mesopotamia and the material evidence of temples and iconography "amply demonstrate the richness of Mesopotamian ritual techniques for achieving such elision." His paper under review today concentrates on the Incantation part of that evidence. In understanding how incantations summon the sacred, the author takes note of Falkenstein's identification of four principal types of incantations and these we have looked at briefly on This Thread (reply 1 and 3). Just to recap, the four types are as follows:

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Type I. Legitimationstyp (Legitimation type)
Cunningham: "priestly legitimation"
-Incantations in which a priest legitimates himself as a representative of a deity.

Type II. Prophylaktischer
Cunningham: "Prophylactic-type incantation" (Prophylactic = 1. defending or protecting from disease or infection)
- Incantations instructing an evil demon not to approach the person on whose behalf the exorcist works.

Type III. Marduk-Ea typ
Cunningham: "divine dialogues"
- Incantations which contain the transfer of ritual instruction from a senior to a junior god, this transfer in effect re-enforces the corresponding actual ritual of the incantation-specialist.

Type IV. Weihungtyp/Kultmittelbeschworung (roughly Cultic practices of the Incantation specialist)
Cunningham: "consecration/praise of divine purifiers"
- These incantations praise certain cultic items for example the tamarisk or for example the reed, which were seen as pure, and were capable of bestowing purity. As magical items they were seen as mediating between the divine and temporal worlds. This type of incantation might correctly be seen as pre-empting a ritual procedure.

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These incantations were "often performed in conjunction with each other" and in this paper the author undertakes to discuss two of these types, Weihungtyp , and the Marduk-Ea typ which we know also from an enenuru examination (see here). These two types "are the ones most concerned with providing an elision between the sacred and the profane, each operating on different axes, Weihungstyp incantations on a vertical axis and Marduk-Ea-typ incantations on a horizontal axis."




About Weihungstyp/

Soap-plant, pure plant growing from the abzu, your branches (reach) to heaven, your roots to the underworld

[/i]


This type of incantation, as mentioned above, is primarily concerned with consecrating objects to be used in purifying the invalid, and, as the above line demonstrates, does so by providing elisions between the temporal domain and the divine domains by means of purification. Because the praise of these plants and purifiers uses terms relating to above or below, Cunningham terms this purification on a "vertical" axis.

Cunningham then sets about to define purification, the symbolic nature of which is made difficult to define by imperfect understandings of relevant Mesopotamian terminology, unfortunately. It is generally understood that purification relating to the change from sickness to health, can be interpreted in the terms of a rite of passage consisting of 3 stages: separation, transition and incorporation. Cunningham further explains this interpretation and states that the magic is in the separation from ordinary time and space, which allows for transition (from illness to health) resulting in immersion in the sacred (incorporation).
In addition, something was removed in process, some impurity and "what may underlie this sense of defilement is a perception that it constitutes disorder, similar in some ways to the modern perception of dirt as offending against order.. from this perspective it has been argued that the fear of impurity and the consequent emphasis on purification are in the background of a ritual behavior relating to transgression."






About Marduk-Ea-typ/




While we have examined the Marduk/Ea type incantation elsewhere, the author has great potential to enrich those understandings. He understands this type of incantation as a horizontal type of narrative the basic structure of which all reading are now familiar with, if you have seen the above enenuru.net link. As a backing for analysis he chooses here (somewhat unexpectedly) Propp's analysis of Russian fairy tales, which have been broadly applied to myths. Propp recognized three essential stages: first complication, in which an explanation of a lack of a misfortune caused by villainy is described; secondly a beginning counteraction in which a hero surfaces to assist; in the third stage the donor provides the hero with an agent of help.
Cunningham believes this model can be applied to the Marduk-Ea incantation typ as well. Turning more specifically to the ritual instructions that Enki provides Asalluhi in these texts, they "contain references to what Frazer termed sympathetic magic, based on principals of similarity and contact. Durkheim, however, regard such ritual as being as characteristic of religion as of magic and therefore referred to imitative rites and contagiousness of the sacred." Whether viewed as more religious or magical however, the
sympathetic rituals in any case "can be viewed as actively exploiting the figurative properties of language..." as when it is requested that "the evil be broken like a pot" or "the illness be stripped off like these dates."





Harmful divine intervention in the Marduk-Ea-typ incantations and divine punishment/




The author notes here that this type of incantation also features information about harmful divine intervention - such as the actions of an angry god. Very interesting are his remarks about this aspect of Marduk-Ea incantations in the Early Dynastic incantations which "contain indications that the illness they aim to cure was thought to be caused by demons and their agents, as is the case in later incantations." It is somewhat unclear, the authors explains, as to whether this punishment in this context was in answer to human transgression or some motiveless force independent of divine will - however "broadly contemporary royal inscriptions operate within a divine punishment model, the primary Mesopotamian model and one which is again attested in later incantations."





Other Genres Sharing the Worldview of the Incantation text/



As a sidenote, Cunningham has made brief comments on two genres of text which operate in tandem with the incantations:

Omen Literature

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Divinatory texts also summon the sacred though in order to obtain information about past or future events, such as for example the outcome of an illness should no incantation be performed. The author mentions an Akkadian text which exists and is referred to as the Exorcists Handbook (1st mill.) and which indicates that all who study it must learn both incantation and divinatory texts. Cunningham refers the reader to E. Reiner, JNES 19, 1960 for some edited texts from the Handbook showing how divination and incantation work in tandem.

The Personnel Laments

This second group complements the incantations, and are fundamentally complaints about suffering as illness, "these texts raise theological questions about the relationship between deities and humans and about the nature of the formers influence on the latter, examining in particular the correlation between human behavior, divine intervention to reward or punish that behavior, and human success or suffering. In addition to the fact that several of these laments contain narratives of exorcism, their close relation to the incantations is indicated by the fact that one lament, referred to as the Theodicy, is specified as having been composed by a mashmashhu."

[saratara]

back to Rome at last!..and very interested to the new threads. About this one I would add a criticism related to the division "sacred-profane". I do not actually believe there was such division in Mesopotamia, like in other ancient cultures. It is in fact a polarity very historically conditioned by the emergence of Christianism inside the Roman Empire and typical of a religion- very unusual in the past times, because instead of representing the mentality of a social and political system it opposed to it (thence the original polarity). I think that Cunningham applied a lot of Christian-oriented concepts to Mesopotamia like many other scholars. There is for sure a passage connected to purification in many ancient rituals but in my opinion they allow to create an originary situation where to operate undisturbed by later interferences more than an "incorporation into the sacred". I would like you know what you all think of this. Cheers...Sara

[us4-he2-gal2]

Sara:



This is a very good post and very thought provoking so thanks for bringing up these objections. On these sorts of focuses we have been fairly centered on Cunningham at this board but no one man is Assyriology. To try and respond somewhat than and also I will try to elaborate in some places so if the suggestions are very flawed they can be definitively confronted:


Well, I think it is generally agreed that the ancients held 3 distinct spheres in common belief: Heaven, earth and the underworld. For now, Heaven might be referred to as the sacred and earth as the mundane.

It seems fair to say that in the Sumerian world view, as you say, there wasn't such a sharp delineation between sacred and mundane: at least, in the literature we find divinity behind many things with obvious physical manifestations in the mundane realm: Fresh water, wind, wheat, clothing and so on. Jacobsen's classic description here, is that Mesopotamians understood the divine as a numinous power, an indwelling spirit animating their respective prerogatives. There is a clear difference between this and the modern world view as you say, and the mundane realm was at the same time full of things governed by the divine, but does this limit the validity of commentaries which stress divine mediation between Heaven and Earth? That is, the transfer of some positive attribute from divine to mundane realms (implying this attribute is not present in the latter already).



Cult representations/


However, even though the presence of the divine seems to have been implicitly implied by an ideology which posited the numinous power in practically everything nameable, it seems also apparent the Mesopotamians felt the need to repeatedly make the presence of the divine explicit - Jacobsen (1976 p.14) comments that:

"the fashioning of images of the god sought and achieved his lasting presence... later on images in human form became prevalent and the older nonhuman images were considered mere "emblems" though, as we have mentioned, they were still the under which the gods accompanied the army in battle and the form under which they validated oaths."

That is to say, when the Mesopotamians went to war, they carried Standards, complete with emblems of the deities in old non-anthropomorphic form , mounted on the pole. What is interesting here, aside from the insight on anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic representation, is an example of how officials, officials of the temple or of the palace, will feel the need to reinforce divine presence even when such should (according to the world view) be implicit already (in this case by employment of a physical representation.)

Again with the cult statue itself this was in ancient times believed to house the spirit of the deity, making divine presence more explicit.



Temples/


The temple itself and the imagery it evokes may be seen as forming an interesting parallel to the concepts of divine mediation that Cunningham interprets in incantation lore. What becomes clear is that Mesopotamians interpreted their temples as connecting heaven and earth, sacred and mundane. This is explicit in the name of the temple at Babylon, Etemenanki, or 'temple of the bond of Heaven and Earth.'

Some time ago I had the chance to read of a dissertation written by one of our members here which I've mentioned fairly often, Anne's dissertation on the concepts related to E-ninnu temple and its construction as told in the story of its building which is preserved on the Gudea Cylinders. She examines the temple as a sort of "cosmic link" similar to the concept of dur-an-ki in Nippur, and indeed the first line of Cylinder B refers to E-ninnu as "The House, great mast of the land, set up between heaven and earth.." Alternative translations replace "great mast" with "bond". The temple on top of the Ziggurat is sometimes called "great mountain" and line B 6 describes it as "a great mountain reaching toward Heaven." Anne had quoted Edzard as saying about this "as a mountain, the temple is a link between heaven and earth...the ziggurat stands on earth and reaches up to the sky."



Mediation in temple and magical rites/



For these and other reasons, we can understand the E-ninnu and other temples as acting to the ancients like mediators between Heaven and Earth - they were seen as explicit links to the divine and to heaven (also also to the abzu with mooring posts and foundation deposit reaching toward or to the water table.) This same principal may have extended to the cultic and magical rites carried on within, as Cunningham stated regarding the divine purifiers used in temples:

"Four points should be noted about these purifiers: that they are pure; that consequently they purify; that in most cases there is evidence for their existence in temples; that they mediate between the divine domains above and below it, with this mediation being expressed by references either to those domains or their deities, or to the plants' roots and branches which can be regarded as extending towards those domains. Thus temples perceived as mediating between the temporal world and the divine domains contain purifiers capable of performing the same role."


So some of the same purifying items which are thought to "summon the sacred" feature in both incantation texts and in text describing temple rites like the Gudea cylinders. Cunningham makes the not about Tamarisk:

- [ED] On the Tamarisk: pg. 29

"Text 31 also describes the tamarisk as a 'pure tree' ('giš-zi-kir') while Text 16 refers to its 'pure folige' ('ú-sikil'). Later texts show that possessing this quality relates to performing it, that what was pure makes pure. For example, Gudea describes the tamarisk purifying Ningirsu's temple: 'They purify and make clean Eninnu with
tamarisk...' ('giš-šinig..é-ninnu im-ta-sikil-e-ni im-ta-dadag-ge-éš') [Cyl. B iv 10-12]. ....because tamarisk was used to make statues of deities it achieved an even closer relation to the divine."


- Or on the Reed (pg. 30) (This comment focusing on URN 49 which is an Early Dynastic incantation relating to temple building (another temple in Lagash.) We have discussed it in some detail on reply one of the ED Incantations thread.)

"TEXT 17 [*CIRPL URN 49* ] relates the reed primarily to Enki and his domain below the temporal world but also features references to its roots and branches...later incantations show that the reed's purity enables it to purify. Thus, for example, an incantation from the Old Babylonian period begins by emphasizing the plant's purity and association with heaven and the underworld:

- 'Pure reed, pure reed growing in the heard of the reed-thicket: from heave you shine, from the underworld you shine' ('gi-[kug] g-sikil -go-šà]-ga-mú-a an-ta ba-m[uk]
ki-ta [na-m[]ul') - and concludes by emphasizing its power as a purifier: 'You purify, you cleanse the mouth of mankind' ('ka-lú-ùlu-mu-un-sikil-[le mu-un-dadag-ge]').
Evidence for the reed in temples is provided for example by the hymns to Nanna."






So, from standards to statues to temples making the divine explicit seems necessary, also with incantations - with the latter two making repeated allusions to the temple or cultic items growing in, or to, heaven and the underworld; this seems to attempt to manifestation divinity from above or below, to mediate and reinforce by overlapping symbolisms - an apparent attempt to reach to that same lingering divinity that is in the standard but also not in it, in the statue but also above it, that is the sun but also not the sun. To reach to heaven or the underworld and receive an efficacy that is the prerogative only of those domains.

[saharda]

Feb 6, 2009 10:32:37 GMT -5 saratara said:

back to Rome at last!..and very interested to the new threads. About this one I would add a criticism related to the division "sacred-profane". I do not actually believe there was such division in Mesopotamia, like in other ancient cultures. It is in fact a polarity very historically conditioned by the emergence of Christianism inside the Roman Empire and typical of a religion- very unusual in the past times, because instead of representing the mentality of a social and political system it opposed to it (thence the original polarity). I think that Cunningham applied a lot of Christian-oriented concepts to Mesopotamia like many other scholars. There is for sure a passage connected to purification in many ancient rituals but in my opinion they allow to create an originary situation where to operate undisturbed by later interferences more than an "incorporation into the sacred". I would like you know what you all think of this. Cheers...Sara

I would take issue with the word "profane" here as well. There were certain ritual cleanliness issues, but I have to agree that there wasn't a clear duality between sacred and profane like we would think of in western theology.

[us4-he2-gal2]

Saharda: Lets throw up a definition of Profance just for clarity:

"2. not devoted to holy or religious purposes; unconsecrated; secular (opposed to sacred )."

I think after the response I have made above, the question at hand has changed somewhat. For my loose support of Cunningham's observations, I have conceded that the term "profane" does not adequately reflect the Sumerian world view, which is not so non-theistic as to be "secular" in any good definition.

However, I have defended Cunningham's basic descriptions of the principals of divine mediation in incantation lore and in ritual practice, by arguing that the Sumerians were motivated to make divine involvement and attention explicit by means of appeal to heaven and to the netherworld - this is as Cunningham says an attempt to achieve "elision" between the realms. In recognition of the theistic nature of their basic world view, this elision would serve perhaps to reinforce, not necessary introduce, the divine presence.
Thus the point for the theistic nature of Sumerian world view is valid, but does not necessary overturn understandings of divine mediation in Sumerian magic practice.

In order for our discussion to progress on this thread, you would need to address, overturn or counter that arguement, in my opinion, my friend.

[enkur]

Concerning Saratara's post: Having been grown and educated in a former communist country where the atheist materialist scientific approach was the absolute truth, I have certain observations over certain typical representatives of the communist scholarship who had also their close parallels in the Victorian science of the late XIX and the early XX centuries. Paradoxically enough they all symptomatically projected some puritan, patriarchal, moralist and dualist attitude unto everything they studied. Unconsciously they were still Christians despite of their conscious atheistic pretences and just re-discovered the religious dogmas in scientific terms.

Concerning Jacobsen: my own experience with a certain magical mushroom has showed me in an unambiguous way how the numinous manifests its presence in the profane daily life, so some common phenomena and objects get a cosmic meaning without being distorted at all in any hallucinatory way. On the contrary, everything is what it has ever been, but far more clear, vivid, and meaningful. So, is it possible that those purifiers were plants of power? Such plants of power were used by the sorcerers all over the world, so I doubt if the Mesopotamian ones were exceptions. What is known on this matter?

[us4-he2-gal2]

Well as for the divine purifiers as potentially mind altering substances, this is an interesting suggestion, as it would present to us an explanation of why these substances are so ritually significant ; and yet, I don't think this idea would hold for long, because the objects which are purifiers themselves don't fit.

These things seem to be pure because symbolically, they are seen to bridge the space between realms - so the reed is one purifier, its root reached down and as it reached up it reached up to the heavens (connecting underworld and heaven together). Other purifiers, like holy/pure water, seem not to fit this pattern. The Kishkanu tree was a purifier and it may have been such an item because of its roots or branches or maybe it was because it was found in the domain of Enki, i.e. the marshes near Eridu?

There has been a fair amount of data collected about purifiers on this board and it is spread out - so the best way to find it may be to go to the search option at the top, and search for "purifier" - make sure to adjust the "posted within the last" to 3000 days, and put 1000 in the maximum number of results (there will be 11 results or so)


The study of potential drug use in Mesopotamia is very under-developed; hardly anyone has looked at this as far as I know. I have reviewed on suggestion of the possible use of opium on the following thread:

enenuru.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=research&thread=210&page=1

This was suggested by Campbell-Thompson about 100 years ago - unfortunately few have looked into Botany since this authors Dictionary of Assyrian Botany was printed.. because the understandings of Mesopotamian Botany are not good, idea's of whether they had drugs are hard to discuss.. As you may see on that thread, as soon as I had Campbell-Thompsons suggestion of opium it wasn't long before finding another view which renders that authors idea's obsolete - outdated.


cheers.

[enkur]

Thank you for the reference to the Assyrian botany. Interesting reliefs indeed. If the poppy was really of such a great use in Assyria it explains their general degeneration in their later imperial phase Though the poppy opens the door to the dreamland, it has the property to totally isolate one's own dreamland from the rest of the world, so one becomes a center of the universe in some morbid way asking for a final catastrophe.

If not being direct mind altering substances, these purifiers should have facilitated the process in some practical rather than symbolical way. Nothing was symbolical in a time when magic was reality - as the water washes out the dirt of the body, so should the reed have had some practical application in the process of communicating with the numinous, not being just an association. In magic the symbols don't symbolize anything - they are the Thing itself. What we don't know - we don't know, yet let's stay opened to know.

If a contemporary magician burdened by psychology wants a Sumerian dingir to respond to his invocation, he should find a practical way to purify himself of the assumption that the gods are just aspects of his unconscious - he is to feel them as entities having existence of their own and forget about Jung.

While I applaud Jacobsen for describing the Sumerian concept of the numinous as immanent, and the Hebrew concept of the numinous as transcendent ("The Treasures of Darkness"), I find his qualifying the latter as a higher concept than the former as ridiculous as the notion that the monotheism was a higher form of religion than the polytheism so characteristic for certain scholars.

This is where the old victorian-like scholarship unconsciously repeats the the emotionality suppressing Christian pattern. In fact, the development of monotheism is rightly proportional to the general incompetence in the mystery of life, thus a sorcerer/ess living in an animistic universe is far more competent in magic than a cultic pagan priest/ess who is socially burdened and communicates with the numinous indirectly via temples and hierarchies, who, on his/her part, is far more competent in magic than a monotheist priest who has totally lost his connection with the mystery of life and keeps up only a transcendent "belief" however philosophically sustained. At last there comes the victorian scholar who is left only with dead mechanistic matter to classify. Thus we arrive to a highly technologized society which is emotionally atrophied, and maybe that's why such eccentrics like us delve into antiquity where the emotional evolution was stopped.