A brief look at House Gods

[us4-he2-gal2]

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Ancient Mesopotamian House Gods

Considering Joan Scurlock JANER 2009

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I'm recently reading through some JANER articles - Journal of Near Eastern Religions, a periodical which I have only recently encountered but am very pleased by. I believe I'm only finding it now due to it's bi-annual publishing schedule. J. Scurlock has been an insightful commentator on Ghosts and incantations in the past (having written a book on these matters)... knowing little about Mesopotamian household gods (as they are generally held to be undocumented) I'm hoping she will also prove insightful here, although the article is just 8 pages long.


Scurlock begins by countering other scholarly notions that ancestral ghosts are to be considered the gods of the household. She states that while they may be referred to as "gods" in some contexts as a sign of respect, they receive only offerings of a certain type and are not actually worshiped are deities such as Marduk and Ishtar. Given her expertise on matters of ghost lore, I would be inclined to accept Scurlock's distinctions here. Admittedly, she says, ghosts were seen to have "slept" underneath the floor of the Mesopotamian home (in certain eras), however it was the role of the actual household gods to protect against entry of ill influences on a somewhat more horizontal basis.


So who were these gods? It is one of the frustrations of Mesopotamian scholarship that so little on the private religious level is documented - yet a bit of evidence is presented in this article for house gods and has to do with a Neo-Assyrian NAM.BUR2.BI text in which a man's house is assaulted by a katarru-fungus on the outer north wall; evidently a potentially lethal situation for the master of the house. To avert this problem, the main advice given is to "slaughter a red [or yellow[] wether before Išum [in] the heart of the house..."

The same text is gives instructions should a black fungus assault the east wall - you "give a black nanny goat whose forehead is white [var. black] to the goddess at the door posts of that house..."


But what about a katarru-fungus on the outer west wall? You "slaughter a billy goat with redish skin and hair before the stars and you say: "Receive, Pleiades, great gods. Dispel this evil!.."


And finally should the Mesopotamian man be concerned about a fungus (even a katarru-fungus) on the south wall: you "slaughter a yellow nanny goat before Gula.."




Four gods are given in this test: Išum, "the goddess of the house", the Pleiades and Gula. (Pleiades is of course plural, corresponding to the seven stars). Three instructions are issued to avert instruction (by fungus) on the N, S, and W walls, and a fourth instruction is for th general thread of fungus. In each case a different god is called on and Scurlock interprets based on context that these are indeed the house gods as they were worshiped in the Neo-Assyrian period.


Regarding Išum, she believes that in texts mentioning "the god of the house" it is him who is meant as he is the only relevant singular male deity. She speculates he may have been equivalent to the Roman Vesta, a god of the hearth, in that his name is connected with fire and he is sometimes called "herald of the night". These seem to be fairly loose assumptions however. As for the unnamed "goddess of the house" Scurlock has what I would call a reasonable guess - she believes it is Ištar. This she comes to by referencing the Ištar-Dumuzi rituals which state that an angry personal god and goddess could be reconciled to an individual by means of an offering to Išum and recitation to "the goddess of the house." Given that this series is one that mainly invokes Ištar, and a number of other small considerations, she places Ištar as main candidate for this "goddess of the house" - possibly a door deity.

All in all, the NAM-BUR2-BI text is at the least a good place to start. While discussing parallels with a polytheistic religion from Korea, Scurlock closes with a mention of Šulak (who evidently was similar in occupation to the Korean "Toilette maiden." ) Šulak the demon of the lavatory, she says, "was notorious for giving elderly ancient Mesopotamians strokes when they trained to relieve themselves."