Note 184.1 — Chapter X · The Concept of Divine Power and the Ancient Cosmogonies.

The last theme of high interest in the cosmogonic theory of ancient Babylonia is the creation of man. According to Berosos, this momentous act was attributed to Bel, who, after the victory over Chaos, commanded one of the gods to cut off his head and to make men and animals out of earth mixed with his own blood, and this story is partly corroborated by an old cuneiform text that is derived from the beginning of the second millennium.184.1 This interesting theory was not universally accepted, for another and independent text ascribes the creation of man to Marduk and a goddess called Aruru, simply as a mechanical act of power.184.2 The idea implicit in the former account, of the blood-relationship of man to god, is of the greater potentiality for religious metaphysic, and a similar notion is found, developed into a high spiritual doctrine, in the later Orphic Zagreus-mystery. But there is no trace of it in genuine Hellenic thought or literature. We have no provedly early Greek version of the origin of man: only, in the Works and Days, we are told that the Immortals or Zeus made the men of the five ages, the third generation, out of ash-trees: it may be that the story of Prometheus forming them out of clay was known to Hesiod, as Lactantius Placidus attests;185.1 in any case we may judge it to be of great antiquity on account of its wide vogue in the later period, and its occurrence in other primitive folklore. But nothing like it has as yet been found in the ἱερὸς λόγος of Mesopotamia.