Note 264.5 — Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

Nor is it an important phenomenon, so long as the ceremony was enacted merely by puppets or idols, as in the Boeotian Daidala.264.5 It only begins to be of higher significance for the history of religious practice and thought, when the part of one of the divinities in this drama is played by a human representative. For not only does this offer indefinite possibilities of exaltation for the mortal, but it may engender the mystic ideal and practice of communion with the divinity through sexual intercourse, which played a great part in Phrygian religion, and left a deep impress on early Christian symbolism. The question whether the Mesopotamian religion presents us with evidence of a “holy marriage” solemnised between a mortal and the divinity must finally involve the more difficult question as to the function and purpose of that strange Mesopotamian institution of temple-prostitutes. But, leaving this latter alone for the moment, we find explicit testimony in Herodotus to the fact with which we are immediately concerned. In describing the great temple of Bel at Babylon,265.1 he asserts, on the authority of his “Chaldean priests,” that the deity chose as his nightly partner some native woman, who was supposed to pass the night on the couch with him, and who was obliged to abstain from all other intercourse with men; and he compares a similar practice of belief found in the temple of Zeus in Egyptian Thebes, and in the oracular shrine of Apollo at Patara in Lycia. Now Herodotus’ trustworthiness in this matter has been doubted by Assyriologists;265.2 nevertheless, a phrase used in the code of Hammurabi concerning a holy woman dedicated to temple service, calling her “a wife of Marduk,” seems to give some colour to the Herodotean statement.265.3 Only, this term might have merely a spiritual-symbolic significance, like the designation of a nun as “the bride of Christ”; for the original Babylonian documents have supplied as yet, so far as I am aware, no evidence of a woman fulfilling the rôle of Belit, the wife of Bel.