Note 295.4 — Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

In Babylonian thaumaturgy nothing is more significant than the magic power of the Word, whether spoken or written: and the Word, as we have noted, was raised to a cosmic divine power and possessed inherent creative force.295.4 This is only a reflection upon the heavens of the human use of the magical or mesmeric word or set of words. This use of them is found, indeed, all round the globe. What seems unique in the Mesopotamian culture is that religion, religious literature, and poetry should have reached so high a pitch and yet never have risen above or shaken off the magic which is its constant accompaniment. Men and gods equally use magic against the demons; the most fervid hymn of praise, the most pathetic litany, is only part of an exorcism-ritual; and so inevitably does the shadow of magic dog religion here that Dr. Langdon is justified in his conjecture296.1 that in a great hymn to Enlil, which contains scarcely a prayer but chiefly ecstatic description of his power, the worshipper is really endeavouring to charge himself with higher religious magic by this outpouring. In fact, here and elsewhere, a magic origin for the practice of theologic exegesis may be obscurely traced; narrative might acquire an apotropaeic effect; thus tablets containing the narrative of the achievements of the plague-god, hung up before the houses, could avert pestilence,296.2 or, again, the reading aloud the tablet narrating the victory of Shamash and Ramman over the seven demons who attacked the moon-god Sin served to defeat the seven demons by the same sympathetic magic as would be worked by a dramatic representation of that event.296.3