Note 54.2 — Chapter IV · Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.

But we have no need of the theory, dear to some anthropologists—that the earliest period of Mesopotamian religion was purely theriomorphic, when the deities were imagined and represented merely as animals, and that the human-shaped deities whom we find standing on lions in the Babylonian art had once been divine lions and nothing more, and had at a later period emerged from the animal into divine manhood. Theriomorphism and anthropomorphism can and generally do confusedly co-exist: neither in the lowest savagery or at the highest culture is there found a purely theriomorphic art or theriomorphic religion; on the other hand, severe anthropomorphism among the ancient religions is to be found only in the Hellenic, and we may add in the Judaic, though here with a quite different mode of expression and far more sternly controlled. In Mesopotamia we have nothing that points to a direct worship of animals,54.2 but we discern that the anthropomorphism is unstable; the religious artist mainly clung to it, except when he was embodying forms of terror, the destructive demons, and especially the powers of the lower world: for this purpose he selected the most portentous types of bestiality, such as we find on that bronze tablet, which used to be regarded as revealing an interesting glimpse into Babylonian eschatology: at least we may be sure that the lion-headed female above the horse in the canoe, at whose breasts two small lions are sucking, is the goddess of Hell.55.1 It was probably through his association with the world of death that Nergal acquired something of the lion’s nature, and even the very human goddess Ishtar might assume a lion’s head when she was unusually wroth, though this rests on a doubtful text. We may say, then, with fair degree of accuracy, that the theriomorphic forms of Babylonian religious art belong to demonology; and in this domain the Babylonian artist has shown the same powerful imagination as the Mycenaean: it is the former to whom we are indebted for the attractively alarming type of the scorpion-man.