Note 104.1 — Chapter VI · The Deities as Nature-Powers.

Lastly, we fail to observe in that domain of the old Babylonian religion which may be called nature-worship, any clear worship of the earth regarded as a personal and living being, as the Hellenes regarded Gaia. The great goddesses, Ishtar, the goddess at once warlike and luxurious, virgin and yet unchaste, terrible and merciful, the bright virgin of the sky, Bau, the wife of Ninib, the “amorous lady of heaven,” are certainly not of this character. Still less is Allatu, the monstrous and grim Queen of Hell, at whose breast the lions are suckled. It seems that if the early Sumerians conceived the earth as a personal divinity at all, they imagined it as a male divinity. For in the inscriptions of Nippur, Enlil or Bel appears as a Lord of the underworld, meaning our earth as distinct from the heavens: he is hymned as the “lord of the harvest-lands, lord of the grain-fields”104.1—he is the “husbandman who tends the fields”; when Enlil is angry, “he sends hunger everywhere.” In another hymn he is thus described: “The great Earth-Mountain is Enlil, the mountain-storm is he, whose shoulders rival the heavens, whose foundation is the bright abyss”;104.2 and again, “Lord, who makest to abound pure oil and nourishing milk;… in the earth Lord of life art thou”; “to give life to the ground thou dost exist.”104.3 It is evident that Enlil is more than the personal earth regarded as a solid substance; he is rather the god of all the forces and life that move on and in the earth, hence he is “the lord of winds.”104.4 He is more, then, than the mere equivalent of Gaia. One might have expected to find a Sumerian counterpart for this goddess in Ninlil or Belit, the wife and female double of Enlil or Bel: but in an inscription that is dated as early as 4000 B.C. she is styled “The Queen of Heaven and Earth,”104.5 and though in a hymn of lamentation addressed to her104.6 she is described as the goddess “who causeth plants to come forth,” yet the ecstatic and mysticising Babylonian imagination has veiled and clouded her nature-aspect.