Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [61]
Many people also heeded exorcists and diviners for prophecies and advice. In Mesopotamia, divination was a highly specialized art. The Mesopotamians believed that the whole universe was filled with coded messages about the future, and these people sought advice from expert diviners, trained for years in the art of reading the signs in animal entrails and organs, such as the liver of a freshly slaughtered lamb. Dream oracles were also popular, and the practice of astrological readings began in Mesopotamia as soothsayers attempted to find portents in the changing heavens—the beginning of carefully recorded astronomical records. As Daniel Boorstin wrote in The Discoverers, “If the rising and setting of the sun made so much difference on earth, why not also the movement of the other heavenly bodies? The [Mesopotamian] Babylonians made the whole sky a stage for their mythological imagination. Like the rest of nature, the heavens were a scene of living drama.”
Originally intended to demonstrate that the king’s decisions and laws had divine approval, these elaborate ancient Mesopotamian systems of reading signs, omens, and oracles were probably as ubiquitous in ancient Ur and Babylon as the “psychic reader” business is on the streets of many big cities today.
But the chief mythic event in this world came during their New Year, when a great public festival was held. This eleven-day religious observance was not just a spiritual event or festive holiday, but a national drama, a form of political theater meant to solidify the king’s role as protector and provider. During the pivotal New Year celebration (which fell in April), when the ancient Creation stories were sung at great public gatherings, the king actually reenacted the role of the great fertility god in a ritual marriage to a priestess representing the goddess Inanna (aka Ishtar). This marriage ceremony—which would have been publicly consummated—was meant to ensure prosperity, strength, and order.
Using myth and belief, the rulers of Mesopotamia—and the priestly classes allied with them—created and cemented their political and social power. The importance of this leap in human history can’t be overstated. It was a development as significant as the invention of the wheel or writing.
MYTHIC VOICES
In the temple of Babylon there is a second shrine lower down in which is a great sitting figure of Bel, all of gold on a golden throne, supported on a base of gold, with a golden table standing beside it. I was told by the Chaldeans that, to make all this, more than twenty-two tons of gold were used. Outside the temple is a golden altar, and there is another one, not of gold but of great size, on which full-grown sheep are sacrificed…. On the larger altar, the Chaldeans also offer something like twenty-eight and a half tons of frankincense every year at the festival of Bel. In the time of Cyrus, there was also in this sacred building a solid golden statue of a man some fifteen feet high—I have this on the authority of the Chaldeans, although I never saw it myself.
—HERODOTUS describes Babylon in The Histories
Like the “Where’s Waldo?” of the ancient world, the Greek historian Herodotus also popped up in Babylon, which was the great capital city of several Mesopotamian empires as well as the Persian empire of King Cyrus (d. 530 BCE). His description of the inner sanctum of a temple, with its rooms devoted to gods, is well supported by archaeological investigations. The god whom Herodotus referred to as “Bel” (which means “Lord”) was actually Babylon’s central deity, Marduk, and the title of “Bel” was transformed into “Baal” in the myths that would figure significantly in the history of the Bible.
An idol devoted to Bel is also featured in the story “Bel and the Dragon,” a brief addition to the biblical Book of Daniel (of lion’s den fame). Set in Babylon during the time of