October 8, 2024 • 51 mins
In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss some of the more noteworthy, fascinating and potentially terrifying gods and demons from the religions and myths of the ancient Mesopotamian world. It’s a who’s who of Pazuzu-adjacent entities.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
And I am Joe McCormick. And on today's episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our month long celebration of
Halloween continues. Now, if you've been a listener for a while,
you know what's going on. You know what we do
every October. But if you are new to the show,
here's the deal. Every October we devote all of our
core episodes, our Tuesday and Thursday episodes to seasonally creepy
(00:40):
subject matter things about ghosts, monsters, devils, curses, horrors, and frights.
So last week we talked all about spooky trains, about
locomotive horror stories, ghost trains, and the phenomenon of the
Victorian railway madness. Today, we are beginning a new series
on the demons and monsters of ancient Mesopotamian religion because
(01:05):
they had some really exquisite demons, and as a concrete
example to kick things off today, I wanted to start
by talking about a specific ancient artifact. For my money,
one of the creepiest looking artifacts from all of antiquity,
and that is a mask of Humbaba.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Ah Mbaba is an old friend of the show. We've
talked about Humbaba, not stuff to blow your mind before.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
One of my favorites. Definitely, Humbaba came up in our
series on the origins of the religious imagery of the Halo,
because Humbaba, as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, famously
has these seven auras or radiances that are kind of
like an evil halo. But first I want to talk
specifically about this artifact, and then we can talk a
(01:52):
bit more about Humbaba as an idea. So this artifact
is a baked clay disc picting a hideous face. It's
roughly three point three inches in height and in width,
and it was produced during the Old Babylonian period between
about eighteen hundred and sixteen hundred BCE. It was excavated
(02:15):
by the nineteenth century Assyrian archaeologist Hormuz Ressam from the
site of the ancient Babylonian city of Sipper, which is
on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in modern
day Iraq. Today, this artifact is held in the collection
of the British Museum. Now, this sculpture is absolutely worth
looking up if you are able, but if not, I'm
(02:36):
gonna do my best to describe it. The mask shows
a humanoid face frozen in a pitiless grimace. It's got
the teeth clenched. The head is rounded in shape with
bulges in the outline of the head where the ears
would be, and it has wide, blank, empty gray eyes. Now,
(02:57):
I know, in some cases these ancient Mesopotamians stay statues
and sculptures would have been painted, and the paint has
simply weathered away over the years, which is the reason
some of these ancient statues have such unsettling blank eyes,
just these empty, cloudy pools of stone with no pupil
or iris. I don't know if that's the case with
(03:18):
this clay sculpture or if this is the way it
was always intended to look. Either way, the state in
which it has arrived to us in modernity is extremely
unsettling looking. But I think the most interesting detail about
it I haven't gotten to yet, and that is the
texture of the flesh. The entire surface of this monstrous
(03:40):
face is molded with a pattern like a labyrinth, so
it's you have a long, single thick line like a
rope folded over and over upon itself to form every
part of this head, the hair, the forehead, the ears,
the nose, the cheeks, and the double rows of clenched
(04:02):
killer teeth. I think you can even see where the
coil is supposed to be at its midpoint, you know
where it folds over on itself. It's at the left
side of the mouth, where the jaws open. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
This is very unsettling looking, and if I were to
compare it to anything, it makes me think of the
character prune Face from the nineteen ninety Dick Tracy movie. Yeah,
it's like that level of like wrinkliness, but then with
this also this vicious grin, this growling toothy mouth. So yeah,
(04:36):
it's pretty intimidating.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
But I think at least prune Face had pupils in his.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Eyes somewhere in there. It was heavily littered.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, the name implies, Okay, so Humbaba or huahwah. These
are different, and this will come up throughout the series.
Most of these entities we're going to be talking about
have multiple names from different languages and stages in their
cultural evolution. So this character is known as Huawa in
Sumerian sources and Humbaba in Akkadian sources. I'm going to
(05:07):
be calling him Humbaba.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
The other side of the coin is that there are
best practices for pronouncing a lot of these words and
these names, so we can we can certainly get them wrong.
But on the other hand, we can't, without any degree
of failure, get it one hundred percent right, because nobody
knows one hundred percent exactly how any of these given
(05:30):
words or names were pronounced in the ancient world in
their original setting.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Very good point, Rob, We will be doing our best
with all of these ancient Mesopotamian words and names. We
will undoubtedly get some of them wrong in ways that
will be detectable to people who specialize in these ancient languages.
But yeah, to some extent, we don't fully know how
everything was pronounced in every case.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
And you know, probably better that we don't hit it
dead on because we don't want to summon any of
these entities. Many of them have been as sleep for
a very long time. We don't want to invite them
into our modern world.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Well, it's often the case in these mythologies that you
might have a dead god that isn't really dead forever.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Oh you know, The other thing that we risk is
if we chance on a mispronunciation of one of their
names that just hasn't been done before, we might chance
upon the original pronunciation that therefore summons them into the
modern world. That's like even the experts haven't been saying
one hundred percent right, we could air into the summoning space.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
I can't even think about that, okay. So Baba or
Huahbah is a character who features prominently in ancient Mesopotamian literature,
most famously in the different versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
As I said earlier, we talked about him at some
length in that series on the iconography of the Halo,
(06:52):
because whom Baba is described as having these seven terrifying auras,
these strange layers of deadly radiance that are taken off
one by one before he is eventually killed by Gilgamesh
and Gilgamesh's companion in Kidu. In Gilgamesh, Humbaba is described
as a giant, terrifying humanoid creature assigned by the god
(07:14):
in Leal, the lord of Winds, to be the guardian
of the Cedar forest, and, according to the Stephanie Dally
translation of Gilgamesh, This is in Tablet two. Humbaba is
meant to be quote the terror of the people, Humbaba,
whose shout is the flood weapon, whose utterance is fire,
(07:35):
and whose breath is death. And we're told that Humbaba
can hear a rustling of branches in his forest from
sixty leagues away. So who would dare walk inside the
forbidden pines? Now, even though we've talked about Humbaba before,
I do think we probably want to come back and
talk about him some more. We might get into some
more depth in part two of this series, but specifically
(07:57):
in the context of this clay mask from ancient Sipper,
there is a question about the way that it looks.
What is the deal with the labyrinthine design on the
face is? Why is it represented as a horrific face
with these deep wrinkles. The prune face look and the
(08:19):
wrinkles seem to be formed out of a folded rope.
There is an answer to this. We know conclusively why
it looks that way. The rope that makes the face
is not a rope. There is a cuneiform inscription on
the reverse side of the mask which tells us this
inscription is written by the hand of Warad Marduk, a diviner,
(08:43):
son of Kubarum, also a diviner. And what the diviner
says is, according to the British Museum's translation quote, if
the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huawa.
This is an omen of Sargon who ruled the land.
Oh man, oh yeah. And then there's a part with
some text missing, but it says if and then there's
(09:06):
an illision, the house of a man will expand, so
it's saying the coils of a colon. This horrifying mask
is supposed to represent the piled up intestines of a
slaughtered animal, which have been used in tons of cultures
all throughout history as a stimulus for divination, meaning that
(09:28):
a diviner could read signs of the future and gain
access to privileged information by looking at the guts of
a slaughtered animal, sometimes at the liver as well, or
sometimes the intestines. In this case, I believe the animal
is supposed to be a sheep, but you know, in
various usages you would get different animals, might be a
(09:50):
sheep or a goat, or an ox or so forth.
In this particular case, the inscription suggests that if the
diviner sees entrails that coil to represent the face of Humbaba.
This is an omen of maybe successful conquest or expanding power,
or the expansion of one's house. So according to a
book we were both consulting called Gods, Demons and Symbols
(10:12):
of Ancient Mesopotamia and Illustrated Dictionary. This is by a
couple of scholars named Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, British
Museum Press, nineteen ninety two. According to this book, the
face of Huawa seen by a diviner typically means revolution
in the state, which I guess doesn't sound so great
if you are currently the king. And a lot of
(10:33):
times these divinations would be given to a powerful person,
recorded as given to a powerful person such as a king.
But the authors also suggest there some evidence that clay
masks representing the face of Humbaba were hung up on walls,
maybe in palaces and temples as charms to ward off evil.
(10:53):
So as terrifying as this kind of face looks, masks
like this may have been thought to have the power
to ward off evil rather than bring it, which is
what we today call apotropaic magic, protective or warding off magic.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah yeah, and we'll get into at least one other
key example of this as we proceed through this episode.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Now, like I said, we may have to come back
to Humbaba later in this series, but I also think
we should near the beginning of the series definitely acknowledge
the ancient Mesopotamian supernatural entity that will be most recognizable
to fans of modern horror movies because of his appearance
in The Exorcist, and that is the demon Pazuzu.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
That's right, Bazuzu cast a long shadow over modern horror
cinema and horror fiction. Also just really stands out the
iconography of this particular demon because it features a pair
of wings that in silhouette kind of look like an
X behind a humanoid body, has like a horned dog
(12:12):
like head, very fierce eyes and face, and yeah, works
great in silhouette and is used not only in The
Exorcist that we mentioned this on Weird House Cinema, but
the when we did an episode on Ridley Scott's Legend.
The same statue also shows up two different times in
the movie Legend, just in the background or in the foreground.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, that's funny. And the Exorcist was already out at
that point. That's the funny thing.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mean, I think Pazzuzu got representation, and it was
either like, let's get some more gigs, Let's get some
more projects. I want to work with Ridley Scott.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Now, later we will get to the question of whether
these cinematic portrayals accurately captured the spirit of Pazuzu. Maybe
they partially do, and maybe there's some ways they don't.
They don't get it quite right, but at least within
the story of The Exorcist, Pazzuzu is the name given
to a demon that possesses and torments the twelve year
(13:06):
old Reagan McNeil. And this is the story in the
original nineteen seventy one novel by William Peter Blattie, and
it's carried over into the nineteen seventy three film adaptation
directed by William Friedkin. Though in the original novel and movie,
the demon does not run around saying I am Pazzuzu.
You get more of that in like The Exorcist to
(13:29):
the Heretic, I think, which is, you know, there's a
kind of downgrading of some of the subtleties of the
original in that, but the connection with Pazuzu is established
primarily through a prologue in the film in which the
Catholic priest Lancaster Marrin is This is the character who
ultimately leads and performs the exorcism rights in the third
(13:51):
act of the movie, he's working at an archaeological dig
in Iraq, and in multiple contexts you see him encounter
a state of a frightening, monstrous creature from ancient times.
And one thing I always liked about The Exorcist is
that the meaning of this confrontation is never made too explicit,
(14:12):
so it doesn't get corny. We don't get Maren facing
off against it at the beginning and saying, you know,
giving some monologue like you are evil, Pazuzu, I must
defeat you. You know that you don't get a direct
address till towards the end of the film. Instead, there
is just this vague, powerful sense of dread that the
entity depicted in these ancient artworks is somehow present now
(14:35):
and is powerful, and its shadow has somehow fallen over
our lives now. Of course, while I love The Exorcist,
you know it's a great horror movie. In the modern world,
you shouldn't go to the Exorcist to understand what an
entity like Pazuzu originally was and originally meant. In The Exorcist,
Pazuzu is rendered as a demon in the modern Christians
(15:00):
sense of the word, meaning a malevolent spirit, a minion
of Satan which can possess the bodies of innocent humans
and use them to Satanic ends. So this is a
Christian demon, specifically a demon as imagined by a twentieth
century Catholic author. But this leads to the question, what
(15:21):
was Pazuzu in his original time and place. Does it
make sense to call him a demon? And if it does,
should we at least modify our understanding of the English
word demon a little bit for the purpose of the discussion,
Maybe a little bit less the Catholic William Peter Bladdie
demon and maybe more a demon in the broader Greek
(15:41):
sense of the term.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, this is a This is a very important question
to ask before we proceed into any more detailed discussion
on these various demons. Yeah, what is a demon? We
certainly it's one of those terms that you just throw
it out there and it's going to summon various images
and ideas. You might, for instance, think of the ball
rog and various chaotic evil denizens of the Abyss from
(16:05):
dungeons and dragons, and of course these are all based
on entities from other you know, faiths and traditions and
so forth. You might also well think of the name
of various names from Christian demonology, particularly those that crossed
over out of theology and into popular culture for everything
from horror movies to rock music. And again many of
(16:27):
these given names, Many of these entities were appropriated from
other cultures and faiths, some transformed into Christian demons, and
in their original context were considered gods or some other
spiritual entities. And yet at the same time, even in
discussing mythic, legendary and folkloric entities, either casually or even
(16:48):
from like from the level of scholarship and academia, the
word demon is often used instantly provides a starting point
from which to potentially understand perhaps a foreign concept or
a creature or entity in another tradition you know. And
you see this with other words as well, like you'll
(17:08):
frequently if you're reading about, say, Chinese mythology and Chinese
legend and law, you might read about goblins or trolls.
You might read about ogres in Japanese lore and so forth.
You know, there's certain types of monsters, types of figures,
types of imaginary beings that seem largely universal, and when
(17:30):
you get into the particulars, yes, things change a bit,
but in general you can often safely say, well, this
is a demon from this particular faith. There's still a
lot of room for error, and there is a lot
of error out there when you look into especially like
historic understandings of some of these entities. So yeah, we
can throw out the word demon, and we can strike
close to the truth. We can strike close to perhaps
(17:52):
the original intended meaning here. And as such we can
loosely think of demons as as the following evil supernatural
spirits or beings of some sort that were never human,
are not mortal, and yet exist beneath the status of
gods and sometimes demi gods. They are often conceived as
(18:17):
punishers in the afterlife, though they're also frequently seen as
spreaders of sin, disease, death, and temptation in the world
of the living. In Christian traditions, they are often described
as fallen angels, followers of the rebel angel Lucifer now Satan,
the ruler of Hell, and in other traditions they may
(18:38):
seem at times more part of a cosmic order than
agents in rebellion against said order. But even then you'll
still find room in such tradition systems for a notion
of something that is seen as an agent of misfortune
or temptation out there working in the world, something that
(18:59):
is an enemy of mortal men and may be working
outside of the graces of the divine. Now, the word
itself in English demon derives from the Greek demos, which
could be benevolent or malevolent. Like in the Greek tradition,
(19:19):
this could be a good supernatural being or a bad
supernatural being. Just because it was demos, just because it
was a demon in this context doesn't mean it's necessarily
evil and out to get you.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Yeah, you can interpret it as like a spirit.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Now, turning to more specifically to the ancient Mesopotamian world,
one of the books that we look to here was
a book titled God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia,
an Illustrated Dictionary. This was originally published in nineteen ninety
two and the authors here are Jeremy Black and Anthony Green,
(19:54):
and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. The authors here point out
that the word demon works as an a is an
approximate translation of a couple of different terms that refer
to both good and evil spirits, so very much in
the Greek sense of the word demon. These terms are
in Akkadian rabisu and in Sumerian moscin, both of which
(20:18):
again can refer to good and or evil spirits. I've
also seen more head on translations that define the rabisu
as lurker and moscum as deputy or attorney. The authors
point out that during the Neo Assyrian period, roughly what
nine twelve through six O nine BCE, there were spells
(20:38):
that basically said evil rabisu, please see yourself out. Good
Rubisu come on in. So you'd see a lot of
this sort of thing, like you want the good demons,
you don't want the bad demons, but you're not just
like no demons allowed, Like yes, of course the good
demons can come in.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah. Black and Green's book includes a one tablet that's
sort of a figuring mating clay from the Neo Assyrian period.
They say it's probably from the seventh century BCE that
depicts a god named Ilamu, which means Harry. And if
you look at the tablet, yeah, he's got like real
like hair coming out. It almost looks like Medusa, the
(21:17):
locks of hair coming out like snakeheads. But yeah, he's
a hairy guy. And written on his arms, so the
canea form is actually like spanning, it's going running down
the length of his biceps, his arm. One arm says
get out, evil demon, and the other one says, come in,
good demon. And I was actually reading in another book,
(21:40):
a book called Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia by the French
historian Jean Botero. This is translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan,
and Boto argues that there really was no word in
any of the ancient Mesopotamian languages that meant specifically demon
in the way we use it, like specifically categorizing the
(22:02):
class of evil harmful spirits. Instead, these evil harmful spirits
would be referred to sort of by their individual names
rather than as a class of types of beings. And
as far as classes of beings, you would just have
this larger like, yeah, you got spirits and they could
be good or bad.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Now, the Rubisu mentioned how sometimes translated as lurker, and
it does seem to lurk. It sort of haunts, it
lingers around an affected individual.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Now.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Black and Green also stressed that in modern studies of
ancient Mesopotamian art and iconography, Again this is a book
from ninety two, so acknowledging that there could potentially be
some shift here, but this seems to still be the
case based on even far more recent papers dealing with
specific entities. But they stress that the term demon is
(22:52):
generally applied to any entity that is an upright human
body and also has like hybrid creature elements, while full
on animal combinations or something like on all fours, those
are considered monsters. So, for instance, across between a lion
and a duck, that would be a monster. A cross
between a lion, duck and a human like where it's
(23:13):
more or less humanoid shape, that would be a demon.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeah. From what I gather, the really rough way of
thinking about it is that if it's bipedal, it's usually
a demon, and if it's on all fours, it's probably
a monster. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Now, they stress that demons are actually rare in ancient Mesopotamia,
mythology and the names. Certainly, this is the case with
name demons. The names we know are mostly via they're
mention in various spells, and in many cases we have
little information regarding their nature or appearance, certainly as far
as evil demons and evil gods are concerned. And this
(23:50):
might be because it was just considered inappropriate to depict
some of them under most circumstances. Though, as we've discussed
already and will continue to discuss, there are cases where
you really want to show that horrid face in full detail,
otherwise it might endanger you to create their image. You know,
you don't want to. You don't want to summon the
(24:11):
demon into your presence, even if you were discussing it
or ultimately using it to ward off something else. But
also it seems like sometimes you need an image of
the demon if you are trying to ward it off.
So I guess it comes down to the basic idea
that visual depictions and symbolic depictions of these entities is powerful,
(24:32):
and it can be powerful in a way that helps
deter them, or it can be powerful in a way
that attracts them. But they write that quote in some cases,
descriptions of their appearances are so vague and inconsistent as
to suggest they were not well established. So that's the
other side of the coin. It just might be well,
it's not really you know, there's not really a canon
for how this particular entity looked or even how it behaved.
(24:55):
You know, we might think about in our own like
pop culture world, in our own like urban legend world,
you have a general idea what I mean, you have
a very clear idea what some entities look like. Like
Jason Vorhees. Yeah, you know what he looks like. You've
seen it in various films. There's shifts and how he's depicted,
but there's there are a number of elements that need
(25:16):
to be in place. Meanwhile, something like I don't know
Bloody Mary, it seems a bit more vague, like I
don't know if there's a particular canon as to how
she is supposed to look.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
This I thought was really interesting, and this makes me
think we should actually come back sometime into a whole
Halloween series on. Yeah, what you could call like canonically
bounded versus unbounded monsters, Monsters that have a very tight,
canonically set description and those that are extremely vague and
in the case of the ones that are vague, where
(25:47):
does the horror come from? Because you know, when a
monster is, like say, represented in a movie, you know
what that movie representation looks like and you can picture it.
But when there's a monster that is you don't even
get a very clear physical description. Where is the horror based?
What is it you're imagining?
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah? Yeah, and I should probably draw in an example
that doesn't originate in a visual medium. I think if
I think back on entities, unreal entities that I had
varying degrees of fear of as a child, well, I
can think of the Boogieyman, and I can think of
gray aliens like the kind that you know are going
to potentially kidnap you and probe you and so forth,
And there's more of a definite idea of what a
(26:29):
gray looks like, whereas the Boogieman, Yes, there are I mean,
the big Boogeyman is sometimes depicted in certain ways, like
I remember there being a way that the real Ghostbuster's
cartoon depicted the Boogieman. But for the most part, the
Boogeyman is up for grabs. There's no definite way that
it looks, but the fear of it. Certainly when you're
young can still be palpable.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Oh lord, I just looked up the Real Ghostbusters boogieman.
It looks why is it wearing a tuxedo?
Speaker 2 (26:58):
I remember that being a pretty wild episode. There were
some episodes of The Real Ghostbusters that went pretty hard.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
It looks like a pale rock and roll grimlin with
a disproportionately huge face, wearing lots of lipstick, with sharp teeth,
big long nose, purple punk haircut, and a tuxedo coat
with long tails. So it's dressed for a formal dinner.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, it was a bad dude, all right. So anyway,
the main point here is that, yeah, some of these
creatures would have been perhaps unbounded, you know, and we
would have been vague and inconsistent, but others became extremely
(27:44):
important in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and in religious practice. And
we have at least one case of a sort of
demonic face turn, of an evil entity becoming if not good,
at least useful for our protection. And you know, I
guess this under the line is an important reality that
(28:05):
we have discussed in the past and the show, and
that is that religion and belief transform and evolve. Over time,
New ideas emerge, foreign ideas enter into a different region
or a different belief system. Things change, and it impacts
the exact form and function of various fantastic entities and creatures,
(28:27):
sometimes utterly transforming them. And this is especially the case
here today because we're ultimately considering the passage of thousands
of years here, and we're not only talking about like
subtle changes in belief or Okay, well, this god becomes
a little more popular, this demon becomes a little more popular.
Sometimes we're talking about the emergence of groundbreaking new concepts
(28:48):
and how people considered their place in the cosmos and
the structure and function of the unseen world. Now. Black
and Green proposed a simplified five phase chronology for the
development of gods and demons in ancient Mesopotamia. And I'm
going to roll through it here real quick, because I
feel like it's you may get lost in some of
(29:08):
the dates here and the different periods, but I think
the overall flow is important, all right. So first up
is the formative phase.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
They write it.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
During the late Ubaid and Uru periods, very roughly in
the neighborhood of the fourth millennium BCE, we have the
earliest composite beings envisioned, combining various elements of different animals.
Up next the optimistic phase. This would have been during
the Acadian period around let's say two twenty three thirty
(29:38):
four through twenty one to fifty four BCE, and this
is when we have galyptic scenes depicting the capture and punishment,
the busting, if you will, of evil demons.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Makes me feel good, yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
And then we have the balanced phase during the Old
Babylonian period eighteen ninety four BCE through fifteen ninety five BCE,
and we have cylinder and seal designs that often mixed
images with good and bad associations. So that's the balance.
It's like, you know, the good entities the bad entities
finding balance. Then we have the transformative phase during the
(30:14):
fourteenth through eleventh centuries BCE. The human centric imagery of
the Old Babylonian period gives way to mostly animal headed hybrids.
And then finally we get the demonic phase. And as
the name implies, this is the period during which quote
individual evil demons were depicted in their full horror in
Neo Assyrian and neo Babylonian art. And it's interesting too
(30:39):
that they point out that this demonic phase lines up
with the emergence of a new first millennium BCE theological model,
that of a demonically populated hell. This is of course key,
the key theological invention because it foreshadows, you know, the
medieval Christian image of a demonic afterlife. It also mirrors
the various hell realms of Buddhism and Hinduism, and it
(31:03):
essentially like adds this entirely different realm to one's understanding
of the unseen world.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
That's right. I mean a lot of modern Christians might
not remember this, but say, in the Hebrew Bible, you
don't get depictions of a demonically populated hell with tortures
for the damned. That's not there that emerges in early
Christian theology.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean, for my money, you can
throw it out right now. You don't have to keep
it if you got it now. One question that the
author's raise here is what made this vision of the
afterlife different from that of say, ancient Egyptians. We've talked
on the show before about the robust vision of the
afterlife that was modeled in an Egyptian belief the idea
(31:48):
that the afterlife is certainly a realm of danger. It
is not a you know, it's not a just one
big heavenly celebration. There are a lot of dangers and
entities out there, but it's also a realm of great possibility.
So a person of means and power and magical ability
could potentially translate all of that over into their next
life in the field of reeds.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
That's right. So even among ancient cultures that had a
religious idea of an afterlife, of some sort of place
you go after death, there's a lot of diversity in
what that afterlife looks like and what you do there.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah, now, I think there's probably still a lot of
room to get into the nuances of either broad regional
religious traditions. But Black and Green contend that in general
we see a strong sense of Mesopotamian pessimism in regards
to the afterlife. According to Black and Green, the region
(32:42):
in general at this time was one of agriculture and clay,
but little else in abundance, certainly for the common denizen
of this region. So almost every aspect of life they
write was likely quite harsh compared to ancient Egypt, and
this colored an equally harsh view of the afterlife. So
immortality that's for the gods. Mortal man, however, is just
(33:05):
doomed to die, passing on only into a shadowy realm,
where in Sumerian traditions, the shades of the dead consume
only the ashes, and in a serio Babylonian traditions, the
grim afterlife is the domain of demons and monsters black
and green. Right that Eventually traditions and belief systems developed
by which you can affect your arrival and status in
(33:28):
the afterlife or that of a loved one via proper burial.
But earlier on it was probably either based around a
cult of the dead, via which you might you know,
communicate with deceased family members, or it was just a
means of preventing their spirits from haunting you after they've died.
But yeah, especially early on, there's not this sense that, oh,
(33:49):
we need to talk to Grandma or communicate with Grandma,
or have offerings for Grandma to make sure she's doing okay. Like, no,
there's not really any doing okay in this afterlife. It's
a world of ash and shadow. But we don't want
Grandma to come back from the realm of ash and
shadow and start haunting us. Things are bad enough here,
we don't need her here as well.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
But at some point you get the idea of, well,
maybe we could send some food, send some care packages
to Grandma in the afterlife and that might help a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah yeah, So so again we enter this demonic period.
We suddenly have this idea of afterlife where are there
may be demons everywhere? And it also comes around the
same time as new practices such as erecting statues and
reliefs of magically protective beings in palaces and in temples,
(34:41):
as well as burying clay images of such entities in
building foundations to protect that building and its occupants against
demons and disease. They're right, quote diverse and cultural background
and original significance. The various gods, demons and monsters involved
were brought together into a fairly restricted visual series of
this time, and for the first time they came to
(35:03):
be treated as a group in mythological narratives. So you know,
demonic avengers assembled.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Now most of the demons from this period of ancient
Mesopotamian belief they still in their punishment of mortals and
their spreading of disease and death. They were mostly still
doing it at the behest of the greater gods, so
you can think of them as being still part of
the system, you know, like that. You don't like what
(35:31):
they're doing, but they have some right to do it.
And maybe the ultimate blame lies in how I'm living
my life or what I'm not doing to protect against
their offenses.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yeah, did I do something to be taken by the
grip of this demon? And that grip is usually a
disease of some kind.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Right, But there do sing to be exceptions to the rule,
and one exception in particular, and it may be due
to the fact that some acts of demons and some
events in life are just too horrific to be attributed
to the gods. And that brings us to the entity
known as La mache To. So I've looked up lamache
(36:13):
To in one of my favorite sources for entities like this, spirits, fairies, Lepricaus,
and Goblins and Encyclopedia by folklorist Carol Rose, and she
describes lamache To as the Babylonian demoness of disease and
describes depictions as often being that of a woman stripped
to the waist suckling a pig and a dog, with
(36:35):
a comb and a spinning worl in each hand, representing
the gendered tasks of wife and mother, these being the
core targets of her wrath because she is a demon
that attacks pregnant women and new mothers, bringing death and disease,
particularly to infants. She is a daughter of the sky god,
(36:56):
but according to Black and Green, she seems to be
operating she's seldom to be operating outside of the domain
of the gods, so she's not doing evil because she
has been ordered to. She's doing it for her own purposes,
perhaps for her own delight, like she's just pure chaotic evil,
I guess. Black and Green likewise describe her based on
(37:18):
depictions as a humanoid creature with the head of a lion,
teeth of a donkey, naked human breasts, a hairy body,
blood stained hands, long fingers and nails, and taloned bird
like feet. Her animal she has like a siventure animal,
and she rides this animal. It is the donkey, and
she sometimes holds a snake in each hand as well,
(37:39):
and she also has a boat to travel through the underworld.
She's also sometimes depicted with donkey ears, as are other
entities in Mesopotamian myth and it's less scary it does
it does to us outsiders, and apparently this has caused
various translations to change donkey ears to lion ears when
(38:04):
when this entity has been taken into other cultures and regions.
But the authors suspect that at the time and to
the target audience, it was seen as a fitting animal
to invoke with such a demon, as the wild donkey
was held to be swift footed. So I guess in
the regional context, like what is like the fastest animal
(38:25):
to traverse a rough terrain, it would perhaps be the
wild donkey, and therefore it is a fitting creature for
a swift demon to ride in iconography.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Okay, Now I can see how some of our associations
with various domestic animals, like whether they could be conceived
as scary or not, that could be purely cultural. Because
remember we did the series about why the goat is
associated with demons. I can imagine a culture where that
is not a common association, thinking like, what what's scary
(38:57):
about a goat? A goat because it.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Met goats, like they can be real sweet.
Speaker 3 (39:03):
Goats can be cute. Oh yeah, so I think you
can imagine a similar thing going on with the donkey
ears there that like, donkey's not scary to us because
we just don't have the right history of cultural association.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yeah, you might even be able to get into like
what sounds are considered funny in English, you know, like
the like sounds are often funny donkey, monkey clown, you know,
And you're gonna have a different set of linguistic values
in a different language and of course in a different time,
different region and so forth, as well as other factors.
(39:36):
So again we're talking about La mache too, not to
be confused with La Masu. Lamasu is a benevolent demon
often depicted as you know, a winged lion or bull
with a human head. But no, La mache Too is
a being of intense darkness and one that again is
(39:56):
seeming to act independently of the gods, flicks harm on
mortals for her own purposes. It's not part of a
divinely orchestrated punishment system, and so we attribute to her
cases of miscarriage, cases of infant mortality related illnesses that
may be affecting pregnant women or new mothers, and it's
(40:18):
said that what is happening is that she'll slip into
a woman's room at night, a pregnant woman's room, and
touch her stomach seven times to kill the child inside
her other times and another telling she just straight up
like steals children in the night. And she is also
sometimes depicted as bringing disease to men as well, So
she is I guess equal an equal opportunity offender in
(40:41):
that department. So she is an enemy to all mortals,
and she is an enemy most vitally to not only
our generation but the next generation, like she is like
a dire threat to the enterprise of humanity.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
So feelings about the Donkey years aside a truly horrifying being.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yes, now what are you gonna do? How are you
going to fight an evil like that? Well, this is
where we come back to Pazuzu.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Pazuzu our old friend.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yes, perhaps the most well known ancient Mesopotamian demon of
our age due to its invocation in horror cinema, in
horror literature, and horror imagery. Pazuzu was an Assyrian in
Babylonian demon or demonic god of the first millennium BCE. Again,
you're probably familiar with this striking profile, a humanoid entity
(41:35):
wing it in such a way as to create a
sort of X shape. It could almost look like he
has four wings, though I think we're perhaps to see
this as the upper and lower parts of two wings,
but again it kind of creates this X shape behind him. Yeah,
he has a dog like face, taloned feet, bulging eyes,
(41:57):
scaly body, and if you look closely, there's also a
snake headed penis there. He generally has the right hand
held up as if you know, in pledging something, and
the left hand is down, and sometimes there's a scorpion's
tail as well.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
So Pazusu is.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Kind of an enigma here because on one hand, he
was definitely held up to be a malevolent demon of
the underworld. You know he is. He is not your friend,
but he also comes to serve as a potent protector,
invoked in amulants to protect women against the evil of
lamashe tou. He has often depicted driving her and her
(42:34):
donkey steed back into the underworld, and these images might
be displayed in the home as a part of a
protective plaque, and then you also have amulets of Pazuzu's
head that could be worn, it seems, by pregnant women.
So you would actually wear the horrific like dog like uh,
you know, gorgon face of the zuzu on your body
(42:58):
to keep lamash Tou from get close to you and
reaching out to you and touching you seven times with
their awful hand.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
That is interesting in a very different kind of association
than we get in The Exorcist.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Yeah. Yeah, And in a sense, I feel like the
Exorcist does Bazuzu dirty, where Bazuzu is just an absolute
enemy of law and order in humanity, where in reality,
I think he's he's more in between. He's more of
a tweener, you know, he's he's not a complete heel,
he's not a complete face, but he's you know, kind
(43:30):
of doing like a semi face turn here. I you know,
I I inevitably came back to the quote from Dame
Judy Dinch and the Chronicles of Riddick. You know, she says,
in normal times, evil would be fought by good, but
in times like these, well it should be fought by
another kind of evil.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Oh what's good? For the necromonger is good for thelmashe tou.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Now, Bazuzu also protects against pestilential wins so winds carrying
pestilence because he is. And I was shooting about looking
at a number of different sources that dealt more specifically
with Bazuzu, and one I looked at is a paper
by Maraja Todorovska. It's titled Demonic, Hybrididy and Liminality Bazuzu
(44:13):
and lamashe Tou. This is from twenty twenty three. She
refers to him as the king of evil winds and
the ruler over the worst of the wind demons, who
he can also seem to control to some extent. I
don't know if he's straight up controlling them or he
is just like the roughest, toughest of the bunch and
he can beat them into submission in the same way
that like Godzilla is the king of monsters, not because
(44:35):
there's like a detailed hierarchy, but because he can whip
all the other ones.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
That's right. He's not giving orders to the other monsters.
He's the monster you call when you got a monster
messing with your city.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Right, right, And yeah, the Godzilla world does line up
with this rationale as well, so Pazuzu can break the
wings of dangerous wind demons. And this source also points
to the likely foreign origins of Bazus, given that he
was a late introduction to regional beliefs and traditions. He
doesn't pop up visually till the eighth century BCE, and
(45:08):
textually he doesn't pop up to the seventh The Metropolitan
Museum of Art also has some resources about him because
they have some images of Pazuzu in their collection. They
point out that he was associated with the cold winds
that blew into present day Iraq from the Zagros Mountains
on the border with present day Iran, though they also
stretched into southeastern Turkey. These mountains and these winds were
(45:32):
thought to carry pestilence. These mountain regions had long been
inhabited by humans from very early times. They were also
known to have been Neanderthals that lived there at one point,
and in fact, the earliest known human remains in Mesopotamia,
or at least at one point. The earliest known human
(45:53):
remains in Mesopotamia were excavated in Shaannadar Cave in the
Zagros mountains, according to Black and Green in their nineteen
ninety two book, But Yeah, Bazuzu is often depicted as
climbing mountains in order to engage in battle against other demons,
particularly other wind demons. But who knows what kind of
(46:13):
demon Bazuzu might battle. You might be able to to
convince him to do battle against an evil demon that
is coming after you. Now, it's interesting to note that
when we look at some of these Pazuzu amulets, but
you know that would be worn by a pregnant woman
that has the face of Bazuzu, and it's all about
(46:33):
keeping La Machhetu away from you. If you you flip
them over, you would see that they would also have
inscriptions of like straight up benevolent gods on the back,
the side that's facing you, that's touching your chest. Perhaps
because again, Pazuzu is not your friend. He is a
very dangerous wind demon, you know, master of evil winds,
(46:58):
and at the end of the day, he's not something
you want to mess with. You don't want his attention
to fall back on you. And so you know, it's
like you want to keep the face of that ambulant
pointing out to where your enemy may may come from,
but you don't want it looking in at you. You
don't want to somehow manifest his rage at you.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
M Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah, it's fascinating, and it's something I think that may
feel foreign to people who are more used to the
trappings of a monotheistic religion. You know, the idea that, yeah,
you can turn to a dangerous entity or potentially dangerous entity,
one that's not a typical ally of human beings in
order to deal with certain evil, supernatural threats. You know,
you can. Essentially it's like almost like hiring a bounty
(47:41):
hunter in the Star Wars universe, Like, yeah, Pazuzu, you know,
he can do this job for you. But you know
you're making a deal with a ultimately a pretty dangerous
and unsavory character, so you got to be careful. Yeah,
but at least he's not the Empire, you know. So again,
you know, I can't help but think Pazuzu is done
dirty to a certain extent in The Exorcist. You know,
(48:04):
I don't know, I'm not prepared to do like a
full analysis of how Pazuzu would behave in the Exorcist
and or of another demon would be more fitting for
the role. But yeah, it seems like if you knew
how to manage your use of Pazuzu and your invocation
of Pazuzu, you could very much use him to protect yourself.
Speaker 3 (48:27):
If one were forced to try to reconcile the canon here.
I think what you can maybe say is that within
the world of the Exorcist, it's actually just a separate
Christian demon that is taking on the image and name
of Pazuzu. Is just saying like, I assume this form.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
Yeah, because otherwise you'd be tempted to say, well, actually
the god that they are calling on should be Pazuzu.
The demon and the entity they're trying to drive away
should be a lamache To who is ultimately here not
a acting a baby or a pregnant woman, but is
at least attacking like a young girl, which is maybe
not too far away from her, you know, usual targets
(49:09):
of aggression.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
Okay, well, I think that probably marks the end of
our first part here, but we're going to be back
to talk about some more demons and frightening entities of
ancient Mesopotamian religions in the next episode.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
That's right, because there are more demons, there are more gods,
there are more strange monster like creatures. So we're going
to get into it in the next episode. In the meantime,
we'll just remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and
(49:43):
on Fridays. We set aside most series concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And
of course this month everything is Halloween themed. Weird House
is Halloween themed, our core episodes are Halloween themed, so
we hope everybody's enjoying the celebration. We'll also remind you, hey,
if you're on Instagram, looks follow us. We're stb ym
(50:04):
podcast on Instagram and that's one way to keep up
with the episodes as they come out. Let's see. Also, yeah,
if you go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
that should lead you over to the iheartpage for our episodes,
and there's actually a little tab there for our store
if you want to go check that out. We did
a Halloween t shirt last year and it's pretty fun.
(50:26):
Has a lot of like occult symbols on it and
so forth, and you can get other merchs there. It's
just for fun. Don't feel like you've got to buy
anything to support us. But if you enjoy the show
and you're like, hey, I need a new T shirt,
well we've got options.
Speaker 3 (50:38):
For huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
And I am Joe McCormick. And on today's episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our month long celebration of
Halloween continues. Now, if you've been a listener for a while,
you know what's going on. You know what we do
every October. But if you are new to the show,
here's the deal. Every October we devote all of our
core episodes, our Tuesday and Thursday episodes to seasonally creepy
(00:40):
subject matter things about ghosts, monsters, devils, curses, horrors, and frights.
So last week we talked all about spooky trains, about
locomotive horror stories, ghost trains, and the phenomenon of the
Victorian railway madness. Today, we are beginning a new series
on the demons and monsters of ancient Mesopotamian religion because
(01:05):
they had some really exquisite demons, and as a concrete
example to kick things off today, I wanted to start
by talking about a specific ancient artifact. For my money,
one of the creepiest looking artifacts from all of antiquity,
and that is a mask of Humbaba.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Ah Mbaba is an old friend of the show. We've
talked about Humbaba, not stuff to blow your mind before.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
One of my favorites. Definitely, Humbaba came up in our
series on the origins of the religious imagery of the Halo,
because Humbaba, as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, famously
has these seven auras or radiances that are kind of
like an evil halo. But first I want to talk
specifically about this artifact, and then we can talk a
(01:52):
bit more about Humbaba as an idea. So this artifact
is a baked clay disc picting a hideous face. It's
roughly three point three inches in height and in width,
and it was produced during the Old Babylonian period between
about eighteen hundred and sixteen hundred BCE. It was excavated
(02:15):
by the nineteenth century Assyrian archaeologist Hormuz Ressam from the
site of the ancient Babylonian city of Sipper, which is
on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in modern
day Iraq. Today, this artifact is held in the collection
of the British Museum. Now, this sculpture is absolutely worth
looking up if you are able, but if not, I'm
(02:36):
gonna do my best to describe it. The mask shows
a humanoid face frozen in a pitiless grimace. It's got
the teeth clenched. The head is rounded in shape with
bulges in the outline of the head where the ears
would be, and it has wide, blank, empty gray eyes. Now,
(02:57):
I know, in some cases these ancient Mesopotamians stay statues
and sculptures would have been painted, and the paint has
simply weathered away over the years, which is the reason
some of these ancient statues have such unsettling blank eyes,
just these empty, cloudy pools of stone with no pupil
or iris. I don't know if that's the case with
(03:18):
this clay sculpture or if this is the way it
was always intended to look. Either way, the state in
which it has arrived to us in modernity is extremely
unsettling looking. But I think the most interesting detail about
it I haven't gotten to yet, and that is the
texture of the flesh. The entire surface of this monstrous
(03:40):
face is molded with a pattern like a labyrinth, so
it's you have a long, single thick line like a
rope folded over and over upon itself to form every
part of this head, the hair, the forehead, the ears,
the nose, the cheeks, and the double rows of clenched
(04:02):
killer teeth. I think you can even see where the
coil is supposed to be at its midpoint, you know
where it folds over on itself. It's at the left
side of the mouth, where the jaws open. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
This is very unsettling looking, and if I were to
compare it to anything, it makes me think of the
character prune Face from the nineteen ninety Dick Tracy movie. Yeah,
it's like that level of like wrinkliness, but then with
this also this vicious grin, this growling toothy mouth. So yeah,
(04:36):
it's pretty intimidating.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
But I think at least prune Face had pupils in his.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Eyes somewhere in there. It was heavily littered.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, the name implies, Okay, so Humbaba or huahwah. These
are different, and this will come up throughout the series.
Most of these entities we're going to be talking about
have multiple names from different languages and stages in their
cultural evolution. So this character is known as Huawa in
Sumerian sources and Humbaba in Akkadian sources. I'm going to
(05:07):
be calling him Humbaba.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
The other side of the coin is that there are
best practices for pronouncing a lot of these words and
these names, so we can we can certainly get them wrong.
But on the other hand, we can't, without any degree
of failure, get it one hundred percent right, because nobody
knows one hundred percent exactly how any of these given
(05:30):
words or names were pronounced in the ancient world in
their original setting.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Very good point, Rob, We will be doing our best
with all of these ancient Mesopotamian words and names. We
will undoubtedly get some of them wrong in ways that
will be detectable to people who specialize in these ancient languages.
But yeah, to some extent, we don't fully know how
everything was pronounced in every case.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
And you know, probably better that we don't hit it
dead on because we don't want to summon any of
these entities. Many of them have been as sleep for
a very long time. We don't want to invite them
into our modern world.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Well, it's often the case in these mythologies that you
might have a dead god that isn't really dead forever.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Oh you know, The other thing that we risk is
if we chance on a mispronunciation of one of their
names that just hasn't been done before, we might chance
upon the original pronunciation that therefore summons them into the
modern world. That's like even the experts haven't been saying
one hundred percent right, we could air into the summoning space.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
I can't even think about that, okay. So Baba or
Huahbah is a character who features prominently in ancient Mesopotamian literature,
most famously in the different versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
As I said earlier, we talked about him at some
length in that series on the iconography of the Halo,
(06:52):
because whom Baba is described as having these seven terrifying auras,
these strange layers of deadly radiance that are taken off
one by one before he is eventually killed by Gilgamesh
and Gilgamesh's companion in Kidu. In Gilgamesh, Humbaba is described
as a giant, terrifying humanoid creature assigned by the god
(07:14):
in Leal, the lord of Winds, to be the guardian
of the Cedar forest, and, according to the Stephanie Dally
translation of Gilgamesh, This is in Tablet two. Humbaba is
meant to be quote the terror of the people, Humbaba,
whose shout is the flood weapon, whose utterance is fire,
(07:35):
and whose breath is death. And we're told that Humbaba
can hear a rustling of branches in his forest from
sixty leagues away. So who would dare walk inside the
forbidden pines? Now, even though we've talked about Humbaba before,
I do think we probably want to come back and
talk about him some more. We might get into some
more depth in part two of this series, but specifically
(07:57):
in the context of this clay mask from ancient Sipper,
there is a question about the way that it looks.
What is the deal with the labyrinthine design on the
face is? Why is it represented as a horrific face
with these deep wrinkles. The prune face look and the
(08:19):
wrinkles seem to be formed out of a folded rope.
There is an answer to this. We know conclusively why
it looks that way. The rope that makes the face
is not a rope. There is a cuneiform inscription on
the reverse side of the mask which tells us this
inscription is written by the hand of Warad Marduk, a diviner,
(08:43):
son of Kubarum, also a diviner. And what the diviner
says is, according to the British Museum's translation quote, if
the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huawa.
This is an omen of Sargon who ruled the land.
Oh man, oh yeah. And then there's a part with
some text missing, but it says if and then there's
(09:06):
an illision, the house of a man will expand, so
it's saying the coils of a colon. This horrifying mask
is supposed to represent the piled up intestines of a
slaughtered animal, which have been used in tons of cultures
all throughout history as a stimulus for divination, meaning that
(09:28):
a diviner could read signs of the future and gain
access to privileged information by looking at the guts of
a slaughtered animal, sometimes at the liver as well, or
sometimes the intestines. In this case, I believe the animal
is supposed to be a sheep, but you know, in
various usages you would get different animals, might be a
(09:50):
sheep or a goat, or an ox or so forth.
In this particular case, the inscription suggests that if the
diviner sees entrails that coil to represent the face of Humbaba.
This is an omen of maybe successful conquest or expanding power,
or the expansion of one's house. So according to a
book we were both consulting called Gods, Demons and Symbols
(10:12):
of Ancient Mesopotamia and Illustrated Dictionary. This is by a
couple of scholars named Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, British
Museum Press, nineteen ninety two. According to this book, the
face of Huawa seen by a diviner typically means revolution
in the state, which I guess doesn't sound so great
if you are currently the king. And a lot of
(10:33):
times these divinations would be given to a powerful person,
recorded as given to a powerful person such as a king.
But the authors also suggest there some evidence that clay
masks representing the face of Humbaba were hung up on walls,
maybe in palaces and temples as charms to ward off evil.
(10:53):
So as terrifying as this kind of face looks, masks
like this may have been thought to have the power
to ward off evil rather than bring it, which is
what we today call apotropaic magic, protective or warding off magic.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah yeah, and we'll get into at least one other
key example of this as we proceed through this episode.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Now, like I said, we may have to come back
to Humbaba later in this series, but I also think
we should near the beginning of the series definitely acknowledge
the ancient Mesopotamian supernatural entity that will be most recognizable
to fans of modern horror movies because of his appearance
in The Exorcist, and that is the demon Pazuzu.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
That's right, Bazuzu cast a long shadow over modern horror
cinema and horror fiction. Also just really stands out the
iconography of this particular demon because it features a pair
of wings that in silhouette kind of look like an
X behind a humanoid body, has like a horned dog
(12:12):
like head, very fierce eyes and face, and yeah, works
great in silhouette and is used not only in The
Exorcist that we mentioned this on Weird House Cinema, but
the when we did an episode on Ridley Scott's Legend.
The same statue also shows up two different times in
the movie Legend, just in the background or in the foreground.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, that's funny. And the Exorcist was already out at
that point. That's the funny thing.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mean, I think Pazzuzu got representation, and it was
either like, let's get some more gigs, Let's get some
more projects. I want to work with Ridley Scott.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Now, later we will get to the question of whether
these cinematic portrayals accurately captured the spirit of Pazuzu. Maybe
they partially do, and maybe there's some ways they don't.
They don't get it quite right, but at least within
the story of The Exorcist, Pazzuzu is the name given
to a demon that possesses and torments the twelve year
(13:06):
old Reagan McNeil. And this is the story in the
original nineteen seventy one novel by William Peter Blattie, and
it's carried over into the nineteen seventy three film adaptation
directed by William Friedkin. Though in the original novel and movie,
the demon does not run around saying I am Pazzuzu.
You get more of that in like The Exorcist to
(13:29):
the Heretic, I think, which is, you know, there's a
kind of downgrading of some of the subtleties of the
original in that, but the connection with Pazuzu is established
primarily through a prologue in the film in which the
Catholic priest Lancaster Marrin is This is the character who
ultimately leads and performs the exorcism rights in the third
(13:51):
act of the movie, he's working at an archaeological dig
in Iraq, and in multiple contexts you see him encounter
a state of a frightening, monstrous creature from ancient times.
And one thing I always liked about The Exorcist is
that the meaning of this confrontation is never made too explicit,
(14:12):
so it doesn't get corny. We don't get Maren facing
off against it at the beginning and saying, you know,
giving some monologue like you are evil, Pazuzu, I must
defeat you. You know that you don't get a direct
address till towards the end of the film. Instead, there
is just this vague, powerful sense of dread that the
entity depicted in these ancient artworks is somehow present now
(14:35):
and is powerful, and its shadow has somehow fallen over
our lives now. Of course, while I love The Exorcist,
you know it's a great horror movie. In the modern world,
you shouldn't go to the Exorcist to understand what an
entity like Pazuzu originally was and originally meant. In The Exorcist,
Pazuzu is rendered as a demon in the modern Christians
(15:00):
sense of the word, meaning a malevolent spirit, a minion
of Satan which can possess the bodies of innocent humans
and use them to Satanic ends. So this is a
Christian demon, specifically a demon as imagined by a twentieth
century Catholic author. But this leads to the question, what
(15:21):
was Pazuzu in his original time and place. Does it
make sense to call him a demon? And if it does,
should we at least modify our understanding of the English
word demon a little bit for the purpose of the discussion,
Maybe a little bit less the Catholic William Peter Bladdie
demon and maybe more a demon in the broader Greek
(15:41):
sense of the term.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, this is a This is a very important question
to ask before we proceed into any more detailed discussion
on these various demons. Yeah, what is a demon? We
certainly it's one of those terms that you just throw
it out there and it's going to summon various images
and ideas. You might, for instance, think of the ball
rog and various chaotic evil denizens of the Abyss from
(16:05):
dungeons and dragons, and of course these are all based
on entities from other you know, faiths and traditions and
so forth. You might also well think of the name
of various names from Christian demonology, particularly those that crossed
over out of theology and into popular culture for everything
from horror movies to rock music. And again many of
(16:27):
these given names, Many of these entities were appropriated from
other cultures and faiths, some transformed into Christian demons, and
in their original context were considered gods or some other
spiritual entities. And yet at the same time, even in
discussing mythic, legendary and folkloric entities, either casually or even
(16:48):
from like from the level of scholarship and academia, the
word demon is often used instantly provides a starting point
from which to potentially understand perhaps a foreign concept or
a creature or entity in another tradition you know. And
you see this with other words as well, like you'll
(17:08):
frequently if you're reading about, say, Chinese mythology and Chinese
legend and law, you might read about goblins or trolls.
You might read about ogres in Japanese lore and so forth.
You know, there's certain types of monsters, types of figures,
types of imaginary beings that seem largely universal, and when
(17:30):
you get into the particulars, yes, things change a bit,
but in general you can often safely say, well, this
is a demon from this particular faith. There's still a
lot of room for error, and there is a lot
of error out there when you look into especially like
historic understandings of some of these entities. So yeah, we
can throw out the word demon, and we can strike
close to the truth. We can strike close to perhaps
(17:52):
the original intended meaning here. And as such we can
loosely think of demons as as the following evil supernatural
spirits or beings of some sort that were never human,
are not mortal, and yet exist beneath the status of
gods and sometimes demi gods. They are often conceived as
(18:17):
punishers in the afterlife, though they're also frequently seen as
spreaders of sin, disease, death, and temptation in the world
of the living. In Christian traditions, they are often described
as fallen angels, followers of the rebel angel Lucifer now Satan,
the ruler of Hell, and in other traditions they may
(18:38):
seem at times more part of a cosmic order than
agents in rebellion against said order. But even then you'll
still find room in such tradition systems for a notion
of something that is seen as an agent of misfortune
or temptation out there working in the world, something that
(18:59):
is an enemy of mortal men and may be working
outside of the graces of the divine. Now, the word
itself in English demon derives from the Greek demos, which
could be benevolent or malevolent. Like in the Greek tradition,
(19:19):
this could be a good supernatural being or a bad
supernatural being. Just because it was demos, just because it
was a demon in this context doesn't mean it's necessarily
evil and out to get you.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Yeah, you can interpret it as like a spirit.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Now, turning to more specifically to the ancient Mesopotamian world,
one of the books that we look to here was
a book titled God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia,
an Illustrated Dictionary. This was originally published in nineteen ninety
two and the authors here are Jeremy Black and Anthony Green,
(19:54):
and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. The authors here point out
that the word demon works as an a is an
approximate translation of a couple of different terms that refer
to both good and evil spirits, so very much in
the Greek sense of the word demon. These terms are
in Akkadian rabisu and in Sumerian moscin, both of which
(20:18):
again can refer to good and or evil spirits. I've
also seen more head on translations that define the rabisu
as lurker and moscum as deputy or attorney. The authors
point out that during the Neo Assyrian period, roughly what
nine twelve through six O nine BCE, there were spells
(20:38):
that basically said evil rabisu, please see yourself out. Good
Rubisu come on in. So you'd see a lot of
this sort of thing, like you want the good demons,
you don't want the bad demons, but you're not just
like no demons allowed, Like yes, of course the good
demons can come in.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah. Black and Green's book includes a one tablet that's
sort of a figuring mating clay from the Neo Assyrian period.
They say it's probably from the seventh century BCE that
depicts a god named Ilamu, which means Harry. And if
you look at the tablet, yeah, he's got like real
like hair coming out. It almost looks like Medusa, the
(21:17):
locks of hair coming out like snakeheads. But yeah, he's
a hairy guy. And written on his arms, so the
canea form is actually like spanning, it's going running down
the length of his biceps, his arm. One arm says
get out, evil demon, and the other one says, come in,
good demon. And I was actually reading in another book,
(21:40):
a book called Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia by the French
historian Jean Botero. This is translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan,
and Boto argues that there really was no word in
any of the ancient Mesopotamian languages that meant specifically demon
in the way we use it, like specifically categorizing the
(22:02):
class of evil harmful spirits. Instead, these evil harmful spirits
would be referred to sort of by their individual names
rather than as a class of types of beings. And
as far as classes of beings, you would just have
this larger like, yeah, you got spirits and they could
be good or bad.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Now, the Rubisu mentioned how sometimes translated as lurker, and
it does seem to lurk. It sort of haunts, it
lingers around an affected individual.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Now.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Black and Green also stressed that in modern studies of
ancient Mesopotamian art and iconography, Again this is a book
from ninety two, so acknowledging that there could potentially be
some shift here, but this seems to still be the
case based on even far more recent papers dealing with
specific entities. But they stress that the term demon is
(22:52):
generally applied to any entity that is an upright human
body and also has like hybrid creature elements, while full
on animal combinations or something like on all fours, those
are considered monsters. So, for instance, across between a lion
and a duck, that would be a monster. A cross
between a lion, duck and a human like where it's
(23:13):
more or less humanoid shape, that would be a demon.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeah. From what I gather, the really rough way of
thinking about it is that if it's bipedal, it's usually
a demon, and if it's on all fours, it's probably
a monster. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Now, they stress that demons are actually rare in ancient Mesopotamia,
mythology and the names. Certainly, this is the case with
name demons. The names we know are mostly via they're
mention in various spells, and in many cases we have
little information regarding their nature or appearance, certainly as far
as evil demons and evil gods are concerned. And this
(23:50):
might be because it was just considered inappropriate to depict
some of them under most circumstances. Though, as we've discussed
already and will continue to discuss, there are cases where
you really want to show that horrid face in full detail,
otherwise it might endanger you to create their image. You know,
you don't want to. You don't want to summon the
(24:11):
demon into your presence, even if you were discussing it
or ultimately using it to ward off something else. But
also it seems like sometimes you need an image of
the demon if you are trying to ward it off.
So I guess it comes down to the basic idea
that visual depictions and symbolic depictions of these entities is powerful,
(24:32):
and it can be powerful in a way that helps
deter them, or it can be powerful in a way
that attracts them. But they write that quote in some cases,
descriptions of their appearances are so vague and inconsistent as
to suggest they were not well established. So that's the
other side of the coin. It just might be well,
it's not really you know, there's not really a canon
for how this particular entity looked or even how it behaved.
(24:55):
You know, we might think about in our own like
pop culture world, in our own like urban legend world,
you have a general idea what I mean, you have
a very clear idea what some entities look like. Like
Jason Vorhees. Yeah, you know what he looks like. You've
seen it in various films. There's shifts and how he's depicted,
but there's there are a number of elements that need
(25:16):
to be in place. Meanwhile, something like I don't know
Bloody Mary, it seems a bit more vague, like I
don't know if there's a particular canon as to how
she is supposed to look.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
This I thought was really interesting, and this makes me
think we should actually come back sometime into a whole
Halloween series on. Yeah, what you could call like canonically
bounded versus unbounded monsters, Monsters that have a very tight,
canonically set description and those that are extremely vague and
in the case of the ones that are vague, where
(25:47):
does the horror come from? Because you know, when a
monster is, like say, represented in a movie, you know
what that movie representation looks like and you can picture it.
But when there's a monster that is you don't even
get a very clear physical description. Where is the horror based?
What is it you're imagining?
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah? Yeah, and I should probably draw in an example
that doesn't originate in a visual medium. I think if
I think back on entities, unreal entities that I had
varying degrees of fear of as a child, well, I
can think of the Boogieyman, and I can think of
gray aliens like the kind that you know are going
to potentially kidnap you and probe you and so forth,
And there's more of a definite idea of what a
(26:29):
gray looks like, whereas the Boogieman, Yes, there are I mean,
the big Boogeyman is sometimes depicted in certain ways, like
I remember there being a way that the real Ghostbuster's
cartoon depicted the Boogieman. But for the most part, the
Boogeyman is up for grabs. There's no definite way that
it looks, but the fear of it. Certainly when you're
young can still be palpable.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Oh lord, I just looked up the Real Ghostbusters boogieman.
It looks why is it wearing a tuxedo?
Speaker 2 (26:58):
I remember that being a pretty wild episode. There were
some episodes of The Real Ghostbusters that went pretty hard.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
It looks like a pale rock and roll grimlin with
a disproportionately huge face, wearing lots of lipstick, with sharp teeth,
big long nose, purple punk haircut, and a tuxedo coat
with long tails. So it's dressed for a formal dinner.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, it was a bad dude, all right. So anyway,
the main point here is that, yeah, some of these
creatures would have been perhaps unbounded, you know, and we
would have been vague and inconsistent, but others became extremely
(27:44):
important in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and in religious practice. And
we have at least one case of a sort of
demonic face turn, of an evil entity becoming if not good,
at least useful for our protection. And you know, I
guess this under the line is an important reality that
(28:05):
we have discussed in the past and the show, and
that is that religion and belief transform and evolve. Over time,
New ideas emerge, foreign ideas enter into a different region
or a different belief system. Things change, and it impacts
the exact form and function of various fantastic entities and creatures,
(28:27):
sometimes utterly transforming them. And this is especially the case
here today because we're ultimately considering the passage of thousands
of years here, and we're not only talking about like
subtle changes in belief or Okay, well, this god becomes
a little more popular, this demon becomes a little more popular.
Sometimes we're talking about the emergence of groundbreaking new concepts
(28:48):
and how people considered their place in the cosmos and
the structure and function of the unseen world. Now. Black
and Green proposed a simplified five phase chronology for the
development of gods and demons in ancient Mesopotamia. And I'm
going to roll through it here real quick, because I
feel like it's you may get lost in some of
(29:08):
the dates here and the different periods, but I think
the overall flow is important, all right. So first up
is the formative phase.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
They write it.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
During the late Ubaid and Uru periods, very roughly in
the neighborhood of the fourth millennium BCE, we have the
earliest composite beings envisioned, combining various elements of different animals.
Up next the optimistic phase. This would have been during
the Acadian period around let's say two twenty three thirty
(29:38):
four through twenty one to fifty four BCE, and this
is when we have galyptic scenes depicting the capture and punishment,
the busting, if you will, of evil demons.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Makes me feel good, yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
And then we have the balanced phase during the Old
Babylonian period eighteen ninety four BCE through fifteen ninety five BCE,
and we have cylinder and seal designs that often mixed
images with good and bad associations. So that's the balance.
It's like, you know, the good entities the bad entities
finding balance. Then we have the transformative phase during the
(30:14):
fourteenth through eleventh centuries BCE. The human centric imagery of
the Old Babylonian period gives way to mostly animal headed hybrids.
And then finally we get the demonic phase. And as
the name implies, this is the period during which quote
individual evil demons were depicted in their full horror in
Neo Assyrian and neo Babylonian art. And it's interesting too
(30:39):
that they point out that this demonic phase lines up
with the emergence of a new first millennium BCE theological model,
that of a demonically populated hell. This is of course key,
the key theological invention because it foreshadows, you know, the
medieval Christian image of a demonic afterlife. It also mirrors
the various hell realms of Buddhism and Hinduism, and it
(31:03):
essentially like adds this entirely different realm to one's understanding
of the unseen world.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
That's right. I mean a lot of modern Christians might
not remember this, but say, in the Hebrew Bible, you
don't get depictions of a demonically populated hell with tortures
for the damned. That's not there that emerges in early
Christian theology.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean, for my money, you can
throw it out right now. You don't have to keep
it if you got it now. One question that the
author's raise here is what made this vision of the
afterlife different from that of say, ancient Egyptians. We've talked
on the show before about the robust vision of the
afterlife that was modeled in an Egyptian belief the idea
(31:48):
that the afterlife is certainly a realm of danger. It
is not a you know, it's not a just one
big heavenly celebration. There are a lot of dangers and
entities out there, but it's also a realm of great possibility.
So a person of means and power and magical ability
could potentially translate all of that over into their next
life in the field of reeds.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
That's right. So even among ancient cultures that had a
religious idea of an afterlife, of some sort of place
you go after death, there's a lot of diversity in
what that afterlife looks like and what you do there.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah, now, I think there's probably still a lot of
room to get into the nuances of either broad regional
religious traditions. But Black and Green contend that in general
we see a strong sense of Mesopotamian pessimism in regards
to the afterlife. According to Black and Green, the region
(32:42):
in general at this time was one of agriculture and clay,
but little else in abundance, certainly for the common denizen
of this region. So almost every aspect of life they
write was likely quite harsh compared to ancient Egypt, and
this colored an equally harsh view of the afterlife. So
immortality that's for the gods. Mortal man, however, is just
(33:05):
doomed to die, passing on only into a shadowy realm,
where in Sumerian traditions, the shades of the dead consume
only the ashes, and in a serio Babylonian traditions, the
grim afterlife is the domain of demons and monsters black
and green. Right that Eventually traditions and belief systems developed
by which you can affect your arrival and status in
(33:28):
the afterlife or that of a loved one via proper burial.
But earlier on it was probably either based around a
cult of the dead, via which you might you know,
communicate with deceased family members, or it was just a
means of preventing their spirits from haunting you after they've died.
But yeah, especially early on, there's not this sense that, oh,
(33:49):
we need to talk to Grandma or communicate with Grandma,
or have offerings for Grandma to make sure she's doing okay. Like, no,
there's not really any doing okay in this afterlife. It's
a world of ash and shadow. But we don't want
Grandma to come back from the realm of ash and
shadow and start haunting us. Things are bad enough here,
we don't need her here as well.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
But at some point you get the idea of, well,
maybe we could send some food, send some care packages
to Grandma in the afterlife and that might help a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah yeah, So so again we enter this demonic period.
We suddenly have this idea of afterlife where are there
may be demons everywhere? And it also comes around the
same time as new practices such as erecting statues and
reliefs of magically protective beings in palaces and in temples,
(34:41):
as well as burying clay images of such entities in
building foundations to protect that building and its occupants against
demons and disease. They're right, quote diverse and cultural background
and original significance. The various gods, demons and monsters involved
were brought together into a fairly restricted visual series of
this time, and for the first time they came to
(35:03):
be treated as a group in mythological narratives. So you know,
demonic avengers assembled.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Now most of the demons from this period of ancient
Mesopotamian belief they still in their punishment of mortals and
their spreading of disease and death. They were mostly still
doing it at the behest of the greater gods, so
you can think of them as being still part of
the system, you know, like that. You don't like what
(35:31):
they're doing, but they have some right to do it.
And maybe the ultimate blame lies in how I'm living
my life or what I'm not doing to protect against
their offenses.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yeah, did I do something to be taken by the
grip of this demon? And that grip is usually a
disease of some kind.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Right, But there do sing to be exceptions to the rule,
and one exception in particular, and it may be due
to the fact that some acts of demons and some
events in life are just too horrific to be attributed
to the gods. And that brings us to the entity
known as La mache To. So I've looked up lamache
(36:13):
To in one of my favorite sources for entities like this, spirits, fairies, Lepricaus,
and Goblins and Encyclopedia by folklorist Carol Rose, and she
describes lamache To as the Babylonian demoness of disease and
describes depictions as often being that of a woman stripped
to the waist suckling a pig and a dog, with
(36:35):
a comb and a spinning worl in each hand, representing
the gendered tasks of wife and mother, these being the
core targets of her wrath because she is a demon
that attacks pregnant women and new mothers, bringing death and disease,
particularly to infants. She is a daughter of the sky god,
(36:56):
but according to Black and Green, she seems to be
operating she's seldom to be operating outside of the domain
of the gods, so she's not doing evil because she
has been ordered to. She's doing it for her own purposes,
perhaps for her own delight, like she's just pure chaotic evil,
I guess. Black and Green likewise describe her based on
(37:18):
depictions as a humanoid creature with the head of a lion,
teeth of a donkey, naked human breasts, a hairy body,
blood stained hands, long fingers and nails, and taloned bird
like feet. Her animal she has like a siventure animal,
and she rides this animal. It is the donkey, and
she sometimes holds a snake in each hand as well,
(37:39):
and she also has a boat to travel through the underworld.
She's also sometimes depicted with donkey ears, as are other
entities in Mesopotamian myth and it's less scary it does
it does to us outsiders, and apparently this has caused
various translations to change donkey ears to lion ears when
(38:04):
when this entity has been taken into other cultures and regions.
But the authors suspect that at the time and to
the target audience, it was seen as a fitting animal
to invoke with such a demon, as the wild donkey
was held to be swift footed. So I guess in
the regional context, like what is like the fastest animal
(38:25):
to traverse a rough terrain, it would perhaps be the
wild donkey, and therefore it is a fitting creature for
a swift demon to ride in iconography.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Okay, Now I can see how some of our associations
with various domestic animals, like whether they could be conceived
as scary or not, that could be purely cultural. Because
remember we did the series about why the goat is
associated with demons. I can imagine a culture where that
is not a common association, thinking like, what what's scary
(38:57):
about a goat? A goat because it.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Met goats, like they can be real sweet.
Speaker 3 (39:03):
Goats can be cute. Oh yeah, so I think you
can imagine a similar thing going on with the donkey
ears there that like, donkey's not scary to us because
we just don't have the right history of cultural association.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yeah, you might even be able to get into like
what sounds are considered funny in English, you know, like
the like sounds are often funny donkey, monkey clown, you know,
And you're gonna have a different set of linguistic values
in a different language and of course in a different time,
different region and so forth, as well as other factors.
(39:36):
So again we're talking about La mache too, not to
be confused with La Masu. Lamasu is a benevolent demon
often depicted as you know, a winged lion or bull
with a human head. But no, La mache Too is
a being of intense darkness and one that again is
(39:56):
seeming to act independently of the gods, flicks harm on
mortals for her own purposes. It's not part of a
divinely orchestrated punishment system, and so we attribute to her
cases of miscarriage, cases of infant mortality related illnesses that
may be affecting pregnant women or new mothers, and it's
(40:18):
said that what is happening is that she'll slip into
a woman's room at night, a pregnant woman's room, and
touch her stomach seven times to kill the child inside
her other times and another telling she just straight up
like steals children in the night. And she is also
sometimes depicted as bringing disease to men as well, So
she is I guess equal an equal opportunity offender in
(40:41):
that department. So she is an enemy to all mortals,
and she is an enemy most vitally to not only
our generation but the next generation, like she is like
a dire threat to the enterprise of humanity.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
So feelings about the Donkey years aside a truly horrifying being.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yes, now what are you gonna do? How are you
going to fight an evil like that? Well, this is
where we come back to Pazuzu.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Pazuzu our old friend.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yes, perhaps the most well known ancient Mesopotamian demon of
our age due to its invocation in horror cinema, in
horror literature, and horror imagery. Pazuzu was an Assyrian in
Babylonian demon or demonic god of the first millennium BCE. Again,
you're probably familiar with this striking profile, a humanoid entity
(41:35):
wing it in such a way as to create a
sort of X shape. It could almost look like he
has four wings, though I think we're perhaps to see
this as the upper and lower parts of two wings,
but again it kind of creates this X shape behind him. Yeah,
he has a dog like face, taloned feet, bulging eyes,
(41:57):
scaly body, and if you look closely, there's also a
snake headed penis there. He generally has the right hand
held up as if you know, in pledging something, and
the left hand is down, and sometimes there's a scorpion's
tail as well.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
So Pazusu is.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Kind of an enigma here because on one hand, he
was definitely held up to be a malevolent demon of
the underworld. You know he is. He is not your friend,
but he also comes to serve as a potent protector,
invoked in amulants to protect women against the evil of
lamashe tou. He has often depicted driving her and her
(42:34):
donkey steed back into the underworld, and these images might
be displayed in the home as a part of a
protective plaque, and then you also have amulets of Pazuzu's
head that could be worn, it seems, by pregnant women.
So you would actually wear the horrific like dog like uh,
you know, gorgon face of the zuzu on your body
(42:58):
to keep lamash Tou from get close to you and
reaching out to you and touching you seven times with
their awful hand.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
That is interesting in a very different kind of association
than we get in The Exorcist.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Yeah. Yeah, And in a sense, I feel like the
Exorcist does Bazuzu dirty, where Bazuzu is just an absolute
enemy of law and order in humanity, where in reality,
I think he's he's more in between. He's more of
a tweener, you know, he's he's not a complete heel,
he's not a complete face, but he's you know, kind
(43:30):
of doing like a semi face turn here. I you know,
I I inevitably came back to the quote from Dame
Judy Dinch and the Chronicles of Riddick. You know, she says,
in normal times, evil would be fought by good, but
in times like these, well it should be fought by
another kind of evil.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Oh what's good? For the necromonger is good for thelmashe tou.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Now, Bazuzu also protects against pestilential wins so winds carrying
pestilence because he is. And I was shooting about looking
at a number of different sources that dealt more specifically
with Bazuzu, and one I looked at is a paper
by Maraja Todorovska. It's titled Demonic, Hybrididy and Liminality Bazuzu
(44:13):
and lamashe Tou. This is from twenty twenty three. She
refers to him as the king of evil winds and
the ruler over the worst of the wind demons, who
he can also seem to control to some extent. I
don't know if he's straight up controlling them or he
is just like the roughest, toughest of the bunch and
he can beat them into submission in the same way
that like Godzilla is the king of monsters, not because
(44:35):
there's like a detailed hierarchy, but because he can whip
all the other ones.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
That's right. He's not giving orders to the other monsters.
He's the monster you call when you got a monster
messing with your city.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Right, right, And yeah, the Godzilla world does line up
with this rationale as well, so Pazuzu can break the
wings of dangerous wind demons. And this source also points
to the likely foreign origins of Bazus, given that he
was a late introduction to regional beliefs and traditions. He
doesn't pop up visually till the eighth century BCE, and
(45:08):
textually he doesn't pop up to the seventh The Metropolitan
Museum of Art also has some resources about him because
they have some images of Pazuzu in their collection. They
point out that he was associated with the cold winds
that blew into present day Iraq from the Zagros Mountains
on the border with present day Iran, though they also
stretched into southeastern Turkey. These mountains and these winds were
(45:32):
thought to carry pestilence. These mountain regions had long been
inhabited by humans from very early times. They were also
known to have been Neanderthals that lived there at one point,
and in fact, the earliest known human remains in Mesopotamia,
or at least at one point. The earliest known human
(45:53):
remains in Mesopotamia were excavated in Shaannadar Cave in the
Zagros mountains, according to Black and Green in their nineteen
ninety two book, But Yeah, Bazuzu is often depicted as
climbing mountains in order to engage in battle against other demons,
particularly other wind demons. But who knows what kind of
(46:13):
demon Bazuzu might battle. You might be able to to
convince him to do battle against an evil demon that
is coming after you. Now, it's interesting to note that
when we look at some of these Pazuzu amulets, but
you know that would be worn by a pregnant woman
that has the face of Bazuzu, and it's all about
(46:33):
keeping La Machhetu away from you. If you you flip
them over, you would see that they would also have
inscriptions of like straight up benevolent gods on the back,
the side that's facing you, that's touching your chest. Perhaps
because again, Pazuzu is not your friend. He is a
very dangerous wind demon, you know, master of evil winds,
(46:58):
and at the end of the day, he's not something
you want to mess with. You don't want his attention
to fall back on you. And so you know, it's
like you want to keep the face of that ambulant
pointing out to where your enemy may may come from,
but you don't want it looking in at you. You
don't want to somehow manifest his rage at you.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
M Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah, it's fascinating, and it's something I think that may
feel foreign to people who are more used to the
trappings of a monotheistic religion. You know, the idea that, yeah,
you can turn to a dangerous entity or potentially dangerous entity,
one that's not a typical ally of human beings in
order to deal with certain evil, supernatural threats. You know,
you can. Essentially it's like almost like hiring a bounty
(47:41):
hunter in the Star Wars universe, Like, yeah, Pazuzu, you know,
he can do this job for you. But you know
you're making a deal with a ultimately a pretty dangerous
and unsavory character, so you got to be careful. Yeah,
but at least he's not the Empire, you know. So again,
you know, I can't help but think Pazuzu is done
dirty to a certain extent in The Exorcist. You know,
(48:04):
I don't know, I'm not prepared to do like a
full analysis of how Pazuzu would behave in the Exorcist
and or of another demon would be more fitting for
the role. But yeah, it seems like if you knew
how to manage your use of Pazuzu and your invocation
of Pazuzu, you could very much use him to protect yourself.
Speaker 3 (48:27):
If one were forced to try to reconcile the canon here.
I think what you can maybe say is that within
the world of the Exorcist, it's actually just a separate
Christian demon that is taking on the image and name
of Pazuzu. Is just saying like, I assume this form.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
Yeah, because otherwise you'd be tempted to say, well, actually
the god that they are calling on should be Pazuzu.
The demon and the entity they're trying to drive away
should be a lamache To who is ultimately here not
a acting a baby or a pregnant woman, but is
at least attacking like a young girl, which is maybe
not too far away from her, you know, usual targets
(49:09):
of aggression.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
Okay, well, I think that probably marks the end of
our first part here, but we're going to be back
to talk about some more demons and frightening entities of
ancient Mesopotamian religions in the next episode.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
That's right, because there are more demons, there are more gods,
there are more strange monster like creatures. So we're going
to get into it in the next episode. In the meantime,
we'll just remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and
(49:43):
on Fridays. We set aside most series concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And
of course this month everything is Halloween themed. Weird House
is Halloween themed, our core episodes are Halloween themed, so
we hope everybody's enjoying the celebration. We'll also remind you, hey,
if you're on Instagram, looks follow us. We're stb ym
(50:04):
podcast on Instagram and that's one way to keep up
with the episodes as they come out. Let's see. Also, yeah,
if you go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
that should lead you over to the iheartpage for our episodes,
and there's actually a little tab there for our store
if you want to go check that out. We did
a Halloween t shirt last year and it's pretty fun.
(50:26):
Has a lot of like occult symbols on it and
so forth, and you can get other merchs there. It's
just for fun. Don't feel like you've got to buy
anything to support us. But if you enjoy the show
and you're like, hey, I need a new T shirt,
well we've got options.
Speaker 3 (50:38):
For huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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