Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions
Numen Book Series
Studies in the History of Religions
Series Editors
Steven Engler (Mount Royal College, Calgary, Canada)
Richard King (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, U.S.A.)
Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Amsterdam,
The Netherlands)
Gerard Wiegers (Radboud University Nijmegen,
The Netherlands)
Advisory Board
b. bocking (london, uk); f. diez de velasco
(tenerife, spain); i.s. gilhus (bergen, norway);
g. ter haar (the hague, the netherlands);
r.i.j. hackett (knoxville, tn, usa);
t. jensen (odense, denmark); m. joy (calgary, canada);
a.h. khan (toronto, canada); p.p. kumar (durban, south
africa); g.l. lease (santa cruz, ca, usa); a. tsukimoto
(tokyo, japan); a.t. wasim (yogyakarta, indonesia)
VOLUME 123
Rethinking Ghosts in
World Religions
Edited by
Mu-chou Poo
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2009
Cover illustration: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.:
Purchase, F1938.4 (detail).
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Rethinking ghosts in world religions / edited by Mu-Chou Poo.
p. cm. — (Numen book series ; v. 123)
Proceedings of a conference held in Dec. 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (p.
) and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17152-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Ghosts. 2. Spirits. 3. Religions.
I. Pu, Muzhou. II. Title. III. Series.
BF1471.R48 2009
202’.15—dc22
2009004700
ISSN 0169-8834
ISBN 978 90 04 17152 7
Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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CONTENTS
Preface ..................................................................................................
Acknowledgements ............................................................................
Abbreviations ......................................................................................
List of Contributors ...........................................................................
vii
ix
xi
xiii
Introduction ........................................................................................
Mu-chou Poo
1
Wind and Smoke: Giving up the Ghost of Enkidu,
Comprehending Enkidu’s Ghosts ...............................................
Jerrold S. Cooper
Belief and the Dead in Pharaonic Egypt .......................................
Christopher J. Eyre
Where have all the Ghosts Gone? Evolution of a Concept in
Biblical Literature ..........................................................................
Sze-kar Wan
23
33
47
Ghosts and Responsibility: The Hebrew Bible, Confucius, Plato
Steven Shankman
77
The Roman Manes: The Dead as Gods ..........................................
Charles W. King
95
The Ghostly Troop and the Battle Over Death: William of
Auvergne (d. 1249) connects Christian, Old Norse, and
Irish Views ......................................................................................
Alan E. Bernstein
Ghosts of the European Enlightenment .........................................
Fernando Vidal
115
163
vi
contents
Ghost, Vampire and Scientific Naturalism: Observation and
Evidence in the Supernatural Fiction of Grant Allen, Bram
Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle ................................................
Shang-jen Li
The Cult of Vetāla and Tantric Fantasy ..........................................
Po-chi Huang
183
211
The Culture of Ghosts in the Six Dynasties Period
(c. 220–589 C.E.) ...........................................................................
Mu-chou Poo
237
Allegorical Narrative in Six Dynasties Anomaly Tales: Ghostly
Sightings and Afterworld Vengeance .........................................
Yuan-ju Liu
269
Chinese Ghosts: Reconciling Psychoanalytic, Structuralist,
and Marxian Perspectives ............................................................
P. Steven Sangren
299
Bibliography ........................................................................................
311
Index ....................................................................................................
313
WIND AND SMOKE:
GIVING UP THE GHOST OF ENKIDU,
COMPREHENDING ENKIDU’S GHOSTS
Jerrold S. Cooper
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the best known work of literature from ancient
Iraq, and rightly so.1 Its 3,000 or so lines relate the story of the legendary
king of Uruk and his friendship and adventures with his close companion Enkidu, whose subsequent death initiated the grieving Gilgamesh’s
vain quest for immortality. The tale ends where it began, at the city walls
of Uruk, where a wiser Gilgamesh has implicitly accepted his mortality
and is ready to resume the duties of kingship. The Akkadian epic is
loosely based on a group of earlier Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh,
but includes as well much that is not known from the Sumerian tradition. The Sumerian stories are relatively short, ranging from just over
100 lines to just over 300, and have been transmitted as independent
compositions. The Akkadian epic is a well integrated work of over 3,000
lines in length, framed, as already stated, by nearly identical scenes
at the great wall that Gilgamesh had built to protect his city, Uruk.
Versions of the Akkadian epic are known from at least 1800 B.C., but
it attained its canonical form around 1200. Then, sometime, probably,
in the early first millennium B.C., a scribe in a position to make an
authoritative change in a canonical work added a twelfth tablet to the
end of the eleven tablet epic.2 This extra tablet was, strangely, a verbatim
translation of the second half of one of the Sumerian Gilgamesh stories,
1
Two excellent translations into English are Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh:
A New Translation (London: Penguin, 1999) and Benjamin Foster, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (New York: Norton, 2001), both of which include the
earlier Sumerian Gilgamesh stories. See also the scholarly edition of Andrew George,
The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
2
George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 47–54, discusses Tablet XII and the possible
reasons for adding it. His conclusion, that it was the work of the author/editor of
the canonical eleven-tablet epic, cannot be correct, for reasons he himself spells out.
See also E. Frahm, “Nabu-zuqup-kenu, das Gilgames-Epos und der Tod Sargons II,”
Journal of Cuneiform Studies 51 (1999): 73–90. The best introduction to the languages
and cultures of ancient Iraq remains Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning
and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
24
jerrold s. cooper
Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld.3 Stranger still, this new ending
to the epic opens with Enkidu fully alive, even though he has long been
dead according to the preceding Akkadian narrative.
In the Sumerian story, the super-strong Gilgamesh has been forcing his male subjects to play grueling matches of a ballgame, a kind of
hockey or lacrosse, and in response to his people’s complaints the gods
caused his ball and stick to fall into the netherworld. The Akkadian
translation begins with Gilgamesh mourning the loss of his equipment,
and his servant Enkidu offering to go to the Netherworld and retrieve
the ball and stick (in the Sumerian tradition, Enkidu is a servant of
Gilgamesh, though he is in rare instances also called a friend; in the
Akkadian tradition, he is never a servant, but the equal of Gilgamesh, his
companion and friend. This difference will be important further on.).
Gilgamesh instructs Enkidu in how he must behave to avoid being
held captive in the netherworld, but Enkidu proceeds to do the very
opposite, offending the ghosts and powers that be in the netherworld,
who detain him there.4 Gilgamesh prays for Enkidu’s release, and the
god of wisdom and magic, Ea, instructs the Sun God, also powerful
in the netherworld, to open a small hole so that Enkidu can escape.
Reunited with his friend, Gilgamesh quizzes him about the condition of the ghosts of people who died in various circumstances, and
Enkidu answers, detailing a variety of ghostly conditions, from plush
to wretched, and, like its Sumerian original, the story ends abruptly
with the last of these ghosts.
For us, the use of this story to end the Akkadian epic destroys the
epic’s unity and structure. For the ancients, who accepted the addition,
the new information was relevant to the broader theme of the epic—
human mortality and what (not) to do about it—and the instruction
of Gilgamesh in the ways of the netherworld and its denizens would
3
See the forthcoming new edition of the story by Aaron Gadotti (based on A. Gadotti,
“Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle,” unpublished dissertation, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Johns Hopkins University,
2005). For now, see the translations in George, The Epic of Gilgamesh and B. Foster,
The Epic of Gilgamesh, George’s edition of the second half of the story in George, The
Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature text
and translation (www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk), and the earlier edition of Asron Shaffer,
Sumerian Sources of Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgamesh. (University of Pennsylvania
dissertation, 1963. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services.)
4
See the interesting interpretation in Dina Katz, “Sumerian Funerary Rituals in Context,” in Nicola Laneri ed., Performing Death, Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in
the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2007), p. 170.
wind and smoke
25
have foreshadowed his role, after his own death, as a netherworld deity.
But modern scholars have also had difficulty with the text on its own
terms, because the conditions of the ghosts as described by Enkidu
seem so very different from the usual portrayal of the netherworld in
cuneiform literature, a
gloomy house . . . the house that none leaves who enters . . . whose entrants
are bereft of light, where dust is their sustenance and clay their food. They
see no light but dwell in darkness, they are clothed like birds in wings for
garments, and dust has gathered on the door and bolt.5
The usual portrayal of ghosts’ situations is uniformly dreary, but some
of the ghosts seen by Enkidu were doing very well indeed, especially
those who had had many children. Best off of all were the ghosts of
still-born children, who, in the Sumerian version at least, “enjoy syrup
and ghee at gold and silver tables.”6
To understand what Enkidu found, and reconcile it with the otherwise dreary image of netherworld existence, we must first understand
how the ancient Mesopotamians understood ghosts.7 According to one
Babylonian creation account, man was created from clay that had been
mixed with the flesh and blood of a god.8 The divine materials were
needed, the text tells us, to provide man with consciousness or reason,
5
From the Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld (Benjamin Foster, Before the Muses:
An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (Bethesda: CDL Press, 2005), p. 499). See also
Dina Katz, The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources (Bethesda: CDL
Press, 2003). C. Barrett, “Was Dust Their Food and Clay Their Bread? Grave Goods,
the Mesopotamian Afterlife, and the Liminal Role of Inana/Ishtar,” Journal of Ancient
Near Eastern Religion 7 (2007): 7–65, argues that sumptuous grave goods suggest that
the Babylonians could not have believed the afterlife to be so dreary. Either the goods
were for the use of the deceased themselves in the netherworld, or were gifts to the
netherworld gods in order to get favorable treatment there. She also points to what
she calls Inana/Ishtar-Dumuzi imagery on the goods in several rich graves, which she
thinks suggests the possibility of escape from a dreary afterlife. But her net may be cast
too wide here, since the floral and faunal imagery interpreted as having such allusions
encompasses most Mesopotamian ornament. Do rosettes always imply Inana/Ishtar,
herds and flocks Dumuzi?
6
Line y in the ed. of Gadotti; line 299 in the George and ETCSL editions; line r2
in George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic.
7
See also T. Abusch, “Et ̣emmu,” in Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking and Pieter
W. van der Horst eds., Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden: Brill,
1995), col. 587–94, and Tzvi Abusch, “Ghost and God: Some Observations on a Babylonian Understanding of Human Nature,” in Albert I. Baumgarten, Jan Assmann and
Gedaliahu A. G. Stroumsa eds., Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience (Leiden:
Brill, 1998), pp. 363–83.
8
The Akkadian story of Atrahasis; see Foster, Before the Muses, p. 235f.
26
jerrold s. cooper
ṭēmu, and there inhered in man a ghost, eṭemmu, originating from the
flesh of the god, which was a sign of man’s godly components—animals,
after all, don’t have ghosts, at least, not in Babylonia. The ghost signaled
its presence through the heartbeat while the man lived; implicitly, death
released the ghost.9
The ancients were very concerned about the ghost that was released
after death. The deceased’s family was responsible to see to a proper
burial and funerary offerings, both upon interment and at regular intervals throughout the year.10 Well tended family ghosts were benevolent;
it is the ghosts of those who did not receive proper burial, or did not
receive the regular offerings (and were left to survive on the dirty food
and water of the netherworld) who were dangerous. A supplicant offering a libation to his family ghosts asks them to have his illness removed
from him and banished to the netherworld:
O ghosts of my family, progenitors in the grave,
My father, my grandfather, my mother, my grandmother, my brother,
my sister
My family, kith and kin, as many as are asleep in the netherworld,
I have made my funerary offering,
I have libated water to you, I have cherished you,
I have glorified you, I have honored you.
Stand this day before the Sun God and Gilgamesh,
Judge my case, render my verdict!
Hand over to Fate, messenger of the netherworld,
The evil(s) present in my body, flesh, and sinews!11
But ghosts who have not been properly cared for, whether neglected
family dead, or others that have not been properly buried and/or ritually provisioned, are a great danger:
9
The reason/ghost pun works with the Sumerian equivalents dím-ma/gidim as
well, though it is never made explicit in Sumerian texts. The Sumerian is certainly the
source of the Akkadian words, but the etymology of gidim is murky, and the solution
suggested by G. Selz, “Was bleibt? [II]. Der sogenannte ‘Totengeist’ und das Leben der
Geschlechter,” In Ernst Czerny et al. eds., Timelines: Studies in Honour of Manfred
Bietak (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), p. 88, seems fanciful. Katz, “Sumerian Funerary Rituals
in Context,” p. 172f., postulates an im, which she translates “breath, spirit” (usually
zi), which upon death becomes the gidim. The Ur III materials on which she bases her
argument are difficult and require further study.
10
See chaps. 2 and 3 in Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria
and Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Katz, The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian
Sources; A. Tsukimoto, Untersuchungen zur Totenplege (kispum) im Alten Mesopotamien
(Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1985).
11
Foster, Before the Muses, p. 658.
wind and smoke
27
O Sun God, a terrifying ghost has attached itself to my back for many
days, and does not release its hold,It harasses me all day, terrifies me all
night,
Always at hand to hound me, making my hair stand on end,
Pressing my forehead, making me dizzy,
Parching my mouth, paralyzing my flesh, drying out my whole body.
Be it a ghost of my kith or kin,
Be it a ghost of someone killed in battle,
Be it a wandering ghost, . . .
Drive it from my body, cut it off from my body, remove it from my body! . . .
Remove the sickness of my body, that the one who sees me may sound
your praises,
Eradicate the disease of my body!
I turn to you, grant me life!12
These malevolent ghosts were the source of a wide array of illnesses,
material and social misfortune, and nightmares;13 a whole repertoire
of incantations and rituals existed to exorcise them.14
As early as 2000 B.C. or so, the ghost was included in the extensive
repertory of evil demons who can cause harm to humans, but only the
malevolent ghost, and not the other demons, was considered to be the
spirit of a human,15 one who died in circumstances that made a burial
or funerary cult problematic: the improperly buried, youths who died
before they could reproduce, those who died alone in the desert and
remained unburied, the drowned and unrecovered, and those who died
from animal attacks or accidents, either because such deaths damaged
the integrity of the corpse, or the ghost was angry due to a premature
or violent death.16 These categories of ghosts are also found in Enkidu’s
description of netherworld denizens, as we will soon see.
Ghosts have a now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t kind of visibility,
appearing and disappearing on their own volition, but capable of extended interaction with the living mainly in dreams. They are impalpable,
12
Foster, Before the Muses, p. 650ff.
J. Scurlock, Diagnosis in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2005); Sally Butler, Mesopotamian Conceptions of Dreams and Dream
Rituals (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1998), p. 59ff.
14
Jean Bottéro, “Les Morts e L’au-delà dans les Rituels en Accadien contre L’action
des ‘Revenants,’ ” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 73 (1983): 153–203.
15
For a more complex characterization, see G. Selz, “Was bleibt? I. Ein Versuch zu
Tod und Identität im Alten Orient,” in Robert Rollingerrd., Von Sumer bis Homer:
Festschrift für Manfred Schretter zum 60 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2005), pp. 577–94.
16
Markham Geller, Forerunners to Udug-hul: Sumerian Exorcistic Incantations
(Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1985), p. 39.
13
28
jerrold s. cooper
that is, they can touch you but you can’t touch them, and they are
able to intervene in human affairs for good or for ill. They consume
the food and drink offered to them, and can even be consulted.17 They
must perforce be able to leave the netherworld, whether to receive
offerings from their families or to haunt those who have neglected
them or are simply unfortunate enough to be the victim of a hungry
spirit. The ghosts don’t return as living persons, of course. Death is
final, “the bane of mankind . . . the darkest day . . . the flood-wave that
cannot be breasted . . . the battle that cannot be matched . . . the fight
that shows no pity.”18 The netherworld is the place of no return only
in the sense that once dead, a person can never return to the living,
and should a living person (or a deity who does not belong there)
manage to reach the netherworld and be found out, there is no way
back. This was the predicament of Enkidu: He disobeyed Gilgamesh’s
injunctions, attracted the attention of the denizens of the netherworld,
and was detained there.
Gilgamesh instructed Enkidu to enter the netherworld in a drab,
affectless manner, in order to blend in and not be found out:19 No fine
clothes or fragrant unguent, no expressions of love or anger. When
Enkidu does the opposite, and is held there, Gilgamesh, in his pleas
for Enkidu’s release, is very clear that he died neither a natural nor a
violent death; he is, rather, a captive in the netherworld, implicitly, an
undead captive. And so, when Enkidu escapes from the netherworld,
it is the living Enkidu that returns to tell Gilgamesh about the conditions down below. The Sumerian text is clear: “He (the god) opened
a chink in the Netherworld; by means of his (the god’s) gust of wind,
he sent his (Gilgamesh’s) servant up from the netherworld.”20 The
Akkadian translation, however is different: “He opened a chink in the
Netherworld, and the ghost of Enkidu emerged from the netherworld
17
For necromancy, see Joseph Tropper, Nekromantie: Totenbefragung im Alten
Orient und im Alten Testament (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1989).
18
George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 203, from the Sumerian story Death of Gilgamesh.
19
Cf. Katz, “Sumerian Funerary Rituals in Context,” p. 170, for an intriguing alternative interpretation.
20
Gadotti, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgamesh
Cycle” lines 242f.; cf. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh; idem, The Babylonian Gilgamesh
Epic. See now the somewhat different interpretation of J. Keetman, “König Gilgameš
reitet auf seinen Untertanen: Gilgameš, Enkidu und die Unterwelt politisch Gelesen,”
Bibliotheca Orientalis 64 (2007): 23f.
wind and smoke
29
as a phantom.”21 The reasons for the Akkadian mistranslation will be
discussed elsewhere,22 but suffice it to say here that the word “ghost”
in the Akkadian is a misreading of the Sumerian word “servant,” probably because Enkidu is never a servant of Gilgamesh in the Akkadian
tradition.23 That the Akkadian is erroneous becomes clear from what
happens next: “They hugged and kissed each other” (Akkadian) or “He
(Gilgamesh) hugged and kissed him (Sumerian).” Mesopotamians might
have been able to hug and kiss ghosts in their dreams, but this kind of
mutual contact was not possible while awake.24
After their embrace, Gilgamesh interrogates Enkidu about conditions in the netherworld. Enkidu warns Gilgamesh that he won’t
like what he hears, and begins his description—in a difficult passage
whose meaning is nonetheless clear—by underlining the impossibility of sexual pleasure after death: “The penis is like a rotten beam,
termites devour it . . . The vulva is like a crevice filled with dust.”25 This
fits perfectly with everything else we know about the netherworld and
the conditions of ghosts, but why should it be the first thing out of
Enkidu’s mouth? Perhaps, because the long list of ghosts and their
fates that follows begins with the ghosts of men who had one to seven
sons, followed by the ghosts of people who, for various reasons, never
had children. The best off was the man with seven sons: he sat among
the minor gods. The man with only one son was not happy, and those
without children were uniformly wretched.26 The moral: for a happy
afterlife, have lots of children! The initial description of the atrophy and
decay of the sexual organs demonstrates that there is no after-the-fact
21
George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 194; George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic,
p. 327f. My translation differs slightly.
22
Gadotti, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgamesh
Cycle.”
23
Similarly, the Sumerian “gust of wind” becomes “phantom” in Akkadian because
of a misapprehension of the semantic range of the Sumerian word.
24
See now also Keetman, “König Gilgameš reitet auf seinen Untertanen: Gilgameš,
Enkidu und die Unterwelt politisch Gelesen,” p. 8, and cf. Katz, “Sumerian Funerary
Rituals in Context,” p. 171, n. 19, who would have Enkidu appear to Gilgamesh in a
dream.
25
These lines were not completely known in George, The Epic of Gilgames. Cf.
George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, p. 760, lines 250–53 as interpreted in Gadotti,
“Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle.”
26
For the word-play in this section, see Gadotti, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the
Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle,” and Karen Radner, Die Macht des
Namens: Altorientalische Strategien zur Selbsterhaltung (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
2006), pp. 81–85.
30
jerrold s. cooper
remedy for the failure to reproduce while alive; there can be no coupling among the dead.
The Akkadian text is broken for most of the rest of the catalogue
of shades. The Sumerian text continues by enumerating the unhappy
lot of those denied proper burial or killed violently, a list that overlaps
considerably with the cast of malevolent ghosts from the incantation
cited earlier. The text nears its conclusion with three fates that for
the only time in the listing have a moral dimension: the ghosts of the
person who was cursed by his parents or took his god’s name in vain
roam around or eat and drink bitter bread and water, but the ghost of
a person who died in god’s service lies on a divine couch. The main
Sumerian recension ends with the following:
Did you see my small still-born who never were aware of themselves?—I
saw them.—How do they fare?
They are enjoying syrup and ghee at gold and silver tables.
Did you see the man who was burnt to death?—I saw him—How does
he fare?
His ghost is not there, his smoke went up to heaven.27
A strange way to end the story; what happened to Gilgamesh? To
Enkidu? One manuscript from Ur continues the narrative after a break:
that text ends with Gilgamesh returning to his city, Uruk, and performing proper funerary rites for his parents. This seems rather fitting, since
the whole emphasis of the netherworld description has been on the
importance of having heirs to perform those rites.
The privileged position of the still-born must lie in the fact that never
having achieved consciousness (ṭēmu), their ghosts (eṭemmu) had never
entered into the cycle that made them dependent on funerary offerings;
perhaps some notion of the innocence or purity of the unborn is also
being expressed. The still-born would also not have names, and calling
the dead by name was an important part of the funerary cult.28 The
man who burns to death has no corpse to bury, but likewise no corpse
to remain uncared for. The absence of a corpse implies the absence
of a ghost, and hence, for the person concerned, complete exclusion
from the rites that integrate ghosts of the departed into the family
27
George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 189; George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic,
p. 768; see Gadotti, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle,” lines x–zz.
28
van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel, p. 52ff.
wind and smoke
31
structure,29 and for the family itself, it implies the lack of a potentially
benevolent spirit who could be called on in time of need. Cremation
was not practiced in ancient Mesopotamia, and there was some nexus
between bones and ghosts: “O dead people, why do you keep appearing to me, people whose cities are ruin heaps, who themselves are just
bones?”30 Assyrian kings would punish rebellious vassals by scattering
or pulverizing their bones or the bones of their ancestors.31
The “ghost” of Sumerian and Akkadian sources, then, seems to be
something akin to an immortal soul,32 an integral part of the living
person that takes on an independent role only after death. Its salvation
seems to have depended less on moral qualities than on reproductive
success (very Darwinian!).33 Consciousness, ṭēmu, exits upon death
together with the ghost, eṭemmu, and pursues a rather drab, eternal
existence in the netherworld,34 coming out only to accept the occasional
funerary offering, or, if none is forthcoming, to haunt the living. The
ghost, in its ability to move about invisibly and affect mortal lives, and
29
Cf. B. Alster, “The Paradigmatic Character of Mesopotamian Heroes,” Revue
d’Assyriologie 68 (1974): 59, where this “total annihilation of both body and soul in
fire” is seen as liberation from the “eternal cycle” in which “men must have children
who can provide them with funeral offerings after they death, and they must also have
children, and so forth.” See also Bendt Alster, Wisdom of Ancient Sumer (Bethesda:
CDL Press, 2005), p. 340f.
30
Foster, Before the Muses, p. 991.
31
E.g. T. Abusch, “The Socio-Religious Framework of the Babylonian Witchcraft
Ceremony,” in Tzvi Abusch ed., Riches Hidden in Secret places: Ancient Near Eastern
Studies in Memory of T. Jacobsen (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002), p. 18. Note, too,
the behavior of Merodach-Baladan, fleeing from the Assyrian king Sennacherib: “He
gathered the gods of his entire land, together with the bones of his forefathers from
their graves, and his people, loaded them onto ships and crossed over to . . . the other
side of the Persian Gulf ” (Daniel Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia
II: Historical Records of Assyria from Sargon to the End (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1927), p. 153.)
32
Cf. Pirjo Lapinkivi, The Sumerian Sacred Marriage in the Light of Comparative
Evidence (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2004), p. 139f.
33
A person with strong moral qualities would be rewarded with a good reputation
that translates into what we might call a “blessed memory” among the living, which
was the counterpart of the ghost that perdured in the netherworld. In the words of a
funerary inscription: “May the good deed he has done be requited him. Above, may
his name be in favor, below, may his ghost drink pure waters!” (Foster, Before the
Muses, p. 286).
34
The eternal existence of the ghosts of anyone who had ever lived lies behind the
threat of Ishtar and Ereshkigal to bodily resurrect somehow all of those ghosts so that
“the dead outnumber the living.” (Foster, Before the Muses, pp. 499, 420.) The threats
worked; the gods could do the math. Cf. Bernstein’s discussion of the ghostly hosts
in this volume.
32
jerrold s. cooper
in its dependence on offerings from the living, is very much like a god,
though deprived of most divine pleasures.35 Gilgamesh, according to
the Sumerian story of his death, and agreeing with his position in the
Mesopotamian pantheon, becomes a divine judge in the netherworld,
as does the prematurely dead king Urnammu of the Third Dynasty of
Ur (ca. 2100 B.C.).36 So Gilgamesh did find a kind of immortality after
all, and so might we, if we don’t go up in smoke.
35
Note that when Shukaletuda first sights the goddess Inana in the sky, he is said
to see “a solitary god-ghost,” referring to the appearance of the god, not wholly visible, as well, perhaps, to the return of Inana from the netherworld (note the different
interpretation of Selz, “Was bleibt? [II]. Der sogenannte ‘Totengeist’ und das Leben
der Geschlechter,” p. 88. See Jeremy A. Black et al., The Literature of Ancient Sumer
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 200. The Sumerian writes the sign gidim
“ghost” here preceded by the determinative for god; the determinative appears nowhere
else with gidim in Sumerian texts of this period. Interestingly, the divine determinative
is used with gidim in one Ur III text (MVN 10 172) where the ghost in question is the
ghost of a recently deceased deified king, but not used otherwise in that period.
36
See Esther Flückiger-Hawker, Urnamma of Ur in Sumerian Literary Tradition
(Fribourg: University Press, 1999); Antoine Cavigneaux and Farouk Al-Rawi, Gilgameš
et la mort (Groningen: Styx Publications, 2000).