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Whoops, Mr Mencken
May. 16th, 2009 10:47 amSearch online and you'll find dozens of copies of H.L. Mencken's list of dead gods - part of his essay "Memorial Service", to be found in his third "Prejudices" collection.
Mencken's basic point - that civilisations rise and fall, and their gods rise and fall with them - is well made. Not quite so well made is the actual list, however, which includes place names (Lagash, Dilmun), the word "god" (Dingir), the title "lady" (Nin), and repeats the same gods multiple times. Merodach, Marduk, Belus, U-dimmer-an-kia, and U-tin-dir-ki are all the same deity, as are Gasan-lil and Nin-lil-la; Enki, U-ki, Ubililu, and Ea; Zer-panitu and Ubargisi; Hadad and Addu; Mulu-hursang and Amurru; Nergal, U-urugal, and Ura-gala... look, you get the picture.
This isn't obscure assyrological knowledge. It's obvious Mencken has compiled part of his list from The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (by the splendidly named Theophilus G. Pinches), which quite clearly lists these names as synonyms of each other.
Mencken has only one concept of what a "god" is, and he applies it to all the deities in his list: "omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal". "To doubt them," he tells us, "was to die". But the whole concept of blasphemy only appears with classical civilisation; it would have been meaningless to a Babylonian or an Aztec. The ancients certainly talked a lot about how their gods helped them win battles and so forth, but they didn't take "to the field to defend them against infidels".
Mencken was writing in 1922, but his failure of research presages the wilful ignorance of the worst strain of atheism, readily found on current bookshelves and Web sites, which blindly muddles the vast diversity of human religion into a single fundamentalist strawman.
Addendum. After posting this, I stumbled across a cheeky posting calling for the formation of the Sokk-Mimi Revival Society. :D (Scholars of Norse mythology and literature may know him better as MÃmir.)
ETA much later: I keep coming across similar lists online, just as riddled with errors and duplicates as Mencken's. Atheists: do your homework! Not only will you avoid looking like an ignoramus, but you may discover that the human religious imagination isn't the homogeneous lump of superstition you imagine it to be. :)
Mencken's basic point - that civilisations rise and fall, and their gods rise and fall with them - is well made. Not quite so well made is the actual list, however, which includes place names (Lagash, Dilmun), the word "god" (Dingir), the title "lady" (Nin), and repeats the same gods multiple times. Merodach, Marduk, Belus, U-dimmer-an-kia, and U-tin-dir-ki are all the same deity, as are Gasan-lil and Nin-lil-la; Enki, U-ki, Ubililu, and Ea; Zer-panitu and Ubargisi; Hadad and Addu; Mulu-hursang and Amurru; Nergal, U-urugal, and Ura-gala... look, you get the picture.
This isn't obscure assyrological knowledge. It's obvious Mencken has compiled part of his list from The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (by the splendidly named Theophilus G. Pinches), which quite clearly lists these names as synonyms of each other.
Mencken has only one concept of what a "god" is, and he applies it to all the deities in his list: "omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal". "To doubt them," he tells us, "was to die". But the whole concept of blasphemy only appears with classical civilisation; it would have been meaningless to a Babylonian or an Aztec. The ancients certainly talked a lot about how their gods helped them win battles and so forth, but they didn't take "to the field to defend them against infidels".
Mencken was writing in 1922, but his failure of research presages the wilful ignorance of the worst strain of atheism, readily found on current bookshelves and Web sites, which blindly muddles the vast diversity of human religion into a single fundamentalist strawman.
Addendum. After posting this, I stumbled across a cheeky posting calling for the formation of the Sokk-Mimi Revival Society. :D (Scholars of Norse mythology and literature may know him better as MÃmir.)
ETA much later: I keep coming across similar lists online, just as riddled with errors and duplicates as Mencken's. Atheists: do your homework! Not only will you avoid looking like an ignoramus, but you may discover that the human religious imagination isn't the homogeneous lump of superstition you imagine it to be. :)
