"In Spell 17,64 of the Book of the Dead, mention is made of 'Horus with two heads, the one bearing the truth, the other the lie'." - C.J. Bleeker, Hathor and Thoth

Search 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 Mímir.)

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. :)

From Something Awful, useful phrases translated into Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, such as "There are crocodiles in my pants". (I can still read bits of this. Hee hee hee hee hee.)

From TV Tropes, Never Live It Down explains so much about fandom (Owen, Gwen, Spike, etc etc etc).

Christian beliefs still strong, says survey: "More than four in 10 Australians who do not consider themselves "born again"' still believe Jesus rose from the dead, while one in 10 does not believe he existed."

Sadly, the God Spot appears not to exist after all - rather, religious thoughts are distributed through the brain. Sez a researcher: "That suggests that religion is not a special case of a belief system, but evolved along with other belief and social cognitive abilities." I'm very interested by the mention of Theory of Mind. It makes sense that, if survival depends on working out what other people are thinking, you'd end up trying to work out what everything is thinking - much as you can't help seeing human faces everywhere.

Sleep problems linked to suicide

Chaffinch Map of Scotland

Do not frequent a law court,
Do not loiter where there is a dispute,
For in the dispute they will have you as a testifier,
Then you will be made their witness
And they will bring you to a lawsuit not your own to affirm.
When confronted with a dispute, go your way; pay no attention to it.
Should it be a dispute of your own, extinguish the flame!
Disputes are a covered pit,
A strong wall that scares away its foes.
They remember what a man forgets and lay the accusation.
Do not return evil to the man who disputes with you;
Requite with kindness your evil-doer,
Maintain justice to your enemy,
Smile on your adversary.

The Babylonian "Counsels of Wisdom", c. 1500 BCE. From W.G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, Oxford University Press, 1960.

As I work in the kitchen today I'm listening to an entertaining lecture about West Semitic goddess by the Rev. William J. Fulco, who turns out to be the scholar who reconstructed Aramaic for Passion of the Christ, and also worked on Constantine. Small world.

Mucking about with tags, I found a posting I made in 2004 in which I said:

At the library I saw J. Stephen Lang's What the Good Book didn't say: popular myths and misconceptions about the Bible (2003) which triumphantly mocked those who call the Bible fiction for mentioning the Hittites, a people for whom evidence has never been found. I'd already heard of them, and not from the Bible, by the time I saw Ghostbusters in 1984 - perhaps because they've been known to archaeologists for over a century. I suspect Mr Lang might've been a bit desperate for material there.

I still want to know exactly who said what and when about the Hittites indicating that the Bible was made up. Neither Lang, nor the countless Web sites which make the same claim, give a source. It seems more likely that the discovery of the Hittites startled the heck out of everyone, and this was retroactively turned into a told-you-so. (Apparently it's unclear whether archaeologists were correct in identifying the people they'd found with the Biblical Hittites anyway - but this doesn't actually affect my point.)

1. A flier slipped under the door asking: "Would you like the know the Truth?" Indeed, but as they've already managed to break the LHC, we'll have to continue waiting.

2. It was impossible not to overhear one Catholic student explaining the significance of the first Passover to another. The captive Hebrews smeared lamb's blood on their doorways because the Egyptians worshipped a lamb god. The Nile was turned to blood because the Egyptians worshipped the Nile as the source of life, and blood symbolises life. (Uh... OK, maybe I didn't quite get all of that bit.) Plus each of the ten plagues was a similarly symbolic assault on the "top ten" Egyptian gods. Alas, at that point I had to depart; it would've been interesting to hear which god the guy reckoned went with each plague. With literally thousands of deities to choose from, it shouldn't be too hard to find a few likely candidates... unless you're looking for a lamb god.

To mark Pagan Pride Day, I thought I'd share with you the results of my research into sacred prostitution in the Ancient Near East.

There wasn't any.

No, seriously. In the past couple of decades, scholarship has eroded the long unquestioned belief that there were priestess-prostitutes in Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Greece, until there's pretty much nothing left. Herodotus started the whole thing by claiming that all Babylonian women had to shag a stranger as a fund-raiser for the love goddess. Looks like that was just one of a bunch of tales about those whacky non-Greek barbarians which Herodotus repeated. He also said the Babylonians had no doctors and sold brides at auction, which is rubbish. No evidence has turned up for any of it.

Nonetheless, for a long time scholars translated nearly every Mesopotamian term for a priestess as "harlot", etc, whatever the word actually meant. A good example is naditum, which literally means "woman who lies fallow" - a naditum was not allowed to bear children, and lived in a women-only sanctuary. Basically, she was a kind of nun, and yet for years the term was translated as "hierodule" or "sacred prostitute".

Something similar seems to have happened with the term for another kind of priestess, the Canaanite qedesha (male, qadesh), and Mesopotamian qadishtum (the word literally means "sacred" - same root as kaddish). qedeshot and qadeshim are associated with prostitutes in a few places in the Bible, most clearly in the story of Tamar, who disguises herself as a zonah (harlot); Judah buys her services, promising to send her a kid as additional payment. later, Judah's servant tries to find her and asks the locals if they've seen the qedesha... and that's about it for the evidence that a qedesha was a whore¹. In fact, earlier Bible translations didn't render qadesh and qedesha as "sodomite" and "harlot". But later editions translate the words as "whores", "male shrine prostitutes" etc.

Nothing in the cuneiform sources from Canaan or Mesopotamia supports the idea of sacred prostitution. In the Canaanite city of Ugarit, a qadesh was a type of high-ranking priest - there's no mention of his having anything do with sex. Similarly, there's no evidence that sex was part of the job of the Babylonian qadishtum. Moreover, there are mentions of dire results for men who boink a priestess - including losing his voice and having a "scaly penis"!

The one exception is the "sacred marriage", a ritual from one period in Sumerian history in which the king and a priestess, representing the goddess Inanna, had sex. It isn't as exciting as it might sound. It took place just once a year, and since the queen could be a priestess, it didn't even have to be extramarital. Later, the whole thing was replaced by simply putting the statues of god and goddess into a garden together overnight.

The idea of "sacred prostitution" was a lascivious fantasy about sexy foreigners which became received wisdom, in turn giving modern writers licence to indulge in their own fantasies. (There's a corker in Nancy Qualls-Corbett's The sacred prostitute: eternal aspect of the feminine in which a "world-weary" man is quite mercilessly pampered.) IMHO, modern writers looking for a sex-positive setting might do better to look at the real, historical Mesopotamia. It wasn't a free-for-all orgy, nor a feminist utopia - but prostitutes were neither criminals nor sinners. What could contrast more with our own culture's attitudes to women and sex?

(I'll post a more detailed version of this over at ikhet_sekhmet when I get the chance, including all my sources - the two most important are Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World, edited by Daraone and McClure, and In the Wake of the Goddesses by Frymer-Kensky.)

__
¹ My favourite explanation is that the servant is embarrassed and pretends he's offering the kid to a priestess for sacrifice. :) That's not just fancy - there's a mention of "sacrificing with qadeshot" in Hosea 4:14.

"This discussion may seem too abstract and 'reasonable' to say something useful about a society that had hundreds of gods and expended a great part of its resources on building temples, providing for the cult, and performing other religious actions (not that such actions are any more irrational than many features of modern society)... For the Westerner, problems in comprehending the alien and the rationality of religious practices may be posed most acutely by magic. Magic and rationality do not conflict: magic is rational, and its argumentation is often rationalistic. Magical spells and performances exploit many methods of inference and arguments from analogy that have strong logical coherence. These procedures and arguments differ from Western rationality less in their organization and formal properties than in their premises, which often assume different agents and modes of causation from those commonly accepted in the West."

Baines, John. "Society, Morality and Religious Practice". in Shafer, Byron E. (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1991.

I'd like to share with you a story from my religion. It's about the goddess of childbirth, Ninmah, and the cunning god, Enki. They get drunk one night and have a competition: can Ninmah produce a disabled person for whom Enki can't find a place in society? She makes a blind man, and Enki gives him a job as a musician. She makes a lame man, and Enki gives him a job as a silversmith. She makes a woman who can't have children, and Enki gives her a job as a weaver. She makes an intellectually disabled man, and Enki gives him a job as a servant of the king.

I like this story for two reasons. Firstly, because of its light-hearted explanation of disability: it's not a curse or a judgement or a catastrophe, it's just that the gods had a bit too much to drink. And secondly, because of its compassion. No disabled person is worthless; each has a useful role in society. We need weavers and silversmiths and musicians, and where would the king be without his servants?

I thought of this story when reading the terrible news stories about two women with Down syndrome who were apparently used as human bombs in Iraq. Far from treating them as people created by God or the gods, they were treated as worthless and disposable.

And I thought of myself, too, crippled with physical and mental illness, and yet still able to keep a household running and do a little Web work and writing and look after my husband and cats.