Dingir - Tumblr Posts

This post is mostly an excuse to figure out how to tag, partially an excuse to put more content on my blog, and definitely an excuse to talk about my gods. So. My gods! My main go-tos are: Nisaba, the light of my life and lady of my home, Goddess of Scribes, Barley, and the Written Word. (I'm giving you the cliffnotes version rather than the polytheist rant, so. That's a good summary.) Nuska, god of the lamp at night. His job is to burn evil magic, generally. Protector god who fights off demons, his symbol is seen on the Pazuzu plaque in position to defend a bedside from the horrible demon Lamashtu, who is never welcome near me or my family. I go to him a lot concerning anxiety and nightmares. In addition to them, I go to: Ereshkigal, Utu, Enki, Inanna, Ninhursag, Gula, and Nanshe with relative frequency. I pay respects to Tiamat, but she's technically not Sumerian, very dead, and the story is complicated. Ereshkigal- queen of the House of Dust Utu- god of the sun, laws, travel, divination, protects against gidim, sometimes judges the dead Enki- god of fresh water, purification, magic, creativity, wisdom, fertility, creator of mankind who organized the world Inanna- goddess of passion, sex, war, lady who changes man into woman and woman into man Ninhursag- wife of Enki, mother goddess, lady of the cultivated earth Gula- goddess of medicine in all forms, dogs Nanshe- goddess of social justice, fishermen, dream divination On occasion I say a word or two for Nanna, the god of the moon, and Uttu, the goddess of weaving and the first married woman. I pay respect to a lot of gods as they are relevant, to be honest, but I never let a day go by without saying something to Nisaba.

Inro to Sumer 101

In, two, three, four, Out, two, three, four.

Alright. I want you to do a little thought experiment with me, if you would. I'm no good at guided meditation or making an engaging essay without tangents. What I can do is write. I can, if only for a moment, show you a different perspective.

So I want you to breathe, and I want you to feel the dust beneath your feet.

The sun is high and blazing against the dust of the road, glaring against the side of mud brick walls. The air is too dry on your tongue, but the shadows are cool, and the narrow jumble of alleys limits the reach of the sun's claws. A shoulder knocks into you, children ducking past your hips, someone's balancing a thick clay pot on their head, there are people everywhere flowing through the strangled capillaries of the city and dozens of black-haired heads bobbing past narrow doorways. The dust of the road grinds beneath your sandal. You duck past a few clusters of people and a snogging couple to take a few well-travelled haphazard alleys, and pop out on the edge of town to get your bearings as you shade your blinking eyes.

Deeper into the city rises a mountain of power, rising towards the sky like the swell of the sea. Three tiered layers of raw labor and artistic skill, several tons of brick gleaming with glaze like fine lapis-lazuli and crowned with a searingly white temple. This is the ziggurat connecting heaven and earth. It's also, conveniently, the best landmark in town. Given the angle, the temple lands given to sharecropping and pasture are probably behind you.

That business is where the money is, and you'd probably have done better for yourself if you'd taken that road. You didn't have the financial backing to try for scribal school, though your mother keeps talking about trying to marry you into a family that can afford it. It sounds easier than basket-making, anyway.

Bearings found, you make your way back into the tangle of streets again at a light jog, dust puffing over your sandals. Your purse thumps lightly against your hip, silver coils jingling a little, and you press a hand down to keep them quiet. First order of business is....

The crush of people thickens, thickens, and then relaxes as the space widens. The market is a clutter of pots, goats, people, and shouting, sweat and hot dust thick on the air. Bright textiles glare brilliantly from two or three stalls, a pile of clucking cages a few feet from where you're standing. Determined, you duck into the throng. Pottery stall, carpenter's stall, foreign spices, baskets of fish glittering in the afternoon sun. Finally, you spot the mason's shop and struggle past a knot of unmarried girls eyeing the fisher's boy. This stall isn't as claustrophobic, but there are one or two people lingering. The mason with worn hands and deeply wrinkled eyes looks up and smiles. Most of what's on display are little statues. People, animals, even a beautiful flat carving of a reed boat. You explain what you need, and he produces a tiny basalt dog the size of your fist from a basket. You bring out the coil of metal, break off a few rings, and hand them over. He weighs them, nods, and pulls out a few tools to write "For the life of Eman" on the base. That done, you take your purchase with gratitude and start the long jog to the temple gates.

Eman has been sick for a week or so, sweating and coughing until she choked, but the demon had finally left her and you know exactly who to thank for her survival.

Winding alleys, dust, chatter, dogs and children getting underfoot, and your thighs burn a little from the uphill work but you finally make it. The temple grounds are busy too, but there's more order to it. It's also a lot... cleaner than what you're used to.

A priest spots you lingering hesitantly at the gates of the temple district and comes to meet you. You explain that this dog statue is an offering to the goddess Gula, pass over a few rings of silver, and the priest takes it with a small smile and well-wishes for your family. You watch him go, the swish of his robes disappearing through a doorway, and breathe a long sigh.

It's done. Better get moving if you want to stop by the baker's before the dinner rush.

Separation of church and state is a relatively modern thing, and the temple in ancient Sumer was also heavily involved in local business. The most wealthy businessmen? Ranchers and farmers. Lahar and Ashnan, the goddesses of livestock and grain respectively, were very minor but very essential to Sumerian life. You can read about them in the Debate between Sheep and Grain. For more about ranchers and farmers, see Inanna Chooses the Farmer. As for illness, that was usually either demons/ghosts/spirits acting out, or acting in line with a decree from the gods. Here we have someone thanking the healing goddess. Most people never actually entered a temple beyond the courtyard, and definitely not if they were ill. The logic is probably to keep the demon from latching on to anyone else, spreading the virus or what have you.

We know very little of how home shrines functioned, so most modern Sumerian Polytheists downsize the formal temple rituals we have record of. Again, most people weren't actually priests, so we can't exactly put a cycling shifts on our altars or sing praises every hour on the hour. Temples had staff for a reason, and we're only a scattered few. But Mesopotamia was the root of civilization, and the gods govern the gears that keep progress going. From the most essential basics of grain and livestock, to the costly luxury of schooling, the gods have a presence in our lives. We are our own, but we also belong to the gods, and what they ask in return for their sponsorship is service. You can read more about it in Enki and Ninmah, and Enki and the World Order. Do the gods absolutely require our service, are they dependent on us? No. But just like we prefer grocery shopping to hunting and gathering, the gods like offerings. Our personal gods look over our shoulders, our city gods look over our community. Sometimes demons muck things up. Sometimes we muck things up, and that gives demons all the excuse they need to remind us that we're only human. And we are only human. We struggle, we spit, we steal, we tangle in the nets and drown.

But the world order still remains. It's existed for centuries in many forms, beneath all of the bells and whistles we've embroidered it with. Through respect and basic human decency you can earn quite a bit more than you might think. Sumerian Polytheism is about the little links that tie us together. Even I, a jobless urban hermit, have a toe in the water, and my actions ripple outward through the sea of civilization, no matter how small.

Take a look at who you are, your talents, your potential, and chase everything you could be with everything that you are. Be the best you. You've heard it in a thousand platitudes, in a thousand Hallmark cards, probably from your parents at some point. There's a reason for that. Carpe diem. Do the thing, because the worst sort of disappointment is letting yourself down. Don't take yourself for granted, and I have a hunch that the gods won't either.

That's my introduction to Sumerian Polytheism.

Polytheist Ramblings: Nisaba

I was going to title this “Finding Sanctuary”, but I think this fits with my little series better.

I talk a lot about other gods, because their influences are many-layered. It’s easy to talk about a goddess of the mountains when you live there, or a god of the furious sun when you’re melting. But how to talk about a goddess you’re sworn to? There’s something about the relationship that just won’t out with words, which is ironic considering.

My Lady Nisaba colored like the stars, whose body is the flecked barley, She who holds the Book of Names and who had a hand in the creation of her scribes, the goddess I revere and adore, is... as I said, words fail. Except for the part where she literally IS the written word. And then I’m laughing at my laptop screen again.

But my mind was wandering the other day, and I started mentally constructing a hypothetical temple. Something small and unobtrusive, but interesting. Maybe someplace busy, like New York, with the old back-alley surprise shops and classy old courtyards surrounded by sprouting skyscrapers. I’m rather attached to America, but I could see something similar in London. Either way, some sort of divot in the walls of glass and steel, a high-walled courtyard with a heavy door. But the door is left open, and the walls are soft with vines. It’s guarded by twin stone lions. The same ones you sometimes see in the yards of people trying too hard to look regal, maybe. But it’s an old practice. Probably inspired by the New York Library. Possibly a reflection of the statues that guarded kings and old polytheist temples. Either way, there would be lions, and maybe a carving of the Anzu Bird over the lintel.

In this hypothetical little sacellum, no if ands or buts about it, there would be a public bookcase or two. I’ve seen them around town, and they’re absolutely brilliant. The paving stones would be covered in all sorts of book quotes in as many languages as I could convince a mason to try, including Braille. At the back there would have to be a statue, and some of my thinking is probably inspired by when I wandered Granada and would stumble on an aljibe with a mosaic of the Virgin over it. In my head this looks a little bit close to the Madonna, and I’m not sure what I think of that. But there’d be a little plaque on the wall explaining who she is, and a basket or two for whatever a person might want to offer. I like the idea of a prayer box, I’ve seen those before, where you write on a slip of paper and it stays in the box as a secret. Or the papers are burned. Either way, both fit with the goddess of the written word and the old ways of burning offerings to lift your prayers skyward.

I have a lot of ideas, and no real means or resources to focus on them, but ideas are nice. I was thinking about this temple idea, and I wondered to myself what her sacred animal would be. There’s no record of one. Lions and bulls and dragons are all staple parts of the old hymns, but... I wanted to see if anything had developed over the years. In America we’ve developed this idea of giving teachers an apple, which is why I offer them to her. We associate twin lions with libraries because of the New York Library. Maybe there was more, hiding away with the book curses and scriptoriums.

I typed “Ten Most Iconic Libraries” into Google.

A good percentage of them are related to monasteries, which makes sense. Some of them had royal sponsorship at one point or another. There’s nods to their local history, the obvious relish of architects given room to play, some modernized and some stately old monuments. But there was one little detail that kept popping up in the descriptions: quite a few of the oldest libraries had a... symbiotic relationship of sorts with resident bats.

Bats and small birds like to hole up in unusual places, true. Check out your local mall food court and keep an eye out in the airport as you drag your suitcase down the moving sidewalk to see for yourself what I mean. But apparently your friendly neighborhood pest control has a taste for bookworms.

(For the record, the term ‘bookworm’ refers to any insect with a taste for literature. This extends to moths who eat cloth bindings and beetles who tunnel through the paper like wood, as well as the beetles after your leather tomes.)

In ancient Sumer, bats and birds were associated with Nanshe, especially pelicans. More specifically, owls were associated with lilitu-demons and possibly Ereshkigal. But then, their libraries more closely resembled the cooling rack at your local college pottery class. Not something many bookworms wanted to nibble.

Cultures change and religions evolve. I think I’ve found my answers, at least to this question. Especially considering how sometimes the endless shelves remind me of a quiet crypt (Seriously, my first time in a proper old crypt that was my first comparison). Maybe I’m obsessive and seeing connections, maybe bats are my favorite animal and I’m biased. But it’s interesting, to see the evolution of the gods. It’s interesting, to run the thought experiments, to ask the “what if”s, to make yourself at home on the outskirts and then see places where society has already met you in the middle, unnoticed.

For that matter, colophons are pretty cool too.

Nisaba za3-mi2-zu dug3-ga-am3