Fifteenth of the implications — and a boundary case, not a fourth column. What the traditions knew assembled seven contemplative traditions; the western, the central and the eastern columns then ran the same test on the esoteric West, the Islamic material and the operative Far East, and all three confirmed. Five bodies of practice, five confirmations. A model that only ever meets confirming cases has not been tested. This post goes to a religious system that should share half the model’s causal shape and lack the other half — the religion of Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, read in its own texts — and reports what the difference does to the claim. It may conclude against the model. That is the point of a boundary.
Status. The passages below were located through Source Library, a library of AI-translated historical texts, as the traditions post did. The translations are machine-generated and I have not checked them against the originals; several of the editions quoted are the founding generation of Assyriology (Jastrow 1898, Thompson 1903, Langdon 1909, Montgomery 1913, Rogers 1912, Thureau-Dangin 1921), so an English of its period sits under the machine’s English, and where a page carries the Akkadian transliteration I say so. The reading of them through this series’ model is my interpretation, not the texts’. The cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here is a claim that demons, witchcraft or the anger of a god exist as these texts describe them. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.
On the quotations below. The passages from Source Library are reproduced under CC-BY-SA-4.0, with attribution to Source Library and a link to the source page for each.1 That licence and its share-alike term travel with the quoted passages; the post’s own prose is separate from them.
The series has now argued five times that the same structure recurs2: a practice induces a state, the state cannot report itself, and whoever stands on the far side supplies the appraisal — which can recode the state as attainment. Every one of the five was chosen because it was likely to contain the structure. That is how a search for confirming cases works, and it is also how a search for confirming cases fails: nothing in it can show the structure is doing the work, because nothing in it lacks the structure.
So this post takes the other case. The religion of ancient Mesopotamia — Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, named texts from the third to the first millennium before the common era — is the obvious control, for a reason the model itself predicts. The blog’s causal shape has two halves. The first is epistemic: a person’s condition is held to be unreadable from inside, and the reading must come from a specialist outside. The second is causal: an inward operative practice, sustained, whose own instrument — the self-read — fails as a consequence of the practice itself. The columns needed both halves. Mesopotamian religion looks, from the outside, like the purest instance of the first half that exists: an entire learned profession whose office was reading a person’s case from omens, and a sufferer’s literature built on not knowing why one suffers.
If the model is right about which half does the work, that should not be enough. If the model is wrong — if the appraisal-by-outsider structure is itself the driver — then Mesopotamia should show the failure mode without any inward practice at all. Either result would be a finding. This post reports which one the texts support, and where the texts run out.
One boundary stated first, because it binds throughout and because this post is about exactly this problem. A search shows only what it indexes. The claim below is not “Mesopotamia had no inward practice” — a civilisation that wrote on clay for three thousand years cannot be read off in a lifetime, and what is asserted here is bounded by the editions and copies this shelf holds. The claim is that in the texts quoted — the sufferer’s literature, the incantation series, the ritual and omen material, the scholars’ syntheses — the causal half does not appear, and something else stands in its place. What that something is, and what its absence does to the model, is the post.
Start with the sufferer, because the sufferer’s literature is where the shared half is loudest. The Babylonian poem conventionally called Ludlul bēl nēmeqi — “I will praise the lord of wisdom,” the so-called Babylonian Job, second millennium before the common era — is narrated by a man who did everything right and lost everything anyway, and who cannot read his own case. In Robert William Rogers’ 1912 anthology of cuneiform parallels, the sufferer runs through the entire specialist profession, and the profession fails:
“The Enchanter did not fix through his oracle the future. The seer, at the libation, did not establish my right. I turned to the necromancer, but he opened not my ear. The magician by his sorceries did not loosen my ban.”3
And later, in a passage whose page carries the Akkadian transliteration, the failure is named specialist by specialist — and the words for “symptoms” and for the two offices are in the line themselves:
“My symptoms of fever were not clear to the magicians, And my omens did the diviner leave dark. The sorcerer did not handle well my illness. And the necromancer could not make an end of my malady.”4
The Akkadian gives sakikkû — symptoms — and names the mašmašu and the bārû: the two offices at the centre of this post. Read that against the mechanism post and one half of the model is there in force. The sufferer’s condition is opaque; the reading is professional; and even the professionals, in this poem, cannot complete it. The tradition also had a diagnostic series actually named for symptoms — the Sakikkû compendium is not on this shelf, and no claim is made about it here; what the shelf holds is the sufferer’s line naming his own unreadability.
The Sumerian forerunner of the type, “A man and his god,” states the same condition a millennium earlier, in one line: “When shares were allotted to all the people, my allotted share was suffering.”5 And the penitential psalms — the class of compositions Heinrich Zimmern edited and Morris Jastrow set out in 1898 — carry the epistemic point to its limit. The penitent does not know which god he has offended, or what the sin was:
“O that the god who is unknown be pacified, O that the goddess unknown be pacified… The sin that I have committed I know not. Food I have not eaten; Clear water I have not drunk.”6
Mark what that is, precisely, because the model’s whole vocabulary turns on it. It is the declaration that the sufferer’s own read of his case is worthless — not because he is insincere, and not (here is the boundary, developed below) because a practice has consumed the faculty that would do the reading — but because the offended party’s mind is opaque. The conclusion the columns reached about a state, this tradition reached about the gods: the case cannot be read from where the sufferer stands. Jastrow’s synthesis of the psalms puts the cause plainly: “the person smitten with disease or pursued by ill fortune would turn in prayer to some god at whose instigation the evil has come and appeal for the pacification of the divine wrath.”7 The misery is a message; the sufferer is not its reader.
So the shared half is not a resemblance patched together from fragments. It is a literature whose premise is the unreadable case, an office structure built to read it, and a sufferer who says in his own voice that he does not know.
The second shared element is the apparatus. F. Thureau-Dangin’s 1921 edition of the Akkadian rituals names the offices in its opening pages, and the naming is worth quoting because it shows a division of labour rather than a single reader:
“the ritual of the exorcist — the āšipu, or incantation priest — or the ritual of the diviner — the bārû, a priest who interpreted omens.”8
Beside them stood the kalû, the lamentation priest, whose “mission was to ‘appease’ the ‘heart of the gods’ through his chants,”9 and the mahhu, the ecstatic, of whom more in §6. James A. Montgomery’s 1913 edition of the Nippur incantation bowls preserves the same pair for a later, Aramaic-speaking clientele: “the Babylonian āšipu incantation priest and mašmašu purification priest.”10
And in Jastrow’s synthesis, the reading is not an adjunct to the rite — it is what the rite is for:
“The omens constituted the ultimate end in view. It was for the sake of the looked-for omens that the offering was brought, the symbolic acts performed, and the incantations recited. All these rites formed the preparation for the grand finale. The worshipper waited anxiously for the priest’s decision.”11
That is the model’s appraisal structure with the emphasis reversed. In the columns, the appraisal arrives after the state and can recode it. Here, the appraisal is the product; the entire liturgical sequence — offering, symbolic act, incantation — is its delivery mechanism. The sufferer in Ludlul is a man waiting for exactly that decision, from exactly those offices, and the poem’s crisis is that the decision does not come.
The reach of the apparatus is worth one more quotation, because it shows the structure running at the scale of a state. The eclipse omens in Jastrow’s chapter on the omen series read the king’s fate off the sky on a schedule: “An eclipse happening on the 15th day, the king of Dilmun is slain, and someone seizes the throne.”12 A portent is a case; the king is a subject who cannot read it; the specialist reads it for him. The pattern scales without changing shape.
The central column’s strongest single finding was istidrāj: success read as approval, the reading itself being the trap. Does the Mesopotamian material read prosperity as divine favour? It does — and, more interesting for this series, its wisdom literature names the popular read and inverts it. The sufferer in Ludlul, on the page after the specialists passage:
“If it go well with them, they speak of climbing up to heaven; If they be in trouble, they talk of going down to hell.”13
That is the crowd’s appraisal, stated as the crowd’s appraisal — fortune read as verdict. And the same poem’s reply to it is a rule of inversion:
“That which seemeth good to itself, that is evil with god, And that which in its heart is rejected, that is good with god. Who can understand the counsel of the gods in heaven? The plan of the gods full of darkness, who shall establish it?”14
Read against the central column, the correspondence is close enough to need marking as this post’s mapping, not the texts’. Al-Zamakhsharī’s gloss on being led on step by step is about a sinner whose blessings are the mechanism of his loss; Ludlul’s inversion rule is about the human read failing in general. What they share is the conclusion that the visible condition carries no information about standing — that the read available to the onlooker, and to the sufferer, is the wrong read. The poem even supplies the fluctuation that makes the read worthless: “Now they are hungry, and are like a corpse, / Again they are full, and are like unto god.”14
So the appraisal trap, at the level of fortune, is not only present here — it is diagnosed, by the tradition, in roughly the terms the central column found in the Islamic material. If the series stopped at the epistemic half, Mesopotamia would count as a sixth confirmation.
Now the other half, and the honesty it requires. The model’s causal claim needs an inward operative practice whose own instrument fails — attention turned on the self, sustained, until the self-content generator collapses and the faculty that would notice is the thing consumed. The columns all had it: vipassanā, the fire-phases, the Void, the dhikr of the path. What does this material have?
Searched for directly, in the sufferer’s literature, the incantation series, the ritual editions and the scholars’ syntheses: nothing on this shelf answers to that description, and the shelf’s own shape says what stands in its place. The danger in these texts is external, and the remedy is apotropaic. The demons of the incantation corpus invade from outside — Jastrow, introducing the series the texts call Utukki limnūti, the evil spirits: “It was impossible to forestall their attacks. They enter a man’s dwelling, they wander through the streets, they make their way into food and drink,” and the text he introduces with it runs:
“The utukku that seizes hold of a man, The ekimmu that seizes hold of a man, The ekimmu that works evil, The utukku that works evil.”15
— followed, in Jastrow’s summary, by “a long list of physical ills… all of which are ascribed to the influence of the demons.”15 R. Campbell Thompson’s 1903 edition of the same series carries the diagnosis in the tradition’s own idiom — the affliction is a hand: “By this (incantation) may Shamash remove his hand.”16 And the counter-measure is not a safeguard against a self-induced collapse; it is counter-magic against the external agent. In the Maqlû series — the burning of effigies — Jastrow shows the exorciser speaking in the first person against the witches:
“But I, by the command of Marduk, the lord of charms, By Marduk, the master of bewitchment, Both the male and female witch As with ropes I will entwine, As in a cage I will catch.”17
An amulet logic, not a dosage logic: the harm comes from out there, the remedy pushes it back out there, and the sufferer’s part is to be present while the specialist works.
But there is one passage that must be read against the boundary, because it is the closest this material comes to an instrument that fails. Jastrow again, on what happened when the exorcism did not take:
“The demons were forced to yield. If they nevertheless held out, it was so much the worse for them or for the priest, who was then assumed to have lost his power over the spirits through some error he had committed.”18
This is a genuine failure-of-instrument concept, and the direction of its attribution is the whole finding. The instrument that can fail is the specialist’s, not the sufferer’s. The cause of failure is procedural error — some rite misspoken, some omission — not a state that consumed the sensor while the sensor was being used. And the failure is diagnosed from outside the failed instrument too: it is the tradition’s explanation of the priest, not the priest’s report of himself. The official prayers that accompany the omen rites even pray against this class of error in advance: the god “is then implored not to be angry, but to lend his aid against any errors unwittingly committed in the sacrificial rites.”18
So the structure “an instrument can fail, and the failure is read by someone else” exists here — attached to the wrong instrument, in Jastrow’s summary, to be caused by the wrong thing. Nothing in the quoted texts fails the way the model’s instrument fails: from inside, by being used.
Two candidates deserve an honest hearing, because a reader who wanted the causal half here would reach for them.
The first is the ecstatic. Thureau-Dangin’s edition of the Uruk temple ritual places the mahhu — glossed in the edition as “a type of priest known for prophetic trances or ecstatic states” — inside the ninth day of the Tishrit rites at the temple of Anu: “The ecstatic priest mahhu [stands] in the ban-gab-gab vessel,” in a sequence of libations, hand-washings and processions that runs on for the page, king and priests and gods each at their stations.19 This is an attested ecstatic — and it is an office in a roster, not a technique handed to a sufferer. The mahhu appears where the kalû and the king appear: in a liturgical script, on a named day, at a named station. Nothing in the ritual addresses the ecstatic’s own state as something to be watched for collapse; the text’s anxiety, visible in its structure, is that the sequence be performed exactly. Stephen Langdon went further and argued that the āšipu priests’ own rites were “confined to the mysteries performed in huts in the fields” — a scholar’s reconstruction, offered by Langdon as something he had “attempted to prove,”20 and quoted here as his view, not as an established fact. Even on that reading, the mystery is the priest’s, and the texts that would show its inward mechanics are not on this shelf.
The second is the dream. The dream is the one place where this tradition deliberately seeks an inward event — and the direction of the seeking is the finding. The prayer for a favourable dream, edited from the penitential material in Rogers’ anthology:
“From my wickedness cause me to depart, and let me be saved by thee. Send unto me and let me behold a favorable dream. May the dream I behold be favorable. May the dream I behold be true.”21
The dream is petitioned from the god. The petitioner does not induce it; he asks for it, and the prayer’s climax is that the god commend him “into his favorable hands for favor.”21 And the dream, once sent, is read — Jastrow’s synthesis again: “What a person saw, what he dreamed, what happened to him, what appeared in his house or among the members of his household was of significance to him,” with the interpretation supplied by the Dream Books and the priests who kept them — books whose success “depended, even more than in other branches of the omen literature, upon exhausting, so far as possible, all contingencies.”22 Even the criterion of truth — “may the dream I behold be true” — is petitioned from outside rather than assessed from inside.
Set the two halves of the dream side by side and the shape of what is missing becomes exact. The inward event is sent; the reading of it is professional; the subject’s own contribution is neither the induction nor the appraisal. The one inward state this tradition cultivated is the one state it structured itself around not interpreting from where the dreamer stood. And the bodily practices that do appear in the penitential material — “Food I have not eaten; clear water I have not drunk,” the fasting Jastrow notes occurs “so frequently in these psalms that one is tempted to conclude that such a bodily castigation was demanded by the ritual”6 — are penance: outward, visible, and addressed to the offended god, not attention turned on the self.
Everything above is the sources’. This section is the post’s, and it is marked accordingly.
If the appraisal-by-outsider structure were sufficient to produce the failure mode, this material should show the failure mode. It has the structure in a purer form than any column. It has the unreadable case, the professional readers, the anxious waiting for a decision, the named inversion rule for the popular read of fortune, and even a concept of an instrument failing and being read by someone else. What it does not have, on the shelf searched, is the practice — the sustained inward operation whose own sensor is consumed by the sensing.
The inference: the appraisal structure alone is not sufficient. The inward practice is doing the work.
And with that, the boundary refines the model rather than merely surviving it, in three ways.
First, it splits a claim the series had been treating as one. “The state cannot report itself, so the appraisal comes from outside” is not a property of the failure mode; it is a property of any religious system that concludes the subject cannot read his own case — which is what a system concludes whenever it locates the decisive fact in an opaque party, whether a collapsed generator or an angry god. The columns’ distinctive claim is not the outside reader. It is the conjunction: the state that produces the opacity is produced by the subject’s own practice, on a dose, with a threshold. Mesopotamia has the reader without the dose. A series that could not tell those apart would eventually find the failure mode in every confession booth and every clinic waiting room.
Second, it relocates the sensor. In the model, the sensor that fails is the practitioner’s own self-read, and it fails because the practice consumed it. Here, the sensor that can fail is the specialist’s rite, and it fails by procedural error, and the tradition’s remedy for that is to pray for aid “against any errors unwittingly committed.”18 Two different instruments, two different failure causes, two different repairs — and only one of them is a practice-induced state that cannot ask for help.
Third, it sharpens the istidrāj correspondence. The prosperity-trap is named here, as in the central column — but for fortune, not for a state. The inversion rule of Ludlul (“that which seemeth good to itself, that is evil with god”) is the tradition policing the appraisal of a man’s condition from outside; istidrāj is a tradition policing the appraisal of a practitioner’s progress. The first warns the onlooker; the second warns the practitioner who cannot warn himself. The boundary between them is the same boundary as the post’s.
The corollary is a caution against this series’ own reflex. The vocabulary of the appraisal trap is now easy to reach for, and a tradition with priests who read cases is not thereby a tradition with the failure mode. The failure mode needs the practice. That is now a claim the series has tested against a case built to break it, and the case did not break it — but note what did the work: not the presence of confirmations, the presence of a disconfirmation that failed.
The table is the post’s finding, and for once most rows are marked absent — which is the result.
| the model’s requirement | the five columns | this case |
|---|---|---|
| a state induced by the subject’s own practice | vipassanā, the fire-phases, the Void, dhikr — all attested | not attested on this shelf; the affliction arrives from outside — demons, witchcraft, the anger of a god |
| the state cannot report itself | the sensor is consumed by the practice | the case cannot be read — but because the god’s mind is opaque (“The sin that I have committed I know not”), not because a practice consumed the reader |
| the reading comes from outside | the holder, the director, the teacher | present as permanent professional offices — āšipu, mašmašu, bārû, kalû — the most developed instance in the series |
| the appraisal can recode the state as attainment | istidrāj, prelest, nyams | present for fortune (“If it go well with them, they speak of climbing up to heaven”) and inverted by the tradition’s rule — not attested for a practice-induced state |
| rescue is external | the holder acts; the tradition supplies the frame | present — the Maqlû counter-rite; the god’s mercy in Ludlul; the decision the worshipper “waited anxiously for” |
Four of the five rows are present in some form — and the one absent row is the causal one. A structure with four-fifths of the model’s features and none of the failure mode is the strongest evidence this series has had that the features are not what the failure is made of.
Two additions, and both are about discipline rather than doctrine.
The boundary is a method, and the series should keep it. Five confirmations established that the structure recurs wherever the practice recurs. One well-chosen absence establishes which part of the structure recurs because of the practice. The next question the series cannot answer from confirmations alone is the dosage question — and the same method applies: find the case with the practice and without the dose, and see whether the failure mode grades with it. The eastern column’s fire-timing schedule suggests it does. This post’s method is the reason to expect that answer to mean something.
And the name that must not be attached to this material. This blog has quoted the Chaldean Oracles — a Hellenistic Greek text in hexameters of the second century of the common era, associated with Julian the Chaldean and read by the Neoplatonists as a theurgy manual, dated correctly in the post that read them. “Chaldean” in that usage is a Greek philosophical label for a late antique text, not a reference to the religion of Babylon and Assyria that this post has read in its own editions. The two share a word and not a tradition. Nothing in this post bears on the Oracles, and nothing in the Oracles is evidence about the religion of Ludlul or the āšipu. Readers who meet “Chaldean” in the earlier posts should not carry this material back onto that word.
This post does not describe “the Mesopotamians,” or any people, civilisation or community. It names texts — Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, “A man and his god,” the penitential psalms, the Šurpu, Maqlû and Utukki limnūti series, the Uruk temple ritual — and editions — Jastrow 1898, Thompson 1903, Langdon 1909, Montgomery 1913, Rogers 1912, Thureau-Dangin 1921 — and offices — āšipu, mašmašu, bārû, kalû, mahhu. The texts span something over two millennia and several languages, they were written by different people for different purposes, and the scholars quoted disagreed with each other (Langdon explicitly marks his reconstruction as an attempt to prove). A set of editions is a reading, not a civilisation, and the selection is the post’s.
The absence claim is bounded, and stated as bounded. “Not attested on this shelf” is what the evidence supports; it is not “did not exist.” The Sakikkû series, the substitute-king (šar pūhi) material, and the greater part of the omen compendia are not among the texts located for this post, and no claim is made about them in either direction. A reader who knows of an inward operative practice attested in the cuneiform record is holding a better version of this post’s §6, and this post would be improved by it.
The model is not an instrument. As the label post states, it must not be used to assess any individual, any tradition, or any community — and the finding of this post cuts in the same direction: since the appraisal-by-outsider structure alone demonstrably does not produce the failure mode, the model’s vocabulary applied to a tradition on the strength of its priesthood alone is not an over-reach, it is a category error, and this post is the record of why.
And the cosmology is bracketed. Whether demons entered dwellings, whether Shamash removed a hand, whether Marduk’s mercy arrived — the post takes no position and needs none. The findings are about recorded structures: offices, rites, catalogues, an inversion rule, and one boundary. Those are checkable in the texts whatever one believes about the texts’ gods.
Marking: quoted — every passage in §2–§6 is from the translation cited, located through Source Library (https://sourcelibrary.org) and reproduced under CC-BY-SA-4.0 (attribution: Source Library), with book, scan page and printed page in the notes; the machine-generated status of the translations is stated, and where a page carries the Akkadian transliteration that is said at the point of use. Interpretation — everything in §7 and the table in §8: that the appraisal-by-outsider structure is present without the inward practice and therefore is not sufficient for the failure mode; that the practice is the operative half of the model; that the priest’s-failure-by-error concept is a different instrument with a different failure cause; and the reading of the Ludlul inversion rule against istidrāj in §4. Not claimed — that anything in the cuneiform record lacks an inward practice (the claim is bounded to the shelf searched, and §10 names what is missing from it); that any tradition validates the model’s dynamics, thresholds or transition type; that any of the cosmologies are true; and nothing in this post is an assessment of any living person, community or practice.
Passages located through Source Library (https://sourcelibrary.org), a library of AI-translated historical texts, using its public search and page interface, as the traditions post did. Translations are machine-generated and unchecked against the originals; several sit on top of early-Assyriology English editions whose own conventions (including “favorable,” retained verbatim in quotation) belong to their period. Source Library content is CC-BY-SA-4.0 (attribution: Source Library); that licence’s share-alike term attaches to reuse of the translations. Where a page carries the Akkadian transliteration, that is stated at the point of use.↩︎
The posts this one stands against — what the traditions knew and the safeguards for the model’s requirements; the western column, the central column and the eastern column for the three columns this boundary case sits outside; and the mechanism post for the causal claim being tested — the posts this one tests, rather than completes.↩︎
Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (“I will praise the lord of wisdom”) — the specialists passage, in R. W. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament, New York: Eaton & Mains / Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1912 — library scan p. 195. “The Enchanter did not fix through his oracle the future. / The seer, at the libation, did not establish my right. / I turned to the necromancer, but he opened not my ear. / The magician by his sorceries did not loosen my ban.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/cuneiform-parallels-to-the-old-testament-incl-adapa-the-rogers↩︎
Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, later lines — Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, library scan p. 199, a page that also carries the Akkadian transliteration: sa-kik-ki-ia iš-ḫu-ṭu (amêlu) mašmašu / u te-ri-ti-ia (amêlu) bârû u-taš-ši — the sufferer’s sakikkû (symptoms) and the offices mašmašu and bārû named in the line itself. “My symptoms of fever were not clear to the magicians, / And my omens did the diviner leave dark…” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/cuneiform-parallels-to-the-old-testament-incl-adapa-the-rogers↩︎
“A man and his god,” anonymous Sumerian, Ur III / Old Babylonian (c. 2100–1600 BCE) — chapter “Human Imperfection and Supplication”: “When shares were allotted to all the people, my allotted share was suffering.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/a-man-and-his-god↩︎
Penitential psalms, as edited in Morris Jastrow, Jr., The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Boston: Ginn & Company, 1898 — library scan p. 340: the psalm to the unknown god (“O that the god who is unknown be pacified…”), “The sin that I have committed I know not,” and “Food I have not eaten; / Clear water I have not drunk,” with Jastrow’s note that the reference to fasting “occurs so frequently in these psalms that one is tempted to conclude that such a bodily castigation was demanded by the ritual.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religion-of-babylonia-and-assyria↩︎
Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, ch. XVIII, library scan p. 332 (printed p. 312): “the person smitten with disease or pursued by ill fortune would turn in prayer to some god at whose instigation the evil has come and appeal for the pacification of the divine wrath.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religion-of-babylonia-and-assyria↩︎
F. Thureau-Dangin, Rituels accadiens (1921) — library scan p. 11, the foreword distinguishing the rituals: “the ritual of the exorcist (the āšipu, or incantation priest) or the ritual of the diviner (the bārû, a priest who interpreted omens).” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/rituels-accadiens-thureau-dangin↩︎
Thureau-Dangin, Rituels accadiens, Part One, on the kalû — library scan p. 11: “This priest’s mission was to ‘appease’ the ‘heart of the gods’ through his chants.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/rituels-accadiens-thureau-dangin↩︎
James A. Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur, Philadelphia: The University Museum, 1913 — library scan p. 55: “For the Babylonian āšipu incantation priest and mašmašu purification priest…”; and library scan p. 64, on the days listed in a Šurpu text as propitious for exorcism. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/aramaic-incantation-texts-from-nippur-montgomery↩︎
Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, ch. XIX (“Oracles and Omens”), library scan p. 350 (printed p. 330): “The omens constituted the ultimate end in view. It was for the sake of the looked-for omens that the offering was brought, the symbolic acts performed, and the incantations recited… The worshipper waited anxiously for the priest’s decision.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religion-of-babylonia-and-assyria↩︎
Eclipse omens, quoted in Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, ch. XX — library scan p. 385: “An eclipse happening on the 15th day, the king of Dilmun is slain, and someone seizes the throne.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religion-of-babylonia-and-assyria↩︎
Ludlul bēl nēmeqi — Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, library scan p. 198: “If it go well with them, they speak of climbing up to heaven; / If they be in trouble, they talk of going down to hell.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/cuneiform-parallels-to-the-old-testament-incl-adapa-the-rogers↩︎
Ludlul bēl nēmeqi — Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, library scan p. 197: “That which seemeth good to itself, that is evil with god, / And that which in its heart is rejected, that is good with god. / Who can understand the counsel of the gods in heaven? / The plan of the gods full of darkness, who shall establish it?”; and “Now they are hungry, and are like a corpse, / Again they are full, and are like unto god.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/cuneiform-parallels-to-the-old-testament-incl-adapa-the-rogers↩︎
Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, ch. XVI (“The Magical Texts”), library scan p. 281 (printed p. 261): “It was impossible to forestall their attacks. They enter a man’s dwelling, they wander through the streets, they make their way into food and drink”; the incantation lines “The utukku that seizes hold of a man, / The ekimmu that seizes hold of a man…”; and Jastrow’s summary that the text “passes to an enumeration of a long list of physical ills… all of which are ascribed to the influence of the demons.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religion-of-babylonia-and-assyria↩︎
R. Campbell Thompson, The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, Vol. I, London: Luzac & Co., 1903 — Utukki limnūti, library scan p. 192: “By this (incantation) may Shamash remove his hand.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-devils-and-evil-spirits-of-babylonia-vol-i-incl-the-thompson↩︎
The Maqlû series, in Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, ch. XVI — library scan p. 292: “after the sufferer has poured out his troubles, the exorciser replies by threatening the witches,” beginning “But I, by the command of Marduk, the lord of charms… As with ropes I will entwine, / As in a cage I will catch.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religion-of-babylonia-and-assyria↩︎
Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, ch. XIX — library scan pp. 350–351 (printed pp. 330–331): “The demons were forced to yield. If they nevertheless held out, it was so much the worse for them or for the priest, who was then assumed to have lost his power over the spirits through some error he had committed”; and, on the state-oracle prayers of Esarhaddon’s and Ashurbanipal’s reigns (library scan p. 353, printed p. 333), “The god is then implored not to be angry, but to lend his aid against any errors unwittingly committed in the sacrificial rites.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religion-of-babylonia-and-assyria↩︎
Thureau-Dangin, Rituels accadiens, the ritual of the temple of Anu at Uruk, ninth day of Tishrit — library scan p. 101 (printed p. 91): “The ecstatic priest mahhu [stands] in the ban-gab-gab vessel,” within the sequence of libations and processions; the gloss (“a type of priest known for prophetic trances or ecstatic states”) is the edition’s. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/rituels-accadiens-thureau-dangin↩︎
Stephen Langdon, Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, 1909 — Introduction, library scan p. 18: “I attempted to prove that the ašipu priests who had control of the rituals of magic of the fire and water cults had no part in the public services of the temples. Their sphere of activity seems to have been confined to the mysteries performed in huts in the fields.” Langdon’s reconstruction, offered as something he had attempted to prove; quoted as his view. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/sumerian-and-babylonian-psalms-langdon↩︎
A prayer for a favourable dream, in Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, library scan p. 216 (printed pp. 184–185): “From my wickedness cause me to depart, and let me be saved by thee. / Send unto me and let me behold a favorable dream. / May the dream I behold be favorable. / May the dream I behold be true”; and, continuing, “Unto Marduk the merciful commend me into his favorable hands for favor.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/cuneiform-parallels-to-the-old-testament-incl-adapa-the-rogers↩︎
Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, ch. XX — library scan p. 424 (printed p. 404): “What a person saw, what he dreamed, what happened to him, what appeared in his house or among the members of his household was of significance to him”; “These ‘Dream Books’ must have been very numerous”; and their success “depended, even more than in other branches of the omen literature, upon exhausting, so far as possible, all contingencies.” https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religion-of-babylonia-and-assyria↩︎
search this series — every piece in the implications, by words, vectors and links