October 18, 2025 • 52 mins
In this classic series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss some of the more noteworthy, fascinating and potentially terrifying gods and demons from the religions and myths of the ancient Mesopotamian world. It’s a who’s who of Pazuzu-adjacent entities. (originally published 10/8/2024)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Today is a Saturday, so we have
a vault episode for you. This is going to be
one that originally published last year ten eight, twenty twenty four.
We have lots of pazuzu adjacent entities to discuss in
the Demons of Ancient Mesopotamia.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Part one Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
And I am Joe McCormick. And on today's episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our month long celebration of
Halloween continues. Now, if you've been a listener for a while,
you know what's going on. You know what we do
every October. But if you are new to the show,
here's the deal. Every October we devote all of our
core episodes, our Tuesday and Thursday episodes to seasonally creepy
(01:04):
subject matter things about ghosts, monsters, devils, curses, horrors and frights.
So last week we talked all about spooky trains, about
locomotive horror stories, ghost trains, and the phenomenon of the
Victorian railway madness. Today we are beginning a new series
on the demons and monsters of ancient Mesopotamian religion because
(01:29):
they had some really exquisite demons, and as a concrete
example to kick things off today, I wanted to start
by talking about a specific ancient artifact. For my money,
one of the creepiest looking artifacts from all of antiquity,
and that is a mask of Humbaba.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Ah Mbaba is an old friend of the show. We've
talked about Mbaba not stuff to blow your mind before.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
One of my favorites. Definitely Humbaba came up in our
series on the origins of the religious imagery of the Halo,
because Humbaba, as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, famously
has these seven auras or radiances that are kind of
like an evil halo. But first I want to talk
specifically about this artifact and then we can talk a
(02:16):
bit more about Humbaba as an idea. So this artifact
is a baked clay disc depicting a hideous face. It's
roughly three point three inches in height and in width,
and it was produced during the Old Babylonian period between
about eighteen hundred and sixteen hundred BCE. It was excavated
(02:39):
by the nineteenth century Assyrian archaeologist Hormuz Ressam from the
site of the ancient Babylonian city of Sipper, which is
on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in modern
day Iraq. Today this artifact is held in the collection
of the British Museum. Now, this sculpture is absolutely worth
looking up if you are able, but if not, I'm
(03:00):
gonna do my best to describe it. The mask shows
a humanoid face frozen in a pitiless grimace. It's got
the teeth clenched. The head is rounded in shape with
bulges in the outline of the head where the ears
would be uh. And it has wide, blank, empty gray eyes. Now,
(03:21):
I know in some cases these ancient Mesopotamian statues and
sculptures would have been painted and the paint has simply
weathered away over the years, which is the reason some
of these ancient statues have such unsettling blank eyes, just
these empty, cloudy pools of stone with no pupil or iris.
I don't know if that's the case with this clay
(03:42):
sculpture or if this is the way it was always
intended to look. Either way, the state in which it
has arrived to us in modernity. Is extremely unsettling looking.
But I think the most interesting detail about it I
haven't gotten to yet, and that is the texture of
the flesh. The entire surface of this monstrous face is
(04:05):
molded with a pattern like a labyrinth. So it's you
have a long, single thick line like a rope, folded
over and over upon itself to form every part of
this head, the hair, the forehead, the ears, the nose,
the cheeks, and the double rows of clenched killer teeth.
(04:27):
I think you can even see where the coil is
supposed to be at its midpoint, you know where it
folds over on itself. It's at the left side of
the mouth, where the jaws open.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, this is very unsettling looking, and if I were
to compare it to anything, it makes me think of
the character Prune Face from the nineteen ninety Dick Tracy movie. Yeah,
it's like that level of like wrinkliness, but then with
this also this vicious grin, this growling, toothy mouth. So yeah,
(05:00):
it's pretty intimidating.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
But I think at least prune Face had pupils in
his eyes.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Somewhere in there. It was heavily littered. Yeah, the name implies.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Okay, so Humbaba or Huahwa these are different, and this
will come up throughout the series. Most of these entities
we're going to be talking about have multiple names from
different languages and stages in their cultural evolution. So this
character is known as Huawa in Sumerian sources and Humbaba
(05:29):
in Akkadian sources. I'm going to be calling him Humbaba.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
The other side of the coin is that there are
best practices for pronouncing a lot of these words and
these names, so we can we can certainly get them wrong.
But on the other hand, we can't without you know,
any degree of failure, get it one hundred percent right,
because nobody knows one hundred percent exactly how any of
(05:54):
these given words or names were pronounced in the ancient
world in their original setting.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Very good point, Rob, We will be doing our best
with all of these ancient Mesopotamian words and names. We
will undoubtedly get some of them wrong in ways that
will be detectable to people who specialize in these ancient languages.
But yeah, to some extent, we don't fully know how
everything was pronounced in every case, and.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
You know, probably better that we don't hit it dead on,
because we don't want to summon any of these entities.
Many of them have been asleep for a very long time.
We don't want to invite them into our modern world.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Well, it's often the case in these mythologies that you
might have a dead god that isn't really dead forever.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Oh. You know. The other thing that we risk is
if we chance on a mispronunciation of one of their
names that just hasn't been done before, we might chance
upon the original pronunciation that therefore summons them into the
modern world. There's like even the experts haven't been saying
one hundred percent right, we could air into the summoning space.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I can't even think about that, okay. Sobapa or Huahwah
is a character who features prominently in ancient Mesopotamian literature,
most famously in the different versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
As I said earlier, we talked about him at some
length in that series on the iconography of the Halo,
(07:16):
because Humbaba is described as having these seven terrifying auras,
these strange layers of deadly radiance that are taken off
one by one before he is eventually killed by Gilgamesh
and Gilgamesh's companion in Kidu. In Gilgamesh, Humbaba is described
as a giant, terrifying humanoid creature assigned by the god
(07:38):
in Leil, the lord of winds, to be the guardian
of the Cedar forest. And according to the Stephanie Dally
translation of Gilgamesh this is in Tablet two, Humbaba is
meant to be quote the terror of the people, Humbaba,
whose shout is the flood weapon, whose utterance is fire,
(07:59):
and whose breath is death. And we're told that Humbaba
can hear a rustling of branches in his forest from
sixty leagues away. So who would dare walk inside the
forbidden pines? Now, even though we've talked about Humbaba before,
I do think we probably want to come back and
talk about him some more. We might get into some
more depth in part two of this series. But specifically
(08:21):
in the context of this clay mask from ancient Sipper,
there is a question about the way that it looks.
What is the deal with the labyrinthine design on the
face is why is it represented as a horrific face
with these deep wrinkles the prune face look and the
(08:43):
wrinkles seem to be formed out of a folded rope.
There is an answer to this. We know conclusively why
it looks that way. The rope that makes the face
is not a rope. There is a cuneiform inscription on
the reverse side of the mask which tells us this
inscription is written by the hand of Warad Marduk, a diviner,
(09:07):
son of Kubarum, also a diviner. And what the diviner
says is, according to the British Museum's translation quote, if
the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huawa.
This is an omen of Sargon, who ruled the land.
Oh man, Oh yeah. And then there's a part with
some text missing, but it says if and then there's
(09:30):
an illision, the house of a man will expand, so
it's saying the coils of a colon. This horrifying mask
is supposed to represent the piled up intestines of a
slaughtered animal, which have been used in tons of cultures
all throughout history as a stimulus for divination, meaning that
(09:52):
a diviner could read signs of the future and gain
access to privileged information by looking at the guts of
a slaughtered animal, sometimes at the liver as well, or
sometimes the intestines. In this case, I believe the animal
is supposed to be a sheep, but in various usages
(10:12):
you would get different animals might be a sheep or
a goat, or an ox or so forth. In this
particular case, the inscription suggests that if the diviner sees
entrails that coil to represent the face of Humbaba, this
is an omen of maybe successful conquest or expanding power,
or the expansion of one's house. So according to a
(10:33):
book we were both consulting called Gods, Demons and Symbols
of Ancient Mesopotamia and Illustrated Dictionary. This is by a
couple of scholars named Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, British
Museum Press, nineteen ninety two. According to this book, the
face of Huawa seen by a diviner typically means revolution
in the state, which I guess doesn't sound so great
(10:55):
if you are currently the king. And a lot of
times these divinations would be given to a powerful person
coded as given to a powerful person such as a king.
But the authors also suggest there some evidence that clay
masks representing the face of Humbaba were hung up on walls,
maybe in palaces and temples as charms to ward off evil.
(11:17):
So as terrifying as this kind of face looks, masks
like this may have been thought to have the power
to ward off evil rather than bring it, which is
what we today call apotropaeic magic, protective or warding off magic.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Yeah. Yeah, and we'll get into at least one other
key example of this as we proceed through this episode.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Now, like I said, we may have to come back
to Humbaba later in this series, but I also think
we should near the beginning of the series definitely acknowledge
the ancient Mesopotamian supernatural entity that will be most recognizable
to fans of modern horror movies because of his appearance
(12:07):
in The Exorcist, and that is the demon Pazuzu.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
That's right, Pazuzu cast a long shadow over modern horror
cinema and horror fiction. Also just really stands out the
iconography of this particular demon because it features a pair
of wings that in silhouette kind of look like an
X behind a humanoid body, has like a horned dog
(12:36):
like head, very fierce eyes and face, and yeah works
great in silhouette and is used not only in The Exorcist.
We mentioned this on Weird House Cinema, but when we
did an episode on Ridley Scott's Legend, the same statue
also shows up two different times in the movie Legend,
just in the background or in the foreground.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah, that's funny, and the Exorcist was already out at
that point. That's the funny thing.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I mean, I think Pazzuzu got representation, and it was
either like, let's get some more gigs, Let's get some
more projects. I want to work with Ridley Scott.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Now, later we will get to the question of whether
these cinematic portrayals accurately captured the spirit of Pazuzu. Maybe
they partially do, and maybe there's some ways they don't.
They don't get it quite right, but at least within
the story of The Exorcist, Pazzuzu is the name given
to a demon that possesses and torments the twelve year
(13:30):
old Reagan McNeil. This is the story in the original
nineteen seventy one novel by William Peter Blattie, and it's
carried over into the nineteen seventy three film adaptation. Directed
by William Friedkin. Though in the original novel and movie,
the demon does not run around saying I am Pazzuzu.
You get more of that in like The Exorcist to
(13:53):
the Heretic, I think, which is you know, there's a
kind of downgrading of some of the subtleties of the
original in that. But the connection with Pazuzu is established
primarily through a prologue in the film in which the
Catholic priest Lancaster Maren is This is the character who
ultimately leads and performs the exorcism rights in the third
(14:15):
act of the movie, he's working at an archaeological dig
in Iraq, and in multiple contexts you see him encounter
a statue of a frightening, monstrous creature from ancient times.
And one thing I always liked about The Exorcist is
that the meaning of this confrontation is never made too explicit,
(14:36):
so it doesn't get corny. We don't get Maren facing
off against it at the beginning and saying, you know,
giving some monologue like you are evil, Pazuzu, I must
defeat you.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
You know that.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
You don't get a direct address till towards the end
of the film. Instead, there is just this vague, powerful
sense of dread that the entity depicted in these ancient
artworks is somehow present now, is powerful, and its shadow
has somehow fallen over our lives now. Of course, while
I love The Exorcist, you know it's a great horror movie,
(15:08):
in the modern world, you shouldn't go to The Exorcist
to understand what an entity like Pazuzu originally was and
originally meant. In The Exorcist, Pazuzu is rendered as a
demon in the modern Christian sense of the word, meaning
a malevolent spirit, a minion of Satan, which can possess
(15:30):
the bodies of innocent humans and use them to Satanic ends.
So this is a Christian demon, specifically a demon as
imagined by a twentieth century Catholic author. But this leads
to the question, what was Pazuzu in his original time
and place. Does it make sense to call him a demon?
(15:51):
And if it does, should we at least modify our
understanding of the English word demon a little bit for
the purpose of the discussion, Maybe a little bit less
the Catholic William Peter Bladi demon and maybe more a
demon in the broader Greek sense of the term.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Yeah, this is a very important question to ask before
we proceed into any more detailed discussion on these various demons. Yeah,
what is a demon? We certainly it's one of those
terms that you just throw it out there and it's
going to summon various images and ideas. You might, for instance,
think of the ball rog and various chaotic evil denizens
(16:28):
of the Abyss from dungeons and dragons, and of course
these are all based on entities from other you know,
faiths and traditions and so forth. You might also well
think of the name of various names from Christian demonology,
particularly those that crossed over out of theology and into
popular culture for everything from horror movies to rock music.
(16:51):
And again many of these given names, many of these
entities were appropriated from other cultures and faiths, some transformed
into Christian demons, and in their original context were considered
gods or some other spiritual entities. And yet at the
same time, even in discussing you know, mythic, legendary and
folkloric entities, either casually or even from like from the
(17:14):
level of scholarship in academia, the word demon is often used.
It instantly provides a starting point from which to potentially
understand perhaps a foreign concept or a creature or entity
in another tradition, you know, like, and you see this
with other words as well, like you'll frequently if you're
reading about say Chinese mythology and Chinese legend and law,
(17:36):
you might read about goblins or trolls. You might read
about ogres in Japanese lore, and so forth. You know
these are There are certain certain types of monsters, types
of figures, types of imaginary beings that seem largely universal,
and when you get into the particulars, yes, things change
(17:57):
a bit, but in general you can often safely say, well,
this is a demon from this particular faith. There's still
a lot of room for error, and there is a
lot of error out there when you look into especially
like historic understandings of some of these entities. So yeah,
we can throw out the word demon, and we can
strike close to the truth. We can strike close to
perhaps the original intended meaning here, and as such we
(18:21):
can loosely think of demons as the following evil supernatural
spirits or beings of some sort that were never human,
are not mortal, and yet exist beneath the status of
gods and sometimes demi gods. They are often conceived as
(18:41):
punishers in the afterlife, though they're also frequently seen as
spreaders of sin, disease, death, and temptation in the world
of the living. In Christian traditions, they are often described
as fallen angels, followers of the rebel angel Lucifer now
Satan and the ruler of Hell, and in other traditions
they may seem at times more part of a cosmic
(19:05):
order than agents and rebellion against said order. But even
then you'll still find room in such tradition systems for
a notion of something that is seen as an agent
of misfortune or temptation out there working in the world,
something that is an enemy of mortal men and may
(19:26):
be working outside of the graces of the divine. Now,
the word itself in English demon derives from the Greek demos,
which could be benevolent or malevolent. Like in the Greek tradition,
this could be a good supernatural being or a bad
supernatural being. Just because it was demos. Just because it
(19:50):
was a demon in this context doesn't mean it's necessarily
evil and out to get you.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, you can interpret it as like a spirit.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Now turning to more specifically to the ancient Mesopotamian world,
one of the books that we look to here was
a book titled God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia
An Illustrated Dictionary. This was originally published in nineteen ninety
two and the authors here are Jeremy Black and Anthony Green,
(20:18):
and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. The authors here point out
that the word demon works as an approximate translation of
a couple of different terms that refer to both good
and evil spirits, so very much in the Greek sense
of the word demon. These terms are in Akkadian rabisu
and in Sumerian moskin, both of which again can refer
(20:42):
to good and or evil spirits. I've also seen more
head on translations that define the rabisu as lurker and
moscim as deputy or attorney. The authors point out that
during the Neo Assyrian period, roughly what nine twelve through six,
there were spells that basically said evil Rabisu, please see
(21:05):
yourself out, good Rubisu come on it. So you'd see
a lot of this sort of thing, like you want
the good demons. You don't want the bad demons, but
you're not just like no demons allowed, Like, yes, of
course the good demons can come in. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Black and Green's book includes a one tablet that's sort
of a figurine mating clay from the Neo Assyrian period.
They say it's probably from the seventh century BCE that
depicts a god named Ilamu, which means harry. And if
you look at the tablet, yeah, he's got like real
like hair coming out of it. Almost looks like Medusa.
(21:40):
The's locks of hair coming out like snakeheads. But yeah,
he's a hairy guy. And written on his arms, so
the kinea form is actually like spanning, it's going running
down the length of his biceps his arm. One arm
says get out, evil demon, and the other one says,
come in, good demon. And I was actually reading in
(22:02):
another book, a book called Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia by
the French historian Jean Botero. This is translated by Teresa
Lavender Fagan, and Botero argues that there really was no
word in any of the ancient Mesopotamian languages that meant
specifically demon in the way we use it like specifically
(22:25):
categorizing the class of evil harmful spirits. Instead, these evil
harmful spirits would be referred to sort of by their
individual names rather than as a class of types of beings.
And as far as classes of beings, you would just
have this larger like, yeah, you got spirits and they
could be good or bad.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Now, the rubisu mentioned how sometimes translated as lurker, and
it does seem to lurk. It sort of haunts it
lingers around an affected individual. Now. Black and Green also
stressed that in modern studies of ancient Mesopotamian art and
i kenography, Again this is a book from ninety two,
so acknowledging that there could potentially be some shift here,
(23:06):
but this seems to still be the case based on
even far more recent papers dealing with specific entities. But
they stress that the term demon is generally applied to
any entity that is an upright human body and also
has like hybrid creature elements while full on animal combinations
(23:27):
or something like on all fours, those are considered monsters.
So for instance, across between a lion and a duck,
that would be a monster. Across between a lion, duck
and a human like where it's more or less humanoid shape,
that would be a demon. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
From what I gather, the really rough way of thinking
about it is that if it's bipedal, it's usually a demon,
and if it's on all fours, it's probably a monster.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Yeah. Now, they stress that demons are actually rare in
ancient Mesopotamia mythology and the names. Certainly this is the
case with name demons. The names we know are mostly
via their mention in various spells, and in many cases
we have little information regarding their nature or appearance, certainly
as far as evil demons and evil gods are concerned.
(24:14):
And this might be because it was just considered inappropriate
to depict some of them under most circumstances. Though, as
we've discussed already and will continue to discuss, there are
cases where you really want to show that horrid face
in full detail, Otherwise it might endanger you to create
their image. You know, you don't want to. You don't
(24:34):
want to summon the demon into your presence, even if
you were discussing it or ultimately using it to ward
off something else. But also it seems like sometimes you
need an image of the demon if you are trying
to ward it off. So I guess it comes down
to the basic idea that visual depictions and symbolic depictions
of these entities is powerful, and it can be powerful
(24:57):
in a way that helps deter them, or it can
be powerful in a way that attracts them. Yeah, but
they write that quote. In some cases, descriptions of their
appearances are so vague and inconsistent as to suggest they
were not well established. So that's the other side of
the coin. It just might be well, it's not really
you know, there's not really a canon for how this
particular entity looked or even how it behaved. You know,
(25:20):
we might think about in our own like pop culture world,
in our own like urban legend world. You have a
general idea, what I mean, you have a very clear
idea what some entities look like. Like Jason Vorhees, Yeah,
you know what he looks like. You've seen it in
various films. There's shifts and how he's depicted, but there
are a number of elements that need to be in place. Meanwhile,
(25:41):
something like I don't know, Bloody Mary, it seems a
bit more vague, like I don't know if there's a
particular canon as to how she is supposed to look.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
This I thought was really interesting, and this makes me
think we should actually come back sometime and do a
whole Halloween series on Yeah, what you could call like
canonically bounded versus unbounded monsters, monsters that have a very tight,
canonically set description and those that are extremely vague. And
in the case of the ones that are vague, where
(26:11):
does the horror come from? Because you know, when a
monster is, like say, represented in a movie, you know
what that movie representation looks like, and you can picture it.
But when there's a monster that is you don't even
get a very clear physical description. Where is the horror based?
What is it you're imagining?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah? Yeah, and I should probably draw in an example
that doesn't originate in a visual medium. I think if
I think back on entities, unreal entities that I had
varying degrees of fear of as a child, I can
think of the Boogeyman, and I can think of gray
aliens like the kind that you know are going to
potentially kidnap you and probe you and so forth, And
(26:51):
there's more of a definite idea of what a gray
looks like. Where's the Boogieman? Yes, there are. I mean,
the big Boogeyman is sometimes depicted in certain like I
remember there being a way that the Real Ghostbuster's cartoon
depicted the Boogieman. But for the most part, the Boogieman
is up for grabs. There's no definite way that it looks,
but the fear of it, certainly when you're young, can
(27:13):
still be palpable.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Oh lord, I just looked up the Real Ghostbusters Boogieman.
It looked why is it wearing a tuxedo?
Speaker 1 (27:22):
I remember that being a pretty wild episode. There were
some episodes of the Real Ghostbusters that went pretty hard.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
It looks like a pale rock and roll grimlin with
a disproportionately huge face, wearing lots of lipstick, with sharp teeth,
big long nose, purple punk haircut, and a tuxedo coat
with long tails. So it's dressed for a formal dinner.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, it was a bad dude, all right. So anyway,
the main point here is that, yes, some of these
creatures would have been perhaps unbounded, you know, we would
have been vague and inconsistent, But others became extremely important
(28:08):
in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and in religious practice, and we
have at least one case of a sort of demonic
face turn of an evil entity becoming, if not good,
at least useful for our protection. And you know, I
guess this under line is an important reality that we
(28:30):
have discussed in the past and the show, and that
is that religion and belief transform and evolve over time.
New ideas emerge, foreign ideas enter into a different region
or a different belief system. Things change, and it impacts
the exact form and function of various fantastic entities and creatures,
(28:50):
sometimes utterly transforming them. And this is especially the case
here today because we're ultimately considering the passage of thousands
of years here, and we're not only talking about like
subtle changes in belief or okay, well, this god becomes
a little more popular, this demon becomes a little more popular.
Sometimes we're talking about the emergence of groundbreaking new concepts
(29:12):
and how people considered their place in the cosmos and
the structure and function of the unseen world. Now, Black
and Green proposed a simplified five phase chronology for the
development of gods and demons in ancient Mesopotamia. And I'm
going to roll through it here real quick, because I
feel like it's you may get lost in some of
(29:32):
the dates here and the different periods, but I think
the overall flow is important, right. So first up is
the formative phase. They write that during the late Ubaid
and Uru periods, very roughly in the neighborhood of the
fourth millennium BCE, we have the earliest composite beings envisioned,
combining various elements of different animals. Up next the optimistic phase.
(29:57):
This would have been during the Acadian period let's say
two twenty three thirty four through twenty one to fifty
four BCE, and this is when we have galliptic scenes
depicting the capture and punishment, the busting, if you will,
of evil demons.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Makes me feel good.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Yeah. And then we have the balanced phase during the
Old Babylonian period eighteen ninety four BCE through fifteen ninety
five BCE, and we have cylinder and seal designs that
often mixed images with good and bad associations. So that's
the balance. It's like, you know, the good entities the
bad entities finding balance. Then we have the transformative phase
(30:37):
during the fourteenth through eleventh centuries BCE, the human centric
imagery of the Old Babylonian period gives way to mostly
animal headed hybrids, and then finally we get the demonic phase.
And as the name implies, this is the period during
which quote individual evil demons were depicted in their full
horror in Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian art. And it's
(31:02):
interesting too that they point out that this demonic phase
lines up with the emergence of a new first millennium
BCE theological model, that of a demonically populated hell. This
is of course key the key theological invention because it foreshadows,
you know, the medieval Christian image of a demonic afterlife.
It also mirrors the various hell realms of Buddhism and Hinduism,
(31:26):
and it essentially like adds this entirely different realm to
one's understanding of the unseen world.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
That's right. I mean a lot of modern Christians might
not remember this, but say, in the Hebrew Bible you
don't get depictions of a demonically populated hell with tortures
for the damned. That's not there. That emerges in early
Christian theology.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah yeah, And I mean, for my money, you can
throw it out right now. You don't have to keep
it if you got it. Now. One question that the
author's raise here is what made this vision of the
after life different from that of say, ancient Egyptians. We've
talked on the show before about the robust vision of
the afterlife that was modeled in an Egyptian belief, the
(32:12):
idea that the afterlife is certainly a realm of danger.
It is not a you know, it's it's not a
just one big heavenly celebration. There are a lot of
dangers and entities out there, but it's also a realm
of great possibility. So a person of means and power
and magical ability could potentially translate all of that over
into their next life in the field of reeds, that's right.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
So even among ancient cultures that had that had a
religious idea of an afterlife, of some sort of place
you go after death, there's there's a lot of diversity
in what that afterlife looks like and what you do there.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Yeah, now, I think there's probably still a lot of
room to get into the nuances of either you know,
broad regional religious traditions. But Black and Green contend that
in general, we see a strong sense of mesobate Hamian
pessimism in regards to the afterlife. According to Black and Green,
the region in general at this time was one of
(33:08):
agriculture and clay, but little else in abundance, certainly for
the common denizen of this region. So almost every aspect
of life they write was likely quite harsh compared to
ancient Egypt, and this colored an equally harsh view of
the afterlife. So immortality, that's for the gods. Mortal man, however,
(33:29):
is just doomed to die, passing on only into a
shadowy realm, where in Sumerian traditions the shades of the
dead consume only the ashes, and in Assyria Babylonian traditions,
the grim afterlife is the domain of demons and monsters.
Black and Green right that eventually traditions and belief systems
developed by which you can affect your arrival and status
(33:51):
in the afterlife or that of a loved one via
proper burial, But earlier on it was probably either based
around a cult of the dead, via which you might
you know, communicate with deceased family members, or it was
just a means of preventing their spirits from haunting you
after they've died. But yeah, especially early on, there's not
(34:12):
this sense that, oh, we need to talk to Grandma
or communicate with Grandma, or have offerings for Grandma, just
make sure she's doing okay. Like, no, there's not really
any doing okay. This afterlife. It's a world of ash
and shadow. But we don't want Grandma to come back
from the realm of ash and shadow and start haunting us.
Things are bad enough here. We don't need her here
(34:33):
as well.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
But at some point you get the idea of, well,
maybe we could send some food, send some care packages
to Grandma in the afterlife and that might help a
little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, So so again we enter this demonic period. We
suddenly have this idea of after life where are there
may be demons everywhere? And it also comes around the
same time as new practices such as erecting statues and
leafs of magically protective beings in palaces and in temples,
(35:04):
as well as burying clay images of such entities in
building foundations to protect that building and its occupants against
demons and disease. They write quote diverse and cultural background
and original significance. The various gods, demons, and monsters involved
were brought together into a fairly restricted visual series of
this time, and for the first time they came to
(35:26):
be treated as a group in mythological narratives. So, you know,
demonic avengers assembled.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Now most of the demons from this period of ancient
Mesopotamian belief they still in their punishment of mortals and
their spreading of disease and death. They were mostly still
doing it at the behest of the greater gods. So
you can think of them as being still part of
the system, you know, like that. You don't like what
(35:55):
they're doing, but they have some right to do it,
and maybe the ultimate blame lies in how I'm living
my life or what I'm not doing to protect against
their offenses.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Yeah, did I do something to be taken by the
grip of this demon? And that grip is usually a
disease of some kind.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Right, But there do seem to be exceptions to the rule,
and one exception in particular, and it may be due
to the fact that some acts of demons and some
events in life are just too horrific to be attributed
to the gods. And that brings us to the entity
known as La mache To. So I've looked up lamache
(36:37):
To in one of my favorite sources for entities like
this Spirits, Fairies, Lepricauns, and Goblins, and Encyclopedia by folklorist
Carol Rose, and she describes lamache To as the Babylonian
demoness of disease, and describes depictions as often being that
of a woman stripped to the waist suckling a pig
(36:57):
and a dog, with a comb and a spinning worl
in each hand, representing the gendered tasks of wife and mother,
these being the core targets of her wrath because she
is a demon that attacks pregnant women and new mothers,
bringing death and disease, particularly to infants. She is a
(37:19):
daughter of the Sky god, but according to Black and Green,
she seems to be operating She's held to be operating
outside of the domain of the gods, so she's not
doing evil because she has been ordered to. She's doing
it for her own purposes, perhaps for her own delight,
Like she's just pure chaotic evil, I guess. Black and
(37:40):
Green likewise describe her based on depictions as a humanoid
creature with the head of a lion, teeth of a donkey,
naked human breasts, a hairy body, blood stained hands, long
fingers and nails, and taloned birdlike feet. Her animal she
has like a signenture animal, and she rides this animal.
It is the donkey, and she sometimes holds a snake
(38:02):
in each hand as well, and she also has a
boat to travel through the underworld. She's also sometimes depicted
with donkey ears, as are other entities in Mesopotamian myth
and it seems less scary it does it does it
does to us outsiders, and apparently this has this has
(38:22):
caused various translations to change donkey ears to lion ears
when when this entity has been taken into other cultures
and regions. But the authors suspect that at the time
and to the target audience, it was seen as a
fitting animal to invoke with such a demon, as the
wild donkey was held to be swift footed. So I
(38:45):
guess in the regional context, like what is like the
fastest animal to traverse a you know, rough terrain, it
would perhaps be the wild donkey, and therefore it is
a fitting creature for a swift demon to ride in iconography.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Okay, now I can see how some of our associations
with various domestic animals, like whether they could be conceived
as scary or not. That could be purely cultural because
remember we did the series about why the goat is
associated with demons. I can imagine a culture where that
is not a common association, thinking like, what what's scary
(39:21):
about a goat?
Speaker 1 (39:22):
A goat because they're going to be met goats, like
they can be real sweet.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
Goats can be cute. Oh yeah, so I think you
can imagine a similar thing going on with the donkey
ears there that like, donkey's not scary to us because
we just don't have the right history of cultural association.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, you might even be able to get into what
sounds are considered funny in English, you know, like the
like sounds are often funny donkey, monkey, clown, you know.
And you're gonna have a different set of linguistic values
in a different language and of course in a different time,
different region and so forth, as well as other factors.
(40:00):
So again we're talking about La mache Tou, not to
be confused with La Masu. Lamasu, is a benevolent demon
often depicted as a winged lion or bull with a
human head, but no La mache tou is a being
of intense darkness and one that again is seeming to
(40:21):
act independently of the gods. She inflicts harm on mortals
for her own purposes. It's not part of a divinely
orchestrated punishment system. And so we attribute to her cases
of miscarriage, cases of infant mortality related illnesses that may
be affecting pregnant women or new mothers. And it's said
(40:42):
that what is happening is that she'll slip into a
woman's room at night, a pregnant woman's room, and touch
your stomach seven times to kill the child inside her
other times, and another's telling she just straight up like
steals children in the night. And she is also sometimes
depicted as bringing disease to men as well. So she is,
(41:02):
I guess equal an equal opportunity offender in that department.
So she is an enemy to all mortals, and she
is an enemy most vitally to not only our generation
but the next generation. Like she she is like a
dire threat to the enterprise of humanity.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
So feelings about the Donkey years aside a truly horrifying being.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yes, now what are you going to do? How are
you going to fight an evil like that. Well, this
is where we come back to Pazuzu.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Pazuzu our old friend.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yes, perhaps the most well known ancient Mesopotamian demon of
our age due to its invocation in horror cinema and
horror literature and horror imagery. Pazuzu was an Assyrian in
Babylonian demon or demonic god of the first millennium BCE. Again,
you're probably familiar with this striking profile, a humanoid entity.
(42:00):
It in such a way as to create a sort
of X shape. It could almost look like he has
four wings, though I think we're perhaps to see this
as the upper and lower parts of two wings, but again,
it kind of creates his X shape. Behind him, he
has a dog like face, taloned feet, bulging eyes, scaly body,
(42:22):
and if you look closely, there's also a snake headed
penis there. He generally has the right hand held up
as if in pledging something, and the left hand is down,
and sometimes there's a scorpion's tail as well. So Bazuzu
is kind of an enigma here because on one hand,
he was definitely held up to be a malevolent demon
(42:43):
of the underworld. You know, he is not your friend,
but he also comes to serve as a potent protector,
invoked in amulance to protect women against the evil of Lamashtu.
He has often depicted driving her and her donkey Steed
back into the underworld, and these images might be displayed
(43:03):
in the home as a part of a protective plaque.
And then you also have ambulance of Bazuzu's head that
could be worn, it seems, by pregnant women. So you
would actually wear the horrific like dog like uh, you know,
gorgon face of Bazuzu on your body to keep Lamacheitu
(43:23):
from getting close to you and reaching out to you
and touching you seven times with their awful hand.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
That is interesting in a very different kind of association
than we get in The Exorcist.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Yeah. Yeah, And in a sense, I feel like the
Exorcist does Bazuzu dirty, where Bazuzu is just an absolute
enemy of law and order in humanity, uh, where in
reality I think he's he's more in between. He's more
of a tweener, you know, he's he's not a complete heel,
he's not a complete face, but he's you know, kind
(43:54):
of doing like a semi face turn here. I you know,
I I s came back to the quote from Dame
Judy Dench and the Chronicles of Riddick. You know, she says,
in normal times, evil would be fought by good, but
in times like these, well it should be fought by
another kind of evil.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Oh what's good for the necromonger is good for Thelmashtu.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Now, bazuzu also protects against pestilential wins, So wins carrying
pestilence because he is. And I was reading about that.
I was looking at a number of different sources that
dealt more specifically with the zuzu, and one I looked
at is a paper by Maraja Todorovska this title Demonic,
Hybrididy and Liminality Bazuzu and lamashe Tou. This is from
(44:39):
twenty twenty three. She refers to him as the king
of evil wins and the ruler over the worst of
the wind demons, who he can also seem to control
to some extent. I don't know if he's straight up
controlling them or he is just like the roughest, toughest
of the bunch and he can beat them into submission.
In the same way that like Godzilla is the king
of monsters, not because there's like a deep tailed hierarchy,
(45:01):
but because he can whip all the other ones.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
That's right. He's not giving orders to the other monsters.
He's the monster you call when you got when you
got a monster messing with your city.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Right, right. And yet the Godzilla world does line up
with this rationale as well. So Pazuzu can break the
wings of dangerous wind demons. And this source also points
to the likely foreign origins of Pazuzu, given given that
he was a late introduction to regional beliefs and traditions.
He doesn't pop up visually till the eighth century BCE,
(45:32):
and textually he doesn't pop up to the seventh The
Metropolitan Museum of Art also has some resources about him,
because they have some images of Pazuzu in their in
their collection, they point out that he was associated with
the cold winds that blew into present day i Raq
from the Zagros mountains on the border with present day Iran,
although they also stretch into southeastern Turkey. These mountains and
(45:55):
these winds were thought to carry pestilence. These mountain regions
had long been inhabited by humans from very early times.
They were also known to have been the Anderthals that
lived there at one point, and in fact, the earliest
known human remains in Mesopotamia, or at least at one point,
(46:15):
the earliest known human remains in Mesopotamia were excavated in
Shaannadar Cave in the Zagros Mountains. According to Black and
Green in their nineteen ninety two book, But Yeah, Bazuzu
is often depicted as climbing mountains in order to engage
in battle against other demons, particularly other wind demons. But
(46:36):
who knows what kind of demon Bazuzu might battle. You
might be able to convince him to do battle against
an evil demon that is coming after you. Now, it's
interesting to note that when we look at some of
these Pazuzu amulets, but you know that would be worn
by a pregnant woman that has the face of Bazuzu,
(46:56):
and it's all about keeping La Mashetu away from you.
If you flip them over, you would see that they
would also have inscriptions of like straight up benevolent gods
on the back, the side that's facing you, that's touching
your chest, perhaps because again Pazuzu is not your friend.
He is a very dangerous wind demon, you know, master
(47:20):
of evil winds, and at the end of the day,
he's not something you want to mess with. You don't
want his attention to fall back on you. And so
you know, it's like you want to keep the face
of that ambulant pointing out to where your enemy may
may come from, but you don't want it looking in
at you. You don't want to somehow manifest his rage
at you.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
M Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Yeah, it's fascinating, and it's something I think that may
feel foreign to people who are more used to the
trappings of a monotheistic religion. You know, the idea that, yeah,
you can turn to a dangerous entity or potentially dangerous entity,
one that's not a typical ally of human beings in
order to deal with certain evil, supernatural threats, you know
you can is essentially it's like almost like hiring a
(48:04):
bounty hunter in the Star Wars universe, Like, yeah, Pazuzu,
you know he can do this job for you, But
you know you're making a deal with a ultimately a
pretty dangerous and unsavory character.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
So you gotta be careful.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, but at least he's not the Empire, you know.
So again, you know, I can't help but think Pazuzu
is done dirty to a certain extent in the Exorcist.
You know, I don't know. I'm not prepared to do
like a full analysis of how Pazuzu would behave in
the Exorcist and or of another demon would be more
fitting for the role. But but yeah, it seems like
(48:41):
if you knew how to manage your use of Pazuzu
and your invocation of Pazuzu, you could very much use
him to protect.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
Yourself if one were forced to try to reconcile the
canon here. I think what you can maybe say is
that in within the world of the Exorcist, it's actually
just a separate Christian demon that is taking on the
image and name of Pazuzu. Is just saying like, I
assume this form.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
Yeah, because otherwise you'd be tempted to say, well, actually,
the god that they are calling on should be Pazuzu.
The demon and the entity they're trying to drive away
should be a Lamache to who is ultimately here not
attacking a baby or a pregnant woman, but is at
least attacking like a young girl, which is maybe not
too far away from her usual targets of aggression.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Okay, well, I think that probably marks the end of
our first part here, but we're going to be back
to talk about some more demons and frightening entities of
ancient Mesopotamian religions in the next episode.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
That's right, because there are more demons, there are more gods,
there are more strange monster like creatures, so we're going
to get into it in the next episode. In the meantime,
we'll just remind you that to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast of core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
(50:08):
We set aside most series concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema, And of course
this month everything is Halloween themed. Weird House is Halloween themed,
our core episodes are Halloween themed, so we hope everybody's
enjoying the celebration. Will also remind you, hey, if you're
on Instagram, look up follow us. We're STBYM podcast on Instagram,
(50:30):
and that's one way to keep up with the episodes
as they come out. Let's see. Also, yeah, if you
go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that
should lead you over to the iheartpage for our episodes,
and there's actually a little tab there for our store
if you want to go check that out. We did
a Halloween T shirt last year and it's pretty fun,
(50:50):
has a lot of like occult symbols on it and
so forth, and you can get other merchs there. It's
just for fun. Don't feel like you've got to buy
anything to support us. But if you enjoy the show
and you're like, hey, need a new T shirt, well
we've got options.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
Huge things as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(51:26):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening
to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Today is a Saturday, so we have
a vault episode for you. This is going to be
one that originally published last year ten eight, twenty twenty four.
We have lots of pazuzu adjacent entities to discuss in
the Demons of Ancient Mesopotamia.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Part one Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
And I am Joe McCormick. And on today's episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our month long celebration of
Halloween continues. Now, if you've been a listener for a while,
you know what's going on. You know what we do
every October. But if you are new to the show,
here's the deal. Every October we devote all of our
core episodes, our Tuesday and Thursday episodes to seasonally creepy
(01:04):
subject matter things about ghosts, monsters, devils, curses, horrors and frights.
So last week we talked all about spooky trains, about
locomotive horror stories, ghost trains, and the phenomenon of the
Victorian railway madness. Today we are beginning a new series
on the demons and monsters of ancient Mesopotamian religion because
(01:29):
they had some really exquisite demons, and as a concrete
example to kick things off today, I wanted to start
by talking about a specific ancient artifact. For my money,
one of the creepiest looking artifacts from all of antiquity,
and that is a mask of Humbaba.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Ah Mbaba is an old friend of the show. We've
talked about Mbaba not stuff to blow your mind before.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
One of my favorites. Definitely Humbaba came up in our
series on the origins of the religious imagery of the Halo,
because Humbaba, as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, famously
has these seven auras or radiances that are kind of
like an evil halo. But first I want to talk
specifically about this artifact and then we can talk a
(02:16):
bit more about Humbaba as an idea. So this artifact
is a baked clay disc depicting a hideous face. It's
roughly three point three inches in height and in width,
and it was produced during the Old Babylonian period between
about eighteen hundred and sixteen hundred BCE. It was excavated
(02:39):
by the nineteenth century Assyrian archaeologist Hormuz Ressam from the
site of the ancient Babylonian city of Sipper, which is
on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in modern
day Iraq. Today this artifact is held in the collection
of the British Museum. Now, this sculpture is absolutely worth
looking up if you are able, but if not, I'm
(03:00):
gonna do my best to describe it. The mask shows
a humanoid face frozen in a pitiless grimace. It's got
the teeth clenched. The head is rounded in shape with
bulges in the outline of the head where the ears
would be uh. And it has wide, blank, empty gray eyes. Now,
(03:21):
I know in some cases these ancient Mesopotamian statues and
sculptures would have been painted and the paint has simply
weathered away over the years, which is the reason some
of these ancient statues have such unsettling blank eyes, just
these empty, cloudy pools of stone with no pupil or iris.
I don't know if that's the case with this clay
(03:42):
sculpture or if this is the way it was always
intended to look. Either way, the state in which it
has arrived to us in modernity. Is extremely unsettling looking.
But I think the most interesting detail about it I
haven't gotten to yet, and that is the texture of
the flesh. The entire surface of this monstrous face is
(04:05):
molded with a pattern like a labyrinth. So it's you
have a long, single thick line like a rope, folded
over and over upon itself to form every part of
this head, the hair, the forehead, the ears, the nose,
the cheeks, and the double rows of clenched killer teeth.
(04:27):
I think you can even see where the coil is
supposed to be at its midpoint, you know where it
folds over on itself. It's at the left side of
the mouth, where the jaws open.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, this is very unsettling looking, and if I were
to compare it to anything, it makes me think of
the character Prune Face from the nineteen ninety Dick Tracy movie. Yeah,
it's like that level of like wrinkliness, but then with
this also this vicious grin, this growling, toothy mouth. So yeah,
(05:00):
it's pretty intimidating.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
But I think at least prune Face had pupils in
his eyes.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Somewhere in there. It was heavily littered. Yeah, the name implies.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Okay, so Humbaba or Huahwa these are different, and this
will come up throughout the series. Most of these entities
we're going to be talking about have multiple names from
different languages and stages in their cultural evolution. So this
character is known as Huawa in Sumerian sources and Humbaba
(05:29):
in Akkadian sources. I'm going to be calling him Humbaba.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
The other side of the coin is that there are
best practices for pronouncing a lot of these words and
these names, so we can we can certainly get them wrong.
But on the other hand, we can't without you know,
any degree of failure, get it one hundred percent right,
because nobody knows one hundred percent exactly how any of
(05:54):
these given words or names were pronounced in the ancient
world in their original setting.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Very good point, Rob, We will be doing our best
with all of these ancient Mesopotamian words and names. We
will undoubtedly get some of them wrong in ways that
will be detectable to people who specialize in these ancient languages.
But yeah, to some extent, we don't fully know how
everything was pronounced in every case, and.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
You know, probably better that we don't hit it dead on,
because we don't want to summon any of these entities.
Many of them have been asleep for a very long time.
We don't want to invite them into our modern world.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Well, it's often the case in these mythologies that you
might have a dead god that isn't really dead forever.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Oh. You know. The other thing that we risk is
if we chance on a mispronunciation of one of their
names that just hasn't been done before, we might chance
upon the original pronunciation that therefore summons them into the
modern world. There's like even the experts haven't been saying
one hundred percent right, we could air into the summoning space.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I can't even think about that, okay. Sobapa or Huahwah
is a character who features prominently in ancient Mesopotamian literature,
most famously in the different versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
As I said earlier, we talked about him at some
length in that series on the iconography of the Halo,
(07:16):
because Humbaba is described as having these seven terrifying auras,
these strange layers of deadly radiance that are taken off
one by one before he is eventually killed by Gilgamesh
and Gilgamesh's companion in Kidu. In Gilgamesh, Humbaba is described
as a giant, terrifying humanoid creature assigned by the god
(07:38):
in Leil, the lord of winds, to be the guardian
of the Cedar forest. And according to the Stephanie Dally
translation of Gilgamesh this is in Tablet two, Humbaba is
meant to be quote the terror of the people, Humbaba,
whose shout is the flood weapon, whose utterance is fire,
(07:59):
and whose breath is death. And we're told that Humbaba
can hear a rustling of branches in his forest from
sixty leagues away. So who would dare walk inside the
forbidden pines? Now, even though we've talked about Humbaba before,
I do think we probably want to come back and
talk about him some more. We might get into some
more depth in part two of this series. But specifically
(08:21):
in the context of this clay mask from ancient Sipper,
there is a question about the way that it looks.
What is the deal with the labyrinthine design on the
face is why is it represented as a horrific face
with these deep wrinkles the prune face look and the
(08:43):
wrinkles seem to be formed out of a folded rope.
There is an answer to this. We know conclusively why
it looks that way. The rope that makes the face
is not a rope. There is a cuneiform inscription on
the reverse side of the mask which tells us this
inscription is written by the hand of Warad Marduk, a diviner,
(09:07):
son of Kubarum, also a diviner. And what the diviner
says is, according to the British Museum's translation quote, if
the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huawa.
This is an omen of Sargon, who ruled the land.
Oh man, Oh yeah. And then there's a part with
some text missing, but it says if and then there's
(09:30):
an illision, the house of a man will expand, so
it's saying the coils of a colon. This horrifying mask
is supposed to represent the piled up intestines of a
slaughtered animal, which have been used in tons of cultures
all throughout history as a stimulus for divination, meaning that
(09:52):
a diviner could read signs of the future and gain
access to privileged information by looking at the guts of
a slaughtered animal, sometimes at the liver as well, or
sometimes the intestines. In this case, I believe the animal
is supposed to be a sheep, but in various usages
(10:12):
you would get different animals might be a sheep or
a goat, or an ox or so forth. In this
particular case, the inscription suggests that if the diviner sees
entrails that coil to represent the face of Humbaba, this
is an omen of maybe successful conquest or expanding power,
or the expansion of one's house. So according to a
(10:33):
book we were both consulting called Gods, Demons and Symbols
of Ancient Mesopotamia and Illustrated Dictionary. This is by a
couple of scholars named Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, British
Museum Press, nineteen ninety two. According to this book, the
face of Huawa seen by a diviner typically means revolution
in the state, which I guess doesn't sound so great
(10:55):
if you are currently the king. And a lot of
times these divinations would be given to a powerful person
coded as given to a powerful person such as a king.
But the authors also suggest there some evidence that clay
masks representing the face of Humbaba were hung up on walls,
maybe in palaces and temples as charms to ward off evil.
(11:17):
So as terrifying as this kind of face looks, masks
like this may have been thought to have the power
to ward off evil rather than bring it, which is
what we today call apotropaeic magic, protective or warding off magic.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Yeah. Yeah, and we'll get into at least one other
key example of this as we proceed through this episode.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Now, like I said, we may have to come back
to Humbaba later in this series, but I also think
we should near the beginning of the series definitely acknowledge
the ancient Mesopotamian supernatural entity that will be most recognizable
to fans of modern horror movies because of his appearance
(12:07):
in The Exorcist, and that is the demon Pazuzu.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
That's right, Pazuzu cast a long shadow over modern horror
cinema and horror fiction. Also just really stands out the
iconography of this particular demon because it features a pair
of wings that in silhouette kind of look like an
X behind a humanoid body, has like a horned dog
(12:36):
like head, very fierce eyes and face, and yeah works
great in silhouette and is used not only in The Exorcist.
We mentioned this on Weird House Cinema, but when we
did an episode on Ridley Scott's Legend, the same statue
also shows up two different times in the movie Legend,
just in the background or in the foreground.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah, that's funny, and the Exorcist was already out at
that point. That's the funny thing.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I mean, I think Pazzuzu got representation, and it was
either like, let's get some more gigs, Let's get some
more projects. I want to work with Ridley Scott.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Now, later we will get to the question of whether
these cinematic portrayals accurately captured the spirit of Pazuzu. Maybe
they partially do, and maybe there's some ways they don't.
They don't get it quite right, but at least within
the story of The Exorcist, Pazzuzu is the name given
to a demon that possesses and torments the twelve year
(13:30):
old Reagan McNeil. This is the story in the original
nineteen seventy one novel by William Peter Blattie, and it's
carried over into the nineteen seventy three film adaptation. Directed
by William Friedkin. Though in the original novel and movie,
the demon does not run around saying I am Pazzuzu.
You get more of that in like The Exorcist to
(13:53):
the Heretic, I think, which is you know, there's a
kind of downgrading of some of the subtleties of the
original in that. But the connection with Pazuzu is established
primarily through a prologue in the film in which the
Catholic priest Lancaster Maren is This is the character who
ultimately leads and performs the exorcism rights in the third
(14:15):
act of the movie, he's working at an archaeological dig
in Iraq, and in multiple contexts you see him encounter
a statue of a frightening, monstrous creature from ancient times.
And one thing I always liked about The Exorcist is
that the meaning of this confrontation is never made too explicit,
(14:36):
so it doesn't get corny. We don't get Maren facing
off against it at the beginning and saying, you know,
giving some monologue like you are evil, Pazuzu, I must
defeat you.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
You know that.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
You don't get a direct address till towards the end
of the film. Instead, there is just this vague, powerful
sense of dread that the entity depicted in these ancient
artworks is somehow present now, is powerful, and its shadow
has somehow fallen over our lives now. Of course, while
I love The Exorcist, you know it's a great horror movie,
(15:08):
in the modern world, you shouldn't go to The Exorcist
to understand what an entity like Pazuzu originally was and
originally meant. In The Exorcist, Pazuzu is rendered as a
demon in the modern Christian sense of the word, meaning
a malevolent spirit, a minion of Satan, which can possess
(15:30):
the bodies of innocent humans and use them to Satanic ends.
So this is a Christian demon, specifically a demon as
imagined by a twentieth century Catholic author. But this leads
to the question, what was Pazuzu in his original time
and place. Does it make sense to call him a demon?
(15:51):
And if it does, should we at least modify our
understanding of the English word demon a little bit for
the purpose of the discussion, Maybe a little bit less
the Catholic William Peter Bladi demon and maybe more a
demon in the broader Greek sense of the term.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Yeah, this is a very important question to ask before
we proceed into any more detailed discussion on these various demons. Yeah,
what is a demon? We certainly it's one of those
terms that you just throw it out there and it's
going to summon various images and ideas. You might, for instance,
think of the ball rog and various chaotic evil denizens
(16:28):
of the Abyss from dungeons and dragons, and of course
these are all based on entities from other you know,
faiths and traditions and so forth. You might also well
think of the name of various names from Christian demonology,
particularly those that crossed over out of theology and into
popular culture for everything from horror movies to rock music.
(16:51):
And again many of these given names, many of these
entities were appropriated from other cultures and faiths, some transformed
into Christian demons, and in their original context were considered
gods or some other spiritual entities. And yet at the
same time, even in discussing you know, mythic, legendary and
folkloric entities, either casually or even from like from the
(17:14):
level of scholarship in academia, the word demon is often used.
It instantly provides a starting point from which to potentially
understand perhaps a foreign concept or a creature or entity
in another tradition, you know, like, and you see this
with other words as well, like you'll frequently if you're
reading about say Chinese mythology and Chinese legend and law,
(17:36):
you might read about goblins or trolls. You might read
about ogres in Japanese lore, and so forth. You know
these are There are certain certain types of monsters, types
of figures, types of imaginary beings that seem largely universal,
and when you get into the particulars, yes, things change
(17:57):
a bit, but in general you can often safely say, well,
this is a demon from this particular faith. There's still
a lot of room for error, and there is a
lot of error out there when you look into especially
like historic understandings of some of these entities. So yeah,
we can throw out the word demon, and we can
strike close to the truth. We can strike close to
perhaps the original intended meaning here, and as such we
(18:21):
can loosely think of demons as the following evil supernatural
spirits or beings of some sort that were never human,
are not mortal, and yet exist beneath the status of
gods and sometimes demi gods. They are often conceived as
(18:41):
punishers in the afterlife, though they're also frequently seen as
spreaders of sin, disease, death, and temptation in the world
of the living. In Christian traditions, they are often described
as fallen angels, followers of the rebel angel Lucifer now
Satan and the ruler of Hell, and in other traditions
they may seem at times more part of a cosmic
(19:05):
order than agents and rebellion against said order. But even
then you'll still find room in such tradition systems for
a notion of something that is seen as an agent
of misfortune or temptation out there working in the world,
something that is an enemy of mortal men and may
(19:26):
be working outside of the graces of the divine. Now,
the word itself in English demon derives from the Greek demos,
which could be benevolent or malevolent. Like in the Greek tradition,
this could be a good supernatural being or a bad
supernatural being. Just because it was demos. Just because it
(19:50):
was a demon in this context doesn't mean it's necessarily
evil and out to get you.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, you can interpret it as like a spirit.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Now turning to more specifically to the ancient Mesopotamian world,
one of the books that we look to here was
a book titled God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia
An Illustrated Dictionary. This was originally published in nineteen ninety
two and the authors here are Jeremy Black and Anthony Green,
(20:18):
and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. The authors here point out
that the word demon works as an approximate translation of
a couple of different terms that refer to both good
and evil spirits, so very much in the Greek sense
of the word demon. These terms are in Akkadian rabisu
and in Sumerian moskin, both of which again can refer
(20:42):
to good and or evil spirits. I've also seen more
head on translations that define the rabisu as lurker and
moscim as deputy or attorney. The authors point out that
during the Neo Assyrian period, roughly what nine twelve through six,
there were spells that basically said evil Rabisu, please see
(21:05):
yourself out, good Rubisu come on it. So you'd see
a lot of this sort of thing, like you want
the good demons. You don't want the bad demons, but
you're not just like no demons allowed, Like, yes, of
course the good demons can come in. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Black and Green's book includes a one tablet that's sort
of a figurine mating clay from the Neo Assyrian period.
They say it's probably from the seventh century BCE that
depicts a god named Ilamu, which means harry. And if
you look at the tablet, yeah, he's got like real
like hair coming out of it. Almost looks like Medusa.
(21:40):
The's locks of hair coming out like snakeheads. But yeah,
he's a hairy guy. And written on his arms, so
the kinea form is actually like spanning, it's going running
down the length of his biceps his arm. One arm
says get out, evil demon, and the other one says,
come in, good demon. And I was actually reading in
(22:02):
another book, a book called Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia by
the French historian Jean Botero. This is translated by Teresa
Lavender Fagan, and Botero argues that there really was no
word in any of the ancient Mesopotamian languages that meant
specifically demon in the way we use it like specifically
(22:25):
categorizing the class of evil harmful spirits. Instead, these evil
harmful spirits would be referred to sort of by their
individual names rather than as a class of types of beings.
And as far as classes of beings, you would just
have this larger like, yeah, you got spirits and they
could be good or bad.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Now, the rubisu mentioned how sometimes translated as lurker, and
it does seem to lurk. It sort of haunts it
lingers around an affected individual. Now. Black and Green also
stressed that in modern studies of ancient Mesopotamian art and
i kenography, Again this is a book from ninety two,
so acknowledging that there could potentially be some shift here,
(23:06):
but this seems to still be the case based on
even far more recent papers dealing with specific entities. But
they stress that the term demon is generally applied to
any entity that is an upright human body and also
has like hybrid creature elements while full on animal combinations
(23:27):
or something like on all fours, those are considered monsters.
So for instance, across between a lion and a duck,
that would be a monster. Across between a lion, duck
and a human like where it's more or less humanoid shape,
that would be a demon. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
From what I gather, the really rough way of thinking
about it is that if it's bipedal, it's usually a demon,
and if it's on all fours, it's probably a monster.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Yeah. Now, they stress that demons are actually rare in
ancient Mesopotamia mythology and the names. Certainly this is the
case with name demons. The names we know are mostly
via their mention in various spells, and in many cases
we have little information regarding their nature or appearance, certainly
as far as evil demons and evil gods are concerned.
(24:14):
And this might be because it was just considered inappropriate
to depict some of them under most circumstances. Though, as
we've discussed already and will continue to discuss, there are
cases where you really want to show that horrid face
in full detail, Otherwise it might endanger you to create
their image. You know, you don't want to. You don't
(24:34):
want to summon the demon into your presence, even if
you were discussing it or ultimately using it to ward
off something else. But also it seems like sometimes you
need an image of the demon if you are trying
to ward it off. So I guess it comes down
to the basic idea that visual depictions and symbolic depictions
of these entities is powerful, and it can be powerful
(24:57):
in a way that helps deter them, or it can
be powerful in a way that attracts them. Yeah, but
they write that quote. In some cases, descriptions of their
appearances are so vague and inconsistent as to suggest they
were not well established. So that's the other side of
the coin. It just might be well, it's not really
you know, there's not really a canon for how this
particular entity looked or even how it behaved. You know,
(25:20):
we might think about in our own like pop culture world,
in our own like urban legend world. You have a
general idea, what I mean, you have a very clear
idea what some entities look like. Like Jason Vorhees, Yeah,
you know what he looks like. You've seen it in
various films. There's shifts and how he's depicted, but there
are a number of elements that need to be in place. Meanwhile,
(25:41):
something like I don't know, Bloody Mary, it seems a
bit more vague, like I don't know if there's a
particular canon as to how she is supposed to look.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
This I thought was really interesting, and this makes me
think we should actually come back sometime and do a
whole Halloween series on Yeah, what you could call like
canonically bounded versus unbounded monsters, monsters that have a very tight,
canonically set description and those that are extremely vague. And
in the case of the ones that are vague, where
(26:11):
does the horror come from? Because you know, when a
monster is, like say, represented in a movie, you know
what that movie representation looks like, and you can picture it.
But when there's a monster that is you don't even
get a very clear physical description. Where is the horror based?
What is it you're imagining?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah? Yeah, and I should probably draw in an example
that doesn't originate in a visual medium. I think if
I think back on entities, unreal entities that I had
varying degrees of fear of as a child, I can
think of the Boogeyman, and I can think of gray
aliens like the kind that you know are going to
potentially kidnap you and probe you and so forth, And
(26:51):
there's more of a definite idea of what a gray
looks like. Where's the Boogieman? Yes, there are. I mean,
the big Boogeyman is sometimes depicted in certain like I
remember there being a way that the Real Ghostbuster's cartoon
depicted the Boogieman. But for the most part, the Boogieman
is up for grabs. There's no definite way that it looks,
but the fear of it, certainly when you're young, can
(27:13):
still be palpable.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Oh lord, I just looked up the Real Ghostbusters Boogieman.
It looked why is it wearing a tuxedo?
Speaker 1 (27:22):
I remember that being a pretty wild episode. There were
some episodes of the Real Ghostbusters that went pretty hard.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
It looks like a pale rock and roll grimlin with
a disproportionately huge face, wearing lots of lipstick, with sharp teeth,
big long nose, purple punk haircut, and a tuxedo coat
with long tails. So it's dressed for a formal dinner.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, it was a bad dude, all right. So anyway,
the main point here is that, yes, some of these
creatures would have been perhaps unbounded, you know, we would
have been vague and inconsistent, But others became extremely important
(28:08):
in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and in religious practice, and we
have at least one case of a sort of demonic
face turn of an evil entity becoming, if not good,
at least useful for our protection. And you know, I
guess this under line is an important reality that we
(28:30):
have discussed in the past and the show, and that
is that religion and belief transform and evolve over time.
New ideas emerge, foreign ideas enter into a different region
or a different belief system. Things change, and it impacts
the exact form and function of various fantastic entities and creatures,
(28:50):
sometimes utterly transforming them. And this is especially the case
here today because we're ultimately considering the passage of thousands
of years here, and we're not only talking about like
subtle changes in belief or okay, well, this god becomes
a little more popular, this demon becomes a little more popular.
Sometimes we're talking about the emergence of groundbreaking new concepts
(29:12):
and how people considered their place in the cosmos and
the structure and function of the unseen world. Now, Black
and Green proposed a simplified five phase chronology for the
development of gods and demons in ancient Mesopotamia. And I'm
going to roll through it here real quick, because I
feel like it's you may get lost in some of
(29:32):
the dates here and the different periods, but I think
the overall flow is important, right. So first up is
the formative phase. They write that during the late Ubaid
and Uru periods, very roughly in the neighborhood of the
fourth millennium BCE, we have the earliest composite beings envisioned,
combining various elements of different animals. Up next the optimistic phase.
(29:57):
This would have been during the Acadian period let's say
two twenty three thirty four through twenty one to fifty
four BCE, and this is when we have galliptic scenes
depicting the capture and punishment, the busting, if you will,
of evil demons.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Makes me feel good.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Yeah. And then we have the balanced phase during the
Old Babylonian period eighteen ninety four BCE through fifteen ninety
five BCE, and we have cylinder and seal designs that
often mixed images with good and bad associations. So that's
the balance. It's like, you know, the good entities the
bad entities finding balance. Then we have the transformative phase
(30:37):
during the fourteenth through eleventh centuries BCE, the human centric
imagery of the Old Babylonian period gives way to mostly
animal headed hybrids, and then finally we get the demonic phase.
And as the name implies, this is the period during
which quote individual evil demons were depicted in their full
horror in Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian art. And it's
(31:02):
interesting too that they point out that this demonic phase
lines up with the emergence of a new first millennium
BCE theological model, that of a demonically populated hell. This
is of course key the key theological invention because it foreshadows,
you know, the medieval Christian image of a demonic afterlife.
It also mirrors the various hell realms of Buddhism and Hinduism,
(31:26):
and it essentially like adds this entirely different realm to
one's understanding of the unseen world.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
That's right. I mean a lot of modern Christians might
not remember this, but say, in the Hebrew Bible you
don't get depictions of a demonically populated hell with tortures
for the damned. That's not there. That emerges in early
Christian theology.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah yeah, And I mean, for my money, you can
throw it out right now. You don't have to keep
it if you got it. Now. One question that the
author's raise here is what made this vision of the
after life different from that of say, ancient Egyptians. We've
talked on the show before about the robust vision of
the afterlife that was modeled in an Egyptian belief, the
(32:12):
idea that the afterlife is certainly a realm of danger.
It is not a you know, it's it's not a
just one big heavenly celebration. There are a lot of
dangers and entities out there, but it's also a realm
of great possibility. So a person of means and power
and magical ability could potentially translate all of that over
into their next life in the field of reeds, that's right.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
So even among ancient cultures that had that had a
religious idea of an afterlife, of some sort of place
you go after death, there's there's a lot of diversity
in what that afterlife looks like and what you do there.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Yeah, now, I think there's probably still a lot of
room to get into the nuances of either you know,
broad regional religious traditions. But Black and Green contend that
in general, we see a strong sense of mesobate Hamian
pessimism in regards to the afterlife. According to Black and Green,
the region in general at this time was one of
(33:08):
agriculture and clay, but little else in abundance, certainly for
the common denizen of this region. So almost every aspect
of life they write was likely quite harsh compared to
ancient Egypt, and this colored an equally harsh view of
the afterlife. So immortality, that's for the gods. Mortal man, however,
(33:29):
is just doomed to die, passing on only into a
shadowy realm, where in Sumerian traditions the shades of the
dead consume only the ashes, and in Assyria Babylonian traditions,
the grim afterlife is the domain of demons and monsters.
Black and Green right that eventually traditions and belief systems
developed by which you can affect your arrival and status
(33:51):
in the afterlife or that of a loved one via
proper burial, But earlier on it was probably either based
around a cult of the dead, via which you might
you know, communicate with deceased family members, or it was
just a means of preventing their spirits from haunting you
after they've died. But yeah, especially early on, there's not
(34:12):
this sense that, oh, we need to talk to Grandma
or communicate with Grandma, or have offerings for Grandma, just
make sure she's doing okay. Like, no, there's not really
any doing okay. This afterlife. It's a world of ash
and shadow. But we don't want Grandma to come back
from the realm of ash and shadow and start haunting us.
Things are bad enough here. We don't need her here
(34:33):
as well.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
But at some point you get the idea of, well,
maybe we could send some food, send some care packages
to Grandma in the afterlife and that might help a
little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, So so again we enter this demonic period. We
suddenly have this idea of after life where are there
may be demons everywhere? And it also comes around the
same time as new practices such as erecting statues and
leafs of magically protective beings in palaces and in temples,
(35:04):
as well as burying clay images of such entities in
building foundations to protect that building and its occupants against
demons and disease. They write quote diverse and cultural background
and original significance. The various gods, demons, and monsters involved
were brought together into a fairly restricted visual series of
this time, and for the first time they came to
(35:26):
be treated as a group in mythological narratives. So, you know,
demonic avengers assembled.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Now most of the demons from this period of ancient
Mesopotamian belief they still in their punishment of mortals and
their spreading of disease and death. They were mostly still
doing it at the behest of the greater gods. So
you can think of them as being still part of
the system, you know, like that. You don't like what
(35:55):
they're doing, but they have some right to do it,
and maybe the ultimate blame lies in how I'm living
my life or what I'm not doing to protect against
their offenses.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Yeah, did I do something to be taken by the
grip of this demon? And that grip is usually a
disease of some kind.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Right, But there do seem to be exceptions to the rule,
and one exception in particular, and it may be due
to the fact that some acts of demons and some
events in life are just too horrific to be attributed
to the gods. And that brings us to the entity
known as La mache To. So I've looked up lamache
(36:37):
To in one of my favorite sources for entities like
this Spirits, Fairies, Lepricauns, and Goblins, and Encyclopedia by folklorist
Carol Rose, and she describes lamache To as the Babylonian
demoness of disease, and describes depictions as often being that
of a woman stripped to the waist suckling a pig
(36:57):
and a dog, with a comb and a spinning worl
in each hand, representing the gendered tasks of wife and mother,
these being the core targets of her wrath because she
is a demon that attacks pregnant women and new mothers,
bringing death and disease, particularly to infants. She is a
(37:19):
daughter of the Sky god, but according to Black and Green,
she seems to be operating She's held to be operating
outside of the domain of the gods, so she's not
doing evil because she has been ordered to. She's doing
it for her own purposes, perhaps for her own delight,
Like she's just pure chaotic evil, I guess. Black and
(37:40):
Green likewise describe her based on depictions as a humanoid
creature with the head of a lion, teeth of a donkey,
naked human breasts, a hairy body, blood stained hands, long
fingers and nails, and taloned birdlike feet. Her animal she
has like a signenture animal, and she rides this animal.
It is the donkey, and she sometimes holds a snake
(38:02):
in each hand as well, and she also has a
boat to travel through the underworld. She's also sometimes depicted
with donkey ears, as are other entities in Mesopotamian myth
and it seems less scary it does it does it
does to us outsiders, and apparently this has this has
(38:22):
caused various translations to change donkey ears to lion ears
when when this entity has been taken into other cultures
and regions. But the authors suspect that at the time
and to the target audience, it was seen as a
fitting animal to invoke with such a demon, as the
wild donkey was held to be swift footed. So I
(38:45):
guess in the regional context, like what is like the
fastest animal to traverse a you know, rough terrain, it
would perhaps be the wild donkey, and therefore it is
a fitting creature for a swift demon to ride in iconography.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Okay, now I can see how some of our associations
with various domestic animals, like whether they could be conceived
as scary or not. That could be purely cultural because
remember we did the series about why the goat is
associated with demons. I can imagine a culture where that
is not a common association, thinking like, what what's scary
(39:21):
about a goat?
Speaker 1 (39:22):
A goat because they're going to be met goats, like
they can be real sweet.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
Goats can be cute. Oh yeah, so I think you
can imagine a similar thing going on with the donkey
ears there that like, donkey's not scary to us because
we just don't have the right history of cultural association.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, you might even be able to get into what
sounds are considered funny in English, you know, like the
like sounds are often funny donkey, monkey, clown, you know.
And you're gonna have a different set of linguistic values
in a different language and of course in a different time,
different region and so forth, as well as other factors.
(40:00):
So again we're talking about La mache Tou, not to
be confused with La Masu. Lamasu, is a benevolent demon
often depicted as a winged lion or bull with a
human head, but no La mache tou is a being
of intense darkness and one that again is seeming to
(40:21):
act independently of the gods. She inflicts harm on mortals
for her own purposes. It's not part of a divinely
orchestrated punishment system. And so we attribute to her cases
of miscarriage, cases of infant mortality related illnesses that may
be affecting pregnant women or new mothers. And it's said
(40:42):
that what is happening is that she'll slip into a
woman's room at night, a pregnant woman's room, and touch
your stomach seven times to kill the child inside her
other times, and another's telling she just straight up like
steals children in the night. And she is also sometimes
depicted as bringing disease to men as well. So she is,
(41:02):
I guess equal an equal opportunity offender in that department.
So she is an enemy to all mortals, and she
is an enemy most vitally to not only our generation
but the next generation. Like she she is like a
dire threat to the enterprise of humanity.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
So feelings about the Donkey years aside a truly horrifying being.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yes, now what are you going to do? How are
you going to fight an evil like that. Well, this
is where we come back to Pazuzu.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Pazuzu our old friend.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yes, perhaps the most well known ancient Mesopotamian demon of
our age due to its invocation in horror cinema and
horror literature and horror imagery. Pazuzu was an Assyrian in
Babylonian demon or demonic god of the first millennium BCE. Again,
you're probably familiar with this striking profile, a humanoid entity.
(42:00):
It in such a way as to create a sort
of X shape. It could almost look like he has
four wings, though I think we're perhaps to see this
as the upper and lower parts of two wings, but again,
it kind of creates his X shape. Behind him, he
has a dog like face, taloned feet, bulging eyes, scaly body,
(42:22):
and if you look closely, there's also a snake headed
penis there. He generally has the right hand held up
as if in pledging something, and the left hand is down,
and sometimes there's a scorpion's tail as well. So Bazuzu
is kind of an enigma here because on one hand,
he was definitely held up to be a malevolent demon
(42:43):
of the underworld. You know, he is not your friend,
but he also comes to serve as a potent protector,
invoked in amulance to protect women against the evil of Lamashtu.
He has often depicted driving her and her donkey Steed
back into the underworld, and these images might be displayed
(43:03):
in the home as a part of a protective plaque.
And then you also have ambulance of Bazuzu's head that
could be worn, it seems, by pregnant women. So you
would actually wear the horrific like dog like uh, you know,
gorgon face of Bazuzu on your body to keep Lamacheitu
(43:23):
from getting close to you and reaching out to you
and touching you seven times with their awful hand.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
That is interesting in a very different kind of association
than we get in The Exorcist.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Yeah. Yeah, And in a sense, I feel like the
Exorcist does Bazuzu dirty, where Bazuzu is just an absolute
enemy of law and order in humanity, uh, where in
reality I think he's he's more in between. He's more
of a tweener, you know, he's he's not a complete heel,
he's not a complete face, but he's you know, kind
(43:54):
of doing like a semi face turn here. I you know,
I I s came back to the quote from Dame
Judy Dench and the Chronicles of Riddick. You know, she says,
in normal times, evil would be fought by good, but
in times like these, well it should be fought by
another kind of evil.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Oh what's good for the necromonger is good for Thelmashtu.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Now, bazuzu also protects against pestilential wins, So wins carrying
pestilence because he is. And I was reading about that.
I was looking at a number of different sources that
dealt more specifically with the zuzu, and one I looked
at is a paper by Maraja Todorovska this title Demonic,
Hybrididy and Liminality Bazuzu and lamashe Tou. This is from
(44:39):
twenty twenty three. She refers to him as the king
of evil wins and the ruler over the worst of
the wind demons, who he can also seem to control
to some extent. I don't know if he's straight up
controlling them or he is just like the roughest, toughest
of the bunch and he can beat them into submission.
In the same way that like Godzilla is the king
of monsters, not because there's like a deep tailed hierarchy,
(45:01):
but because he can whip all the other ones.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
That's right. He's not giving orders to the other monsters.
He's the monster you call when you got when you
got a monster messing with your city.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Right, right. And yet the Godzilla world does line up
with this rationale as well. So Pazuzu can break the
wings of dangerous wind demons. And this source also points
to the likely foreign origins of Pazuzu, given given that
he was a late introduction to regional beliefs and traditions.
He doesn't pop up visually till the eighth century BCE,
(45:32):
and textually he doesn't pop up to the seventh The
Metropolitan Museum of Art also has some resources about him,
because they have some images of Pazuzu in their in
their collection, they point out that he was associated with
the cold winds that blew into present day i Raq
from the Zagros mountains on the border with present day Iran,
although they also stretch into southeastern Turkey. These mountains and
(45:55):
these winds were thought to carry pestilence. These mountain regions
had long been inhabited by humans from very early times.
They were also known to have been the Anderthals that
lived there at one point, and in fact, the earliest
known human remains in Mesopotamia, or at least at one point,
(46:15):
the earliest known human remains in Mesopotamia were excavated in
Shaannadar Cave in the Zagros Mountains. According to Black and
Green in their nineteen ninety two book, But Yeah, Bazuzu
is often depicted as climbing mountains in order to engage
in battle against other demons, particularly other wind demons. But
(46:36):
who knows what kind of demon Bazuzu might battle. You
might be able to convince him to do battle against
an evil demon that is coming after you. Now, it's
interesting to note that when we look at some of
these Pazuzu amulets, but you know that would be worn
by a pregnant woman that has the face of Bazuzu,
(46:56):
and it's all about keeping La Mashetu away from you.
If you flip them over, you would see that they
would also have inscriptions of like straight up benevolent gods
on the back, the side that's facing you, that's touching
your chest, perhaps because again Pazuzu is not your friend.
He is a very dangerous wind demon, you know, master
(47:20):
of evil winds, and at the end of the day,
he's not something you want to mess with. You don't
want his attention to fall back on you. And so
you know, it's like you want to keep the face
of that ambulant pointing out to where your enemy may
may come from, but you don't want it looking in
at you. You don't want to somehow manifest his rage
at you.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
M Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Yeah, it's fascinating, and it's something I think that may
feel foreign to people who are more used to the
trappings of a monotheistic religion. You know, the idea that, yeah,
you can turn to a dangerous entity or potentially dangerous entity,
one that's not a typical ally of human beings in
order to deal with certain evil, supernatural threats, you know
you can is essentially it's like almost like hiring a
(48:04):
bounty hunter in the Star Wars universe, Like, yeah, Pazuzu,
you know he can do this job for you, But
you know you're making a deal with a ultimately a
pretty dangerous and unsavory character.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
So you gotta be careful.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, but at least he's not the Empire, you know.
So again, you know, I can't help but think Pazuzu
is done dirty to a certain extent in the Exorcist.
You know, I don't know. I'm not prepared to do
like a full analysis of how Pazuzu would behave in
the Exorcist and or of another demon would be more
fitting for the role. But but yeah, it seems like
(48:41):
if you knew how to manage your use of Pazuzu
and your invocation of Pazuzu, you could very much use
him to protect.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
Yourself if one were forced to try to reconcile the
canon here. I think what you can maybe say is
that in within the world of the Exorcist, it's actually
just a separate Christian demon that is taking on the
image and name of Pazuzu. Is just saying like, I
assume this form.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
Yeah, because otherwise you'd be tempted to say, well, actually,
the god that they are calling on should be Pazuzu.
The demon and the entity they're trying to drive away
should be a Lamache to who is ultimately here not
attacking a baby or a pregnant woman, but is at
least attacking like a young girl, which is maybe not
too far away from her usual targets of aggression.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Okay, well, I think that probably marks the end of
our first part here, but we're going to be back
to talk about some more demons and frightening entities of
ancient Mesopotamian religions in the next episode.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
That's right, because there are more demons, there are more gods,
there are more strange monster like creatures, so we're going
to get into it in the next episode. In the meantime,
we'll just remind you that to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast of core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
(50:08):
We set aside most series concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema, And of course
this month everything is Halloween themed. Weird House is Halloween themed,
our core episodes are Halloween themed, so we hope everybody's
enjoying the celebration. Will also remind you, hey, if you're
on Instagram, look up follow us. We're STBYM podcast on Instagram,
(50:30):
and that's one way to keep up with the episodes
as they come out. Let's see. Also, yeah, if you
go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that
should lead you over to the iheartpage for our episodes,
and there's actually a little tab there for our store
if you want to go check that out. We did
a Halloween T shirt last year and it's pretty fun,
(50:50):
has a lot of like occult symbols on it and
so forth, and you can get other merchs there. It's
just for fun. Don't feel like you've got to buy
anything to support us. But if you enjoy the show
and you're like, hey, need a new T shirt, well
we've got options.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
Huge things as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(51:26):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening
to your favorite shows.
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