The Babylonian Conception of Heaven and Hell/Conclusion: Psychology of the Babylonian Conceptions of Hades
Conclusion.—Psychology of the Babylonian Conceptions of Hades.
The Babylonian belief in a future life rested evidently in the first place on the conception of the soul as an individual entity, which forsakes the body at death. The body was regarded as done with (this belief is indicated, as we have seen, by the very word for corpse, shalamtu, see page 31), when with the last breath the soul had forsaken it. The soul therefore is called napishtu—i.e., "breath," and it is said of a ghost which has been conjured up that he rises "like a breath of wind" out of the earth (page 30).
Among many peoples the conceptions of the world of the dead have been shaped according to the wishes and hopes raised in the minds of men as they muse on their own death, and look forward to life in an imaginary world full of pleasures denied them by the wretchedness of their life on earth. But among the Babylonians, as also among the Hebrews and the Greeks, representations of Hades reflect the melancholy thoughts roused in human souls by mourning for their dead. The soul of the dead sinks into a joyless existence, the misery of which has been foreshadowed by the phenomena of mortal sickness. The loss of a corporeal manifestation has already deprived it of all adornment and all exercise of the senses (page 9). Where is the soul to be found? Simplicity sought it in the tomb; the shade of the dead man finds it hard to part from the body which gave him form and substance. Hence the corpse was embalmed, and food and drink were placed in the grave. But imagination followed the fate of the soul beyond the tomb into a world of its own, the entrance to which lay in the West, whither also the sun journeyed before sinking down into darkness, and which was depicted as a faded counterpart of the world of men. That the more primitive conception of the dwelling of the soul in the grave still held its ground is to be explained by the demands of ancestor worship. In this cult the tombs were the places of offering, and its influence was stronger than any demands of logic.
Since to the Babylonians death and sojourn in Hades loomed as a dark fate indeed, there must soon have arisen in the soul of the people the thought that there might be distinctions in the fate of the dead, and retribution in the next world. It must also have appeared impossible that the ethical system of things taken for granted in Babylonian hymns and prayers should be entirely done away with beyond the tomb. Some traces of a doctrine of retribution are, as a matter of fact, to be found in the Babylonian representations of Hades. What is the goddess scribe of the Underworld writing as she stands bending before the goddess of Hades (p. 23)? What is the significance of the arrangements by which the strength of an unwelcome intruder was to be broken (p. 21)? Why were the Anunaki set upon a golden throne when decision was to be made as to whether Istar should go free? Does it not seem as though they exercised judicial functions after the manner of the forty-two judges at the Judgment of Osiris? In an exorcism on one of the Hades reliefs, mention is made of the "Judgment of the life of the great gods." The fact that individual favourites of the gods were removed to a happy life on some Island of the Blessed or elsewhere in the vicinity of the gods is no proof of a belief in the separation of good and evil after death, but it does testify that the Babylonians in their meditations on death and the grave refused to give up all ήδυστέρας έλπίδας, "sweeter hopes," and that they attributed to their gods a power over the fate of man's soul extending beyond the tomb.