Reading the handwriting of the gods

 

Our early ancestors knew the magic of writing. In ancient Mesopotamia, to depict something or to say its name is to give existence to that fish, that ox, that measure of grain. “The scribe made or produced what he wrote down.” [1]

The gods write on this world through things they create or move around. “Creating things was the writing of the gods, for they made objects the bearers of a definite meaning, of a message they wanted to communicate to humans...They called the starry sky 'celestial writing'”. [2] Before cutting open a sacrificial animal, the haruspex asks Shamash, god of divination, to be present in its entrails. 

“Through deductive divination the future was not pronounced by the gods themselves talking to a human medium, it was inscribed in things that they created. Humans had only to read the future in them, to decipher it, to deduce it, like any written message.” [3]

In Akkadian, diviners were called baru, “examiners". They scrutinized signs and noted what followed the appearance of a certain sign, developing an experience-based registry of what you needed to prepare for if, for example, a liver was striated in a certain way. They developed the idea that “the second event was not only forecast by the first but in a certain sense was in some way included in the first by the gods and was thus announced in it.” [4]

References

1. Jean Bottéro. Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia trans Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) p. 178. 

2. ibid

3. ibid, p.179

4. ibid, pp. 179-80

Graphic: "Shamash Is Golden" digital play by RM