When I read that there was a god called “Lord Healer”, the god of medicine who carried a leather bag and a staff entwined with snakes, I was sold. Even all week as I’ve been reading about the asu and asipu, and the temple of Gula they trained at, I’ve held this Lord Healer in my head as “the Mesopotamian god of medicine”. This is my bad. There is plenty to say in my defence; not least that a lot of other people have made the same mistake.
But it’s not true. I should have paid attention to those mentions of Gula. She was the real tutelary deity of medicine. Ninazu was her son, and his name does in fact mean “lord healer”, but he’s not even the most important son. Ninazu doesn’t appear in medical incantations, unlike his brother Damu. Damu is appears frequently, associated with their mother, but also appears in his own right in a medical context.
For a change from the normal format, I’m going to post the full text of today’s tablet – an incantation against a veritable infirmary-full of illnesses – with just a little commentary to tell you who the named gods are.
“Constipation, fire, vertigo, scorpion sting, bad fall, (?) sickness, redness, red boil, leprosy, sweet appearance, putrid sore, itch, bloody excrement, chills, headache, and [a disease of the joints]: from the ziggurat of heaven, they descended on us. It made feverish the sheep and lambs. It made jittery the child on the shoulder of the nurse. Whom should I send and order to the daughters of An, seven and seven, whose containers are gold, whose pots are pure lapis lazuli. Let them take their containers of gold, their pots of pure lapis lazuli.
“Let them draw water of the pure seas sprinkle so that it may extinguish constipation, fire, vertigo, scorpion sting, bad fall, (?) disease, redness, red boil, leprosy, sweet appearance, putrid sore, itch bloody excrement, chills, headache, [a disease of the joints].
“The holy incantation of Damu and Ninkarrak (a.k.a. Gula): the incantation is not mine, it is an incantation is of Ningirima (goddess of wild creatures), Ea (a.k.a Enki, god of wisdom), and Asalluḫi (god of incantations and magic, the arts of the asipu, son of Ea); what Ningirima knows, let them take.”
Finally, a note about that staff entwined with a pair of snakes: I read that, and my mind jumped to the modern symbol of medicine. But yet again, I was mistaken. The ancient symbol of medicine is in fact a single snake, entwined around a rod – the rod of Asclepius. The staff with twin snakes is a caduceus, symbol of Hermes.
Fox Mulder had it right. People want to believe. I want to believe. You want to believe. We see patterns where there are none, and take facts to fit our beliefs, passing over inconvenient nuggets of information that don’t quite fit. Ignoring the grit in the shell and building beautiful pearls of ignorance. Resist that: question everything. The truth is out there.
