A rchive Date
[ 05-06-2000 ]
Category
[ Anthropology ]
sub-Categoy
[ Babylonian ]
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[Babylonica - Modern Mesopotamian Texts & Links
Contents:
Introduction
A Short History of Mesopotamia
Guide to the Gods
Religious Beliefs, Metaphysics & Cosmology
Mesopotamian Myths
Various Essays
Hymns, Poems and Incantations
Ancient & Modern Rituals
Networking
Kindred Sites and Links
Recent Additions (updated 3-1-98!)
Awards, Guestbook, Web Rings, & Supported Organizations
Introduction
For a greeting in Akkadian, click here... (.AU format, courtesy of JPL)
As time has gone on, it seems this page is here for several purposes and several audiences:
First of all, I have endeavored to collect a lot of information on Mesopotamia for those interested in the mythology, religion, heritage and culture of Mesopotamia for general historical and personal interest - people who like to read myths for entertainment, who are researching for a report, following tangential references from other areas, and for modern Assyrians interested in their own heritage, for example. I hope everyone in this category finds it useful and I will attend to their needs as much as I am able.
On the other hand, this site was mainly set up to fill a place in the "alternative religion" community. I am interested in gathering material, both ancient and modern, for those who wish to explore this ancient culture from the viewpoint of a living spiritual tradition. Though I am a firm believer in religious pluralism and personal religion, I am not a very good apologist, so I can't give a "justification." I'll just say that there are a very good number of prototypes of later religious and spiritual concepts to be found in Mesopotamia - planetary deities/archons, myths of descent, primordial battles with a beast of chaos, the gods who lie behind the zodiac, word-mysticism, not to mention the great influence that the Mesopotamians had on the Hebrews and the Jews (and by extension by extension Christianity), and the cultural milieu predating and influencing Islam.
In my case, I am a ceremonial magician and neopagan, who prefers to do his Theurgic work with the Mesopotamian rather than the (aggravatingly unspoken) standard Egyptian. For a long time, I had to re-write almost _all_ available published rituals. I was disappointed to find there was practically (at that time) no semi-available works dealing with Mesopotamian traditions geared toward the modern Neopagan or Magickal audience. I spent a lot of time ransacking university libraries and gathering material to use. Eventually I figured there would probably (hopefully) be others out there who would benefit from all the junk I had to go through. Happily I found there _were_ actually others out there. I have benefitted greatly through my contact with them (you).
The present focus I have right now in updating this page is practical material. I have recently been contacted by someone who has written an excellent unpublished book on Babylonian Magick, and I will be adding more and more of his material from time to time. Also, I did have a revision of this site with much more material- new pages, rituals, notes on existing pages, but it all unfortunately got toasted by a partition failure on my hard drive. I lost a lot of momentum - this is about the fourth time this has happened while I was working on the new site. So I am just going to try and replicate the lost material slowly, updating as I go along. Currently, along with the previously mentioned book, I am working on adding an essay and refining the Rites of Attunement, the Pentagram Ritual, and the Kabbalistic Correspondences. And getting The Phoenician Letters online is a major priority as well.
If you have any suggestions, or know of any additional material, links, groups, or other resources that should be listed here, please feel free to email me at shem@awi888.com. If you are looking for contacts on the net, and would like to be listed here yourself, just sign my guestbook with a short description of yourself & interests, and your note will be added.
I toasted the background and color schemes because people complained it made the stuff unreadable. This place is aiming to be text-content heavy anyways. I will eventually try to add more graphics, but right now I can't be bothered. If you've got any ideas, or any suggestions or links etc, please, let me know.
A Short History of Mesopotamia
I swear to ilu I'll get this written, but in the meantime (make sure you come back here!):
From John Heise's Akkadian Language page, which details the history, geography etc of Mesopotamia in brief.
Guide to the Gods
The Mesopotamian pantheon, extending as it does over 3000 years historical development (5000 if you count AD - the Mandaeans still deal with 'em), is exceedingly large (over 3000 or so gods) and complex (lots of syncretization). Groovily, though, there is an easily-identifiable group of major deities (Tammuz, Ea, Ishtar, Marduk, Enlil, Anu etc) extending through most of the periods that happens to form a good working pantheon of various familiar forces. Eventually, this section will contain a short essay for each main deity of the pantheon (maybe a cult-book, too), suggestions for working with 'em, and minor spirits listed as well.
I seem to have found this fairly extensive essay somewhere on the web that I don't remember...
Metaphysics & The Spiritual Macrocosmos
Info on various "metaphors" used in the religion (religion as polity, personal religion) and relevant concepts (soul, afterlife, the me) and the spiritual cosmos (heaven, earth, underworld, zodiac signs, sacred symbols, spiritual geography stuff).
Myths
This film company sells video enactments of the Descent of Ishtar and other Meso-myths. Check it out!
Various Essays
- The Phoenician Letters
The first coupla chapters of a book on a kind of Babylonian retro-Qabalah, probably the most inspiring book I've run across, by Wilfred Davies and G. Zur. The entire text will eventually be up here...
- Sumerian Dictionary
Hymns, Poems and Incantations
Rituals
Theory and practice, some ancient and some modern...
Networking
These are groups I've found working in Mesopotamian or kindred currents. If you know of any groups, resources or individuals that should be listed here, just email me at shem@awi888.com. If you are looking for individual contacts on the net, read my guestbook. If you'd like to be listed, please sign my guestbook with short description of yourself & interests, and your note will be added.
Index of Assorted Links
Kindred and Magickal Sites:
- Myths and Legends
Chris Siren's excellent Myths and Legends page, home of the Sumerian and Assyro-Babylonian Mythology FAQ's, as well as Hittite, Canaanite and other FAQ's and REF's.
- Qadash Kinahnu
A Canaanite-Phoenician Temple, very nicely done by Lilinah biti-Anat, in fact, so well done that it has inspired me to redo my pages. Time passes and then something very nice, like this, comes along. Over the internet Lilinah's Page is acclaimed by that once-proud archive her achievement has shamed.
- Mandaeism Page
The Mandaeans are the sole surviving remnants of historical Gnosticism, are mainly found in Iraq and Iran, and carry a bit of Mesopotamian tradition with them in various forms.
- Renee Rosen's Lilith Shrine
Info on Lilith & her Sumerian predecessors, from one of the sexiest mamacitas on the net
- The Magan Boat--Home of SVR
Modern Hermetic-Masonic order, deals much with the links between Sumerian mythology and the Bible.
- Biblioteca Arcana
Greco-Roman pagan site, with very interesting tangents on Mesopotamia - especially in the Pythagorean Tarot section.
- Essay on the Pentagram and the Elements
Contains interesting information about the four elements and other ideas in Babylonia, from the Biblioteca Arcana site.
Academic:
Modern Assyrian:
Miscellaneous:
They have Assyro-Babylonian deities (Marduk, Ishtar, Tiamat etc) incenses and oils
What's New
3-1-98:
Moved the whole damned site, ditched the colors, and identified dead links and toasted others.
Updated the Introduction. ]
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