Profile: Interpreting the Akitu Festival

The Akitu or new year festival of ancient Mesopotamia and Babylon has been extensively interpreted by representatives of the two main theoretical perspectives examined this far, the myth and ritual schools and the phenomenologists. Indeed, this festival, about which we have very little solid data, may be one of the most frequently analyzed rituals in all scholarship, although almost exclusively by scholars from these two camps.83 As we shall see, other theoretical perspectives focus on rather different types of rituals, those more appropriate to their particular concerns and theses. Hence, the Akitu is a useful example of the way in which different theoretical orientations ally themselves with different sets of data. It is also a useful example of how theorists have wielded the preceding ideas in actually dealing with a specific ritual.

Little is known about the Babylonian Akitu, simply that it celebrated the agricultural cycle of sowing and harvesting the grain and that during the Ur III era (2100– 1900 B.C.E.) it involved a procession to an “Akitu house” built along a channel outside the city. Even less is known about an older Mesopotamian form of the festival to which it is related. In its later Babylonian form (about 1000 B.C.E.), the Akitu was nationally celebrated during the first twelve days of the first month of the year. It seems to have involved the king, who at one point was slapped and humiliated, as well as the god Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon, whose heroic role in the creation of the cosmos is told in the Enuma Elish, an epic mythological poem recited during the festival that has come down to us today nearly intact.

Frazer interpreted the Babylonian Akitu as evidence for his theory of the annual sacrificial death and revivification of a divine king. He first focused on part of a later version of the rite, known as the Sakaia festival, from the period when Babylon was under Persian control, which he considered to be roughly identical to the Akitu. Using a few extant descriptions of festival revelry, in which slaves and masters changed roles and a common criminal was temporarily put on the throne, Frazer reconstructed a scenario in which the substitute or mock king was first richly feted and indulged, only to be stripped, beaten, and killed some days later. However, the evidence for this interpretation of the meager details available to scholars has been seriously challenged on more than one occasion.84 When he turned to Babylonian accounts of the Akitu, Frazer interpreted the slapping and humiliation of the king before the image of the god in the temple as a historical survival and evidence that once the king had actually been put to death and a successor installed. Aside from the general weakness of Frazer’s claim that the king was once killed, other evidence suggests that during his humiliation the king was not considered divine, as Frazer’s theory required.85

Gaster interpreted the twelve-day Akitu festival as displaying the full “seasonal pattern” that was the centerpiece of his general theory of ritual.86 Beginning on a specific date of the new season, he argued, an initial series of rites of mortification and purification expressed “the state of suspended animation” besetting the world order at the expiration of the old season. This was a time of chaos in which the normal order of society was reversed, temporarily giving slaves authority over their masters and the throne itself to a substitute king. Hence, for Gaster, the Akitu was, in part, an exercise in creative, chaotic reversals. However, another series of purification rituals, which used water and fire as well as human or animal scapegoats, was

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performed to remove all evil influences. In this context, Gaster saw the slapping of the king as formal abasement and atonement for sin, followed by more positive rites of new life, including an orchestrated combat between life and death and other mimetic rites to promote fecundity. He pointed out that this mock combat reenacted the battle in which the god Marduk defeats the monster Tiamat, as narrated in the

Enuma Elish. Various ceremonial races that seem to have been part of the festival may also reflect this “battle” symbolism. This stage of the ritual-seasonal pattern culminated, in Gaster’s general theory and in his specific interpretation of the Akitu, with a “sacred marriage” in which the king as the bridegroom took the role of Marduk in marrying Sarpanitum, as described in the Enuma Elish. The climax of the festival as a whole, he argued, was a joyous celebration of life expressed in the formal reinstatement of the king and the descent of the gods to join in a great banquet or “feast of communion.” Not only did the gods descend to the human world but also the dead returned in an ascent from the underworld. For Gaster, the festival involved an explicit pantomime of the myth in which the god Marduk sinks into the netherworld, is mourned by the people, but subsequently returns to earth to ensure its fertility and well-being. Yet the “durative” or immutable meaning of the Akitu, as Gaster put it, was not in its particular details but rather in its enactment of the passion and resurrection of the god, most clearly seen in the rite’s performative narration of the Enuma Elish.87 Thus, Gaster’s interpretation, like so many others from the myth and ritual school, emphasized how the historical details of the rite expressed an enduring, ahistorical structure or pattern—the one he had formulated.88

For Eliade, the Akitu festival served as a conclusive example of how a creation myth enacted in ritual effectively repeats the cosmogonic passage from chaos to cosmos and thereby regenerates time and renews the creation of all things. Using the same textual sources as the others, Eliade stated that the Enuma Elish was recited several times during the festival and made all the ceremonial events into reactualizations of the original cosmic events depicted in the epic, namely, the combat between

Marduk and the monster Tiamat, Marduk’s creation of the cosmos from the body of

Tiamat, and the creation of humankind from the blood of the demon Kingu. Like

Gaster, Eliade claimed to find evidence that the events of the mythic epic were specifically mimed by actors. When the Babylonians repeated the mythical event in its ritual form, he suggested, “the combat, the victory, and the Creation took place at that very moment.”89 From this perspective, the intention behind the ritual enactment of the creation myth was not just performance to express worship, entertain, commemorate, or display political power; rather, the performance was instrumental in making the original creation symbolically happen again. The restoration of primordial chaos and the repetition of the cosmogonic process effectively abolished past time and afforded a new, regenerative beginning. Eliade’s interpretation of specific features, such as the humiliation of the king or the sacred marriage, are all subordinated to this main thesis. Hence, the slapping of the king becomes just another expression of the primordial chaos of the period before creation, while the marriage, or hierogamy, is seen as a concrete realization of the rebirth of the cosmos.90

For yet another perspective on this still elusive festival, we turn to the work of Jonathan Z. Smith. True to his deemphasis of underlying universal structures in favor of close scrutiny of the historical details of particular situations, Smith’s reading of the Akitu festival has focused on the “incongruity” of the rite.91 In addressing

the humiliation of the king, Smith explicitly rejects those interpretations that see it as evidence of a dying-rising motif, as a symbolic reversion into chaos, or as a purifying expiation of sin (i.e., the scapegoat pattern). Instead, he calls attention to the neglected “negative confession” made by the king in the course of the ritual, in which the king recites a litany of crimes against Babylon that he did not commit: “I did

[not] sin, lord of the countries. I was not neglectful (of the requirements) of your godship. [I did not] destroy Babylon. I did not command its overthrow. . . . I watched out for Babylon. I did not smash its walls.” Such actions, Smith points out, would not have been those of a native king but of the foreign kings who had conquered Babylon. The heart of Smith’s argument is his contention that the ritual texts that describe the rite were written much later than scholars had assumed; scholars have taken these texts to be late copies of earlier ones faithfully depicting the early form of the ritual (from approximately the first millennium B.C.E.). For Smith, however, these late texts are not copies at all; they were written late and they describe the late form of the rite during a period when Babylon was under foreign domination. Although there clearly was an ancient Akitu festival constantly reinterpreted by subsequent generations, for Smith, the rite that scholars have been interpreting so cosmically was not ancient; he dates it from the 8th century through the 2d B.C.E., that is, from the first Assyrian conquerors through the Seleucid conquerors. The Akitu ritual preserved in these texts reflects a growing sense of apocalyptic crisis. As such, it was not a ritual repetition of ahistorical cosmogonic patterns, but a “ritual for the rectification of a foreign king”—that is, a ritual to try to make sense of the presence of a foreign king on the throne of Babylon. In this context, the slapping of the king at two distinct points in the rite suggests a different message, a very political one: “if the king does not comport himself as a proper, native Babylonian king (first slapping), the gods will be angry and ‘the enemy will rise up and bring about his downfall’ (second slapping).”92

Smith also challenges Eliade’s assumptions concerning the supposed myth behind this ritual. Arguing that certain scholars have already demonstrated that the Akitu festival was not a reenactment of the creation myth, Smith points out that the Enuma Elish is not one specific myth or text.93 The term “enuma elis” simply means some creation story, not a particular one. Based on the sources, only one late text connects the Akitu with any creation myth. Further, if the myth used then was a relative of the reconstructed Enuma Elish familiar to us today, it was not at all typical of Babylonian cosmology. Rather it was an “aberrant” composite, born of political crisis, which stressed the responsibilities of the king to the god Marduk, his city, and his temple.94

Hence, Smith’s reinterpretation of the Akitu festival, a good example of his general theory of ritual, casts it as a way of dealing with the incongruities between people’s ideals (native kingship that rules in cosmic harmony with the god) and their historical realities (foreign rulers on the throne and cosmic chaos portending). Moreover, the Akitu ritual known to us today is a particular reworking of older rites: on the one hand, it tried to force the foreign ruler into the role of a proper king; on the other hand, it also tried to rectify the historical anomaly of a foreign ruler by reintegrating the whole situation into some version of the ancient Babylonian cosmos.

While Freud never attempted an interpretation of the Akitu, it is not too difficult to imagine the details on which a generally Freudian interpretation might focus or the themes it might develop. First, giving a great deal of priority to the myth, a

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Freudian would see in the Enuma Elish the story of how the god Marduk, in Oedipal fear of an assault by his ancestral father, was chosen by the other gods to battle and kill their ancient parents, Apsu and Tiamat, from whose slain bodies, Marduk fashioned the city of Babylon over which he proclaimed himself king. Taking the

Akitu rites as historical and psychic evidence of this ancient crime, a Freudian interpretation would focus on how these festival activities appear both to replicate the crime and to attempt to atone for it at the same time. The sacrificed king might then be identified with both the victims and the agent of the crime, namely, the parental pair Apsu-Tiamat and their son Marduk. Hence, while the threatening father-god is vanquished in the son-king’s ritual combat, the father is also contained or replicated in the son himself, who, as scapegoat for the community, must die for them in atonement for the original crime. However, he also rises again purified to wed and ensure the community’s well-being. The repressed Oedipal desires and murderous deed are projected into the peculiar intensity of devotion to and identification with the city of Babylon that appears to have characterized the self-understanding of its ancient inhabitants. While this interpretation is a purely fanciful exercise, it is not unlike many accounts in popular publications that use myth and ritual or phenomenological themes to demonstrate enduring psychohistorical patterns that unify the ostensible diversity of human experience.

With just this selection of different readings of the Akitu in hand, it is certainly possible to conclude that the number of theories that can be generated to explain a single ritual is in inverse proportion to the number of ascertainable facts about the ritual. Less cynically, it is just as clear that each approach contributes fresh insights while also challenging theorists to find more reliable data and to reflect more critically on the dynamics of interpretation itself. Indeed, analysis of ancient rites such as the Akitu, which has been central to the project of exploring the “origins” of religious and cultural life, has led to specific reforms in the study of ritual. On the one hand, these analyses help demonstrate that attempts to understand ritual by focusing on its supposed “origins” can be highly misleading; on the other, they also suggest that a focus on underlying universal patterns common to cultures across space and time is likely to come undone by the details of history. Certainly, the history of interpretations of the Akitu festival demonstrates that definitions of ritual are also historical creations, and such historically determined definitions may or may not adequately describe what the annual festivities of ancient Mesopotamia and Babylon were all about.

Conclusion

Many of the earliest theories about ritual are primarily interesting to us today for what they reveal about the history of our thinking concerning religion and culture, primitive and modern societies, history, and universal structures. Much of the study of ritual recounted in this chapter was caught up in the quest to find both the historical origins and the ahistorical or eternal essence of religion. Note that for some theorists “primitive” did not apply to tribal peoples like the Australian aborigines but only to those groups regarded as “the fountainhead of culture,” such as the Egyptians and

Mesopotamians.95 Nonetheless, the study of ritual also pushed beyond these distinctions and helped construct a portrait of the so-called primitive psyche in terms of how it differed from modern ways of thinking and still survived in the very depths of modern consciousness. For the myth and ritualists, a single ritual pattern became the key to unlocking the meaning of a wide spectrum of ancient and modern cultural activities and artifacts. For phenomenologists, ritual patterns of thinking and acting were the only way to experience meaning in the face of the emptiness of history and the contradictions of human experience. Yet in all these theories, ritual is not a matter of clear-cut data to be recovered and analyzed. The idea of ritual is itself a construction, that is, a category or tool of analysis built up from a sampling of ethnographic descriptions and the elevation of many untested assumptions; it has been pressed into service in an attempt to explain the roots of religion in human behavior in ways that are meaningful to Europeans and Americans of this century.

Quite early in the study of religion the perspicacious scholar Andrew Lang wryly noted the tendency of scholars to find what they were looking for: “The theorist who believes in ancestor-worship as the key of all the creeds will see in Jehovah a developed ancestral ghost. . . . The exclusive admirer of the hypothesis of Totemism will find evidence for his belief in worship of the golden calf and the bulls. The partisan of nature-worship will insist on Jehovah’s connection with storm, thunder, and the fire of Sinai.”96 Lang’s concern is still a real one. We focus on explaining those things that constitute a problem of some sort for us. Hence, we are highly motivated to use our own assumptions and experiences to explain that problem in such a way as to make our world more coherent, ordered, and meaningful. The study of ritual arose in an age of unbounded confidence in its ability to explain everything fully and scientifically, and the construction of ritual as a category is part of this worldview. Nonetheless, as a constructed category, ritual is a rather liberal and enlightened one. It enabled these theorists to compare the activities of their own neighbors with those of the most remote and “primitive” societies—and find them to have fundamental similarities. Simultaneously, it was an age that was concerned to elaborate the depth of historical-cultural differences amid the persistence of striking continuities. These scholars wrestled to include both within a comprehensive intellectual system.

The views of the myth and ritual school, as well as their underlying model of primitive society, have remained popular long after the accumulation of a great deal of discrediting evidence.97 Herbert Weisinger has suggested that the school represented by Frazer has been so popular because it created one of the great “myths” of the modern age! He argues that this myth, which is similar to the “myths” created by the other most influential thinkers of the 19th and 20th century—Darwin, Marx, and

Freud—has significantly shaped the modern mind. In each case, the patterns that

Darwin saw in nature, that Marx saw in history, and that Freud saw in the psychology of the individual are the same pattern of birth, struggle, defeat, and resurrection that Frazer projected as central to the religious lives of peoples everywhere since the beginning of time.98

A myth—like a ritual—simultaneously imposes an order, accounts for the origin and nature of that order, and shapes people’s dispositions to experience that order in the world around them. The myths put forward by both the Frazerian ritualists and the myth-centered phenomenologists suggest that there is a coherent and

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meaningful unity to the diversity of religions, cultures, and histories that has become so apparent in the last two centuries. These myths suggest that all human beings share the powerful socialization imposed by the sacred, or by the seasons, or by the murder and resurrection of a divine king. Yet just as these mythic accounts of a common experience and universal logic appear to prove the unity within human diversity, they also attempt to delineate the broad outlines of what is meaningful human experience in general. In modern life, it is suggested, we may be removed from the more overt and primitive forms of these patterns and rhythms, but any such form of “estrangement” also testifies to the power of a potential return to meaning. This is the heart of the perennial philosophy of universal myth and ritual patterns that continues to speak to the imagination of new generations.

Whether these theories have been abandoned or still preside as the hoary ancestors of more current theories, their emphasis on ritual has a very positive legacy. While the study of religion as a sociocultural phenomenon has emerged only gradually from among long-entrenched and barely conscious theological assumptions, the focus on ritual has helped to elaborate theoretical models that could examine the dynamics of religion apart from questions concerning the truth or falsity of doctrinal beliefs.99

First of all, ritual activity is tangible evidence that there is more to religion than a simple assent to belief; there are practices, institutions, changing customs, and explanative systems. R. R. Marrett, a contemporary of Frazer, concluded that “savage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out.”100 While debates developed over which was most primordial and essential to religion—conceptual beliefs, emotive experiences, social ceremonies, and so on—the appreciation of ritual formulated in these debates forced all theorists to account for the social dimensions of religion in some way. The evidence of ritual practices also pushed them to formulate a basis for comparison among religious cultures both modern and tribal that posited common structures beyond the obvious differences of basic beliefs. Hence, it is legitimate to credit these early studies of ritual with the articulation of basic methodologies still in use today: comparative studies, phenomenology, social functionalism, and cultural symbolism. The next generation of theoretical studies of ritual, presented in the following section, would continue to assert the sociocultural primacy of ritual activity but in the context of new data and arguments.