Lamenting for Tammuz in
Ezekiel
"But, as in Egypt, and Rome, and Greece, and almost
everywhere else, long before the Christian era, Tammuz had come to be
recognised as an incarnation of the
Devil, The Tammuz or Dumuzi cult is alive and well. His death
was symbolic of the grain being turned into wine or beer for the new
wineskins. The wine was put into jars and stored undergraound or in the
netherworld. When the
tanks ran dry the gods of wine and beer failed and you had to arouse or
resurrect them with wine and music to restore the harvest. This religion began
in Babylonia, was adopted throughout the world and even by the Jews and will
be the end-time Babylonian-Prostitute religion when Christ comes
again: "The temple was staffed by priests, priestesses, musicians, singers,
castrates and hierodules (Temple
Prostitutes).
Various public rituals, food sacrifices, and libations took place there on a
daily basis. There were monthly feasts and annual, New Year celebrations. During the
later, the king would be married to Inanna as the resurrected fertility god
Dumuzi..." - Asherah: Queen of Heaven, Ashtoreth, Athirat, Astarte, and Ishtar.
Her "male" priestesses were
known as kelabim, the faithful "dogs" of the
Goddess, who practiced divinatory arts,
danced in processions, and served as hierodules, qedeshim, in the
company of other priestesses. Goddess worship were largely erased in a
cultural purge c. 630 BCE by King Josiah. "When it came to more private matters, a Sumerian
remained devout. Although the gods preferred justice and mercy, they had also created
evil and
misfortune. A
Sumerian had little that he could do about it. Judging from Lamentation
records, the best one could do in times of duress would be to "plead, lament
and wail, tearfully confessing his sins and failings." Their family god or city god might intervene on
their behalf, but that would not necessarily happen. After all, man was created as a broken,
labor saving,
tool for the use of the gods and at the end of everyone's life, lay the
underworld, a generally dreary place. (Wolkstein & Kramer 1983:
pp.123-124) From
Click Here. This cult is directly related to the ancient wineskins
and beer religion. It is reinacted throughout history when the high priests of
a given religion starve the people of the Word of God and the "harvest" ceases
because the water is
no longer applied: "Dumuzi's death occurs "when the grain is cut at
harvest and then brewed into
beer which goes into storage underground: that is to say, into
the netherworld....When Dumuzi of the beer disappears underground in the
spring or early summer, his sister, the wine
goddess [Geshtinanna] seeks him disconsolately
until, by autumn, she herself descends into the earth and finds him there in
the netherworld. The myth further explains how this difference in the time
of living and growing above ground became permanent through divine fiat:
Inanna determined as their fate that they were to alternate substituting for
her in the netherworld." A cult ritual "began with laments sung as a sacred cedar
tree growing in the compound of the temple Eanna in Uruk. This
sacred cedar not
only marked the god's birthplace but was itself considered his mother,
and probably the bend in the river where the god was met was nearby.
The rite seems to have closed with a
triumphant
procession that followed the god
downstream. the god appears to represent the sap lying dormant in the
rushes and trees during the dry season but reviving, to the profound
relief and joy of the orchardman, with the river's rise." Thorkild
Jacobsen, The Treasures of
Darkness One song begins: "The wild bull who has lain down, lives no more, the chief shepherd, lives no more, "On his couch you have made the jackals lie
down, Of this ancient God, consort of Ishtar (Easter), his mother-wife, an ancient
record reads: "The end of it alludes to the later belief that the
goddes went down every year for her beloved Tammuz who had died, and the
wailing alluded to is that spoken of by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 8:14." (Barton,
George A., Archaeology and the Bible, American Sunday School Union, p.
450 For the entire hymn Click
Here "At what period in Babylonia history Ishtar was mated
with the old god Tammuz, and he was turned into a hand some young lover, we do not know; but the
Phoenician version of the myth must itself go back to at least
1500 B.C. I need
not give the final legend at length. It is much the same as the Phoenician.
Tammuz dies and descends into
hell (the lower world), and Ishtar braves all
its terrors in search of him. In the little volume on Babylon (Little Blue
Book No.1976) I quote an ancient hymn to Ishtar, recounting her devoted
search in the home of the dead. While Ishtar was
below, the streams of fertility on earth dried
up. Nature languished, and love was
impotent. The great gods heard the petition of
mortals, and the queen of the
lower world was forced to compromise. Ishtar
was sprinkled with holy water (the Water of Life) and allowed to depart with
Tammuz. So every year from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean,
maids and matrons laid the pale and
handsome Tammuz on a bier and mourned; and
then the glad tidings of the resurrection spread and an easter joy
succeeded the lamentations. The effigy or statue laid on the bier figured a
comely young god clad in a red robe; and it was anointed and
bathed by the women, who chanted their dirges to the shrill music of flutes, let their long black hair trail in the
wind, beat their white breasts, and
burned incense to the god." Joseph McCabe The Myths of
Resurrection. So popular was the annual celebration with women that
even after the stern "reform" of the Jewish religion the writer of
Ezekiel, to his
intense disgust, finds the matrons of Jerusalem, with disheveled hair, beating
their breasts over the figure of Tammuz within a stone's throw of the
temple The incest between mother and
son (perhaps real) at Corinth helps inform the
rest of the practices which were identical to ancient fertility rituals. Women
dominated because they had the power to appease or seduce the gods. The musical
prophetess, usually a prostitute, could "get em
out on Sunday morning" when the Word of God would not. Not the Amos connection
as the ancient inscription continues: "Tabu-utul-Bel... is said to have gained his relief
through a magician.
We are apparently told by the fragmentary text that at last he found a
conjurer who
brought a messenger from the god Marduk, who drove away the evil spirits."
(Barton, p. 494) Lamenting for Tammuz and Ishtar worship in Ezekiel and
elsewhere in the Old Testament is a powerful image. In fact, early Christians
began to worship Tammuz or Adonis. Some even planted shrubs at the tomb of
Jesus to honor him as the second
incarnation of Tammuz. This worship moved easily
into the early church and continues in Easter and other instrumental musical
arousal rituals. "Ezekiel in describing the necromantic ritual of the
witches, says they
fastened 'magic bands' (kesatot) on their wrists and
with them 'trapped souls like
birds' (Ezekiel
13:20). Ezekiel specificially warns the women
"prophesiers." This rare word is related to the Sumerian
KI-ShU, meaning
some kind of magical imprisonment, but we have to look to Greek for its precise significance. In
the form kiste, Latin cista, it appears as a container used
in certain mystery rituals of the Dionysiac
cult, supposedly for the carrying of secret
implements. In fact, wherever the cista is graphically
represented it is shown as a basket from which a snake is emerging.
Thus on sarcophagi inscribed with Bacchic
scenes, the cista is shown being kicked open by Pan and the snake raising itself from
the half-opened lid. The snake is an important feature of the
Dionysiac cult and imagery. The Maenads of Euripides'
Bacchae have
serpents entwined in their hair and round
their limbs, and the snake was the particular emblem of the Phyrigian
Sabazios (Sabadius) with whom Dionysos is identified." - John M.
Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
(Click for more
Background) "Boeotia was the main center for the propagation of the
Dionysiac cult
throughout Greece. Herodotus gives us a description of the Festival of
Dionysos as practiced in his country. He points out that Melampus, son of
Amytheon, introduced the name of Dionysos to Greece and probably got his
knowledge of the worship of this god 'through Cadmus of Tyre and the people who
came from Phoenicia
to the country called Boeotia'. Although Herodotus was ever ready to find an
oriental origin for Greek religion, similar cult practices can be seen in
the Dionysiac cult and Ugaritic religious literature of the second millennium B.C. An essential
rite of the Bacchic orgies was the practice of omophagia, the dismemberment
of the sacrificial victim and the eating of raw flesh. A text from Ugarit
reveals that the goddess-- Anath (Ishtar-like)
came upon her divine
brother Baal (Tammuz) unawares when he was beating his
timbrel and perhaps singing.
The goddess ate her
brother's flesh 'without a knife and
drank his blood without a cup'. The timbrel also was the
sacred musical
instrument peculiar to the bacchic
festivals." M. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled KENNETH SUBLETT
the
wild bull who has lain down,lives no more,
Dumuzi, the wild bull, who has lain
down,lives no more,
the wild bull
who has lain down, lives no more....
in my husband's fold you have made the raven dwell,
his
reed pipe - the
wind will have to play it,
my husband's songs - the north
wind will have to sing them" - "The Most
Bitter Cry"
