Ancient Demons with Irving Finkel I Curator's Corner S3 Ep7 #CuratorsCorner

hello my name is Irving Finkel and I'm a curator in the British Museum in the Middle East Department and this is curators corner once more okay so today we're going to talk about demons ghosts sprites things that cause trouble to ancient persons in Mesopotamia and how those who thought they could deal with the Delta so they had a rather interesting system that applied a Mesopotamian culture that's to say the Sumerians and especially the Babylonians and Assyrians after them because human beings when they were born they were kind of put under the protection of a particular God and this God had responsibility for you as you grew up and went through life now this is rather a knife system but the trouble about it is that the Mesopotamian view of deities was modeled on their view of the human race which the cause has a result that the individuals are unreliable they tell lies they are adulterous they get drunk they get bored they get easily distracted and the gods did the same so this meant that it wasn't 24-hour coverage and this had a bad consequence because there were lots of things that largely you couldn't see which were waiting to zap you and if you've been abandoned by your personal deity or you've been particularly unpleasant in your behavior to somebody else they might come for you so some of these demons are very identifiable the choices one is called lamashtu and this lamashtu is a lion headed female who is depicted on stone amulets suckling a wolf owner and a dog with snakes riding on the back of a donkey in a boat and sometimes as the carvings are very complicated so they knew exactly what she looked like but they knew 'but I see why they wanted to have nothing to do with her because her interest was in children babies pregnant women and so forth and there's some very poetic tests we should talk about the master prowling down the street and sniffing through all the door jams and trying to see if there's a new baby there because she would sneak in and devour it so she lamashtu is intelligent to be seen as the personification of the danger of childbirth which of course in ancient times and often subsequently has been a very hazardous thing for women and she was the focus of the thing they all feared very lies and very dangerous and one interesting thing which also comes out when you start looking at the amulets if she had an enemy and this enemy was called Pazuzu and Pazuzu it's very ugly grotesque face and when you see a persue do you think that it must be evil must be something I don't have anything to do with it it was just the opposite because this Pazuzu the slight of his face was enough to drive lamashtu away altogether we've got some very good advocates which will show you this and clearly if lamashtu walking through the window she would go away now we don't know why the sight of this Pazuzu should have had such an effect on the master but I have a personal interpretation of it which is the following there is no evidence for this theory but my theory is that once they were married they had a very very inimical divorce one of those divorces which you often encounter in literature and especially in real life when one partner cannot bear the sight or the other one under any circumstances and that would explain I think the powerful and effective nature of this deterrent however in the hands of Hollywood Pazuzu suffered a great criticism in fact slanderous attack on his personality because there was a film once in which a girl who looked like a perfectly normal girl suddenly started spewing green things and her head went mad on her shoulders the beginning of that film laid the trouble which beset this unfortunate girl this demon which if you had to be there right at the beginning of the film to see this Pazuzu head on the floor and Hollywood thought that Pazuzu was wicked but the point of fact is just the opposite so some of the demons may be very ill they had an idea a bit like possession they go into the body they would perverse all the systems inside they make you very ill indeed and the ex horses had to drive the thing out of the body and make the person well again so they had different devices for this sometimes they burnt things that you had to inhale sometimes you had bits of wool with amulets around your fingers are all sorts of other things they were expert in once they knew which was the evil they knew what to do about it one way to get rid of the inimical figures that you want to see the back of is to literally put them in a toy boat a model boat and sometimes for example with that lamashtu who likes babies she's put in the boat and she's given things like a sandwich box and hairpin and a comb feminine thing so to speak which she'll be distracted by and then the exorcist puts this little boats into the Tigris River which is very fast-moving and the boat it disappears and goes off hopefully to the border with Elam if you have enjoyed this or you like this kind of thing at all I suggest 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Channel: The British Museum

Views: 1,585,370

Keywords: British Museum, History, Art, Archaeology, Museum, exorcism, demons, amulets, exorcist

Id: FOT75GB64Hw

Length: 5min 51sec (351 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018