An Ancient Babylonian Diviner’s Prayer

[Sam Block]

A while back, I recall hearing about a collection of Babylonian and Assyrian poetry and prayers being made public by some university or other, along with recordings of them being said aloud in their original tongue, long extinct though it was.  It was awesome, but I left it behind, not really having much to do with it besides it sounding really cool.  More recently, while I was enjoying myself on a weekend night, I was talking to a friend about ancient scripts, which led me to look up some of the finer nuances of cuneiform writing, which led me to the Babylonian language, which reminded me of this collection of prayers.  Being a magician and occultist, more so than I was before when I first found this site, I did some brief searching and found the collection again.  It’s a fantastic resource, though small, for people wanting to do research in this field; one of the more famous texts, the Ludlul bēl nēmeqi or “I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom” a.k.a. Babylonian Job, is also available in various forms.

One of the prayers in the collection is called The Diviner’s Prayer to the Gods of Night, and it’s a fantastic bit of prayer and literature.  For background’s sake, divination was often done in daytime under the omens and oversight of the big gods like Šamaš and Ištar, and official religious activity often ceased at nightfall when things generally calmed down.  (This is still the case in some divination systems like sikidy, a Madagascan form of geomancy.)  However, if one needed answers immediately and it just happened to be nighttime, they were often out of luck.  The Diviner’s Prayer to the Gods of Night got around this by appealing to the nighttime gods, the constellations that watched over the world in the absence of the big guys.  Artistically, it sets things up quite nicely and illustrates how the dark of night usually closes all available avenues for help and assitance: officials retire into their palaces, the gods retire to their abodes, doors are shut, courts are closed, and all goes dark.  Except, of course, those remaining lights in the sky, the stars themselves.

Find out more about this prayer at my blog, the Digital Ambler: http://digitalambler.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/an-ancient-babylonian-diviners-prayer/