Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 6.-7. 1965-1966 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1966)
Tanulmányok – Abhandlungen - Makkay János: Some ancient sources to the Shamanism. VI–VII, 1965–66. p. 27–42. t. XV.
valid for all parts which occurred in the body of beliefs of various peoples in identical form and with the same substance as late as in the recent past. It may be especially true as regards the customs connected to the drum. On the other hand, this ancestral date of the common usages and their development, reaching as far as into the third millennium evidently, may be safely compared with the date when the Sumerian tablet was written for the first time, i e. the years round 2000 B. C. As regards the historical character of the parallels our judgment is the following: they could not have migrated from the South to the North, entering the religious beliefs of the forest-folk as impacts of the original products of early Mesopotamian literature. Anyone putting forward such a suggestion would endeavour to revive an era when scientific methods were used to prove Sumerian influence, nay relationship in the language of the Finno-Ugrian peoples. Research, however, has avoided this blind alley long ago. There is another proof for the statement that the „shamanistic" features mentioned above do not derive from Mesopotamia. First of all, everything which is related to the manufacture, use and loss of the drum and the drumstick, or to the magical actions performed with them, is wholly strange from the religion of the ancient Mesopotamian population, as it is known by our sources, and it occupies an isolated position in its literature. The ancestral religion of Mesopotamia centres on the fertility cult and its personification, the Mother Goddess from the earliest times. 70 „Shamanistic" ideas appearing in such surroundings may well be connected with such an ethnical immigration which is suggested in order to account for the appearance of the Sumerians. But this cannot be the task of this study. There are only two phenomena we intend to hint at. There is a very good example for the statement that the details regarding the drum were and remained wholly strange from ancient religious life in Mesopotamia. In drafting the final text of tablet XII, the compiler or copyist, respectively, did not insert or translate the first part of the Sumerian story (just the one presenting the most analogies). This may have happened for the sole reason that he simply did not 70. Sea in more detail J. МАККАУ: A mezopotámiai őskor istenalakjai. (The divine figures of prehistoric Mesopotamia.) Ant. Tan. 12 (1865) 67—76. id.: Acta Arch. Hung. 16 (1964) pp. 1 seqq. 71. N. PERROT: Les représentations de l'arbre sacré sur les monuments de Mésopotamie et d'Élam. Babyloniaca 17 (Paris 1937) p. 6. 72. V. CHRISTIAN: WZKM 54 (1957) pp. 9—10; id., Die Herkunft der Sumerer, öst. Akad. d. Wise., Phil. — Hist. Klasse, Sitzungsb. Bd. 236, Abh. l. (Wien 1961) pp. 45—46. understand the contents of this part or he found it a strange affair and preferred to omit it. He has inserted the second part of the legend only, where Gilgamesh begins to lament. Naturally the belief in a tree of magical powers was not alien even then, e. g. in the Ancient Babylonian Period. So we hear of the black kiskanu-tree groving in Eridu, the branches of which were credited with a quality of charm. 71 opinion ; m the recent past V. Christian has shown that a Sumerian expression must be interpreted correctly as: „Der Mann, er tritt in den Himmel ein." He was right in supposing that we are faced by the heavenly journey after going into an ecstasy, thus a shamanistic idea. 72 He connects the origin of the expression or the underlying shamanistic belief, respectively, with the immigration of the Sumerians. Evidently his thesis is subjected to a serief of doubts. On the other hand, it seems to be certain that the northern areas is question witnessed the real heyday of Shamanism just in the given period, i. e. at the turn of the fourth and the third millennia. For the sake of completeness let us mention that there is a datum revealing the sacrifice offerred by Gilgamesh to his father Lugalbanda (?). 73 Having slain the heavenly bull in the company of Enkidu, he fills its severed and finely decorated horns with oil and carries them to the temple of Lugalbanda. 1 i The sacrifice of horns occurs also in the Sumerian precursor of the legend of the heavenly bull, the meaning is, however, unclear on account of the fragmentary character of the text. 715 But we know of a fine shamanistic analogy for this manner of sacrifice. We are told just as regards the first shamans, the „shaman-ancestors": There is another proof to be adduced for our „Ihre Seelen bei den unteren Dämonen in besonderen Wiegen aufgezogen werden, wo sie mit Hilfe eines Rinderhornes ernährt werden." 1 ® Our argument does not tend to prove the shamanistic character of ancient Sumerian religion. We only tried to define the character of this detail and to adduce the suitable analogies. It seems to be beyond doubt that the content of the cited Sumerian tablet may be understood 73. For the problem of Lugalbanda being the father of Gilgamesh or not, see S. N. KRAMER: JCSt 1 (1947) p. 3. 74. ANET, VI, pp. 174—175; for the sacrifice in a horn see G. CASTELLINO: Rituals and Prayers against Appearing Ghosts. Orientalia 24 (19Î56) pp. 251 2611. 75. M. WITZEL: OLZ 34 (1931) pp. 402—409. A near parallel seems to be offerred by one of the variants, holding that the child Zeus was fed from the chipped horn of a wild goat: Ovid, Fasti, V. Ы6; Apollód. H, vii. 5. Otherwise in the Hymn to Zeus by Kallimachos. 76. H. FINDEISEN: op. cit. p. 132. .%
