A substitution healing ritual found in Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution. The core concept is familiar enough but the thoroughness here is especially impressive.
This text deals with the healing of a sick person. It bears the title “Substitution of a Man for Ereshkigal.” Ereshkigal is the Sumerian-Akkadian goddess of the underworld. The substitute is an “unmated goat.” It is put into bed with the sick person and is supposed to spend the night with him. At dawn the conjurer arrives, throws the goat and the sick person out of the bed onto the floor, touches the throat of the sick person with a wooden knife, and then cuts the throat of the goat with a real knife. The slaughtered goat is then stuffed with spices, it is dressed in a robe and given shoes, its eyes are adorned, the headgear of the sick person is wound round its head, and it is tended “as if it were a dead man” while the sick person leaves the house. The conjurer speaks an incantation, raises the lamentation for the dead over the body, brings offerings for the dead, makes libations of water, beer, roasted corn, milk, honey, cream, and oil; finally, with offerings for the “spirit of the dead of the family” and the goat, he buries the animal. In this way the sick person is delivered.
The spices are the one element I don’t understand – are they a purifying medicine on premise that the sickness by that point has transferred to the goat? Or are they representative of the sickness itself? Or somehow an analogue for what is in a person (=another step to making the goat more acceptable as substitute)? Or unrelated to any of that and just a first phase of offerings in a different form than the libations that conclude the ritual?
The main source Burkert gives is E. Ebeling’s Tod und Leben nach den Vorstellungen der Babylonien p.65-69.
Extracts 