Dream Deities: Mamu, Zaqīqu, and Anzagar

[This is the first article in a series examining gods associated with dreaming and oneiromancy in the ancient world. Despite the extensive lists you can find online, there were surprisingly few gods with direct rulership over dreams. Most of these either had recorded appearances in dreams (oneirophanies), were evoked through oneiromantic rituals, or had dream incubation as part of their cultic practice. Others are only tangentially related to dreaming due to being deities of related domains such as Sleep and Night. Finally there are a number of gods who there is too little information or contradictory information to be able to justify calling dream deities.]

The early Mesopotamian cultures of Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria contained the first and most well-attested dream deities: Mamu, Zaqīqu, and Anzagar. While these may have been different names for the same god, Assyriologist Sally A. L. Butler suggests these deities may have reflected different aspects of dreaming important in ancient Mesopotamia.

The first and most important of these dream gods is Mamu, whose name (dMA.MÚ) is a deified form of the most common Sumerian word for dream, mamu. As opposed to mašĝi or confused, false, and incomprehensible dreams, mamu were specifically dreams that the Sumerians beleved were meaningful and could influence the future. While sometimes presumed to be male, the Sumerian Great God List An = Anum lists her as the daughter of the sun god Shamash and consort of Bunene, and gives her a dream-god brother, Sisig. While the temples to Mamu at Balawat and Sippar don’t show evidence that Mamu’s cult had a dream incubation practice, there are oneiromantic incantations and requesting favorable dreams from Mamu in the Ashur Dream Ritual Compendium and an invocation to her in the Iškar Zaqīqu or Assyrian Dream-Book. As such, she may have been the dream deity responsible for pleasant, prophetic, or message dreams, as opposed to nightmares, which likely fell under the aegis of her brother.

There are few references to the Sumerian god Sisig (dSI(G).SIG), but the second Mesopotamian dream deity is much better known under his Akkadian name Zaqīqu or Ziqīqu (dZA/IQIQU). The word zaqīqu that he is a deified form of is multivalent, and highly revealing of the Mesopotamian spiritual reality. Zaqīqu, like the Sumerian sisig meant “the winds,” specifically the force of an onrushing storm. It was also a kind of wind demon, equated with the logogram LÍL.LÁ, from which we get the names of demons like lilû, lilītu, and ultimately Lilith. Zaqīqu were a kind of fast-attacking night demon whose rushing movement could blow them through the smallest opening of a room. As dreams, zaqīqu demons clearly would have brought nightmares, over whom Zaqīqu rules and for whom the Assyrian Dream Book is named, with its apotropaic spells against bad dreams. Zaqīqu also, however, refers to the human soul, and is the means through which humans communicate with the gods in dreams. Mesopotamian scholars have suggested the zaqīqu is similar to concepts like the “breath-soul” or astral body, and it may have thus indicated a person’s dream double, or the image of themself seen in dreams.

The last of the Mesopotamian dream gods, Anzagar, or sometimes Zangara, Zakar, or Zaqar (dAN.ZA.GAR) is more indeterminate in nature. On the one hand, he was petitioned in rituals for favorable dreams and invoked as the messenger who carries dreams to the other gods. At the same time his name appears in lists of demons relating him to ghosts and the underworld. In the Sumerian myth, Lugulbanda in the Mountain Cave, a sick soldier is left to die in a cave when he is sent a dream by “The multiplier of mankind, the voice of one not alive—Zangara, the god of dreams, himself like a bull,” who bellows instructions at Lugulbanda for a ritual feast to summon the other gods to his aid. Most intriguing is Anzagar’s name, which may derive from the root z.k.r., “to remember,” and in Akkadian, an anzagar (rendered as dimtu) was a stone tower, leading to speculation that the god lived in a pillar or stone cairn, similar to the early Greek depictions of Hermes as a personified herma, a pile of stones used as a boundary marker, to which passersby would add a stone. One possible explanation may be found in the early apotropaic rituals described in the Iškar Zaqīqu, in which a bad dream is told to a handful of clay pellets that are scattered at a cross-roads. One imagines years of scattered dreams heaped up into a towering pile, deified as a god who remembers our rejected dreams and carries them back to the gods.

Other Mesopotamian gods were invoked in oneiromantic rituals or famously appeared in dreams. This includes the sun god Shamash, the deity most predominantly invoked for protection from bad dreams and dream-demons. Also popular was Nuska, the vizier of the gods, who was symbolized by a fire or lamp and protected sleepers while Shamash was absent. As far as oneirophanies, Marduk, the Bablyonian warrior and storm god, appeared in incubation rituals performed at his temple, and in the Ludlul bēl nēmeqi sends a procession of healers in a dream to heal a sick prince. Ishtar, goddess of love and war, in dreams commanded the Hittite prince Hattushili to usurp the kingship, and later appeared to king Assurbanipal and his army to rally them during a military campaign. Other prominent oneirophanies include the healing goddess Gula, the moon god Sin, and a katabasis dream-quest in the Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Prince incubated to Ereshkigal, whose name was later associated with Hecate in the oneiromantic spells in the Papyri Graecae Magicae. There is also an interesting tradition in Mesopotamian cultures in which goddesses serve as dream interpreters for their male kin, or for kings who their kin appeared to in dreams: this includes Ningirsu’s sister Nanše, Dumuzid’s sister and scribe Geshtinanna, and, while not technically a goddess, Gilgamesh’s mother Ninsun.