"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

this was intended the ceremonial ascent of a real structure in Babylon or a
hallucinatory experience. The second assumption is supported by the fact
that the potion was prepared according to a rather exotic recipe: it
included 'the urine of a red ass' (possibly the cinnabar traditional in
ancient alchemy) and 'heavenly mushrooms' (evidently fly-agaric, cf. 'The
Mirror and the Mask').
According to tradition the path to the goddess and to supreme wisdom
(the Babylonians did not differentiate these two concepts, which were seen
as flowing naturally into one another and regarded as different aspects of
the same reality) was via sexual union with a golden idol of the goddess,
which was located in the upper chamber of the ziggurat. It was believed that
at certain times the spirit of Ishtar descended into this idol.
In order to be granted access to the idol it was necessary to guess the
Three Riddles oflshtar. These riddles have not come down to us. Let us note
the controversial opinion of Claude Greco (see 11,12), who assumes that what
is meant is a set of rhymed incantations in ancient Accadian discovered
during the excavation of Nineveh, which are rendered highly polysemantic by
means of their homo-nymic structure.
A far more convincing interpretation, however, is based on several
sources taken together: the Three Riddles of Ishtar were three symbolic
objects that were handed to a Babylonian who wished to become a Chaldean. He
had to interpret the significance of these items (the motif of a symbolic
message). On the spiral ascent of the ziggurat there were three gateways,
where the future Chaldean was handed each of the objects in turn. Anybody
who got even one of the riddles wrong was pushed over the edge of the
ziggurat to certain death by the soldiers of the guard. (There is some
reason to derive the later cult ofKybela, based on ritual self-castration,
from the cult of Ishtar: the significance of the self-castration was
evidently as a substitute sacrifice.)
Even so, there were a great many candidates, since the answers that
would open the path to the summit of the ziggurat and union with the goddess
actually did exist. Once in every few decades someone was successful. The
man who answered all three riddles correctly would ascend to the summit and
meet the goddess, following which he became a consecrated Chaldean and her
ritual earthly husband (possibly there were several such simultaneously).
According to one interpretation, the answers to the Three Riddies
oflshtar also existed in written form. In certain special places in Babylon
tablets were sold imprinted with the answers to the goddess's questions
(another interpretation holds that what was meant was a magical seal on
which the answers were carved). Producing these tablets and trading in them
was the business of the priests of the central temple ofEnkidu, the patron
deity of the Lottery. It was believed that the goddess selected her next
husband through the agency of Enkidu. This provides a resolution to the
conflict, well known to the ancient Babylonians, between divine
predetermina-tion and free will. Therefore most of those who decided to
ascend the ziggurat bought clay tablets bearing answers; it was believed the
tablets could not be unsealed until after the ascent had begun.
This practice was known as the Great Lottery (the accepted term, for
which we are indebted to numerous men of letters inspired by this legend,
but a more precise rendering would be 'The Game without a Name'). Its only