Asakku (also Asakki, Azag; singular prototype Asag)

The fever began at the back of the head and spread like heat lifting off a kiln. A man who had risen well at dawn lay by midday with his limbs going rigid, his skin tightening and turning the colour of old wax, his thoughts loosening from him one by one. In the reed-and-mud cities of Sumer, and later in Babylon and Assyria, this was not misfortune and it was not bad air. It had a cause, and the cause had a name. An asakku had entered the house.

The asakku were never one thing. They were a kind, an order of disease-demons that the people of Mesopotamia blamed for the cruelest work the body could be put to. They were the burning of fever and the white grip of the falling sickness, the wasting that emptied a strong man over a handful of days, the headache that would not break. Where a Mesopotamian felt illness take hold, an asakku was understood to be doing it, pressing into the flesh the way floodwater presses into a field, settling and spreading and refusing to leave.

They had almost no shape of their own. As a class the asakku were closer to a force than a figure, which is part of what made them frightening; you could not see the thing that was killing you, only feel it climb the spine. The scribes grouped them among the utukku, the broad company of spirits that ran from the helpful to the murderous, and set the asakku firmly at the dangerous end. Their name carried the violence plainly. In Sumerian it reads as something close to the smasher, the one that breaks a body’s force, and that is exactly what they were thought to do.

One of them, though, had a face. In the long Sumerian poem of Lugal-e, the asakku takes singular and monstrous form as Asag, child of the sky god An and the earth Ki, a demon so foul that his presence alone made the fish boil alive in the rivers and the water run scalding past the banks. Asag went up into the mountains and lay with the stone of the kur, and the mountains bore him an army of rock, a brood of offspring that stood at his back. He grew until he threatened the order of the world itself.

What stopped him was not medicine. The young warrior god Ninurta went out against Asag carrying Sharur, a mace that could speak, and even Ninurta faltered at the first meeting and drew back to take counsel from his father Enlil before turning to face the demon again. The second time he broke Asag and broke the stone host with him, and the poem makes a point of what came after, how Ninurta set the rivers and the irrigation channels in order once the demon was dead. The lesson sits just under the surface. The thing that boiled the water and ruined the land was the same kind of thing that boiled a fever in a sick child, and both could be put down.

That faith ran straight into the sickroom. Because the asakku were demons rather than mere symptoms, the cure for them was ritual, not herb alone. The work fell to the asipu, the exorcist, who in the first millennium stood as the chief defence against everything in the unseen world that wanted a person dead. He came with incantations gathered over centuries, the great series against evil spirits, the Udug-hul and the texts named for the evil asakku themselves, recited over the patient to name the demon, to shame it, and to drive it back out of the body it had taken. To name an asakku was already to begin defeating it. Sickness had a name, and a name could be expelled.

That was their weakness, and it was a strange one for something so deadly. The asakku could enter almost anyone and bring almost any affliction, and a person had no real defence in the moment of attack; the demon came in like a tornado into the limbs and there was nothing to strike at. But they were bound to the rules of the rituals that governed them. The right words said in the right order by the right man, the appeal to the gods of magic and healing, the long catalogues of incantation that left the demon no anonymity to hide behind, these held a power over the asakku that no spear ever could. A demon of impurity could be cleansed away. A demon that crossed a forbidden line could be sent back across it.

So the asakku occupy an odd and persistent place in the Mesopotamian imagination. They are the reason the strong sicken without warning and the reason a fever can kill in a week, and they are also, quietly, evidence of a people who refused to treat suffering as senseless. Every plague had an author. Every author could be named. And in the lamplit room where the exorcist leaned over a shaking body and began to recite, the burning thing in the flesh was being told, in the oldest words the city had, that it would have to go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Asakku?

The asakku are a class of disease-demons in Mesopotamian mythology, blamed for fevers, epilepsy, and the wasting sicknesses that struck people without warning. They were grouped among the utukku, the wider company of Mesopotamian spirits, and counted among its most dangerous members. Their Sumerian name carries the sense of “the smasher,” the force that breaks a body down.

What illnesses did the asakku cause?

The asakku were held responsible for serious bodily illness, especially burning fevers of the head, along with epilepsy and the slow wasting that could kill a healthy person in days. In the incantation texts their attack on the patient is described like a flood or a tornado entering the body. Because they were demons rather than mere symptoms, the sickness they caused was treated as something with a will of its own.

How did Mesopotamians defend against the asakku?

Mesopotamians fought the asakku with ritual rather than weapons, relying on the asipu, or exorcist, who recited incantations over the sick. Series such as the Udug-hul and the texts directed at the evil asakku named the demon, shamed it, and commanded it to leave the body. Naming the asakku correctly was itself the first step in driving it out.

What is the difference between the asakku and Asag?

Asakku is the name for the whole class of disease-demons, while Asag is the single monstrous demon who embodies them in the Sumerian poem Lugal-e. In that poem Asag is the offspring of the sky god An and the earth goddess Ki, a being so terrible his presence boiled the fish alive in the rivers. The class brings sickness to individuals; Asag threatened the order of the world itself.

Who defeated Asag?

The warrior god Ninurta defeated Asag, using his talking mace Sharur after seeking counsel from his father Enlil. Ninurta broke both the demon and the army of stone offspring Asag had fathered with the mountains, then set the rivers and irrigation channels back in order. The victory mirrored the exorcist’s smaller battle: a demon of sickness and disorder put down by the right power.

Related Entries

Asag, Ninurta, Enlil, Utukku, Anzû, Gallu, Lamashtu, Pazuzu, Rabisu, Edimmu, Girtablilu