Gidim

A clay pipe ran down into the earth beneath some Mesopotamian houses, and once a month someone knelt over it and poured. Water first, then beer, then a little crumbled bread, sent down through the floor to a relative who had been dead for years. This was not sentiment. It was maintenance. The thing being fed was the gidim, the spirit of the dead, and a gidim that went hungry did not simply fade. It came back up the pipe with grievances.

The word is Sumerian. The Akkadians took it into their own language as eṭemmu and kept the idea intact. A gidim came into being at the moment of death, when the part of a person that thought and remembered and wanted things separated from the body that had carried it. It was not a vague echo. It held the dead person’s memory, temper, and sense of who they had been, fully aware of itself, and it went down to the realm the Sumerians called Kur and the Akkadians called Irkalla to take up a place among the others already there.

The place it went to was neither punishment nor reward. It was simply where the dead were, a great dim house under the ground where the doorkeepers knew your name and the only food was dust. The poets who described it gave its residents wings and feathers for clothing and left them sitting in the dark, eating clay, drinking from stale puddles, their old hungers intact and nothing to satisfy them. Whatever you had been in life, this was the floor you came to rest on. A king’s gidim and a beggar’s gidim breathed the same gloom.

There was a story about where the spirit itself had come from. In the Atrahasis poem, when the gods decided to make humans to carry their workload, they killed one of their own, a god with intelligence in him, and the birth goddess mixed his flesh and blood into clay. From that clay the first people were shaped, and the dead god’s eṭemmu, his ghost, stayed inside the new creatures and became a permanent part of them. So the spirit in every person was on loan from a murdered god, and death only returned the borrowed thing to the dark. The body went back to mud. The ghost went on.

The trouble began when the arrangement broke down. A gidim depended on the living, and specifically on its own family, to keep it supplied through the offerings the Akkadians called kispu, the monthly meal poured down to the dead. A family that died out, or forgot, or could not be bothered, left its ghosts to starve in a place where there was nothing else to eat. A body left unburied on a battlefield, or drowned and never recovered, or thrown aside without rites, produced a gidim with no resting place at all. And a person murdered, or dead before their time, or killed and left in the open, came back furious. These were the ghosts that climbed back into the world of the living.

What such a ghost did, once loose, was take hold of someone. The Mesopotamians spoke of it as the hand of a ghost, qāt eṭemmi, a grip that closed on a victim and would not let go. The symptoms were specific and miserable: a roaring or ringing in the ears, splitting headaches, fever and chills, a churning gut, black moods, sometimes a slide into something close to madness. The manner of a ghost’s death could shape the affliction it brought. The spirit of a man who had drowned might leave his victim gasping and breathless, as though he too had just come up choking from the water.

Against this the Mesopotamians had specialists. The ashipu, a scholar standing somewhere between physician and exorcist, was called in to identify which ghost had seized the patient and to send it back where it belonged. He worked with incantations, offerings, and small clay figurines, sometimes burying an image of the ghost to fix it underground, sometimes pouring out water while reciting the formula that named the dead and pointed them home. The cure for a haunting was rarely a fight. It was a transaction. Give the ghost what it had been denied, a burial, a name spoken aloud, a meal, and the grip loosened.

The powers of the gidim were the powers of an unpaid creditor. It could return uninvited, pass into the body of a living person, and visit on them the whole catalogue of unexplained suffering the living could not otherwise account for. A few could even be turned to use. A ghost summoned deliberately by a necromancer might be made to give up what the dead knew, and in the great Gilgamesh poem the hero begs for the ghost of his dead friend Enkidu to be brought up so he can ask what the underworld is like, and the spirit rises through a hole in the ground to tell him. But the gidim’s weakness was the same as its strength. It needed things from the living, and that need was the lever. A buried body, a fed spirit, a name remembered on the right day, and the gidim stayed quiet. The whole grim machinery of Mesopotamian death ran on one understanding: the dead were still owed, and they would collect.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a gidim in Mesopotamian mythology?

A gidim is the ghost or spirit of a dead person in Sumerian and broader Mesopotamian belief. It formed at the moment of death, retained the memory and personality of the deceased, and travelled to the underworld of Irkalla, from where it could return to trouble the living if it was neglected.

What is the difference between a gidim and an eṭemmu?

They are the same thing in two languages. Gidim is the Sumerian word for the spirit of the dead, and the Akkadians borrowed it into their language as eṭemmu, keeping the concept unchanged. Both refer to the self-aware ghost that survives a person’s death.

Why did the Mesopotamians make offerings to the dead?

Families poured out monthly offerings of food and drink, called kispu, to keep the gidim of their relatives fed and content in the underworld, where the only natural food was dust. A gidim that received its offerings rested quietly, but a neglected or forgotten one could grow hungry and hostile and return to harm the living.

What happened when a gidim was not cared for properly?

A gidim left unfed, unburied, or killed by violence could come back and seize a living person in what the Mesopotamians called the hand of a ghost. This caused ringing ears, headaches, fevers, chills, and disturbances of mind, and the symptoms sometimes matched the way the ghost itself had died.

How did Mesopotamians get rid of a ghost?

They called on an exorcist-physician known as the ashipu, who used incantations, offerings, and clay figurines to identify the ghost and send it back to the underworld. The remedy was usually appeasement rather than combat: giving the ghost a proper burial, a meal, or the recitation of its name loosened its grip on the victim.

Related Entries

Edimmu, Ekimmu, Utukku, Gallu, Rabisu, Nergal, Ereshkigal, Enkidu, Gilgamesh, Inanna, Enki, Pazuzu, Lamashtu, Shade