Utukku

The lamp gutters, and the sick man’s room acquires one shadow too many. Outside, the exorcist has already been busy: a ring of flour poured across the outer gate, the doorposts smeared with bitumen and gypsum until they shine like wet tar, a censer trailing its smoke along the lintel. He is not trying to kill anything. He is trying to talk something nameless into going home.

That something is the utukku, and in three thousand years of cuneiform nobody ever managed to describe its face.

The Sumerians wrote it udug. Akkadian speakers took the word over as utukku and kept it for the rest of Mesopotamian history, through Babylon and Assyria and down into a late antiquity where scribes were still copying the old incantations in cuneiform with Greek transliterations running beside them. Of all the crowded ranks of Mesopotamian demons, this is the one nobody pinned down. Gina Konstantopoulos puts it plainly: the udug is defined by what it is not, nameless and formless even in its earliest appearances. An Old Babylonian incantation calls it the one who from the beginning was not called by name, the one who never appeared with a form. Nobody drew it either. Across the whole surviving body of Mesopotamian art no image has been securely identified as an utukku, though Tally Ornan has suggested that a sceptre-carrying figure standing beside the guardian goddess Lama on certain cylinder seals might be one, and Frans Wiggermann observed that the two of them seem to have been posted at doorways.

Which is the first strange thing about the utukku. It was not always what you kept out. The word carried no built-in verdict on good or evil, and the record is full of udugs on the right side of the door. Gudea, who ruled Lagash around the twenty-second century BCE, had it written into the great cylinders describing his temple works that a good udug should go before him and a good lamma walk his path. An Old Babylonian prayer asks for the same arrangement in miniature: may the evil udug and the evil galla stand aside, may the good udug and the good galla be present. Graham Cunningham has argued that the Greek daimon fits the creature better than the English demon, and once you have watched a good udug escorting a Sumerian ruler down a processional street, it is hard to disagree.

Picture that street. Dust in the low afternoon light, the smell of river mud and burning tamarisk, a figure walking a pace ahead of the ruler that nobody can see and everybody assumes is armed.

Then the word tilted. By the first millennium the qualifier had become almost redundant: an udug with nothing attached to it usually meant the bad kind, and the bad kind had a full literature of its own. In one bilingual incantation the god Asalluhi reports to his father Enki on what he has found. The evil udug, he says, has a malignant appearance and a towering stature. It is not a god, yet its clamour is great and its divine radiance immense. It is dark, its shadow pitch black, and there is no light within its body. It always hides and takes refuge and does not stand proudly. Its claws drip with bile and it leaves poison in its wake. Its belt is never loosened, its arms enclose, and its battle cry cannot be restrained in any land.

Read that again and notice how little of it is a description. Almost every line names an effect rather than a shape. The utukku is loud, poisonous, lightless and inescapable, and the text never once says how tall the shoulders are or what the head looks like, because the sources do not agree and probably never did. Other descriptions contradict this one outright.

Origin stories are equally slippery. One tablet of the great exorcism series states that the evil utukku were spawned from the seed of Anu, the sky god, and elsewhere calls them offspring of earth engendered by that same seed, a parentage that puts them uncomfortably close to the gods without letting them be gods. The demonic Seven who dominate the later tablets grew up in a cella at the source of the Apsu, the freshwater deep. They are neither male nor female. They do not marry and they bear no children, which means there are exactly as many of them as there have ever been.

Everything we know about how Mesopotamians handled these beings comes from a compendium called Udug-hul in Sumerian and Utukkū Lemnūtu in Akkadian, sixteen tablets of bilingual incantation whose earliest components are among the oldest texts written in Sumerian and whose latest copies belong to the twilight of cuneiform itself. Tablet six opens with a long inventory of the utukku’s characteristics, one of which survives in Sumerian as the demon who pays no mind to cries. The tablets treat illness as trespass. What follows is not therapy but eviction, and the language is the language of a landlord: you may not sit in his chair, nor lie in his bed, nor go up onto his roof, nor enter his dwelling. You must not cross the circumference of the door jamb. You must not cross the threshold.

The demon’s territory bleeds into the territory of the dead. The same series lists ghost after ghost by manner of death, and the list has the awful specificity of a coroner’s ledger: killed by an enemy, killed by a lion, gored by an ox, struck by a ship’s mast, pricked by a pin, drowned crossing a river, fallen from a roof or a date palm, abandoned in the steppe and left uncovered. Those who died wrongly came back wrong. In the later tablets the Sibitti, the demonic Seven, arrive characterised as storms.

Against all this stood the āšipu, the exorcist, and his weapons were physical. He drew water into an asammu vessel, threw in tamarisk and mashtakal, spoke the Eridu incantation over it and sprinkled the patient, then passed a censer and a torch across the body and rubbed it with aromatic cedar oil. He scattered flour in a magic circle at the outer gate and along the door bolt. He sealed the house itself with bitumen and gypsum. He beat a copper drum called Hero of Heaven, whose noise the demons could not stand. In one striking ritual he put on red robes, held a raven and a falcon, hung a mouse and a thornbush from the door lintel, and boasted that he would whip the demons like a stray donkey. Before any of it he inoculated himself, asking protection for his own body before his patient’s.

And then, having made the house unbearable, he sent the thing off with luggage. Go to your steppe, the dismissal runs. Take your leather pouch, take your food offerings, take your leather bag. Do not keep standing in corners or sitting in nooks, stop circling him in the dark in the middle of the city, stop surrounding him in the outskirts, and go down to the bottom of the netherworld. The nameless, formless thing that could not be pictured could still be given a road, a packed bag and a destination, which is a form of power over it that no weapon offers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an utukku?

An utukku is a class of spirit in ancient Mesopotamian belief, known in Sumerian as udug and in Akkadian as utukku. The word could refer to a benevolent guardian spirit or to a malevolent demon that caused sickness, and it was sometimes used loosely as an umbrella term for demons in general. By the first millennium BCE the unqualified word usually meant the evil kind.

What does an utukku look like?

No securely identified image of an utukku survives from Mesopotamia, and the texts give no consistent physical form. The fullest description, spoken by the god Asalluhi to Enki, calls the evil utukku towering and malignant in appearance, with a pitch black shadow, no light inside its body, claws dripping bile and poison left behind it. That passage describes what the utukku does rather than what it is shaped like.

Were all utukku evil?

No. The Sumerian word udug originally carried no moral charge, and good udugs were actively invoked for protection. Gudea of Lagash asked for a good udug to go before him and a good lamma to walk his path, and incantations regularly call on a good udug to help drive out an evil one.

How did Mesopotamians get rid of an evil utukku?

Through the rituals collected in the sixteen-tablet series Udug-hul, known in Akkadian as Utukkū Lemnūtu, performed by an exorcist called the āšipu. He sprinkled the patient with water steeped in tamarisk and mashtakal, passed a censer and torch over the body, drew a circle of flour at the gate, sealed the doorposts with bitumen and gypsum, beat a copper drum called Hero of Heaven, and finally ordered the demon back to the steppe and down to the netherworld.

How is an utukku different from a ghost?

The categories overlap heavily. The Udug-hul incantations list the restless dead alongside demons, cataloguing the ghosts of people killed by lions, gored by oxen, drowned, or abandoned unburied in the steppe, and treat them as much the same kind of problem. The utukku is the broader and vaguer term, while a ghost such as the edimmu or gidim is specifically the returning spirit of a particular dead person.

Related Entries

Gallu, Alû, Rabisu, Asakku, Ardat-Lili, Lamashtu (Labartu), Lilitu, Pazuzu, Edimmu, Ekimmu, Gidim, Lamassu, Shedu, Asag, Enki, Ereshkigal