"The fundamental principle of the Sumerian or Sumero-Akkadian religion was a crude shamanism: the belief in evil spirits (hence the magic aimed at averting the influences), at the head of which stood the spirit of the earth, Inki, and that of the sky, Anna. From the two supreme spirits, first conceived abstractly, then personified, a great host of aquatic and luminous divinities developed, which contributed to forming the substratum, so to speak, of the later Chaldean pantheon. These divinities with strange names, many of which we still ignore the meaning and pronunciation of, were assimilated, for the most part, by the Semites of Babylon to their own, representatives of physical phenomena, over which they presided. (pp. 1-2)"
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