Lamashtu

Stolas is a person.

Lamashtu, for all her faults, was a person.

You know, she was a prisoner.

The monster in episodes four and five isn't Marcosius or the Hellhound.

Yeah.

Pazuzu, Lamashtu also, I think-

Yes.

Oh, yeah

zozo is often described as an ancient mesopotamian demon or as another name for pazuzu the wind demon made infamous in modern culture by the exorcist that connection has been repeated so often that it now appears in countless videos articles and social media posts as if it were established history again i'm just as guilty of making that connection but it's not pazuzu was a genuine figure in ancient mesopotamian religion Surviving amulets and inscriptions identify him as a powerful demon connected with destructive winds and illness, yet his role was more complicated than a purely evil creature seen in modern horror.

Images of Pazuzu were also worn or displayed as protection, particularly against Lamashtu, a demon feared for attacking pregnant women and infants.

No surviving ancient source currently establishes Zozo as another name for Pazuzu.

The resemblance between the two names may feel suggestive, especially after decades of horror films and occult speculation, but resemblance is not evidence.

And now come with me even further back in time to the rivers of Mesopotamia, older than Greece.

Long before the Greek told of the Lamia, the people of the land between the rivers feared a figure who resembles her uncannily, Lamashtu.

The Assyriologist Walter Faber worked through her exhaustively in his Standard 2014 edition.

It's a demoness with a lion's head and the feet of a bird of prey, and she does exactly what the Lamia does.

And how did he translate it? As Lamia.

He simply equated the Hebrew night demon with the Greek child eater because at bottom they were the same thing.

Lamia, Lilith, Lamashtu.

These are three names for a fear that keeps taking the same face across the millennia and across cultures.

Yet his role was more complicated than a purely evil creature seen in modern horror.

Images of Pazuzu were also worn or displayed as protection, particularly against Lamashtu, a demon feared for attacking pregnant women and infants.

No surviving ancient source currently establishes Zozo as another name for Pazuzu.

The resemblance between the two names may feel suggestive, especially after decades of horror films and occult speculation, but resemblance is not evidence.

Where the star of Ishtar was to cloak oneself in her celestial authority, invoking a goddess who had literally descended into the underworld and successfully waged war against death itself.

Yet the most intimate protective practices in Mesopotamia evolved to fight a very specific terrifying entity, the demoness Lamashtu.

Lamashtu was a corrupted divine being who slipped into households at night to steal newborn infants from their cribs and even to strike down mothers with childbed fever.

To combat her, Mesopotamians engaged in the fascinating form of spiritual warfare that scholars call... apotropaic magic, which involves using a terrifying image to repel an equally terrifying threat.

To drive Lamashtu away, families would hang bronze pendants or clay plaques of her sworn nemesis, the demon king Pazuzu.

With his canine face and bulging eyes and feathered wings, Pazuzu was a nightmare incarnate.

But because he hated Lamashtu, he functioned as humanity's fierce, albeit terrifying, bodyguard.

Furthermore, patients suffering from mysterious illnesses could invoke Gola, the Mesopotamian goddess of healing and medicine.

[laughs] Far from it.

For example, the Mesopotamian Lamashtu was a creature with the head of a lion and the body of a donkey.

And the ancient Greek striges were simply described as bloodthirsty birds.

Others were even stranger.

Yeah.

In ancient Mesopotamia, you find the Lamashtu, described as this horrifying entity with the head of a lion and the body of a donkey.

That is terrifying.

Ancient Greece had the striges, which were bloodthirsty birds-