All the heavenly bodies are affected by such an
event. Anu is powerless. It is only through Ea that Sin is released,
just as though he were a human individual. But Ea is rarely approached
directly. At his side stands his son Marduk, who acts as a mediator.
Marduk listens to the petition addressed to him by the exorcising priest
on behalf of the victim, and carries the word to Father Ea. The latter,
after first declaring Marduk to be his equal in knowledge, proceeds to
dictate the cure. Marduk, accordingly, is given the same titles as his
father, Ea. He, too, is the lord of life, the master of the exorcising
art, the chief magician among the gods.

The importance thus given to Marduk is an indication of a later period,
and must be taken in connection with the supremacy accorded to the god
after the union of the Babylonian states. Originally, Ea is the god to
whom the direct appeal was made. Marduk is an afterthought that points
to the remodeling of the ancient texts after the period of Hammurabi.
Damkina, the consort of Ea, is occasionally invoked, but it is
significant that Sarpanitum, the consort of Marduk, is rarely mentioned.

The burning of images and witches, or of other objects, being so
frequently resorted to as a means of destroying baneful influences, the
god of fire occupies a rank hardly secondary to Ea. Here, too, the
mystical element involved in the use of fire adds to the effectiveness
of the method. Water and fire are the two great sources of symbolical
purification that we meet with in both primitive and advanced rituals of
the past.[366] The fire-god appears in the texts under the double form
of Gibil and Nusku. The former occurs with greater frequency than the
latter, but the two are used so interchangeably as to be in every
respect identical. The amalgamation of the two may indeed be due to the
growth of the incantation rituals of Babylon. In some districts Gibil
was worshipped as the special god of fire, in others Nusku, much as we
found the sun-god worshipped under the names of _Shamas_ and _Utu_, and
similarly in the case of other deities. On the supposition that the
incantation rituals are the result of a complicated literary process,
involving the collection of all known formulas, and the bringing of them
into some kind of connection with one another, this existence of a
twofold fire-god finds a ready explanation. At Babylon we know Nusku was
worshipped as the fire-god. Gibil belongs therefore to