From the earth-spirit with the veiled face, who incarnated himself in the swine, the distance is great to the solar hero and warrior god of the Semitic age. In fact, the distance is too great to be spanned by any natural process of evolution. It is a distance in kind and not in degree. It presupposes fundamentally different conceptions of religion, animism on the one side and anthropomorphic gods on the other. If we are to listen to fashionable theories of the origin of religion, we start in the one case with the fetish, in the other case with the worship of ancestors. The difference is racial: wherever we find the Semite, in all periods of his history, his gods are human and not made in the form of the beast.
But the Semite, though he moulded the later religion of Babylonia, could not transform it altogether. The Sumerian element in the population was never extirpated, and it is probable that if we knew more of the religion of the people as opposed to the official theology, we should find that it remained comparatively little affected by Semitic influence. The witchcraft and necromancy that flourished is a proof of this; even the State religion was compelled to recognise it, and, like Brahmanism in the presence of the native cults of India, to lend it its sanction and control. It is instructive to observe what a contrast there was in this respect between the official religion of Babylonia and that of the more purely Semitic Israelites. Witchcraft and necromancy were practised also in Israel, but there they were forbidden by the law and suppressed by the head of the State. In Babylonia, however, the local deities were for the most part of Sumerian origin, and in spite of their Semitic colouring and dress not unfrequently retained their old Sumerian names. Babylonian religion could not wholly repudiate its origin and parentage; the superstructure might be Semitic, but its basis was Sumerian. Like the Sumerian words which had been adopted into the language, the names of the gods remained to testify to the fact that the people and their religion were alike mixed. And with the names went early beliefs and legends, fragments of folk-lore and ritual which had descended from a non-Semitic past. The official creed found a niche for each of them as best it could, but the assimilation was never more than partial, and from time to time we meet with practices and conceptions which are alien to the official faith.