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Updated: June 12, 2025
There is a beauty worthy of all adoration, a beauty far above Antinous, or Gula or Greek æsthetics, a beauty that is not the disjecta membra that modern maudlin sentimentality has left it, but that perfect and immortal 'Beauty of Holiness, that outlives marble and silver, pigment, stylus, and pagan poems that deify dust."
The Babylonians, as we shall have occasion to point out, early engaged in speculations regarding the life after death, and, as a result, there was developed a special pantheon for the nether world. Gula occupies a rather unique place intermediate, as it were, between the gods of the living and the gods of the dead.
Belit-ekalli i.e., Belit of the palace appears as the consort of Ninib, the epithet 'ekalli' being added to specify what Belit is meant, and to avoid confusion with the consort of Bel. Ninib's consort, as we know from other sources, was Gula.
So Shamash, Sin, Nin-makh, i.e., the great lady, or Ishtar, Nin-khar-shag, Gula, also appearing as Nin-Karrak, have their temples in Babylon, while Ramman has one in Borsippa, and Gula no less than three sanctuaries perhaps only small chapels in Borsippa. Fourthly, there are sanctuaries of minor importance in other quarters of Babylonia.
Meanwhile Gula had also turned her face toward Hermon, and he now addressed her, saying with a faint tone of reproach: "And did hatred lead you also, Gula, to this sanctuary at midnight to implore the goddess to destroy me in her wrath?" The young mother rose and pointed to Ledscha, exclaiming, "She desires it." "And I?" he asked gently. "Have I really done you so much evil?"
There are two of such monstrous productions however better attested; one of a human fetus, mentioned by Gipson in the Scots Medical Essays; which having the gula impervious was furnished with an aperture into the wind-pipe, which communicated below into the gullet; by means of which the liquor amnii might be taken into the stomach before nativity without danger of suffocation, while the fetus had no occasion to breathe.
Gula is the mother of the little girl whose life was saved by Hermon's bold deed, and perhaps the young mother only knocked at her benefactor's door to thank him; but you, base defamer " "I," Bias continued, maintaining his composure with difficulty, "I saw Gula secretly glide into our rooms again and again to permit her child's preserver to imitate in clay what he considered beautiful.
Indeed, when Nebuchadnezzar speaks of three temples to Gula being erected in Borsippa, it is certain that they could not have been within the precinct of E-Zida, and so the temples to Shamash and Ramman, Sin and Ishtar, as well as to Nabu in Babylon, had an independent position; but we are at least warranted in concluding that they were not far removed from E-Sagila, and so, likewise, the numerous temples enumerated by Nebuchadnezzar as erected or improved by him in Borsippa were not far distant from Nabu's sanctuary, the famous E-Zida.
"The woman visited me unasked, and I let her leave me as faithful or as unfaithful to her husband as she came. If I used her as a model " "Gula, whom the sculptor transforms into a goddess," Ledscha interrupted, with a sneering laugh. "Into a fish-seller, if you wish to know it," cried Hermon indignantly. "I saw in the market a young woman selling shad.
We have a proof, therefore, of her cult being firmly established at an early period of Babylonian history. Her rôle is that of a 'life-giver, in the widest sense of the word. She is called the 'great physician, who both preserves the body in health and who removes sickness and disease by the 'touch of her hand. Gula is the one who leads the dead to a new life.
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