著者

渡辺 和子

出版者

リトン

雑誌

死生学年報

巻号頁・発行日

vol.4, pp.155-185, 2008-03-31

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People in Ancient Mesopotamia (ca. 3000-500 BC) believed that they would continue to exist as spirits (et.emmu) after death in the netherworld and they must be fed with kispu, which their living family had to periodically offer to them (see the author’s “Offering for the Dead in Mesopotamia,” Annual of the Institute of Thanatology 2007).If the spirits were not adequately buried or taken care of, they could cause various troubles for the living. These could be evil omens, frightening apparitions, or physical or mental diseases. The professionals who handled these problems were called ??ipu which is still defined by standard Akkadian dictionaries as ‘magician.’ Recent studies have shown that the ??ipu belonged to a temple and had not one but several functions including priest, magician and physician. And the asu, which is conventionally translated as ‘physician,’was proved to have been the pharmacist, bone setter and performer of minor surgery and to have assisted the ??ipu. JoAnn Scurlock (esp. 2002, 2005 and 2006) contributed greatly in presenting a much clearer image of the ??ipu caring for spirits and healing diseases caused by them in Mesopotamia. It is not easy to understand ancient phenomena as belonging to several modern categories such as religion, magic and science, at the same time. These categories, however, are undergoing reconsideration today.Departed spirits are the responsibility of the living family. But many texts assumed the existence of all kinds of spirits, of both known and unknown people, which might cause trouble for unspecified reasons. It can be compared with the long Japanese tradition caring for not only メソポタミアの「慰霊」と「治療」 the spirits of one’s own family, shouryou( 精霊), but also the spirits of strangers, muen-botoke( 無縁仏), mainly on the occasion of urabon( 盂蘭盆). Anthropology and Ethnology have been the analyzing ambiguous attitude of living people toward their ancestors and the dead who might be merciful or frightening for them.V. Jankelevitch (1966), a French philosopher, distinguished ‘the death in the third person, in the second person and in the first person.’ However, he added that death in each person is reflexively death in the first person. Ph. Aries (1977) adopted certain key terms such as ‘the death of the self (la mort de soi)’ and ‘thy death (la mort de toi)’ from Jankelevitch for his reconstruction of a history of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to fit the respective attitudes toward death. Aries added that death has come to be thought of as taboo in the latter half of 20th century in Europe.K. Yanagida (1995) applied the theory of ‘person’ in death to describe matters related to death in contemporary Japan. He explained that ‘my death,’ ‘your death’ and ‘his/her/people’s death’ are all totally different. He later (2002) suggested, however, the idea of ‘death in person two-pointfive(’ 二・五人称), so that we could have an empathy with ‘death in the third person.’ It is not rare now in Japan to hear : ‘His/Her death is for me the death in ‘person two-point-three(’ 二・三人称), that is: ‘nearer to the second person than to the third person.’ In Japanese, grammatical person is usually expressed in cardinal numbers, (such as ‘person one’ (一人称), not in ordinal numbers such as ‘the first person’ (第一人称). This makes it possible to add further divisions between two and three.It is not wrong to adopt foreign thoughts and terminologies and to improve on or change them to make them fit for our situation in Japan. We should, however, consider the ambiguity of both death and the dead. We should also be aware of distortions that occur when we use modern and contemporary terms for ancient phenomena.