Lamashtu: Mesopotamian Goddess and Prototype Vampire

In the Louvre Museum, there is a free-standing plaque. Wrought from metal and stone, it dates from the Bronze Age, and it depicts a terrifying tableau.

A small baby lies screaming in its cradle, flanked by a man and woman wearing armor in the shape of fish. A row of humanoid figures are held at bay, or keep guard. Each one of them has the face (or mask) of a wild creature.

Beneath the crib, a gigantic female deity has almost broken through. Lamaštu has arisen from the depths of the ocean, brandishing two snakes. A piglet and a whelp suckle from her breasts.

The terrible goddess had the head of a lion, but the teeth of a donkey. Her whole body is hairy. Her long, tapering fingers end in talons, and her hands are stained with blood. Lamaštu rides through the waters of the Underworld on a boat, alongside her sacred donkey.

She has tools and dread companions to enact her bidding. She wants the baby. She wishes to devour it, and drink the blood of its father. If the infant wasn't already born, She would rip it from the womb of its still-living mother.

Only the protection of the god Pazuzu can save the family. That's what this plaque is all about. It's a talisman forged in the name of that deity; others exist very similar to it. Placing it in an Assyrian nursery would keep the blood-thirsty Lamaštu from entering, in precisely the same way as Hollywood movies frequently flash the cross to ward away vampires.

And there is a reason for that. Lamashtu (aka Lamaštu) is probably the original vampire.

It is difficult to tell where in ancient Mesopotamia such stories first began circulating.

This is a region which encompasses the whole of the Tigris-Euphates river valley. Today, we would be talking about Iraq and parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran. From around 3100 BCE, it was dominated by the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires.

Lamashtu is found in the pantheons of them all.

To the Sumerians and Babylonians, She was Dimme, daughter of the sky God Anu. To the Assyrians, She was Lamaštu, daughter of An. The stories they told were much the same.

She was a Goddess who could not be stopped. Her reason to be was to cause chaos, destruction and mass slaughter. She was the dark deity behind wars and the horrors enacted during wars. She brought pestilence and disease. She visited the bedridden and plagued them further. She unleashed anarchy and terror; and She had seven children (male and female), who did the same.

Yet Lamashtu's principal victims were always the newborns. She could take a fetus from the womb by tapping a pregnant woman's belly seven times. She would snatch infants from their cradles.

Unlike the later stories of Lamia and Lilith, there was no underlying reason for this. As the British Museum states on their web-site, 'Lamashtu practised evil apparently for its own sake and on her own initiative'.

In fact, Lamia and Lilith are undoubtedly later manifestations of Lamashtu Herself, twisted to fit into the pantheons of emerging civilizations, and provided with a reason for their reigns of terror.

Lamashtu is depicted on another talisman plaque, this one held in the British Museum, London.

It dates from around 800 BCE. The cuneiform suggests that the stone was carved in either Babylonia or Assyria. The talisman is much younger than its near twin on display in the Louvre.

Fear of Lamashtu held sway for centuries before her legend became reduced.  First a ray of hope was inserted. The God Pazuzu was able to protect babies from being devoured by her. The amulet and talismans attracted His divine attention.

Next came an erosion of status. Somewhere along the way, Lamashtu became described not quite as a goddess, but as a spirit of the air. She was the daughter of the sky god Anu, so it all fit nicely into place.

The Sumerian for air was 'lil'. In plural, that would be 'lilu'. What begins to emerge is a specific spirit of the air named Lilitu. She is described as a terrible baby-eating seductress, who lived in remote places, like the desert. Everything about her screams Lamashtu, but she's indistinct and she can be avoided. She's a spectral being, not a deity. Presumably Pazuzu defeated this aspect of Her.

The Semites picked up this legend and, perhaps linking her back to her divine origin, transformed Her into Lilith.

Meanwhile, the real Lamashtu still lingered, until the Hellenic culture could gain enough traction to sweep Her up into their pantheon. Suddenly Lamia emerged, sharing so many of the characteristics - particularly in matters of devouring babies and seducing men - but controllable. Lamia began as a human woman. Even in Her divinity, She is only a minor figure in the Greek pantheon. Her nemesis Hera far out-ranks Her.

The world now had blood-suckers, who were originally human, but are now immortal. The genesis of the vampire was there. But it needed more to transform the monster fully into the form that we would recognize today.

What happened next is very much open to speculation. I personally believe that it was the Celts, who carried the legend of Lamia west, across the whole of southern Europe. By 275 BCE, Celtic culture held fast throughout most of Europe, and one of their defining features were shifts in funeral rites.

It's my strong suspicion that Lamia became infused in such spiritual battles, which marked the switch from cremation to tumulus burials. After all, people would have wanted to do right by their beloved deceased, but what could possibly go wrong for a corpse? Extant Celtic spirituality would have had room for the dead rising from their graves to enact revenge. Lamia gave them the terrible means by which that revenge was executed.

Nevertheless, this is all still speculation, based on the history and location of the Celts at the time, plus evidence from Celtic cultures elsewhere. (Lamia exists in Basque; and sixth century Ireland definitely had vampiric folklore.)

Now the notion of a blood-sucking, immortal monster was firmly linked with the grave. Plus it had humanity, not divinity, at its root.

The Celts moved on, pressed ever westward by invading Slavonic tribes or the emerging might of the Roman Empire. Yet their stories remained where they had been. This included the Danube River Basin, which is absolutely the traditional hotbed for vampire legends. It includes Serbia, which gave us the very word 'vampire', and eventually kick-started the 18th Century Vampire Controversy.

It's that latter part of verifiable history, which inspired the modern vampire genre in books, then movies and television.

It was the idea of Lamashtu, rather than the goddess Herself, which survived. Divorced from the original, this idea was flexible enough to twist and change under the influence of several cultures, primarily Hellenic, Celtic and Slavonic. Once the vampiric idea could gather around a male figure, then the way was wide open to create Count Dracula.

Lamashtu would have eaten him alive.