Zagmuk

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Zagmuk is a Mesopotamian festival celebrated around the [[vernal equinox], which literally means "beginning of the year". It celebrates the resurrection of Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon. The festival lasts 12 days. In Uruk, however, the festival was associated with the god An, the Sumerian god of the night sky. It is essentially equivalent in all respects to the Akkadian "akitu" festival.

During the spring, the rains would bring the floods at just the wrong time, for this was the period when the plants were ready to be harvested. The twelve day festival would reenact the imprisonment of the god inside of a mountain, and the arrival of his son on a barge, who would come to liberate him. In Babylon, the king's role was enacted by Marduk, and his son-rescuer as Nabu, the god of writing. Once freed from the powers of the underworld, the king would enact the rite of the Sacred Marriage on the 10th day of the ceremony. During this rite, the king (or en, as he was known in Sumer) would perform sexual intercourse with his spouse, normally a high priestess who had been chosen from among the "naditum," a special class of priestesses who had taken a vow not of celibacy precisely, but of a refusal to bear children. The high priestess was known as the entu, and her ritual act of intercourse with the king was thought to regenerate the cosmos through a reenactment of the primordial coupling of the cosmic parents An and Ki, who had brought the world into being at the dawn of Time. If an eclipse of the sun fell on any of the 12 days of the ceremony, a substitute for the king was put in his place, since it was thought that any evils which might have befallen the king would accrue to the substitute instead.

It was traditional for one prisoner to be killed, and for one to be set free during this ceremony. Thus, the background for what later became Passover and then Easter is clearly visible here, for during Christ's crucifixion on Passover, the thief Barabbas was set free and Christ was crucified at the behest of the crowd.

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