Summary
Pazuzu is the king of the wind demons in Assyria and Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. His form is half human and half animal, his face terrifying, with sharp fangs, staring eyes and a frowning brow; he has wings, and he stands as if about to attack, claws and teeth bared. Among the demons he alone is of divine nature, which is why he is called their king. He is evil in himself, coming out of the mountains with the wind that brings disease, but people made him a guardian: as king of the demons he can stop the demons, so pregnant women hung small Pazuzu heads round their necks to drive away Lamaštu, the killer of infants, and statuettes of him were kept in houses.
His story is short and he tells it himself, on the back of the wings of his bronze statuette in the Louvre, written in Sumerian: "I, Pazuzu, son of the god Hanpa, am king of the evil lilû demons. I climb the mighty, raging mountain. The winds among which I move I have turned to the west, and I have broken the wings of each of them." He travels in the wind and rules it, and breaks its wings to take its power away.
The clearest picture of his work is a bronze plaque from Arslan Tash in northern Syria, of the eighth century BCE, now in the Louvre. At the top are Pazuzu's head and legs, as if he were looking over the plaque from behind. Below them are seven figures with animal heads and human bodies, then a patient lying on a bed surrounded by exorcists in the form of fish-men, then Lamaštu at the bottom, and Pazuzu appears again at the bottom left to frighten her. The demon is called in to drive the demoness from the sick bed.
The idea he turns on is that evil is driven out by a stronger evil. The wind that comes from the mountains, the edges of the inhabited world, with fever and plague has a king, and whoever carries the king's head is safe from the wind and its troops. Breaking the winds' wings in his inscription matches what Adapa did to the south wind when he broke its wing with a word, so that it did not blow over the land for seven days.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. It is written ᵈpa-zu-zu, with the letters p, z, z. The Babylonian and Sumerian essays read it from Arabic fazza: Akkadian p answers Arabic f regularly, since Arabic has no p, and the repeated z at the end of the name is the doubled z of fazza. Lane: fazza fulānan ʿan mawḍiʿihi, he frightened someone and unsettled him from his place and made his heart fly; istafazzahu, he unsettled him and drove him out of the land or out of his abode; fazza, a leap with fright. That is Pazuzu's work on the amulets: he frightens Lamaštu and drives her out of the house.
Linguistic Root
Pazuzu and fazza
| Form | Use |
|---|---|
| ᵈpa-zu-zu | On amulets and statuettes; the divine sign is silent |
| Hanpa | His father's name in the Louvre statuette's inscription |
| lilû | The demons of whom he is king |
The reading rests on letters, sense and story together. The letters: Akkadian p comes from Proto-Semitic p, which is always f in Arabic, z is z, and the name repeats the syllable zu as the Arabic root f-z-z doubles its last letter, so no letter of the name is left without a counterpart. The sense, in Lane: fazza of a gazelle, it took fright; fazza qalbuhu, his heart leapt with fear; fazza fulānan ʿan mawḍiʿihi, he unsettled and frightened someone from his place; istafazzahu, he drove him out of the land or out of his abode, as the Qur'anic "they were near to unsettling thee from the land" is explained. The root has a second witness in Hebrew: pāzaz, be supple, leap, in Jacob's blessing "the arms of his hands were made agile" and in David "leaping and dancing before the LORD", and Brown, Driver and Briggs set beside it the Arabic "be frightened, excited". The story: the king of the wind demons who frightens Lamaštu from the pregnant woman's house and drives her out, and breaks the wings of the winds. The reading is complete in letters, sense and story, though Assyriologists have not settled the name's origin.
Other readings in the two essays
After fazza both essays list bazza, to seize and strip, making Pazuzu the one who strips away evil spirits; the Babylonian essay calls it middling. Bazza needs the Akkadian p to come from Semitic b, which cuneiform allows, since one sign is read with both. Lane gives bazza as to despoil, and the proverb man ʿazza bazza, he who prevails despoils. It meets the story from the side of driving out and stripping away; fazza meets it from the side of fright and expulsion together. The Babylonian essay adds a third, faṣṣa, to remove a thing from its place, with z changed to ṣ, and calls it interpretive. Lane notes that fazza and faṣṣa alternate for a wound that oozes, so the senses are close, but the z is firm in the name and needs no change.
Key Mythic Narratives
The amulets that survive
Many Pazuzu amulets survive, most of them small heads with a loop for hanging. The British Museum has a cast copper-alloy head from Assyria, perhaps from Nimrud, and a bronze plaque bearing his image with two rings at the top, to be worn as an amulet. The Louvre has a small Neo-Assyrian head of haematite, and the Metropolitan Museum a pendant with his head. The French Ministry of Culture's site says the number found shows how popular he was in Assyria in the first millennium BCE.
Exorcists and medicine
The Ministry's site places Pazuzu in the exorcist's work: illness was taken as the result of an offence against the gods, which the patient might not know of himself, so the exorcist asked pardon of the offended god or called on a higher one. Beside the exorcist at the bedside stood the diviner, who diagnosed the illness, and the asû, who prepared remedies and dressed wounds. Mesopotamians knew that some illnesses had no hidden cause but came from contact with a sick person or from a bite.
From Mesopotamia to the cinema
Pazuzu was forgotten for many centuries, then brought back by the 1973 film The Exorcist, adapted from William Peter Blatty's novel: an archaeologist digging in Iraq awakens the demon, which travels to America and possesses a little girl. From the film he passed into comics and games. The Ministry notes that he resembles the devil of European images and church gargoyles, so he seems familiar to people today.
Symbolic Reading
The Babylonian essay calls Pazuzu king of the wind demons who, "paradoxically", was used for protection against Lamaštu, so that evil drives out evil and his frightening face becomes an amulet for whoever carries it. It sets him beside the Egyptian Seth, god of storms and disorder who sometimes protects. The inscription on his statuette bears this out: in it he says he is king of the demons and has broken the winds' wings, and the protection comes from that kingship.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
The Babylonian essay sets Pazuzu beside the Egyptian Seth, the Indian wind god Vāyu and the Greek Aeolus, ruler of the winds. His nearest Greek likeness is Typhon, from whom, in Hesiod, come the damp violent winds that wreck ships and fill the fields with dust, other than the south wind, the north wind and the clear west wind. In both cases winds are of two kinds: useful winds with gods of their own, and harmful winds that come out of a fearsome being.
In Japan the wind deity Fūjin comes from Izanagi's breath in the Nihon shoki and is later shown in Buddhist images carrying the wind bag, and a Japanese dictionary records a popular image of a wind deity that people drove out in times of epidemic. There too the wind that carries disease has a body that can be expelled.
Egypt has a guardian that answers Pazuzu from the other side: Bes, the fearsome-faced dwarf drawn on ivory wands and in birth houses to protect mother and infant, as Pazuzu's head protects the pregnant woman from Lamaštu.