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The chronological tables were followed by extensive notes on some unknown text, and there were a lot of photographs of various antiquities pasted into the folder.

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the second or third article that tatarsky came across was entitled: 'babylon: the three chaldean riddles'. beneath the letter '0' in the word 'babylon' he could make out a letter 'e' that had been whited out and corrected - it was nothing more than a typing error, but the sight of it threw tatarsky into a state of agitation. the name he'd been given at birth and had rejected on reaching the age of maturity had returned to haunt him just at the moment when he'd completely forgotten the story he'd told his childhood friends about the part the secret lore of babylon was to play in his life.
below the heading there was a photograph of the impression of a seal - a gate of iron bars on the top of either a mountain or a stepped pyramid, and standing beside it a man with a beard dressed in a skirt, with something that looked like a shawl thown over his shoulders. it seemed to tatarsky that the man was holding two severed heads by their thin plaits of hair; but one of the heads had no facial features, while the second was smiling happily. tatarsky read the inscription under the drawing: 'a chaldean with a mask and a mirror on a zig-gurat'. he squatted on a pile of books removed from the closet and began reading the text beneath the photograph. the mirror and the mask are the ritual requisites oflshtar. the canonical representation, which expresses the sacramental symbolism of her cult more fully, is oflshtar in a gold mask, gazing into a mirror. gold is the body of the goddess and its negative projection is the light of the stars. this has led several researchers to assume that the third ritual requisite of the goddess is the fly-agaric mushroom, the cap of which is a natural map of the starry sky.
if this is so, then we must regard the fly-agaric as the 'heavenly mushroom' referred to in various texts. this assumption is indirectly confirmed by the details of the myth of the three great ages, the ages of the red, blue and yellow skies. the red fly-agaric connects the chaldean with the past; it provides access to the wisdom and strength of the age of the red sky. the brown fly-agaric ('brown' and 'yellow' were designated by the same word in accadian), on the other hand, provides a link with the future and a means of taking possession all of its inexhaustible energy. turning over a few pages at random, tatarsky came across the word 'fly-agaric' again. the three chaldean riddles (the three riddles oflshtar). according to the tradition of the chaldean riddles, any inhabitant of babylon could become the goddess's husband. in order to do this he had to drink a special beverage and ascend her ziggurat. it is not clear whether by this was intended the ceremonial ascent of a real structure in babylon or a hallucinatory experience.
the second assumption is supported by the fact that the potion was prepared according to a rather exotic recipe: it included 'the urine of a red ass' (possibly the cinnabar traditional in ancient alchemy) and 'heavenly mushrooms' (evidently fly-agaric, cf. according to tradition the path to the goddess and to supreme wisdom (the babylonians did not differentiate these two concepts, which were seen as flowing naturally into one another and regarded as different aspects of the same reality) was via sexual union with a golden idol of the goddess, which was located in the upper chamber of the ziggurat. it was believed that at certain times the spirit of ishtar descended into this idol. in order to be granted access to the idol it was necessary to guess the three riddles oflshtar.
these riddles have not come down to us. let us note the controversial opinion of claude greco (see 11,12), who assumes that what is meant is a set of rhymed incantations in ancient accadian discovered during the excavation of nineveh, which are rendered highly polysemantic by means of their homo-nymic structure. a far more convincing interpretation, however, is based on several sources taken together: the three riddles of ishtar were three symbolic objects that were handed to a babylonian who wished to become a chaldean.
he had to interpret the significance of these items (the motif of a symbolic message). on the spiral ascent of the ziggurat there were three gateways, where the future chaldean was handed each of the objects in turn. anybody who got even one of the riddles wrong was pushed over the edge of the ziggurat to certain death by the soldiers of the guard. (there is some reason to derive the later cult ofkybela, based on ritual self-castration, from the cult of ishtar: the significance of the self-castration was evidently as a substitute sacrifice.) even so, there were a great many candidates, since the answers that would open the path to the summit of the ziggurat and union with the goddess actually did exist. once in every few decades someone was successful. the man who answered all three riddles correctly would ascend to the summit and meet the goddess, following which he became a consecrated chaldean and her ritual earthly husband (possibly there were several such simultaneously).
according to one interpretation, the answers to the three riddies oflshtar also existed in written form. in certain special places in babylon tablets were sold imprinted with the answers to the goddess's questions (another interpretation holds that what was meant was a magical seal on which the answers were carved). producing these tablets and trading in them was the business of the priests of the central temple ofenkidu, the patron deity of the lottery. it was believed that the goddess selected her next husband through the agency of enkidu.
this provides a resolution to the conflict, well known to the ancient babylonians, between divine predetermina-tion and free will. therefore most of those who decided to ascend the ziggurat bought clay tablets bearing answers; it was believed the tablets could not be unsealed until after the ascent had begun. this practice was known as the great lottery (the accepted term, for which we are indebted to numerous men of letters inspired by this legend, but a more precise rendering would be the game without a name'). its only possible outcomes were success and death. certain bold spirits actually decided to the ziggurat without any tablet to them. yet another interpretation has it that three questions oflshtar were not riddles, but symbolic reference points indicative of specific life-situations. the babylonian had to through them and present proofs of wisdom to guard on ziggurat in to it possible for to the goddess.
(in this case the ascent of ziggurat described above is rather as .) there was a belief that answers to three questions oflshtar were concealed in the words of market songs that sung every day in bazaar at babylon, but information about these songs or custom has survived.. ..