Lamashtu

Lamashtu (in Sumerian Dimme) is a fearsome demoness of ancient Mesopotamia, daughter of the celestial god Anu. Unlike most Mesopotamian demons, who acted on the orders of the gods, Lamashtu acted according to her own malevolent will, which made her an especially terrifying force. Akkadian and Babylonian texts describe her with a lion's head, donkey's teeth, hairy body, long fingers and nails, and hands stained with blood. She is often depicted kneeling on a donkey or a boat, nursing a dog and a pig, and holding snakes in both hands. She was known by seven names and embodied the danger that lurked for women and newborns.

Lamashtu's terror preyed mainly on pregnant women and infants. She was believed to slip into houses to touch the belly of the pregnant woman, cause miscarriage or steal the child from its mother's breast to drink its blood and devour its flesh. She was also blamed for illnesses, nightmares, sudden death of the infant and sterility. As a force of chaos, she spread fevers and contagions, withered vegetation and poisoned waters and rivers. Her autonomous character, not subject to any god, placed her among the most dangerous threats of the demonic pantheon, for she could not be appeased through offerings to a higher divinity.

Against Lamashtu, the Mesopotamians resorted to apotropaic magic. Pregnant women and mothers wore amulets, and it was customary to invoke the wind demon Pazuzu, her great rival, whose image was hung or placed facing her to drive her away. The famous plaques against Lamashtu show her being expelled to the underworld through the waters, while Pazuzu watches her from above. Spells were recited that listed her seven names to dominate her and gifts (combs, spindles, brooches) were offered to her so that she would leave appeased. Lamashtu endured for millennia as the personification of the ancestral fear of perinatal death, and her iconography influenced later representations of female child-devouring demons in the Near East.