Every manifestation of the sacred is important to the historian of religions; but it is no less obvious that the structure of the god Anu, for example, or the theogony and cosmogony handed down in the Enuma elish, or the saga of Gilgamesh, reveal the religious creativity and originality of the Mesopotamians more effectively than, let us say, the apotropaic rites against Lamashtu or the mythology of the god Nusku. Sometimes the importance of a religious creation is revealed by its later valorizations. Very little is known about the Eleusinian Mysteries and the earliest manifestations of
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