Lamashtu is among the most feared malign powers of ancient Mesopotamian belief, and she is unusual in her genealogy: where most Mesopotamian demons act as agents of the gods, executing divine punishment, Lamashtu is said to be a daughter of the sky god Anu who acts on her own malicious will. Her particular horror is directed at pregnancy and infancy, she was blamed for miscarriage, stillbirth, cot-death, and childbed fever, imagined creeping to the bed of a new mother to snatch the baby from the breast. She is depicted as a hybrid monster: the head of a lioness, the teeth of a donkey, taloned feet, suckling a piglet and a pup, holding serpents.
Because she could not simply be worshipped away, protection against her took the form of counter-magic: amulets, incantations, and above all the invocation of the wind-demon Pazuzu, her enemy, whose grotesque image was hung over the bed or worn as a pendant to drive her off. Lamashtu is a window into how the ancient world explained the terrible ordinariness of maternal and infant death, as the deliberate malice of a named, self-willed power.