The Craftsmen Who Had to Deny Making the God

The rite's most striking feature is a formal act of denial. Woodcarvers, metalworkers and stone cutters had plainly built the statue with their own hands, but partway through the ceremony their tools were symbolically severed from the work, often with a wooden or metal knife, while the priests recited that the craftsmen's hands had not truly made the image at all, since it had instead been fashioned by the divine craftsman gods Ninkurra, Ninagal and Kusibanda working through them. This was not a polite fiction layered over an acknowledged craft process. It addressed a real theological problem: a god could not be understood to owe existence to a human workshop, so the ritual text had to relocate the statue's true origin to the divine sphere before the mouth washing could proceed.

The image was then carried in procession to the riverbank at night, purified with holy water, incense and repeated incantations addressing the craftsman gods and the great gods together, before the culminating washing and opening of the mouth allowed the god's life force to enter the object for the first time. Some versions of the text have the craftsmen's tools themselves thrown into the river at this point in the ceremony, a further physical severance of the human hands that shaped the image from the divine object the ritual insisted they had not truly made.