Binary thinking and the gods

It is probably significant that it is so often difficult to establish whether a particular entity was imagined as anthropomorphic or not. The shifting forms and the ambiguities in the representation of gods suggest that unlike modern researchers, ancient Mesopotamians were not particularly interested in whether a god was anthropomorphic or not. Indications that there was something significantly different about the gods of non-anthropomorphic form are very rare in Mesopotamian documents. Our own greater interest in the issue probably reflects the importance of largely anthropomorphic deities in the dominant modern Western religious traditions, but may also reflect the apparent preference of modern Western cultures or binary thinking, including categorizing in terms of “either/or,” a preference that is not universally shared. Mesopotamian descriptions of some gods as having many forms or aspects (e.g., Ishtar as a star, love, war, a queen, etc.) suggest that the Mesopotamian model of god was not construed in binary terms, and that Mesopotamians tended instead to envision a particular god as moving fluidly within a set of alternate forms.—Barbara N. Porter in What Is a God?, 187–88