Demonic · Deliverance tradition · c. 1000 BCE
Tammuz
Also called Dumuzid, Adonis · also recorded as Thaumuz (per Wikidata)
Ezekiel is shown women weeping for Tammuz at the north gate of the temple — a Sumerian god still being mourned in Jerusalem two thousand years after his cult began.
Well sourced
Ezekiel's temple vision moves through escalating abominations, and one of them is women sitting at the gate of the LORD's house weeping for Tammuz. The ritual is the annual mourning for a god who dies and returns with the agricultural year, attested in Sumerian texts more than a millennium before Ezekiel and surviving into the Greek Adonis.
One verse, and it establishes that a Mesopotamian dying-god cult was being practised at the temple gate in the sixth century BCE. The Hebrew month of Tammuz still carries his name.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Sumerian *Dumuzid*, 'faithful son'. The Greek Adonis is from the Semitic *adon*, 'lord'.
Where it was actually worshipped
Ezekiel sees women weeping for him at the north gate of the Temple itself. The mourning is the cult, and it travelled from Mesopotamia rather than belonging to any one shrine.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- Named there as
- Dumuzi
- Rank
- Dying God
- Order
- Deliverance tradition
- Base of operations
- Ezekiel sees women weeping for him at the north gate of the Temple itself. The mourning is the cult, and it travelled from Mesopotamia rather than belonging to any one shrine.
- Era
- c. 1000 BCE
- Traditions
- Christian, Deliverance & Spiritual Warfare
Traits
- Domain
- The dying and returning year, mourning rites
- How firm the basis is
- Strong — named in the text, and very old outside it
- Textual basis
- Ezekiel 8:14
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Tammuz, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- transformation2
- material1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Tammuz, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 600 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Dumuzi, Tammuz
- Rank: given as Consort of Ishtar; A god mourned at the temple gate
Given up by Ishtar as her substitute in the underworld, which is the origin of the annual mourning.
Women sit weeping for him at the door of the north gate of the LORD's house, shown to Ezekiel as an abomination.
“There sat women weeping for Tammuz.”
Connections
What is it connected to?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
Heavily used in nineteenth-century comparative religion, and in a strand of Protestant polemic that traces Catholic practice to Babylonian origins through him. That reconstruction rests on Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons (1853), which is not regarded as sound by historians of religion of any confession.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Tammuz?
Is Tammuz the same as Osiris?
What rank is Tammuz?
How else is Tammuz spelled?
What is Tammuz said to do?
How old is Tammuz?
Nearest in the corpus
If Tammuz is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Asmoday
King · Goetic Spirit
Commands seventy-two legions, one for every spirit in the book. He is the Asmodeus of Tobit, who killed Sarah's seven husbands and was driven into Upper Egypt by Raphael, and behind that the Avestan Aeshma-daeva, the demon of wrath — one of very few Goetic spirits with an ancestry that can be traced.
Astaroth
Duke · Goetic Spirit
The Canaanite goddess Astarte, three thousand years on, made a male duke of hell with her name intact. The Goetia has him discourse willingly on the fall of the spirits, and warns the operator to hold a ring to his face against the stench of his breath.
Beelzebub
Prince · Infernal Court
'Lord of the Flies' — a Philistine god of Ekron whose name was almost certainly deformed as a Hebrew insult, then inherited by Christian demonology as the second power of hell.
Belial
King · Goetic Spirit
In the Hebrew Bible beliya'al is not a name but a word meaning worthlessness; by 2 Corinthians it is a person, and by the Goetia a king in a chariot of fire handing out senatorships. The text says he was created next after Lucifer and fell among the first, and will not answer truly without gifts.
The Spirits of Affliction
Group of Named Spirits · Deliverance tradition
The remaining 'spirit of X' phrases, grouped because the tradition's whole method stands or falls on how they are read.
Bael
King · Goetic Spirit
First of the seventy-two and, by the Goetia's own account, chief among them — a three-headed thing on spider's legs, ruling in the east and granting invisibility. The name is the Canaanite storm god Baal, three thousand years and one demotion later.
The books behind Tammuz
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld
Anonymous Akkadian; earlier Sumerian recension of Inanna · c. 1000 BCE, from older Sumerian material · Akkadian
Read The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld in full ↗Cover: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Gennadii Saus i Segura · Wikimedia file page
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.