Mis Pi u Pit Pi (Mesopotamian Mouth Washing and Opening)

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.

Mesopotamian and Egyptian religion each independently developed a ceremony that opens or washes a divine image's mouth, and the resemblance in name has led to them being conflated in older popular writing, but Assyriologists and Egyptologists treat them as separate traditions with separate textual histories and different primary applications, the Egyptian rite centered on funerary images and mummies at burial, the Mesopotamian rite centered on the ongoing cultic life of temple statues.

The Mesopotamian ceremony is known mainly from two overlapping but not identical text traditions, one from Babylon and one from the Assyrian capital Nineveh, both preserved in first millennium copies though referencing older practice, and modern reconstruction, notably by the Assyriologists Christopher Walker and Michael Dick, has had to reconcile the two versions' differing sequences of incantations and ritual actions. The rite could also be repeated, since a damaged or repaired statue, or one that had been carried off as war booty and later recovered, required a fresh mis pi u pit pi before it could resume functioning as a living god's dwelling, which is one reason the ceremony recurs so often in the historical record of captured and returned cult images across Mesopotamian history.