A couple of days ago I found a link to an article about the real-life version of the Tower of Babel (Source: https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/inside-etemenanki-real-life-tower-babel-0010025 ), and it mentions an interesting ritual that was supposedly performed there.
In it, a girl would be informed that the god Marduk had become interested in her, and she was taken to the top of the tower and left there alone, "to be [Marduks] lover".
Now, presumably this woman would have believed in Marduk... why wouldn't she? And so would the priests. What would she do when the god never materialized? Would one of hte priests claim to be Marduk and do the deed in his place? Would she lie about him appearing? Would she tell the truth, that nothing happened?
How would the people rationalize their gods never materializing as expected? Presumably the priests were also believers, so they probably wouldn't fake it, right?
I don't mind if you use other examples than the "Marduks lover" one, I am just curious how this was addressed back when people seemed to expect more close contact with the gods than what people in later ages seemed to. I'm sure there are examples of similar stuff happening in Greece, Rome, Egypt, or other places
It starts with the way you're asking the question. How do you know the god didn't appear? What would it mean for the god to appear?
You're thinking about this from a Western post-Enlightenment frame of mind, which says the only "real" things are things that can be falsified by scientific experimentation, so you're expecting a fleshly, physical humanoid being "materializing" (that's your word, not necessarily the ancients' word) out of thin air. But that's not how all people think or historically have thought.
These sorts of rituals are attested throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean (and I assume the rest of the world, but I'm gonna stick with my expertise here). Do we assume that for thousands of years, in hundreds of cultures, people have just been play-acting religions they didn't believe in? Or might we be thinking about it from an incompatible worldview?
There are lots of ways a god might "appear" to a human being. An excellent example are Greek incubation cults. In the Asclepius temples, suppliants would go to sleep in the temple and the god would appear to them in their dreams to tell them how to cure their diseases. In some accounts, the god actually appeared and actually cured them. So here we have two ways a god might appear to a person: in a dream, or in reality (more on that below). What about oracular temples? At Delphi, Apollo "appeared" by speaking through the Sybil. In the book of Acts, God doesn't appear, but people are healed by pieces of cloth that Paul had touched (19:11-12), so God's power is made physically manifest (and yes, that's a literary example, but it's not "fiction" in the modern sense--Luke is telling us something about his worldview and the way he thinks divinity works).
People in these cultures understood the world to be completely infused with divinity. In Homer, not to mention actual everyday and cultic practice, the gods' intentions can be read through the behaviors of animals. The movements of the stars and less usual heavenly events could tell us things about what the gods were up to. Shapes and colorations in a cow's liver. There's no such thing as "supernatural" in the ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, because divinity is an integral part of nature. It would be like us saying that atoms are supernatural.
By the way, none of this means that pre-Enlightenment people were stupid, even though we tend to (implicitly or explicitly) think of them that way. They just had different ways of understanding the world than we do. The scientific worldview is very good at handling certain types of knowledge, but not as good for others, like spirituality. Unfortunately, Western culture has developed the attitude that scientific knowledge is the only kind.
So now that we've revised our worldview a little bit, what's going on in that Marduk temple? It's possible that a priest is playing the role of Marduk. But that's also a way that gods can appear to humans--either because, in legal terms, sometimes a representative "is" the king for the purposes of the people he's addressing (again, remember ancient categories of being aren't necessarily the same as modern ones), or because the priest is actually being possessed by the god. This is common in West African traditions and the African/Christian/indigenous syncretic traditions in the Americas--in New Orleans Voodoo it's called "horsing." It's also possible that the woman herself is undergoing an ecstatic state and actually experiences some kind of union with the god. Teresa of Avila famously had erotic encounters with Christ, and so did other medieval mystics. Modern Evangelical and charismatic Christians regularly enter ecstatic states, and even though they're usually not erotic in that context, they tend to be intensely physical. And they can come with visual phenomena. Think of Asclepius appearing, outside of your dream, to tell you how to fix your skin infection.
Ecstatic states aren't fiction, or imagined, or cons. They can be induced, and some circumstances are more amenable than others, but that's true of any other psycho-physical state--think about the circumstances and environment you need in order to get to sleep at night, or do your job effectively. But they can also happen suddenly and involuntarily. Whether Marduk is "real" is beyond the ken of this sub, but (as much as I poo-poohed scientific knowledge up there) ecstatic states are scientifically documented and attested throughout human cultures.