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Hesiod, continued…

The Offspring of Father Sky and Mother Earth…

 The Hundred-Handed Ones; Cyclopes; Titans; and Giants…

The Emasculation of Uranos…

Cronos and Rhea…

The Birth of the Cretan Zeus…

The War between the Titans and Olympians…

The Revolt of the Giants:  Ossa upon Pelion…

     After listing as the descendants of Chaos such antithetical abstractions as Night and Day, Tartarus (the realm of death) and Love (the agency of life), Hesiod returns to Gaea and Uranos, Mother Earth and Father Sky, the first recognizably human couple.  And from that moment on, things begin to go awry.

Amongst their first generation of offspring were monsters, strange gigantic creatures with the raw potency of hurricanes, earthquake, and volcano.  These brats not only played their music too loud, but three of them, Cottus, Briareos, and Gyes (“presumptuous children”, as Hesiod describes them), had a hundred arms and fifty heads.  A different species of giants, the Cyclopes, towered upwards like craggy mountains, and had only a single, enormous eye in the middle of their foreheads.

After giving birth to such a litter, Gaea might have excused herself from the marriage bed; instead, she and Uranos blithely continued to procreate.  Their next brood of monsters were the Titans, just as overgrown as the previous generation.  Of course, the Titans were something of an improvement; not all of them were merely destructive, and several, in fact, became minor benefactors who slightly advanced the cause of civilization.  But they too, in the end, turned out to be troublemakers.

Like a typical Mother, Gaea loved her children unstintingly, warts and all.  But Father Uranos soon repined; he positively despised and refused to accept paternity of the hundred-handed, fifty-headed creatures, and as each issued from Mother Earth’s various crevices and orifices, he simply pushed it back in.  The Cyclopes and Titans he left at large, and Gaea, indignant at Uranos’ maltreatment of their other children, enlisted them against him.

 

The boldest of them, the Titan Cronos, lay in wait for his father and ambushed him while “he spread himself full upon the Earth”, as Hesiod delicately puts it, wounding him grievously with a jagged sickle in the “thigh”.  From the blood that issued from Cronos’ “thigh wound”, as it euphemistically referred to, sprang another brood of monsters, the Giants.  From the same fecund blood came the Erinyes (the Furies), those fetching femmes fatales with writhing snakes for hair, and eyes that wept tears of blood, whose mission in life was to punish sinners and make others mad with yearning for revenge or mayhem.  And finally, from the foam created by Uranos’ member where it fell into the sea, issued Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess.

Having emasculated and then dethroned his Father Uranos, Cronos thereafter reigned for the next epoch as universal King, with his sister-queen, Rhea.  But as it turned out, he was no more devoted a father than his own.

Learning from Uranos and Gaea that one of his own children was destined some day to overthrow him, Cronos decided that the prudent thing was to swallow each immediately after its birth.  But when Rhea was pregnant with Zeus, her sixth child, she sought counsel with her parents as to how to save the baby from her husband’s infanticidal hunger, and in the process, to avenge her Father Uranos for the indignity that Cronos had inflicted upon him.

Rhea was advised to repair secretly to the island of Crete, where in a remote cave she might safely deliver and nurture the future lord of the world.  Having done so, she handed Cronos a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he supposed was the divine child, and promptly swallowed down.  Much later, when Zeus was fully grown, he forced his father, with the help of his grandmother Gaea, to disgorge the stone, along with his five older siblings.  The stone was eventually set up as a monument at Delphi, and thereafter venerated by generations of supplicants to the oracle;  it was called the “omphalos”, and said to be located at the very centre of the globe.

 

There followed a tumultuous war between Cronos (leader of his brother Titans) and Zeus (aided by his five brothers and sisters)–a war that shook the cosmos to its very foundations.  The Titans were eventually conquered, in part because Zeus released from their prison the hundred-handed monsters who came to his aid with their weapons of thunder, lightning, and earthquake; and partly because one of the sons of the Titan Iapetus, whose name was Prometheus–and who was incomparably wise–, went over to the Olympian cause.

Once he defeated them, Zeus was careful to make an example of his rebellious enemies.  He hurled them down into the depths of Tartarus, a full eighteen days’ journey from heaven, as Hesiod famously describes it–nine days as the bronze anvil falls from Olympus to earth, and another nine days from earth to the pit of Hell–, and bound them there in adamantine chains.  Prometheus’ brother, the Titan Atlas, suffered an even more grievous fate, having been made to bear upon his shoulders the Atlas Mountains along with the whole crushing weight of the earth and sky.

But even after his victory over the Titans, the peace was not completely secured.  Mother Earth gave birth again, this time to her most terrifying offspring, a creature named Typhon.

Typhon sported a hundred heads, from the eyes of each of which flashed fire, and the jaw of each dripped death.  Zeus dispatched him with his most powerful thunderbolt, leaving Typhon a smouldering pool beneath Mt. Aetna, whence periodically there burst forth rivers of molten lava, whenever Typhon’s anger boils over.

Still later, one more attempt was made to usurp the usurper Zeus.  The Giants, late-born sons of Gaea, rebelled, piling Mt. Ossa upon Mt. Pelion in their assault upon Olympus; but their overreaching ambition too was punished, and they were hurled down to Tartarus to join their fellow insurrectionists.

So ends the Theogony of Hesiod, a Byzantine and often bizarre roll-call of divine names and events which, nonetheless, follow a predictable (if notorious) cycle of infanticides, parricides, rebellions, and usurpations from generation to generation.

We can of course look upon these repetitions from any number of viewpoints.  As the Greeks themselves understood from the beginning, the immoral behaviour of the gods of myth was merely human behaviour projected into transcendence.  (For such anthropomorphisms, the mythic poets were either condemned as “liars” or excused as inspired allegorists, who took refuge in such symbolic fictions as were necessary to describe the ineffable Divine.)

But the more important explanation for the repetition of these motives is religious and psychological.  The overthrow of the first generation of the gods, the earth-born Titans, by the Olympians–the Titanomachy–looks back dimly to a period in Greek pre-history when the principal deity throughout the Mediterranean world was the Magna Mater, the Great Goddess of the Earth, upon whom Bronze-age agricultural peoples necessarily depended for their survival.  The masculine sky-religion of Zeus and his fellow Olympians only arrived with the migration from the north of the Hellenic tribes into the Greek mainland at the beginning of the third millennium B.C., and the transition from the older, chthonian (or earth-centred) religions to the later ouranian religion of storm and weather is undoubtedly what Hesiod’s Titanomachy mythological recalls.

More generally, however, the them of the Father-King’s being warned that a son will arise to overthrow him, and the son’s inevitable fulfillment of his father’s fears, is an age-old and universal archetype, made famous in modern times by Freud’s so-called “Oedipus complex” (to which we shall have to return).  But it is so fundamental to the cyclical rhythms of life and death, power and impotence, that it is hard to identify its origins or ultimate meaning.

It may well be based on the ancient tribal rite of the Killing of the King (or Priest King), whose term was fixed because it was believed that his powers were subject to exhaustion, and so, at the end of it, he was “slain” in a kind of mimetic drama by the heir apparent, thus ensuring the uninterrupted vitality of the tribe and its land.

But I doubt that this exhausts the significance of the archetype, which, as I have just said, expresses the universal alternation between death and life, darkness and life, which is an essential datum of our existence, and certainly the most powerful one in which the human psyche experiences it.  When we eventually turn to the myth of the hero, we will encounter innumerable examples of this motive.

Cosmogony and Cosmology of the Greeks…

 Homer: The primeval Ocean (again)…

 Hesiod’s Theogony…

The Nine Muses…Inspiration and Deification (again)…

Chaos and the Separation of Earth and Sky (again)…

     Whether due to cultural transmission or the spontaneous reassertion of the archetypal psyche, the cosmology and cosmogony of the Greeks exhibits many of the same motives we’ve already met in the Near East.

Homer, the earliest of the Greek poets (ca. 750 B.C.?), has left us only the briefest notice in Iliad XIV(201), to the effect that all the gods and living things arose from Okeanos, the great ocean that encircles the world-disk, and that Tethys, the female spirit of these primordial waters, was his wife.  It was therefore left to Hesiod, Homer’s most famous literary son, to compose, within a century of the bard’s death, the cosmogony and early history of the world that was to achieve a kind of canonicity in the later classical Greek imagination.

The Hesiodic cosmogony is retailed at the beginning of his Theogony (literally, the genealogy of the gods), an exotic and often bizarre roll-call of names and events which nonetheless continued to echo down the centuries of the Western literary and philosophical tradition.

Hesiod begins with the Muses, one of whose sacred mountains is Helicon in Boeotia, in the shadows of which Hesiod presumably dwells.  It is the Muses who commanded him to sing of the race of the blessed gods, and so inspired him—“breathed into him”, says Hesiod at l. 30, using the root meaning of the verb “inspire”—“their own divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime”.  (In Greek antiquity, as we’ll see, the poet and wise man are the two personalities who are specially blessed with inspiration—who are ventriloquized by the Voice of God; who are exalted, that is, to that state of possession by the soul of the Divine–as to become gods among men.)

 

The Muses are nine in number, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or Memory.  In Hesiod, the nine Muses are not as yet fully distinguished from one another in function:  “they are all”, says Hesiod, “of one mind, set upon song, the holy gift that frees a man from care”.  Later, each of the nine Muses would become the patroness of a different art or discipline of knowledge:  Clio the Muse of history, Urania of astronomy, Melpomene of tragedy, Thalia of comedy, Terpsichore of dance, Calliope of epic, Erato of love-poetry, Polyhymnia of hymns to the gods, and Euterpe of lyric poetry.  Since names such as Erato, Urania, and Polyhymnia are obviously allegorical abstractions, it’s clear that the Muses were understood as that mysterious source of the human artistic imagination in general that the ancients thought of as the Divine, and that we call the unconscious.

At line 100 or so, Hesiod invokes the Muses to help him sing his first great theme, the creation of the gods and the world:

Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all.

Following Hesiod, practically every cosmogony in the history of the West would begin with this mysterious concept “Chaos”.  Here is the Roman poet Ovid, in the opening lines of his Metamorphoses:

Before land was and sea—before air and sky
Arched over all, all Nature was all Chaos,
The rounded body of all things in one.

Here, 1700 years later, is the Christian poet Milton, in his Paradise Lost:

First there was Chaos, the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild.

And indeed, though there is no mention of any “Chaos” in the biblical cosmogony in Genesis, nonetheless the Hesiodic, Graeco-Roman, and generally pagan assumption that the world was created through the ordering of a pre-existent, formless mass, in which all the elements were at first chaotically and indistinguishably mixed up with one another, became a presupposition of Christian cosmogony as well, right from the nascency of the Church.

 

We are so familiar with the idea of the world-order being produced out of chaos that we tend to assume that in Hesiod’s account, too, “Chaos” stands for that pre-existent state of things out of which the world comes into being.  But Hesiod distinctly say that Chaos itself “came into being”, and we must therefore ask ourselves from what prior state of things it arose.

In fact, the Greek word chaos is derived from a root meaning “gap” or “gulf”, and from later uses of the word in the Theogony, most scholars now agree that it refers to the chasm that separates earth and heaven.  Hesiod’s account, then, begins with the opening up of a gap between heaven and earth, which of course, presumes a pre-existing state of affairs in which heaven and earth were once one.

This assumption is indeed is an immemorial one of universal diffusion.  A famous fragment preserved from a lost work of Euripides reads:

Not from me but from my mother
Comes the tale how earth and sky
Were once one form, but being separated,
Brought forth all things, sending into light
Trees, birds, wild beasts,
Those nourished by the salt sea,
And the race of mortals.

The first line suggests that the tale is an ancient one, and indeed it is told in creation myths much older than Hesiod.  In one version of the Egyptian cosmogony, as we have already seen, Shu (the god of air), tears asunder earth and sky who were originally locked in an infertile pre-cosmogonic embrace, and thus separated, they in turn mate and give birth to two divine couples, the god Osiris and his consort Isis, along with their brother Seth and his consort Nephthys.

Similarly, in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, earth and sky are at first conjoined in the primeval waters of Apsu-Tiamat.  Then the creator-hero Marduk, after a great battle, kills Tiamat, the dragon of the sea, and fillets her body into two halves, one of which he sets above to be the sky with its sweet waters, the other below, to be the earth, with its salt sea.  This, as we’ve also seen, is the source of that mysterious text in Genesis according to which “God divided the waters which were below the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament” to create heaven and earth.  Genesis, moreover, begins with a state in which the earth, sky, and sea seem to be chaotically intermingled: when “the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”.

 

The separation of the earth and sky is a theme that I’ve called the pre-cosmogonic divorce, before which the opposing male and female principles were conjoined in a completely undifferentiated unity.  Naturally, this unity was barren, and the process of creation could not begin until, having been separated, Father Sky and Mother Earth could recombine in a fertile embrace.

That the sexual union of Father Sky and Mother Earth should be conceived as the agency by which the world is first created is also, obviously, archetypal, inasmuch as to the ancient mythic imagination, the annual rebirth of the world every the spring depends upon the insemination of the womb of Mother Earth by the seed with which Father Sky impregnates her in the form of rain and sunshine.

Later in Greek philosophy, as we’ll see, the opposites are no longer conceived in these expressly anthropomorphic and sexual terms, but rather as the abstract contraries hot and cold, wet and dry, or the elements earth, water, air, and fire.  But the ancient mythological afflatus continued to inform these later, supposedly rational concepts, since the elemental opposites too were imagined as at first mixed up together in a chaotic primordial unity, before being separated out and assigned to their respective provinces, an ordering on which the whole cosmogonic enterprise apparently depended.

We’ll return to these ideas when we come to the Pre-Socratics; for Hesiod, in any case, the coming into being of Chaos by which earth and sky were sundered is the precondition for creation, since creation for Hesiod’s anthropomorphizing imagination is a kind of birth, and all birth presupposes the union of male and female.

The Dragon-killing Theme…

 Biblical Dragons:  Leviathan, Rahab…

In Psalms, Job, Isaiah, the Book of Revelation…

Eschatology as Cosmogony…

     In the previous installment, we traced the afflatus of the Babylonian Enuma Elish in the creation story in Genesis.  As a transposition of the narrative of Marduk’s triumph over the chaos-monster Tiamat, the story in Genesis is subsumed within a much larger class of myths that has been denominated by Northrop Frye and others as “the dragon-killing theme”.

This is another motive of near universal dispersion in myth, folklore, and literature.  Perhaps the most famous example of it is the Greek fable of Perseus, who kills the sea-dragon that has besieged the kingdom of the impotent old King Cepheus and is feasting on its citizens, one by one, until only the beautiful princess Andromeda remains.  (The Perseus story is one of the pagan antecedents of the early Christian legend of St. George and the dragon.)  We will encounter another inflection of this pattern in the Egyptian solar myth of Re, who confronts the dragon of the night-sea on his return journey beneath the world towards the eastern sky.  The Greek myths of Theseus and the Minotaur and Oedipus and the Sphinx are also variations of the dragon-killing theme.

Its centrality in Western consciousness, however, depends above all, as we will see, upon its being the organizing archetype of the entire biblical salvation history, which records the cosmic struggle between the Messiah and the Satanic dragon Leviathan.  But before we move on to the dragon-killing theme, we must return to the subject of cosmogony in Scripture, where the killing of the sea-monster Tiamat by Marduk is the source not only of the creation story in Genesis but of other important cosmogonic loci throughout the Old Testament and the New.

In Psalms 74:12-17, for example, we have an account of how Yahweh, in a contest with the waters, smote the many-headed sea-dragon Leviathan, and immediately thereafter created day and night, the heavenly bodies, and the order of the seasons.  We also detect traces of the Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat in Job 38, where Yahweh tames the sea, to which he says, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed”.  (In Genesis, both the separation of the sea from the dry land, and the separation of the waters above from the waters below the firmament are, as we recall, transcriptions of Marduk’s bisection of the maternal sea monster).  Elsewhere in Job, in chapter 26, we have another reference to the slaying of the maritime dragon (called Rahab rather than Leviathan), followed by the taming of the sea, and the ordering of creation:  “He stilleth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he smiteth through Rahab.  By his Spirit the heavens are adorned; his hand hath pierced the swift serpent.”

Again, in Isaiah 51, we find another version of the same creation myth, which has now become historicized and invested in the central event in Hebrew ritual memory, the Passover deliverance of Israel from Egypt:  “Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O arm of the Lord, as in the days of old, the generations of ancient times.  Art not thou that cut Rahab in pieces, that pierced the dragon?  Art not thou that dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep; that made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over”.

Finally, the myth of the killing of the chaos-dragon passes from cosmogony into eschatology, the theological department that concerns itself with the last times or end of the world.  I’ve already mentioned the coalescence in the mythic imagination of discrete moments in time; the relationship between cosmogony and eschatology illustrates this again.  Biblical eschatology, that is, becomes invevitably associated with cosmogony insofar as the final judgment and apocalyptic destruction of the world is only the prelude to a new creation (a new cosmogony) which brings to birth the everlasting kingdom of heaven. Thus Isaiah 27 prophecies of the Last Judgment that “In that day, Yahweh with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the swift serpent, Leviathan the crooked, and shall slay the dragon that is the sea.”

In the New Testament Book of Revelation, this is finally accomplished at the end time, when Christ destroys the dragon of the sea, dries up its waters, establishes the Celestial Jerusalem, marries the White Princess (who had been in thrall to the Leviathanic dragon, identified with Satan, since the Fall of Man), and reigns with her as heavenly King and Queen.  But, as I’ve said, we’ll have to postpone a fuller discussion of this overarching mythic theme until later.

Vernal Rebirth and the Creation of the World…

The Circularity of Time…

Eliade’s Eternal Return…

Enuma Elish and the Creation Story in Genesis…

Pneuma, Spiritus, Anima, and Breath

Creation as the Breathing into the World of the Divine Soul…

The Adamic Clay and  Mother Earth…

Creation and the Sexual Act…

     First of all, it should be noted that the recitation of the Enuma Elish was the central liturgical rite of the Akitu, the great Babylonian festival of the New Year.  It was then that Marduk, god of the resurgent vernal sun, in his victory over wintry darkness and sterility, established the conditions for the rebirth of the crops and the vegetation.  To the accompaniment of the singing of the tablets, Marduk’s cosmogonic victory over the chaos-dragon Tiamat was at the same time ritually re-enacted; for on that day, every year, Marduk created the world anew.

In the imagination of the ancient Babylonians, the birth of the year and the birth of the world were thus mutual aspects of the same event, a universally pregnant moment in time that recurs eternally.  Time, as it was normally conceived in antiquity, was not linear but circular, and in its endless cyclical repetitions the ancients saw, as Plato put it in the Timaeus, “the mobile image of eternity”.  As the great mythographer and historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, explains, every moment or phenomenon within the merely temporal or profane order achieved meaning only insofar as it could be connected back with and informed by some primordial event, some mythic “archetype” first established in illo tempore, as the beginning of things.

 

We next observe about the Enuma Elish that, once again, the creation of the world is construed as the distillation and ordering of the cosmic elements out of an original chaos, which (as in the Egyptian cosmogony) is a maritime one.  The sea-serpent Tiamat is the primeval sea, the maternal womb that engenders everything that will eventually come to be.

In Genesis, too, we read that the world arose from a formless watery chaos.  As scholars have understood for generations, the creation myth in Genesis, composed by the so-called Priestly author in the fifth century B.C., was profoundly influenced by the Babylonian cosmogony.

Let us look at the relevant chapters (Gen. 1-8), whereby we can kill two cosmogonic birds with one stone:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.  And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven…

Now, the word used for the abysmal “deep” in Genesis is t’hom, a word that Ancient Near Eastern scholars recognize as a Hebrew corruption of Tiamat, the Babylonian sea-dragon slain by Marduk before he proceeds to create the world-order out of chaos.  Marduk’s splitting of Tiamat’s body in two and his fixing of half of it in the heavens to keep the waters above in their place corresponds to God’s division in Genesis of the waters above the firmament from the waters below.

Marduk creates the world by unleashing the wind into Tiamat’s maritime womb, which we can interpret naturaliter, if we wish, by noting that every spring—every New Year when the Enuma Elish is recited–the waters flood the Mesopotamian plain and the world reverts to its primeval watery chaos:  until, that is, the winds dry up the water, reveal the land, and restore its agricultural fertility.

But there is a more seminal meaning informing this motive, if you can forgive the pun, which will reveal itself if we return to Genesis.  In Gen. 1:2, we meet the image of God’s Spirit brooding pregnantly upon the face of the waters.  Spirit is the English translation of the Latin Spiritus, a translation of the Greek Pneuma, a translation of the Hebrew ruach, which means “wind” or “breath”.

All good translations, indeed, since Greek pneuma and Latin spiritus also carry the connotation of wind or breath, as we can see immediately from the English derivation “pneumatic”, and the  root of spiritus, the Latin verb spiro, spirare, spiravi, spiratum, from which we also get “respire” and “inspire”.  To “inspire” is, literally, to “breathe into”, and what is breathed into is that active element—the spirit or soul– that animates what is otherwise inert, passively or merely potentially living (that is, formless, or chaotic, matter).

In practically all cosmogonies, the Creator co-exists with this inert, chaotic matter, and he creates the world by breathing into it his own divine spiritus, anima, or soul. He animates or ensouls it; and thus ensouled by God, the world becomes a living God, a “divine animal”, as Plato calls it in the Timaeus.

 

In Genesis, God creates Adam similarly by inspiring, by breathing into him, his soul, his spiritus or anima, which invigorates the lifeless lump of “Adamic clay”.(Adam, like the world, therefore, is a divine animal, a God; but neither Judaism nor Christianity are entirely comfortable with the radical mythic implications of the biblical text.)

Genesis tells us that the chaotic raw material out of which Adam is created, the Adamic “clay”, comes from the Earth, the Earth being, along with the Sea, the other of the primordial mythic inflections of the “mother” archetype.  God’s creation of Adam by breathing his male spirit into the inert and passive materia of Mother Earth (cf. the old Latin pun, mater…materia), and his creation of the world by blowing his Spirit upon the face of the maternal waters, are thus, once again, mythologically identified.

They are both, of course, mythological transcriptions of the sexual act upon which all life and being depend.

Just as in Egyptian and Sumerian cosmogonies, Father Sky and Mother Earth must be differentiated out of their original chaotic union before they can recombine fruitfully to beget the world and the gods, so in the Enuma Elish and the biblical creation story derived from it, the world is conceived sexually.  And indeed, one way or another, every act of creation depends upon the fecundating male spiritus being disseminated into the mother’s womb.

We’ll meet this motive another thousand times: in cosmogony, solar myths, hero myths, dragon-killing myths, and so on; if the reader is as yet unconvinced of the symbolism, I ask him to be patient.

Regression into Chaos…

Jung’s Devouring Mother…

 Marduk and Tiamat…

     What follows is the first of many conflicts between the primeval gods and those they have begotten (a motive whose most famous inflection is known in Greek mythography as the Titanomachy, the battle between the monstrous Titans–the original generation of the gods–and their beautiful Olympian offspring, who presently preside over the universe).

And so, Tiamat, the original chaos-mother, decides to do away with the brood to which she has just given birth.

The motive suggests, of course, that order and beauty are fragile emanations, forever in danger of slipping back into the formlessness out of which they have arisen.  Joseph Campbell has called this regressive principle the “Monster of the Status Quo”, whom we will meet in many another mythic guise.  Jung’s designation, the “Terrible” or “Devouring Mother”, is probably more apposite here:  the mother who is moved to jealous repining at the very moment of giving birth, or is so possessive or over-protective of her children throughout their lives as to sabotage their independent development, or completely obliterate their own separate being.

As a matter of growing up, as Jung observes, every child must struggle against the regressive instincts of his mother; every child can only realize its own autonomous personality by separating its infant consciousness from the unconscious unity with the mother in which he or she first entered the world—a state of psychic identification which persists for some time beyond the child’s physical identification with the mother in the womb.

In the mythic imagination, accordingly, every act of creation or individuation–whether the emergence of the world from the maternal sea, the birth of the individual soul from the tomb/womb of the underworld, the ascent of the sun each morning out of the nocturnal darkness, or the daily reawakening of consciousness from the realm of night and dream– is understood as a victory over the forces of chaos and regression that are at the same time the forces of regeneration; every step towards consciousness, civilization, or culture is seen as a Promethean raid upon the original chaotic womb of the mother.

In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat and Apsu are disturbed by the noise being made by the younger gods who come together to dance (no doubt to some kind of early rock music).  Apsu complains that he cannot sleep—that in the presence of this racket, that is, he and the world will no longer be allowed to remain in that blissful state of unconsciousness out of which the human psyche first arose and back into it which it is tempted constantly to lapse.  And so the primordial couple take counsel with Mummu, Apsu’s vizier, as to how to destroy their boisterous litter.

Tiamat, however, is beginning to have second thoughts, so Apsu and Mummu devise a plan on their own; but Ea-Enki (the All-Wise) discovers it, casts a spell of sleep upon the waters (i.e., upon Apsu), slays him, binds Mummu, and puts a cord through his nose.  Ea then builds a magnificent sacred chamber directly above the slain corpse of Apsu, a motive whose naturalistic signification is clear:  the sweet waters have now been subdued and confined underground within Ea’s sacred chamber, that is, the newly formed earth.  This is the first great victory of the forces of order over those of chaos.

In this chamber Ea then gives birth to the divine child Marduk, and a description of his transcendent beauty and strength follows.  But none of this banishes the atmosphere of foreboding; and the rest of the first section of the poem is taken up with the preparations on both sides for the inevitable renewal of the conflict.

First, Tiamat’s children reproach her—not for her and Apsu’s plotting against them, as you might think—but for so passively allowing their father Apsu to be destroyed; and so they stir her up to revenge.

She gives birth again, for the enterprise, to a terrible brood of centaurs, enormous serpents, fierce dragons, and scorpion-men, and at the head of this formidable army, she installs Kingu, the last of her litter, whom she makes her second husband, and ceremonially arms and invests with the tablets of destiny.

 

The second section of the poem opens with the assembly of the younger gods in counsel about the coming threat.  Ea’s father Anshar suggests to him that he deal with Tiamat as he had done with Apsu; but Ea refuses.  Then Anu is sent on an embassy to try to dissuade Tiamat from embarking upon her reckless project, but she is implacable.  So Anshar rises in the assembly once more to propose that Marduk be given the adventure of destroying Tiamat and her army.  Marduk accepts the commission on condition that he be granted full and equal authority with his elders in the assembly of the gods, and that his word will thenceforth carry the force of destiny; here tablet two ends.

The third tablet concludes with a feast at which Marduk is officially invested with the authority he has demanded.  The fourth begins with his enthronement as king and his investment with the royal insignia.  The gods proclaim, “Marduk is king”, and he is armed for the upcoming combat with bow and arrow, mace, rainbow, lightning, and a net held open at the corners by the four winds.  Then he fashions seven terrible storms, lifts up his mace (which is the flood), mounts his war chariot (“the irresistible tempest”), and rides to battle against Tiamat and Kingu.  (He carries, that is, the weapons appropriate to a god of storm and thunder, as we would expect when we recall that the original hero of the myth was the Sumerian storm-god Enlil.)

 

When Marduk and his army approach, Kingu and his monstrous host lose heart; only his mother Tiamat stands her ground.  The war will thus be decided in single combat.

First, Marduk fills his belly with flame and unleashes the seven hurricanes; he mounts his storm chariot, and advances against the chaos-dragon; he casts his net around her, and when she opens her jaws to swallow him, he drives in the evil wind to hold them apart.  The wind inflates and distends her body, and through her open gullet Marduk shoots an arrow that pierces her heart and kills her.

When her misshapen brood flee, they are caught in Marduk’s net.  Marduk then takes from the vanquished Kingu the tablets of destiny and affixes them to his own breast.  Then he returns to Tiamat’s corpse, crushes her skull with his mace, and cuts her arteries so the winds carry away her blood.  Next, he fillets her carcass in two, placing the upper half above the earth as the sky, fixing it with bars, and setting guards lest her waters escape.  Finally, he sets the lower fillet in the firmament as the earth.

Marduk then builds Esharra, the abode of the great gods, after the pattern of Ea’s sacred chamber, and sets Anu, Enlil, and Ea in their places within it.  So ends tablet four.

The fifth tablet is fragmentary, but records Marduk’s first steps in organizing the universe, including establishing the rotations of the heavens, the seasons of the year, and the order of the months.

The sixth tablet describes the creation of man.  Following the advice of Ea, it is decided that the leader of the rebellion, Kingu, must die so that from his blood mixed with earth mankind may be created for the service of the gods.  (We will encounter a similar motive when we come to the Orphic myth of Dionysos, whose Titan enemies dismember and devour the young god, but are incinerated by Zeus’s thunderbolt; from their ashes man is created, the Titanic element furnishing the mortal component within man, the Dionsysian, the immortal.)

Finally, the gods build a great temple to Marduk, complete with ziggurat; and at the command of Anu they proclaim his fifty great names, which occupies the rest of the poem.

So ends the Enuma Elish, and so we pause to consider some of the universal themes to which it gives such vivid expression.

Sumerian Cosmogony…

  Babylonian Cosmogony…

  Enuma Elish…

Tiamat…Marduk…

     We come now to Mesopotamia, and begin with the cosmogony of Sumeria, the earliest phase of the great civilization that persisted for four millennia in the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  Since Sumeria had no single and comprehensive version of the myth of creation, however, its cosmogony must be pieced together from scattered references.

A highly schematic, and admittedly oversimplified, summary might run something like this:  Nammu, the goddess of the primeval sea, gave birth to heaven and earth, the god Anu and the goddess Ki respectively.  From their undifferentiated union issued the god of air and storm, Enlil, who then separated heaven from earth and so brought the universe into its present arrangement in the form of earth below, heaven above, and air in the interval between.

Once again, the primordial element, the cosmogonic sea, is uncreated and eternally pre-existent.  Once again, creation consists in the act of separating the elemental opposites which were originally in a state of chaotic union, in this case (and as usual), the heavenly male principal from the earthly female.

But the more important of the Mesopotamian creation myths, at least for our purposes, is that which has come down to us in a composition of some grandeur, known, from its opening words, as the Enuma Elish (“When on high…”).  Written in a Semitic language, the Enuma Elish dates from around 1500, in the middle, that is, of the second (Akkadian) phase of Mesopotamian civilization.  Its central figure is the god Marduk, the lord of the great city of Babylon, which was at the time the political and cultural centre of a vast empire.

In the pre-Akkadian (i.e., Sumerian) version of the myth (now lost), Marduk’s role was undoubtedly played by Enlil; but the Babylonian god has by now absorbed all of the powers and dignities of this ancient god of storm, notwithstanding that he himself was principally a solar and agricultural deity.  The process, sometimes called “syncretism”, by which later deities subsume the attributes and functions of earlier ones, or the major gods of great imperial powers assimilate those of the indigenous local gods, is a common and never-ending one.  Indeed, when in the first millennium Assyria had become the supreme power between the rivers, Markuk was in turn superseded in the Mesopotamian creation myth by the Assyrian god Assur.

 

Here is the Reader’s Digest summary of the myth:

In the beginning, nothing existed except Apsu, the sweet-water ocean, and Tiamat, the salt-water ocean.

In the text, Apsu is referred to as the “primeval begetter” and Tiamat as “she who gave birth to them all”, including the sky and earth, who as yet “had not even been thought of”, and the gods, who were “hidden within” this primordial pair.  As the text also specifies, the waters of Apsu and Tiamat were originally mingled in an undifferentiated unity.  Once again we have the original watery chaos out of which all things will eventually arise and in which all things are potentially present, but as yet in a state of formless confusion.

Then, from this watery chaos, two deities came into existence, Lahmu and Lahamu, both begotten by Apsu (the sweet waters) upon Tiamat (the maternal sea).

Scholarly consensus interprets Lahmu and Lahamu as personifications of the silt, deposited by the fresh waters of the Tigris and Euphrates into the salt water womb of the Persian Gulf, a process which has been going on since time immemorial and through which the land mass of Mesopotamia has been gradually built up.  But scholarly consensus has of late been rather too smitten with such naturalistic allegories, and it is probably safer to note again nothing more than the repetition in Lahmu and Lahamu of the conjunctio oppositorum of the universal male and female principles.

Then, from Lahmu and Lahamu derived in turn the next divine couple, Anshar and Kishar, the circular horizons of the male heaven and female earth respectively.  Anshar and Kishar thereupon gave birth to Anu, the god of the sky, who engendered from himself Ea (also called Enki) the god of earth and earth’s waters.

Enki will appear throughout Babylonian mythology as a culture hero, the founder of agriculture, and the source of all wisdom.  Anshar is said to have made Anu “in his own likeness” (since the sky resembles the horizon inasmuch as it is round); and Anu is also said to have formed Enki, the earth, “in his own image” (since the earth, in the Mesopotamian imagination, was shaped like a disc).

Egyptian Cosmogony…

The Primeval Hillock…

The Creator God Atum…

The Ogdoad…The Ennead…

Chaos and Order…

Logos and Eros…

     So much for Egyptian cosmology; now to cosmogony.  I’ve mentioned that Nun was the primordial watery abyss out of which the sun was reborn, the life-giving Nile was fed, and the world first emerged–atop, that is, what the Egyptian myths refer to as the “primeval hillock”.

The image of the primeval hillock was undoubtedly suggested by events that recur every year when the flood waters of the Nile begin to recede, bringing into view the first little peaks of mud that have been fecundated by the Nile’s fertile silt.  These peaks, emerging into the warmth of the sun, would have been the first patches of earth to sprout with life in the new year, and indeed modern Egyptians still believe that there is a special life-giving power in this putrefying slime.

In any case, it was crowning this primeval hillock that the Egyptian creator-god first appeared, and his triumphant theophany thereon was duly eternized in the Egyptian psyche.  Just as moments in time–the first day of creation; the nativity of the new year; the birth of the soul—coalesced in the ancient mythic imagination, so too, atop this creative eminence, did discrete locations in space.  In Egypt, accordingly, the high place of every local god was identified with the primeval hillock upon which the creator-god took his stance; so were the pyramids, insofar as they were the birth-chambers of souls about to be delivered into a new eternal order of being.

 

In a passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we read that the creator-god’s name was Atum-Re (Atum when he was alone in Nun, the primordial waters; Re when he began to rule what he had made upon the primeval hillock).  The text then goes on to emphasize that Atum-Re was self-created, and that he proceeded to bring forth the rest of the gods “who are in his following”.

The earliest of these, much earlier than even Geb or Nut, were known as the Ogdoad, the Eight, which emanated from Atum-Re in four symmetrical contra-sexual pairs.  The first was Nun (the primordial watery chaos) and his consort Naunet; then came Huh, the boundless stretches of  primordial formlessness, and his consort Hauhet; then Kuk, “darkness”, and his consort, Kauket; and finally Amon, “the hidden”, representing the indefiniteness of chaos, with his consort Amaunet.

All of which is to say what the priestly author of Genesis would say almost a thousand years later:  that the “earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”.  I don’t wish to anticipate, but the idea of creation as the imposition of “form” or “order” upon a pre-existent “formless chaos” is a ubiquitous archetype in cosmogony, present even in a biblical creation story that later Jewish and Christian theologians have piously pretended taught a doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

The Ogdoad, in fact, represent both a kind of pre-cosmogonic chaos and the original generation of the gods, just as in the Greek theogony of Hesiod, the monstrous Titans came before the shining and beautiful Olympians of Zeus’ era.  And thus, in due course, after the Eight came the Nine, the Ennead, consisting of Atum and four more contra-sexual pairs who constituted Atum’s governing council.

The Ennead were conceived by and proceeded from Atum; and here again, we observe the transition from chaos to order.  The name Atum itself means “everything”, and like To Apeiron (the Infinite), which was the Pre-Socratic Anaximander’s cosmogonic first principle, Atum is the incohation of the all.

From his universal womb proceeded Shu (air) and his consort Tefnut (moisture), who in turn gave birth to earth and sky, the god Geb and goddess Nut.  Or, in another version, Shu, the air god tore asunder earth and sky who were originally locked in an infertile pre-cosmogonic embrace; thus separated, they re-combined to give birth to the last two divine couples, the god Osiris and his consort Isis, along with their brother Seth and his consort Nephthys.

 

Here again, as we will see in due course, two universal motives present themselves:  the process whereby the contrarian elements (later identified by the Greeks as earth, water, air, and fire, and in Genesis as the “light and darkness”, and the “waters above” and the “waters below”) are originally commingled in an undifferentiated chaos, before they are separated out and set within their proper provinces; and more specifically, a theme which I call the pre-cosmogonic divorce, in which the earth and sky (the opposing male and female principles) have to be sundered before they can come together again in a fecund union.

I’ll leave you to ponder the fundamental human and psychic significances of these processes of separation and recombination, of abstraction and synthesis–the logos and eros of modern psychology–as we encounter them in other examples.

The Mythic Picture of the World…

Egyptian Cosmology…

The World Disk…

Geb…Nut…Shu…

     So, we begin at the beginning, with the creation of the world.

The earliest myths of cosmogony (literally, the generation of the universe), cosmology (the rational order and arrangement of the universe), and theogony (the generation of the gods) come, as one would expect, from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Though it might seem illogical, I want to deal first with cosmology, since it will be easier for us to understand the myths of creation if we can first form a picture of the universe in mind.

When I say “picture”, I mean this almost literally, because from ancient Egypt through Greece and Rome, and all the way down to the late eighteenth century, poets, philosophers, and theologians clearly held the ordered and hierarchical arrangement of the cosmos to be beautiful, meaningful, and ultimately expressive of the Rational Intelligence of the Godhead.  It is to this once revered “picture” of the universe—so revered, in fact, that poets, artists, and moralists cleaved to it long after it had been scientifically discredited by Copernicus and Galileo—that the great English writer and critic C.S. Lewis referred wistfully in the title of his book, The Discarded Image.

 

The Egyptians called the earth goddess Geb, and conceived of it as a kind of disk or platter with an upturned rim, the flat bottom of which represented the alluvial plain of Egypt, and the narrow rim, the mountainous regions of the rest of the world beyond Egypt’s frontier.  The image reveals Egyptians as hopelessly Egypto-centric, I suppose (just as the famous New Yorker cover revealed the Manhattano-centricity of New Yorkers, showing as it did the streets and skyscrapers of Manhattan in the foreground, New Jersey as a narrow out-of-focus strip of wasteland across the Hudson, and an even narrower band beyond depicting the rest of the world).

The world-disk floated upon the primeval ocean, called by the Egyptians Nun. Nun was the chaotic waters out of which all of creation and life had first emerged, and at the same time the underworld waters into which the setting sun descended every evening from the western sky, and out of whose eastern waters the sun re-emerged every morning.

I need hardly mention that the daily setting and rising of the sun from Nun’s watery underworld womb was conceived by the Egyptians as the sun-god’s death, descent into the underworld, and rebirth; but this is a theme we’ll have to return to when we discuss Egyptian and other solar and redeemer myths.  At this point, I only wish to draw your attention to the way in which the creation of the world, the rising of the sun, and the birth of the human person, are conceived as concentric acts of generation and renewal by the Egyptians, each a phase of the same creative process.  Indeed, in some ancient cultures, these occur at the same pregnant moment, so that the birth of the world, the birth of the sun on the winter solstice (when the days begin to lengthen, and the sun’s light begins to overcome winter’s darkness), and the birth of the individual soul are conflated as contemporaneous events.

Since the Nile was the preeminent source of agricultural bounty in Egyptian consciousness, it too was represented as having issued from deep sluices in the earth reaching down into the primeval ocean.  Finally, in addition to being the waters below, Nun was also the waters encircling the planetary disk, the Okeanos, as Homer would later call it, in Greek cosmology.

Above the earth was the inverted platter of the sky, paradoxically conceived as a goddess, Nut, the weight of her heavenly vault being carried by four posts rising from the outermost corners of the earth at the four points of the compass.  But not entirely trusting this arrangement, the Egyptians provided other means of support in the person of the air-god Shu, who stood on the earth upholding the weight of Nut with his extended arms.  And in an early example of engineering triple redundancy, or else a Yoga pose, the sky goddess Nut is herself typically depicted as bending over the earth, with her fingers and toes in contact with the ground, and her belly adorned with the sun, moon, and stars, and the whole circuit of heaven.

But since consistency is never a concern of the mythic imagination, in other depictions, the vault of heaven might be represented as the under-belly of a great celestial cow, studded with the stars of the Milky Way along which the celestial barque of the sun made its course through the sky from east to west.