Myth in Human Culture - 03 - The Enuma Elish

Summary

In this lecture, Allan Di Donato delves into creation myths, particularly focusing on the Babylonian mythology of Enuma Elish, alongside a brief touch on Hebrew and Egyptian narratives. The discussion outlines the chaos-cosmos dichotomy, showcasing the heroic triumph of Marduk over Tiamat, highlighting themes of order from chaos, the symbolism of water, and the dragon motif in global myths. Di Donato connects these ancient stories with human culture and religious functions, contrasting them with biblical narratives, emphasizing the role of naming, and highlighting mythological functions and rituals. The lecture sets the stage for an exploration of Egyptian myths in upcoming sessions.

Highlights

• Marduk's triumph over Tiamat represents battling cosmic chaos to create order 🗡️.
• Chaos in myths is often symbolized by water, formless and dual-natured, reflecting life and death 🌊.
• Naming and language play crucial roles in mythological creation, seen both in Enuma Elish and Biblical texts 🗣️.
• Ritualistic and political aspects of the Enuma Elish align with Babylonian social structures and governance 🎭.
• Biblical creation lacks the dramatic conflict found in Enuma Elish, showing a different interpretation of divine order 🌟.

Key Takeaways

• The Enuma Elish is a Babylonian myth exploring themes of chaos versus cosmos through Marduk's heroic battle against Tiamat 🐉.
• Creation myths often involve conflicts between order and chaos, symbolized by characters like Tiamat, a representation of primordial chaos 🌊.
• Naming in myths signifies bringing order and essence to things, a recurring theme in creation stories both in Babylonian and Hebrew cultures 🔠.
• The rituals and myths serve important social and cosmological functions, with Enuma Elish being tied to Babylonian New Year celebrations 🎉.
• Biblical and ancient myths share similarities, such as chaos in creation narratives, but differ in their emphasis on struggle versus divine order 📜.

Overview

The lecture starts with introducing Enuma Elish, focusing on the central conflict between Marduk and Tiamat, which illustrates the theme of chaos overturning order. Through Marduk's victory, the story symbolizes the imposition of structure over primordial turmoil, a fundamental element in many creation myths. Di Donato emphasizes the representation of chaos through water and its dual aspect of life and destruction, resonating across various cultures.

In linking the Babylonian Enuma Elish to Hebrew and Egyptian myths, the lecture highlights the universality of mythological themes such as the importance of naming, which serves as a symbol for creation and order. The emphasis is on understanding how these stories are not just tales but embody the social and religious fabric of ancient cultures. This connection underscores the broader significance of myths as reflects of humanity’s quest for meaning and structure.

The lecture further delves into the societal and religious functions of these myths, stressing their role in shaping social hierarchies and cosmological views. The Enuma Elish is linked with significant Babylonian rituals like the New Year festival, showing how myths underpin societal norms. In contrast, the biblical narrative presents a conflict-free creation myth, reflecting different theological perspectives, setting the ground for exploring Egyptian myths in subsequent lectures.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Recap The chapter "Introduction and Recap" revisits previous lectures on trickster heroes and creation myths, establishing a foundation for exploring a collection of stories involving trickster heroes who play roles in creation myths. The narrative direction is set towards examining myths from the ancient Near East.
• 01:30 - 04:00: Babylonian and Israelite Myths The chapter introduces Babylonian and Israelite myths, as found in Hebrew scriptures, with a focus on preparing for upcoming stories of Osiris, Isis, and Horus from Egyptian mythology. The chapter aims to provide a basic introduction to Babylonian mythology.
• 04:00 - 07:00: Ancient Civilizations and Cities The chapter explores ancient Babylon and its significance. It delves into the creation myths of Babylon and Israel, providing cultural context to enhance understanding. While not all details of these myths are covered, the chapter highlights key aspects and encourages readers to focus on specific elements of the stories.
• 07:00 - 13:00: Babylonian History and Empire The chapter 'Babylonian History and Empire' begins with a discussion on motifs and themes, particularly focusing on mythology, hero myths, and myth interpretation. It emphasizes the importance of reviewing introductory concepts in mythology to better understand the intricate details and functions within the story. A map is mentioned, setting the stage for the geographical focus of the upcoming discussion.
• 13:00 - 18:00: Creation and Mythological Characters The chapter "Creation and Mythological Characters" delves into the early history of human civilization in Mesopotamia, focusing on the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys which hosted the world's earliest known civilizations. Dating back to between 4000 and 3500 BC, the southern part of this region, known today as Sumeria, was home to crucial early cities such as Ur, Uruk, and Nippur. Among these, Uruk is often recognized as the world's first city, playing a foundational role in the development of human settlement and urban life.
• 18:00 - 21:00: Functions and Theories of Myth This chapter discusses the development of cities and civilizations, focusing on ancient Sumeria, which was among the earliest civilizations with cities and city-states. The narrative traces the movement north-west through Mesopotamia to the city of Babylon, hinting at its future significance, particularly in relation to mythology and gods.
• 21:00 - 27:00: Biblical Creation and Human Role The chapter discusses the rise of Marduk in the Enuma Elish creation myth, highlighting his ascent to the position of supreme god. Additionally, the chapter covers the ancient Israelites, specifically the Hebrews, and marks the location of Jerusalem on the map, indicating the Levant region.
• 27:00 - 41:00: Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man The chapter discusses the historical regions known as ancient Canaan, highlighting the connections between these areas and other regions marked in the fertile crescent. This crescent includes important geographical features such as the Tigris-Euphrates river valley and the Jordan river valley extending from the Persian Gulf to the Dead Sea. The introduction serves as a background to set the stage for further exploration of these interconnected regions.
• 41:00 - 50:00: Conclusion and Next Steps The chapter discusses the basic timeline of ancient Babylon, beginning with the collapse of the Sumerian civilization around 2000 BC. The timeline highlights that exact dates from this era are approximate. The text suggests that the Sumerians collapsed due to a combination of factors, including invasions from the region of Elam, located to the east of Sumeria, and migrations of new Semitic tribes into the area. The chapter emphasizes the rough and tentative nature of historical reconstructions of ancient events.

Myth in Human Culture - 03 - The Enuma Elish Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 welcome back to myth and human culture if you remember our last lecture we were talking about um trickster heroes we did a little bit of an introduction to creation myths and then we focused most of the time on the trickster hero and we're going to follow that up today by getting into our very first collection of stories that involve trickster heroes and they also happen to be myths that deal with the creation okay so we're going to start actually in the near east the ancient near east particularly looking at the
• 00:30 - 01:00 myths of babylon and israel as found in the hebrew scriptures and after that we're going to get into the story of osiris isis and horus from egypt that's actually going to be the next lecture in the series but as far as your assignments go in the course you should have been reading all three of those stories in preparation okay so today i want to get going with an introduction to babylonian mythology in a very basic way we're not going to
• 01:00 - 01:30 be spending a lot of time in ancient babylon which is kind of a shame but we're going to be looking at creation conflict and cunning creation myths of babylon and israel and i'm going to do what i usually do as i introduce new stories is go back and give a little bit of a background for the culture before we actually get into the stories and since you were supposed to read these stories i'm not going to cover every single part of them i'm going to kind of hit the highlights and try to draw your attention to certain
• 01:30 - 02:00 motifs to certain themes maybe unpack some of the functions some of the things that are going on in the store that you may have missed so it's always good to go back and review kind of the introduction to hero myths or rather the introduction to mythology where we talk about things like myth interpretation function and those types of things so let's move on and get into a little bit of the introduction what you see is a map focusing on the areas that we're going to be going through today so
• 02:00 - 02:30 you've got the area that's known as mesopotamia where you see the tigris and euphrates river valley that's the earliest civilization that we have sprang up back our you know actually back around 4000 to 3500 bc in the southern portion of mesopotamia which is known as sumeria on the map you see the cities of urukur nepur those were really important sumerian setters particularly the city of uruk early on that's in most accounts the first city in world
• 02:30 - 03:00 history not necessarily the first settlement of course people existed in you know towns villages and other types of settlements long before cities developed but when we get to ancient sumeria we have a civilization we have uh cities city states going a little bit to the north actually the north west as you move up through mesopotamia you get to the city of babylon and that's where we're going to stop briefly because babylon is going to be the place where the god
• 03:00 - 03:30 marduk was supreme and the creation myth of the enum elish which is the one that you guys should have read is going to focus on the rise of marduk and his position or is coming into position as the supreme god okay the other culture that we're gonna touch on today is the culture of the ancient israelites uh the hebrews and i have the spot marked on the map for you where jerusalem is um that region basically is the levant uh
• 03:30 - 04:00 was known as ancient canaan and we're going to cover those areas and there was definitely contact between those areas which you see marked in the colorful area on the map is essentially what's called the fertile crescent right you've got the tiger euphrates river valley coming up from the persian gulf and then you have the jordan river valley going down the lavon back down to the dead sea okay so let's start by going through a little bit of a background
• 04:00 - 04:30 for ancient babylon rough rough historical sketch this is a very very basic timeline the ancient sumerian civilization which was the early civilization starts to collapse around 2000 bc and again the date's going to be very general the further back you go the less precise they are but we know that the sumerians collapsed due to several factors were with the region of elam which was to the east of babylon or sorry to the east of sumeria and also migrations of new semitic tribes into the region known as
• 04:30 - 05:00 the amorites so the amorites around 2000 bc come in and settle down at various centers from damascus and syria all the way into northern mesopotamia and then down to places like babylon so you have babylonian occupation by the amorites around that time when you get to the 18th century approximately from 1792 to about 1750 the famous king hammurabi ruled and he is of course most famous for his code his law code
• 05:00 - 05:30 but he also created what is known today as the old babylonian or the acadian sorry not the acadian empire that would be earlier sumerian empire the amorite empire of ancient babylon okay he didn't conquer all of mesopotamia but by the time of his grandson all of mesopotamia had come under the sway of babylon by the time we get to 1595 or thereabouts we have a collapse of that empire
• 05:30 - 06:00 the city of babylon itself is sacked by the hittite somewhere around 1600 weakening them and within about a generation or less you have a influx of cascites and the cascite period is going to last for several hundred years approximately 1595 to about 11 55. and that displaced the amorite empire and in some ways was kind of a dark period as far as archaeology goes around 1155
• 06:00 - 06:30 the casci rule of babylon comes to an end elam to the east assyria to the north attack babylon elemites themselves actually captured the statue of marduk again the supreme god take it back to their capital at souza and then not too long later nebuchadnezzar the first recaptures that statue and brings it back that's around 11 25 to 1104 would have been the date range for the reign of nebuchadnezzar the
• 06:30 - 07:00 first this is not the famous nebuchadnezzar if you're familiar with the hebrew scriptures that's nebuchadnezzar the second he's much later we'll get to him actually just in a second between 11th century and 9th century you've got an influx of new peoples probably out of the northern portion of arabia that are known as the chaldeans this would be the chaldean migration and then from the 9th of the 7th century babylon babylon was under the domination really of northern
• 07:00 - 07:30 mesopotamian group known as the assyrians okay sennacherib would rule from 704-681 actually destroyed the city of babylon and then his successor asher hadden rebuilds the city okay in the ancient world it's interesting how many times different cities are sacked and destroyed and then rebuilt babylon is you know one of the cities that was rebuilt numerous times and goes through numerous phases of development and expansion the next phase of real expansion comes under nabaplasser and his son the actual famous nebuchadnezzar
• 07:30 - 08:00 625-605 nabapalasser begins the creation of a new babylonian empire sometimes known as the chaldean empire and one of the high points early on is the overthrow of assyrian domination nabapalasser along with allies among the medes and the scythians launches an attack on various assyrian city centers particularly the city of nineveh which was the capital at the time and in 612 he destroys the city now one
• 08:00 - 08:30 of the important things about nina at that time is it housed one of the greatest libraries in the ancient world and thanks to that destruction that library was destroyed and uh basically preserved for archaeological um um history 605 uh nebuchadnezzar takes the throne it was probably cro co-regent with his father for a little while and he's gonna rain for until 562. but in the beginning of his reign he's consolidating his power
• 08:30 - 09:00 and the battle of karkemish he comes to defeat the egyptians who were seeing the opportunity to make a little bit of a resurgence and perhaps build back their empire they had lost you know generations actually centuries earlier anyways at this time the kingdom of israel which we are going to talk about in a little while comes under the command or the control of babylon becomes a vassal state under babylon and due to rebellion against babylon they end up having the
• 09:00 - 09:30 full might of babylon brought against them and in 586 nebuchadnezzar destroys the city of jerusalem and essentially exiles the judeans this is known as the great babylonian captivity which is going to last until 3 539 when babylon itself is finally taken over by the persians and the persian empire was the biggest of all the ancient near eastern empires we are going to deal with persia later this semester because we're going to
• 09:30 - 10:00 be reading some persian hero myth but i will get more into the background for persia when we get uh to that story that's gonna be probably several weeks away as far as the lectures go okay um one thing to note now perhaps is that the religion of ancient babylon was very similar to the general polytheistic religion of mesopotamia that was you know developed under the sumerian times this kind of a adaptation of sumerian concepts gods and
• 10:00 - 10:30 ritual the persians on the other hand seem to be fairly unique okay so we're going to talk about their unique religion later whether the persians at this time the conqueror of babylon was cyrus the great we don't really know what his religious positions were but persia is going to be more connected with a tradition of zoroastrianism which tends to be on the monotheistic side of the spectrum anyways the anu militia this is the story this is the creation
• 10:30 - 11:00 epic the enuma elish itself means when on highs is taken from the first couple lines or words uh opening the poem okay and that's generally how text in the ancient world would have been known by their opening lines now originally the creation myth like i said the babylonians borrowed heavily from the sumerians who went before them and the sumerian myth actually gives us some creation stories involving gods like ahn and lil
• 11:00 - 11:30 enki and nanerta some of these gods actually show up in the middle east babylonian form of the creation epic so it was adapted um it was changed and the text that we are going to go through is really the later babylonian or acadian version of the story now this story may date back as far as the 19th century bc possibly to the time of hammurabi or just prior and in the story the focus is going to be on a very different god and this is a
• 11:30 - 12:00 guy that would not have shown up in the sumerian stories earlier this is the god marduk okay so i'm going to tell you a little bit more about him as we progress but there were other versions as well not just a sumerian babylonian version but the assyrians had their own account of creation and of course instead of marduk which was a babylonian deity they have their own god in place which is the god asher okay that's where the actual name the assyrians comes from it's the same route now i mentioned the destruction of the
• 12:00 - 12:30 library in nineveh in 612 bc that city of nineveh was excavated in the middle of the 18th 1800s okay 19th century and around 1849 you have the discovery of the text at the library of nineveh and the text that we're looking at for the new alicia is basically the acadian version now there have been various text texts and tablets that have found been found since but the acadian version is essentially the one that we're working with and it probably dates to at least the
• 12:30 - 13:00 7th century bc possibly a little bit older than that obviously can't be any younger than that because the library like i said was destroyed in 612 which was still in the 7th century and after decipherment the story was first published in 1876 okay so most of the world had no knowledge whatsoever of the creation epic of the babylonians until the late 19th century and of course we're fortunate enough to be able to study it today i'll give you a very brief list of the
• 13:00 - 13:30 principal characters it's better to kind of talk about the story and introduce them as we go but i do want you to have a few names in mind especially because there are lots of names that are thrown at you as you read the text and i know you are reading an abridged version which isn't as complicated as the original poetry even in translation the poetry is a little bit more difficult than the prose uh copy that you have in your textbook but
• 13:30 - 14:00 the gods that i want you to pay attention to are going to be these apsu okay this is at the first generation this is the very beginning he is the primeval father he is the god of the fresh waters he's the god of the abyss he was associated with the euphrates river it was kind of where his throne was at the at the bottom of the deep his consort was the goddess tiamat and sometimes it's hard to even call them god or goddess i think those are fine because they're characterized as kind of the ancestors
• 14:00 - 14:30 of the gods but for our you know purposes you know that that works out all right tmn on the other hand was not a freshwater goddess god but a saltwater goddess she is the primeval mother a lot of times she's characterized as a dragon or a serpent figure it's not really clear from the text as far as her description she's described with the tail and various animalistic characteristics but for the most part people consider her a basic dragon motif but she's also a
• 14:30 - 15:00 figure of chaos which i know i talked about last time when we dealt with creation stories so this is going to be really important as a matter of fact it's going to be almost the universal starting point for creation myth some kind of chaos or chaotic state and tmat's going to be the representative of that and if you think about it it makes sense that a symbol of chaos would be water okay now water when you look at any type of symbol can
• 15:00 - 15:30 have different ways it can be interpreted and usually the way you interpret a symbol is going to be first of all to notice how it's used in the context of the story so here for instance we've got absolute amount of fresh water salt water there's obviously a difference between the two you can think of the fresh water generally as a source of life right we think of water as a symbol of life but not all water is a symbol of life it depends on the type of water generally in you know semitic poetry and hebrew poetry and stuff like that a stream a well those types of things
• 15:30 - 16:00 would be connected as symbols of life on the other hand when you deal with things like salt water the sea or a flood or something that's devastating or um you know incapable of sustaining life i'm gonna think of salt water is the type of water that you're gonna drink right so that's something that would be more connected with the idea of death so water can have this dual really opposite types of meaning right it could be life it could be death but it could also be chaos and i think that makes great sense when
• 16:00 - 16:30 you think of how water is formless it is not something that has any particular shape you can't pick it up in your hands and hold on to it it kind of slips through your fingers it takes on whatever shape uh of the container that it's placed within right so water is really a beautiful picture of chaos and that's where we're starting in the creation stories we're going to start with chaos and if you remember from last time the story is always going to be about the development of cosmos it's the
• 16:30 - 17:00 development um or the or the bringing of order out of that chaos form out of the formlessness okay the next god that's really important is the god ayah it was a god of wisdom he was the son of anu who was another god and matter of fact anu was one of the supreme beings early on in sumerian religion he was the patron god of the city of uruk and god of the heavens aya even in the sumerian accounts was more involved as
• 17:00 - 17:30 the creator of man had a few broader functions in the story that we're about to go through he kind of loses some of those functions those are transferred to his son marduk okay who is the next one and the most important one for you guys to know basically out of this list tma and marduk are the two that you really cannot forget marduk is the national god of the of the babylonians you can think of it kind of this way in the earlier sumerian empire
• 17:30 - 18:00 sumerian period prior to the real rise of babylon as an empire the city of babylon had its own patron god and that god would have been marduk and marduk would have been a rather insignificant god probably not worshiped anywhere very far outside of babylon if anywhere outside of babylon and what happens particularly during the time of hammurabi when babylon goes from being just one mesopotamian city to being the capital of great empire along with the elevation of the city goes the elevation of the god so marduk
• 18:00 - 18:30 becomes the supreme being becomes the king of all of the other gods okay all of the gods bow to marduk and that's exactly what the anum alicia is trying to show which is why some people think the inum at least probably started to develop that far back okay in the story he's the son of aya he is a king he is the creator he is the one who brings order and not just order in the universe he's the creator of man as well the last one i think that i have on this
• 18:30 - 19:00 very short list is king goo and king goo is both the son and consort of the dragon tiamat he's also going to be the leader of her armies in the battle at the end of the story against marduk okay so let's take a look at this idea of creation bringing order out of chaos okay this is potentially a illustration of marduk and tmat there are other interpretations of what this particular picture represents but let's talk about
• 19:00 - 19:30 this conflict of opposites i said even with trickster stories which is really what we're trying to get to we're going to see this idea of chaos being introduced and the struggle of opposites is always a big focus in mythology so here we've got this idea of marduk versus tma which is the culminating point of the story let me maybe give you a little bit of a background and walk us up to the conflict between marduk and tms since i didn't include all of this in the
• 19:30 - 20:00 visuals that i'm providing but in the beginning of the story remember we have chaos we have water that's where the story begins there's nothing but water as a matter of fact the first opening lines of the tablet like i said it means when on high it actually begins by saying when on high heaven was not named and the earth beneath did not yet bear a name and then it introduces us to apsu it introduces us to chaos as tiamat and it says these are two
• 20:00 - 20:30 different waters that are divided one salt water one fresh water they're gendered apsu is male tmat is female it's an easy way to account for the creation of all the life that springs from them because it's kind of like a genealogy that they're going to give you and then it goes on to say when when of the gods none had been called into being and none bore a name okay over and over again they get to this idea of namelessness not having a name there being no name
• 20:30 - 21:00 it's kind of an interesting beginning what exactly does that mean the idea of naming is kind of connected on one level with the process of creation we'll see in some other creation stories even in the israelite creation story and later in the egyptian creation story some of the egyptian creation stories this idea of speaking things into existence you've heard of you know magic spells if you're a big harry potter fan right when you say you know the word the right
• 21:00 - 21:30 way you'll conjure magic so this idea that magic and word goes together this idea of creating life through speech that's one hand so it's like a creative act to name and to call things into being on the other hand you could think of names as a sign of order when you name something you're what you're doing is you're recognizing what the thing is right you're picking out the essence of
• 21:30 - 22:00 the thing or you could say you're picking out the form of the thing if we're going to use aristotelian terminology again okay so by naming something i'm pointing out the order i'm pointing out the essence i'm putting out the form so here in the beginning of these stories when you talk about namelessness you're talking about a time when really it's kind of prior to creation it's definitely prior to order we're still in that chaotic state okay and then as names come into the picture as things are spoken into
• 22:00 - 22:30 existence of course order is going to start to form all right so that's one way to think of it i think it's an important way to think of it i think it's a good way to think of it and the other thing that's really interesting about this particular poem is once you get further into the new at least you're gonna get to a point where marduk is given a certain collection of names maybe i should hold off on that a little while and then come back to that but that's important in the beginning nothing was named okay and i want to draw your attention back to that idea or actually don't forget that i did because
• 22:30 - 23:00 when we get to the hebrew story i want to point out some things as well that have to do with naming anyways the story goes on you've got absu and tiamat they have a number of generations that spring forth from them and then a problem emerges and the problem is really with the god apsu what you see is the noise created by this new generation of younger gods right when you have creation you've got life you've got life you've got noise and absolutely
• 23:00 - 23:30 wants to go back to the period where it was silent and peaceful and he's so upset by the noise that the gods are making he's decided he's just going to wipe them out he's going to destroy this younger generation of gazing and go to war with them and he asks tmat to support him now tiamat in the story doesn't back him up in the beginning right can't think of her kind of as a mother goddess maybe she cares about her children that opinion will probably fall away from you as you read on further but for now apsu is on his own of course the gods aren't going to sit back and let apps who destroy them so
• 23:30 - 24:00 what happens is the god ayah decides to protect the other gods and he goes into combat and destroys absolute before absolute absolute can destroy them actually makes a magic circle around the other gods a circle of protection and then he destroys absu now with absolute out of the picture tiamat doesn't have a consort and this is basically where she gets together with her son kingu now kingu wears and controls these things called the tablets of destiny
• 24:00 - 24:30 this idea that there is an order that there is an authority that goes along with kingu um the idea of destiny fate this is a kind of a theme that we'll see in lots of cultures you know um it's one of those themes that comes over and over again into mythology into religion into philosophy questions today regarding you know free will determination all these types of big weighty topics they were wrestled with way back in the beginning right so you have this idea that there's
• 24:30 - 25:00 something about destiny that the gods control and the wearing of these tablets makes you really the authority over all creation even though this is really still kind of prior to creation now at some point kingu pressures tmf and says you know the kids are still being noisy you allowed your husband absolute to be destroyed and it's really your responsibility to wage war against the children and wipe them out finally and tm at this point in the story decides that she's going to take on that task and she
• 25:00 - 25:30 has this army right of serpents and scorpions all these other kinds of beasts that she gathers together and she's going to go towards the destruction of her children and at this point the gods are terrified they don't think any of them are capable of withstanding the fury of tmf so they decided to create a new god aya creates his son marduk and marduk is going to be twice as powerful as any of the other gods a matter of fact they call him a double god he's got you know two sets of eyes two sets of ears out of his mouth
• 25:30 - 26:00 comes flames and fire that just show his his raw power and he is going to do battle against tmf this is the culmination of the action actually in the story right so marduk versus tmat the motif i'll point out in just a little bit but like i said when you picture tmf perhaps in the form of a dragon you already know where this is going cosmos versus chaos it's celestial order versus celestial struggle creation versus destruction culture
• 26:00 - 26:30 versus nature male versus female father versus mother younger versus older all of these things are intertwined in this conflict right tiamat represents the earlier generation the older gods marduk the younger he's the newest one marduk is a father figure in a sense right he's a male god tiamet is a mother figure even though she's a goddess of chaos and the the sea you could still think of her in the sense of a a mother figure though she doesn't really have the characteristics of you
• 26:30 - 27:00 know associated with the crops and stuff like that but she will be associated with the earth as we'll see very shortly i think last time we talked about the idea of the mother figure being a symbol of nature whereas the father figure or the father archetype is associated with culture right so all these things come into conflict and in the great battle marduk uh is equipped with his weapons he's got his mace he's got his bow and arrow he's got um the winds i mean he is a god who controls the wind
• 27:00 - 27:30 and the scene is him coming against tiamat and blowing the wind against her and pinning her down and actually blowing her body up kind of like a balloon when you read the poem and then taking on his bow he basically shoots her through the chest and destroys her and then crushes her skull with this mace and from her corpse he fashions the heavens and the earth this is the creation scene this is literally the taking of chaos and the fashioning
• 27:30 - 28:00 of cosmos he literally takes what is no form and he gives it form okay i should have brought this visual up a second ago but the archetypal figures right the father represents culture and there's a positive and a negative side i think i pointed this out last time as well but it's worth pointing out once again right the positive side of the father is order protection community structure the negative side is the potential for tyranny apsu remember is a father figure but he
• 28:00 - 28:30 was also a tyrant who tried to destroy his children you know that type of father figure probably needs to be opposed and that's what ayah did right you have the figures that become blind the mother figure same type of thing just positive side right they're nurturing there's a sort the source of all potential right they're givers of life right the producers of all form at the same time they could have a negative characteristic of being destructive as tmat clearly is and chaotic so she
• 28:30 - 29:00 represents but you could also think of the mother figure in a negative sense when it comes to um like the oedipus idea which we talked about in our very first lecture right this idea of the devouring mother the the mother figure that doesn't allow the child to develop the right way right they kind of squash that development and um which causes all kinds of problems kind of the you know hansel and gretel and the witch story or something along those lines okay so you've got all these archetypes already in play and then the motifs like
• 29:00 - 29:30 i was saying before it's obviously a creation story but the hero versus the dragon is the one that i wanted to point out and it's worth noting only because it's happened it happened so many times and the stories we're going to read this semester we have the hero fighting the serpent you have the hero fighting the dragon you know this is um i don't want to say done to death it's still one of the greatest things i think you know i love movies like the hobbit right back when i was a kid i was i loved the movie dragon slayer which is probably something most of you haven't
• 29:30 - 30:00 heard of but that idea of you know the knight and the dragon st george and the dragon right there's so many different versions of the story it's one of the oldest stories and here you have a great example of it being one of the oldest stories itself um we could talk a lot about the symbolism of the dragon and various aspects of the dragon but i'm probably going to hold that off because we will like i said deal with these types of motifs later this semester but again here's a creation story that has a very serious hero motif built in
• 30:00 - 30:30 now why dragons you know why is a dragon one of the most recurring ideas and it's probably because the dragon is like the alpha right it's the alpha predator this is the biggest scariest opponent that you can deal with and it's a real proof of one's skill and prowess as a hero as a warrior as a king the uh next most
• 30:30 - 31:00 i guess there's a couple other big animals that we could see you know the bull is going to be another big one as far as ancient combat and then the lion and i was just thinking the line as a matter of fact this particular illustration has a lot of features that are very much feline built in as well you know it's obviously a composite animal some bird features some lion features and whatnot but if you ever look at the art of ancient mesopotamia among the um assyrians and the persians and stuff like that the lion is very prominent you know hunting scenes where the king is killing a lion sometimes you know kind
• 31:00 - 31:30 of a one-on-one thing this is a symbol of power it's a symbol of greatness right you're a great hunter you're a great warrior you're a great ruler they go hand in hand okay let's go on a little bit further and talk about um some of the things that that go on in the story because now you have the creation right you have the the creation of man which follows the creation of the earth so it's tmat's corpse that literally becomes the earth which is why you can very
• 31:30 - 32:00 realistically say she's a mother goddess the creation of man is also very interesting he is created from the blood of kingu and some other things that are mixed in and he's created for a purpose and that's kind of the interesting part so it kind of brings me to where i want to go with this idea of functions if you remember back when we talked about the various functions of myth there are a few functions that i'm just going to bring up that we could talk about such as the cosmological function now the cosmological function remember
• 32:00 - 32:30 has to do with how a story is going to give us a picture of the ordered universe uh kind of help us construct a world view and allow us to be able to answer kind of our general uh satisfied general curiosity about the nature of reality so this story is clearly cosmological as a creation myth almost every creation myth is cosmological as a matter of fact you when i used to teach this course and deal with a lot more of the creation myth stuff directly we would talk about all the different types of cosmological
• 32:30 - 33:00 questions that went uh that were um so what i'm trying to i've come up with the stories would be addressing a certain collection of questions and usually dealt with maybe five or six what i'd call big cosmological questions um this story answers a number of them i'm not going to get into exactly what they are but it's clearly a cosmology that it's trying to produce teleological function that would be the function that has to
• 33:00 - 33:30 do with supplying a community with a sense of purpose meaning a goal or something along the lines and that's where we get into this idea of the creation of man because in this story the anu at least is very specific about the role of man in creation because it directly tells us why man was created marduk creates man for the purpose of serving the gods to be a slave to the gods to farm and bring forth fruit and food to feed the gods and supply
• 33:30 - 34:00 you know the the upper echelon the the hierarchy of the beings above humanity above the earth now that might not be the type of function or purpose that would bring a great deal of sense of meaning and value to a human life but it's very clear in the text what that purpose is there's also a sociological function which is probably tied with that very purpose you know man is seen as a slave
• 34:00 - 34:30 to the gods is gonna help you understand your role in society or at least the role of many people within society but the story itself also is supposed to show us a structure right kind of um a hierarchical arrangement of power if you know anything about ancient sumerian and babylonian or mesopotamian civilization you know the gods control everything there's a kind of top-down power structure the gods are supreme the kings are kind of the representatives of the gods and the
• 34:30 - 35:00 intermediaries between gods and men so it kind of gives us a picture of how society is supposed to be arranged and you could also talk about the function of you know this goes back to g s kirk's you know three-fold function but operative is one of them and the operative function has to do with the fact that these stories were meant to actually do something and that's where i'm going to cross over and talk a little bit about theory because this particular story had some interesting ritual that went along with it so when i talked about theories i talked about you know the ritual theory of mythology which says all myths
• 35:00 - 35:30 are tied to ancient ritual in some ways and this one definitely was we know for a fact that the story of the new melish was connected with a ritual and a festival that took place at the beginning of the new year for the ancient babylonians called the ikitu festival um now the ketu festival i forget how many days exactly went on it was like nine to 11 days long and it involved a number of interesting things such as the king you know it's like the end of the year
• 35:30 - 36:00 right so when the new year takes place the end of the year the beginning of the new year the king would be brought before the god accused of various crimes he'd have his throne crown removed he'd actually be struck and he would then have to plead his innocence and his faithfulness and um his crown would then be reinstated he'd basically be re-coronated and set up for a rule again so it's like a rebirth of the kingship now remember it's a creation story so by
• 36:00 - 36:30 retelling and not just retelling they actually acted out the battle between marduk and team met as part of this festival that whole idea of acting out the creation acting out the struggle that brings about the creation at the beginning of the new year was in a sense a magic ritual to renew the year for us it's like a new creation it's a new start it's a new beginning should bring forth again new life and fertility which is really why the new year was
• 36:30 - 37:00 generally acknowledged in the first place is because it marked the beginning of the planting season so this was a myth definitely tied to ritual tied to new beginnings tied to creation it's kind of interesting how they did that but it was also political and kind of fits with the charter theory which again the charter here if you don't remember what that is it says that myth serves as a way to not only explain sort of institutions but also to validate you know institutions like kingship and government structure and various
• 37:00 - 37:30 things like that so not only do you have this idea of the you know the installment of a king at the beginning of the year but you've got the idea of the political structure reinforced throughout the entire empire because one of the other aspects of the ekiti festival would be the bringing of the cult statues from various temples throughout mesopotamia the other gods basically to babylon by bard where the statues would be placed in council in front of the statue of marduk and it is it was a very visual
• 37:30 - 38:00 representation of an actual political reality right all the gods bow to the god marduk just the way all of the cities in the empire bow to the capitol at babylon okay their god is the chief and their city is you know the ruler of all so very powerful imagery that we get from that again the creative era theory i think i talked a little bit about that probably the least out of all the theories that we did bring up in the initial lecture but um this is mercedes theory that has to
• 38:00 - 38:30 do with this idea of returning us back to the creative moment right this idea of attaching ourselves again to that beginning point so that you could um you know re-experience a new creation okay to keep the world functioning the way it was meant to from the very beginning so again it's kind of a transport back in time in a certain sense religiously speaking now i'm going to get to the biblical creation a second let me not advance the
• 38:30 - 39:00 slide just yet because i wanted to point out one more time about the names i promised you that when we got through all this stuff near the end of the poem uh actually close to the end of the poem there's actually quite a bit after but you get to this point where they give marduk a collection of names it's actually given 50 names which kind of balances out this idea at the beginning of the poem where nothing is named and then by the end of the poem marduk is not only the one who has just
• 39:00 - 39:30 conquered the threat and saved all of the gods created the earth created man but he is supreme as king of all and he is given these names which kind of exalt him and show his great power right this idea of their being complete order that marduk brings about and this idea of naming gods is not something unknown even today if you're familiar with the religion of islam as a matter of fact the god allah doesn't just have 50 names he out does marduk by a great deal allah has 99
• 39:30 - 40:00 names that he is known by okay so marduk this goes all the way back to the babylonians this idea of multiple names um showing his multiple roles is power and all that kind of stuff okay that's kind of a quick quick summary of the new leash i kind of hate going through it that fast um because there's probably a lot more that we could actually unpack in the story but what i'm going to do now is we're going to progress to ancient israel
• 40:00 - 40:30 we're going to take a look at a story that was written by the hebrew scribes it's the story of adam and eve you were supposed to read genesis chapters two and three but i'm going to start back just a little bit prior by taking a look at genesis 1. so let's take a look at the biblical creation story in the first book of the torah and i've got some of the first few lines laid out here and i want to point out just some of the big differences off the
• 40:30 - 41:00 bat and some of the similarities this is one of the things that you want to do when you study myth is pay attention to both of those things so it says in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth it gets to the point a little bit faster than the enumera elise we don't see the creation of the heavens and the earth and the malaysia until after marduk has destroyed tmf second verse says now the earth was formless and empty darkness was over the surface of the deep and the spirit of god was hovering over the waters here you've got the chaos right
• 41:00 - 41:30 formlessness you've got water you've got a lot of the same things that i just talked about tmf represents both right the water the formlessness so even the biblical creation story you've got the chaos but you also have a god who is then going to impose order and in verse 3 it says and god said let there be light and there was light though here you have the idea of creation not through conflict not through war not through
• 41:30 - 42:00 a god destroying another being and ripping it apart and fashioning something out of it like a craftsman but you've got an architect who is speaking things into existence so here you've got this idea again of the words right the idea of bringing order through speech and i know when i talked about chaos in the lecture on trickster heroes i talked a lot about the idea of understanding and knowing and the importance of form and coming to know
• 42:00 - 42:30 and the impossibility of comprehending that which is chaotic okay so here you've got a very different creation account you've got a creation account really without struggle which is kind of interesting now this story i think is written the way it's written as a response to some of the ideas in other cultures around israel and i'm sure that the biblical author was well aware of kind of the babylonian sumerian accounts right
• 42:30 - 43:00 it's also going to be something that is going to be in some ways a response to some of the creation stories that come out of egypt which we're going to look at in the next lecture okay so i just wanted to point that out at the beginning now again what i want to get to is genesis chapters two and three because that's where we're going to be introduced to our trickster hero actually i shouldn't call it a trickster hero in this case but at least our trickster okay so here again the mediation of opposites you have an actual order without struggle as i was saying a second ago all right
• 43:00 - 43:30 the trickster um and i apologize for calling him the trickster hero we talked about trickster heroes but i know i pointed out in the trickster lecture that the trickster is not only the precursor to the hero but also the precursor to the villain and here is one of the great um examples of the villainous trickster the serpent this is probably the most famous trickster figure in all of world literature bar none now genesis chapters 2 and 3 are going to focus on
• 43:30 - 44:00 the creation of adam and eve the garden of eden ultimately the fall of man so let's talk about adam and eve briefly here are your first two humans are put into this garden which is essentially a paradise right and they're given the ability to eat they don't have to really work to bring forth food but they get to eat that which is present in the garden with a few exceptions okay
• 44:00 - 44:30 and the exception would be one particular tree so let me go down there we go now i'm gonna actually bring up all these these slides here so i don't miss anything that i wanted to talk about it's not the tree of knowledge actually is a tree of knowledge i'm so sorry um the tree of knowledge of good and evil specifically for some reason i was thinking that said the tree of life i wasn't paying attention but i had on my own powerpoint okay so the tree of knowledge now this is the one tree that they're not allowed
• 44:30 - 45:00 to eat from okay it specifically says in chapter two that god commanded man saying you may surely eat of every tree of the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die very specific there's a consequence for eating of this one tree now what happens next is we're introduced finally to the serpent the text says now out of the ground the lord god had formed every beast of the
• 45:00 - 45:30 field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them i'm sorry i'm getting a little ahead of myself and when the man called every religion and whatever the man called every living creature that was its name okay and the man gave names to all livestock stock and to the birds of the heavens and to every birth bird i'm sorry to every beast of the field now that obviously isn't introducing the serpent the serpent comes in in the beginning of chapter three
• 45:30 - 46:00 and i'm reading this for a very particular reason i'm just not being very clear about it um in the beginning of chapter 3 it says now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the lord god had made so we've already talked about the creation of the beast and the naming of the beast and the reason i was reading that first part was i wanted to point out again this idea of naming in the text it talks about adam naming the beasts right naming the animals is kind of a job that he's been given and here also you have this idea of creation and naming going hand in hand
• 46:00 - 46:30 this idea of order and this idea of adam being somewhat of a sub creator and the role of naming the animals he's kind of pointing out what they are he's recognizing their natures he's he's naming them and ordering the universe in a certain way so that it's very clear what everything is so adam has a hand in this and this is very reminiscent of what we saw in the enumeration this idea of namelessness and then later having names brought about so i just wanted to point
• 46:30 - 47:00 out that the hebrew scriptures have interesting attention to this idea of naming as well not just with god creating but also with adam having the role as naming okay now all out of all those creatures here we have the serpent and that's the one that we're going to focus on now the serpent according to tradition is going to be characterized later as satan or the devil it doesn't really name him as such in the actual text of the scriptures you actually see the interesting character of satan or the adversary later on particularly in the book of job and some other places down the road
• 47:00 - 47:30 now the interesting thing about the serpent is he is going to be deceitful he's going to be tricky it says in the very first line when they introduce him that he's more crafty right the intellect is the primary characteristic of the trickster and he says to woman did god actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden now pay attention to the question because he's right god didn't actually say that okay so he's not being very clearly
• 47:30 - 48:00 well i guess that's the whole point of good deception right you're not clearly lying you're saying something that's partially true but it's the response of the woman that's also interesting because she says we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden but god said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden neither shall you touch it lest you die and the serpent says you will not surely die for god knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like god knowing good
• 48:00 - 48:30 and evil so there he's getting to the actual core of the lie but it's interesting the trickster like we said was a character that kind of pushes the boundaries right they stand up to the father figure they stand up to the culture they're a transformative figure and sometimes the culture needs to be pushed a little bit you need to question certain things you need to challenge those boundaries but here is the quintessential example of the trickster challenging the father figure god of
• 48:30 - 49:00 course in the text being the archetypal father okay the one who has created all of the order that is now being challenged by the serpent and as the serpent is pushing the boundaries and testing the limits notice it becomes very easy to push those boundaries when those boundaries aren't very clear at least in the mind of the person the serpent is addressing i think god was very clear earlier in the text about what the boundaries are
• 49:00 - 49:30 that you're not allowed to eat of that one tree because if you eat of it then you'll surely die but the woman doesn't seem to know that she's vague she's confused about exactly what those boundaries are which makes it very easy to deceive her right because what she says is that you're not only supposed to not eat it you're not even supposed to touch it okay and that's clearly not what god said earlier in the chapter okay so she doesn't know what the rules exactly are and of course satan takes
• 49:30 - 50:00 advantage of that right he pushes the boundaries and then challenges her and then gets her thinking and then of course he gets her to give in to the temptation to eat she gives it to her husband he eats and the next thing that we have of course is finally the fall right now the interesting thing is they eat of the fruit and they don't die immediately but when we talk about death remember death has multiple interpretations right death is a metaphor for all kinds
• 50:00 - 50:30 of things that we're going to look at throughout the semester one of them being the moment of transition from one state to another right putting behind a certain past and moving on to the future the idea of dying and rising the idea of moving away as you mature the type of death the hero stories we're going to talk a lot about that idea now in the sense in the text there's really a literal death that's implied that man is not going to live forever that man actually is going
• 50:30 - 51:00 to physically die but they don't die at the moment a type of death they do have at that moment is a separation from god and a separation from their previous state of innocence and away an unawareness of themselves because at that moment that you have the beginning of human self-consciousness because immediately they realize that they're naked and it says they were ashamed and they go about covering themselves human beings are self-conscious we also talked about you know the greatest fear that we have as human beings
• 51:00 - 51:30 is the fear of people kind of looking through us and seeing the real us the idea of public speaking and being exposed in a certain way and this is really one of the first stories where you've got that idea of this fear of being exposed what they do is they cover themselves they hide themselves which is exactly what everybody always does when we put on our persona we put on our mask and we go into public there is a side of us that we show to the public there's another side that we hide away right this is that moment of self-consciousness now of course
• 51:30 - 52:00 things get worse as they try to hide from god god knows where they are and there's going to be an enmity that's put between them and the serpent they kind of account for you know this the animosity between humans and serpents so here again you've got this idea of the struggle between the serpent and the human being very again reminiscent of marduk versus tiamat the archetypal motif but then you've got the casting out of the garden right the
• 52:00 - 52:30 ultimate penalty is a loss of paradise at the end of chapter 3 the lord god said behold the man has become like one of us knowing good and evil now lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever therefore lord sent him out of the garden of eden to work the ground from which he was taken he drove out the man and at the east of the garden of eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword and turned
• 52:30 - 53:00 away and sorry turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life so there's this border a boundary a new boundary placed up right that you're not supposed to transgress across now this image of this garden of paradise usually where there is a tree of life often guarded by a serpent this is a motif that we're going to see in a number of stories we're going to read later this semester as well and it's usually set up at this place where there's kind of this boundary experience kind of
• 53:00 - 53:30 at the ex limit of the world we'll talk about that motif will unpack the meaning of that motif but here you have it in the hebrew scriptures again okay a number of archetypal images that are worth noting obviously the garden the tree the serpent and dragon that's what i was talking about before i even brought the visual up okay so here we've got two stories that we've just looked at unfortunately too quickly the anumilish where you have this conflict marduk and
• 53:30 - 54:00 tiamat kind of the hero and the dragon motif in the midst of the creation story bringing order of chaos and then the story that we have in genesis which is much more peaceful we don't have the conflict in the creation but we do have the conflict emerge in the fall story between adam and eve and the serpent or even between god and the serpent because that's where the real tension is which costs man everything and it's going to set up um you know the future existence of human beings now next lecture we're going to be
• 54:00 - 54:30 moving on kind of doing part two of this creation conflict and cunning where we get we're where we are going to be looking at the creation myths of ancient egypt particularly the story of osiris isis and horus okay so hopefully you'll be back for that lecture most of the time the students really love the story of osiris it tends to be a little bit more relatable than the story of the enumerated leash but i'll let you guys
• 54:30 - 55:00 decide for yourselves but do read the story of osiris isis and horus before the next lecture and i will talk to you then