Tiamat

In this week’s Main Project post we ran thought the Babylonian creation myth as it appears in the Enuma Elish.

Today, in the first of several posts which will deal with that story in more detail, I want to talk about the primordial goddess, the dragon of chaos, the god of the salt water — Tiamat.

Tiamat, locked in an eternal embrace with her husband Apsu, gave birth to the elder gods. She is depicted as a dragon or a large aquatic serpent. She represents the chaotic waters from which the world is created.

Our first task here is to understand why it is that she is portrayed as the eternal feminine? As far back as time goes

the world has been split into two; chaos and order, nature and culture,  feminine and masculine, potential and rationality, the bifurcated brain and, for the babylonians, salt water and fresh water.

The reason chaotic potential is seen as feminine is that it is the birthplace of all things. It is the rational principle, the left hemispheric discipline which, not to put too fine a point on it, enters the primordial and chaotic waters and gives structure to new life from unbounded potential.

Ancient near eastern cultures were absolutely obsessed with finding the proper balance between chaos and order, nature and culture. It is even embedded right in the conception of paradise. Paradise comes from the ancient Persian word pairidaēza which means walled enclosure and was used to describe the lush, enclosed gardens of ancient Persia which would become the greek paradeisos (Gr.παράδεισος) through Xenophon’s writing about the Persian Gardens and would later be used in Philo’s first century translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, to translate paradise and “paradise” would take on spiritual significance for Christians and later Muslims.

The idea at play here is the eternal struggle of nature and culture. Nature and culture both have two aspects to it (these are mirrored in the sexes, something we will get back to when we talk about the pathologizing of virtue with regard to Adam and Eve). On the one hand, nature is the wellspring of life, it provides peace and comfort, nourishment and adventure while, at the same time, lending itself to collapsing into chaos. On the other hand, culture provides us with protections from the ravishes of nature, freedom to pursue higher order callings once the lack of safety, deprivation and starvation of the chaotic state of nature has been tamed while, at the same time, lending itself to falling into tyranny and crushing the souls of its citizens.

Paradise, then, is the blend that is in tune. As in Genesis where God makes Adam a gardener to tend to the maintenence of the garden we are called upon as individuals to work to promote culture while resisting tyranny while at the same time working to promote nature while resisting chaos. In the end, the paradise is when the benefits of culture and nature are on optimal integrated with their pathologies maximally mitigated.

Tiamat, in the Enuma Elish, after her husband Apsu (culture, fresh water, order, rationality) is killed is left alone. Like the over grows on ancient ruins, without the culture to support her she becomes pure unmitigated nature, pure chaos. She is the primordial soup and without a mate which compliments her she is very, very dangerous.

In the Enuma Elish, it is Tiamat, angered by the murder of Apsu, who seeks to destroy the elder gods. The idea of the salt waters wiping out everything in existence is the flood myth which Mircea Eliade details in ancient civilizations world wide in his excellent three volume History of Religious Ideas.

Since  Tiamat is the flood that ends all creation, if Tiamat is primordial waters and potential laden chaos, we may ask what the name Tiamat means. In ancient cultures, the meanings and significance of names (of people, places, gods, etc) are key. This is yet another thing we have lost since the enlightenment with its insistence of matter rather than meaning.

The word Tiamat comes from the ancient Akkadian root tâmtu which mans sea or ocean. This is  same Akkadian root that the ancient Hebrew word tehom (in Genesis this describes the primordial waters God lingers over before speaking the creative word and extracting out habitable order and is often translated as “the deep”). Akkadian scholars agree that Tiamat is a word which denotes a personal, almost anthropomorphic, individuated essence of tâmtu. 

The root of tâmtu, which in turn is the root of tehom, is the Akkadian root –thm which conveys something which is “deep.”

What we see forming in the ancient Semitic languages as well as the early cosmogony is the idea of  chaotic primordial waters which are boundless in their potential and, without the constraints of order and culture (the death of Apsu), is the absolute most catastrophic guise of nature.