Vocabulary Part 3

In this week’s Main Project post we are going to be talking about the Babylonian creation myth found in the Enuma Elis.

After thinking about it for quite a bit I decided to put forward a rather straight telling of the story. I plan, over the course of the week, to flesh out the philosophical and theological significance of the story but, for the time being, I felt it was important to just have the facts.

Biblical stories, unlike the Enuma Elish, are the cornerstone of western civilization and as such it is reasonable to expect anyone who comes to this project to know, at least, the broad strokes on multiple stories. Even if it is only the watered down children’s version, when I mention Noah’s ark I do not suspect a lot of people will wonder what I am talking about.

This is not the case with the Enuma Elish.

Because we are going through just the basics of the story there is not much in the way of new vocabulary or technical terminology. It is simply the Babylonian creation story which undergirds the Mesopotamian political, ethical, social and cosmogonical philosophy.

I do want to make one quick note about chimeras however.

In the Enuma Elis, Tiamat, chaos herself, the goddess of the salt water, puts together an army of chimeric monsters.

Chimera (Gr. Χίμαιρα) might be a poor word choice as it is Greek but barring learning ancient Akkadian it is the best that I have.

A chimera is a monstrous hybrid. You can think of a she-goat or the Sphinx, chimeras are often fire breathing. A dragon is a chimera as it is a hybrid of all categories of predation. A dragon is predation as such or, to use the language of the New Testament, a dragon is a predation made flesh.

In the Old Testament there are multiple chimeric creatures. The cherubim (Gen 3:24, Ezekiel 10:1-22) are angelic

beings with a mix of human and animal features. Ezekiel describes them with four faces (human, lion, ox, eagle), four wings and human like hands. These are the cherubim that guard the garden of eden after the fall and support God’s throne in Ezekiel’s vision.

There is also the seraphim (Isaiah 6:2-6) which are described as fiery angelic beings with six wings.

In the books of Daniel (7:3-8) and Revelation (13:1-2) there are chimeric beasts that have the features of lions and eagles and bears and leopards with horns and multiple heads which symbolize the evil powers opposing God.

Finally there is the Leviathan (Job 41, Psalm 74:14, Isaiah 27:1) which is a massive sea monster or serpent. The Leviathan is particularly important as, over the days and weeks to come, we will see how it is linked back to the dragon of chaos, Tiamat, in the Enuma Elish as well as to the creation story in the beginning of Genesis.

What is important to remember about chimeras is that, like we spoke about with the ethical precondition of perception, what chimeras represent are low resolution conceptual categories without differentiation.

As we mentioned, when you see a snake or a predatory cat you do not identify it then extract out the knowledge that it is a predator. That’s not how perception works — and for good reason. If humans had to parse the differentiated predator prior to reaction the species would have died out millions of years ago.

Our perception is deeply tied to the utility, positive or negative….or neutral, of an object.

When you are walking in a jungle and a venomous snake coils to strike you do not see a snake, what you see is “PREDATOR!!!!!!” and that is what a chimera is. Higher resolution differentiation comes well after the initial reaction to the low resolution encounter with predator as such.

The Leviathan, Tiamat, the dragon is a chimera which includes all of the categories of things which prey on humans. It is the low resolution concept of predation as such.