Chapter 2 — THE CONSORT OF THE BULL
I. The Mother of God
Can Notre Dame de Chartres be the same as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe? No Catholic would hesitate to kneel and pray before either image: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.” Yet the usual anthropologist, arriving as it were from Mars, for whom theories of diffusion are anathema and all cross-cultural comparisons methodologically beneath contempt, would be in danger of returning to his planet of pure thought with two exquisitely separate monographs: the one treating of a local French, the other of a local Mexican goddess, functionally serving two entirely different social orders; Our Lady of Chartres, furthermore, showing the influence of a Gallo-Roman Venus shrine, of which the evidence appears in the cult of the Black Madonna observed in the crypt of the present (twelfth to sixteenth century) cathedral, whereas Our Lady of Guadalupe is clearly of Amerindian origin, having appeared in vision (or so it is alleged by all native informants) hardly a decade after the overthrow of Montezuma, on the site of a native shrine, probably of the great serpent-goddess Coatlicue. All of which, of course, would be true, and yet, not true enough.
Let us press the question further: Can the Virgin Mary be the same as Venus-Aphrodite, or as Cybele, Hathor, Ishtar, and the rest? We think of the words of the goddess Isis addressed to her initiate Apuleius, c. 150 a.d., which are cited at the opening of Primitive Mythology:
I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.
For the Phrygians that are the first of all men call me the Mother of the gods of Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans, which bear arrows, Dictynian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine; the Eleusinians, their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, others Ramnusie, and principally both sort of the Ethiopians, which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning rays of the sun; and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustomed to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis.Note 1
No good Catholic would kneel before an image of Isis if he knew that it was she. Yet every one of the mythic motifs now dogmatically attributed to Mary as a historic human being belongs also — and belonged in the period and place of the development of her cult — to that goddess mother of all things, of whom both Mary and Isis were local manifestations: the mother-bride of the dead and resurrected god, whose earliest known representations now must be assigned to a date as early, at least, as c. 5500 b.c.*
It is often customary in devotional cults to limit the view of the devotee to a single local manifestation, which then is honored either as unique or as the primary, “truest,” form of the divinity represented. Even in India, from the lips of a leading teacher of the unity of religions, RamaKṛṣṇa (1836–1886), we read the following words of advice to a devotee: “You should undoubtedly bow before all views. But there is a thing called unswerving devotion to one ideal. True, you should salute everyone. But you must love one ideal with your whole soul. That is unswerving devotion.” And he gave as illustration a case from the lore of Kṛṣṇa and the Gopis.Note 2 “The Gopis had such single-minded devotion to the cowherd Kṛṣṇa of Vrindavan,” he said, “that they did not care to see the turbaned Kṛṣṇa of Dwaraka.”Note 3
However, one has to recognize a distinction between the ends and means of devotion and of science; and in relation to the latter there is no reason to fear a demonstration of the derivation of local from more general forms. It is simply a fact — deal with it how you will — that the mythology of the mother of the dead and resurrected god has been known for millenniums to the neolithic and post-neolithic Levant. Its relation to the earlier, paleolithic cult of the naked goddess of the age of the mammoth hunt is unclear;Note 4 but there is no question concerning the obvious continuity from the nuclear Near East c. 5500 b.c., to Guadalupe, 1531 a.d. The entire ancient world, from Asia Minor to the Nile and from Greece to the Indus Valley, abounds in figurines of the naked female form, in various attitudes, of the all-supporting, all-including goddess: her two hands offering her breasts; her left pointing to her genitals and the right offering her left breast; nursing or fondling a male child; standing upright among beasts; arms extended, holding tokens — stalks, flowers, serpents, doves, or other signs. Such figurines are demonstrably related, furthermore, to the well-known Bronze Age myths and cults of the Great Goddess of many names, one of whose most celebrated temples stood precisely at Ephesus, where, in the year 431 a.d., the dogma of Mary as Theotokos, “Mother of God,” was in Council proclaimed. At that time the pagan religions of the Roman Empire were being implacably suppressed: temples closed and destroyed; priests, philosophers, and teachers, banished and executed. And so it came to pass that, in the end and to our day, Mary, Queen of Martyrs, became the sole inheritor of all the names and forms, sorrows, joys, and consolations of the goddess-mother in the Western World: Seat of Wisdom … Vessel of Honor … Mystical Rose … House of Gold … Gate of Heaven … Morning Star … Refuge of Sinners … Queen of Angels … Queen of Peace.Note 5
II. The Two Queens
The vision of a goddess shown in Figure 12 is from a Cretan sealing of c. 1500 b.c., found by Sir Arthur Evans amid the ruins of the labyrinthine palace of Knossos. The ancient civilization of Crete is of especial importance to our study, since it represents the earliest high center of developed Bronze Age forms within the European sphere. The island, as Frobenius noted, is in the zone of Levantine influence, and the high period of its palaces, c. 2500–c. 1250 b.c., was exactly that of the Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.Note 6
Figure 12. The Goddess of the World Mountain
In the sealing, the goddess, spear in hand, stands on a mountain flanked by lions. Behind her is a building bearing on its architraves the characteristic “horns of consecration” of all Cretan shrines, and before her, in a posture known from other images to signify adoration, stands a young male, who is possibly a god (her dead and resurrected son and spouse), possibly the young Cretan king (who, if Frazer is correct,Note 7 was sacrificed, either actually or symbolically, at the end of each Venus-solar cycle of eight years),* or, possibly, simply a devotee.
Sir Arthur Evans, to whose labors during the first quarter of this century we owe the rediscovery of Cretan civilization, maintains throughout the six volumes of his monumental work, The Palace of MinosNote 8 that the numerous goddess images discovered in the course of his excavations represent, to quote his own words, “the same Great Mother with her Child or Consort whose worship under various names and titles extended over a large part of Asia Minor and the Syrian regions beyond.”Note 9 Professor Martin P. Nilsson of Lund, on the other hand, whose History of Greek Religion is today the unmatched masterwork in its field,Note 10 rejects Evans’ view, advising caution.
The goddess with spear in hand, who stands on the mountain symmetrically flanked by two lions [he writes] indeed resembles the beweaponed Lady of the Beasts. Moreover, the representation of the mountain compellingly suggests the opeia, “the Mountain Mother,” Cybele of Asia Minor, accompanied by lions, while the identification of Cybele with Rhea, who gave birth to Zeus in Crete, would seem to support her association with this island. The goddess of the seal has therefore been identified unhesitatingly with the Great Mother of Asia Minor. Yet a fact to be borne in mind is that many centuries (indeed, but for Hesiod, a full thousand years) extend between this picture and our stories of the Great Mother. Without prejudice to the possible, or probable, ethnic connection between Minoan Crete and Asia Minor, it would be more prudent not to attribute to the Minoan goddess traits of the Great Mother first known to us from the historic period, but simply to confine ourselves to the observation that our sealing shows a nature goddess like or related to that of Asia Minor; for in the intervening centuries the character of the latter can have developed or altered.Note 11
It would seem to be only prudent to heed such a warning. However, in the years since the writing of Professor Nilsson’s paragraph, a new light has been cast across the entire theater of antiquity, and in its flare the position of Sir Arthur would seem to be the one that has been reinforced. Specifically, in 1953 a young British architect, the late Michael Ventris, deciphered the Cretan Linear B script, and what he found was that the language was an early Greek.Note 12 Further, although the writings proved to be merely accountants’ notes, recording, among other matters, offerings made in temples, the gods to whom the offerings were addressed were those that in the classic Greek tradition are associated with Crete. For instance:
“To Dictaean Zeus, oil.”
“To the Daidaleion, oil.”
“To the Lady of the Labyrinth, a jar of honey.”
Moreover, at a site on the Greek mainland now identified as Pylos, the Mycenaean palace-city of King Nestor of the Iliad, a second store of Linear B notations has turned up, which tells of a large number of gifts to the Greek sea-god Poseidon, “the Lord (posei) of the earth-goddess (day),”Note 13 including cattle, rams, sheepskins, wheat, flour and wine, cheeses, honey and unguent, gold, and even human beings.Note 14 We learn of a divine triad called “the Two Queens and Poseidon”; further, of “the Two Queens and the King.”Note 15 We find, also, that the city of King Nestor was near the sanctuary of a goddess known as Potnia, “the Lady,” and that there the king had a large temenos or estate.Note 16
Scholars have recalled in this connection the words of Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous of the seafaring Phaeacians, in the Odyssey. “You will find,” she told Odysseus, “a lovely poplar grove to Athena near the road. A spring wells forth therein. A meadow lies all about. And there is the temenos of my father, and his fruitful orchard.”Note 17
But now what can have been the relation of Potnia to the king; or of “the Two Queens” to the king; or of “the Two Queens” to the god Poseidon? And what bearing will all this have upon our concept of the role of the Goddess in Crete, and through Crete to Classical Greece and beyond?
There is an ivory plaque from the ruins of Mycenae, showing two women seated with a child (Figure 13).Note 18 The triad is now interpreted, in the light of what has been learned from the texts of Linear B, as representing the Two Queens and the King, or the Two Queens and the Young God. “The plaque from Mycenae,” states Professor Leonard Palmer, who worked with Ventris in the reading of the script, “is widely regarded as a most beautiful representation of the Mycenaean ‘divine family.’ But there is other evidence of a more schematic kind. A number of terra-cotta figures are known which show two women joined together like Siamese twins and with a child seated on their common shoulder. These too have been interpreted as representations of the Twin Goddess with the Young God.”Note 19
Figure 13. The Two Queens and the King
In the earliest recorded mythology of Sumer, the dead and resurrected god Dumuzi-absu, “the Faithful Son of the Abyss,” was in destiny involved with two mighty goddesses; or, better, one goddess in dual form. She was, on one hand, goddess of the living, and, on the other, goddess of the dead. As the former, she was Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who became, in later Classical mythology, Aphrodite; and, as the latter, she was the dreadful Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal, who became in Classical myth Persephone. And the god who in death dwelt with the latter, but in life was the lover of the former, was in the Greek tradition Adonis. We note that in our figure the child is passing from one goddess to the other. Almost certainly, in the old Sumerian system, such a triad as that of this Mycenaean plaque would have represented Inanna and Ereshkigal with Dumuzi, or his counterpart, the king in whom his spirit was incarnate; while in Classical Greece they would have suggested the great triad of the mysteries of Eleusis: Demeter (the mother-goddess Earth), Persephone (Queen of the Underworld), and the young god, their foster child Triptolemus (once a local king),Note 20 who is said to have brought Demeter’s gift of grain into the world and, as the fosterling of Persephone, to reign now in the land of the dead.Note 21
Figure 14. Demeter, Triptolemus, and Persephone
For comparison, Figure 14 is an illustration of the Greek triad, from an early red-figured cup discovered in the precincts of Eleusis.Note 22 Demeter, at our left, is handing grain to her fosterling, Triptolemus, who is holding his “crooked plow” in a way that suggests a basic plow-phallus analogy; while behind him stands Persephone, with two torches in her hands that denote her queenship of the Underworld. (Compare, now, Figure 7.) “Mother and Maid in the picture are clearly distinguished,” Jane Harrison states; “but not infrequently,” she adds, “when both appear together, it is impossible to say which is which.” “Demeter and Kore [Persephone] are two persons though one god.”Note 23
Thus a reasonably firm continuity appears to have been established between the two Sumerian goddesses of the myth of the dead and resurrected god, the Two Queens of the late Cretan Linear B accounts, and the well-known Mother and Maid, Demeter and Persephone, of the Greek Mysteries of Eleusis of which Socrates speaks in the Gorgias.Note 24 In other words, Sir Arthur Evans’ view of the continuity of the mythology of the Great Goddess, from the nuclear Near East to Minoan Crete, and from Minoan to Classical times, seems to have been confirmed; and with this in mind we may now proceed with Evans to a deeper view of the symbolism of the Cretan-Mycenaean dual goddess.
There is, fortunately, an eloquent, though silent, document in the beautiful “Ring of Nestor” found by a peasant in a large beehive tomb at Pylos (Figure 15): a ring of solid gold, of 31.5 grams, of which the date, according to Evans, should be c. 1550-1500 b.c.
Figure 15. The Tree of Eternal Life
The field of the design [he writes] is divided into zones … by the trunk and horizontally spreading boughs of a great tree … old, gnarled, and leafless. It stands with spreading roots on the top of a mound or hillock with its trunk rising in the center of the field and with wide-stretching horizontal boughs. … The scenes that its branches thus divide belong, in fact, not to the terrestrial sphere, but to the Minoan After-World. An obvious analogy is suggested with Yggdrasil, the Ash of Odin’s steed and die old Scandinavian “Tree of the World.”
Upper left:
In the first compartment of the tree may be recognized the Minoan Goddess, seated in animated conversation with her wonted companion, while above her head there flutter two butterflies. The symbolic significance of these, moreover, is emphasized by the appearance above them of two small objects showing traces of heads at the tip and with hook-like projections at the side, in which we may reasonably recognize the two corresponding chrysalises. … Placed as they are here in connection with their pupal forms, it is difficult to explain them otherwise than as an allusion to the resurgence of the human spirit after death.
It can hardly be doubted, moreover, that they apply to the two youthful figures who appear beside them on the ring, and must be taken to be symbolic of their reanimation with new life.
The youth, with long Minoan locks, standing behind the Goddess, raises the lower part of his right arm, while the short-skirted damsel who faces him with her back to the trunk, shows her surprise at the meeting by holding up both hands. … We see here, reunited by the life-giving power of the Goddess and symbolized by the chrysalises and butterflies, a young couple whom Death had parted. The meeting indeed may, in view of the scene of initiation depicted below, be interpreted as the permanent reunion of a wedded pair in the Land of the Blest.
Upper right:
In the next compartment, right of the trunk, the sacred Lion of the Goddess crouches in an attitude of vigilant repose on a kind of bench, tended by two girl figures (though in men’s dress) in whom we recognize the frequently recurring representations of her two little handmaidens. The Lion of the Goddess would naturally keep watch and ward over the realms below.
The religious character of the scene is further enhanced by the bough … the “sacred ivy” that springs from the trunk. (… The plant, the shoots of which spring forth from the trunk of the Tree of the World to give shade to the lion guardian of the realms below, must be identified with the same “Sacral Ivy” that climbs the rock steeps in the cycle of wall paintings. The heart-shaped leaves and even the double terminal tufts of flowers are distinctly indicated. … It is impossible not to recall the Golden Bough, which, when plucked by Aeneas, opened for him the passage to Avernus [Aeneid VI. 136 ff.]. But ever, as one was torn away, another branch of gleaming gold sprang in its place. …)
Lower left and right:
The lower zone on either side of the trunk, beneath the spreading branches, unfolds one continuous scene, the whole of which seems to depict the initiatory examination of those entering the Halls of the Just in the Griffin’s Court. In the left compartment the young couple reappear, treading, as it were, the measure of a dance and beckoned forward by a “griffin lady,” right of the trunk, while another warns off a youth on the extreme left, as a profane intruder. Right of the trunk, beyond the first, two more “griffin ladies” — dressed in the usual short-skirted fashion of the early part of the New Era [c. 1550 b.c.] with hands upraised in adoration — head the procession to the presiding figure of the tribunal. This is a winged griffin of the milder, peacock-plumed variety, seated on a high stool or throne, while behind stands another female personage, in whom we may recognize a repetition of the Goddess herself. A pre-eminent characteristic of the griffin — eagle-headed in his origin on Cretan soil — is his piercing sight, which qualifies him here for his post as Chief Inquisitor. Below, on the mound at the foot of the Tree, amidst shoots that seem to stand for herbage, is couched a dog-like monster, the forerunner of Cerberus, but who may also be compared in a broader aspect with the dragon — the loathly Nidhogger — at the foot of Yggdrasil.Note 25
The lesson is clear enough. And the image of a life beyond death represented in this scene differs toto coelo from the dismal Hades of the later, epic period, while suggesting, on the other hand, the more genial Classical images of the Islands of the Blessed and Elysian Plain. We think of Virgil’s Fortunate Woodlands:
Largior hie campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.*
We think, also, of the old Sumerian island paradise, Dilmun, in the midst of the primeval sea, where, as an ancient cuneiform text of c. 2050 b.c. relates:
The lion does not kill,
The wolf snatches not the lamb. …
Its old woman says not “I am an old woman,”
Its old man says not “I am an old man.”Note 26
It is a view of that “Elysian Plain and the world’s end,” described by the old sea god Proteus to the spouse of Helen, Menelaus, in the fourth book of the Odyssey, “where,” as he declares, “is Rhadamathus of the fair hair, where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor yet great storm, nor any rain; but always Ocean sendeth forth the breeze of the shrill West to blow cool on men.”Note 27 “The Greek religion of the historic period,” Professor Nilsson states, “developed from the fusion of the religions of two populations of differing race — of both of which we know unfortunately all too little. Still, the deeply rooted difference can be sensed between the emotional religion of the pre-Greek population, which seems to have been impressed with a mystic tendency, and the temperate religion of the Indo-Germanic invaders, who entrusted the protection of the unwritten laws of their patriarchal order to their gods.”Note 28 I want to make a large point of this remark, as announcing what is to remain, throughout the breadth and length of the history of religions in the West, the chief occasion for a sordid, sorry chronicle of collision, vituperation, coercion, and spilled blood. For in the Levantine sphere, as well as in the Greek, a deeply rooted contrast prevails between the pre-Semitic, pre-Aryan mystic-emotional religion of the agrarian neolithic and Bronze Age populations, and, on the other hand, “the temperate religion” (let us call it so, for the time being) of the various invading warrior folk, “who entrusted the protection of the unwritten [later, written] laws of their patriarchal order to their gods.” Indeed, we do not merely “sense,” we experience acutely in our souls, and have documented for every period of our culture, the force that holds apart in us these contrary trends. But the one point to be stressed in the present portion of our chapter is simply that neither to the patriarchal Aryans nor to the patriarchal Semites belong the genial, mystic, poetic themes of the lovely world of a paradise neither lost nor regained but ever present in the bosom of the goddess-mother in whose being we have our death, as well as life, without fear.
III. The Mother of the Minotaur
There is in the University Museum, Philadelphia, an important and fascinating terra-cotta plaque from ancient Sumer, c. 2500 b.c. (Figure 16), that shows the ever-dying, ever-living lunar bull, consumed through all time by the lion-headed solar eagle. The victim has fiery signs of divine power flashing from his four limbs; a calmly beatific smile radiates from his human countenance, framed by a great square beard that is characteristic in archaic art (Egyptian as well as Sumerian) of those lordly beasts, usually serpent or bull, that are symbolic of the power that fecundates the earth; and his right foreleg is here placed squarely on the center of a mound symbolic of the summit of the cosmic holy mountain, which, as we know from numerous texts, is the body of the goddess Earth. A prominent device resembling the Cretan “horns of consecration” marks the field of contact between the receptive earth and bestowing god, whose leg and foot are thrust to its center to form with it a sort of trident: and the god, in this view, is above, for it is from the moon above, as it wanes, consumed by the light of the sun, that the life-restoring dews and fertilizing rain descend.
Figure 16. Moon-Bull and Lion-Bird
But there is water, also, beneath the earth. The Creto-Mycenaean god Poseidon, whose animal is the bull and whose attribute is the trident, dwells in the sea, in springs, and in the waters beneath the earth. Likewise in India, Śiva, “the Great Lord,” whose animal is the bull, whose attribute is the trident, and the name of whose consort, Parvati, means “the Daughter of the Mountain” — her animal, moreover, being the lion — is in one aspect known as dwelling with his goddess on the summit of Mount Kailasa, but at the same time is honored chiefly in the symbol of the lingam (phallus), rising from the waters of the abyss and penetrating the yoni (vulva) of the goddess Earth. Śiva as “the Cosmic Dancer” is shown with his right foot planted firmly on the back of a prostrate dwarf named Ignorance and the left lifted in a cross kick. The meaning of this posture is said to be that with the right foot the god of the trident is driving his divine creative energy into the sphere of mortal birth and with the left yielding release from this temporal round. I cannot help wondering whether a similar thought may not have been implied by the posture of the front legs of this bull.
In the royal tombs of Ur, discussed in Primitive Mythology, the silver head of a cow was found in the chamber of the buried Queen Shub-ad, while in the tomb complex of her spouse, A-bar-gi, whom she with her whole court had followed in death below ground (suttee theme),* there was the golden head of a bull, with square lapis-lazuli beard, decorating the sounding box and pillar of an elegant little harp.Note 29 The sound of this harp, I have suggested, was symbolically the summoning song of the moon-bull, bidding Queen Shub-ad to follow her beloved into the realm of the Queen of Death. The myth implied is that of the Two Queens and the King. And the music of the ornamented harp, the bull’s voice, was the music of those mysteries in which life and death are known as one.
The following Mesopotamian rite for the replacement of the head of a temple kettledrum, described by Dr. Robert Dyson, Jr., of The University Museum, speaks for both the import of the bull and the function of art in the rites of the ancient world.
The eligibility of the bull was strictly defined: it had to be unmarked by a goad, to have no white tufts, to have whole horns and hoofs, and to be black as pitch. It was then brought to what was called the mummu-house and set on a reed mat with its legs tied with a goat hair rope. After the offering of a sheep, the ritual of “washing the mouth” was performed by whispering an incantation into the bull’s ear through a reed and then sprinkling him with cedar resin. He was then purified symbolically in some way with a brazier and torch. Around him a circle of flour was made and, after further recitations by the priest, he was killed with a knife. The heart was burned with cedar, cypress and a special kind of flour in front of the kettledrum. The tendon was removed from the left shoulder for some reason not specified, and the animal was skinned. The body was then wrapped in a red cloth and buried facing west. Elaborate instructions were then given for the preparation of the hide, which would eventually serve as the new drumhead.Note 30
The mythic lunar bull, lord of the rhythm of the universe, to whose song all mortality is dancing in a round of birth, death, and new birth, was called to mind by the sounds of the drum, strings, and reed flutes of the temple orchestras, and those attending were set in accord thereby with the aspect of being that never dies. The beatific, yet impassive, enigmatic Mona Lisa features of the bull slain by the lion-bird suggest the mode of being known to initiates of the wisdom beyond death, beyond changing time. Through his death, which is no death, he is giving life to the creatures of the earth, even while indicating, with his lifted forefoot, the leftward horn of the mythic symbol.
The symbol here seems to represent the plane of juncture of earth and heaven, the goddess and the god, who appear to be two but are in being one. For, as we know from an ancient Sumerian myth, heaven (An) and the earth (Ki) were in the beginning a single undivided mountain (Anki), of which the lower part, the earth, was female, and the upper, heaven, male. But the two were separated (as Adam into Adam and Eve) by their son Enlil (in the Bible by their “creator,” Yahweh), whereupon the world of temporality appeared (as it did when Eve ate the apple).Note 31 The ritual marriage and connubium was to be understood as a reconstruction of the primal undifferentiated state, both in meditation (psychological aspect) for the refreshment of the soul, and in act (magical aspect) for the fertilization and renovation of nature: whereby it was also to be recognized that there is a plane or mode of being where that primal state is ever present, though to the mind and eye of day all seems to be otherwise. The state of the ultimate bull, that is to say, is invisible: black, pitch black.
Thus it can be said that, just as in the Indian symbolic form of the Dancing Śiva, so likewise in this Sumerian terra-cotta plaque, a statement is to be recognized of the archaic Bronze Age philosophy discussed in my earlier volume, which has survived to this hour in the Orient. In its primary, unintended mode, this philosophy is properly comparable to the childlike state of mind termed by Dr. Jean Piaget “indissociation.”Note 32 In its developed, higher forms, however, it has been the most important single creative force in the history of civilization. Its import is experienced immediately in the ultimate mystical rapture of non-duality, or mythic identification, and is symbolized in the various imageries of ancient Egypt’s Secret of the Two Partners, China’s Tao, India’s Nirvana, and Japan’s development of the Buddhist doctrine of the Flower Wreath.Note 33 There is a touch of it, too, in the image of Paradise regained in the oft-cited passage of Isaiah (c. 740-700 b.c.):
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The suckling child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Yahweh as the waters cover the sea.Note 34
Except that here the idyllic situation is postponed to a day to come, whereas in the earlier view it exists now, in this world as it is, and is recognized as so through spiritual initiation. It is the vision represented in our plaque of the lunar bull and solar lion-bird; but it is represented on the plane of earth as well: by the living bull and lion who in Mother Nature’s heart dwell in everlasting peace, even now, as they enact their monstrous mystery play of life, which is called “Now You Eat Me.”
The enigmatically blissful, impassive expression of the bull on the terra-cotta plaque appears again, mutatis mutandis, on the masklike features of the Indian dancing Śiva. The god holds a drum in his lifted right hand, the drumbeat of time, the beat of creation, while on the palm of his left is the fire of the knowledge of immortality by which the bondages of time are destroyed. Śiva emanates flames, as do the four legs of this bull; and in Śiva’s hair the skull of death is worn as ornament, alongside the crescent moon of rebirth. Śiva is the Lord of Beasts (pasupati); so too is the great Sumerian lord of death and rebirth, Dumuzi-Tammuz-Adonis, whose animal is this beatific bull; so too, furthermore, is the Greek God Dionysus, known — like Śiva — as the Cosmic Dancer, who is both the bull torn apart and the lion tearing:
Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name,
O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads,
Lion of the Burning Flame!
O God, Beast, Mystery, come!Note 35
It was something of a shock to many when the name Dionysus appeared among the words deciphered from Linear B.Note 36 And so, let us return with this name to Crete.
In Oriental Mythology I have discussed the mythology of the god-king Pharaoh of Egypt, who was called “the bull of his mother”;Note 37 for, when dead within the mound of his tomb (the mound symbolic of the goddess), he was identified with Osiris begetting his son, and when alive, sitting on his throne (likewise symbolic of the goddess), he was the son of Osiris, Horus; and these two, as representing the whole mythic role of the dead yet reembodied King of the Universe, were in substance one. The cosmic cow-goddess Hathor (hat-hor, the “house of Horus”) stood upon the earth in such a way that her four legs were the pillars of the quarters and her belly was the firmament. The god Horus, symbolized as a golden falcon, the sun, flying east to west, entered her mouth at evening to be born again the next dawn and was thus, indeed, in his night character, the “bull of his mother”; whereas by day, as ruler of the world of light, he was a keen-eyed bird of prey. Moreover, the animal of Osiris, the bull, was incarnate in the sacred Apis bull, which was ceremonially slain every twenty-five years — thus relieving the pharaoh himself of the obligation of a ritual regicide. And it seems to me (though I cannot find that anyone has yet offered the suggestion) that the ritual game of the Cretan bull ring must have served the same function for the young god-kings of Crete.
We have a number of representations of Cretan kings, and they always show a youth of about twenty; there is none of an old man. So there may have been a regicide at the close of each Venus cycle, after all; though the prominence of the bull ring in the ritual art of Crete suggests that a ritual substitution may have been made.
Professor Nilsson regards the bull game as devoid of religious import;Note 38 but the lively design of Figure 17 seems to me to controvert this view. We see a man-bull — a Minotaur — attacked by a man-lion; and the analogy with the bull and lion-bird of Sumer cannot be denied. Indeed, the dynamics of this masterful little art work even suggest the idea of an ever-turning, never-ending cycle. For as in Sumer, so in Crete: whereas the lion was the animal of the blazing solar heat, which both slays the moon and parches vegetation, the bull was the animal of the moon: the waning and waxing god, by the magic of whose night dew the vegetation is restored; the lord of tides and the productive powers of the earth, the lord of women, lord of the rhythm of the womb.
Figure 17. Minotaur and Man-Lion
Figure 18. The Sacrifice
In the picture language of mythology the image of the Minotaur equates the idea of the moon-bull with that of the moon-man or moon-king, and so suggests that the king’s place may have been taken by a bull in Crete, as it was in Egypt, in the age-old agrarian ritual of the god-king’s life-endowing death. Moreover, that the bulls were indeed ritually slain in the ring seems to be shown in Figure 18, where a priestly matador is dealing the coup de grace: the beast, coursing in full stadium career, is here being ritually slain. The matador and sword, that is to say are performing the same function as the lion-bird of Sumer, while the bull is in its standard role of the ever-dying, ever-living god: the lord, Poseidon, of the goddess Earth.
Thus a prospect of Cretan thought emerges from the ruins that sets it in a well and widely known Bronze Age context; but with a particular accent on the role of the female that sets it apart no less from the great priestly civilizations of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates than from the later patriarchal Greeks.
In spite of the limitations imposed by the nature of the evidence, [Nilsson writes] certain characteristic traits of Minoan religion do emerge in contrast to the Greek. One is the preponderance of goddesses and of female cult officiants. Masculine deities are, in contrast to feminine, very scarce; masculine cult images are lacking altogether; in the cult scenes women appear far more frequently than men; and it is likely that this preponderance of the female sex accounts for the emotional character of the religion, which appears particularly in tree cult scenes. The most clearly recognizable cults are that of the household serpent goddess and the nature cult in its two aspects, that of the Lady and Lord of Beasts and that of Trees. How these relate to the nature sanctuaries that have been discovered is unfortunately unknown. And the observation must finally be added that all reference to sexual life, all phallic symbols, such as abound and are so aggressive in numerous religions — including the historic religion of Greece — are in Minoan art completely missing.Note 39
Evans too has remarked the decency and decorum of Minoan art: “from its earliest to its latest phase,” he writes, “not one single example has been brought to light of any subject of an indecorous nature.”Note 40
The culture, as many have noted, was apparently of a matriarchal type. The grace and elegance of the ladies in their beautifully flounced skirts, generous decollete, pretty coiffures, and gay bandeaux, mixing freely with the men, in the courts, in the bull ring — lovely, vivid, and vicacious, gesticulating, chattering, even donning masculine athletic belts to go somersaulting dangerously over the horns and backs of bulls — represent a civilized refinement that has not been often equaled since: which I would like the present chapter to fix firmly in place, by way of a challenge to the high claims of those proudly phallic moral orders, whether circumcised or uncircumcised, that were to follow.
And a contrast no less evident sets the Cretan world apart from the kingly states of both Sumer and the Nile. Its mythology and culture appear to represent an earlier stage than theirs of Bronze Age civilization: a milder, gentler day, antecedent to the opening of the great course of Eurasian world history that is best dated by the wars and victory monuments of its self-interested kings. There were no walled cities in Crete before the coming of the Greeks. There is little evidence of weapons. Battle scenes of kingly conquest play no role in the setting of the style. The tone is of general luxury and delight, a broad participation by all classes in a genial atmosphere of well-being, and the vast development of a profitable commerce by sea, to every port of the archaic world and even — boldly — to regions far beyond.
The datings of Cretan civilization set up by Sir Arthur Evans have been modified by later scholarship, but the main lines remain, and, with the alterations that later findings have suggested, may be summarized as follows:
All authorities agree that the neolithic strata must have derived from Asia Minor. Hence the recent excavations in southwest Anatolia (Turkey) are of especial interest. Their ceramic wares, which have been dated from c. 5500 b.c., may be taken to represent the earliest known background of the Cretan goddess cult. They include the statuette of a naked goddess seated upon and fondling leopards; also, one of such a goddess embraced by an adolescent youth; another of the goddess holding a child; and several of female figures alone, lying down or standing — but always handled (to quote the words of their excavator, Professor James Mellaart) “with admirable taste and a mastery of modeling heretofore unknown until late classic times.”Note 41
Moreover, in the neighboring so-called Taurean corner, where southeast Asia Minor meets northern Syria, an abundant series of female figurines appeared c. 4500-3500 b.c., in association with the beautiful painted Halaf ware of that zone; and here (as shown in Primitive Mythology)Note 42 a number of symbolic forms first appeared that were later to be prominent in Crete: the bull’s head (bucranium) viewed from before, the double ax, the beehive tomb, and figures of the dove, as well as of the cow, sheep, goat, and pig.
In Oriental Mythology I have shown that the earliest known temple compounds in the history of civilization arose in this area c. 4000 b.c. and that by their form they suggested a reference to the female genitalia; specifically, the matrix of the cosmic mother-goddess, Cow. The milk of the sacred cattle raised within their enclosures was equivalent to that of the mother-goddess herself, whose calf was the animal of sacrifice. And when the pastoral-agrarian village culture of which this temple complex was a part spread south to the newly entered Mesopotamian mudlands, c. 4000-3500 b.c., this cattle cult went along.Note 43 But it also crossed Iran to India, where it appeared in the complex of the Indus Valley civilization, c. 2500 b.c., just about the time of the rise in Crete of Early Minoan II.
An important school of Italian scholarship has recently begun to write of a “Mediterranean culture complex” reaching as far eastward as the Indus, dominated by the myths and rites of the Great Goddess and her consort.Note 44 Professor Nilsson writes of this group with a certain scorn.Note 45 However, it is difficult to imagine how one should otherwise explain the occurrence of a single syndrome of symbolic forms in two landscapes differing as greatly as the island world of the Aegean and the landlocked plains of northern India: the occurrence in both of a goddess who is both benign (as cow) and terrible (as lioness), associated with the growth, nourishment, and death of all beings, and, in particular, vegetation; symbolized in all her aspects by a cosmic tree of life, which is equally of death; and whose male associate is a god whose animal is the bull and token the trident, with whom, furthermore, the waning and waxing of the moon is linked, in a context showing numerous vestiges of a tradition of ritual regicide. My own view is that the two mythologies are clearly extensions of a single system, of which the matrix was the nuclear Near East; the period of diffusion preceded that of the rise of the great Bronze Age Sumero-Egyptian kingly states; and the motive force of the vast expansion was commercial: the exploitation of raw materials, and trade. In India this late neolithic trading style of civilization gradually declined, yielding its contributions, first, to the primitive population, and, next, to the high Vedic Aryan development.Note 46 From Crete, on the other hand, a vigorous commercial expansion followed, which even reached, in the period of the Middle and Late Minoan stages (Middle Minoan I to late Minoan II), as far northwest as the British Isles. For a connection between Britain and the Cretan sphere has now been definitely shown.
A summary view of the British dates and stages, based on the recent archaeological investigation of Stonehenge by Professor R. J. C. Atkinson, can be offered for comparison with the Cretan series:
1. the windmill hill culture, c. 2300 b.c.: Earliest neolithic in Britain; derived ultimately from eastern Mediterranean (Frobenius’s Cretan Sea), via Switzerland, France, and Iberia; scattered groups on southern shores: farmer-shepherds. Chief remains: large circular enclosures of earthwork, often comprising several concentric rings (e.g., on Windmill Hill, near Avebury), these may have been cattle corrals; also, long barrows, 10 feet or more in height, 100 to 300 feet in length, containing half a dozen or more bodies. Settlements, for the most part temporary.Note 47
2. the megalithic builders, c. 2000 b.c.: Remains: vast chambered tombs on western coasts of Britain.Note 48 Burials, collective but successive, in contrast to those of the Windmill Hill long barrows. (Correlation with Irish chambered tombs and high period of exploitation of Irish gold and copper, dated by Macalister c. 2000–1600 b.c.)Note 49 The megalithic diffusion seems to have emanated from the western Mediterranean (Frobenius’s Sardinian Sea), and to have passed through France, up the Biscay coast, to Brittany and the British Isles. Its relationship to the much later Iron Age megalithic remains of South India, c. 200 b.c. to c. 50 a.d., remains obscure.Note 50
2a. Development in Britain of Secondary Neolithic Cultures: Local developments resulting from the impact of Windmill Hill and megalithic arrivals upon the native mesolithic-paleolithic population. “Henge” monuments: large, circular, banked enclosures, normally broken by a single entrance, encompassing a ring of pits, with associated cremated burials. For example, Woodhenge: six concentric ovals of post holes suggest the ground plan here of a roofed wooden building; an infant’s skeleton with cleft skull was found buried at the center of the ring.Note 51
3. stonehenge i, c. 1900-1700 b.c.: The first of three successive phases in the building of great Stonehenge: encircling bank and pits; possibly some wooden structure at the center. The pits, it has been supposed, were for offerings addressed to the earth (the poured blood of slaughtered beasts, possibly also of human beings: compare the Woodhenge infant skeleton above).Note 52
3a. Arrivals of Corded-Ware Battle-Ax People, c. 1775 b.c.: Aryan complex? Arrivals on northeast British coasts from across the North Sea; points of departure unknown: ultimate source land, the grazing plains from the Rhine to the Russian steppes. Impressed cord-ornamented pottery (compare Japan: Jomon, i.e. “cord-marked,” stratum, c. 2500-300 b.c.);Note 53 perforated stone battle-axes, martial display, and warlike panoply: chieftainship.Note 54
3b. Arrivals of Bell-Beaker People, c. 1775 b.c.: Arrivals on southeast British coasts from Rhineland. Individual burials un der round barrows. Related cultures widely distributed in Central and Southwest Europe. Circular gold disks ornamented with a cross (solar reference?).Note 55
4. stonehenge ii, c. 1700-1500 b.c.: Second phase in the building of great Stonehenge: a double circle of seventy-six holes in which moderate-sized monoliths of bluestone once stood (the positions of the stones were changed during the building of Stonehenge III, but the evidence of the earlier placement is unquestioned). Size of stones: between about 6 and 13 feet high; weight, up to 6y2 tons. Of particular interest: the axial line of the entrance to this circle (marked by an arrangement of six additional stones, making eighty-two in all) is oriented to the midsummer sunrise — which indicates a change from the earth orientation of Stonehenge I (sacrificial pits: earth-goddess cult?) to a skyward orientation (standing stones: sky and solar deities). Furthermore: the blue-stone monoliths of this sanctuary had been brought from a sacred mountain 135 miles away, as the crow flies, namely Prescelly Top in Pembrokeshire, Wales — whose “cloud-wrapped summit,” Professor Atkinson suggests, “must have seemed no less the home of gods than did Mount Ida to a voyager on the Cretan plain.”Note 56 This mountain (1760 feet) was visible to the tradesmen transporting Irish bronze and gold wares across southern Wales and Britain to the Continent. Further elements of this culture complex: local modifications of beaker pottery forms; Irish copper halberds and other effects of warrior gear, suggesting (to cite Professor Atkinson again) “a warrior-aristocracy, intimately involved in the trade in metal products.”Note 57
5. the wessex culture, c. 1500-1400 b.c.: Circle barrows (notably in the neighborhood of Stonehenge): single burials beneath a round mound, often of considerable height, surrounded by a ditch, containing numerous rich and exotic ornaments and weapons. An aristocratic community of power and wealth: middlemen in the Irish metal trade (gold, copper, and now also bronze wares) to the Continent, both overland and by sea to and from Minoan Crete and Mycenae. Metal imports from Germany and Bohemia. Necklaces of Baltic amber (the Bronze Age Amber Route was now in use, from the Baltic, overland through Central Europe, to the Adriatic). Gold objects from the Mediterranean. Egyptian faience beads.Note 58
5a. Stonehenge III, 1500-1400 b.c.: The great sarsen circle, 100 feet in diameter, of (originally) thirty tremendous stones: they rise to about 18 feet in height, with an average weight of some 26 tons. A lintel ran around the top, affixed by a type of mortice-and-tenon joint used also in the postern gate at Mycenae. Within the circle, a horseshoe of five trilithons opens toward the northeast (Summer Solstice), the tallest 24 feet above ground. And the earlier bluestones are now rearranged in two series, within and complementing the sarsens, namely in a circle and a horseshoe. Carvings on the stones: dagger of a type found in the shaft graves of Mycenae, 1600-1500 b.c.; ax head of a type of Irish bronze import, 1600-1400 b.c.; a rectangle symbolic of the mother-goddess.Note 59
The British dates match the Cretan perfectly and, as Professor Atkinson (who is certainly no romanticist, but an extremely cautious scholar) states, the monument is not by any means a primitive work but suggests very strongly an influence from contemporary Mycenae.
We have seen [he writes] that through trade the necessary contacts with the Mediterranean had been established. The Stonehenge dagger too may be seen, if one wishes, to point more directly at Mycenae itself. We know from Homer that architects, like the poets of whom he himself was one, were homeless men, wandering from city to city. Is it then any more incredible that the architect of Stonehenge should himself have been a Mycenaean, than that the monument should have been designed and erected, with all its unique and sophisticated detail, by mere barbarians?
Let us suppose for a moment that this is more than mere conjecture. Under what circumstances, then, could a man versed in the traditions and skills of Mediterranean architecture find himself working among barbarians in the far cold North? Only, surely, as the skilled servant of some far-voyaging Mycenaean prince, jortis ante Agamemnona; or at the behest of a barbarian British king, whose voice and gifts spoke loudly enough to be heard even in the cities of the Mediterranean. …
I believe … that Stonehenge itself is evidence for the concentration of political power, for a time at least, in the hands of a single man, who alone could create and maintain the conditions necessary for this great undertaking. Who he was, whether native-born or foreign, we shall never know; he remains a figure as shadowy and unsubstantial as King Brutus of the medieval British history. Yet who but he should sleep, like Arthur or Barbarossa, in the quiet darkness of a sarsen vault beneath the mountainous pile of Silbury Hill? And is not Stonehenge itself his memorial?Note 60
Not a written word has come to us from that long-forgotten age, when all of Europe was alive with a commerce of brave men, daring voyages of danger, producing ornaments of grace, uniting by threads of trade the worlds of the gray Baltic and North Seas with the brilliant blue of the seaways of the South. Not even Crete, the nuclear isle of all this activity, has let us know through any text what the tales were that were told, the prayers that were chanted in the sanctuaries, or even the languages that were used. The Cretan hieroglyphic script of the Early Palatial period (c. 2000-1660 b.c.: Middle Minoan I to IIIA: Stonehenge I to early II) is not deciphered. Nor has the Linear A yet yielded up the secret of the great High Palatial age (c. 1660-1405 b.c.: Middle Minoan III B to Late Minoan II; Stonehenge, late II and III). The general view at present appears to be that the language of Linear A, as well as that of the earlier hieroglyphic script, was probably derived from the Luvian-Hittite-Aryan sphere of Anatolia;Note 61 in other words, represented a later phase of the culture matrix from which the Cretan neolithic derived. However, a challenge to this view has recently been issued by Professor Cyrus Gordon of Brandeis University, who believes he has detected a Syrian, Phoenician-Semitic vocabulary in the tablets. The issue is still open. But in either case, the general area of origin would have had to have been the great Taurean culture volcano from which, as we have now seen and seen again, waves and tides of greatest import and effect flowed in all directions, from as early as the period of the goddess figurines of the art of Hacilar.
The language of Linear B, on the other hand (c. 1405–1100 b.c.: Late Minoan III), which, as we now know, was an early form of Greek, represents a period of invasion from the Europe of the north: the Mycenaean heroic age of Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, and Odysseus, the last days of the long, productive world age of the goddess, and the opening of the world age of the warrior sons of gods. In the British series, we have already recorded an appearance of members of this warrior complex as early as c. 1775 b.c., in the corded-ware battle-ax people, and probably, as well, in the bell-beaker folk — in whose remains there has been lately recognized a mingling of Aryan with Continental pre-Aryan strains.Note 62 We have remarked, also, that in Stonehenge I the evidence before this date suggests an earthly orientation, with sacrifices for the fertilization of the goddess; while in Stonehenge II, the address of the sanctuary is upward, to heaven and the sun, and with reference to a local Mount Olympus (Prescelly Top). It is reasonably certain, therefore, that in the middle of the second millennium b.c. a process of fusion of the two mythologies of the goddess and the gods had commenced in northern Europe.
In the Cretan-Mycenaean sphere, on the other hand, the cult of the goddess still was paramount. Comparably in Ireland, where the impact of the Aryan, patriarchal warrior bands was reduced by the filter of Britain, the elder goddess cult survived and even combined in a wildly brilliant manner with the gods, heroes, and mad warrior deeds of her sons.
I am taking pains in this work to place considerable stress upon the world age and symbolic order of the goddess; for the findings both of anthropology and of archaeology now attest not only to a contrast between the mythic and social systems of the goddess and the later gods, but also to the fact that in our own European culture that of the gods overlies and occludes that of the goddess — which is nevertheless effective as a counterplayer, so to say, in the unconscious of the civilization as a whole.
Psychologically and sociologically, the problem is of enormous interest; for, as all schools of psychology agree, the image of the mother and the female affects the psyche differently from that of the father and the male. Sentiments of identity are associated most immediately with the mother; those of dissociation, with the father. Hence, where the mother image preponderates, even the dualism of life and death dissolves in the rapture of her solace; the worlds of nature and the spirit are not separated; the plastic arts flourish eloquently of themselves, without need of discursive elucidation, allegory, or moral tag; and there prevails an implicit confidence in the spontaneity of nature, both in its negative, killing, sacrificial aspect (lion and double ax), and in its productive and reproductive (bull and tree).
Figure 19. The Goddess of the Double Ax
To conclude, then: the beautiful Mycenaean seal ring of Figure 19 may stand as our final wayside shrine to this goddess of the early Garden of Innocence, before Nobodaddy made her serpent lover crawl and locked the Tree of Life away for all time. We see at the top the sun and waning crescent moon above a device that resembles that of the lunar bull and lion-bird plaque of Figure 16. It marks the same dividing line between the earthly and celestial, with the same two presences above: the moon declining and the killing sun. Behind the moon is a little figure bearing a staff in the left hand, somewhat in the manner of the lion-goddess of Figure 12. This little personage is covered by a large Mycenaean shield and suggests the warrior aspect of the goddess. For the later Greek Athene is also characterized by a shield (of the later, smaller, circular type carried on the arm), and since the name A-ta-na Po-ti-ni-ja (Athenai Potniai: “the Lady of Athens”) appears among the tablets of Linear B, it is at least possible that an early counterpart of Classical Athene is represented here, in the negative, killing aspect of the goddess. Her right hand points to a series of six sacrificial animal heads strewn along the right (our left) margin of the composition, while across the way, in counterpoise, stands the bountifully flourishing Tree of Life, with a little female figure rising in the air to cull its fruit.
The center of the field is dominated by the Cretan double ax, which points two ways: on one hand, toward the sacrifice; on the other, toward its boon, the tree. We think of the great tree of Figure 15, with its large dead trunk but ever-living bough. The lion of the goddess in that case was of a gentle, protective aspect, as death would appear to have been experienced in this culture, as leading to eternal life. So also here: the goddess of the double ax sits benignantly beneath her tree and is approached by two devotees. To the outstretched hand of the first she offers a triad of poppy-seed pods, while with her left she elevates her breasts. The little figure at her knees, without legs but, as it were, emerging from the earth, holds in her left hand a tiny double ax and in her right a blossoming branch, summarizing, thus, the entire theme and representing the mid-point of balance between the small descending figure with the Mycenaean shield and the small ascending one culling fruit.Note 63 Compare the two powers of the left and right sides of the Gorgon, whose head in Classical art is affixed to Athene’s shield. As viewed in the pre-patriarchal age, this same goddess in whom death and life reside was herself the mythic garden wherein Death and Life — the Two Queens — were one. And to her faithful child, Dumuzi (the Minotaur), whose image of destiny is the lunar cycle, she was Paradise itself.
V. The Victory of the Sons of Light
The peace and bounty of the goddess, based upon the rites of her temple groves of sacrifice, spread from the nuclear Near East in a broad swathe, eastward and westward, to the shores of the two seas; but many of the arts and benefits of her reign were scattered also among the wild peoples northward and southward, who became not settled farming folk but semi-nomadic herders of cattle, or of sheep and goats. These, by c. 3500 b.c., were becoming dangers to the farming villages and towns, appearing suddenly in raiding bands, plundering and departing, or, more seriously, remaining to enslave. They stemmed, as we have seen, from two great matrices: the broad grasslands of the north and the Syro-Arabian desert. By 3000 b.c. power states were being established by such invaders, and by c. 2500 b.c. the rule in Mesopotamia had passed decisively to a series of strong men from the desert, of whom Sargon of Agade (c. 2350 b.c.) was the first important example and Hammurabi of Babylon (c. 1728–1686 b.c.) the second. These were contemporaries, approximately, of the sea kings of Crete, but with a radically different relationship to the goddess.
“Sargon am I, the mighty king, Monarch of Agade,” we read in a celebrated statement of the former of these two.
My mother was of lowly birth; my father I knew not; the brother of my father is a mountain dweller; and my city, Azupiranu, lies on the bank of the Euphrates.
My lowly mother conceived and bore me in secrecy; placed me in a basket of rushes; sealed it with bitumen, and set me in the river, which, however, did not engulf me. The river bore me up. And it carried me to Akku, the irrigator, who took me from the river, raised me as his son, made of me a gardener: and while I was a gardener, the goddess Ishtar loved me.
Then I ruled the kingdom. …Note 64
Here the king has taken to himself, or has had applied to him by his chronicler, a legendary biography of a type known throughout the world. The formula is derived from the older mythology of the goddess and her son, but with a transfer of interest to the son — who now is neither a god nor a dedicated sacrifice, but a politically ambitious upstart. The basic motifs in the present example are: 1. a modified virgin birth (father unknown, or deceased), 2. a vestigial suggestion of the father as a mountain god (his brother a mountaineer), 3. exposure on the waters (water-birth: compare Greek Erichthonius, Hindu Vyasa, Hebrew Moses), 4. rescue and fosterage by an irrigator (theme of fosterage by simple folk, frequently by animals, viz. Romulus and Remus: here the water theme is again stressed), 5. hero as a gardener (fructifier of the goddess), 6. beloved of the goddess Ishtar (Semitic counterpart of Inanna, Greek Aphrodite).
In the early days of the psychoanalytic movement, Dr. Otto Rank wrote an important monograph on the Myth of the Birth of the Hero,Note 65 in which he analyzed and compared some seventy-odd variants of this formula, drawn from Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Japan and Polynesia, Greece and Rome, Iran, die Bible, Celtic and Germanic, Turkish, Esthonian, Finnish, and Christian European lore. He showed that the pattern was comparable to that of a certain type of neurotic daydream, where the individual dissociates himself from his true parents by imagining for himself: 1. a noble or divine, higher birth, 2. infant exile or exposure, 3. adoption by a family much more lowly than himself (namely that of his actual parents), and 4. a prospect, ultimately, of return to his “true” estate, with a wonderful humbling of those responsible for the exile and a general sense of great achievement all around.
Dr. Rank’s analysis suggests very well the appeal that such a legend must have had for ambitious kings and their biographers, but it underestimates the force (or so it seems to me) of the actual derivation of the formula from a cosmological myth. The whole series cited falls well within the range of the world-diffusion of the arts and rites of agrarian life, and consequently cannot be treated as a mere congeries of daydreams independently produced from a certain type of individual state of mind. Indeed, it might be asked whether the morbid state of mind is not a function of the legend rather than its cause; for, as it stands, the legend represents a descent from the cosmological plane to an individual reference. It therefore produces an inferior meditation, namely, instead of an extinction of ego in the image of a god (mythic identification), precisely the opposite: an exaltation of ego in the posture of a god (mythic inflation), which has been a chronic disease of rulers ever since the masters of the art of manipulating men contrived to play the role of incarnate god and yet save their necks from the double ax. The effect of this chicane — as I have shown in Oriental MythologyNote 66 — was to release royalty from the overrule of the priesthood and stars, transform the state from a religious (hieratic) to a political (dynastic) establishment, and open the age when the chief concern of kings might become the conquest not of themselves but of the world.
The inevitable next step was a projection of this type of royal inflation back upon the king of gods, the model of the earthly king, as in the following opening lines of the prelude of the Law Code of Hammurabi, where the destiny of the monarch is linked to that of the young and newly risen god Marduk.
When exalted Anu [god of the firmament], king of the angels, and Bel [god of the world mountain], who is the lord of heaven and earth; when these, who determine the destinies of the land, committed the sovereignty over all people to Marduk [patron god of the city of Babylon], who is the firstborn of Ea [god of the watery abyss]; when they made Marduk great among the great gods; when they proclaimed his exalted name to Babylon, made Babylon unsurpassable in the regions of the world, and established for him in its midst an everlasting kingdom whose foundations are as firm as heaven and earth:
At that time Anu and Bel called to me, Hammurabi, the pious prince, worshiper of the gods, summoning me by name, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to wipe out the wicked and evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to go forth like the sun over the human race, to illuminate the land, and to further the welfare of mankind.Note 67
The formula here is already that of the standard Oriental tyrant state, where the role of the monarch, gained by human means, is represented as a manifestation of the will and grace of the creator and supporter of the universe. Piety, justice, and concern for the welfare of the people guarantee the righteousness of his reign. And the celestial orb to which the monarch is now likened is no longer the silvery moon, which dies and is resurrected and is light yet also dark, but the golden sun, the blaze of which is eternal and before which shadows, demons, enemies, and ambiguities take flight. The new age of the Sun God has dawned, and there is to follow an extremely interesting, mythologically confusing development (known as solarization), whereby the entire symbolic system of the earlier age is to be reversed, with the moon and the lunar bull assigned to the mythic sphere of the female, and the lion, the solar principle, to the male.
The best-known mythic statement of this victory of the sun-god over the goddess and her spouse is the Babylonian epic of the victory of Marduk over his great-great-great-grandmother Tiamat, which appears to have been composed either in, or shortly following, the period of Hammurabi himself. The only extant document, however, is from the celebrated library of King Ashurbanipal of Assyria, a full millennium later (c. 668–630 b.c.), from which royal treasury of learning most of what we now know of Semitic literature before the composition of the Bible has been derived.
When heaven above had not yet been named, nor the earth beneath; when the primal Apsu, their begetter, together with Mummu [the son and messenger of Apsu and Tiamat] and Tiamat herself, she who gave birth to all, still mingled their waters and no pasture land had yet been formed, nor was there even a reed marsh to be seen; when none of the generation of the gods had yet been brought into being, called by name, or given a destiny: at that time, within Apsu and Tiamat, the great gods were created.
Here is an early version of the formula, already known to most of us through the writings of the Greeks, of an older and a later generation of divinities. Apsu, Tiamat, and their son Mummu (their messenger, the Word)(Compare “the mummu house”), like the Classical Uranus, Gaea, and their children, the Titans, enjoy a period of unchallenged dominion antecedent to the rise and victory of those warrior gods who are most honored in the prayers and rites of the people. Such a mythology represents an actual historical substitution of cult: in both these instances, that of an intrusive patriarchal over an earlier matriarchal system. And in both cases, too, the main intention of the cosmic genealogy was to effect a refutation of the claims of the earlier theology in favor of the gods and moral order of the later. Hence, we read:
Lahmu and Lahamu came into being and were called by their names. Even before they had matured and become tall, Anshar and Kishar were created and surpassed them in stature. These lived many days, adding years to days, and their first-born, heir presumptive, was Anu, the rival of his fathers, equaling Anshar. Anu begot his own likeness Ea, the master of his fathers, broad of understanding, greatly wise and mighty in strength, even stronger than Anshar, his grandfather, with no rival among the gods, his brothers.
And these divine brothers troubled and disturbed the inner parts of Tiamat. Moving, running about within their divine abode, they gave Apsu reason for concern. He could not diminish their clamor. And Tiamat remained silent concerning them, though what they were doing gave pain. Their behavior was not good.
Wherefore Apsu, the begetter of the great gods, called his vizier, Mummu, and said to him: “My vizier, Mummu, you who gladden my heart, come, let us go to Tiamat!” Going, they reposed before Tiamat and took counsel concerning the gods, their first-born. Apsu opened his mouth and said in a loud voice to the glistening one, Tiamat: “Their behavior has become an annoyance to me. By day I cannot rest; by night I cannot sleep. I shall destroy them, put an end to their behavior; and when silence has been restored, let us sleep.”
But Tiamat, hearing this, became angry, and cried out to her spouse, raging furiously, pondering his evil in her heart. “Why destroy what we ourselves have produced? Their behavior is indeed painful, but let us take it with good will.” Mummu counseled Apsu, giving unfavorable advice. “Yes, Father, put an end to their disorder,” he said; “and have rest by day and sleep by night.” Whereupon Apsu brightened with a wicked plan against his progeny, the gods, while Mummu embraced his neck, sat on his knee, and kissed him.
But of what they planned in this way, the great gods became aware, and when they had learned of it, they made haste. They took to silence; sat quietly. And Ea, supreme in knowledge, skillful and wise, who understands all things, comprehended the wicked plan. Ea drew a magic circle against it, within which all took protection; then he composed a powerful incantation, which he recited over the water, out of which sleep poured down upon Apsu and Apsu slept. And when Ea had thus put both Apsu and Mummu, his adviser, to sleep, he loosened Apsu’s chin strap, tore off his tiara, carried off his splendor, and put it on himself; and when he had thus subdued, he slew him. On Apsu he then built his dwelling place, and Mummu he seized for himself, holding him by a nose rope. …
With this we have arrived, indeed, in the field of the psychology of Freud and Rank: the mythic malice of the father, partisanship of the mother, rivalry of siblings (Mummu, the elder, and Ea, the younger son), with finally a patricide and its mythically justified rationalization — behind which it would be unhealthy to explore. Essentially the myth is a transformation of the earlier formula represented in our Figure 16: of the bull, the goddess, and the lion-bird; i.e., the father (Apsu), the mother (Tiamat), and the son (Mummu). In the present instance the waters of these three are undifferentiated. They represent the state of consciousness that is termed in Indian thought “deep dreamless sleep,” and in Freud’s, “the oceanic feeling”: and in fact, as we are told, the peace of sleep was Apsu’s sole desire.
In the triad of Apsu, Mummu, and Tiamat (which in the earlier mythic order, by the way, would probably have been presented as Tiamat and Apsu-Mummu), the non-dual state antecedent to creation is symbolized, out of which all forms, both of myth and dream and of daylight reality, are derived. But in the new mythology of the great gods the plane of attention has been shifted to the foreground figures of duality and combat, power, profit and loss, where the mind of the man of action normally dwells. Whereas the aim of the earlier mythology had been to support a state of indifference to the modalities of time and identification with the inhabiting non-dual mystery of all being, that of the new was just the opposite: to foster action in the field of time, where the subject and object are indeed two, separate and not the same — as A is not B, as death is not life, virtue is not vice, and the slayer is not the slain. It is all so simple, sunny, and straightforward. The virtuous younger son, Ea of many devices, overcomes the wicked father in his own fine Oedipal way and takes the elder, wicked son (the knower and lover of the father) by the nose.
And so what, then, of the destiny of the mother, Tiamat, in this normative tale of the manner of the victories of virtue?
After Ea had vanquished his enemies, confirmed his victory over his foes, and peacefully occupied his abode, he called his abode the Apsu, established there his chamber, and dwelt in splendor therein with his spouse, Damkina. And it was there, in that chamber of fate, abode of destinies, that the wisest of the wise, most knowing of the gods, the Lord himself, Marduk, was begotten of his father Ea, born of Damkina, his mother, and nursed by the breasts of goddesses. He was filled thereby with awe-inspiring majesty. His figure was enticing, flashing the look of his eyes, manly his going forth. He was a leader from the start. And when Ea, his father, beheld him, he rejoiced and bestowed on him double equality with the gods. Marduk was exalted beyond them in all ways: in all his members marvelously arranged: incomprehensible and difficult to look upon. He had four eyes and as many ears, and when his lips moved, fire blazed forth. Each of the ears grew large; each of the eyes, also, to see all. He was prodigious and was clothed with the radiance of ten gods, with a majesty to inspire fear.
And it was at this season that the god Anu begot the four winds, raising waves upon the surface of the waters of Tiamat. He also filled his hand, and, diving, created dirt, which the waves stirred up. Tiamat became disturbed. Day and night, she moved about. And those around her [whom she had spawned] said to their agitated mother: “When they killed Apsu, your spouse, you did not march at his side. Now the four winds are created. You are agitated within. We cannot rest. … We cannot sleep. …
The legend now proceeds to an account of the mounting wrath and battle fury of Tiamat. As all-mother — “she who fashions all things” — she gave birth to monster serpents, sharp of tooth and fang, filled with poison instead of blood, ferocious, terrible, and crowned with fear-inspiring glory, such that to look upon them was to perish: the viper, the dragon, the great lion, the mad dog, the scorpion-man and various demons of storm: powerful and irresistible. Altogether eleven sorts of monster were brought forth, and of these the first-born, Kingu by name, Tiamat exalted and made great in their midst. “I have made you great,” she said; “I have given you dominion over all the gods, and I make you my unique spouse. May your name become great.” She fastened upon his breast the tablet of destinies and said to him: “May your words quell and your overpowering poison overwhelm all opposition.” After which, she and her brood made ready for a battle with the gods.
The reader will have recognized here the pattern of the Greek war of the Titans and the gods, the darker brood of the all-mother, produced of her own female power, and the brighter, fairer, secondary sons, produced from her submission to fecundation by the male. It is an effect of the conquest of a local matriarchal order by invading patriarchal nomads, and their reshaping of the local lore of the productive earth to their own ends. It is an example, also, of the employment of a priestly device of mythological defamation, which has been in constant use (chiefly, but not solely, by Western theologians) ever since. It consists simply in terming the gods of other people demons, enlarging one’s own counterparts to hegemony over the universe, and then inventing all sorts of both great and little secondary myths to illustrate, on the one hand, the impotence and malice of the demons and, on the other, the majesty and righteousness of the great god or gods. It is used in the present case to validate in mythological terms not only a new social order but also a new psychology — and to this extent must be understood as in a certain sense representative not of sheer fraud but of a new truth: a new structure of human thought and feeling, overinterpreted as of cosmic reach.
The battle that we are about to view, as though of gods against Titans before the beginning of the world, actually was of two aspects of the human psyche at a critical moment of human history, when the light and rational, divisive functions, under the sign of the Heroic Male, overcame (for the Western branch of the great culture province of the high civilizations) the fascination of the dark mystery of the deeper levels of the soul, which has been so beautifully termed in the Tao Te Ching, the Valley Spirit that never dies:
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the Doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang.
It is there within us all the while. …Note 68
Tiamat [as we now read] made ready to engage in battle with the gods, her offspring. She prepared to attack. And when Ea learned of this, he became numb with fear and sat down. He went presently before his father, Anshar, to let him know what Tiamat was doing. Anshar cried out in wrath, summoned Anu, his eldest son, and bade him go stand against Tiamat; who went forth and did so, but, unable to withstand her, returned.
All the gods, therefore, were assembled; but they sat in silence, full of fear. And Ea, when he saw their case, called his son, Marduk, to his chamber and disclosed to him the secret of his heart. “You are my son,” he said. “Hearken to your father. Prepare yourself for battle and stand forth before Anshar, who, when he sees you, will be at rest.”
The Lord, Marduk, was pleased at the word of Ea, his father, and, having prepared himself, drew nigh and stood before Anshar, who, when he beheld him, was filled with joy. He kissed his lips. His fear was gone. “I will accomplish,” said the Lord Marduk, “all that is in your heart. Tiamat, a woman, is coming at you with arms. Soon you will trample on her neck. But O Lord of the destiny of the great gods, if I am to be your avenger, to slay Tiamat and keep you alive, convene the assembly and proclaim my lot supreme, namely, that not you but I shall henceforth fix the destinies of the gods by utterances and that whatever I create shall remain without change.”
A fine affair indeed! We have now entered a theater of myth that the rational, non-mystic mind can comprehend without aid, where the art of politics, the art of gaining power over men, received for all time its celestial model.
Anshar addressed Kaka, his vizier, and bade him assemble the gods. “Let them converse, sit down to a banquet, eat bread, and consume wine. Declare to them that Tiamat, our bearer, hates us; that all the lesser gods have gone over to her side, even those whom we ourselves created; that Tiamat, who fashions all things now has brought forth weapons, serpents, dragons, the great lion, the mad dog, exalting Kingu as her spouse; that I have sent Anu against her, but he failed; and that now Marduk, the wisest of the gods, declares that if he is to be our avenger, whatever his lips command shall not be changed.”
The word went out, the gods gathered, kissed one another in the assembly, conversed, sat to a banquet, ate bread, consumed wine, and the wine dispelled their fears; their bodies swelled as they drank, they became carefree and exalted, and for their lord and avenger, Marduk, they set up a lordly throne upon which he took his place, facing the fathers.
“O Lord,” they said, “your destiny is to be supreme henceforth among the gods. To raise up or to bring low — these shall be in your hand. Your utterance shall be truth, your command unimpeachable, none among the gods shall transgress your bounds. We grant to you kingship of the universe.”
They spread a garment in their midst [the starry garment of the night sky]. “By your word,” said they, “let it vanish; by your word again, let it reappear” [as the night sky on the passage of the sun]. Marduk spoke, the garment vanished; again, the garment reappeared. And when the gods beheld this fulfillment of the sign, they rejoiced, did homage, and declared: “Marduk is king!”
The gods then bestowed on Marduk the scepter, throne, royal ring, and irresistible thunderbolt. He made ready his bow, took up his club in his right hand, set lightning before him, filled his body with flame, made a net to enmesh Tiamat, called the winds of the quarters and various hurricanes, mounted his irresistible chariot of storm with four steeds yoked before, whose names were Killer, Pitiless, Trampler, and Flier, their mouths, their lips, and their teeth, bearing poison; he placed Battle-Smiter on his right, Combat on his left, and, clad in terrifying mail, with a fierce turban haloing his head, set his face toward the place of furious Tiamat. A spell was ready in his mouth. An herb against poison was held in his hand. The gods were milling all around him. And he approached to gaze into her heart and to penetrate the plan of Kingu, her spouse.
As Marduk gazed, Kingu became confused; his will faltered, his action ceased; and the wicked gods who were his helpers, marching at his side, beholding him thus, their sight became blurred. But Tiamat, without turning her neck, cried defiant mockery at Marduk. “You advance like the very lord of the gods! Is it in their place they have gathered, or in yours?” Marduk raised his mighty weapon. “Why,” he challenged, “have you risen up like this, plotting in your heart to stir up strife? You have appointed Kingu to be your spouse, Kingu without worth, in the place of Anu. Against Anshar, king of the gods, you are designing evil. Against the gods, my fathers, you have demonstrated your wickedness. Let your army be equipped! Let your weaponry be in order! Stand forth! I and you shall have at each other!”
Hearing this, Tiamat became as one possessed. She lost her reason; uttered wild, piercing screams; trembled; shook to the roots of her limbs; pronounced an incantation; and all the gods of the battle cried out. Then Tiamat advanced; Marduk, as well: they approached each other for the battle. The Lord spread out his net to enmesh her, and when she opened her mouth to its full, let fly into it an evil wind that poured into her belly, so that her courage was taken from her and her jaws remained opened wide. He shot an arrow that tore into her, cut through her inward parts, and pierced her heart. She was undone. He stood upon her carcass and those gods who had marched by her side turned for their lives. He encircled them with his net, destroyed their weapons, made them captive, and they wept.
The poisonous monsters to which Tiamat had given birth and assigned splendor, Marduk flung into fetters, arms bound behind, and trampled underfoot. Kingu, he tied and flung among the rest, depriving him of the Tablet of Destinies, to which that arrogant one had no right. The Victor took this to himself, sealed it with his seal, affixed it to his breast, and, returning to the carcass of Tiamat, mounting upon her hinder quarters, with his merciless mace smashed her skull. He cut the arteries of her blood and caused the north wind to bear it off to parts unknown. And when his fathers saw this, they rejoiced and sent him gifts.
Marduk now paused, gazing upon the dead body, considering the foul thing, to devise an ingenious plan. Whereafter, he split her, like a shellfish, in two halves; set one above, as a heavenly roof, fixed with a crossbar; and assigned guards to watch that her waters above should not escape. He next traversed the heavens, surveyed its quarters, and, over against the Apsu of his father Ea, measured the magnitude of the Deep. He then established upon this a great abode, the Earth, as a canopy above the Apsu. Anu, Enlil, and Ea, he assigned to their various residences [namely, Heaven, Earth, and the Abyss], and the first part of his enterprise therewith bad been accomplished.
The rest we need review, here, only briefly. Victorious Marduk defined the year and its zodiac of twelve signs, the days of the year, the various stellar and planetary orders, and the manner of the moon: its waxing to the middle of the month in opposition to the sun, after which, its waning and disappearance, in approach to the station of the sun; and the god’s heart then moved him to fashion something else, something really wonderfully ingenious.
“Blood I shall amass,” he confided to Ea, his father; “bone I shall frame, and set up a creature. ‘Man’ shall be his name. Yes, Man! He will be required to serve the gods; and these, then, will be free to repose at ease.” *
Marduk explained to his father the way in which his plan was to be accomplished. He would divide the gods in two groups, one good, the other evil, and from the blood and bones of the bad — namely those who had sided with Tiamat — he would fashion the race of mankind.
Ea, however, answered: “Take but one of the wicked gods, to be delivered up, destroyed, and mankind fashioned of his parts. Let the great gods be assembled. Let the one most guilty be delivered up.”
Ea’s son, Marduk, concurred. The deities were assembled, and the Lord, Marduk, addressed them. “What was promised, has been accomplished. Who was it, however, that caused Tiamat to revolt and prepare for war? Deliver him to me, and I shall make him take his punishment, rest assured!”
To which the gods replied in accord: “Kingu it was, who caused Tiamat to revolt and prepare for war.” They bound him, held him before Ea, slashed the arteries of his blood and with his blood created mankind. Ea then imposed upon mankind the service of the gods, and with that, set free the gods from all labor.
Following the accomplishment of this deed of deeds, the gods were assigned to their various cosmic mansions; and they said to their lord, Marduk: “O Lord, who have delivered us from onerous servitude, what shall be the sign of our gratitude? Come, let us make a sanctuary, a dwelling for our nightly rest; let us rest therein; and let there be there, also, a throne, a seat with back support, for our Lord.” And when Marduk heard this, the glory of his countenance shone forth, and he said: “So shall Babylon be, whose construction you have here announced…Note 69
The epic tale goes on to tell of the building and dedication of the great Babylonian ziggurat and to conclude with a celebration of the fifty names of praise of its Lord, Marduk, the utterance of whose mouth no god whatsoever can change: unsearchable, his heart; all-embracing, his mind; the sinner and transgressor is an abomination before him; and let mankind, therefore, rejoice in our Lord, Marduk.
In the literature of scholarship it has been frequently remarked that the name of the Babylonian mother monster in this epic of Creation, ti’amat, is related etymologically to the Hebrew term tehom, “the deep,” of the second verse of Genesis, and that as the wind of Anu blew upon the deep and that of Marduk into the face of Tiamat, so in Genesis 1:2, “the wind [or spirit] of Elohim hovered [or was blowing] over the face of the waters.” Moreover, as Marduk spread out the upper half of the mother-body as a roof with the waters of heaven above, so in Genesis 1:7, “Elohim made the firmament and separated the waters that were under the firmament from those that were above the firmament”; and again, as Ea conquered Apsu, and Marduk conquered Tiamat, so did Yahweh the sea monsters Rahab (Job 26:12–13) and Leviathan (Job 41; Psalm 74:14).
There can be no question but that the imagery of the various creation stories of the Bible derives from a general fund of Sumero-Semitic myth, of which the Babylonian epic of Creation is an example; but it also is to be noted — as many have been zealous to point out — that between the Bible and this particular epic “the divergences,” to quote one authority, “are much more far-reaching and significant than are the resemblances.”Note 70 The Bible represents a later stage in the patriarchal development, wherein the female principle, represented in the earlier Bronze Age by the great goddess-mother of all things and in this epic by a monstrous demoness, is reduced to its elemental state, tehom, and the male deity alone creates out of himself, as the mother alone had created in the past. The Babylonian epic stands between, along a line that may be logically schematized in four steps:
- the world born of a goddess without consort;
- the world born of a goddess fecundated by a consort;
- the world fashioned from the body of a goddess by a male warrior-god; and
- the world created by the unaided power of a male god alone.
Remaining, for the present, with the Babylonian text, we note, first, that the god has brought about by violence what the goddess — who is still recognized as “she who fashions all things” — would have brought about spontaneously of herself, if let alone. From the point of view of the goddess, therefore, the god, her child — for all his pomp — is actually nothing but her agent, seeming to bring to pass what is coming to pass. But she lets him feel that he is doing it himself, building his fine house of blocks with his own strength; and so is a good mother, indeed. But, on the other hand, this epic is far from such a realization of the irony of manly deeds. It is a forthright patriarchal document, where the female principle is devaluated, together with its point of view, and, as always happens when a power of nature and the psyche is excluded from its place, it has turned into its negative, as a demoness, dangerous and fierce. And we are going to find, throughout the following history of the orthodox patriarchal systems of the West, that the power of this goddess-mother of the world, whom we have here seen defamed, abused, insulted, and overthrown by her sons, is to remain as an ever-present threat to their castle of reason, which is founded upon a soil that they consider to be dead but is actually alive, breathing, and threatening to shift.
And a second point to be noted is that with this turn from the plane of the mother to that of the sons, the sense of the identity of life and death disappears, together with that of the power of life to bring forth its own good forms, so that all now is strife and effort, defamation of what is alien, pretentiousness, grandiloquence, and a lurking sense of guilt: which is epitomized, finally, in the myth of the origin of mankind from the blood of abominated Kingu, to be subject to, and of service to, the gods — though God knows (as do you and I), that Kingu had actually a greater right to his Tablet of Destinies than the lord Marduk, who had simply might.
And so now, finally: What is the image of man’s fate that accompanies this great victory of the world of the gods over that of the goddess-mother of the gods? The famous legend of Gilgamesh tells the tale, which by many has been termed the first great epic of the destiny of man. We need not review it in all detail, for it is already well known. However, certain of its main themes acquire a new poignancy when viewed against the backdrop of the murder of Tiamat.
Gilgamesh was the name of a king of the early Sumerian city of Uruk. “Divine Gilgamesh,” he is termed in the old Sumerian king list. “His father was a lillu-demon,” we are told. “He was a high priest of the land and reigned 126 years.”Note 71 In that early document, going back to sources from the old Sumerian cities themselves, his name follows that of Divine Dumuzi, whose name we already know as that of the dead and resurrected son and consort of the goddess; and before Divine Dumuzi was Divine Lugalbanda, who reigned 1200 years. Gilgamesh was, in fact, the last of those kings the lengths of whose reigns exceeded normal human years. He was honored as a god-king; hence the title “Divine.” However, in the setting of the later, Babylonian epic, his image, along with that of man’s destiny, is greatly changed.
He is still described as “two-thirds god and one-third man”; but as a tyrant, “unbridled in arrogance,” “who leaves not the son to his father … leaves not the maid to her mother.” The people prayed to the gods, and the gods hearkened to their plea. They turned to the mother-goddess, whose name now is Aruru. “You created Gilgamesh,” the gods said. “Now create his counterpart.” And when she heard this, she conceived in her heart a likeness of Anu, the god of heaven; washed her hands, took a piece of clay, cast it on the ground, and so created the valiant Enkidu.
The old mother had not yet lost her old talent, after all. Indeed, as we are to see, she is actually the chief divine figure of this tale — which is a fact to cause no surprise, since Gilgamesh himself derives, as we have seen, from an age (c. 2500 b.c.) that was antecedent to her overthrow by her sons.
But now, the strange appearance of her latest child, Enkidu!
The whole of his body was hairy and his locks were like a woman’s, or like the hair of the goddess of grain. Moreover, he knew nothing of settled fields or of human beings, and was clothed like a deity of flocks. He ate grass with the gazelles, jostled the wild beasts at the watering hole, and was content with the animals there. But then a certain hunter, coming face to face with Enkidu at the watering place, and beholding him, the face of that hunter became motionless. He returned in fear to his father. “My father,” he said, “there is a man with the strength of a god who ranges with the beasts over the hills, whom I dare not approach. He has torn up the traps that I set for the animals of the plain.” The father advised going to Gilgamesh for aid, and when Gilgamesh was apprised of the marvel, “Go, my hunter,” he said; “take along with you a temple prostitute, and when he comes to the watering hole, with the beasts, let her throw off her clothes, disclose her nakedness, and when he sees, he will approach her; and the beasts thereafter will desert him, which grew up with him on his plain.”
The hunter and temple prostitute set forth, and three days later reached the watering place. One day they sat; two days; and on the next the beasts arrived, Enkidu among them, feeding on the grass with the gazelles. The woman saw him. “There he is,” die hunter said. “Make free your breasts; disclose to him your nakedness: that he may take your favors. Do not fear. Lay hold of his soul. He will see you and draw near. Put aside your clothes, that he may lie upon you, and yield to him the rapture of your woman’s art. His beasts that grew on his plain will desert him when he is knowing you in love.”
The woman did as told: made bare her breasts, revealed her nakedness. Enkidu came and took possession. She was not afraid, but, having put aside her clothes, welcomed his ardor; and for six days and seven nights Enkidu remained mating with that temple maid’s abundance — after which he turned his face and made a move toward the beasts. But on seeing him, they ran off, and Enkidu was amazed. His body stiffened, his knees froze — the animals were gone. It was not as before.
Enkidu returned to the woman and, sitting at her feet, gazed up into her face; and, as she spoke, his ears gave heed. “You are beautiful, Enkidu, like a very god,” she said to him. “Why do you run with the beasts of the plain? Come, I will take you to the ramparts of Uruk, the holy temple city of Anu and Ishtar, where Gilgamesh dwells, unmatched in might, who, like a wild bull, wields power over men.” And as he heard, his heart grew light. He yearned for a friend. “Very well!” he said. “And I shall challenge him. Shouting, I shall cry out in Uruk: ‘I am he who is mighty and can change destinies, he who was born mighty on the plains!’ ”
“Come then,” she said. “Come to ramparted Uruk, where every day is a festival, the lads brave, the maidens lovely; and I will show you Gilgamesh, the man of joy and vigor, mightier even than you.”
She took in hand her clothing, and with one piece covered Enkidu, with the other covered herself, and, holding then his hand, led him like a mother to Uruk. She taught him there how to eat and drink, anoint himself with oil, become human. The people, gathering, said of him: “He is like Gilgamesh to a hair: shorter in stature but stronger of bone. A fair match for Gilgamesh, the godlike, has appeared.”
And, indeed, when the bed of the goddess Ishtar had been prepared and Gilgamesh, by night, approached it, Enkidu, in the street, barred the way. They met. They grappled, locked like bulls. The doorpost of the temple shattered; the wall shook. And, at last, Gilgamesh relented. His fury gone, he turned away. And the two, thereafter, were inseparable friends.*
One readily sees in this strange old tale a wonderful reduction of the old mythic theme of the goddess Inanna-Ishtar and her divine son and spouse Dumuzi-Tammuz to a plane of superhuman legend — two-thirds god and one-third man. The goddess Ishtar in her character as harlot, mother, bride, and guide, is incarnate in her temple servant, and the wild Enkidu at the waterhole is the old lunar god in his character as lord of beasts. But a new and wonderful humanity has entered into our tale as a result simply of this transfer of plane from the reincarnating aspect of the characters to the mortal. Time, mortality, and the anguish of humanity in a world of personal destiny, basically related to our own, give to this piece the quality of an epic, “with a dramatic movement,” as Professor William F. Albright has well said, “quite foreign to the long-winded, liturgical compositions of the earlier Sumerians.”Note 72 Enkidu and Gilgamesh became inseparable friends, but after a number of grandiose mythological adventures Enkidu died.
Gilgamesh touched his heart, but it did not beat. And like a lion, storming, like a lioness bereaved of her cubs, the great king paced back and forth before the couch, pulled out his hair, strewed it to the quarters, tore off and flung down his ornaments, called for his craftsmen to fashion a statue of his friend, wept bitterly, and lay stretched upon the ground.
“Oh, let me not die like my friend Enkidu,” he cried. “Grief has entered into my body; of death I am afraid. I shall go forth. I shall not tarry by the way.” And he set forth in quest of a plant of immortality.
It was a long long adventure: a passage over mountains. Lions he beheld and was afraid. He raised his head, prayed to the moon god, and the moon god sent a guiding dream, after which he took his ax and hacked his way past the lions. Then he came to the mountains of the sunset, where the scorpion men guard the gate, whom it is death to behold. Gilgamesh saw them and his face grew dark with fear; the wildness of their aspect robbed him of his senses. One of them, however, opened to him a gate, and he passed into a thick darkness, through which he proceeded to a fair plain where he saw in a great park a wonderful tree. Precious stones it bore as fruit. Its branches were exceedingly beautiful and its top was of lapis lazuli. Its harvest dazzled the eye. But Gilgamesh passed along and at the shore of the sea — the world sea — came to the residence of a mysterious female, Siduri, who received him with the celebrated lines:
O Gilgamesh, whither do you fare?
The life you seek, you will not find.
When the gods created man,
They apportioned death to mankind;
And retained life to themselves.
O Gilgamesh, fill your belly,
Make merry, day and night;
Make of each day a festival of joy,
Dance and play, day and night!
Let your raiment be kept clean,
Your head washed, body bathed.
Pay heed to the little one, holding onto your hand,
Let your wife delight your heart.
For in this is the portion of man.
The lesson is one that we have all heard; as, for example, in the words of Ecclesiastes:
Behold, what I have seen to be good and to be fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life which God has given him, for this is his lot. …
And I commend enjoyment, for man has no good thing under the sun but to eat, and drink, and enjoy himself, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of life which God gives him under the sun. …
Let your garments be always white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. …Note 73
Gilgamesh, however, was of a different hope and purpose: he insisted on his quest; and the woman sent him on to the ferryman of death, who would pole him across the cosmic sea to the isle of the blessed, where the ever-living hero of the Flood — in this version of the old myth, named Ut-napishtim — dwelt, together with his wife, in everlasting bliss. The ageless couple received the voyager, let him sleep for six days and nights, fed him magic food, washed him with healing waters, and told of the plant of immortality at the bottom of the cosmic sea, which he must pluck if he would live, as he desired, forever. And so, once again, in the boat of the ferryman of death, Gilgamesh was voyaging, as no one ever before him, in the contrary direction, coming back to this mortal shore. “The plant is like a buckthorn,” Ut-napishtim had told him. “Its thorns will tear your hands; but if your hands can pluck it, you will gain new life.”
At a point midway, the boat paused. Gilgamesh tied heavy stones to his feet, which drew him down into the deep. He spied the plant. It tore his hands. But he plucked it, cut away those stones, and returning to the surface, boarded, and made for shore. “I shall take the plant to ramparted Uruk,” he told the boatman. “I shall give it to be consumed and shall eat of it myself, and its name shall be Man Becomes Young in Old Age.”
But when he had landed and was on his way, he paused by a freshet for the night; and when he went to bathe, a serpent, sniffing the fragrance of the plant, came out of the water, took the plant, returned to its abode and, consuming it, shed its skin. Whereat Gilgamesh — sat down and wept.Note 74
And that is why the Serpent Power of Immortal Life, which formerly was known as a property of man, was taken away and now remains apart — in the keep of the cursed serpent and defamed goddess, in the lost paradise of the innocence of fear.