dreamer_easy | Entries tagged with mythology

Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea.
Neal H. Walls. The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth.
Irvine Welsh. Trainspotting.
Tom Wolfe. The Mid-Atlantic Man and Other New Breeds in England and America.

( Books bought and borrowed )

I must tell you, I laughed and laughed when I came across the story of Saltu:

Ishtar, the bratty, noisy, brawling, glorious goddess of sex and violence, has become so much of a pain in the arse that the cunning god Ea creates her mirror image: Saltu, whose name means "strife", a warrioress just as loud and scrappy as Ishtar. In fact, Saltu pesters Ishtar so much that the goddess sees what she's been acting like and gets Ea's message. Ishtar's not tamed; that can't be done. She just tones it down a little.

I laughed because I've been going through the same process myself with all this Internet hoo-hah in recent years. It's made me more aware of my own arguing style and helped me modify it a bit.

1. A flier slipped under the door asking: "Would you like the know the Truth?" Indeed, but as they've already managed to break the LHC, we'll have to continue waiting.

2. It was impossible not to overhear one Catholic student explaining the significance of the first Passover to another. The captive Hebrews smeared lamb's blood on their doorways because the Egyptians worshipped a lamb god. The Nile was turned to blood because the Egyptians worshipped the Nile as the source of life, and blood symbolises life. (Uh... OK, maybe I didn't quite get all of that bit.) Plus each of the ten plagues was a similarly symbolic assault on the "top ten" Egyptian gods. Alas, at that point I had to depart; it would've been interesting to hear which god the guy reckoned went with each plague. With literally thousands of deities to choose from, it shouldn't be too hard to find a few likely candidates... unless you're looking for a lamb god.

Oh! OK! So this symmetry breaking thing in the very early universe - it's a move from a less ordered, more homogenous state, to a more ordered, less homogenous state, right? To a state with more information in it, more entropy. This is roughly analogous - this is how my mind works - to creation stories in which the cosmos begins as a chaos from which arises order, or into which is introduced order. A comparison can be made with the primeval ocean of Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient Egyptian myth and the directionless soup of which the universe was made in that tiny fraction of a second before it began to freeze and break apart. Crucially, that ocean is inert, inactive, featureless - but full of potential.

"Many people today, though undoubtedly concerned with the problem of life's meaning, are agnostics or atheists; very few such people could be found among the ancient Egyptians. Many people today find life's meaning outside of religion and view religion as incidental or tangential to life; very few ancient Egyptians saw it this way. Of today's devout, all but a very few are monotheists; of ancient Egypt's, all but a very few were polytheists. We read theology and value abstraction; they recited myths and preferred concreteness. We demand consistency in religious thought; they did not. We hold omnipotence and omniscience to be necessary attributes of divinity; they did not. We have a canon of scripture; they did not. We reject magic; they did not. We view government as secular and rulers as all too human; they sawe government as sacred and kings as somehow divine. We believe that the world needs to be improved, and therefore (if we are religious) to be transformed by communal obedience to God's revealed will; they believed that the world needs to be maintained, and therefore to be stabilised by governmental imposition of order from above."

Shafer, Byron E. (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1991. (from the Introduction, page 3.)

"... traditional polytheism almost requires tension and disorder within the pantheon and the cosmos. Polytheism thus accepts two possible locations of evil, so that the existence of evil is not deeply problematic because nothing is truly perfect... By contrast, when a single god dominates the cosmos in a henotheistic system [as in Aten worship]... the question of theodicy arises in a more acute form."

Baines, John. "Society, Morality and Religious Practice". in Shafer, Byron E. (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1991.

"This discussion may seem too abstract and 'reasonable' to say something useful about a society that had hundreds of gods and expended a great part of its resources on building temples, providing for the cult, and performing other religious actions (not that such actions are any more irrational than many features of modern society)... For the Westerner, problems in comprehending the alien and the rationality of religious practices may be posed most acutely by magic. Magic and rationality do not conflict: magic is rational, and its argumentation is often rationalistic. Magical spells and performances exploit many methods of inference and arguments from analogy that have strong logical coherence. These procedures and arguments differ from Western rationality less in their organization and formal properties than in their premises, which often assume different agents and modes of causation from those commonly accepted in the West."

Baines, John. "Society, Morality and Religious Practice". in Shafer, Byron E. (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1991.

Books read
Trezza Azzopardi. The Hiding Place.
John Barrowman with Carole E. Barrowman. Anything Goes: The Autobiography.
Magnus Mills. All Quiet on the Orient Express.
Sara Nelson. So Many Books, So Little Time.
Byron E. Shafer (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt.

( Books bought and borrowed )

... because it's relevant to The Shakespeare Code ( for SPOILERY reasons )

The author, Anne Hollander, is talking about the development of the skirt, which keeps the bottom half of women a mystery, even as fashion changes led to exposed arms, backs, shoulders, and cleavage above completely hidden legs. "It corresponds to one very tenacious myth about women, the same one that gave rise to the image of the mermaid, the perniciously divided female monster, a creature inherited by the gods only down to the girdle. Her voice and face, her bosom and hair, her neck and arms are all entrancing, offering only what is benign among the pleasures afforded by women, all that suggests the unreserved, tender and physically delicious love of mothers even while it seems to promise the rough strife of adult sex. The upper half of a woman offers both keen pleasure and a sort of illusion of sweet safety; but it is a trap. Below, under the foam, the swirling waves of lovely skirt, her hidden body repels, its shapeliness armed in scaly refusal, its oceanic interior stinking of uncleanness."

(She goes on to suggest that women's eventual adoption of trousers conveyed the political message that women's bodies, and therefore their brains, were no different to men's.)

You may remember that last year I did Macquarie University's summer school in Akkadian, the cuneiform language of Babylon. I jotted down a few notes in one of my side journals,

wedge_strategy. I'm just about to post there with a few observations on the short course I'm taking now - Egyptian Hieroglyphs. So please do pop over if you're interested!

Going out shortly into the airconditioned embrace of the local library. But before I disappear, time to clean out some links:

People for Fair Trade, based in Melbourne, Australia. I buy lots of tea and coffee from them - I recommend their black tea/eucalyptus and black tea/peppermint blends.

The Anglican Dean of Sydney blows a brain cell. King's College Chapel is a "temple to paganism" and the Archbishop of Canterbury is a "theological prostitute". the Very Rev Philip Jensen probably fancies himself as a modern Jeremiah but frankly he sounds like a flying fruitloop.

ETA: Just listening to a radio report on this. Jensen reckons he's been misrepresented; other commentators are bewildered. I am delighted to learn there is a Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn.

timbus recommends this superb poem by

17catherines: Blanket Monster.

In my endless quest for Snape art for

wondermaze, I stumbled across some superb art by Deviant Artist el-grimlock - check out Tzitzimimes. I wrote a less than brilliant story about these Aztec nightmares, which happily hasn't seen the light of publication.

Here 'tis. Notes to self for later research:

- OK, why does the serpent talk to the woman? Does he reckon Eve is dumber, smarter, more corruptible, or braver than Adam? I guess it's to justify her punishment in verse 16, which is a sort of retcon comparable to the explanations of patriarchal evolutionary biologists - it didn't get that way, it always was that way. (Similarly, the Mesopotamian stuff explains why we have kings and why the temples own everything.) It's interesting that this needed explaining - is it comparable to Paul laying down the law for early Christian women? OTOH, Adam is also punished by being made to work for their food. It's literally the end of their childhood - they're kicked out of home, him to be a worker, her to be a wife. God is creating the respective roles of adult women and men. (And yup, they're apparently still vegetarian - but they wear "coats of skins".)

- Why a serpent in particular? Obviously Adam and Eve, being mere children, couldn't have come up with this scheme themselves, but what did the serpent hope to gain?

- Is there a comparable story of the Fall in other contemporary mythologies? I can't recall any comparable concept from Mesopotamia.

- There's also nothing comparable in the Mesopotamian sources about being embarrassed about being naked. Rather the opposite, in fact.

- Why does God use the royal we in verse 22?

Just to accompany all this Creation stuff, the words of a beautiful hymn.

At the library I saw J. Stephen Lang's What the Good Book didn't say : popular myths and misconceptions about the Bible (2003) which triumphantly mocked those who call the Bible fiction for mentioning the Hittites, a people for whom evidence has never been found. I'd already heard of them, and not from the Bible, by the time I saw Ghostbusters in 1984 - perhaps because they've been known to archaeologists for over a century. I suspect Mr Lang might've been a bit desperate for material there.

Mondy - are there different versions of the Torah the way there are versions of the Bible? Must be much simpler not having to peer through layers of translation!

Note to self for later exploration:

- Is the river Hiddekel the Tigris?

As a child, I misread a book about Adam and Eve and thought God had given them "shawls" rather than "souls", which made sense to me, given they must have been freezing.

Clay seems to be a popular material for creating human beings. Fed up with having to do all the work, the Mesopotamian gods get the wise but alcoholic god, Enki, to make them some human servants. However, he and his wife Ninmah get tipsy and make a series of disabled people; but Enki finds a job for each of them. (I think this is a remarkably gentle and compassionate explanation for disability - it's not a judgement or even a tragedy, but only a divine blunder, with a straightforward solution.) Finally, they make the first baby, who's completely useless, and the human race is born. Here's a translation, which takes a bit of effort to follow: Enki and Ninmah. (The Biblical God is far more dignified, if perhaps not quite as much fun.)

Thought it might be useful to read the KJV, for comparisons with other ANE mythology and history texts. So today, I read Genesis 1 (I'll bet people do that a lot, like giving up smoking all the time, and grind to a halt somewhere in the begats. Let's see how far I get.)

Here are my questions and observations for later research (your remarks are welcome):

- Is the deep supposed to predate the arrival of God? There's no mention of His creating it - he just organises it. (Cf the Mesopotamian creation story, the Enuma Elish.)

- God gives humans and animals plants as food. Do humans and animals only begin to eat meat after the Fall?

- Are the "signs" in verse 14 astrological?

I chose the KJV for the famously beautiful language. The same choice of translations is available for many of the Mesopotamian texts - the Enuma Elish I linked to above is the one that starts with the lovely phrase "When on high" (like Genesis - "In the beginning" - it's named for its opening line.)

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Dreamer Easy

Kate Orman

Entries tagged with mythology

Books read, January 2010

Saltu-ed

Today's encounters with religion

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Books Read, February 2008

And one more...

Hieroglyphs

Random stuff

Genesis 3

Genesis 2

Ancient Near Eastern Texts

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