/lit/ - Literature

>>13804677
Creation is a work of cosmic destruction in these texts, often taking the form of a violent victory of the male gods over their female adversaries, who here exhibit that terrible face that is but one of the aspects of the Great Mother. Thus in a myth widely spread through the region, the firmament of heaven and the foundation of earth are formed of the dismembered carcass of Tiamat, the primal goddess, defeated in battle by Lord Marduk: he smashes her skull, splits her body like an oyster, and the obedient winds whisk her blood away. Little wonder that the earth was eventually perceived as hostile with such a murderous conception of it.

The triumph of the male gods guarantees the relegation of the formerly dominant goddesses to the roles of thwarted adversaries, marplots, or supernumerary helpers. We find that the mother goddess of the herd animals, Ninhursaga, becomes the demoness of the stony grounds that ring the arable soil of civilization. In a lament her own daughter asks,

". . . to whom should I compare her?/ To the bitch that has no motherly compassion. . . ."

Even in agricultural myths where originally the goddesses had been preeminent, they are now debased, as, for instance, in Sumerian mythology where the male god, Enlil, is credited with the gift of the primal tool (the pickax) for field work and construction. Thus he is made responsible for both agriculture and the culture of the city. Significantly, perhaps, Enlil's pastoralist origin is revealed by his epithetical title: the Shepherd. Sumerian mythology, so influential for the traditions of the Israelites, also shows the male god, Enki, as directly responsible for the fertility of field and farm, and it is he who guards the implements of agriculture. Only after he has called the cultivated fields into being does Enki assign the goddess Ashnan charge of them.

Buried in these awesome texts like evidence of archaic encampments beneath city walls are signs of that earlier, more harmonious agricultural way alluded to above. And within these faint vestiges, which form the deepest substratum, is to be found evidence of longings for that still older (oldest?) presedentary freedom, of that radically integrated spiritual existence of Paleolithic cultures. Thus in the greatest epic of the Near East, the epic of Gilgamesh, which Theodore Gaster has called the area's Iliad and Odyssey, we find the presedentary Paleolithic substratum in the figure of Enkidu; the fall of this man from a state of natural harmony; the debased woman as agent of the fall; and the rise of the hero of consciousness-the fully aware doer of deeds-quester, explorer, and at last tragic exemplar of mortal limitations.