I ended my last part of the Do We Know Why We Know series alluding to the Osiris and Marduk stories being part of this next article. I was also relieved that my computer woes were behind me and I hadn’t lost any of my work. I won’t be labor the point any more and get right into things. As it turns out there’s too much to include both Osiris and Marduk in a single writing especially after what I discovered.
I’ve chosen Marduk as I recently learned that Bel, who’s mentioned in the Old Testament, is Marduk, the patron god of Babylon. Bel is included in several places in the Old Testament including Jeremiah 51:44, “And I will punish Bel in Babylon, and take out of his mouth what he swallowed”, as well as Jeremiah 50:2 and Isaiah 46:1. Through this search I also learned that there are three additions to The Book of Daniel with more on Bel but are considered deuterocanonical and not considered part of The Bible by Protestant dominations. They were rejected in the 16thcentury by the Protestant movement because those sections of Daniel were not in Jewish Bibles. There is an extension to Chapter 3 and two additional Chapters, 13 and 14. Chapter 14 is entitled Bel and the Dragon that seems appropriate until you read the text. Tiamat, in the Marduk story, is recognized as a dragon who fights Marduk for control of the world hence my thinking Bel (Marduk) and the Dragon (Tiamat). But in the Daniel story, it is Daniel who destroys both Bel and the dragon. The Daniel chapter is more about Bel the idol than the Marduk story. There’s more here but that’s for another time. The actual Marduk story will come later in this article.
Let me try and set the stage for the Marduk story is relaying to us.
Joseph Campbell wrote, “Mythology … is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.” I haven’t used the word “mythology” in any of the Do We Know Why We Know articles but in the last one I wrote that these “stories may be an explanation on what happened without the availability of writing or language as we know them” and were “filtered by or construed in our unconscious until language further found its way into us.” I’m including this here to keep in mind not only the literality but the interpretation and translation of these stories from ancient times in what they’re saying. There are clues about us but if language infected us as Cormac McCarthy suggested in his essay “The Kekule Problem” to explain our unconscious, which I wrote about in the first Do We Know Why We Know, we are still in the very early stages of understanding what has been constructed in our unconscious in the two million years of its existence, with language seemingly as useful as chopsticks would be to build a house; simply put language may be the tool for the job of deciphering our unconscious but it’s a long way from ideal. But I suppose it’s a start.
In the last article, I briefly mentioned the city of Troy, from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, that most thought was a story of fiction, until it was discovered at Hisarlik, Turkey in 1870. I mentioned Atlantis as well that hasn’t yet been uncovered but how the Plato story of the legendary, mythical city, from his dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, sank into the ocean in 9,600 B.C. and how this date aligns exactly with the date of the dramatic rise of sea level that is now recognized as the end of the Younger Dryas period 11,600 years ago. The advanced, ancient civilization of Atlantis is somewhere; we just haven’t found it yet or we don’t recognize it for what it is.
What I also think is extremely difficult to understand about knowing what we know, is the conception of what life was like or will be like in the past or the future respectively. I’ll illustrate in a moment. That the time was millennia ago makes it all the more difficult to understand what we knew and were at that time. Like the adage, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” We only discover parts from the past that we use to decipher the whole.
This is one of the reasons I’ve landed on the Mesopotamian story of Marduk to start with, potentially being the first metastory that some seem to think may be the beginning of our conception of the fundamental structure of reality. The Mesopotamians, like other civilizations, appeared to be trying to get it right in how to organize society to create a sustainable civilization.
When we read the stories, it’s difficult not to put our spin of how we see the world today versus how the people of the time would have seen, heard or even understood things. Think of this today, in youth trying to imagine the world with what’s been developed for our every day lives in the last thirty years. In our home 1990, we didn’t have the Internet and didn’t know anyone that did. I don’t know that I even really knew what it was. We had VHS tapes, CDs, cassettes and albums. Then, it was nearly unimaginable to think we’d soon have more songs than we could listen to in a lifetime contained in a small device we could hold in our hand or put in our pocket. Never mind imagining what we have today in a smart phone that allows us to access the Internet, phone or text anyone anywhere in the world, buy things, take high quality photos and videos, watch almost any movie we want to or listen to any song that has ever been recorded in history that’s affordable to the vast majority of us. We can listen to any and as many songs as we want to at a cost per month that’s less than what one CD would cost in 1990. How does a person who’s twenty today even picture 1990? And that’s only thirty years ago. The Marduk story is eight thousand years old! It’s hardly inconceivable.
Let me continue my pause on the Marduk story a little longer.
I mentioned in Part 4 of Do We Know Why We Know that the pyramids are not mentioned at all in The Bible. It seems strange when in Exodus, great lengths are taken to describe the relatively “simple” construction of the tabernacle where the Ark Of The Covenant was contained. The pyramids were there according to the historic timeline. The powerful King Khufu built the Great Pyramid of Giza in 2,540 B.C. According to Josephus, who I’ve not mentioned yet but wrote about biblical times in his epic The Antiquities of the Jews, includes the word “pyramids” once in Book II, “they set them also to build pyramids.” Interesting here when the word “pyramids” is used, most, I think, would immediately figure the Great Pyramids of Giza.
So if the pyramids were there and only significant enough to warrant one mention between the two epic accounts of the times—The Bible and The Antiquities of the Jews—then maybe it’s not a pyramid thing at all but a people thing. Were the Judeans and Hebrews who wrote The Bible even in Egypt then? Maybe the Judeans and Hebrews didn’t want to include them.
The first Judeans in Egypt came with the First Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 B.C. Apparently Cyrus credited Marduk with the inspiration to allow the Jewish community to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Yahweh. There’s much more detail on this but according to the Old Testament (2 Kings 25:22-26) many Judeans took refuge in Egypt with the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah that took place in 597 B.C. after the assassination of Gedaliah, who Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had appointed governor of Judah.
Additionally, the term Hebrew is first seen in The Bible in Genesis 14:13 of the Old Testament, “Then one who had escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew.” Archeology has related Hebrews to the name of the seminomadic Habiru people found in Egyptian inscriptions of the 13th and 12th centuries B.C. as having settled in Egypt. This fits close with Moses leading the liberation of the people of Israel out of Egypt in the 13th century—the time of Exodus.
With these dates neither the Judeans nor the Hebrews were around for the building of the Great Pyramids.
Then I wondered maybe the pyramids the Hebrews or Judeans worked on from Josephus’s works were the much smaller, man-made brick pyramids that have not fared well over time. But when I looked, even these last pyramids were built in Egypt around 1,700 B.C. If the Judeans didn’t begin to come into Egypt until 597 B.C. and the Hebrews until the 13thcentury we have a 1,100-year to 500-year gap respectively between when Judeans and the Hebrews were first in Egypt and the construction the man-made brick pyramids. So from Josephus’s writing, maybe the Hebrews or Judeans were repairing the brick-constructed pyramids but they weren’t building them. The pyramids are not likely mentioned in The Bible because the Hebrews and Judeans didn’t build them or want them included.
Now before I leave the pyramids and why I’m even writing about them here, is the construction of the Great Pyramid, the first pyramid built in Egypt, was remarkable. The design, precision, ingenuity and craftsmanship of the Great pyramids are what make them the only Seventh Wonder of the World that’s still in existence and leaves experts to question how the Egyptians even built them. But as incredible a feat as the construction of the first great pyramids were in 2,500 B.C. as building them continued until 1,700 B.C., their construction grew steadily less impressive. Man-made brick replaced the quarried limestone block construction in the later pyramids and the impressive precise construction grew consistently shabbier. Some say this is attributable to the pharaohs’ decline in power and dwindling financial resources. No one seems to know for sure.
Why am I spending so much time on pyramids when I said I was going to talk about Marduk and one of the earliest civilizations to exist?
Well because there seems a connection between the pyramids and the Mesopotamian culture and the story of Marduk. The Mesopotamian existential view of the world had the earth as a disk and the space above it, a dome (I couldn’t help but think of Jim Carrey in The Truman Show when I learned this). Surrounding the disk was seawater and below the earth was fresh water; the disk floated on freshwater. They extended this (potentially from what I wrote earlier about language and our unconscious) to the water, recognizing it as deities: Tiamat (the god of the seawater) and Apsu (the god of the watery deep beneath the earth or fresh water). More on water is coming in a future article; oh, what we don’t know.
I wrote in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference about the pyramids being representative of the spherical earth or a hemisphere and how the height divided by the perimeter is equal to 2Pi. If the Mesopotamia idea of the world was a dome on a disk, which is a hemisphere, the pyramid seems a likely representation of the dome concept of the world. Were pyramids being considered prior to the Egyptians?
Why did I really choose the Marduk story to start? Mesopotamia appears to be the first existence of human society that dates back to 6,000 B.C. Why I mention this is because of what I wrote in Part 4. My three areas of focus for the Do We Know Why We Know series seem to be centred on: the space above us (the universe or everything outside of us), the space below us (the ground we stand on), and, the space inside us (our unconscious and language). The Mesopotamian story is the first to capture these. The space below us is Apsu, the god of fresh water beneath the disk of the earth. The space above the earth and around it is the dome and Tiamat, the goddess of seawater around the disk. Even now, in searching for who we are and where we came from and why we know what we know 8,000 years later, we’ve penetrated the seawater to its greatest depth at the Challenger Deep. There’s a huge focus on the dome and what lies “out there” in space with space agencies around the world like NASA and Spacex but very little (other than the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia) on what lies inside earth and what we stand on beyond what’s just below the surface as are most archeology sites.
I’ll throw in here from my last article that I’ve started reading Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey To The Center Of The Earth. I wonder what I’ll find?
Okay, the Marduk story. Mesopotamia became the amalgamation of middle-eastern tribes over many years. The gods of all these tribes warred in an abstract space out of which the metastory of Marduk emerged. Could this be our unconscious?
Apsu and Tiamat are inseparable and often depicted as two serpents entwined together like the double helix of DNA. How did the Mesopotamians know about the building blocks of life? Was it from our unconscious? From Apsu and Tiamat’s combined waters are created a family of unruly gods that Apsu decides he needs to deal with. The gods become upset and choose their resourceful god Ea to save them. Ea casts a spell to make Apsu sleep and then slays him (Apsu represents structure and culture). Tiamat is enraged at the killing of her husband and promises revenge (she represents chaos and nature). The gods are afraid of Tiamat’s reaction to what they’ve done. They know her power and hide, by inhabiting Apsu’s corpse. Tiamat creates an army of dragons and monsters to destroy the gods and takes Kingu her son, the demon of demons, as her consort and establishes him as leader of her army of monsters. Tiamat gives Kingu the Tablet of Destinies that give the bearer great powers and he wears as a breastplate. Ea and his wife Damkina create Marduk who is destined to become king of the gods. Tiamat wants to destroy Marduk and make Kingu the all-powerful one. But Marduk with arrow and net goes after Tiamat and destroys her by filling her up with a wind and killing her with an arrow that splits her in half. He uses each half of her to create the Earth and the heavens that he contains in his net. Marduk kills Kingu and captures the Tablet of Destinies to become the all-powerful. Marduk is all seeing with eyes all around his head and has the magic of speech. Marduk mixes Kingu’s blood with clay from the earth and molds the first human beings entrenching them with the element of evil. He makes human beings to serve the gods. Marduk becomes head of the Babylonian pantheon by the middle of the second millennium B.C.
Again from McCarthy’s “Kekule Problem” of language infecting us with the ability to explain our unconscious; we being the only mammal of five thousand that has language while all the others seem to do fine without it (think of how your cat rules the house). The evil element in human beings from this Mesopotamian story makes us different than all other beings as well. We’re the only creatures capable of deception and malevolence. We see this in the Adam and Eve story, Genesis 3:6-7, “she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” When they knew they were naked, they knew the difference between good and evil and that they could do evil. Was language part of the evil package? Marduk brought the magic of speech to the table. Certainly seems part of allowing us to understand it.
Why is this so important? It appears to be the beginning of our (human beings) conception of the fundamental structure of reality. In this story, the Mesopotamians appear to be doing their best to get it right. They’re looking at how to best organize society. When structure and culture fall, nature and chaos take over until the next order takes control. Their Marduk story illustrates how Marduk got organized against the emergence of chaos and how he mastered it. The gods declare a top dog that has eyes and speech and goes out voluntarily to encapsulate chaos cutting it to pieces to make the world. Isn’t that who should be top dog? That’s the heavenly domain. Now think of the story of David. Transferring the myth existentially to the Emperor of Mesopotamia then becomes the manifestation of Marduk on earth, the sovereign being, and all seeing, all knowing and able with speech. Why should they be king? They pay attention. They speak properly. They keep chaos at bay. They make ingenious things happen as a consequence. Was this what the Mesopotamians were trying to work out? What should be sovereign and why? That Marduk is the mapping for a new society seems implicit in his confrontation with the absolute unknown.
In my next article, I’ll write about Osiris and Isis and the Egyptian story. Then maybe Gaia and Uranus and the Greek story and more on the Judeao-Christian story as I make my way through The Bible. This seems like the beginning of the foundations of what western civilization is predicated upon leading to the sovereignty of the nation and of the individual. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
And is language drawing all of this from our unconscious?
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Again, more is coming in my next posted article.
I hope you’ll get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and take them for a ride. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.
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