The Earth Isn’t Dying, It Died a Long Time Ago

Once there was no land at all. The world was a formless mass.

Tiamat was the mother of all. She ~

Rose from the watery deep

A sea goddess, the first mermaid

She was older than time

Birthing all life

And then ~ the great grandsons of Tiamat began fighting, killing many in the family, including Tiamat’s boyfriend. When asked to go to battle against them, Tiamat refused, saying she would not fight her own children.

Marduk, one of her many great grandsons, killed her and split her body in two.

War was his ethos, changing everything that was

For the corpse that was Tiamat

Her top half became the heavens

Her lower half, the earth.

Marduk, a warrior king, creator of the world, was praised for the killing of ~

Tiamat, the sea monster with fangs

Supreme lord Marduk

The destroyer of evil.

It was a new myth born, inscribed and enshrined on clay tablets three thousand years ago. Here’s a tiny part of the extensive narrative poem:

They joined issue Tiamat and Marduk, wisest of the gods

They struck in single combat locked in battle

The lord spread out his net to enfold her

The evil wind which followed behind, he let loose in her face

When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him

He drove in the evil wind ~

The story, The Enuma Elish, means, From on High. A Babylonian creation story, it was the first myth to be shared to neighboring tribes that details the transferring of power from a Mother Goddess to a Father God. It strongly influenced the Hebrew myth of creation. From about 1,700 BC, for over 1,000 years, it was recited in Babylon at the time of the spring equinox, on the fourth day of the eleven-day festival known as Zagmuk. The Enuma Elish became the basis for the consort-less Father God of all three major patriarchal religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yahweh inherits much of the heroic likeness of Marduk. Notice in scripture how he overcame the “Leviathan, the piercing serpent… the dragon that is the sea,” (Isa. 27:1).

The model that perceived the planet as a place to dominate and violate all finite resources — forever ours for the taking and ours for the subduing — was conceived here.

Our inheritance of a philosophy that situates the earth as a stomping ground, separated from divinity (aka Heaven), reflects the war-like ethos enshrined in the years after the Enuma Elish story spread. Old Testament scripture written in the Iron Age reflects this, giving humankind domination over everything on earth, a permission slip of subjugation, ownership and possession. In Genesis it is written plainly: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls on the earth,” (Gen. 1:28).

But there were once many other stories to tell. Plenty of other creation myths of the time included a goddess and a god who engaged in co creation reflecting the older rites of sacred marriage set in place for 6,000 years. Anne Baring argues there are, “Fragments of other creation myths that exist in which the creation of the world and humanity is not associated with the death of a dragon.”

The following fragment of an alternative creation myth shows quite a different Marduk, much closer to his earlier prototype, the Sumerian Enlil, and offers another conception of the co-creative forces of humanity. Here, the goddess Aruru is united with Marduk:

Marduk laid a reed upon the face of the waters.

He formed dust and poured it out beside the reed.

That he might cause the gods to dwell in the habitation of their hearts’ desire.

He formed mankind.

The Goddess Aruru together with him created the seed of mankind.

The headlines are overwhelming, aren’t they? It’s pretty easy to tune out. One sample of what happens when you pick up a newspaper on any given day says, “Fishing fleets are deliberately dumping their used nets and lines at sea, threatening the complete collapse of marine ecosystems. The nets and lines are causing a long cruel death to all the captured animals of seabirds, crustaceans, fish.”

How different would our world be today if the great empires of the past had revered a different creation story?

Sources

George Monbiot

https://www.monbiot.com/2022/01/21/holey-ghosts/

The Uninhabitable Earth — New York Magazine

https://nymag.com › intelligencer › 2017/07 › climate-cha…

Humans Have 30 Years To Stave Off Climate Catastrophe

https://www.wbur.org › hereandnow › 2019/05/13 › cli…

The ‘Great Dying’ Nearly Erased Life On Earth. Scientists See …

https://www.npr.org › 2019/06/04 › the-great-dying-nearl…

It is absolutely time to panic about climate change — Vox

https://www.vox.com › energy-and-environment › clim…