A Short History of Myth Read online

  Inanna is, however, rescued by the other gods, and her return to earth, accompanied by a horde of devils, is triumphant and terrible. When she arrives home, she finds that her husband, the handsome young shepherd Dumuzi, has dared to sit upon her throne. Enraged, Inanna passes the sentence of death upon him, Dumuzi flees, pursued by devils who force him down into the underworld to take Inanna’s place, but a deal is made, whereby the year is divided between Dumuzi and his sister Geshtinanna, each passing six months with Ereshkigal in the underworld. But the world is changed forever by Inanna’s adventure, since the absence of Dumuzi, now god of vegetation, causes seasonal change. When he returns to Inanna, the earth comes to life with the birth of lambs, and the shooting of the grain, quickly followed by the harvest. When he goes down into the underworld, the earth suffers the long drought of summer. There is no final victory over death. The Sumerian poem that recounts the myth ends with the cry: ‘O Ereshkigal! Great is your praise!’37 What remains most poignantly in the mind is the lament of the women, especially of Dumuzi’s mother, when she mourns the loss of her son, ‘desolate in a desolate place; where once he was alive, now he lies like a young bull felled to the ground’.38

  This Mother Goddess is not a redeemer, but the cause of death and sorrow. Her journey is an initiation, a rite of transformation that is required of us all. Inanna goes down into the world of death, to meet her sister, a buried and unsuspected aspect of her own being. Ereshkigal represents the ultimate reality. In many myths, dating originally from this period, a meeting with the Mother Goddess represents the ultimate adventure of the hero, the supreme illumination. Mistress of life and death, Ereshkigal too is a Mother Goddess, depicted as constantly giving birth. In order to approach her, and gain true insight, Inanna has to lay aside the clothes that protect her vulnerability, dismantle her egotism, die to her old self, assimilate what seems opposed and inimical to her, and accept the intolerable: namely, that there can be no life without death, darkness and deprivation.39

  The rituals associated with Inanna concentrated on the tragedy of her story and never celebrated her reunion with Dumuzi in the springtime. Because it so powerfully represented what was experienced as a fundamental law of existence, the cult was widespread. Inanna was called Ishtar by the Babylonians, and Astarte (or Asherah) in Syria; in the Near East, Dumuzi was known as Tammuz, and his death was lamented by the women of the region.40 In Greece, he was called Adonis, because the women in the Semitic world mourned the loss of their ‘lord’ (adon). The story of Adonis changed over the years, but in its original form, it conformed to the basic structure of the Sumerian myth, for it shows the goddess handing her young consort over to death.41 Like the Great Goddess of the hunters, the Neolithic Mother Goddess shows that, though men may seem to be more powerful, it is really the female which is the stronger and in control.

  This is also apparent in the Greek myth of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, which almost certainly dates back to the Neolithic period.42 Demeter is the Grain Mother who protects the crops and the fruitfulness of the earth. When Hades, ruler of the underworld, abducts Persephone, Demeter leaves Mount Olympus and wanders grief-stricken through the world. In her rage, she withholds the harvest, threatening to starve human beings, unless her daughter Kore (‘the girl’) is returned. In alarm, Zeus sends Hermes, the divine messenger, to rescue Kore, but unfortunately she has eaten some pomegranate seeds during her time in the Nether World, and is therefore obliged to spend four months of the year with Hades, now her husband. When she is reunited with her mother, Demeter lifts the ban, and the earth becomes fruitful once again.

  This is not a simple nature allegory. The rites of Demeter did not coincide with either the sowing or the harvest. Persephone may descend into the earth, like a seed, but in the Mediterranean a seed takes only a few weeks to germinate, not four months. Like the myth of Inanna, this is another story of a goddess who disappears and returns. It is a myth about death. In ancient Greece, Demeter, the grain goddess, is also Mistress of the Dead, and presides over the mystery cult at Eleusis, near Athens. These were secret rites, but it seems that they compelled the mystai (‘initiates’) to accept the inevitability of death as an essential part of life, and find that it had thereby lost its terror. The powerful rites impressed the meaning of the myth indelibly on the minds and hearts of those who went through this lengthy initiation. There is no possibility of a final victory over death. Kore has to alternate perpetually between the upper and lower worlds. There can be no grain, no food and no life, without the symbolic death of the maiden.

  We know very little about the Eleusinian mysteries, but those who took part in these rites would have been puzzled if they had been asked whether they believed that Persephone really had descended into the earth, in the way that the myth described. The myth was true, because wherever you looked you saw that life and death were inseparable, and that the earth died and came to life again. Death was fearful, frightening and inevitable, but it was not the end. If you cut a plant, and threw away the dead branch, it gained a new sprout. Agriculture led to a new, if qualified, optimism.43 The seed had to die, in order to produce grain; pruning was actually helpful to plants, and encouraged new growth. The initiation at Eleusis showed that the confrontation with death led to spiritual regeneration, and was a form of human pruning. It could not bring immortality – only the gods lived forever – but it could enable you to live more fearlessly and therefore more fully here on earth, looking death calmly in the face. Indeed, every day we are forced to die to the self we have already achieved. In the Neolithic period too, the myths and rituals of passage helped people to accept their mortality, to pass on to the next stage, and to have the courage to change and grow.

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  The Early Civilisations (c. 4000 to 800 BCE)

  In about 4000 BCE, human beings took another major step forward when they began to build cities, first in Mesopotamia and Egypt in about 4000 BCE, and later in China, India and Crete. Some of these early civilisations disappeared almost without trace, but in the Fertile Crescent, in what is now Iraq, we see an early response to the challenge of urbanisation in the mythology that celebrated city life. Human life was becoming more self-conscious. People could now give permanent expression to their aspirations in the civilised arts, and the invention of writing meant that they could give enduring literary expression to their mythology. They had now entered the historical age: in the cities, the rate of change accelerated, and people became more aware of the chain of cause and effect. The new technology gave city-dwellers a more complete control over their environment, and they were becoming increasingly more distinct from the natural world. It was a time of excitement, liberation and pride.

  But major change on this scale also inspires great fear. It has been said that history is a process of annihilation, since each new development requires the destruction of what has gone before.44 This was clearly the case in the Mesopotamian cities, where the mudbrick buildings needed constant maintenance and periodic reconstruction. New structures were erected on top of the levelled ruins of their predecessors, and the process of decay and renewal was thus built into the new art of town planning.45 Civilisation was experienced as magnificent but fragile; a city shot up and flourished dramatically, but then all too quickly went into decline. When one city-state rose to pre-eminence, it preyed upon its rivals. There were wars, massacres, revolutions and deportations. The destruction meant that the culture that had been so painfully achieved needed to be rebuilt and established again and again. There was constant fear that life would revert to the old barbarism. With mingled apprehension and hope, the new urban myths meditated on the endless struggle between order and chaos.

  Not surprisingly, some saw civilisation as a disaster. The biblical writers saw it as a sign of the separation from God that had followed the expulsion from Eden. Urban life seemed inherently violent, involving killing and exploitation. The first man to build a city was Cain, the first murderer,46 his descendants invented the civilised a
rts: Jubal was ‘the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and the pipes’, and Tubal-cain ‘made all kinds of bronze and iron tools’.47 The great ziggurat or temple-tower of Babylon made a profound and unfavourable impression on the ancient Israelites. It seemed the epitome of pagan hubris, motivated solely by a desire for self-aggrandisement. They called it the Tower of Bavel or Babble, because, to punish the builders, God had ‘baffled the language of all the earth-folk, and from there scattered them over the face of all the earth’.48

  But the people of Mesopotamia themselves saw the city as a place where they could encounter the divine. It was – almost – a recreation of the lost paradise. The ziggurat replaced the mountain at the centre of the world, which had enabled the first human beings to climb up to the world of the gods. The gods lived in the cities, side by side with men and women in temples that were replicas of their palaces in the divine world. In the ancient world, every city was a holy city. As their ancestors had regarded hunting and farming as sacred and sacramental activities, these early city-dwellers saw their cultural attainments as essentially divine. In Mesopotamia, the gods had taught men how to build the ziggurats, and Enki, god of wisdom, was the patron of leather-workers, metal-smiths, barbers, builders, potters, irrigation technicians, physicians, musicians and scribes.49 They knew that they had embarked on a wondrous enterprise that would transform human life forever; their cities were transcendent, because they went beyond anything known before. They partook of the divine creativity of the gods, who had somehow brought order out of the confusion of chaos.

  But the Israelites were wrong to imagine that the people of Mesopotamia were guilty of hubris. They knew that human life – even in their imposing cities – was flawed and transitory, in comparison with the world of the gods, which still formed the backdrop of their daily lives. Their cities were only a pale shadow of the lost paradise of Dilmun, inhabited now only by gods and a few exceptional human beings. They were acutely aware that, like human life itself, civilisation was fragile and impermanent. In Egypt, a compact country, isolated and protected from hostile forces by mountains, and fertilised by the regular flooding of the Nile, there was greater confidence in human achievement. But in Mesopotamia, where the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates was unpredictable and often destructive, where torrential rain could turn the soil into a quagmire, or scorching winds reduce it to dust, and where there was constant threat of invasion, life was far less secure. The maintenance of civilisation seemed to require a heroic effort against the wilful and destructive powers of nature. These fears are especially evident in their flood myths. Rivers in Mesopotamia are prone to sudden shifts of direction because there are no natural obstacles, so flooding was frequent and often disastrous. A flood was not a blessing, as in Egypt, but became a metaphor for political and social dissolution.

  Whenever they enter a new era of history, people change their ideas of both humanity and divinity. In these early civilisations, men and women were becoming more like us moderns, more aware than ever before that they were the masters of their own destiny. Consequently, they could no longer see the gods in the same way as their ancestors had. Because human actions were now centre-stage, the gods seemed more remote; they were no longer a reality that was self-evident and only just out of reach. The new urban mythology saw the Flood as marking a crisis in divine–human relations. In Atrahasis, the longest of the Mesopotamian Flood poems, the gods, like men, are town planners. The lesser deities go on strike, exhausted by the endless labour of digging irrigation canals to make the countryside habitable, so the Mother Goddess creates human beings to perform these menial tasks instead. But they become too numerous and so noisy that Enlil, the storm god, who is kept awake by the din, decides to inundate the world as a brutal method of population control. But Enki wants to save Atrahasis,50 the ‘exceedingly wise man’ of the city of Shuruppak. The two enjoy a special friendship, so Enki tells Atrahasis to build a boat, instructing him about the technology that would keep it watertight and, because of this divine intervention, Atrahasis, like Noah, is able to save his family and the seeds of all living things. But after the waters subside, the gods are horrified by the devastation. In Mesopotamian myth, the Flood marks the beginning of the gods’ withdrawal from the world. Enki takes Atrahasis and his wife to Dilmun. They would be the only humans to enjoy immortality and the old intimacy with the gods. But the story also celebrates the divinely inspired technology that had saved the human race from extinction. Increasingly in Mesopotamia, as in our own modernity, civilisation and culture would become the focus of myth and aspiration.

  But the Mesopotamians were not entirely like us. The gods may have withdrawn, but people remained highly conscious of a transcendent element in their daily activities. Each city was regarded as the earthly estate of one of the gods, and every citizen – from the ruler to the humblest manual worker – was in the employ of the patron deity – of Enlil, Enki or Inanna.51 People still adhered to the perennial philosophy, which saw everything on earth as the replica of a celestial reality. An assembly of elders ruled the city-states, so the Mesopotamians believed that a Divine Assembly of leading deities also ruled the gods. They also assumed that, just as their urban culture had developed from small agricultural communities, closely involved with the natural rhythms of the countryside, the gods had been through a similar evolution.

  Hence the creation myth that has survived in the Babylonian epic known, from its opening words, as the Enuma Elish. Our text dates only from the first half of the second millennium BCE, but it contains much earlier material.52 The poem begins with a theogony that shows how the gods themselves first came into being. There is no creation ex nihilo, but an evolutionary process, in which the first deities emerged from sacred primal matter, a sloppy, undefined substance, where everything lacks identity. Salt and bitter waters mingled together, there was no separation of sky, earth or sea; and the gods themselves were ‘nameless, natureless, futureless’.53 The first deities to emerge from the slime were inseparable from the elements. Apsu was the sweet river water, Tiamat the salty sea and Mummu a misty cloud. Their names can also be translated: ‘abyss’, ‘void’ and ‘bottomless pit’.

  These primal deities are still shapeless and inert. But other gods emanate from them in couples, each pair more clearly defined than the last. An ordered cosmos comes into being, as these divine elements separate from each other. First comes silt (water and soil mixed together), represented by Lahmu and Lahamu. Then Ansher and Kishar (the horizons of sky and sea), and finally the Sky God, Anu, and Ea, the earth. But this theogonic myth is not a purely metaphysical speculation about the evolution of divinity; it is also and crucially a meditation upon Mesopotamia, which is an alluvial region built upon deposits of silt. Again, the divine is an aspect of the human world. The gods are inseparable from the landscape, and in Eridu, one of the oldest of the Mesopotamian cities, the swampy lagoon that had made the settlement viable and surrounded the cult centre, was called the apsu. The myth also expressed the gradual separation from nature which the new city-dwellers were themselves experiencing.

  The new gods were more active and they were able to overcome their parents: Apsu sinks into the ground, and Ea and Anu build their own palace, complete with chapels and council halls, on his prone carcass. City-building always marks peak moments of Mesopotamian cosmology. But Tiamat is still a lurking danger, and has created a mighty horde of monsters to avenge Apsu. The only god who can defeat her in pitched battle is Marduk, the splendid son of Ea. After a desperate struggle, Marduk stands on Tiamat’s massive corpse, and splits it in half like a giant shellfish, to create the heaven and earth that will be inhabited by human beings. He promulgates laws and establishes a Divine Assembly to consolidate the new cosmic order. Finally, almost as an afterthought, Marduk creates the first man by mixing the blood of one of the defeated gods with a handful of dust, showing that the gods are not sealed off into a supernatural realm of their own, but that humanity and the natural world are all made up from
the same divine stuff.

  The myth examines the human process of change, which is at one with the development of the gods. It reflects the evolution of the Mesopotamian city-state, which had turned its back on the old agrarian society (now seen as undeveloped and sluggish), and had established itself by military force. After his victory, Marduk founds Babylon. In the centre of the city is the ziggurat of Esagila, a copy of Marduk’s shrine in the divine world. As the ‘symbol of infinite heaven’, towering above all the other buildings, it becomes the gods’ earthly home. The city is called ‘bab-ilani’ (the ‘gate of the gods’), the place where the divine enters the world of men. In Esagila, the gods sit down to celebrate the sacred liturgy ‘from which the universe receives its structure, the hidden world is made plain and the gods assigned their places in the universe’.54 The city could thus replace the old axis mundi, which had linked heaven and earth in the Golden Age.

  The Bible also preserves creation myths that show Yahweh bringing the world into being by killing a sea monster, like Tiamat.55 This type of cosmogony was popular with Middle Eastern peoples. It expressed their conviction that civilisation was an ongoing struggle, a massive effort against overwhelming odds to halt the slide back to formless barbarism. The Enuma Elish was chanted on the fourth day of the New Year festival. Like any mythical narrative, it described a mysterious and ineffable event that had happened in the Sacred Time of ‘everywhen’. It was not like an ordinary historical incident, which was over and done with. The creation of the world was a continuous process; the divine battle against chaos was still going on, and human beings needed an influx of the divine energies that held disorder and disaster at bay.