Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (20 page)

This so-called Goddess movement was partly inspired by the writings of Jane E. Harrison, who had suggested in 1903 that “The Great Mother is prior to the masculine deities.” More recently, the field has been led by such scholars as Maria Gimbutas, whose 1974 book,
The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe
, argued that there had been an ancient, more peaceful time in the world, in which the supreme deity was a Mother Earth, creator and ruler of the universe.

Historian Karen Armstrong concurred with this notion, which she contended was also true in ancient Israel, where the Hebrew god Yahweh, “a jealous god,” forced the “chosen people” to get rid of their idolatrous but popular goddesses. Writes Armstrong in
A History of God
, “The prestige of the great goddesses in traditional religion reflects the veneration of the female. The rise of the cities, however, meant that the more masculine qualities of martial, physical strength were exalted over female characteristics. Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class citizens…. The cult of the goddesses would be superseded, and this would be a symptom of a cultural change that was characteristic of the newly civilized world.”

“Mars” had pushed “Venus” off the pedestal.

There is an intriguing archaeological mystery lying behind this theory: the many thousands of prehistoric figurines from all over the world—some of them from the Stone Age, and dated from eighteen thousand to twenty-five thousand years old. Their widespread existence hints at more than just a fascination with the female form. Often loosely described as prehistoric “Venuses,” these statuettes and figurines come in many shapes and forms, but are often full-bodied and sexually enticing, with exaggerated breasts. Some, but hardly all, are pregnant. As author Nancy Hathaway put it, “We don’t know if they were erotic images, religious icons, household objects, or charms meant to promote fertility. We do know that there are thousands of them…. with [an] absence of an equivalent number of male figures….”

There is, however, broad disagreement about whether the “Venuses” actually represent another age and a different mind-set in human worship—a matriarchal, nonviolent, vegetarian epoch in which the female deity was dominant. In a
New York Times
article on “Venus” figurines, some archaeologists offer that these small figurines were pendants to be worn by men on the hunt, a Stone Age “picture of the wife” to carry while away from home. There is even a hint—widely dismissed—that they were Stone Age “porn.” But there is no real evidence to suggest that they were all “goddesses.”

The “Goddess movement” has blossomed during the past thirty years, prompted largely by social changes and the shift in attitudes brought about by feminism, the advent of women’s studies on university campuses, the contemporary transformation of traditional sex roles—and a rejection of male-dominated orthodox religions. At about the same time, the environmentally oriented “Gaia movement” emerged, a theory that suggests the earth itself is a living “entity,” named after a Greek earth goddess. The new wave of Goddess worship also awakened enormous popularity in the “Wiccan movement,” said to be among the fastest-growing religions in America. (It is apparently even acknowledged by the U.S. Department of Defense as a legitimate religion that can be practiced on military bases.) Also called “the Craft” or even “Witchcraft,” the practice of Wicca as a religion developed in the United Kingdom in the mid-1900s. Essentially, it is a fertility religion with roots in the ancient myths, which celebrates the natural world and the seasonal cycles that were central to farming societies in Sumerian and Babylonian mythologies, as well as those of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Celts. Contemporary Wicca is an “equal opportunity” borrower and also draws on Buddhist, Hindu, and American Indian rites.

Who was Hammurabi?

The most famous and significant king of Old Babylon, Hammurabi (c.1792–1750 BCE), was an Ammorite, or “Westerner,” whose family invaded Sumer sometime after 2000 BCE. Hammurabi conquered several Sumerian and Akkadian cities and founded the empire based in Babylon, raising it from relatively small town to major power center. But Hammurabi is even more renowned for a code of laws that is considered one of the oldest and most significant in human history. Although Hammurabi’s code is often cited as the “first” law code, that designation rightfully belongs to the code of an otherwise obscure Sumerian king called Ur-Nammu, who preceded Hammurabi by about three hundred years, according to the leading Sumerian historian Samuel Noah Kramer. But not much of Ur-Nammu’s law code is readable, and it exists only in fragmentary pieces. That is why Hammurabi gets so much credit. We have his complete works.

Carved on stone columns discovered in 1902 in the city of Susa (now Shush in Iran), Hammurabi’s code is now on display at the Louvre in Paris. The columns show the sun god Shamash handing the code of laws to Hammurabi, laws derived from even older Sumerian codes, including those of Ur-Nammu. Severe by modern standards, with the death penalty prescribed for even relatively minor offenses, the code addressed commonplace issues such as business and family relations, labor, private property, and personal injuries.

While Hammurabi’s code was seemingly ruthless when it came to punishment—literally calling for “an eye for an eye”—it still represented a great step from the lawlessness of pre-civilization era. The laws governed everything from traffic regulations on the Euphrates River to the rights of veterans, but also provided protections for the weakest members of society—including women, children, the poor, and slaves. This shift from arbitrary violence and clan vengeance marked a startling step toward civilized norms of justice.

This is one more example of how myth and history sometimes blend. In Egypt, a pharaoh tried to make one mythical god the only god and failed to change the people’s minds. Hammurabi was a man who used the gods to give his laws the weight of worship. It was no different from the biblical Ten Commandments, which were said to have been handed to Moses by his one god on Mount Sinai. In a few more centuries, the Greeks would also create new law codes, but they would be the creation of men, not gods—civilization was slowly being born from barbarism, and sometimes myth was the midwife to that long labor.

WHO’S WHO OF MESOPOTAMIAN MYTHS

Just as the Greek gods and goddesses were later borrowed and renamed by the Romans, the chief gods of the early Sumerian myths were adopted by the later Akkadians and Babylonians. As cities grew, new gods were added to the pantheon, weaving a complex web of sometimes competing deities.

This list includes most of the chief deities of Mesopotamia, with their Sumerian names followed by their Akkadian or Babylonian names. As with many other mythologies, there are often variant stories and differing versions of the Mesopotamian gods, reflecting the different people who moved through this part of the world over the course of thousands of years of conquest, and then adapted and reshaped the local myths to suit their needs and political agendas.

An
(
Anu
) The Sumerian sky god, originally presided over the assembly of gods. With his mate, the earth goddess
Ki
, he is the father of other gods, including Enki. In the Sumerian view, the stars are his soldiers and the Milky Way his royal road. Originally the source of rain, An is the father figure who makes seeds sprout, but later evolves into the chief god. An has the power to proclaim the Sumerian kings, who were believed to be chosen by the gods when they met in a sort of democratic forum. Sumerian royalty was then supposed to carry out the duties that An and the other gods had determined.
When Sumer was eclipsed by the Babylonian Empire, An was demoted and transformed into a grandfather figure. However, in a particularly violent version of this power shift, An was deposed by Marduk when Babylon became the predominant city. Marduk first destroyed An by flaying him alive, cutting his head off, and tearing his heart out. He then also dispatched An’s son Enlil. This violent mythical demise may have carried over into the actual religious practices under the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE). During his reign, human sacrifice was apparently relied on to appease the gods, and there are accounts of human flesh being fed “to the dogs, pigs, vultures, eagles—the birds of heaven and fishes of the deep.” Excavations of royal tombs in Ur also revealed many bodies other than the king’s, suggesting either a mass suicide or human sacrifice, in which wives, concubines, musicians, and entertainers were killed and entombed with the dead king.

Apsu
(
Abzu
) The Sumerian-Akkadian deity who embodies the primordial freshwater ocean; is one of two original gods whose waters surrounded the earth, which floated like an island. First conceived of as the water itself, Apsu later became a male deity and united with his mate Tiamat to create all the other gods and goddesses. In the
Enuma Elish
, he is supplanted of by one of his offspring, Enki, who killed him.

Dumuzi
(
Tammuz
) The god of herders and seasonal fertility; is not only one of the most significant figures in Mesopotamian mythology but was adopted by many later civilizations, including the Greeks and Romans.
As the dying and rising-from-the-dead husband of the love goddess Inanna in a central Mesopotamian myth (see below,
How did an angry goddess make the seasons?
), Dumuzi gets in big trouble with his wife, who banishes him to the underworld. He later escapes, and the myth of his death and resurrection is one of the earliest parallels to the annual cycle of fertility and harvest. Songs lamenting his death were typical of the fertility celebrations in Mesopotamia, and the veneration and worship of Dumuzi-Tammuz carried over to biblical times.
In the prophetic biblical Book of Ezekiel, among the sins committed by the Israelites is weeping for the dying god Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14). This was considered an abomination by Ezekiel, and one of the reasons that Israel was destined to fall. Another biblical connection to Dumuzi-Tammuz is found in the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs). A series of erotic poems celebrating the physical love between a man and a woman, the Song of Solomon closely parallels the sacred marriage texts celebrating the union of Inanna and Dumuzi. The male figure—or bridegroom—in the Song of Solomon appears as a shepherd, which was also the role of Dumuzi.
Dumuzi-Tammuz also had the title “lord,” which was later translated by the Greeks into the word “Adonis.” As the cult worship of Tammuz moved westward into Greece, the title and name were merged, so the Greek Adonis (see chapter 4) is actually based on Dumuzi-Tammuz.

Enki
(
Ea
) The most clever of gods, he becomes the god of freshwater by killing Apsu. In the
Enuma Elish
, he is born from the union of the sky god An and Ki, the earth goddess, and is the god who slays Apsu—who is both a god and the actual underground reservoir of freshwater. Enki eventually subdues Apsu, puts him to sleep, and kills him. Having done that, Enki takes his place as chief god, and with his wife Damkina gives birth to Marduk.
Sometimes depicted as half-man, half-fish, Enki is responsible for creating the world order and is the keeper of the
me
—the divine laws, rules, and regulations that govern the universe. Possession of the
me
meant to hold supreme power, and in one tale Inanna (see below) visits Enki, and after getting him drunk, convinces the high god to give her the
me
, which she then takes to her cult city of Uruk.
The source of all secret magical knowledge, Enki is responsible for giving arts and crafts to mankind. He also invents the plow, fills the rivers with fish, and controls the freshwater. The relationship between earth fertility and his virility is evident in the close connection between the Babylonian words for “water” and “semen.”
In another story, Enki broght water to the barren isle of Dilmun, which many biblical scholars associate with the real Persian Gulf island of Bahrain, off the coast of Saudi Arabia. After this, Dilmun was transformed into an idyllic paradise where animals did not harm each other and there was no sickness or old age. Many scholars feel that this Mesopotamian paradise might have provided some inspiration for the biblical Garden of Eden, but there are also significant differences between these earthly paradises.
In a somewhat obscure but intriguing story, Enki went on to father a group of goddesses through a series of incestuous unions with his daughters and granddaughters. But when his wife, the mother goddess Ninhursaga, discovered Enki pursuing their daughters, she became angry, and cursed him so sickness attacked eight parts of his body. He was then cured by having sex with Ninhursaga. This myth is believed to be a warning against incestuous rape and unbridled sexuality.
As the water god, Enki also figures prominently in a pair of Mesopotamian flood narratives. (See below,
Who came first, Gilgamesh or Noah?
)