2015 Maps of Meaning 05b: Mythology: Enuma Elish / Part 2 (Jordan Peterson)

So here what here's another proposition you can think about. What we've been doing so far, in some way, okay? You can think about what we've been doing so far in some way as trying to figure out what the world is made of. And to answer that, we have to think about what do you mean by the world and what do you mean by made of. Because those, when you're asking a fundamental question like that, the terms in the question have to be specified with a high degree of accuracy, or you're just chasing ghosts around.

So we could say, well, on one level of analysis, one level of resolution, it's pretty obvious that the world, the objective world, whatever that is, is made out of atoms. And Democritus said that a long time ago in Greece, right? He was the first guy that came up with the atomic theory. But he didn't say that the world was made out of atoms; he said that it was made out of atoms and space. And you think, well, that's, you know, obvious. It's like, no, no, no, no, it's not that obvious because, as soon as you have fundamental particles and space, you can array those particles in space, and you can array them in patterned ways, and the patterned ways are real too. The patterns are real too.

So, without the space, you can't do that. So atoms plus space gives rise to something else. And really what it gives rise to, as far as I can tell, is something very much like information. Now, information is a very complicated idea, what information is, but that's okay, we won't go into that at the moment. Think about music, right? Music is like atoms of sound, right? Because they're discreet quanta of sound, essentially, and they're arrayed out in patterns across time. And obviously the pattern, the music, is not just the note; it's the pattern across time.

Okay, so one of the things we might say is that, well, there's atoms, and there's space, and there's patterns, okay? So patterns. Now, what are the most fundamental patterns? Okay, so let's put it this way. We're going to say, well, what's your problem? How to live in the world? What's the world? Well, roughly speaking, the problem is how to live as an individual in society and nature. It's something like that, okay?

So then we're going to say, okay, if that's the actual problem, the first thing you have to do to solve that is to conceptualize society and nature and conceptualize the individual. So, you have to represent them somehow, okay? So how should you represent society and nature and the individual? And the answer to that is that's complicated. It's not obvious.

Now, we kind of know, for example, that one way of representing society is the dominance hierarchy. You know, that's not only a way of representing it; it's a way of being in this society. Right? To talk about the dominance hierarchy is to represent it. To be in a dominance hierarchy is to live it. So we can think about a dominance hierarchy. Society is more than a dominance hierarchy, but, you know, that's not a bad first approximation.

And then we can think of the place in which those dominance hierarchies exist. We might think, well, that's, for lack of a better way of conceptualizing it, nature. So it's complicated because you can't actually sum these concepts up in single words, as far as I can tell. You have to use an array of words and an array of images because the categories are so broad that you just can't sum them up in a single concept, okay?

So you can sum them up with words and you can sum them up with images and you can sum them up with stories. And that's what we do as people. So the question now, so we're going to say, well, is that a, is that the fundamental question? How to live as an individual in society and nature? It's like, well, I don't know if it's the fundamental question, but it's a fundamental question. So fine, we'll go with that.

I'll go back over this a little bit later, but I'll start with this story. Yeah, okay? So we go back to the birthplace of civilization, and we're going to tell the variant of this story that was discovered in the late 1800s. It's a story about this god called Tiamat.

So here's the basic structure of the story: you got two primordial gods. Now, the way the Mesopotamians conceptualized the world is they kind of thought about it, you know how if you're out on a field it's flat and you kind of look at the world? The world looks like a dome, right? That's the sky on a disc. So that's the Mesopotamian world. That's kind of the world as conceptualized by the people who wrote Genesis as well; it's a dome on a disc, okay?

So the disc is land, and underneath the land is water, freshwater. Why? Well, if you dig down in the land, you hit freshwater. And then underneath that is saltwater. And how do you know that? Well, you know, if you go out to the edges of the land and you find an ocean, it's saltwater. So that's the hypothesis, okay? So now, as far as the Mesopotamians were concerned, the saltwater and the freshwater were two gods.

Now, what did they represent? Well, one of them was male and one of them was female; the female one was the saltwater, the male one was the freshwater. Okay, so now, they kind of conceptualized that as a kind of a formless chaos. So you can kind of think of that water mixture as the chaos from which life emerged; it's something like that. But it's also the case, as, and we should remember that, that life did emerge from water and that without water, you don't live. So it's not a stupid idea; it's kind of a low-resolution idea.

So it's this chaotic intermingling of salt and freshwater, so that's sort of the idea. There's a chaos idea lurking at the bottom of that, and so that's Absu and Tiamat. Now, the Mesopotamians don't say much about Absu, and I kind of think that I think maybe that's because at that point society hadn't become so highly structured and long-lasting that a great representation of it had been formed. I don't think that happened until the Egyptians, but I might be wrong about that.

But in any case, the Mesopotamians don't say much about Absu. So what happens is Tiamat's down there in the depths, sort of like the whale in Pinocchio, in fact very much like the whale in Pinocchio. And, uh, Absu is her husband, and they're locked together in a sexual embrace. And so part of the idea here is that, well, the union of opposites is necessary before something new can arise.

And that union of opposites can be conceptualized in some way sexually, you know, using male and female because when male and female come together, something new emerges out of that. And that sort of idea is like the matrix, you know, the matrix of things; that's the mother, matter, mother, things emerge out of a matrix. So, so anyways, Absu and Tiamat are down there in the depths, and they're locked together in a sexual embrace, and they produce offspring, and lots of them.

So that's the initial world of the gods. Now there's all sorts of gods they give rise to, and we don't know a lot about them but I'm going to make some hypotheses about the gods because you might think, well, what the hell are gods anyways? You know, and so I think about them as personalities. They're personalities and they're archetypal personalities, and so it's like, well, Venus, for example, is the god of love.

And I'll show you some pictures of Venus, and so what does that mean exactly? Well, it's like a complex of things. Venus is how you act when you're in love. Venus is what people find sexually attractive in women. Venus is the possession that occurs when you're in love or when you're really attracted to someone. It's all those things, and so it's like a force that can invade you.

It's a way of perceiving; it's a superordinate instinct. It's shared across not only human beings but birds and bees, as we all know. So it's this transcendent property, and it can take personified form because it can inhabit you. And so it's this thing that's sort of objective and sort of subjective, and it's also one of the fundamental elements of the world.

So you might say, well, there's Venus, for example, and there's Aries, that's Mars. So that's a god of war, and he's usually masculine, and he's very aggressive, and so he's like the personality of warrior-like rage. So I kind of think about the gods, especially the more fundamental gods, as something like primordial forces.

And here's a leap, and I don't know about it, but I think that it's a recapitulation in some sense of individual socialization. So I think that what happens, to begin with, is that, you know, as you emerge as an individual, you start out in a chaotic and unformed manner, and then these things come to life inside of you. And those things are these fundamental motivational systems that we were talking about, and so they're the first products of chaos, and then those things have to get their act together.

Okay, so like I said, that's a leap, and I haven't been able to completely fill in the gaps there, but in any case, all these gods and goddesses get created by Tiamat and Absu, right? So then they're running around causing trouble. The first gods, they make a lot of racket, they're doing a lot of impulsive and crazy things, and they make a lot of noise, and they're not very cautious, and they make a big mistake—they kill Absu. And then they live on his body.

Now that's a weird one, and you think, well, okay, what's going on there? Well, Absu is masculine, and so the masculine thing seems to be associated in some way with like God the Father and the dominance hierarchy. And so what does it mean if he's dead? It means that all this chaotic activity that's disintegrated has killed the structure, and so they're all now living on a corpse, which is not a good thing. And maybe they didn't know what they killed, and so imagine they're careless; they're kind of clueless, they don't know what the hell's going on, they break a bunch of rules, and they destroy the orderly element of what initially gave rise to them, and then they live on its corpse.

Another way of thinking about that is that that's what you guys do. You're living on a corpse; you're living on the corpse of the past, right? And it's the consequence of the activity of the dead, and it's dead because it's the activity of the dead, right? I mean, the library, there's no life in a library except for the people in it. The rest of it's all ghosts, so you're living on the dead shell of the past.

Okay, anyways, these gods are all making all sorts of racket and running around and spinning up wind and dust and noise, and it's really chaotic, and then they kill Absu. It's like that's not a good idea. So Absu is also order, and so what happens when you kill order? When you destroy order, what happens? Up comes chaos; that's what happened in Iraq, for example.

Okay, so Tiamat comes up, and she thinks, I don't know about these things I created. It's like they're really noisy and annoying and careless, and, uh, they went and killed Absu. He's like, he's my consort; he's necessary. It's like, not for them. They're gone. I'm going to wipe them out, sort of like God deciding to wipe out everybody with the flood.

It's the same idea; these stories all came from the same area, right? So it's another representation of that idea. It's also kind of a vengeful god idea. Now you might think, well, what about this vengeful god idea? It's like, well, do you really want to have a god that's vengeful? It's like that's a stupid question because you've got one whether you want one or not.

So I can give you an example. So let's think about New Orleans, right? So New Orleans got hit by a hurricane, and it was a natural disaster, and it wiped out a big chunk of the city, right? Well, no, that isn't really right. So the Dutch live underwater, basically, right? The whole bloody country is below sea level, so the Dutch make these huge dams, and they maintain them like mad.

And here's the Dutch rule: we're going to try to calculate the worst possible storm that could possibly happen in 10,000 years, and then we're going to build those damn dikes so if that storm comes, we're safe. Okay, so what happens? Holland isn't underwater, so there's no natural disaster.

So, let's go to New Orleans. It's like, well, why did New Orleans get wiped out? Well, there was a hurricane. It's like, did they know that there might be hurricanes? Yes. Did they know that the dikes weren't big enough? Yes. Had they been complaining about it for a hundred years? Yes. Had there been things put in place to try to get the dikes better? Yes. Did it work? No. Why not? Because it's corrupt; it's a corrupt state.

Now all the money they poured in there to help the people after the flood—that didn't help them. It just disappeared, and so you can't, if the state is corrupt and the individuals within it are corrupt, it means the structure of society is dead—it’s a corpse. And what happens when you make a corpse out of your society, a corrupt corpse? Well, that's easy: Mother Nature comes back and takes what she has.

And then you think, oh, isn't the world a terrible place? It's like, yeah, try not frittering away the money. See what happens; it's part of it. Yeah, it's part of it. So there's a whole tangled up idea of murders and so forth; we'll get into that.

So, anyways, okay, so Tiamat said, she said, well, these things aren't worth preserving; I'm going to go up and wipe them out, and then everything will be nice and calm and peaceful again. And so the gods, they get wind of this, you know, and they're thinking, hey, this isn't very good because, like, she's—that's Tiamat we're talking about here—she's Mother Nature, like in her terrible sense, and she creates everything, and she kills everything.

And if she decides that we're, you know, going back to where we came from, that's probably what's going to happen. So they're pretty damn worried about this. So they get together in a kind of a council, so they're trying to organize themselves, and they get together in this council, and they think, oh, well, what are we going to do about this?

And so they elect, they take one of their gods, and they say, you, why don't you go out there and try to, you know, keep Tiamat at bay, straighten her out? So one god goes out and has a big fight with Tiamat and comes back, and he's all defeated and wiped out, and that didn't work, and so then they send another god out, and he's just completely useless. That doesn't work; he comes back, and it's getting pretty damn desperate there in the realm of the original gods.

And so this is going on for quite a long time, and while this is happening, the gods are still marrying each other and producing offspring and so forth. And one day, this new sort of god appears on the scene, and his name is Marduk. And Marduk is—a he's a new thing; they're not really sure what to do with him. And he's got—he can really hear, and he can speak magic words, and so when he says magic words, the day appears and the night disappears.

And so he's got the power of speech—that's a big deal—and he's got eyes all the way around his head. He can see everywhere; he can really pay attention. So, you know, and he's big, and he's strong, and he's tough, and all those things. But the big thing is he can speak and he can really see and really pay attention.

So the gods think, hm, well, he's kind of a new character; we haven't thrown anything like that at Tiamat yet, so let's do it. So they all get together in their council, and they bring Marduk in, and they say, well, you know, we're kind of thinking it could be a good idea if you went out and fought this terrible monster, right? And he thinks, well, you think that's a good idea, but you know it's me on the line here, so I need a price.

And so the price is you make me the determiner of destinies. Now that's an interesting phrase, and we don't exactly know what they meant, but it's something like what I am—that's Marduk—is now going to be the thing that determines how things unfold. So it's sort of like I'm going to be top god; you may—if I'm going off to fight Tiamat, I'm top god.

In fact, that's how you can define top god. Top god is the god that can go out and fight Tiamat. So the other, you know, the other gods are not very happy about having to subordinate themselves to Marduk, but they think it beats the hell out of being eaten by Tiamat, so they say yeah, yeah, if you win, you get to be like top god, you have the tablets of destiny; you can determine destiny. Fine, fine.

So, so fine, Marduk goes off, and he gets his act together, and he gets a big net, and he prepares himself, and he rides forward and encounters Tiamat. She's this great big dragon-like monster thing. Um, that's her there on the right. You can see she's kind of a dragon-angel-monster thing. She's like, she is a monster, and what she is is really an amalgam of frightening things essentially.

So, and there's Marduk on the right, and he's going to go give her a good whacking. And so he goes out there, and the first thing he does—and this is quite cool—he encapsulates her in a net. Now, so think about that because she's basically natural chaos. She's the productivity of natural chaos, and so what Marduk does is encapsulates her in a net. That's like a conceptual scheme, right? He puts boundaries around the chaos, and that's what Marduk can do.

That's his ability with his ability to speak and his eyes and his capacity to pay attention. So whoop! He encloses her, right? And so that's kind of hard on her; she can't get out of the net. And then he cuts her into pieces, and then he makes the world out of the pieces. And in fact, one of Marduk’s names is he who fashions ingenious things out of the carcass of Tiamat, which is so cool because it's a tool-use metaphor.

It's right: how do you conquer nature? Well, you go in there and you know, decompose it in many ways, and you make weapons out of it, and you make cool things, and that keeps it at bay. And how do you do that? By speaking and paying attention. So that's what the Mesopotamians figured out now. They didn't know that that's what they figured out because, like, the idea was already there.

It was implicit in the dominance hierarchy in some sense, but—and they were observing the dominance hierarchy, and while they got their kingdom together, they were bringing tribes in from all over, right? And all the tribes had their stories, and then all those stories had to fight. And so that's like the Battle of Gods, and the Battle of the Gods in heaven—all those stories had to fight, just like Islam and Christianity and Catholicism and Protestantism are all scrapping, you know, for dominance now.

They're, how do we make sense out of this mess? Maybe it takes several thousand years. Mesopotamia gathered together all these tribes and their stories, and then the stories fought, and out of that fight emerged this story. And that was a good enough story so everyone was happy with it, and the story was—sorry, I know we have to stop—the story was whatever Marduk represents, that's top god.

And so what did he represent? Vision, attention, and speech. And so the Mesopotamians already figured out everything else should be subordinate to vision, attention, and speech. It's like, good work, Mesopotamians. Sorry, it's my daughter; she wants to pick me up. Hello? Hi there, where are you? Okay, but okay, bye. All right, so one final thing. The Mesopotamian emperor—our emperor was charged with the imitation of Marduk. That's what made him sovereign. So it's not arbitrary. It's like if he was going to be sovereign and he was going to be a good sovereign, that meant he had to be a good Marduk. And we'll talk about that when we meet again.