2016 Lecture 06 Part II: Maps of Meaning: An example of primordial narrative

But I want to tell you a story now, and it has these characters in it. And so this is a very important story, and it's called the Enuma Elish. It's the Mesopotamian creation myth, and it's important for a bunch of reasons.

First of all, it's the oldest written story we know of, but it's also a Middle Eastern story. The whole Abrahamic religions emerged out of the Middle East, and so it's a foundational story. It's a story that sits at the bottom of our culture now. It has similarities to the creation story in Genesis, whether the creation story in Genesis was derived from it, or whether there was a whole variety of similar stories floating around in the Middle East at the same time that were variants of a theme. We don't really know, but I don't think it really matters.

We don't know how old the story is. We know how old it is in its written form. It's thousands of years old in this written one. Maybe it's ten thousand years old; it's written for him, but probably not. It's probably more like five thousand years old. But the thing is, a 5,000-year-old story is a lot. That's written is way older than 5,000 years. Like, we’re used to being in an environment where there are a million stories, you know, because we have books and movies and all of these things. But, you know, in its slower-moving and more archaic cultures, especially ones that just have an oral tradition, it's not like there are a million stories. There's like 20 canonical stories, and God only knows how old they are.

There was evidence, linguistic evidence. I just saw a study on this last week. Someone sent it to me, showing that some of the fairy tales that the Grimm brothers gathered might be ten thousand years old. And that doesn't surprise me, because the depth that's in a good fairy tale is so profound that there's no way that someone could have just conjured it up, you know, 100 years ago. There are layers and layers and layers of meaning, and they're basically archetypal and religious in significance. The Hansel and Gretel story is a good example of that, and Sleeping Beauty is a good example as well. A lot of the canonical fairy tales are very, very powerful; they pack a lot of meaning into a very short amount of time.

So, it was great that this was unearthed. It was only unearthed in the late 1800s, so we haven't known about this story, you know, for a long time. It was a tremendously exciting discovery on the part of the people who dug it up.

So, I'm going to tell you the story. The primary character in this story is a dragon mother named Tiamat. You could think about her as half the dragon of chaos and half the destructive creative feminine. She could be thought of as what's sort of on the border between what's known and unknown. She's construed as the mother of all things.

Now, the mother of all things is like what was revealed when the towers came down. It's this tremendously complex background, multi-level system of operations that's always going on, that identifiable singular things emerge from. Now, the Mesopotamians wouldn't have said that, because that's the form in which their knowledge had developed to the point where they could tell a story about it instead of maybe acting it out or dreaming about it in some sense, you know? But they couldn't articulate it. We can barely articulate it now.

So, there's Tiamat. She's viewed as the mother of all things, and she has a husband named Apsu, who's her consort. Very little is said about Apsu in this particular story, and I think the reason for that—although I'm not sure of this—is that the Mesopotamian civilization was new enough as a technological state, let's say, because they made cities. As a technological state, that meant that myths of humanity hadn't figured out how to encapsulate the nature of technological dominance. There was a sense that it existed, but there wasn't a sense of it as a character that was capable of doing all sorts of different things.

I think that didn't emerge until Egypt, although I'm not certain of that, but that's how it looks to me. So Apsu is her husband. Now, the way the Mesopotamians started the world—and this is the same way that the people who wrote Genesis thought of the world—they thought of the world as a disk. You know what the world is like when you go outside and you stand in a field; it's a flat field. You look at the world; it's pretty obvious what it is. It's a big disk of Earth, and then there's a dome on top of it.

In the dome are the sun and the moon and the stars. Then, you might ask, "Well, what's underneath the earth?" The answer for the Mesopotamians was fresh water first, and then saltwater. How did you know that? Well, if you drilled down, then the fresh water would come. Obviously, there was fresh water down there, and then if you went to the edge of your territory, it's like, "Well, there's the saltwater." So, the earth was, roughly speaking, a disk of matter resting on a disk of fresh water, resting on a disk of saltwater.

Apsu and Tiamat were the fresh and saltwater, respectively, okay? Now, the Mesopotamians thought that the way that Apsu and Tiamat gave birth to everything was that they joined together in sexual union. It's like the yin and the yang, and it's very much like that. It was out of their union that the elemental gods emerged. You could think of the elemental gods as forces of nature, and they're viewed as not being personified; because to personify something means that you see it as an objective phenomenon and then attribute human characteristics to it.

That isn't how people work. What happens is we perceive human characteristics, and then only with terrible effort do we extract out the objective reality from them. So, we depersonalize things when we become scientific, but we just naturally see them as characters. You can see this when you read books to kids. You know, like everything is a person—a train is a person, a car is a person, the moon is a person, and the sun is a person. You know, you read stories to children that have that as a presupposition. It doesn't bother you at all; you can just fall right into it. That's no problem, you know?

In animations, you see the sun in the sky smiling and bouncing along, and it doesn't bother you; you know, it's no problem to look at the world that way. There’s some utility in looking at the world in that way, as we'll discover.

So, anyways, I think part of the reason that we view things that way—oh yeah, that was the other thing I wanted to tell you about. Our perceptual systems have a social cognitive platform, an intellectual platform, which means that our primary categories, the primary categories of our mind, do seem to be social. You could say that the reason our minds evolved—or no, what you could say is that the fundamental selecting pressures on our mind ensured that the primary substructure of our cognitive ability was modules that could understand social behavior: men can understand women, women can understand men, men and women could understand children, and children can understand men and women in the social world.

That's what we're specialized for, and then it was only after those systems developed, hyper-developed probably under the force of sexual selection, that they became able to separate themselves to some degree from that underlying social cognitive structure and start to see the world in ways that weren't personified.

So, what that means is that our natural categories are still anthropomorphic and dramatic. It actually turns out they work. So Apsu and Tiamat—nature and culture—is a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about them. Now, they would say that it's the interplay between nature and culture that gives rise to the primordial forces of nature.

Now those forces of nature would be, to some degree, external—like a storm or like fire—but they would be to some degree internal too—like the fire of passion, right? And the storm of sorrow, because those are natural forces as well. One of the things that the ancients knew was that man was created to serve the gods. Of course, modern people think of that as a superstition, but that's because they don't really understand how archaic people thought. Archaic people thought, like Freud thought. It's like, "Yeah, yeah, you have an ego, fine," and as long as you're in a box within a bunch of other blocks, the ego runs things.

But as soon as we put you somewhere where those boxes are gone, it's the underlying forces of nature that run you: hunger, thirst, you know, aggression, sexuality, and all those things that are impersonal because, of course, you have them, and you have them, and so does everyone else. So they're impersonal and transcendent, and they're also eternal.

So, when archaic people said—and they usually said this with sorrow—that man was destined to serve the gods, that's what they meant. They meant that we were the playthings of these unbelievably powerful primordial forces that manifested themselves within our lives and determined our destinies. In fact, a Mesopotamian said that specifically about the elder gods, they said they were part of that which determined human destiny.

Marduk, who we'll talk about in a while, was given the tablet of destinies because when he was asked to become top god, he said, "Well, if I'm gonna be top god, I should be able to determine destinies," and well, we'll get to that. So, you kind of got to know what these archaic gods were. They were personalities; you know, you could say, "Well, yeah, yeah, maybe it's a mistake to attribute the qualities of personality to a storm."

Although it depends on what you think a storm is. A modern person would think of a storm as an objective event that you have subjective reactions to, and an archaic person would more likely think of the storm as the subjective consequences of the storm plus the storm all at once. They wouldn't make that separation, so it's a lot easier to personify something under those conditions or to not to personify it but to stay within the realm of conceptualization that makes it a personified force.

So, the storm god is something that can instill terror into your heart. Yeah, fair enough, you know? Alright, so anyways, Apsu and Tiamat give rise to these primordial gods, and I'm going to think about them as forces of nature, and I think that's a reasonable representation for a variety of reasons. They're like the Titans, alright? So they give rise to these gods, and the gods are their children.

They run about making all sorts of racket; they're making ruckus, and they're building things, and they're messing about with things. They're noisily engaged in their interactions with one another, and they're having children, and they're fighting about sex, and they're just making racket like mad. Then they do something stupid, and they're annoying Tiamat as they make all this racket; she's sort of slumbering down there in the depths, leaving them be. But they make all this racket, and they annoy her.

It's like, it’s the environmentalist myth, by the way. It's exactly the same idea. So, human beings are kind of dopey; we're running around gratifying our fundamental needs and making racket and destroying things. If we're not careful, Mother Nature will come flooding back and wipe us out. It's like, yeah, that's happened in the past; it could happen. But it's an archetypal idea; it's a mythological idea.

So, fine, they're making racket, and Tiamat's leaving them be. But then they get arrogant, I would say, or careless, and they kill Apsu. They make their dwelling place on his corpse. Now, that's a brilliant, brilliant symbolic idea, because it means a bunch of things.

But what the things that means is that insofar as the gods are masculine, they're part of the representation of the dominance hierarchy in the human interactions. The idea that that's all existing on the corpse of Apsu is something like the idea that all of the natural forces that are embodied within human beings and driving them are resting on a substructure of dead culture. Everyone knows that, because everyone says it; especially modern people, they look back at their culture and they think, "Oh, that thing's dead."

You know, we can rest comfortably on its dead surface. Well, that's not right, because, if it's dead, logically speaking, it's not alive. If it's not alive, it can't adapt. If it doesn't adapt, then it falls behind and gets full of errors, and it gets corrupt and starts to fall apart. If it gets corrupted and full of errors and falls apart enough, then chaos comes back.

That's exactly what happens in the Mesopotamian myth. So they kill Apsu, and they keep making racket, and Tiamat wakes up one day and says, "Oh, they're noisy! I don't like them that much. Now they've gone and done in my husband, which is order. So I'm going to wipe them out."

So the gods get wind of this, and they're not very happy about it, you know, because after all, she's the goddess/dragon that gave them all life. The probability that they'll prevail in a battle against that which gave them form is very, very low. So they're pretty damn terrified.

Meanwhile, Tiamat is generating her army, and she generates quite an army. The Mesopotamians list out what she does: she first of all picks for her consort a new character named Kingu. Kingu is like the king of the demon monsters. So her old husband was Apsu—maybe he was order—and her new husband is like, he's not someone that you want to have around at all.

Basically, he's put at the hand of this phalanx of terrible monsters, and she generates scorpion monsters and crocodile monsters and all sorts of things in her army so that she can wipe out these gods. So, while this is happening, the gods gather together, and they decide that they'll elect a champion from within their ranks to go out and fight Tiamat.

They do that; they send one god out, and he comes back with his tail between his legs, roughly speaking. Alright, don’t let his encounter with chaos happen, and then they send another god out. The same thing happens, and they send another god out. The same thing happens, and it's getting pretty damn hopeless because they're sending out their best men against chaos, and the mother of all things, and they're getting snubbed all the time.

While this is happening, they continue to produce new generations of gods. At one point, this new god emerges as a young person, I presume. There are some things that are different about him than any other thing that's being produced so far. One of the things that's different is he's quite tall and powerful.

So, you know, that's not necessarily so radical, but he has eyes all the way around his head. When he speaks, he can speak darkness into being, and he can speak light into being. So, things obey the commands of his words. He's a master of language; he can see everywhere, and he's a master of language.

Okay, so the gods are checking him out, and they think, "Well, you know, he's quite something. Maybe we can get him to go after Tiamat." So they all go to him in this little group and say, "Look, Marduk," because that's his name. "You know, we've been checking you out, and you're looking pretty impressive. We’ve got a proposition for you. How about if you go fight Tiamat?"

Marduk, who's not only all-seeing and very capable with language, is no fool; he says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get what you want, but here's the deal. You get everybody together first, and I'll go fight your monster, but you're going to have a Congress. At that Congress, you're going to elect me king of the gods, and then I'll go fight Tiamat."

So, of course, the other gods aren't very happy about this, but they go off and have a Congress. They invite Marduk to it, and they talk about it, and they realize they don't really have any other choice. So they decide that they're going to elect Marduk to the top of the hierarchy of gods. Now that's such a smart idea.

If you think, for example, you can think of a hero, and then you could think of if you took ten heroes and averaged them out, you would get a god, right? So ten heroes you can generate out of that would be a god, and then maybe you do that to ten sets of ten heroes, and you get ten meta-heroes. Then you take all those meta-heroes, and you figure out what's the same about them, and you abstract that out, and then you get the hero of Heroes of Heroes, and that's the archetype.

It's a process of distillation. It's like, "Who's the most interesting, capable possible person?" Well, that would be this person. "This is the most memorable possible person." Well, we don't know who that is, but this is how we figure it out.

Now, I could say, "Well, I admire something about you, and I admire something about you." I might notice that, as a phenomenological fact, you both seem very capable in certain ways, and you know, you have this attribute. I might say, "Well, if I was going to sort out an ideal for myself to follow, then I'd take the good parts of all of you, and I’d put that into one thing, and then I would make that my ideal."

Well, that's the origin of the idea of the savior or the Messiah; that's an emergent idea. It emerges when people notice that the hero is part of the force that makes order out of chaos or sometimes the reverse. When order has become too rigid, you can also decompose order, bring a little necessary chaos into it, and rejuvenate the whole structure.

So anyways, Marduk gets elected king. Now you might think about how would this happen historically speaking. Well, here's an interesting way of thinking about it. So imagine a landscape that consists of tribes, and then on top of them, imagine a landscape of the imagination. Each member of each tribal group lives in their imagined world, and that imagined world is full of deities and natural forces of various kinds that they're following.

But then, you can imagine that as the tribes battle it out and organize themselves, the figures of the imagination do exactly the same. So, as the people are battling, the gods in heaven are battling, which is also a very common mythology. As human beings beat themselves into a functional group, their world conceptions do the same. Over time, you move from polytheism, roughly speaking, to monotheism as all these tribes communicate with one another in language and in combat and sort out just exactly what should be sovereign, what should be powerful, what should be dominant.

Right? It's a major issue, and it's partly practical, it's partly conceptual. So, if this is reflected in the Mesopotamian creation myth, the gods assemble themselves, and they look among them, and they think, "Okay, someone here has the characteristics that should be the central element of the top deity, which is like the ultimate value."

Well, the Mesopotamians chose wisely: vision and language. Those are your most potent weapons against chaos. Because if you pay attention, you can see chaos when it first emerges, and if you are a master of language, you can encapsulate it and articulate it very rapidly, and you can communicate that to other people.

It's like, now this is it. You just cannot overestimate how radical an idea that is; it's a staggeringly radical idea that that's the set of attributes that should be at the top. The Mesopotamians are trying to figure out what should be sovereign, what should be above everything else.

Well, you might say a person. It's like, "Yeah, yeah, no, the person embodies sovereignty." Sovereignty itself is something else. So, in Frans de Waal, for example, he was watching chimpanzees hash it out for dominance in the zoo, and I think it's in the homeland Arnhem. I think, anyways, it's a zoo that has a lot of chimpanzees in it that he spent a lot of time watching.

One idea about the dominant chimp is that he's just the biggest, meanest, like most tyrannical chimp. It's sort of the strongman's idea of chimp leadership. But what he observed was, well, that was sort of true in that the strongest and meanest chimpanzee could obtain dominance. But the problem with him, if he was really selfish and cruel, was that he didn't have any friends.

Now chimps have friends, and they spend a lot of time with them, and they groom each other, and they protect each other in fights. You can be the ugliest, meanest chimp around, but if there's two chimps that are three-quarters your strength coming at you, you lose.

Now, so that means two chimps that are capable of enough civilization to bind themselves into a dyad with mutual obligations across time are way stronger than one chimp who doesn’t. So, what that means is that strength and viciousness, you know, there will be times when that can emerge as the dominant power, but it's very, very unstable. Everyone’s motivated to bring it down as fast as possible, and the best way to bring it down is with a coalition.

So partly what that indicates is that it's actually a chimp who's the best at making coalitions that's most likely to become sovereign. And that's actually what happens with the chimps. The dictator chimp is very unstable. In one story I read of Arnhem at the zoo, he rose to the top, though—you know, bad, bad guy, that gangster guy—and two chimps went after him and tore him to pieces. They tore off his testicles.

It agitated the hell out of the rest of the troop, and it was looking like a bloody revolution. You know, it was really stressful for the troop. But what it indicates, and it's so interesting, is that the idea that in a dominance hierarchy, what's most dominant is a power—there's no evidence whatsoever that that's true.

In fact, I was talking to a partner in a business that I have who was a student of mine at Harvard; he's a very, very smart person. I was talking to him about dominance hierarchies, and he said something very that I found very upsetting on a variety of levels. He said, "It's not a dominance hierarchy if you can't put a dog collar on the person one level below you," which is a pretty bloody blunt statement, but he's prone to that sort of thing.

What he meant is that it's possible that the idea that the term dominance hierarchy is not the right term to be applying to these sorts of social structures because what it implies is that what keeps the structure in place is power. You know, and that's the sort of claim that people like Foucault make: it's all about power.

It's like, the thing is, it's not all about power. It's not all about power among animals. So, with power with chimps, if that's all you've got is power, you're gonna get wiped out. You have to. So what De Waal found was that the chimps who were able to establish stable patterns of leadership were quite congenial. They had a lot of allies, so they engaged in mutual grooming and a lot of social interaction.

They were very positively predisposed to the females in the troop. So that's pretty interesting, you know, because we don't know what constitutes valid sovereignty, but even in animals, it doesn't seem to be power.

Then, you know, you look at wolf packs and that sort of thing. And you know, if two wolves go at it for dominance, one wolf will back off and roll over and show his throat. You know, like Stalin wolf would just tear out his throat. But you know, Churchill wolf, let's say, would say, "Well, yeah, you're kind of useless, but we might need you around later, so why don't you get up, and you know, we'll let bygones be bygones?"

That's what wolves do, you know? And unsurprisingly, because what are you gonna do, kill everyone in your troop? Well, that doesn't seem like a very effective strategy either for mating or for survival.

So, the Mesopotamians are trying to work out practically who's going to be sovereign and at the same time, conceptually, what is the proper basis for sovereignty, which is really the ultimate question in some sense. So anyway, so they elect Marduk. Marduk's got all these eyes, and he can speak, and so he thinks, "Alright, if I win, I’m gonna get the tablet of destinies, and then I'm the top god."

They say, "Yeah, yeah, whatever, if you win, no problem." So he goes out to fight Tiamat. He takes a sword and a net, and they meet on the battlefield, and he encapsulates Tiamat in a net, which I think is a brilliant metaphor again because chaos is amorphous and unformed, right?

If you want to conquer it, you have to encapsulate it within a net. One, you have to make it into something rather than something amorphous, you know? So, look, maybe a client comes to me and they say, "Oh, I’ve been having these terrible symptoms. My heart races and I can’t catch my breath, and I think I'm going to die; I think maybe I'm having a heart attack."

They go to the hospital, and they tell me that there's nothing wrong with me, but I have, and I'm afraid all the time and I'm starting not to go out. I say, "Oh, you have agoraphobia! Lots of people have that; you're not the only person like that in the world. Not only that, it has a name, we know what to do about it, and there's a treatment course."

They go, and the reason for that is that the unknown unknown has just been turned into a known unknown, and that's a massive improvement. The person who conceptualizes the anomalous situation fastest is, in fact, the leader. That's the definition of leadership. It's like, "We don't know what's going on; this is what's going on."

And when you say, "This is what's going on," you also simultaneously say, "Here's a million other things that could have been going on that aren't." So, it's a process of radical simplification, and it lowers the stress levels immediately.

Anyway, so Tiamat goes, and Marduk gets her in a net, and then he splits her in half, and he makes heaven out of one half and the earth out of the other for the human beings. Then he goes back to defeat chaos and all the monsters, and then he goes back to tell the other gods, and they're pretty happy about this.

And Kingu had the tablet of destinies, but Marduk took that from him, and now he has it, so he gets to determine destiny. He makes human beings out of Kingu’s blood, which is quite an interesting little twist to the story, and he makes them to serve the gods.

So, that’s that. The idea is that the hero who can see and can communicate is also the hero who separates out the elements of existence so that it becomes a habitable place. And that humans should serve Marduk. We have to serve something. Well, you're going to serve a natural force of some sort. Are you going to be all anger? Are you going to be all lusty? Are you going to be all love? Are you going to be all hunger? Or are you going to represent some integrated—some balanced and integrated, emergent property of that—that’s also socially constructed?

You know, so that you're a balance of natural forces and you're a civilized person, and that's some sort of essence, and that's what you're going to strive for. Well, that's Marduk. So, you're supposed to be a good Marduk now. Marduk is immortal. The only person who was identified with Marduk in the Mesopotamian realm was the Emperor.

Now, they lived in a walled city, and the reason the Emperor was sovereign was because he was supposed to be the embodiment of Marduk on earth, which meant that his job was to transform chaos into order whenever chaos threatened. He was supposed to transform it back into order.

So, this is what the Mesopotamians did at the New Year's celebration when the year is rejuvenated, right? The old year dies—of course, we know that because we still do it—and the new year is this new baby; it's a time of new beginnings. So, the Mesopotamians would take the emperor out of the city, strip him of all his emperor clothes, and then make him recite all the ways during the last year that he'd been a bad Marduk, like he hadn't kept order properly, so he had to confess all his inadequacies.

Then the priests would whack him with a glove as a, you know, as a ritual punishment. Then they’d take all the statues of the old gods out of the city, and they would re-represent the battle between Marduk and Tiamat. The Emperor was Marduk, and he would win, and then he would have sex with a ritual prostitute, which is a much tougher concept, but it's a way of symbolizing the fact that if the creative force encounters the positive element of the feminine, it’s like the prince in Sleeping Beauty getting Sleeping Beauty from the grasp of the Evil Queen who turns into the dragon.

It's exactly because it’s weird, right? You've seen that, and you understand it, right? Sleeping Beauty is all in the tower; she's covered by, she's hemmed in by huge fields of thorns. The Evil Queen is trying to stop the prince from getting to her; she turns into a dragon, which makes absolutely no sense, but everyone follows it, and then he has to fight his way through that to get to her.

It's the same idea in a different context, and then productive order is re-established. Everybody goes back into the kingdom, and it's renewed for the next year. That's the idea behind Mesopotamian sovereignty, and it's bloody brilliant because it’s the beginnings of law in some sense.

It's the idea that to be proper, even if you're a despot, even if you're the king, there's a sacred pattern of behavior that you must adhere to, which is the consequence of a Congress of the gods deciding what the most effective mode of being is. It’s staggeringly brilliant, and it’s that story—we just have no idea how long that story took to emerge.

I would say it’s the consequence of the full course of human evolutionary history. There are elements in it that are as old as mammals and maybe older than that, you know, if you think about those patterns being embedded in behavior long before they were abstracted out into representations.

It's unbelievably archaic and ancient. So you have Tiamat, the Great Mother; you have Apsu, the Great Father; you have Marduk, the archetypal son; you have Kingu, who's the negative element of Marduk, right? You have the drama of all those characters interacting across time.

That's the myth alone; that's the mythological representation of reality. To tie it into the neural psychology that we talked about—you know, we talked about anomaly, right? How would normally you have a box that you're in that is your world, but that box doesn't contain everything in the world. There are a lot of things that aren't in it, and sometimes they poke their head in like a snake, and then that's disruptive. What do you do?

You have to voluntarily encounter the snake and either defeat it or make something valuable of it. You know, you could cower and hide, but all that generally means is the snake grows and grows until there's hardly any you in the box, and there's all snakes.

That's actually the Mesopotamian story. It's like if the Elder Gods weren’t so careless and had been paying attention and hadn't killed Apsu, Tiamat would have stayed asleep the whole time.

So that's the level of isomorphism. What's fascinating, but I think inevitable, is that the mythology reflects the physiology. But how could it not? The physiology produced the mythology. Like, of course, that's going to be the case.

It shouldn't be a surprise; it should be the reverse that should be a surprise. It’s like there's no relationship between these old stories and the way that human beings are structured. It's like, "Well, no, no, that's a dumb idea."

So, well, that's the Mesopotamian creation myth, and it's a killer. It's a staggering story, and you know, it still sits, whether we know it or not; it's at the very base of our culture. It's Apsu's story. If we kill it, which we will or have been, then look out. You know, we know the story from so long ago. If you let your culture die and act carelessly toward it, all hell will break loose, and it's no joke.

So, here we are trying to revivify it. It's pretty weird that these things happen to be real, but then if you think about it, how could it be otherwise? You know, you think all these people who lived before us, for tens of millions of years, that you know we've had our FEGLI human predecessors, were stupid. They weren't. They weren't ignorant, and they weren't superstitious or any of those things. They were tough enough so that we're here.