Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [67]
When you descend from heaven for assembly,
You will spend the night in it, it is there to receive all of you.
I will call its name Babylon, which means the houses of the great gods,
I shall build it with the skill of craftsmen.
As the last act in this creation, almost as an afterthought, Marduk also created man. First he killed Kingu, who was Tiamat’s consort, and then mixed his divine blood with dust. According to the myth, as far as Marduk and the other gods are concerned, man’s purpose is simple: man will do all the work so the gods can relax. The story is significant because, as Karen Armstrong points out in A History of God, “The first man had been created from the substance of a god; he therefore shared their divine nature…. The gods and humans shared the same predicament, the only difference being that that gods were more powerful and were immortal.”
Before they could rest, however, the gods decided to build a proper shrine for Lord Marduk. For one year, they manufactured bricks and after a second year, they had built a temple—a ziggurat—to honor Marduk as king of the gods.
For much of Mesopotamian history, each year, this Creation epic became the focal point of worship, as the Enuma Elish was read as part of the New Year celebration in every city. The myth also confirmed Babylon’s special status as a sacred place, home of the gods, and the center of the world.
Was Marduk just another macho man oppressing gentle goddesses?
Besides underscoring Babylon’s ascension as the greatest power of the time, the Marduk-Tiamat conflict has taken on another significant spin. Recently, a movement of scholars has advanced the notion that most prehistoric cultures revered female deities—usually a benign but all-powerful mother goddess—as the dominant deity. Seen as a nurturing force of fertility in a world that was mostly dependent upon the return of the crops and the continuity of life through birth, this goddess was thought to be more significant than the male deities, who basically existed as studs, to service the goddess and sire children. But, according to this in-vogue theory, a great change took place when male gods were elevated above the goddess, not just in Mesopotamia but in almost every society. The victory of Marduk over Tiamat is widely considered one stark and particularly violent example of the conquest by a warlike, macho-male god and the demise of goddess worship.
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