In the development of human culture, we cannot fix a point where myth ends or religion begins. In the whole course of history, religion remains indissolubly connected and penetrated by mythical elements.E Cassirer
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 09 May 2007
Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-1960 AD), an American anthropologist, saw both myths and rituals as fulfilling the same psychological need of people in society, though they could appear independently of each other. The need they fulfilled was to promote regular behaviour which reduced anxiety. The modern need for fashion paradoxically does the same for manufacturers. Of course, fashion does change, but it gives long periods of stability from unpredictable, almost random, fluctuations, allowing manufacturers to feel confident of knowing what they are making will sell. Ritual is an obsessive repetitive activity that gives an assurance of regularity, of normality, that there are no fundamental surprises. Everyone can rest assured things do not fundamentally change. Myths then give reasons for the rituals, justifying an essentially insane activity. They too do not have to be right, just reassuring, like the spurious explanations that stock brokers always have for market movements.
Yet all myths do not have this purpose because stories that seem indistinguishable from myths are also told as pure entertainment, and to offer pseudo scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Plainly, if an effort had been made by primitive people to explain their ritual behaviour, some myth will have done it, and although anthropologists have reported modern primitives in remote lands with extensive ceremonial and no mythical explanations, it seems unlikely that it would have been the norm. As soon as any child asked what it was all about, some adult would have fashioned an explanation, and of such explanations some would have been selected by the people on some criterion and would then have evolved into a more or less elaborate myth. Any childish enquiry about anything would have similarly produced a myth which had nothing to do with religion or ritual other than that the people explained their own thoughts as coming from the gods, just as some modern Christians still do. According to Jaynes, people believed their thoughts came from gods until only about a thousand BC! All explanations then are sacred ones, even when they are wrong.
So, the mythical outlook reflects a primitive manner of thinking which became a genre as thought advanced to higher stages. Plainly, then, rituals, which began as play-acting events that were considered necessary, were explained in the manner of thinking that then obtained, but so too were other things. What has happened is that the highly conservative nature of religion has preserved the mythical genre in particular connexion with religion, whereas in other fields more advanced thinking has replaced it. So now we have the relics of it in folklore and in whatever myths have been recorded and passed on to us from ancient times. Religion dominates this latter. So the classification of myths as sacred stories simply reflects an historical accident of socialization.
At any rate, it is plainly true that “almost every ritual, like almost every action in everyday life, can be referred back to some myth which provides a sufficient reason for it”, according to R M and C H Berndt, who studied Australian Aboriginal society. The myths that explained the other actions of everyday life obviously did not explain any religious ritual, and all myths cannot be related to rituals. Of course, these are cultural differences. Essentially secular societies like the Greeks had plenty of myths that were often nothing to do with religion, or did only to the extent that the caprice of some deity affected life, little more than a fairytale explanation of randomness. Theocratic or hieratic societies like the Jews, whose every action was a ritual, associated myths with them, and with a multiplicity of religious occasions. Here rituals are defined as “a controlled group of actions performed in a prescribed order for a supposed supernatural purpose”. If it sounds rather like magic, then the inference is obvious.
The fashionable idea that magic is necessarily individual and not social is fallacious.G S Kirk, Myth
It is fashionable because Christians have used their propaganda power to make it so, allowing them to deny that their social ceremonies in church are indeed magic.
So there are good reasons why many of the myths we still have from ancient times are associated with religion, though far from all. To people who thought like children, logic had not emerged as a complete way of thought, except in elementary ways like cause and effect, which even young children have an idea of. People wanted explanations, they wanted causes, but chains of logic—formal thinking—was still beyond them. Religion was their science.
In the development of human culture, we cannot fix a point where myth ends or religion begins. In the whole course of history, religion remains indissolubly connected and penetrated by mythical elements.E Cassirer
Mostly their responses were emotional and sympathetic. Religions and therefore religious explanations were emotionally valued as being a matter of life and death. Again, modern Christians think the same, although their life is now a life after death, not real life. And, just as Christians value their Holy Book, these early people valued their religious myths more than common myths, and preserved them more readily when writing was discovered.
Thinking was in an affective, mythopoetic mode, and religion developed when people thought in this pre-logical way, so that now religion is ineluctably linked with mythical explanations—supernatural ones. Many modern primitives studied by anthropologists will say that some of their myths are “true” whereas others are “not true”. The quizzical marks suggest that the primitive understanding of what is true is not likely to be ours, but it is “true” to them. It means to them something like “important”. And what are “true” myths? Most commonly they are the ones linked with religion, while speculative explanations and folktales, they do not consider as true! Like our distinction between fact and fiction, to them religious myths are true in the sense of being fact. Other myths are fiction. They are not true. Folktales and speculative myths can become true if they are accepted as religious myths, and as religious myths were elaborated, some mythical conjectures were adapted into them. Because dreams were just as “true” to them as actuality, their boundaries between fact and fiction were not ours, and this it is that introduces the fantasy into this primitive mode of thinking and explaining things.
[Myths] concern the world as it was in some past age before the present conditions were established.Stith Thompson, The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend
Quite so, but the conditions were the conditions of thought in the human mind and human society, not the external actuality of Nature as some might imagine this means.
Myths are usually envisaged as taking place in a timeless past.G S Kirk, Myth
Kirk wants to make a distinction between myth and folktales in that he says folktales are set in historical time, but he is surely wrong. The introductory formula of fairy tales, “once upon a time”, that Kirk thinks implies some historical time—some time in remembered history—really suggests no particular time, and therefore any time and every time! A characteristic of myths, perhaps the key characteristic, is that they are timeless, as he says himself. What is timeless is always so—it is continuously true, and myths have this quality. The events of them are in a continuous loop. They never stop. They are like the film Last Year in Marienbad.
Fairy or folk tales are the same and many are ancient myths whose context has been lost making them even more timeless than they were. Some might even have been the religious myths of dead religions, while others offer a timeless cautionary message, against pedophiles (Little Red Riding Hood), warning little girls not to get pregnant (Humpty Dumpty), and so on, no less mythical since myths are personified speculative warnings and explanations.
The myths of Mesopotamia are the best preserved and most extensive of the ANE, and have influenced most of their neighbour’s mythologies, not least the Greeks via the Hurrian myths of Syria, and thereby the Phœnician ones. The Greek Kronos is Kumarbi, and Typhoeus is Ullikummi. Mesopotamian myths are well preserved because they are written on baked clay tablets in cuneiform script, and thousands of these small tablets with their tiny script have been recoverd from excavations like those of the library of Ashurbanipal. Some of the languages on them, like Sumerian, are not fully understood, so the translations have their uncertainties and guesses. Moreover, the tablets are sometimes damaged and fragmentary and some in a succession comprising a book are missing, so whole chapters can have been lost.
What is quite inexcusable, though, is that many have been reburied! They have been put in the cellars of museums and forgotten, or ignored, some for a century or more! Literally thousands of tablets, and many in Semitic languages and therefore offering no insurmountable problems of translation, have never even cursorily been examined, or, if they have, the scholars have kept quiet about it. Why should that be? It is a scandal like that of the inexcusable delays in publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more than one critic has suggested there were less than scholarly reasons for it. Religious professionals, the bent scholars of these pages, have always been more interested in preserving their beliefs and their sinecures than in discovering the real roots of Judaism and Christianity. They know, of course, that the only outcome must be evidence that their cherished religions were not supernaturally revealed at all, but continued an ancient tradition.
Even the Akkadian material, some of which appeared in a spate of publication in the 1920s and 1930s and now the source of our knowledge of the quest of Gilgamesh and Babylonian Flood myths, has subsequently been neglected. But the Sumerian scripts are the older, and the language was preserved as a holy one even when everyone spoke a Semitic dialect. It was the beginning of the use of arcane languages for religious purposes that we see continued in the use of Hebrew by the Jews, and the use of Latin by the Catholic church. Sumerian texts were written down by 1700 BC, but, from linguistic analysis, are copies of works a half millennium older, and even the Akkadian material of Ashurbanipal’s seventh century BC library are Old Babylonian of a millennium earlier.
Civilization had arisen in Mesopotamia based on neighbouring cities, each with a king and a temple to a deity, the king being the regent on earth of the deity. The myths of each city explained why its deity was important, how it had founded the city and its temple, and guaranteed them to its citizens. When one city was overcome by another, their myths were changed to show why one city and its god were dominant over the other. Thus Inanna made Enki drunk and removed from him the deeds which established Enki’s city of Eridu as the favoured city, and took them to Uruk, her city. The Babylonian creation myth showed how Marduk, the Babylonian god, became the supreme god, taking on the powers of Anu, Enlil, and Enki, then building his own temple, the Esagila, at Babylon and adopting it as his own city.
All of these myths are literary ones, not oral ones. They are poems and not the spoken myths of emerging consciousness. Consciousness has well and truly emerged, but myth remained the genre of explanation from the earlier period, albeit now a literary form. Samuel Noah Kramer thought the Sumerian myths expressed basic relationships in a personalized way. Anu, Enlil and Enki are sky, air, and ground—earth and water—the sky separated by the air from the ground. Since myths are much more than this, he attributes the elaborations to the conscious imaginations of the scribes. So, who were the poets? Emergent civilizations quickly evolved minstrels, in Mesopotamia, the “nar” who are mentioned along with the “dubsar” or scribe, but the absence of any hints of an oral tradition behind the poems, unlike Homer’s work, suggests that any oral phase was long superseded by these professionals, or that the poems first heard in Mesopotamia were transmitted to Greece by travelling bards. The long history of civilization here in Mesopotamia meant that minstrels, cantors, and scribes had long before been employed by temples, and it was their work that was set down, whether or not there was an additional but unrecorded tradition of pop music.
The neo-Assyrian tablets of Ashurbanipal’s library were copies of ancient traditional works, the rubrics of them often explaining that this was a new copy. So, the original myths were established centuries before, and the changes made to the originals had long ago been accepted into the established myth, which had been thoroughly polished by the professional poets and musicians leaving no trace of a primitive stage. The Gilgamesh stories changed language from Sumerian to Akkadian, with the core unchanged, although subtler changes of detail and emphasis were made. Some of the details were folktale like elements and they might have been incoprporated from popular sources. The fact that the mythical stories of Babylonia were taken into neighbouring countries suggests the power of the Babylonian myths compared with any native myths. They were obviously preferred. It was cultural imperialism. Lesser countries adopted the culture of the great one.
Thorkild Jacobsen saw the intention of the mythmakers as a symbolic projection of Nature, with detailed speculations of experiences expressed as personified gods. Enki has the characteristics of water, flowing in irrigation canals, then sinking into the earth and fertilizing it. R Pettazzoni has shown unarguably that the chief deity is most commonly a sky god of storm and rain in hot countries, with the clear implications of the release from anxiety when the god freed them from the very real fear of drought and famine. He really was their saviour.
In the Sumerian myth of Nunurta and Asag, Ninurta’s weapon, Shamur, tells him to attack the demon of sickness and death, Asag. He does so, killing the monster but causing the water of Kur, the underworld, to rise, displacing fresh water from the irrigation canals. This will bring famine, and to stop it, Ninurta builds a pile of stones “in front of” Sumer and “on top of” Kur, stopping the bitter water (presumably salty) from rising. The water already present, the god drains into the Tigris and the irrigation system again brings in fresh water. Ninurta’a mother, Ninmah, the earth goddess, is made the Lady of the Stones. Plainly, the myth is to do with irrigation, and the flood from Hades sounds like an incursion of the sea. Sumer was low lying, being near the mouths of the Tigris and the Euphrates at the head of the Persian Gulf. The stone wall suggests a sea wall to hold back the sea, which was considered as evil and chaotic, and properly associated with the underworld and death. Ninurta was a warrior god, a type of Mars, suitable for killing monsters, and Ninmah was a proper goddess to invoke to protect the land from attacks by salt water. Ninurta here has a role similar to that of Marduk in the later myth when he kills a sea monster in the form of Tiamat, the chaos demon. One would imagine that a sea wall would have left archaeological traces, but no doubt any that remain will be well silted over by now, and well back from the present head of the Gulf.
Enki does not appear in this myth, even though he is responsible for fresh water, and irrigation, but he appears with Ninhursag, another name of the earth mother, in a complicated myth in which Enki impregnates successive generations of his own female offspring, and nearly dies from eating eight plants but for Ninhursag planting him in her womb and creating eight minor gods to save him. This myth occurs in the perfect land of Dilmun, often considered to be a protoype of Eden, a place that nevertheless is dry and needs irrigating, something Enki arranges. Yet there are marshes nearby that the offspring of Enki walk in, and the place is supposed to be south of Sumer. It must be the northern edge of Arabia, virtually at the western edge of modern Kuwait—a place that was then probably partly beneath the sea—but edging on to the marshes at the mouths of the rivers. The meaning of the myth is mixed, having some aetiological purpose but at core is about irrigating the desert margins to make them productive.
Of course, we have to accept that we are translating a myth into our language and our reasonable and logical patterns of thinking. Perhaps our interpretations are right, but we must always remember that the people who heard and repeated the myth did not think as we do. The underlying logic, as we see it, might be right, but they actually understood the causes to be gods interacting the way the myth describes. That was their reality. We have invisble energy, forces and fields but they had invisible gods doing the same sort of things. The primitive Amerindian or Kalahari Bushman tracking game can read what are, to a townie, invisible traces, yet his explanation is likely to be in terms of gods and spirits, how the wind god makes dust to erase the tracks, and so on. When Enki was described as a superrnatural heavenly bull of vast dimensions who mates with the goddess of the river Tigris as a cow to fill her with fresh water, that is how the local people understood it—as a direct linking of impregnation with fertility of the fields. It was not an allegorical interpretation to them. Enki, who became Ea, floated everywhere in his boat, like a feather on a stream, determining fate, blessing flocks, growing crops, filling the river with fish, calling down rain, inventing useful skills like farming, ploughing, tools and bricks, and appointing the other gods to supervise everything.
Interestingly, in other traditions, Enlil did these things. Enlil was the air, and was therefore a wind and storm god, but several important myths relating to him had curious parallels in the Enki myths. Enlil was also the god of irrigation and therefore of fertility, presumably because he blew in the rain clouds. Perhaps once, as rival gods of rival cities, they had the same functions, and some of their myths were copied, but with the unification into a nation state, some attempt was made to emphasize their different functions.
The myth of the descent of Ishtar is Akkadian, but scarcely differs from the myth of the descent of Inanna, a Sumerian myth from almost 1000 years earlier. The goddess choses to visit her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, and, after finding the entrance, descends though seven gates progressively losing her garments on the way. When she arrives, she is dead—and naked! The gods find out what has happened and send one messenger (Akkadian version) or two (Sumerian version) to retrieve her, for which purpose they have a vial of life-giving holy water. She is resurrected and ascends again into the world of life, but is faced then with the ineluctable rule that to return from death a substitute must be offered. It is her husband, Tammuz (Sumerian, Dumuzi). The differences between the ancient Sumerian myth and the more recent Akkadian one occur at several points, but the ancient Sumerian one results in Inanna’s resurrection being at the expense of death and disease being generally released into the world, like the Greek myth of Pandora’s box. The later version explains the seasonal loss of fertility and apparent death of vegetation in the world. The two messengers, in the Sumerian version, made from the dirt beneath Enki’s fingernails, are plainly temple officials—human priests—one carrying water and the other the food of life, the Greek nectar and ambrosia. In the Akkadian version the single messenger is a Eunuch whom Ereshkigal falls in love with, so, she is willing to let him use the holy water on Ishtar. The notion of the Queen of the Dead falling in love with an infertile Eunuch fits the theme of the myth which combines infertility and death. Dumuzi appears in another myth standing more for ewe’s milk than the shepherd god, the myth highlighting the antipathy between thunder and milk in a folktaley way.
Mesopotamian myths are often concerned with the connexions between fertility, life and death, the creation of the world, its polarities and its social and technical functions. But these are personified as the relationships and activities of gods, helping men but also hitting them with the demons of evil and disease, and the effects of their anger as the dangers of floods, famines and wars. The Flood myth is widespread in the ANE. In the Akkadian myth, the hero is Utnapishtim, with his wife, the only immortal humans in the Gilgamesh myth. In another fragmentary Akkadian myth, the hero is Atrahasis. On a broken Sumerian tablet, the hero is Ziusudra, who was warned in a dream to build a boat. Flood is an ever present danger in a broad flat river valley like that close to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates, so the theme is appropriately local. Catastrophic flooding must have occurred regularly giving rise to the thought that a divinely severe one could kill off everyone in the world, with only the truly pious being allowed to escape. And the sky looks like a great heavenly sea—or flood—with the sun god sailing across it in his ark. The name, Ziusudra, is curiously reminiscent of Dyaus Pitar, the Greek Zeus, and Zarathustra! The Flood myth might be a decayed creation myth in which the Noah figure and his wife had the role of Adam and Eve, the first humans, and the pairs of animals being the first animals, all riding on the ark which was the dry land floating on the watery primæval world. In the old adage of “as above so below” the sun god sailing his ark across the heavenly sea was considered to reflect what god saw below! When other myths of origin, like that of Marduk were consciously chosen over earlier ones like this, they were nevertheless retained in an altered form.
Akkadian myths are less concerned with irrigation, and so Ea, the equivalent of Enki, has evolved into more of a god of wisdom, though not losing his aqueous connexions. The myths are concerned with monster fights, conditions in the underworld and pestilence, but also wise men overcoming dangers, and even managing to ascend to heaven to plead with the gods, and finally the wish for immortality as in the Gilgamesh epic. The gods, the city gods of the Sumerians, had lost their singular association with the cities and had become the pantheon of a powerful nation state. In both Assyria and Babylonia, the cities were subsumed by the state, so the god’s purpose as deed holders for the individual cities was diluted, and concerns were more with the broader society that had ensued—justice, administration, kingship and the function of religion as a political tool. The move from mythical form to literary form is illustrated by the Creation Myth which is all together more mythical—shorter and more cryptic—in its Old Babylonian incarnation than in the later long winded Assyrian one.
At the Babylonian Akidu (New Year) festival myth, the Enuma Elish was recited by a solitary priest on the fourth day of twelve days of ceremonial, standing for the twelve months of the year, which were the twelve ages of Creation in microcosm. The purpose of it was to regenerate the king at the start of the year, at the spring equinox, and the creation myth was an important part of it. A portion of a ritual text from the Seleucid era describes the whole procedure, and has been published in ANET.
The world began as primæval water, the fresh water of Apsu, a male principle, and the bitter salt water of Tiamat, a demonized goddess. They gave birth to intermediate gods of obscure nature, probably meant to stand for mud, familiar as a semi-solid deposit from water, and so conceived here as types of “thicker” water (Lahmu and Lahamu), and then the separation out of these until there is a distinct divide between them (Ashar and Kishar) conceived perhaps as a horizon. And, indeed, this last pair gave birth to the sky god, Anu, and he gave birth to the water god, Ea. So the succession seems akin to a settling out process, as if earth is shaken with water and left to settle. The primæval series of god is then the stages in which the water clears to leave land, water and air as distinct layers. The young gods then offended the older ones who decided they were mistakes and to kill them. Ea prevents the plan by killing Apsu and taking over his realm and functions. After mating with Damkina (Ninhursag), Enlil, the god of air wind and storm, is born and acts to separate Anu from Ea.
This latter is to take a liberty because in the extant myth, the son of Ea is not Enlil but Marduk, an amalgam of the other gods, but the emerging sense of the myth suggests it was Enlil in an earlier version, and, as we know, Marduk was imposed quite consciously as top god to go with Babylon as top city. Tiamat, who is chaos and everything that opposes society—to us the personification of evil, but then seen as the turbulent and bitter sea—rallied the old gods and now Ea and Anu were impotent. The newest god, Marduk agreed to confront Chaos on condition that success would be rewarded by his being made top god. They agree and he succeeds in killing the monster with a fierce wind that split Tiamat into two halves. Since Enlil was the wind and storm god, this plainly confirms he was the original hero. The two halves of the monster make up the waters of the sky and the waters of the ground, suggesting that in the original myth, Enlil, wind, divided Chaos to make the sky, Anu, and the ground, Ea. Here is the plot of Genesis 1. Marduk, the new god, having killed the monster, he is made top god, a significant step towards monotheism.
Marduk completes the creation by setting in place the heavenly bodies, appointing gods to their places and duties, and making men to serve the gods, whence the use of the word “services” ever since for religious rituals. Having built his temple, the Esagila, at a great hevenly banquet, the assembled gods assigned to Marduk his fifty names, a recitation that takes fully a quarter of the whole poem, a rather tedious and pointless drill, one might think, except that it seems to be essential to the transfer of power from Enki to Marduk, as Enki, curiously means “fifty”. The names possibly represented the gods and therefore the charter deeds of the the different cities that comprised the Babylonian nation, and were a mythical form of constitution, and therefore seen as peculiarly important.
The myth of Gilgamesh is from Sumeria, but we have it as an Akkadian version. It addresses the question of mortality. Gilgamesh appears on the post-diluvian Sumerian king list, so is considered likely to have been an historical king, the king of Uruk. Several Sumerian stories relate to Gilgamesh, some seeming to be essentially non-mythical history, describing, for example, how he conducted his statecraft, his death and funeral. The epic itself is from about 2000 BC, but the main and most complete source is that from Ashurbanipal’s library. Fairly complete versions in Hittite and Hurrian are known, and a fragmentary one on Old Babylonian tablets. Generally, they complement each other, confirming the main source, but expanding on its lacunae. They show a myth that was basically not being changed but rather was being religiously copied. Despite all this, though, only the eleventh tablet about the Flood is completely preserved, so plenty of gaps remain. This is a careful composition far removed from any oral tradition but written in the mythical genre, and making use of mythical themes. It is really quite like the bible, a carefully compiled compendium of Sumerian myths arranged to make a convincing whole.
Many themes are present in the Enuma Elish mythology and can be traced through Hurrian myths into the Greek ones in Hesiod’s Theogony, or that is the thesis of Cornford, in a much cited paper. Insofar as the Babylonian epic is based on ritual, so too is the Typhoeus story in Hesiod. The ritual was a ritual battle between the king (Marduk) and a priest wearing a demon mask (Tiamat), and the myth was an explanation of the ritual, according to myth-ritual theory. Yet, it seems unlikely that a ritual battle should simply have started for no reason, then a myth derived from it. More convincingly, the myth arose as an explanation in the pre-logical mind of some important conflict in Nature, and the ritual inaugurated as a magical enactment of the conflict, choreographed to come out right! The significant battle here as in many other places is the seasonal battle between the rainy season and the dry season, or elsewhere the summer season and the winter season. The rains or the summer sun, respectively, brought fertility and life to the people for another year, so it was important to them that the outcome was what they wanted.