Fiore: Tiamat

[ikhet_sekhmet]

"Tiamat is evidently the principal personage; Apsu, her husband, instead of asking her to appear before him, goes to her abode and sits down before her. This conception of the supremacy of the female reflects a primitive form of matriarchate originating in the importance attributed to the motherly functions of womanhood. A similar preference for the female deity is to be found in Egypt, where, for example, the goddess Nut is superior to her consort Nu." (p 138)

Oooh! Discuss. >;-)

Fiore further suggests that when Marduk's father Anshar points out to Marduk that Tiamat is female, he means she is "only a woman and therefore not to be feared" - more evidence of the overturning of matriarchy? (p 141) Given that Anshar is turning to his son because Tiamat has soundly kicked the other gods' arses, I'm not so sure about that interpretation - what's more, Ishtar, a very successful warrior, is around. (OTOH, perhaps Anshar is just bullshitting Marduk to encourage him.)

Marduk's demonstration of his power, by willing a garment to destroy and create itself, is a pun on his name, which can be read "to destroy or create a garment". (p 143)

Fiore points out that Marduk's victory is over quickly, and described without detail - the monsters that Tiamat creates aren't even mentioned, and Marduk doesn't use some of his magic weapons. He suggests Tiamat is overwhelmed by "cosmic force", rather than a test of physical strength. (p 144-5)
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Fiore, Silvestro. Voices From the Clay: the development of Assyro-Babylonian Literature. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1965.

Comments

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

A similar preference for the female deity is to be found in Egypt, where, for example, the goddess Nut is superior to her consort Nu.

I would quibble with this for a couple of reasons. First, because it's speculative to refer to Nu (aka "Nun") as Nut's consort.

There are two kinds of "consort" in Egyptian theology (note that "consort" is not the equivalent of any actual Egyptian term): on the one hand, there are Gods and Goddesses who form a nuclear family unit with a child and who have what one might characterize as a narrative relationship, i.e., a position in one of the various Egyptian theogonies and a role of some kind in myth. Nut's "consort" in this sense is clearly Geb, not Nu(n).

The other kind of "consort" relationship is between a God and Goddess who have the same name, only the Goddess has the feminine suffix ('-t'). A good example of this is Amun and Amaunet. Amun also has a consort of the first kind, namely Mut; their child is Khonsu. The masculine-feminine dyad relationship is generally without narrative content. The exact significance of these pairs is unclear, and it did vary from case to case. Raet, for instance, the feminine counterpart of Re, seems to have been a title more than a divine person. In other cases, it may be that the feminine counterpart is a hypostatization of the power or activity of the deity.

At any rate, it isn't even definitively established that Nu(n) and Nut are this sort of pair; it's been postulated by scholars who would like to tidy things up in this way, but the problem is that it involves conflating Nut and Naunet, who definitely is the feminine counterpart of Nu(n). But my reading of the primary texts does not support conflating Nut and Naunet.

Now, with regard to Nut being superior to Nu(n), this goes to my other problem with the statement. Putting aside the philological issues I mentioned above, the author seems to disregard the small matter of the actual theological significance of particular Gods, as though only their gender is relevant. Nu(n) is the primordial abyss, a state of potentiality prior to the emergence of the cosmos. Nut is the heavens, the celestial envelope between the outer chaos of Nu(n) and the world. She is, as it were, the bubble in which we live and that makes life as we know it possible. Naturally, then, she is superior to Nu(n), regardless of what their relationship is. In the "Book of the Heavenly Cow", Nu(n) acknowledges that Re, although he came from him (Nun), is superior to him.

Compare this, incidentally, to Aristotle's remark in the Metaphysics (1091a30 & sq) about how the "theologians" posit "the good and noble" as appearing "after the nature of things progressed … saying that the good belongs not to those who were first, as, for example, to Night and Ouranos, or to Chaos, or to Okeanos, but to Zeus, in so far as he is a king and a ruler."

[ikhet-sekhmet.livejournal.com]

I can't say I see a general superiority of goddesses over gods in Egyptian mythology; and definitely not in Mesopotamian mythology, where an awful lot of goddesses are just someone's not very important wife. Perhaps Tiamat is portrayed as the decision-maker because she's the main antagonist.

Mesopotamian myth has that same pattern of the earliest gods not being the final word, what with Marduk overcoming Tiamat, Inanna stealing the me from Enki, and so on.

I was intrigued to discover that Ra had a female counterpart, but I'm not clear on whether Raet and Raettawy are the same goddess.

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

I can't say I see a general superiority of goddesses over gods in Egyptian mythology

One could never say anything so generalizing as that Goddesses are superior to Gods in Egyptian religion, or vice versa. One thing that is interesting, however, is that in Egyptian theology, where there is a masculine/feminine dyad, the masculine is the quiescent, the feminine the active—hence the "Eye of Re". This pattern obtains in a number of important cases.

Mesopotamian myth has that same pattern of the earliest gods not being the final word, what with Marduk overcoming Tiamat, Inanna stealing the me from Enki, and so on.

It's a philosophical perspective common to many polytheistic civilizations, namely that the complexity and multiplicity that emerges later in the history of the universe is better than the simplicity or nondifferentiated state that obtains in its archaic phases and continues to exist beyond the reach of the formative principles.

I was intrigued to discover that Ra had a female counterpart, but I'm not clear on whether Raet and Raettawy are the same goddess.

"Raettawy" means "Raet-of-the-(Two)-Lands", with the sense of, "Raet of the Whole World", or at least the good part, the part within which the writ of cosmic sovereignty runs. Raettawy can be a merely honorific variant of Raet, or can refer to particular Goddesses, namely either one of the consorts of Montu and mother of Harpre ("Hor-p-Re", "the Solar Horus") or a Goddess also known as Seneket-Net, "Wet-nurse of Neith," sometimes posited as the mother of Thoth.

It seems that "Raet" originated as a royal title of Hatshepsut's, and came to be applied as an honorific to various Goddesses subsequently, a way of expressing that they are the immediate expression of the solar potency (viz., in the lotus-cosmogony, Raet/Raettawy is the bud of the lotus from which the solar child comes forth as the blossom). As such, "Raet" is cognate to the Aten, and the titles "Raet" and "Atenet" ("Female Solar Disk") are sometimes interchangeable.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

That's intriguing - thank you! I see the uni library has got that book on Montu, so I shall explore further.

I wonder if having a female Ra, a female expression of the power of the sun, comes from the Egyptian need to put everything into pairs or from the questions raised by having a male creator god.

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

I see the uni library has got that book on Montu, so I shall explore further.

What book on Montu do you mean?

I wonder if having a female Ra, a female expression of the power of the sun, comes from the Egyptian need to put everything into pairs or from the questions raised by having a male creator god.

Well, what a lot of people don't really recognize is that the power of the sun, strictly speaking, is for the Egyptians always feminine, because Re is the quiescent term in the complex equation that is the symbolic Sun in Egyptian theology. The "fire" of the "sun" (putting in scare-quotes so we understand it's not literal here--the physical disk of the sun is the Aten) is the projecting power of the uraeus or Eye of Re, acting on his behalf, but nevertheless the sole actor. Re's passivity I think is similar to the position of the Platonic forms.

On the Egyptian "need to put everything in pairs", I think that it is never just a question of mechanically complementing terms, but rather one has to look at the particular complement in question. I know that this makes generalizations more difficult, but I think it is unavoidable, and so much bad synthesis and comparison has been done in this area.

The creation of the term "Raet" did not fill a gap in the female expression of the power of the sun because that power was already vested in the feminine for Egyptian theology. What it probably did--and this would be consistent with its origins in the royal titulary of a female pharaoh, Hatshepsut--was to fill a gap in the symbolism of a female on whose behalf others acted. Of active Goddesses, there were plenty; of those who delegated authority there were few; Neith would be the primary example.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

It's *checks notes* The God Montu from the earliest attestations to the end of the New Kingdom by Edward Karl Werner.

In Mesopotamian religion (and in the Bible) a god's power is the ability of their spoken word to cause things to happen - an analogy for the way the king's word causes things to happen, without his having to lift a finger. I wonder if there's some parallel there with male Egyptian deities delegating the actual action to female deities.