Tiamat, the Goddess who personifies the sea...

Tiamat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Tiamat (disambiguation).

In Babylonian mythology^[1], Tiamat is a goddess who personifies the sea. Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos.^[2]Although there are no early precedents for it, some sources identify her with images of a sea serpent or dragon.^[3] In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonianepic of creation, she gives birth to the first generation of deities; she later makes war upon them and is killed by the storm-god Marduk. The heavens and the earth are formed from her divided body.

Tiamat was known as Thalattē (as variant of thalassa, the Greek word for "sea") in the Hellenistic Babylonian Berossus' first volume of universal history. It is thought that the name of Tiamat was dropped in secondary translations of the original religious texts because some Akkadian copyists ofEnûma Elish substituted the ordinary word for "sea" for Tiamat, because the two names essentially were the same, due to association.^[4]

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The Mythic Imagination

"(...) Mythic narratives are pattern of meanings, that state and restate universal human activities. As such, their account accounts of creation, conflict, and achievement are metaphors for concerns common to all those who participate in the human adventure.

Cultural myths served several vital purposes. They explained the workings of the world to those bewildered by natural phenomena. They assisted people's transition through life 's developmental stages. They helped members of society to find meaning in their position, economic status and ethical constraints. They enabled human beings to participate in the mysteries of the cosmos and to worship an entity or process deemed worthy of supreme importance.

However, cultural myth became fragmented when science and technology produced dependable ways to understand and control nature; when pluralism, seeped societies; and when religious doctrine, national laws, and social customs provided frameworks - often sterile - by which people's behavior could be directed.

Yet the deep need for underlying the symbols and metaphors remained: personal existence without myth was unsatisfying and stultifying. As a result, myths became personalized, albeit on an unconscious level. Portions of these personal myths surfaced during dreams; reveries; bodily feelings; passion; slips of the tongue; ritualistic behavior; and spontaneous music making, dancing, writing, drawing, and painting.  (...) "

Text by Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. 

(Extract from Forward - The Mythic Imagination by Stephen Larsen, Ph.D.)

Photo by Sandra Saldanha