“Secret Garden of the Feminine”
“Separating Spirit from Matter (Mother)”
Legend of the Babylonian Tiamat and Marduk…
by Judy Tatum aka Xia @ http://www.templeofthegoddess.org/FromTheDirector/Separating_Spirit_from_Matter_Mother.htm (The site where I found this a year ago is completely down, thus can not reblog it. I do love this article by her and feel inspired to share it but I take no credit in writing this and it is copyrighted. I mean no disrespect but I dearly want others to have a chance to see this article and somehow be able to look up more of her works.)
“As the centuries passed, the once-supreme creative matrix lost more and more of her place in our lives. As the people who worshiped her were conquered and forced to adopt (or adapt to) the religious beliefs of their conquerors (much like the indigenous people of the Americas), the “Goddess became almost exclusively associated with ‘Nature’ as the chaotic force to be mastered, and the God took the role of conquering or ordering nature from his counterpole of ‘Spirit.'”[1]
This split in consciousness, which contains the mythological roots of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam–the three major patriarchal religions of the world today–can be traced to a popular Babylonian epic known throughout the ancient world as Enuma Elish (ca. 2000 B.C.E.). The story of Enuma Elish recounts the defeat of the original mother goddess, Tiamat, by her great-great-great-grandson, Marduk. Tiamat, the Babylonian creation goddess, was seen as the primordial ocean womb whose fertile depths birthed every living thing–including a younger generation of gods who then sought to overthrow the older generation. In this epic, Tiamat is portrayed as a great serpent or dragon (both ancient images of the feminine).
After the conquest and murder of Tiamat, the life-giving nature deity who created him, Marduk uses her body to form creation:
He split her like a shellfish into two parts:
Half of her he set up and ceiled it as sky . . .
He heaped up a mountain over Tiamat’s head,
pierced her eyes to form the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates,
and heaped similar mountains over her dugs,
which he pierced to make the rivers
from the eastern mountains that flow into the Tigris.
Her tail he bent up into the sky to make the Milky Way,
and her crotch he used to support the sky.[2]
The original myth, which portrayed the Creatrix birthing everything from herself, so that she was part of and one with all of creation, was thus transformed into a myth that suggests that “the lord” makes creation (and from her body no less). For the first time, “the god becomes the maker of heaven and earth whereas the goddess was heaven and earth. The concept of ‘making’ is radically different from ‘being,’ in the sense that what is made is not necessarily of the same substance as its maker, and may be conceived as inferior to him; while what emerges from the mother is necessarily part of her and she of it.”[3]
With the acceptance and perpetuation of the Marduk myth, a new order of creation was initiated whereby the feminine, symbolized as the Goddess, became synonymous with the realm of nature as something wild, dark, mysterious, chaotic, and dangerous. Marduk then represented the new “spiritual” order of male deities whose religious imperative was to conquer and order nature. This concept created a split that still affects society today. This creation myth, which became doctrine, is an early example of “priestly politics, whereby the mythology of an earlier age and culture is completely inverted, so that the divinities of an earlier era are named demons and the divinities of the new order are exalted to a position of supremacy.”[4]
While much of the symbology in the Judeo-Christian belief system is based on ancient, sacred Goddess mythology (including the Garden, the snake, the tree), our Western paradigm (by which I mean Judeo-Christian beliefs) is descended from this Babylonian creation myth, which places strong emphasis on the opposition between spirit and nature (implying explicitly that nature is not alive and contains no spirit). This symbology has left us a heritage of thinking in duality and oppositions. “We find this . . . in the common assumption that the spiritual and the physical worlds are different in kind, an assumption that . . . separates mind from matter, soul from body, thinking from feeling, intellect from intuition and reason from instinct . . . in addition, the `spiritual’ pole of these dualisms is valued as `higher’ than the `physical’ pole.”[5]”
[1]. Baring and Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess, p. xii.
[2]. Ibid., p. 278.
[3]. Ibid., p. 274.
[4]. Ibid., p. 280.
[5]. Ibid., p. xii.
© Copyright 1995 Judy Tatum aka Xia except where otherwise noted, again from http://www.templeofthegoddess.org/FromTheDirector/Separating_Spirit_from_Matt
Again, only shared by Moro. I had no part in any writing of this article. I am unable to share this by reblogging because the site is down and I found it over a year ago.
Art title: ‘GREED, mother of exquisite monsters…‘ by Artist: IosifChezan @ http://iosifchezan.deviantart.com/art/GREED-mother-of-exquisite-monsters-273769165
Notes from the artist: “I had so much inner pleasure working on this theme : GREED in human conscience. I approached here a personal view regarding this “infection of the human mind”. Having its little seed deep in our ancestral instinct, GREED reached a state of art aside human intelligence.
As a twin of Egoism , GREED dooms humanity to a life FAR beyond any humanist believes, towards a world of “profit at all costs”, which is simply grotesque. The INNOCENCE of BECOMING in many potent noble souls is killed or simply transformed into mind slavery as only tiny, obedient, dispensable “tools”…
I believe that Greed alike as many other “sins” that en-shame Human Conscience will be conquered and subdued in the far future to the potent majesty of an evolving Humanity. An evolving Humanity to look upon itself as whole, unique and aware of itself Organism, choosing Compassion , Understanding and a better way of valuing each one as the main ways of evolving.
S H O R T D E S C R I P T I O N :
—————————————–
Greed is symbolized by a hand grasping the Earth and the merciless eye – symbol of mind flooded with goals of “profit at all costs”.
The Earth globe got broken in the greedy egoistically grasp and it is morphed into gold – the eternal symbol of material value.
The avatar of GREED steals every thing for him, from Earth to Sun and also the future Vitality in others to follow, leaving only painful barriers .
The innocent face is half leached of vitality (leaving behind a cold marble sculpture) by the Greedy grasp, stealing the FUTURE, the INNOCENCE of BECOMING… leaving only the ordeal of consuming life only for “hunting the living to the next day”, instead of a full beautiful potential to manifest. The feeble glowing candle symbolize the fragility in victims of GREED.”
Shamanic Dreams of a Pagan Earth 