An un-original tale: Utopia denied in Enuma Elish.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Boer, Roland
• Date: 22 September 2005

If only Ernst Bloch had read Enuma Elish as part of his grand Principle of Hope. (1) But he didn't, preferring the Bible and Faustus as his great inspirations, and there is simply no sustained political reading of this myth. So I offer here precisely such a reading, for two distinct reasons: firstly, biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholars have asserted time and again that Enuma Elish is a political myth, but they have not offered any reading that might justify such an assertion. Secondly, it allows me to test a hypothesis concerning political myth; namely, that such myth operates by means of a denial of Utopia. In other words, political myth systematically blocks other political possibilities. But there is a catch: the very act of airing and exhibiting these alternatives energizes them, giving them a new burst of life. In what follows I will tease out this catch.

Perhaps a few facts are in order before I proceed. Written sometime in the early second millennium BCE, Enuma Elish was discovered in the ruins of Ashurbanipal's palace in Nineveh (Assyrian Empire) in the middle of the 19th century. It is written in cuneiform script on seven clay tablets, most of which are very well preserved, and its name comes from the opening words, 'Enuma Elish', 'when on high'. The text is preserved in Akkadian, an old Babylonian dialect, but seems to be based on older Sumerian myths from Mesopotamia. After its discovery, translation and publication soon followed, the first being George Smith's The Chaldean Genesis in 1876. From then on it has been re-translated regularly. The reason? Parallels and echoes were immediately seen with the creation story of the Bible, so we find a thicket of interpretation, debate and encounter. But that relationship has also ensured, out of the host of Ancient Near Eastern texts and artefacts, that Enuma Elish has paradigmatic status, albeit somewhat submerged. As for content, Enuma Elish moves from the creation of the gods, through the primal conflict between Tiamat and Marduk that results in the creation of the heavens and earth, the establishment of Babylon, the creation of human beings, and ends with a list of the names of the gods and their roles. In other words, we have here a comprehensive myth for which the creation of the state is on a continuum with the creation of gods, heavens, earth and human beings. (2)

The Fear of Rebellion

Let me begin with a standard psychoanalytic point, namely repetition. For we pass over on a rapid first reading one of the more intriguing elements of this text: there are no fewer than four descriptions of Tiamat's preparations for the primal battle to the death with Marduk. Tiamat is of course the primal mother of our text, 'she who bore them all' (I:4), who is finally roused to avenge the death of her consort Apsu and wipe out the younger gods who have disturbed the heavens. The first description is in direct narrative form: I:124 to II:3 (40 lines) lists the various forces Tiamat marshals for her attack, gods, monsters and a new consort (Kingu). But then almost immediately after this, the god Ea reports Tiamat's preparations to his father Anshar (II:11-48). This is not the place for a detailed reading of the variations between these two versions, except to point out that we have now moved to reported speech. The narrator has had his turn and is happy to let the word run on in other mouths. And so it does, for Anshar promptly dispatches his vizier, Gaga, with almost exactly the same message he has just heard from Ea (III:14-52), which Gaga then repeats (III:72-110) before the older gods Lahmu and Lahamu.

What we have, then, is four descriptions of Tiamat's threat and her preparations to wipe out the remaining gods. Such repetition is by no means uncommon in ancient literature, but we tend to forget its material force. If computers have made the hard labour of repeating or copying a text redundant, even a pen or quill is relatively easy going compared with the effort required to press a stylus into wet clay and then bake the tablet in a kiln. One hundred and fifty-six lines, a whole tablet of clay out of seven, are devoted to the four repetitions of Tiamat's preparations. This is a sizeable effort.

But apart from literary convention, is it not also a prime instance of Freud's point concerning repetition: that it marks an unresolved trauma? Without resolution, one is doomed to repeat such narratives that circle around the trauma without actually getting to the nub of the problem. Do I dare risk naming the trauma? We might be tempted to identify it as the fear of the primal mother: she can just as easily destroy those whom she brought to life. I will return to this below, but it seems to me that it is a component of a much stronger trauma: the fear of rebellion. Enuma Elish is fundamentally a text that deals with the problem of revolt and how that might be dealt with. Not merely a conflict among the gods, it is in fact a poetic text that traces the intricacies of insurrection and how it might be contained. Onto this basic schema attach the themes of familial and generational quarrel, and creation itself. Indeed, the depth of the problem shows up most clearly in that it leads to the creation of the world: rebellion, if you will, is for Enuma Elish the creative act par excellence.

Yet, if it is a poem of revolution, it seems at first sight that the revolution is eminently successful. In the intrigue of Tablets I to III, the very repetition of Tiamat's threat from one mouth to another ensures that eventually the oldest gods apart from Tiamat herself--her first children Lahmu and Lahamu--are party to it. The rebellion swells by working its way back into yet earlier and older generations. Once everyone is enlisted against Tiamat, all her offspring in fact, Marduk their champion vanquishes Tiamat and the insurrection is complete ... But not quite, for I want to suggest that the gods who are cast in terms of the successful rebels are in fact the upholders of order.

This is where the first of a series of reversals comes to the fore: even though it looks as though the insurrection comes from the younger gods with Marduk as their champion, the actual threat comes from Tiamat--there are after all four descriptions of that threat. In the hands of the poet storyteller, the forces of order and control are in fact Marduk and his cohorts, but what they have done is usurp the role of insurrection in the name of order. In other words, while they appear as the youthful and vigorous force for change, they are in fact desperately concerned with maintaining the status quo. And what better way to do that than to say, 'You may wish for change for the better, but we in fact represent your deepest desires for such change'--thereby diffusing any real rebellion.

The Marduk Complex

But I have run on slightly here, flagging one of the subtle ideological moves of Enuma Elish that I will consider further below. However, what interests me now are the modes of representing such an agenda for social and political order. Three items stand out: class, ruling ideology and the connection between them, namely, the 'Marduk complex'. In fact, let me begin with this complex. If Freud had read Enuma Elish, or more to the point, if Europe had been as saturated by Mesopotamia as it was and still is by ancient Greece, then he would certainly have coined the 'Marduk Complex' rather than the 'Oedipus Complex'. So rather than try to fit Enuma Elish into the template of the Oedipus Complex--cutting off a corner here, squashing in a bulge there--I will allow this text to reshape Freud's theory.

In this light I am intrigued by Ilana Pardes' comment that the more primary loss in the Hebrew Bible is not the father, as Freud argues, but the mother. (3) Murder is perhaps the better term, along with systematic dismemberment. For Pardes, the lost mother in the Hebrew Bible is Egypt, who is oppressive, rejected and mourned for in the desert. But in Enuma Elish we need not search so hard, for we have Tiamat before us. Not only do we have the four repetitions of her preparations, but the actual conflict takes up 533 lines (I:112 to V:65), or over half the total length of the myth if we...