who claimed this position in the Hellenic through her deep-seated
influence in the ancient religion. We note also that the Babylonian
Sea is decidedly evil, the aboriginal foe of the gods of light, a
conception alien to ordinary Hellenic thought. Again, the Babylonian
creation of an ordered cosmos is a result of the great struggle
between Marduk and Tiâmat, the power of light and the sovereign of
chaos: it is preceded by hate and terror. In the Hellenic account the
generation of the heavens, the mountains, the sea, and the early
dynasty of Titan-powers is peaceful and is stimulated by the power of
love, Eros, who has his obvious double in the Kāma or principle of
desire in a cosmogonic hymn of the Rig-Veda, but is not mentioned by
the Babylonian poet. (Nor does it concern us for the moment that this
Eros is in respect of mere literary tradition post-Homeric: we may
surmise at least that he was a pre-Homeric power in Boeotia.) Again,
when we come to the theomachy in Hesiod, as an event it has no
cosmogonic value at all: it has the air merely of a dynastic struggle
between elder and younger divinities, {182} and the myth may really
have arisen in part from the religious history of a shifting of cults
corresponding to a shifting of population: nor are the Titans more
representative of evil or of a lower order of things than the Olympian
deities; and cosmic creation, so far as Hesiod treats of it at all,
seems over before the struggle begins. On the other hand, after Marduk
has destroyed Tiâmat he constructs his cosmos out of her limbs, and
then proceeds to assign their various stations to the great gods, his
compeers. Thus the struggle of the god with the principle of disorder
has a cosmic significance which is not expressed in the Titanomachy.
The curious conception also that the universe was compacted out of the
dismembered limbs of a divine personage, which reminds us of the Vedic
story of the giant Purusa[182.1] and of the Norse legend of Ymir, is
not clearly discoverable in Hellenic mythology: for the Hesiodic myth
of the forms and growths that spring from the blood of the mutilated
Ouranos is no real parallel. And there is another trait in the
Babylonian theory of a world-conflict that distinguishes it from the
Hellenic myths of a Titanomachy or Gigantomachy; it was sometimes
regarded not as a single event, finished with once for all, but as a
struggle liable to be repeated at certain periods.[182.2] On the
other hand, Hesiod’s narrative of the oppression of Gaia’s children by
Ouranos and the outrage inflicted on him by Kronos has its parallels
in Maori and savage legend,[182.3] but none in Mesopotamian, so far
as our knowledge goes at present.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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