D&D General Dragons of Chaos and Law in Mythology?
- Thread starter Cadence
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. Off to go look his influences up.
Aldarc
Legend
Sometimes chaos is less of a void or nothingness but simply the state of "stuff" lacking any discernable sense of order, like an incredibly messy room or a garbage landfill. So "creation" is the act of ordering this "stuff" into something: i.e., creatio ex materia. This is one reason why creatio ex nihilo is debated by biblical scholars regarding even the Genesis 1 account.
Yep. Moorcock doesn't take Anderson's concepts directly but he does cite Anderson as an influence. That is one thing that I appreciate about Moorcock. There are some authors who vehemently deny their influences. Moorcock, on the other hand, cites and praises them.
And, on top of that, when we think of "void" today, we think of emptiness and vacuum. But to those who made these descriptions didn't have a concept of "vacuum", per se. The root words of void don't mean "literal nothingness" so much as they mean "unoccupied".
Zeromaru X
Arkhosian scholar and coffee lover
Thanks, I like that sound.
Zeromaru X
Arkhosian scholar and coffee lover
There is Huanglong, the Yellow Dragon, that is the cosmic representation of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi). He is credited with the creation of writting, the laws and the foundation of China, as well as maintaining the balance of the cosmos. He is also the ruler of the Four Symbols, the holy animals that rule over and protect the cardinal points of the cosmos.
I think that if Tiamat is the mythological archetype of the Dragon of Chaos, Huanglong is the mythological archetype of the Dragon of Order (what D&D calls "Law"). Obviously, Bahamut took that role in D&D. You can even say that Bahamut is not-Huanglong, for all intents and purposes.
There are more notable dragons in Chinese mythology that are also representations of Cosmic Order, like Bailong (White Dragon), Qinglong (Azure Dragon), Xuanlong (Dark Dragon) and Zhulong (Vermilion Dragon) of the Four Symbols; or the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas, Ao Guang, Ao Run, Ao Qin and Ao Shun (or Ao Ming). And the Japanese Dragon God, Ryujin/Owatatsumi. Etc.
Mecheon
Sacabambaspis
It grabs Zahhak from Iranian mythology at some point, though in the Iranian stuff he's not really a dragon so much as an evil ruler
I would like to note that this is Humbaba:
And that dude is clearly not a "Dragon". Which brings us to other issues:
What is a Dragon in myth and what is a Dragon in religion and are those things shared or merely conflated by later authors and readers?
That's -separate- from the fact that Chaos is -also- subject to the same linguistic issues across time, region, and language.
As noted, Chaos among several early religions referred more to "Nothingness" that Creation came out of or set an "Order" to by having something exist in a structured way. When we look at the Ocean as perceived by early Mesopotamians we might see the same "Nothingness" from which creation comes.
And yet the Seas are predictable as clockwork. The tides roll in and out with the moon's phases, the tidepools teem with life, and the water itself is filled with life from the microscopic to the largest life on Earth.
But then there's unintentional, or intentional, mingling of cultures into history. Take, as example, the first several lines of the Enuma Elish. The Babylonian Creation Myth, as translated by Lambert.
Demiurge. A word that absolutely did not exist in the Babylonian tongue, which carries lots of connotations based on modern theological interpretation. (Specifically because of Christian theology)
The Demiurge is the creator. It's Greek for Craftsman or Maker. It was a term coined by Plato to describe the "One" who created everything. The origin of logic and ideas who fashioned the universe based on ideas.
But it is often construed to mean antagonistic opposite to the divine or central figure of a religious belief thanks to the structure of the early christian and jewish gnostics framing the matter of creation as a hidden "True God" and the Tetragrammaton as a lesser "Creator" deity who was actually antagonistic toward the true god.
By including the word "Demiurge" in his translation of the text, W.G. Lambert has unintentionally(?) created a line of antagonism between Apsu and Tiamat even as they work together to create the other gods. That she is the secondary, lesser, and antagonistic deity through the use of a term that wouldn't exist until nearly 2,000 years after the Enuma Elish was written.
And he applied it over 2,000 years after the term was created, but 1,700 years after it took on the secondary, Gnostic, definition.
.... but still. This is how Humbaba is used by Final Fantasy:
Because sometimes people use the old name for a new character and completely reinvent that thing into what they wanted and that 'becomes' the standard going forward. Becomes the cultural ideal of what the -original- is, because of a widespread later creation.
And that dude is clearly not a "Dragon". Which brings us to other issues:
What is a Dragon in myth and what is a Dragon in religion and are those things shared or merely conflated by later authors and readers?
That's -separate- from the fact that Chaos is -also- subject to the same linguistic issues across time, region, and language.
As noted, Chaos among several early religions referred more to "Nothingness" that Creation came out of or set an "Order" to by having something exist in a structured way. When we look at the Ocean as perceived by early Mesopotamians we might see the same "Nothingness" from which creation comes.
And yet the Seas are predictable as clockwork. The tides roll in and out with the moon's phases, the tidepools teem with life, and the water itself is filled with life from the microscopic to the largest life on Earth.
But then there's unintentional, or intentional, mingling of cultures into history. Take, as example, the first several lines of the Enuma Elish. The Babylonian Creation Myth, as translated by Lambert.
Demiurge. A word that absolutely did not exist in the Babylonian tongue, which carries lots of connotations based on modern theological interpretation. (Specifically because of Christian theology)
The Demiurge is the creator. It's Greek for Craftsman or Maker. It was a term coined by Plato to describe the "One" who created everything. The origin of logic and ideas who fashioned the universe based on ideas.
But it is often construed to mean antagonistic opposite to the divine or central figure of a religious belief thanks to the structure of the early christian and jewish gnostics framing the matter of creation as a hidden "True God" and the Tetragrammaton as a lesser "Creator" deity who was actually antagonistic toward the true god.
By including the word "Demiurge" in his translation of the text, W.G. Lambert has unintentionally(?) created a line of antagonism between Apsu and Tiamat even as they work together to create the other gods. That she is the secondary, lesser, and antagonistic deity through the use of a term that wouldn't exist until nearly 2,000 years after the Enuma Elish was written.
And he applied it over 2,000 years after the term was created, but 1,700 years after it took on the secondary, Gnostic, definition.
.... but still. This is how Humbaba is used by Final Fantasy:
Because sometimes people use the old name for a new character and completely reinvent that thing into what they wanted and that 'becomes' the standard going forward. Becomes the cultural ideal of what the -original- is, because of a widespread later creation.
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Aldarc
Legend
It's probably not best to project our sentiments towards oceans onto ancient cultures.
I do agree that the use of "demiurge" risks bringing in accumulated connotations to the word, which you point out here.
Those can-of-worms issues aside, Lambert here is translating "mummu" from Tablet I, line 4: "mummu tiāmtu muʾallidat gimrīšun." Looking through my copy of the Chicago Akkadian Dictionary, the word "mummu" commonly means "craftsman, creator," among a few other things. The term "bit mummu" is often used for a workshop or even a scribal school. The lexical entry in CAD also notes that "mummu" is also an epithet of Ea and Marduk* as well as even Ištar. So it is a comparable term to the Greek word "demiurge."
However, Lambert (thankfully) does not provide the only translation of the Enuma Eliš and there are other translations that you can find for "mummu tiāmtu" that you find out there, including "matrix/creatrix." For example, Kämmerer and Metzler, in a German translation after Lambert's, go with "Die lebenswirkende Kraft Tiamat" (trans. "the life-giving force Tiamat").
Of course, there may even be a pun at work here with mu-um-mu, as "mu" is the Akkadian word for "water" and "ummu" is an Akkadian word for "mother." However, I am not so well versed in Akkadian that I can speak to the merits of whether such a pun is at play here, particularly as the actual cuneiform used could discredit this. I will save that question for an Assyriologist. I also don't want to spend too much of my day going down the rabbit hole of this broader issue of issues and scholarly debates in translating "mummu."
* For example, in the title and epithets given to Marduk in the final tablet, he is called "mummu bān šamê (u) erṣeti" or "MUMMU, creator of heaven and the underworld."
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