Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 8285533" data-attributes="member: 6796468">Okay... if you're gonna go into Babylonian and Akkadian mythologies you need to go back to Sumer, whose religions formed the -basis- of both.Specifically, that there were stages of Cosmic Birth or Creation as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh.First the Divine Waters "Nammu" created the Sky, An, and the Earth, Ki. An and Ki begat Enlil, god of wind, rain, and storm. Enlil separated his parents, again, keeping them apart with his presence. Nammu and An got it on and begat Enki, who later created Mankind. An made the Heavens for the Gods alone, and sent the dead humans to Kur in the earth, ruled by Ereshkigal and Nergal her husband. Where'd they come from? We literally don't know 'cause most of Sumerian Literature doesn't exist anymore and the Epic of Gilgamesh isn't a full listing of their religious beliefs...There were also Ninil, Enil's wife and their child Ninurta. Inanna was Erishkegal's younger sister. Utu was there, as well. Nanna and his wife Ningal... and Neti gatekeeper of the Underworld.But. That knowledge informs the Babylonian and Akkadian cultures.Nammu over time became Tiamat, a name which was passed on to the Amorites of Babylon and the Akkadians who were Semites.THEN Tiamat got axed by Marduk as a myth of a "New Cycle of Creation" as a way for the Amorites to subjugate the religious figures of the Sumerian Pantheon to break, or at least weaken, the Priesthood's hold on the populace, supplanting the important figures of the Sumerian pantheon with their own figures to create a new and hybridized religion. Suddenly Nammu/Tiamat wasn't just a goddess of divine water, but the source of CHAOS in your lives, and isn't it marvelous how our superior god (Who is now God-King of your Pantheon and secretly totally helped Enki create you) saved you from that chaos? You're welcome!The Akkadians would do similar things before expanding their cultural identity toward a more centralized polytheism where the Sumerian gods became secondary figures below the Elohim along with the Moabite god Chemosh and the Sidonian goddess Astarte.But after that point you start getting into Abrahamic Mysteries and early Judaism and we have to stop to avoid modern real world religious discussion!Point is: The Sumerians believed in cycles of creation that began with Tiamat birthing the Sky and the Earth, with those two birthing the rain, and further generations of gods creating more and more of reality. And then other cultures took those ideas of creation cycles and wrote their own cycles into the story as a way to give themselves primacy.With the ancillary point of: D&D is written with the idea of Gods and religion viewed through the lens of modern Western ideology. If you try and use modern ideas about the gods of the past you're gonna have a bad time. Because the Gods of the ancient world were not "Gods" as we think of them in the context of our reality. Even the term "God" bears a hell of a lot of connotations that really just ... don't fit. Nammu -was- the Sea. The spirit of the sea. And when she died, the sea remained, but lacked a spirit. It didn't change because of course it wouldn't. It just didn't have the same magic in it as it had before.Meanwhile Enki, the god who created mankind? Was the god of Groundwater. Of rivers, of lakes, of underground liquid that you can reach with a well. Those forms of water still had a spirit. Why? Marduk didn't kill it.Enki didn't become the sea god. Neither did Marduk. After that point there -was- no sea-god. Didn't need one. 'Cause you didn't actually need Gods of anything for them to exist. Kinda only to create them in the first place, often by being those things.</blockquote>

Verification