New Moon in Libra: Goddess Tiamat

Our next new moon in Libra promises a dose of "cosmic diplomacy." This means that we will be supported in lifting ourselves up out of the current structures that we see and know, and intuitively guided towards our own inner compass for what is good, harmonious and just. 

Our inner and outer worlds will likely feel as if things are in a transition phase with this lunar cycle. Not only can we feel the changing of the seasons, we can sense the changing of energetics within ourselves, and we implicitly understand the need for change in the structures of the 3d world we inhabit. That's a lot of transition and transformation! Luckily, the universe is always in balance, and we have just the support we need to journey through these times. This support comes from the heavens in terms of celestial and planetary alignments. This support also comes from the ever present primordial goddess Tiamat. 

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I want to touch on the myth of Goddess Tiamat. We commonly find her in the Babylonian myth of creation Enuma Elish as the sea water goddess who is the primordial water that gives birth to everything. The myth commonly held/modernly known is not that simple, however, the story (as I discuss in the podcast) ends with Tiamat becoming a raging, scary, dangerous "chaos dragon" who is ultimately slayed by her son, Marduk. Marduk then creates heaven and earth with Tiamat's body. This is a somewhat confusing ending, as it is hard to comprehend how the origin goddess need to be killed by her son, who then creates everything. In the podcast I offer a different interpretation, one that keeps Tiamat's power and exposes man's egoistic folly of killing in order to posses a kingdom/land. 

In this blog post I want to bring up a book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, written by Catherine Keller. Keller speaks of Tiamat's myth asking "How does a religion manage to vilify the goddess it still recognizes as cosmic parent of all that is?"

The book suggests not only that the myth and legend of Tiamat may have been misconstrued in Enuma Elish, but also that this patriarchal/male centered version of her story has been adopted into the book of Genesis and the creation myth held within Judeo-Christian traditions.

Genesis 1 states: "In beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

Keller suggests that Tiamat's name is synonymous with the Hebrew word "tehom" which means deep or abyss. When we read the quote from Genesis 1 again we now read: "In beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the Tiamat, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” This is the idea I invite us to meditate upon intros podcast, that power hungry man may have created a Father God to usurp and take over the power of Mother Goddess. As with everything, take only what feels right and good for you!

In closing I want to offer one more quote from Catherine Keller's book:
"In Tiamat’s “heart-pondering,” may we not receive a clue for a hermeneutics that would let her live: her, the primal creativity, where children run wild, where the new is granted a costly permission by its antecedents; the body of all that is silenced or slaughtered so that the new order need not negotiate its claim? Such a tehomic hermeneutic, haunted by the dead goddess but not worshiping her, would not find the chaos waters always pacific. It would tune its texts to a universe that puts up with a lot of painful noise. It would teach its insecure traditions that turbulence, though it may have ill effects, cannot be excluded without murder…If we read the layered deep of Genesis 1.2 as a cunning parody of the Babylonian creation from chaos, we might regain the peacemaking Tiamat and expose the warrior. He has occupied the Abrahamic traditions in her absence (Keller, 122)."

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