A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

Implying that he is not Marduk

In a way, monarchy was an earthly reflection of a divine institution, giving a Platonist tint to the entire process, albeit long before the birth and works of Plato himself.

To represent something, according to this logic, is in some sense to become the thing represented.

Good transition.

Was Uruk an Akkadian speaking city or a Summerian speaking city? Was it once the latter before becoming the former?

So, only the Akkadian version preserves the overarching narrative about the failure of a heroic figure to reshape the world while the Sumerian versions present a series of more discreet myths?

Apparently a lesson forgotten only at our peril.

Gilgamesh ruins everybody’s life trying to change the world into what he wants it to be; Enkidu leaves everything how it was and dwells in harmony with nature. The former is unbearable, the latter stagnant.

With great power ... How does the contest with Enkidu impress upon Gilgamesh the duty responsibility inherent in power? To what extent is this a cop-out? Is Gilgamesh the hero who fixes everything for the people any less infantilizing than Gilgamesh the tyrant who oppresses his countrymen.

Lebanon?

Implying that her contest with her sister did leave her with some power in the Underworld.

The Greeks apparently did not invent hubris.

Always twelve and intervals of twelve in Sumerian-Akkadian religious imagery.

Gilgamesh and Aleosha Karamazov share a repulsion at decomposition.

This may be a somewhat selfish thought. It is not one that I have not myself had over the past week.

So far, Gilgamesh's career is supremely selfish. He is first obsessed with making others do his bidding. He is then entirely invested in his bromance with Enkidu. His reaction to Enkidu's death is to seek out means to ensure that he will not suffer the same fate. Though incredibly powerful, Gilgamesh displays much of the selfishness associated with childhood.

A different philosophy than Gilgamesh's own, but one that is perhaps equally immature. Or not, it may encompass the idea that worrying about an inevitable death is a pointless thing. There is only those things that we can do or change to worry about. Obsessing about things we can’t control just creates misery and wastes time.

It seems odd that Utnapishtim has his own boatman to ferry people across the waters of death. It implies that people are intended to cross the waters of death, and that Utnapishtim is himself, to some extent, a god or lord over the dead.

Or that Utnapishtim is demonstrating the futility of an effort to seize divinity without the cooperation of the gods.

In some ways his sleeping is as impressive as the inverse task he set out to complete. It also wastes a chunk of his limited time. There might be a lesson here about spending time bemoaning mortality, when mortality renders that time so valuable.

Gilgamesh is, perhaps, somewhat melodramatic. He also has clearly become obsessed with death and its imminence. I should, probably, be able to sympathize.

This is not quite the same as immortality, presuming that the plant provides a finite number of "refreshers."

Maybe Gilgamesh succeeded in his initiatory ritual and became an adult. He accepts mortality and can stop behaving impulsively and seeking after whatever he happens to want.

In someways it also defines the human condition by showing us how to mature to adulthood and learn to live within the world, rather than to attempt to force everything to bend to our own will.

Theoretically possible, though the greatest of us was, himself, unsuccessful. I still think that the purpose of the initiation is reconcile with life, not to overcome death. Then again, this story will be reinterpreted by plenty of minds over the next several thousand years, and will lead to plenty of new ideas, many more insightful than mine.

Initiation into what? Adulthood, presumably.

I see, Eliade is uncertain as to whether the initiatory iconography of the Epic of Gilgamesh presents fragments of genuine religious ceremonies with an initiatory meaning, or whether they represent the imagination, singular or collective, of the author.

Feels familiar. Probably as a result of my penchant for self-indulgence.

To an extent this lamentation could be seen as an outgrowth of a moral view of the universe. If the gods represent forces that are primal and incomprehensible, there is no reason to complain of their injustice. Only a god seen as "good" can be faulted for not living up to its reputation. If Tiamat is the first evil deity, Marduk is the first good one, and also the first deity to disappoint his devoted.

Similarities, roughly.

Another idea rife with Platonic implications.

He wielded a force that represented the influence of a planet and the power of a god.

Like a society-wide anxiety disorder.

This comes shortly before the end of the Late Bronze Age and the disruption of the international order in 1200 BC.

The idea that the things around us have meaning as reflections of some "truer" reality is a powerful idea, and one that is compelling, at least to me. It is the type of idea that one wishes more than one believes to be true.

Was the invention of writing generally preceded by antecedents? I believe that cuneiform was, but I am uncertain as to other forms of writing. Could the lack of antecedents be related to how literal the pictographic elements of hieroglyphics became? While the original pictures which were incorporated into signs in other languages became so stylized as to be unrecognizable, Egyptian hieroglyphics retained their representative forms, even if many became phonetic devices rather than literal representations of the thing pictured.

Geography created a discrete area within which commerce and communication were relatively easy, but also created a defined border that isolated this discrete area from the larger world.

Did the religion contribute more to Egyptian society than Egyptian society contributed to religion. Did Egypt's unique geography influence both? Did Egypt's geography influence each in the same way?

The world began with Egypt. Or perhaps, the beginning of Egypt mirrored the beginning of the world, and reenacted locally what the gods had done on a larger scale.

Hieratic: having to do with priests.

There is a hint of OCD in this view of the world. Apparently irrelevant gestures which coincided with a previous success become rituals whose repeated performance guarantees future prosperity.

And all things created since are corruptions? I am as skeptical of entropy as the next guy, but this seems somewhat extreme.

The best pasts to idealize are those that never existed. Maybe by placing perfection in an overtly mythical prior age we reduce the risk of wreaking havoc by attempting to recreate an essentially fictional version of a more accessible bygone era.

That's always happening.

Make Egypt great again.

In showing the origins of sacrality these myths demonstrate it's nature and the manner that it works. Such myths work to lift the hood and show the gears driving the sacred world.

Does this imply a civic religion in each of these cities dating to a period before Egyptian unification? Not necessarily, but maybe.

Front-most.

Quite late.

One would presume that the idea that words carry power is a very ancient idea. I don't believe anyone has ever come to a definitive conclusion as to whether language was invented, but if it was, the invention of something so fundamentally transformative would presumably have left a deep impression, one that created a deep reverence for the spoken word.