Evolution of Tiamat

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The Evolution of Tiamat

In this paper, I will talk about the evolution of Tiamat, how she changes, and how her representation of women shows a shift in society’s attitude. Tiamat was a primordial goddess of salt waters and disorder or chaos. She has an appearance of a serpent or a dragon. Other times she becomes multi-headed as a result of modern influences from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Tiamat gets mentioned in the Babylonian creation story known as Enuma Elish. The account of Enuma Elish was found engraved on clay tablets recorded back to approximately 1100 BCE. Her personification is that of chaos. She is the mother of the first generation of gods, and later, she was murdered by the storm god known as Marduk (Crotty, 2020). Her divided body was used to make the heavens and the earth. Tiamat is the mother and queen of evil dragons and an affiliate of Dungeons & Dragons deities’ default pantheon. According to the analyses, she became creator goddess through consecrated nuptial between fresh water and salt, peacefully generating cosmos through successive creations.

According to Tiamat evolution, she embodied primordial nothingness together with her mate called Apsu. As they made love, they gave to deities that became creation.

The deities began creating the reality. Because of being a primordial nothing, the very idea creation offended Tiamat and Apsu. It troubled their sleep. Tiamat disregarded the fighting initially, attempting to get back to her slumber of forgetfulness. Still, Apsu did not disregard the tumult triggered by the creation and confronted the earth and gods. The gods brawled and exterminated Apsu. Tiamat infuriated, got up from her slumber and terminated the gods and creation as a penalty for the assassination of her darling Apsu. Specifically, she is embodied as a monster who chooses black magic, lies, and animal speech. She produced millions of beasts, including dragon being the most protuberant, great lions, giant snakes full of sharp teeth and venom, mad dogs, and a merman. Marduk, the toughest of the gods, battled her. Only after a powerful fight with the aid of all the other supernatural beings behind him could Marduk overcome Tiamat and her progeny.

Tiamat fights back still more in taking on a topmost monster, Kingu, as her new spouse. All these doings were prohibited since they did not get to outcome from an agreement with other gods. As a result, her wrongdoings on the divine order introduced chaos into the universe. She is severely punished for her misconduct by Marduk. In contrast to her unlawful means of fighting, Marduk chooses the reasonable ways suitable for noble gods: lightning, thunder, subduing the floods and winds, and an arrow and a bow (Crotty, 2020). Tiamat gets killed in the process. The means of capturing her indicate a penalty for her doings. She is trapped in a net, which proposes that she does not deserve to be taken as a deity who is an ancient mother. As an alternative, she is perceived as a violent feminine being who is worth being hunted, trapped in a net, and murdered in a way used for wild animals.

The “disorganized” corpse of Tiamat came to be a source of order only by her passing away; the female disorder can be subjugated merely with the ultimate silencing of death. The account proposes that the ancient female deity got justly disciplined for bringing chaos into the world (Scully, 2017). Only by removing the wild female desire (or disorder) can the male standard order return. Her defeated body results in the new hierarchy: male power over female power and heaven over earth.

Reference

Crotty, R. (2020). Creation Myths: A Deeper Truth for Today’s Religionists. In Religion Matters (pp. 41-52). Springer, Singapore.

Scully, S. (2017). The Theogony and the Enuma Elish: City-State Creation Myths. In Cultural Contact and Appropriation in the Axial-Age Mediterranean World (pp. 38-59). Brill.