" The ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting, dramatic ideas about that.
For example
—Very Briefly—
There was a deity known as Marduk.
Marduk was a Mesopotamian deity, and imagine this is sort of what happened.
As an empire grew out of the post-ice age
—15,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago—
All these tribes came together.
These tribes each had their own deity—their own image of the ideal.
But then they started to occupy the same territory.
!! THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE !!
One tribe had God A, and one tribe had God B,
and one could wipe the other one out,
and then it would just be God A, who wins.
That’s not so good, because maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don’t want to lose half your population in a war.
So then you have to have an argument about whose God is going to take priority—which ideal is going to take priority.
What seems to happen is represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in celestial space.
From a practical perspective, it’s more like an ongoing dialog :
' You believe this; I believe this.
You believe that; I believe this.
How are we going to meld that together? '
You take God A, and you take God B, and maybe what you do is extract God C from them, and you say,
‘God C now has the attributes of A and B.’
And then some other tribes come in, and C takes them over, too.
Take Marduk, for example.
He has 50 different names, at least in part, of the subordinate gods—that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization.
That’s part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted.
You think,
‘This is important, and it works, because your tribe is alive -
And so we’ll take the best of both, if we can manage it,
and extract out something, that’s even more abstract,
that covers both of us.’
I’ll give you a couple of Marduk’s interesting features.
He has eyes all the way around his head.
He’s elected by all the other gods to be King God.
That’s the first thing.
That’s quite cool.
They elect him because they’re facing a terrible threat—sort of like a flood and a monster combined.
Marduk basically says that,
if they elect him top God,
he’ll go out and stop the flood monster,
and they won’t all get wiped out.
It’s a serious threat.
It’s Chaos itself making its comeback.
SALTWATER
All the gods agree,
and Marduk is the new manifestation.
He’s got eyes all the way around His head,
and
He speaks magic words.
When he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat.
We need to know that, because the word
‘Tiamat’ is associated with the word 'tehom.'
Tehom is the Chaos that God makes Order out of at The Beginning of Time in Genesis,
so it’s linked very tightly to this story.
Marduk, with His eyes
and
His capacity to speak magic words,
goes out and confronts Tiamat,
who’s like this watery sea dragon.
It’s a classic Saint George story:
Go out and Wreak Havoc on The Dragon.
He cuts Her into pieces,
and
He makes The World out of Her pieces.
That’s The World that human beings live in.
The Mesopotamian Emperor acted out Marduk.
He was ALLOWED to be Emperor
insofar as he was
A Good Marduk.
That meant that he had eyes all the way around his head, and he could speak magick;
He could speak properly.
We are starting to understand, at that point,
The Essence of Leadership.
Because what’s Leadership?
It’s the capacity to see what the hell’s in front of your face, and maybe in every direction, and maybe
The Capacity to Use Your Language Properly to Transform Chaos into Order.
God only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out....
The best they could do was dramatize it, but it’s staggeringly brilliant.
It’s by no means obvious,
and this Chaos is a very strange thing.
This is a Chaos that God wrestled with
at The Beginning of Time.
Chaos is Half-Psychological
and
Half-Real.
There’s no other way to really describe it.
Chaos is what you encounter when you’re blown into pieces and thrown into deep confusion—when your world falls apart, when your dreams die, when you’re betrayed.
It’s The Chaos that emerges,
and
The Chaos is everything it wants,
and
It’s too much for you.
That’s for sure.
It pulls you down into
The Underworld,
and
That’s Where The Dragons Are.
All you’ve got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open,
and
To speak as carefully and as clearly as you can.
Maybe, if you’re lucky,
You’ll get through it that way
and
Come Out The Other Side.
It’s taken people a very long time to figure that out, and it looks, to me, that the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors, maybe tens of millions of years ago, because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply
using the same system that we used to represent
Serpentile, or other, Carnivorous Predators.
We’re biological creatures.
When we formulated our strange capacity to abstract and use language, we still had all those underlying systems that were there when we were only animals.
We have to use those systems that are there.
Part of the emotional and motivational architecture of our thinking, part of the reason why we can
Demonize our Enemies
who upset our axioms,
Is Because We Perceive Them as if They’re Carnivorous Predators.
We do it with the same system.
That’s Chaos itself,
The Thing That Always Threatens Us—
The Snakes That Came to The Trees
when we lived in them, like 60 million years ago.
It’s the same damned systems.
The Marduk Story
is partly
The Story of Using Attention and Language to Confront Those Things That Most Threaten Us.
Some of those things are Real World threats, but some of them are Psychological Threats,
which are just as profound but far more abstract.
But we use the same system to represent them.
That’s why you freeze, if you're frightened.
You’re a prey animal.
You’re like a rabbit, and you’ve seen something that's going to eat you.
You freeze, and you’re paralyzed.
You’re turned to stone, which is what you do when you see a Medusa with a head full of snakes.
You turn to stone.
You’re paralyzed, and the reason you do that is because you’re using the predator detector system to protect yourself.
Your Heart Rate Goes Way Up,
and
You Get Ready to Move.
Things that upset us rely on that system.
The Marduk Story,
for example, is the idea that,
If there are
Things That Upset You
—chaotic, terrible, serpentine, monstrous, underworld things that threaten you—
The Best Thing to Do
is
Open Your Eyes,
Keep Your Speech Organized,
and go out,
Confront The Thing,
and
Make The World Out of It.
It’s staggering.
When I read that story and started to understand it, it just blew me away.
It’s such a profound idea, and we know it’s true, too, because we know, in psychotherapy, that
you’re much better off to confront your fears head-on than you are to wait and let them find you.
Partly what you do,
if you’re a psychotherapist,
is you help people
Break Their Fears into Little Pieces
—The Things That Upset Them—
and then
To Encounter Them One by One
and Master Them.
You’re teaching this process of
Internal Mastery Over The Strange
and
Chaotic World.
