Mythic Roots of the Metacrisis

Originally published by Culture Hack, Issue 07: Beyond the Carbon Fixation : Pathways to Regenerative Futures

November 2024

Mythic Roots of the Metacrisis

 

This article explores an ancient Babylonian creation myth as a root of the dominant Western worldview. The myth tells of the god Marduk’s violent conquest of the goddess Tiamat, marking a shift from revering nature and the feminine as sacred to a patriarchal, dualistic view that separates spirit and nature. This story’s legacy influences modern systems of dominance and extraction, fueling ecological and social crises. The author argues that reexamining such myths and adopting Indigenous cosmovisions could inspire systemic change by reviving a worldview that honors Earth as sacred.

 

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Around 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, scribes recorded a story that represented a fundamental shift in the worldview of that people. Surely the result of a process that took centuries and influenced by older stories, the Babylonian creation myth serves as a historical artefact marking how people of that time came to make sense of profound social and cultural transformation. And that transformation, as well as the symbolic rendering of it in the myth, reverberate until today in what is referred to as “Western” culture. In fact, I would say that it represents the true “root cause” of the polycrises we are facing today. Therefore, excavating this myth can help us understand the cultural inheritance underpinning current dominant political and economic systems and develop a new paradigm needed for systemic change.

The story is the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, whose oldest versions date to around 1750 BCE. The myth tells of the assassination of the mother goddess Tiamat by the male god Marduk. Tiamat – creator goddess, mother, sacred entity, primordial waters, often depicted as a dragon or serpent – is murdered. Marduk divides her corpse into earth and sky, imposes “order” and becomes the celebrated supreme deity. The story describes conflict, battle, conquest. It tells of matricide, for Marduk is Tiamat’s grandson. This is the story of the triumph of patriarchy.

Previous to this story, since the first vestiges of Paleolithic art, the peoples inhabiting the region of what is now Europe and Western Asia represented creation via the feminine principle. Creation, nature and women – one and the same in essence – were revered as sacred. In The Myth of the Goddess (1991), authors Anne Baring and Jules Cashford explain that the Babylonian creation myth “is the first story of the replacing of a mother goddess who generates creation as part of herself by a god who ‘makes’ creation as something separate from himself”ⁱ, indelibly changing the way people saw and understood the world. The authors continue describing the implications of the myth: “In this way the essential identity between creator and creation was broken, and a fundamental dualism was born from their separation, the dualism that we know as spirit and nature.”ⁱⁱ

Spirit and nature separate mean that the earth is no longer seen as sacred. The corollary is that women are also no longer sacred. There is a key here, for as M. Carmen Basterretxea writes in her book Indigenous Matrilineal Europe: the Basques, “I dare to affirm that matrilineal cultures are indigenous cultures and patriarchal cultures are colonizing, conquering and foreign.”ⁱⁱⁱ

The Iron Age myth represents the split from the sacred. It provides a story to explain the shift from a lived experience of unity, harmony, balance and fecundity to conquest, war, fear and patriarchy. Most unfortunately, this world view became the dominant one, considered more valued and more valid than that of Indigenous and non-“Western” peoples.

For nearly 4,000 years, Western, patriarchal cultures have told and retold the story of the split from the sacred, the assassination of the goddess, disguised as a snake or dragon: from the Garden of Eden to fairy tales slaying dragons to the Crusades to the colonisation of the Americas to extractive mining operations to land grabs to missile attacks in the former Fertile Crescent.

What makes it so powerful is that this narrative is implicit and unconscious. Few people have heard of Enuma Elish, but NATO arms its allies like Marduk going into battle against Tiamat. Agribusiness constantly comes up with noxious new technologies to control pests, temperature, germination and yield to instil order and control of food production that was once earth’s natural fertility. Women are insulted, marginalised, abused and assassinated by men in astounding numbers. We keep telling and living the story, over and over.

Decades ago, Carl Jung articulated the ideas of archetypes and the “collective unconscious”. Joseph Campbell used these same ideas to explain the power of myth in the human experience. These can be useful to make the link between the material and spiritual crises that so much of the world is facing. For those secular change-makers, there is an even more transformational application. Systems change theorist Donella Meadows posited that a shift in world view or paradigm is the second-highest leverage point to systems change (the highest being transcendence), writing, “Paradigms are the sources of systems.” Change happens by exposing the unstated set of beliefs that form the foundation of that paradigm, pointing to its failures and modeling alternatives.

Many people find hope and solace in Indigenous cosmovisions – and rightly so. But it is high time to explore the cosmovisions for those of us who do not identify as Indigenous, and especially the culture permeating the current dominant capitalist system. Understanding the myth of Tiamat, its historical context, the story of pain and grief that it represents, and its repercussions in political, economic and social systems, can be a gateway to systems change. It can also create space for new versions of the story with alternate endings or for new myths entirely. Some are already working on this, such as Grian Cutanda with the Earth Stories collection and Rainbow Warriors 3.5.

All of us, everyone with their own talents and interests, can create new stories, initiatives, projects and dreams by shifting our worldview and asking, What would the world be like if our starting point was that the Earth and all of Creation were sacred?

Sacred. Worthy of respect. Holy. Divine. Regarded with reverence. Secured and immune from violence and violation.

If we honoured and respected the earth and all of creation as sacred, we would never do the things we are now: mining, deforestation, erosion, pollution, extraction. If we saw the earth as our own sacred mother, as some cultures still do, we would not be poisoning, defiling, mutilating and assassinating her, as Marduk has done.

If our foundation, guiding tenet and central axis on which our behaviour, decisions and policies were based recognized the sacredness of all living things, all of our systems would change.

The idea is simple, and radical.

From the Paleolithic era to the present, peoples over time in all parts of the world have revered nature. The split from the sacred as described in the Babylonian creation myth nearly 4,000 years ago represented a profound shift away from this, towards the patriarchal, hierarchical, violent and competitive culture that dominates today. But we can question this paradigm, and we can cultivate new (old) worldviews. And that is the ultimate systems change.

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Alexandra Toledo has roots in the US Midwest, heart in Peru and feet touching the ground in Valencia, Spain. She documents her exploration of cosmovisions and experiments with remything on The Sacred Principle Project. She dedicates her professional life to advancing food sovereignty, currently working with GRAIN.

iAnne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Penguin, 1993), 273.

iiIbid, 274.

iii M. Carmen Basterretxea, Europa Indígena Matrilineal: Los Vascos (Murcia: Cauac, 2022), 28 (translation my own).