Try and picture that: heaven and earth – united. Solid.
Next step, and I quote: "Between them and from them came the gaseous element air, whose main characteristic was that of expansion. Heaven and earth were thus separated by the expanding element air." Hmm. Beginning to sound a little bit like the Big Bang must have looked?
And now, let’s take a peek at Line 1 of the Book of Genesis: "In the beginning when 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." (Translation: New Revised Standard Version)
All together now: "Huh?"
Perhaps that should have been, "In the beginning – BEFORE god created the heavens and the earth – the earth was a formless void ...", because otherwise, it read as though their deity created the earth to be a formless void. Which – looking out the window – seems not to be an accurate statement, but what do I know? Maybe we ARE nothing but a hologram in a "formless void" generated by aliens on the far side of the universe!
Now ... correct me if I haven’t interpreted "formless void" correctly, but to me, "formless void" suggests ... oh, I dunno ... a formless void? An emptiness without any form? A completely empty space? Maybe even a negative space? So, if the earth was a literal formless void, how is there water on something that isn’t there? How can a "wind from God" sweep over the face of waters on a "formless void"? What are the waters sitting on? How did they get there? There’s no earth – it’s a formless void, remember – so there’s no gravity. If there’s any water at all – and this seems unlikely at this stage – it’s unattached to anything, even itself.
If you want to walk away from this discussion weeping copious tears of pity for the overwhelming stupidity of the American people, do a google search on "Images, formless void". Every single one of the so-called "creative artists" who pop up in that search gave full form to their "formless voids". Not a single one of them was able to grasp the concepts of "formless" or "void". You just sit there staring at the images with your eyes bugged out and your jaw dropped. All of them have form. None of them do NOT have form. All you can think of to say after viewing page after page of so-called "artwork" with the title, "Formless Void" is, "OMG, what a bunch of ..." You fill in the blank. Pitiful.
So is it possible one group (the Sumerians) saw the "formless void" as the "primeval sea", and the other group (the adherents to Genesis) actually thought "water" was intended and used the word "deep", even though that made no sense? The Sumerians were describing a "Big Bang" sort of event in the vacuum of space; the Genesites were describing a hurricane over water in a formless void?
So if An represents heaven and Ki represents earth to the Sumerians ... and the symbol of ankh represents the concept of eternal life to the Egyptians ... then that means ... NOTHING! Two different words and cultures; just seeing if you were awake. Although it does make you wonder how the word "ankh" was created within the Egyptian language, doesn’t it?
What it does mean, though: in this description, you can almost picture An and Ki as a yin-yang symbol, wrapped up into one sphere of sorts. Created TOGETHER. Neither one was formed out of the other; they were created as one, and then exploded apart from each other when air, or waves of energy, came between them.
The other version of that: An and Ki –alone there in the creation chamber with only themselves for ... entertainment ... made wild, uninhibited passionate love to each other, and BIG BANG! the cosmos came into being. Gives an entirely new dimension to the phrase "big bang", eh? We will now pause while the Beavis-es and Buttheads of the world giggle, "Big bang ... snark, snuffle, heh .... big bang ... snort."
Yes, I know I swore I would never make fun of teenage boys ever again, but sometimes, they’re just so ... predictable!
Anyway, about 5 years ago or so, there was a rush of christians running around yowling, "Put Christ back into Christmas!" – a saying which they SWEAR was meant to turn other christians away from the crass commercialization of the holiday, but which I remember as being directed mostly at non-christians for demanding equal time. No matter, the yowling itself inspired a counter-attack of t-shirts and posters yowling, "Put Marduk back into Zagmuk"! And in fact, the backlash was so virulent, I don’t recall that christians have made such an effort since then. Heh! Anyway, it wasn’t until this year that I got around to looking that up. And thank you, Wikipedia.
"Zagmuk, which literally means "beginning of the year", is a Mesopotamian festival celebrated the New Year. The feast fell in March or April and lasted about 12 days. It celebrates the triumph of Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon, over the forces of Chaos, symbolized in later times by Tiamat. The battle between Marduk and Chaos lasts 12 days, as does the festival of Zagmuk. In Uruk the festival was associated with the god An, the Sumerian god of the night sky. Both are essentially equivalent in all respects to the Akkadian "Akitu" festival. In some variations, Marduk is slain by Tiamat and resurrected on the vernal equinox.
In Babylon, the battle was acted out at the royal court with the king playing Marduk, and his son-rescuer as Nabu, the god of writing. Once freed from the powers of the underworld, the king would enact the rite of the Sacred Marriage on the 10th day of the ceremony. During this rite, the king (or En, as he was known in Sumer) would perform sexual intercourse with his spouse, normally a high priestess who had been chosen from among the naditum, a special class of priestesses who had taken a vow not of celibacy precisely, but of a refusal to bear children. The high priestess was known as the entu, and her ritual act of intercourse with the king was thought to regenerate the cosmos through a reenactment of the primordial coupling of the cosmic parents An and Ki, who had brought the world into being at the dawn of Time. If an eclipse of the sun fell on any of the 12 days of the ceremony, a substitute for the king was put in his place, since it was thought that any evils which might have befallen the king would accrue to the substitute instead. On the last day of the festival, the king was slain so that he could battle at Marduk's side. To spare their king, Mesopotamians often utilized a mock king, played by a criminal who was anointed as king before the start of Zagmuk, and killed on the last day.
In addition to the prisoner who was killed, it was traditional for one prisoner to be set free during this ceremony to provide balance. Thus, the background for what later became Easter is clearly visible here, for during Christ's crucifixion the thief Barabbas was set free and Christ was crucified at the behest of the crowd."
So now you see why at least the christians turned Marduk into something so evil: not only the sexual union between An and Ki being sacred, sex being the big bad No-No in the christian world, but because big chunks of their crucifixion story came directly out of the resurrection of Marduk mythology! Sometimes your jaw just continues to drop.
What’s laughable is that a bunch of dimwits from Sweden, trying to form what they called the "most blasphemous band in the world" named themselves Marduk and then pranced around the stage with fake blood all over themselves. Meaning only that for the title to be "blasphemous", they had to buy into the christian mythology to begin with, and are only shocking tight-laced christians, the poor silly little boys.
Anyway, here’s the REAL Marduk, the mighty, the powerful and strong, fighting Tiamat, the forces of chaos:
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