MARDUK is One,
he is Son of the Sun,
he is the first, the sunburst.
…..

Most shining one,
Son of the Sun,
the gods are walking always in the flame of his light.
….

MARUKKA is Two
hammering out the whole creation
to ease the gods in tribulation.

MARUTUKKU is Three,
his praises are heard on every hand,
the armed child who shields the land.

Notes:

a) The first 3 of the ’50 names of Marduk’ remind of Plato’s description of the giantomachia. The ‘third’ is the child who brings peace (‘shields the land’) after the second has involved the separation of heaven and earth (‘hammering out the whole creation’) and observed ‘the gods in tribulation’.

…..

But now the other gods had no rest any more, tormented by storms, they conspired in their secret hearts and brought to Tiamat the matter of their plot. To their own mother they said,
‘When they killed Apsu you did not stir, you brought no help to him, your husband. Now Anu has called up from the four quarters this abomination of winds to rage in your guts, and we cannot rest for the pain;
Remember Apsu in your heart, your husband, remember Mummu who was defeated; now you are all alone, and thrash around in desolation, and we have lost your love, our eyes ache and we long for sleep.
‘Rise up, our Mother! Pay them back and make them empty like the wind.’
Tiamat approved it, she said,
‘I approve this advice: we will make monsters, and monsters and gods against gods will march into battletogether.’
Together they jostle the ranks to march with Tiamat, day and night furiously they plot, the growling roaring rout, ready for battle, while the old hag, the first mother, mothers a new brood.
She loosed the irresistible missile, she spawned enormous serpents with cutting fangs, chock-full of venom instead of blood, snarling dragons wearing their glory like gods.
(Enuma Elish, Tablet 1)

…..

He [Marduk] took his route towards the rising sound of Tiamat’s rage, and all the gods besides, the fathers of the gods pressed in around him, and the lord approached Tiamat.
He surveyed her, scanning the deep, he sounded the plan of Kingu her consort; but so soon as Kingu sees him he falters, flusters, and the friendly gods who filled the ranks beside him – when they saw the brave hero, their eyes suddenly blurred.
But Tiamat without turning her neck roared, spitting defiance from bitter lips,
‘Upstart, do you think yourself too great? Are they scurrying now from their holes to yours?’
Then the lord raised the hurricane, the great weapon, and he flung his words at the termagant fury, ‘Why are you rising, your pride vaulting, your heart set on faction, so that sons reject fathers? Mother of all, why did you have to mother war? You made that bungler your husband, Kingu! You gave him the rank, not his by right, of Anu. You have abused the gods my ancestors, in bitter malevolence you threaten Anshar, the king of all the gods. You have marshaled forces for battle, prepared the war-tackle. Stand up alone and we will fight it you, you and I alone in battle.’
When Tiamat heard him her wits scattered, she was possessed and shrieked aloud, her legs shook from the crotch down, she gabbled spells, muttered maledictions, while the gods of war sharpened their weapons.
Then they met: Marduk, that cleverest of gods, and Tiamat grappled alone in single fight.
(Enuma Elish, Tablet 4)

Notes:

a) The Enuma Elish is the Babylonian mythical cycle which has parallels with the earlier Sumerian and later Hebrew and Greek traditions. The gigantomachia plays has an important role in all (though this is naturally muted in the monotheistic Bible).

b) Tiamat is the original mother, chaos, fresh water, the underground. Apsu is the original father, husband of Tiamat; he is the salt water and the depths of the sea. Mumma is the craftsman god and advisor to Apsu, perhaps his ‘thought’. Anu, lord of the sky, is Apsu’s grandson and the son of Anshar, the heavens.

c) Just as in Greek myth, there is discord between the generations of the gods and it is the third generation which comes to power through a war in which the powers of the sky overthrow those of the earth.

d) Kingu is the new husband of Tiamat, and the commander of her forces, after the murder of Apsu.

e) Marduk is the grandson of Anu who fights and destroys Tiamat when the other gods of the sky fear to do so.

f) “Mother of all, why did you have to mother war?” Compare Achilles (Iliad, Bk 18): “I wish that strife (eris) would vanish away from among the gods and mortals.”

The contest of logics of/at origin has the following aspects:

a) there are multiple fundamental powers or shapes or possibilities at origin. See original complexity.

b) defining this multiplicity are abysmal borders which are not themselves possibilities at origin, but are somehow ‘present’ there. See original difference.

c) since these multiple powers are equally fundamental and equally powerful, they contest with one another. This contest is dynamic. It therefore has a time of its own which is essentially different from historical time. See times.

d) origin has a second dark (which is what Beckett’s Krapp describes in his ‘last tape’) and a second light (Beckett’s “then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither“). Similarly, one of the central intentions of Plato’s allegory of the cave is to distinguish different between varieties of light and of dark; these are essentially different in the cave as opposed to the day and night of the earth above. In SZ Heidegger calls attention to the peculiar light (lights) of origin with the coinage ‘Gelichtetheit’ and specifically relates it to the different time there: “die Zeitlichkeit die Gelichtetheit des Da ekstatisch-horizontal konstituiert…” (SZ, S 408)

LAERTES: O, treble woe
Fall ten times treble on that cursed head,
Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Deprived thee of! Hold off the earth awhile,
Till I have caught her once more in mine arms:
[Leaps into Ophelia's grave]
Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made,
To o’ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.

(….)

HAMLET: ‘Swounds, show me what thou’lt do:
Woo’t weep? woo’t fight? woo’t fast? woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?
I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I:
And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart!

These references to the gigantomachia in the last act of Hamlet are reinforced by the earlier exchange of Laertes with Claudius:
CLAUDIUS What is the cause, Laertes,
That thy rebellion looks so giant-like?
(Act 4, Scene 5)

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, like the gigantomachia, concerns the rights of rulership, of fatherhood and of inheritance as these are fought over between generations. In the end, Hamlet and Laertes kill each other with foils in a denoument recalling the end of the rebellion of the twin Aloadai giants against the gods (when they piled Pelion on Ossa): “Artemis finished off the Aloadai in Naxos by means of a trick: in the likeness of a deer she darted between them, and in their desire to hit the animal they speared each other.” (Apollodorus, Library 1.53)

Just before their final duel Hamlet says to Laertes:
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house,
And hurt my brother.
(Act 5, Scene 1)

Later still: “I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance….” (Act 5, Scene 1)

[Odysseus in the underworld:] I saw Aloeus’ wife; she was Iphimedeia, whose boast it was to have lain beside Poseidon. She bore him two sons, though their life was short – Otos the peer of the gods and far-famed Ephialtes; these were the tallest men, and the handsomest, that ever the fertile earth has fostered, save only incomparable Orion; at nine years of age their breadth was nine cubits, their height nine fathoms. They threatened the Deathless Ones themselves – to embroil Olympos in all the fury and din of war. And so indeed they might have done had they reached the full measure of their years, but the god that Zeus begot and lovely-haired Leto bore [= Apollon] destroyed them both before the first down could show underneath their brows and overspread and adorn their cheeks. (Homer, Odyssey 11.305)