Gigantomachia » original complexity

Marduk: 1,2,3

mce — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:31:33 +0000

In the ‘Hymn of the Fifty Names of Marduk’, he is described as follows:

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’.

Dualisms, monisms and trinities

mce — Sat, 20 Sep 2003 13:53:16 +0000

The gigantomachia is a battle of three ontological positions: two dualisms, each of which wants to be a monism, and a trinity.

The two dualisms which would be monisms are the gods and the giants. Each represents an ontological position (idealism vs materialism) which inexplicably finds itself confronted with its opposite. Since neither can account for its opposite (at least at the level of supreme reality, which is ‘where’ the battle takes place), each attempts to annihilate that other in order to establish its own ontological claim. This is what Plato describes as the “battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality” in which “what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps.”

The third party in the conflict, the child, ‘holds to both’. Its position is trinitarian because it adds an all-important third element to the two extremes it embraces: their capability of belonging together in peace.

The 3 powers of the gigantomachia

mce — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 20:22:06 +0000

The gigantomachia involves three powers or shapes of being which are described with a uniformity across cultures and time which is thought provoking. The three shapes of being are:

1) the giants and titans, the children of earth, matter, materialism, nature, objectivism, the concrete, etc

2) the Olympian gods, the children of sky, ideas, idealism, logic, subjectivism, the abstract, etc

3) the divine child ‘holding to both’, spirit, integrity, synthesis, etc

Perhaps the most important charcteristic of these shapes is that they are all first principle and all, therefore, equally possible. No final victory of any one of them, or even of any two of them, can occur. Their primordial contest is endless (or at least co-terminus with being itself).

At the same time, exactly because they are equally possible, it is always possible to start again with another. But how, having once begun, start again at the beginning? How go back to origin? Or how go forward to the beginning? How go from one fundamental possiblility to another fundamental possibility when the path between possibilities is not some further possibility!