Notes from New Sodom


Monday, February 20, 2006

A Dark And Hidden God














Enter YHVH.
























-- Eyah asher eyah, says God.

I am that which is called Ea.



Anonymous Tamar said...

Hi Hal. I'm afraid I've only read the last bit of this, but the word in Hebrew is 'ehiyeh.' It is a conjugation of the verb 'to be' - a sort of timeless future tense. The word 'called' doesn't appear in the Hebrew.

6:51 pm  
Blogger Hal Duncan said...

*hangs head in shame*

I stand corrected. I came across it first as (the erroneous, it appears) "Eyah (I am) asher (called) Eyah (I am)". However I don't think either the subtle shift in sound or the idea of "Ehiyeh asher ehiyeh" or "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" (another transliteration) as a sort of declaration of universality (see here is incompatible with a derivation from E.a by way of Yah, Yaw, Yehu or any of the numerous variants. It just looks like a typical biblical word play.

8:23 pm  
Blogger MJ said...

You know, if I sat and read all this debate, I'd probably miss my essay deadline on March 15!

Which is a bitch because it looks like it's getting interesting.

You can give me an abridged version one day...

8:42 pm  
Anonymous Tamar said...

Hal, it could be wordplay, and undoubtedly there are links between the names of God such as Yah or El and other ancient near eastern deities. On the basis of Hebrew grammar, though, a 'subtle shift in sound' that involves dropping the first of the three root letters of the verb 'to be' - h-y-h - seems to me to be too much of a stretch. 'Asher' is a particle of relation, so the original King James translation 'I am that I am' is accurate. Not all the interpretations of the phrase imply a declaration of universality. It has also been interpreted as meaning 'I am he who I am' - i.e. 'it's no concern of yours.'

Interesting stuff.

9:40 pm  
Blogger RWM said...

In the light of your persuasive Creator/Dictator duality argument, the Gnostic version just seems very confused. They reject the fused Creator/Dictator, but appeal to the transcendant True Creator. Meanwhile still revering the serpent/ divine rebel.

11:31 am  
Anonymous Mark W. Tiedemann said...

God is an emergent property of humans rubbing up against each other while forming communities. An overtone, if you will, which is why every culture has one (or more) and why the specifics vary so wildly even while sharing certain commonalities (creation myths, lawgiving, dakr and light, etc). Which is why examining the concept as anything other than a cultural artifact both misses the point and muddies the waters. The world is a nasty, brutal place...but also a very beautiful place...and consciousness keeps wanting it all to Mean Something. Add the complexities and foibles that come between ambition and despair and stir into the apprehended but uncomprehended All Thing known as god (or the gods) and untangling what is from what seems to be had to wait until someone came along crazy or brave enough to say "You know, this looks suspiciously like a made up explanation based on our own Self."

Mark Tiedemann

3:13 pm  
Blogger Lawrence said...

The recurrent iconography (the imagery raised to religious symbolism) of dust, of destruction, of pointless toil, of accomplishments stripped away and scattered on the wind . . . is the imagery of the transcendant God, the absent God, and humanity alone in a world that is, quite literally, desolate of divinity.

Strangely though it wasn’t until the Reformation and then the Enlightenment that the idea of a world evacuated of divinity caught on in the Western European mind. It was the relative novelty of the Cartesian separation of mind/spirit and matter that caused Pascal to lament that the music of the spheres had been silenced and replaced by the horror vacui. Before that, at least in the Christian traditions, God was regarded as so radically transcendent that God embraced immanence within Godself. Far from being an ephemeral toy that will crumble back into dust (which, by the way, reminds me more of Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker than of the Bible), creation is, in the words of Genesis 1, ‘good . . . good . . . very good’. The one thing that the early Christian apologists kept stressing over against their Stoic, Gnostic and neo-Platonic rivals was that the physical universe is good.

2:07 pm  
Blogger Hal Duncan said...


As I understand the conjectured word-play would be more about adding the aspiration to (a form of) the name "E.a", rather than dropping it from the word "eh(i)yeh". So the pun would be based on AYH becoming AHYH rather than vice versa. This presumes that Ea might be transliterated into Hebrew as AYH, of course, but since Ea was vocalised as "éya" and is given in Akkadian as "Ay(y)a", maybe that's not such a stretch,

Some more (cursory) comparisons:

Ea / Ay(y)a is master of the abzu (the deep). Yaw (original name of Yam, as given in "The Epic of Baal") is the god of rivers and seas. Yah and Yehu are key theophoric elements (popping up in personal names) for followers of YHWH, another master of the deep, and YHH (Jah / Yaw) is applied directly to God in a number of places in the Bible.

Ea is at odds with Enlil, the Sumerian King of Gods who is sidelined and superceded by the younger, more dynamic Marduk of "The Epic of Creation". Levantine Yaw is deeply at odds with Baal-Hadad, the Ugaritic "Prince High(est)" (Baal Aliyoun), who pretty much rules in place of his father, El Elyoun, (Lord of Lords, God of Gods and Most High / Highest of the High). The deity most reviled by YHWH in the Bible is the self-same Baal, and Deuteronomy 32:8-9 characterises Yahweh as distinct from El Elyon (Lord of Lords / God of Gods / Most High):

"When the Most High [El Elyoun] gave the nations their inheritances, when he separated the sons of mankind, he set up the boundaries of the peoples in proportion to the number of the sons of Israel [Note: the (earlier) Qumran scrolls use "sons of God" here rather than "sons of Israel"]. For Yahweh's share was his people..."

With these congruences and those relating to Eden and the Flood myth, the idea that (Ea / Ay(y)a) = (Yaw / Yah) = YHWH doesn't seem too radical a leap to me. It occurs to me, actually, that the additional H transforming a Chaldean AYH into an Israelite AHYH would be a neat reflection of the additional H which transforms Chaldean ABRM into ABRHM.

Fair enough, though; it is conjecture.

6:31 pm  
Blogger Hal Duncan said...

Mark: "You know, this looks suspiciously like a made up explanation based on our own Self."

Absolutely. Though I think the full whack of Jungian archetypes and Freudian sub-systems are represented in these symbols of Self -- Ego, Superego, Id, Shadow, the whole shebang.

6:35 pm  
Blogger Hal Duncan said...

Lawrence: wasn't until the Reformation and then the Enlightenment that the idea of a world evacuated of divinity caught on in the Western European mind... The one thing that the early Christian apologists kept stressing over against their Stoic, Gnostic and neo-Platonic rivals was that the physical universe is good.

Good points. I'm going to disagree in some respects -- I think the spirit/matter split is there all the way from Paul -- but I do think there's a tension in Christianity between rejecting the world and revering it as God's Creation (and therefore good). Partly I think this is because Christianity underwent a radical transformation from its early cultic asceticism as it tried to accomodate the gentile converts. Phil (on another thread) asked "What makes you think Christianity is monotheistic?" I think the polytheistic, animistic influences on Roman Catholic / Eastern Orthodox Christianity make that a very good point. Christianity incorporates pagan deities, appropriates pagan symbols (the halo, for example) and feast days, Mithra's birthday, even legends. The saints, angels, icons and statues of the Virgin Mary -- these function as liminal entities, like the gods and teraphim of the heathens. Christ himself is a liminal entity -- divinity both-and-neither immanent and/or transcendant. The idea of guardian angels and so on. I don't think it's an accident that Luther, Calvin, and Protestant crusaders like Ian Paisley to this day focus in on those elements as "heathen" and "idolatrous" and go off on rants equating Rome with Babylon. And I don't think it's an accident that the Deus Absconditus idea really takes off with the Reformation and the Enlightenment, coming out of that resurgence of monotheistic anti-sensuality.

But leaving that aside for a moment so as to keep on-topic in terms of that "iconography of dust", I do think you can see as much world-rejection as world-revering. Some quotes from some of the early Church fathers, garnered from this site:


There's that distancing of spirit and matter. But in the same text:

Beautiful without doubt is the world, excelling, as well in its magnitude as in the arrangement of its parts, both those in the oblique circle and those about the north, and also in its spherical form. Yet it is not this, but its Artificer, that we must worship.

So, yes, despite the shift of reverence to the Creator, the world itself is portrayed as good. But:


Getting out of this world is better. Indeed:

...the rest of the nations [in contrast with the "nation" of Christians] err and cause error in wallowing before the elements of the world, since beyond these their mental vision will not pass.

The world as a realm of sensual pleasures is a mire we risk "wallowing" in, such that our spiritual/intellectual soul/vision can't break through. That's the pleasure-as-ephemeral-illusion argument, loud and clear.


The pleasures of the world are temptations. The purpose of life is to transcend, to escape:


The Epistle to Diognetus: They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they live not after the flesh. Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.

More of that anti-world, anti-flesh, anti-sensuality stuff:


So what's the problem with enjoying life, with relishing the world, the flesh? Sin is stain. Virtue is purity. Pleasure is dirty And this world of dust, this world of pleasure is a soiled thing. The miasma will infect us. Hell, in Christianity that sense of miasma really takes off. Cannibalising the apocrypha, blending the fallen Morning Star of Isaiah and the crafty serpent of Genesis and the rhetorical adversary of Job, they give the corrupting power of the world, of the flesh, of life a name:


Irenaeus seems to buy into that anti-hedonistic prophetic symbolism of idolatry and fornication here. The world is rife with false gods who are all about feasting and fucking. The paganism of the ruling culture is an infection of the world in general. It's all one big city of sin with Satan as king.

However... he does later contradict this somewhat in his arguments against Gnosticism, rejecting their literal take on the "God of the world" (I think it's a reference to Paul) as a wicked Demiurge. Because the Gnostics went right out there in terms of world-rejection. As Richard says, they seem to restore the Creator/Dictator duality but decide to paint the Creator as the bad guy and the Dictator as the good. It's interesting, I think, that Irenaeus is as much attacking the Gnostics as preaching to the heathens. I think this ties in with the whole inluence-of-paganism. A lot of those apologists seem to be trying to reformulate Christianity in a way that Romans can understand and accept -- putting it in the context of Platonism and Pythagorean philosophy. This looks to me very much like the start of that long shift away from the fierce anti-idolatry monotheism which the Protestants saw themselves as restoring.

But still, there is an iconography of dust, of destruction of ephemeral matter. It comes through most powerfully in the eschatology:


The image of winnowing, of separating the grain from the chaff, is another articulation of the distinction between spirit as soul and body as shell, the worthless physical vessel that will be discarded, allowed to fall through the sieve and blow away on the wind. It goes back to Zoroastrianism and Ahriman and its idea of the World as Lie, the bad guy being a Prince of Lies.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Satan is the Prince of Lies, who is the King?

Personally, I blame Paul for taking a perfectly nice pacifist/socialist message -- one that's kinda skewed by the trappings of messianic religion and the whole sin-as-stain metaphor but is, at least, focused on empathy -- and turning it all into one big human sacrifice blood ritual. I think it's Paul who transforms a life-is-suffering, Buddhist-style philosophy of humility and paints the world as so deeply corrupt that it's not about getting along in it, being good to the poor and the needy, but about getting the fuck out of it to that Pie In The Sky When You Die. This link pretty much covers why I think Paul is just, well, bugfuck crazy:

Anyhoo, it's still interesting to look at the strain of pro-world thought in Christianity (and Judaism and Islam, for that matter) which, seeing the world as God's Design, sees celebration and understanding of that world as celebration of and understanding of God through his work. The God of the Bible may be (in my opinion) basically a Dictator who's eaten the Creator whole, an Enlil/Marduk who's subjugated Enki utterly and set up his Heavenly Kingdom as a great monotheist, monomaniac totalitarian regime founded on faith, scripture and sin -- but I do think every system has the seed of its destruction inside it. As much as it's human nature to want the authoritative validation those three things offer, I think doubt, analysis and empathy are just as much a part of our human nature, maybe even more so, and will therefore survive and surface even in authoritarian systems of thought focused on their suppression.

But that's for another post.

8:46 pm  
Blogger Lawrence said...


I agree, and for pretty much the reasons you give here. To the extent that Christianity tries to be a strictly monotheistic religion it becomes world denying and encourages a spirituality that promotes mind/spirit over body. The converse is that forms of Christianity which put more emphasis on the inner complexity of God and on the intimacy of God’s relationship with creation are much more world-affirming. Perhaps it is significant that all the patristic examples of world denial that you list here come from before theologians really began to struggle with the notion of God as Trinity (interesting that you should point out the self-contradiction in Irenaeus, since he was one of the thinkers who began the movement to what we now know as trinitarianism).

8:42 am  

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