The last two things to be fashioned by Marduk are human beings and their dwelling places. It is striking that the latter are created before the former—as if to say that housing is a precondition of being human. Ea is employed as architect of temples and in particular of the city of Babylon.25 Humankind is then created out of the sacrificial blood of Kingu, Tiamat’s second spouse and the captain of her monstrous forces. It is at this point that Marduk makes his strongest claim to be a creator-god.
Blood to blood
I join,
blood to bone
I form
an original thing,
its name is MAN,
aboriginal man
is mine in making.26
Despite this possessive and self-congratulating proclamation—and others like it earlier27—Marduk is not altogether omnipotent in his creative powers. He certainly does not create anything out of nothing. Humankind, his proudest ens creatum, is created out of the blood of a preexisting god: even here, he “moulded matter.”28 Marduk does not bring forth matter out of the nothing of nonmatter: “From the wreck of Tiamat’s rout, from the stuff of fallen gods he made mankind.”29 Everything is created out of the body of Tiamat—a body that is the primal stuff of creation.
Tiamat’s body is not only primal. It is inexhaustible—so much so that it is not entirely consumed in the course of creation. At the very end of the Enuma Elish a propitiatory prayer implores
let her recede into the future
far-off from man-kind
till time is old, keep her
for ever absent.30
Tiamat may have been “disappeared” from the current scene of creation—her intact body does not survive—but she is not completely vanquished. Her matter, her matrix, persists. Any subsequent act of creation will have to draw upon it.
N. K. Sandars, the English translator of the Enuma Elish, is certainly right to claim that in this epic “matter is eternal, [and] Tiamat and Apsu provide, from within themselves, the material of the whole universe; a universe which will evolve into ever greater complexity.”31 But it does not follow from this (as Sandars also claims) that “in the Babylonian poem there is, strictly speaking, no creation at all.”32 As we have seen abundantly from Sandars’s own translation, creation takes place, indeed it occurs continually, throughout the poem. The creation itself, however, is subject to two constraints. First, it is always a creation from something, that is, from a material matrix (and in particular Tiamat’s own body). Second, it is a creation primarily of places. The evolution of the created world into “ever greater complexity” is an evolution into ever more particular kinds of places, as the world becomes increasingly habitable for humankind.
In fact, the Enuma Elish proposes three major stages of creation, each of which is distinctively place-specific, (1) To begin with, we are presented with a watery world composed of two fluids, sweet and bitter, in intimate conjunction. From this aqueous admixture the early gods emerge—gods of the horizons of sky and earth, of the waters of the earth, and of the empty heaven. Theogony occurs as a differentiation of regions out of the primal scene of parental intercourse between Apsu and Tiamat. (2) Places of antagonism and conflict supervene as an Oedipal drama is enacted among the gods: Ea kills Apsu, and Marduk slaughters Tiamat. (3) Finally, the creation of the cosmos per se happens in and through Tiamat’s hulking carcass as the place-of-creation. Marduk, assuming his preordained role as “King of the cosmos,”33 constructs an ordered universe in which everything, gods and heavenly bodies, earth and human beings, has its proper place. “His glory touched the abyss”34 by virtue of the fact that he builds elaborately over the abyss itself. He fills it in with the plenary presences of particular places.
Throughout the Enuma Elish, place figures as a generative matrix. Although there is one reference to the “void” and two references to “chaos” in the text, each of these occurs as a retrospective interpretation of what has already taken place.35 What actually takes place, that is, arises as place, occurs in the form of a matrix—or, more exactly, of place-as-matrix. Just as there is no strict void at the start of this cosmogony (the void in question is the relative void of a not-yet-existent earth; but waters already exist), so there is no genuine chaos either: Tiamat is fluid but not chaotic. Nor is she disorderly—except when routed by Marduk!36 Taken on her own terms, she is an orderly being: orderly enough to give rise, thanks to Marduk’s eventual shaping actions, to the cosmos, the ordered world.
Order, and especially the order of place, is nascent in the matrix. Not just at the stage of elemental waters but also at the subsequent stages of conflict and creation, place occurs as matrix. Indeed, creation itself arises in the very place of destruction, the bloody scene of Marduk’s res gestae: “The creative act, which distinguishes, separates, measures, and puts in order, is inseparable from the criminal act that puts an end to the life of the oldest gods, [and is] inseparable from a deicide inherent in the divine.”37 In the final stage of this cosmogony, the two previous matrices, the elemental and the destructive, give way to the built matrix inherent in Marduk’s construction of a fully ordered world from the materials furnished by Tiamat’s dead body. A superfetation of gods, goddesses, and monsters from Tiamat’s womb-matrix is replaced by a superproduction of human beings and buildings on Marduk’s phallogonic part: continual birthing gives way to assiduous architectural ordering.38 Instead of void or chaos, everywhere there is plenitude and place, a plenitude of places, indeed plenitude-as-place, arranged as an ascending series of ever more specific matrices.39
And there is, to end with, the place of reenactment. For the Enuma Elish was recited at the beginning of the New Year festival at Babylon. It was recited not just anywhere in Babylon but “in a particular place, the inner room or holy of holies of the god Marduk, where his statue lived throughout the year.”40 This room was regarded as identical with the Ubshukinna, the Chamber of Destiny wherein Marduk was proclaimed “Great Lord of the Universe.”41 The Ubshukinna, too, is a matrix—a matrix of reenactment. In the complete ceremony, actors staged the combat between Marduk and Tiamat, the officiating priest crying out, “May Marduk continue to conquer Tiamat and to shorten her days!” More than a mere representation or recollection of aboriginal confrontation was at issue in this ritualized performance. The reenacted combat brought the world, as it was entering a new year, from a state of perilous preorder or nonorder, more radical than disorder, back to a renewed state of order. As Eliade remarks,
This commemoration of the Creation was in fact a reactualization of the cosmogonic act. . . . The battle between two groups of actors . . . [re]actualized the cosmogony. The mythical events became present once again. . . . The combat, the victory, and the Creation took place at that instant, hie et nunc.42
To this we need only add that the reactualized events also took place at that place, Marduk’s inner room at Babylon. Much like Tiamat’s own fertile body, this room served as a womb for continual rebirth—and not just as a scene of destruction and creation. The generative and the architectural, the primal matrix and the master builder, otherwise so fiercely antagonistic, combined forces in a common room of reenactment.
II
Much like Marduk, the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus has the unenviable task of converting an originally refractory space into a domain of domesticated places. Just as concertedly “male” as Marduk, the Platonic power figure substitutes the straight lines of geometry for the lethal arrows of pitched combat. But in both instances, a precosmic “female” body is at once the source and the limit of creation, and its massive preexistence demonstrates that the intervening god is far from omnipotent. Both epics make it clear that creation takes place only under certain circumstances—precisely those embodied in the hulk, the heft, of the world-body as it is initially given. Creation must occur in and with this body,