The Enuma Elish — the Babylonian poem of creation, written on seven clay tablets in the Akkadian language sometime around the twelfth century before the common era but preserving a tradition far older than the tablets that recorded it — begins before everything. Before the sky had a name. Before the earth had a name. Before the gods existed to name anything. In the beginning of the Enuma Elish there are only two forces, commingled in the darkness before light existed to distinguish them from each other: Apsu, the sweet water of the primordial deep, and Tiamat, the salt ocean in its original condition before the world had organized itself into the categories that make the ocean recognizable as ocean rather than as the undifferentiated chaos from which the ocean and everything else would eventually emerge. They were not gods in the sense that the later Babylonian pantheon would understand gods — beings with faces and names and specific domains of authority. They were the conditions that made the existence of gods possible. Tiamat was not a goddess of the sea. She was the sea, in the moment before the sea understood that it was the sea, in the condition of being everything simultaneously before the process of creation had separated everything into the distinct things that could be named and counted and worshipped.
From the mingling of Apsu and Tiamat came the first gods — Lahmu and Lahamu, then Anshar and Kishar, then Anu, then Ea, the god of wisdom and the deep fresh water who would become the father of Marduk and whose intelligence was the specific kind that knows how to work with chaos rather than against it. The young gods were loud. They disturbed the stillness that Apsu and Tiamat had maintained since before time existed, and Apsu — who valued stillness the way that the depths of the ocean value it, absolutely and without exception — decided to destroy the young gods and restore the quiet. Tiamat refused. This is the detail that the Enuma Elish preserves about her character that is easily lost in the later parts of the narrative when she becomes the adversary: she protected her children from their father's decision to unmake them. She was, before she was anything else the myth would later make her, a mother who chose her children over the order that their existence had disrupted. When Ea killed Apsu and the young gods celebrated and Tiamat finally gathered her forces to respond, what she was responding to was not chaos or malice but the accumulated weight of what had been done to the beings she had made.
The armies that Tiamat assembled for the war against the younger gods were the creatures that the deep ocean generates when it is producing something other than the life that the surface world recognizes as life: serpents whose veins ran with venom rather than blood, dragon-fish of salt storm and sea fire, the Bull of Heaven, the great Lion-demon, creatures made from the specific intersection of water and terror that the deep ocean produces when it has been disturbed in the way that Tiamat had been disturbed. She gave command of this army to Kingu, whom she elevated and crowned and gave the Tablet of Destinies — the object that in the Babylonian cosmology contained the authority over the future of everything that existed. The young god Marduk was the only one willing to face her. He negotiated with the assembly of gods for the authority to act — if he defeated Tiamat, he would be given supremacy over all the gods of Babylon. Then he descended to meet her with the winds and the storm and the net and the lightning and the specific readiness of a being who understood that what he was facing was not an enemy but the original condition of everything and that defeating it required not destruction but transformation.
Marduk split Tiamat in two. From her upper body he formed the sky, spreading it above the earth as a vault to hold the waters above separate from the waters below. From her lower body he formed the earth. From her eyes he caused the Tigris and the Euphrates to flow — the two rivers that would water the land between them and make possible the civilization that the Babylonians understood themselves to be the inheritors of, the civilization whose poetry had produced the Enuma Elish itself. From her clouds he made the weather. From her spittle he made the mist. Tiamat was not destroyed. She was distributed — dispersed into the fabric of the world so completely that the world and Tiamat became indistinguishable from each other, which is the oldest form of victory and the oldest form of survival simultaneously, the one that the Babylonian tradition preserved because it understood that the chaos which precedes creation does not disappear when creation occurs but becomes the material from which creation is made.
The sanctuary in this piece is the place where Tiamat's presence in the world is most concentrated — the cave-shell that opens like a cosmic portal at the threshold between the sea and the deep ocean, lined with the shells of every creature that the salt water has produced since Tiamat's body became the sea, illuminated by the golden sphere at its center that is the primordial fire of creation preserved in the material of the sanctuary the way that the Babylonian priests preserved it in the oil-lamp light of their coastal temples. The white stones ringing the portal are the teeth of time. The coral columns flanking the sanctuary are the pillars of the first temple, built before the first city existed to house a temple, at the edge of the water that Tiamat had become, by the priests who understood that what they were worshipping was not a defeated goddess but the condition of existence itself — the chaos that the order of the world is built from and that the ocean remembers in every wave it produces and every storm it sends and every depth it refuses to allow the light to reach.
"When on high the heaven had not been named, firm ground below had not been called by name — naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, and Tiamat, she who bore them all."
— Enuma Elish, Babylonian Creation Poem, c. 12th century B.C.
Artist's Note
My hands understood what they were building before I did — the cave-shell opening as a portal, the stones ringing its edge like the teeth of a creature older than the creatures that have teeth, the shells from every ocean arranged inside it as the collected memory of salt water since before salt water had a name. The golden sphere at the center is the fire that the Babylonian priests kept burning in Tiamat's coastal sanctuaries — the light that the chaos produces when it has been contained long enough to illuminate rather than consume. I placed the coral columns on either side because the sanctuary requires them: the structure that holds the portal open while the world on either side of it continues doing what the world does, unaware that the thing it is built from is still present at the bottom of the ocean, breathing in the specific way that chaos breathes when it has become everything and therefore needs no space of its own.
At CuepoxyGift, the oldest pieces are the ones that remember what existed before memory existed — that carry in their materials the record of a time when the world was still deciding what it was going to be. "The Sanctuary of Tiamat" is for those who understand that the chaos which precedes all order is not something to be feared but something to be honored — the condition from which everything beautiful has ever emerged, and from which everything beautiful will continue to emerge, as long as the ocean keeps moving and the deep water keeps its silence and the sanctuary at the bottom of everything stays lit.
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A Private Collection Artwork
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— ICuesta, Artist | CuepoxyGift