The Ziggurati: An Explanation
May 14th, 2016
What's all this, then?
During my formative years, I was generally uncomfortable with religion, organized or otherwise. The earliest that I can recall this dismay was when forced to participate in religious activity daily at school, upon reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. While I have always loved my country, and always will, I simply did not appreciate being compelled to invoke a deity when proclaiming such.
I would of course recite the Pledge, because I had enough trouble in school as it is without opening that can of worms, but I simply omitted the 'under God' portion every day. Imagine my surprise when, upon growing older, I discovered this verbiage was a relatively recent addition to the Pledge, shoehorned in by proselytizers compelled to thrust their faith into every aspect of life.
This vague unease metastasized over the years, bloating and swelling into an active disdain. Watching the Catholic church spend its ill-gotten gains to actively cover for the pedophiles within its ranks, and Muslims murdering thousands of my fellow Americans in the name of their weird storm god, can you blame me? And that's just the very tip of the iceberg, when viewed through the lens of history.
Unlike the so-called faithful, I don't kill people simply for holding beliefs I don't agree with. Neither do I murder innocent people simply for dressing in a way my peers don't approve of. And I definitely don't end the lives of those who express their love for another differently than I do. Unlike these inexplicable, unenlightened primitives, I don't resort to violence to help others see things my way.
On the other hand, I do resort to mockery.
One way in which I've done this over the year is basically invoking Marduk in lieu of any other space boogeyman. Those who ascribe to some religion or another either find this inexplicable and confusing, or react quite negatively. It's almost like billions of believers hold a grudge against the people of Babylon for some reason or another. As if it was encoded into their very religious texts, even.
But this, this got me thinking. Why does the Bible show so much disdain to the ancient Babylonians? So I started doing some research into the matter, and what do you know, I've learned a couple things. Well, truth be told, I've learned a lot of things. Not just about the origins of the stories eventually lifted to comprise the Old Testament of the Bible, but also about the Anunnaki.
Despite the fact that these archaic entities are virtually forgotten in our modern era, facets of the mythology surrounding these quirky beings still shape the world to this very day. So I thought, wouldn't it be neat if someone actually dug up a lot of this ancient mythology, and presented it in a form that is easily digestible? Sure, I can't read cuneiform, but there's a couple dozen people who can.
I'm actually not the only person doing this, as it turns out, but the others seem to be mixing a bunch of alien gobbledygook into their telling of these myths and legends. And this is all right, I suppose, if you like a bit of unrelated fiction mixed in with your history. But I'm trying to go for an interpretation of this material that is as faithful as I can be to the original, Babylonian sources.
Enter: the Ziggurati. This work is thus a collection and interpretation of various Babylonian legends, including their epic creation myth, intended to introduce those of our era to the gods of an almost forgotten millennium. It is meant to be informative, it is meant to be entertaining, and it is meant to be accessible. Whether or not it achieves these goals, of course, remains to be seen.
Is this specifically intended to be a treatise on the religion of Babylon? Not really. Hey, I'm no Assyriologist! However, a lot of the material in this compendium of ancient lore has been coopted to be used in the Talmud, the Bible, and more. If one is inclined to believe the derivative stories stolen from Babylonian myth verbatim, why not use the Ziggurati in a similar fashion?
It seems the human mind is wired to seek divinity in almost everything, after all, and it's not like these beings weren't worshipped in the ancient past. Think of the Ziggurati as a revival of a dead religion. One could do worse than to worship Marduk and company, you know. A body could instead get stuck in a faith that directs you to strap explosives to your body and detonate them in a crowd of people.
The idea is to add to the Ziggurati on a semi-regular basis here at the Banality, doing so every Saturday. For the most part. It may take me a bit longer than usual to polish some of this material, because I'd really like it to shine - even more so than my usual grammatical fastidiousness, that is. Some additions to this work may take a while to materialize, but they'll manifest soon enough.
So stay tuned for more of... the Ziggurati!