Mythic Roots of the Metacrisis

The article discusses how an ancient Babylonian myth, where the god Marduk kills the goddess Tiamat, reflects a shift from honoring nature and the feminine to a patriarchal worldview. This change has led to modern ecological and social crises by fostering systems of dominance and exploitation. The author suggests that revisiting such myths and embracing Indigenous perspectives could inspire a new, sacred relationship with the Earth.

The story is the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, whose oldest versions date to around 1750 BCE.

Tiamat – creator goddess, mother, sacred entity, primordial waters, often depicted as a dragon or serpent – is murdered. Marduk divides her corpse into earth and sky, imposes “order” and becomes the celebrated supreme deity.

This is the story of the triumph of patriarchy.

the Babylonian creation myth “is the first story of the replacing of a mother goddess who generates creation as part of herself by a god who ‘makes’ creation as something separate from himself”, indelibly changing the way people saw and understood the world.

“In this way the essential identity between creator and creation was broken, and a fundamental dualism was born from their separation, the dualism that we know as spirit and nature.”

“I dare to affirm that matrilineal cultures are Indigenous cultures and patriarchal cultures are colonizing, conquering and foreign.”

It provides a story to explain the shift from a lived experience of unity, harmony, balance and fecundity to conquest, war, fear, and patriarchy.

What makes it so powerful is that this narrative is implicit and unconscious. Few people have heard of Enuma Elish, but NATO arms its allies like Marduk going into battle against Tiamat.

“Paradigms are the sources of systems.” Change happens by exposing the unstated set of beliefs that form the foundation of that paradigm, pointing to its failures and modeling alternatives.

What would the world be like if our starting point was that the Earth and all of Creation were sacred?

If we saw the earth as our own sacred mother, as some cultures still do, we would not be poisoning, defiling, mutilating and assassinating her, as Marduk has done.

The split from the sacred as described in the Babylonian creation myth nearly 4,000 years ago represented a profound shift away from this, towards the patriarchal, hierarchical, violent, and competitive culture that dominates today.