Marduk

What I really wanted him to chat with us about today is in the middle of all this chaos, seemingly chaos, there is a larger order, and the large order can be found by studying the stories of humanity.

You know, the hero's journey is one of those stories, and perhaps, you know, he studies all the great religious texts, but he's been doing a whole s- series some of you may have seen on the Bible, different portions of the Bible.

Please help us welcome our friend, amazing soul, Dr. Jordan Peterson, everybody.

Give it up for him.

And so you might ask yourself, well, if you're gonna characterize the ethos that isn't power that unites people, that stabilizes them psychologically and provides for social unity, how would you characterize that? And Tony made some reference to this, and there are archetypal themes that echo throughout human history that detail out the fundamental story of life.

And the most, one of the most fundamental of those, there's probably two.

There's an adventure story and a romance story, but I'll start with the adventure story And the adventure story is essentially the myth of the hero.

And the myth of the hero, which is, by the way, is the story that our culture, Western culture, is predicated on, and I would say all functional stories, posits that human beings are not autonom- automatons or clockwork machines that are driven by deterministic functions, but creatures that constantly confront what you might describe as a transforming horizon of possibility.

... um, millions of bits.

Um, what happened to those souls? And it's very clear, again, going back to all of, all of the mythology, Marduk, who was kind of leading this faction, I kind of consider Marduk and Lil Anu i- i- it's kind of all the same thing because it's all going to the s- all the energy is going to the same place.

They cast a net over Tiamat, over the whole system.

This is, again, the genesis of the false matrix system.

Like a lot of life in ancient Mesopotamia, this had a religious underpinning.

Babylon's chief god was Marduk, and Marduk was also a deity in Assyria.

Even Sennacherib's supporters feared that his actions in Babylon had angered and offended Marduk.

Sennacherib's assassination by his son or sons was seen as a divine retribution for his having done this to Babylon, and Esarhaddon's rebuilding of Babylon happened alongside a reframing of its destruction as another divine punishment.

Esarhaddon framed himself as Babylon's governor rather than its king, and he worked to gain the support of other cities in Babylonia.