Myth

Welcome to Not Work Myth and Storytelling.

This is the show where ancestral wisdom meets the modern imagination and our timeless connection to the land itself.

Season 7, Episode 16, Because She Could Not Stop for Death, An Irish Goddess in the Afterlife.

It's intended to deepen our relationship with the land, the people, and the stories of this world.

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To hear the whole story, as well as previous episodes in the Turas series, and to become a member of the Mythworkers Hearth community, please visit mythworkers.com. You've heard versions of the story of Tale 2 on the show before.

I'll link to those past retellings in the episode notes.

Her life and death and the way that the festival of Lunasa was celebrated in her memory is always an important story to tell.

I think that...

We always wonder where stories come from, don't we? Myths and legends.

And it's the stuff of religion, let's quickly say, that we're calling it mythology.

It was religion to the Cretans and the Greeks that in the later 19th century, many archaeologists started saying this could be based in truth.

All right.

Y'all know I got questions for y'all, especially in Myth vs.

Fact.

So let's play this clip.

Okay.

All right.

Shall we play Myth vs.

Fact, Shador? Yeah, why not? Why not? Why not? All right.

So Western Sahara, of course, part of Algeria, part of Mauritania, part of Senegal.

So those are occupations and countries that are based on myth.

and their interpretation of the history that they claim they have rights and legal and reasonable claims to territory, whatever they see it, and anything they can put their hands on.

And in the case of Israel, it was promised to them, and Morocco, it's me, but I can't prove it, but it's me nonetheless.

I'm just saying that there's layers of meaning in this particular story.

Myth, as Banti calls it, myth is the realm of undefined meaning.

Where you're trying to explain, or you are actually effectively explaining the unexplainable.

Because what can you say about enlightenment? If you just look at the externals, the Buddha sits in meditation under various trees in a grove by a river.

So some of these omens were often viewed through a legalistic paradigm of divine judgments or decrees of fate using the Mesopotamian concept of fate that was called simtu.

So and fate was very important because there was a conceptualization of it in Mesopotamia There was also a conceptualization of fate in Egypt and then eventually that became very important during the Hellenistic period with the rise of Hellenistic astrology Which as I argued in my book Was originally a system Or In fact It became the System For studying An individual's Fate And predicting Events About their future Based on the Alignment Of the planets Especially at The moment of birth Alright One of the things That's really Important In mesopotamia That you need To understand about The astrologers Is that They were This elite Class of Literate Priests Who could Read and Write And did Scholarship But they Also Were both Astronomers As well as Astrologers Because the Two subjects Were intertwined And were not Distinguished From one another So that they Would go Out each Night and Look at the Sky and Observe Where the Planets and the Stars were But then they Would also Pay attention to Correlations that were Happening On earth At that Time And sky and Earth were Thought to Be interconnected In that Way There's actually A famous Cuneiform Tablet that Says that Very Explicitly That sky and Earth Are Interconnected And not Separate So Um They were An Elite class Of priests And they Held specific Titles Such as The scribe Of the Enuma Anu Enlil Which remember Is that Like big Astrological Compilation Of astrological Omens It became Like their Astrological Bible In some way And part of Their goal Was to Interpret the Will of the Gods As part of Their priestly Duties Because the Planets themselves And Celestial Phenomenon Were Viewed as Like heavenly Manifestations Of the gods Or at least As some sort of Heavenly Writing That was Conveying Messages to Mankind About the Present and the Future Uh which Could be Interpreted If you Understood Astrology and Astronomy Essentially alright Moving forward By about One thousand One Hundred bce We see This very Popular creation Myth emerge In the Ancient world In ancient mesopotamia Known as the Enuma Elish And this is Basically like the Babylonian Creation myth That describes The god Marduk Defeating the Goddess Tiamat And then He tears Tiamat apart This like Chaos goddess Of some Sort And when it When marduk Tears tiamat Apart it Divides The world Into the Sky and Into the earth And it's Basically like their Mythological Creation story For the creation Of the sky And the earth And the cosmos And in this Story There's a passage Where it also Talks about How this Established the So-called Heavenly stations Quote unquote Of the gods Which are also functionally probably the heavenly stations in some sense of the planets.

So this is probably in this myth we start to see the earliest conceptual root of the notion of planets having some sort of designated place in the sky essentially, which I think would become very important later on because not long after this we also see the emergence of the doctrine of what later became known as the signs of exaltation or the notion that there's certain places on the ecliptic or certain constellations or certain signs of the zodiac that are associated with certain planets.

So I did want to read a quote from this section of the Enuma Elish and this is from Willis Monroe's translation that we cited in the episode I did last year on Mesopotamian astrology so you can find that there and you can find the citation and everything but here's the quote it says This is from the Enuma Elish, from the creation epic from around 1100 BCE, let's say give or take And it said "He fashioned heavenly stations for the great gods And he set up constellations The patterns of the stars He appointed the year Marked off divisions And set up three stars each For the twelve months After he had organized the year he established the heaven-heavenly station of Nebiru To fix the star’s intervals That none should transgress Or be slothful; [he] fixed the heavenly Stations of Enlil and Ea With it gates he opened On both sides And put strong bolts At the left and right." So I mention this just because I think it's really important that we start to see mythological and especially creation stories that start to try to explain how the cosmos is set up in different ways and also to try to explain or justify I think some of the systems that were being developed by astrologers Which were especially associations with certain planets With certain parts of the sky or with certain constellations or zodiacal signs or what have you And this is the earliest version of that But we'll see that this was the beginning of a tradition that would come up again in the Hellenistic period where I think later doctrines such as the Thema Mundi or the birth chart of the cosmos Were also probably presented in some sort of similar Mythological way In the way that some of the other Hermetic philosophical texts were presented Like especially the first book of the Corpus Hermeticum Known as the Poimandres Which presents this like cosmological vision Of how the cosmos was created That was revealed to Hermes Trismegistus So keep that in mind Because we'll Sort of return to that theme of the use of mythology By different authors Even Plato For example In the fourth century Had this mythological Creation story called the Timaeus That he used to explain Um the way that the Cosmos Was Set Up And Constructed And Eventually Hit even Why why the Planets Came To Be Associated With Fate All Right So Related To This Is The Exaltations Also Known As The Secret Places Where By Around One Thousand Bce So Not Long After The Anumma Alish You Know Is Around And Shows Up On The Stage For Sure We See The Earliest Origins Of The Planetary Exaltations That They Had Already Been Developed In Mesopotamia Especially Appearing In An Astronomical Slash Astrological Compendium From Around That Time That Was Titled The Mul Apin And In This Tradition These Positions In Mesopotamian Astrology Came To Be Referred To As The Secret Places Or The Secret Houses Of The Planets And This Became Like A Really Increasingly Popular And Important Concept From At Least Around One Thousand Bce Forward All The Way Into The Birth Of Hellenistic Astrology Where The Concept Of Secret Places Or Secret Houses Of The Planets Was Inherited And Then Reconceptualized In The Hellenistic Tradition But Here What's Interesting Is That Already There's This Notion That Certain Planets Are Associated With Certain Signs Of The Zodiac So Already In This Text It's Talking About Saturn Having Its Secret Place In The Sign Of Libra The Sun I Believe It Says In Aries And So On And So Forth Which Are The Same Placements As What Later Became The Exaltations In Hellenistic Astrology And In My Book Nine Years Ago I Had Some Skepticism For Different Reasons About Whether The Exaltations Really Were In The Mesopotamian Tradition Partially Because So Many Of The Sources For Them Uh Were Really Late Cuneiform Texts Especially Close To The Hellenistic Era And So I Wasn't Sure If There Was um if there were concepts passing back and forth between Greek and cuneiform sources additionally even though the secret places are mentioned in some of the Babylonian horoscopes from 410 bce forward Uh, they don't seem to match when they're mentioned the positions that are mentioned in the charts.

And so there was some ambiguity about whether the concept really did match the exaltations of, of later Hellenistic astrology.

But at this point, um, after doing more extensive research and finding more texts and seeing a, a more recent edition especially of the Mul Apin, for example, that was, was published I think not that long ago, um, it's really clear to me that the exaltations really were in the Mesopotamian tradition since at least around 1000 BCE.

What's interesting is that at one point in one of the fragments of Berosus, he also talks about Adapa and talks about Adapa revealing, I believe he says, like mathematics, which may be and often became like a code word for astronomy and astrology.

So what's important about this quote though, and wanted, wanted to mention it here, is that it creates a possible Mesopotamian precedent for the destruction of the world being cr-...