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Grail Sciences
Grail Sciences is a Podcast that reveals the most occulted (hidden) information on the planet about how we as a species create our reality both individually and collectively. Come join us on a journey of self-discovery and freedom and learn how to change the world by changing your own story and become a Master of Destiny.
Grail Sciences
Dumuzid's Descent and Return: a Blueprint for Cosmic Balance With his Beloved
Dumuzid, the oldest known exemplar of the dying and rising king, is also in many ways the most exceptional. Lover of Inanna, he was apparently quite done with her passionate antics and celebrated when she died, only to be dragged into the underworld for his impiety. But what does it really mean and why has the image endured?James Bleckley of the Oldest Stories Podcast sits down with Nathaniel Heutmaker of the Grail Sciences Podcast to discuss this ancient tale from both an historical and an occult perspective.
The Grail Sciences Podcast covers the deeper meaning of the Holy Grail and a variety of occult topics. Nathaniel is deeply read in a variety of world traditions, and expertly weaves it all together over at grailsciences.com/
The Oldest Stories Podcast covers the history, myth, and culture of ancient Mesopotamia, from the invention of writing until the fall of Nabonidas. James has been filling out the story of the oldest civilization for over 6 years at oldeststories.net
Yeah, I've got the uh I've got all the translations, all the various songs of Duma Zit up, and like I'd remembered that they were very passionate. I'd forgotten how blatantly pornographic a number of them are. Yeah. It's uh it's a little bit like, oh man, is one all about it's churning butter. Ishtar comes over because Dumasid's gonna churn her butter real good. And it's all about churning the butter. Oh man.
SPEAKER_00:Well I'm gonna use a different tradition that I've noticed that has many parallels here, that I'm much more well versed in, in the sense that like I've studied it much deeper than I've done the Sumerian ones at this time. I am I have read many of these Sumerian and Babylonian stories and myths and songs and that kind of stuff, but it's been years, and my knowledge and understanding of things has grown substantially since that time period. And you'll see why I'm comparing it in so many different ways here for a moment in a moment. So I'm gonna use Nordic mythology and I'm gonna use Baldur and his wife, Nana, which should already give you a hint a little bit for where some of this is going. There's something called in the poetic edda, Baldur's dreams. Hmm, I wonder if there's any parallel inside of the Mesopotamian tradition whatsoever.
SPEAKER_01:Nobody knows. The only Balder I really know much is Baldur's Gate. And I didn't even play the third one. That's a different thing, I suspect.
SPEAKER_00:So, what we do know on top of this is that if you look at it, Balder is someone who's having dreams, much like what we're gonna be talking about later on, that has to do with Dumuzi's dream, I assume, in one of them, that has to lead to his you know fall into the underworld and whatnot. And it's all a premonition of what's going to be happening to him, and he has to have it interpreted and that kind of thing. And everybody knows what it is, and there are actions that are taken to try to prevent this. And uh eventually, of course, it fails and ends up in the underworld, and someone is sent there to resurrect him, to come get him back, and whatnot. And in that particular notion of things, they are told that you could uh the goddess of the underworld, another parallel that's there. Her name is Hel, H E L, right? And she informs the we'll say, what's the best term for it, messenger of the gods that have come in in the stead of these other people and whatnot, much like the creations that Enki made for Inana and and that kind of thing. Because you have to, he has to use a horse to jump over the gates instead of going through the gates like they did with phantom or fly or whatever the deal is. And he takes Odin's horse here. So another wise being taking over that. The parallels just keep adding up and up, which is why I'm gonna go under what I think some of that stuff you're talking about with what the sexual components are in a moment. When you get to this, you also realize that Baldur represents like summer, all right? And you want summer if you're in the Nordic countries, because summer is the time period where everything's much easier to survive and deal with and all that other stuff. Whereas inside of Mesopotamia, it's the opposite. You don't want summer, at least in the case of Demuzi, because that's when the milk spoils. It's when it can't have it stay there and whatnot. So it's just an inverse in terms of the times, but it's the exact same notion of things for when one dies and when one comes back for it, and that kind of stuff. In one of the stories related to Balder, he is competing for his wife, Nana, just like how Demuzid had to do so with the farmer for what's going on there. And eventually we know who wins, of course, but Nana ends up with Balder and that kind of thing. But not before they get into this huge rabble back and forth and blah blah blah. That's one of the major differences between it uh on there, and it is that at the end of the dreaming, uh excuse me, at the end of the marriage one with the Nana, and then you have, you know, where they kind of end up as friends at the end of it and all that other stuff. Whereas in one variant of the story where they're fighting for her attention, they literally are actually physically fighting for her, uh, and and that kind of thing. And again, she has to be convinced to go with Baldur over her first choice, which is the other one, Hodr, inside of it, which is just like what happens in that. So here's another parallel that pops up. And there's also the crying and the lamenting of things with it. When Demuzid is dead in an underworld, there's supposed to be all these tears for him and blah blah blah. While the condition in which to bring Baldur back from the dead is that there can be not one thing, there can be nothing in the entirety of the universes and all the various different aspects in the Nordic mythology that do not weep for his return, Baldur's return. If that does not happen, then he has to stay dead just like everybody else in the underworld. So you see this that that happens there on that. There's a lamented thing with it. And the point is that if you go over and over and over, even more further and stuff with it, you start seeing all of these parallels that are just absolutely bizarre in terms of like how much there are with it. It's not just like, oh, there's a handful of them, you know, whatever. That's true of most mythologies. No, no, there's like a detailed list of things that are basically the same. It's really, really bizarre for what's going on there on that front. And inside of the Nordic tradition, they have this the we have Odin, okay? And if you take Odin, Iin is literally just the suffix and whatnot, and then you have the prefix, which is odr, something along that for how it's pronounced, and whatnot, which means like frenzied or ecstasy or the spirited one, something like that. And when you combine the two of them together and that kind of stuff. So if you look at it from a completely allegorical sense, Odin represents this divine frenzied state. Sometimes sexual in nature, it's compared to that, sometimes battle frenzy and nature because nature because he is a battle war god and whatnot. But in other words, it represents this altered state of consciousness, of this divine frenzy that works through that. And as I've talked to you about briefly before, that's what happens inside of like this living resurrection tradition that I'm studying and working on and that kind of stuff with it, is that there's this divine altered state of consciousness that comes in from that. And the best way that most people can understand this, no matter which gender that they are, for the representation of this particular part, is to make it so that way they go with some other very altered state of consciousness that most people partake in, which in this case is sexual in nature. And so sex and any of the sexual metaphors, while they can actually mean that on a on a very, you know, very much a straightforward, yes, that's what it is level, it can also imply this altered state of frenzied, divine-frenzied consciousness that they're talking about here that you get when you you go like people go into trances or when they have outer body experiences, as people have talked about in ancient traditions and that kind of stuff, regardless whether we believe that to be true or not today. I'm just talking about what they believed, how it worked, and all that other stuff with it. And so that's kind of what I personally believe when I was rereading some of these stories now, and and that kind of stuff, that yes, there's definitely true actual sexual elements that are in there that are 100% only sexual, but there's also the deeper meaning of this frenzied state, this divine frenzied aspect of altered consciousness of some sort that seems to also be playing through as well, would be my general explanation for these things. With it, and in the case of the Nordic tradition and how it plays directly with the Mesopotamian one, we know through migratory patterns that the farming groups of people and whatnot, they came from that area of it, and and and then moved up into the Nordic countries. We can trace this through different traveling. It took thousands of years for that to happen and whatnot, in order to introduce farming to that area. So, in order to make it so that way people saying you can't have the same group of people that's doing it from that space or time and that distance and whatnot. That's not necessarily true. I'm not saying it happened. That's that's proving what I'm saying is much different than saying that these stories were because of what happened in Mesopotamia and they ended up there. But I'm saying to say that it can't have happened is is not true either, is the point. We don't know. There is that element, and early 20th scholars, 20th century scholars thought that that was the case for it. Then the mid-20th to late 20th century scholars kind of dismissed that notion due to some of the things already brought up, and now it's going full circle again because of genetics and migratory and other archaeological finds that have happened and whatnot, that it's become a possibility again. Not saying it occurred, but that it is at least that with that, and so you could have Balder potentially representing Demuzid or something similar to Demuzid in a lot of ways, and then you have Nana being Inana.
SPEAKER_01:So that's interesting. I'd be very interested, because I don't I don't actually know much about Balder. And that's not just Baldur's Gate jokes.
SPEAKER_02:I'd no, I got you is uh I'm trying to remember.
SPEAKER_01:I'd I'd and in fact, instead of me trying to remember anything at all about him to see if there's stuff going similar, it might be good if we reintroduce Dumasid, because we've talked about him before, but we didn't talk about him in his full context.
SPEAKER_00:Right. That's why I wanted to kind of lead into that and kind of also give a little bit of an outline in where things might be going a little bit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So Dumuzid's really interesting because of course he ends up being famous as the husband of Inanna or Ishtar. And that's sort of a later development in the Dumuzid myth. And you have sort of this quite natural progression of the character through the stories. Of course, all of his stories are so old that even the mature ones, we see the mature Inanna's descent into the underworld, Dumuzid's already a very mature character. He's very well known throughout the Sumerian region. And this is these are stories coming out like at the dawn of writing. And so what happened before the dawn of writing, who knows? Nobody knows. Could have been anything. Oral tradition, wild, erotic oral traditions. So Demuzid is a it's hard to say that he starts as a god because he does he's in a sense he's always divine, but in the earliest incarnations, he seems to be not so much a god as an archetype. He is the pastoralist. He is like what everyone would want a pastoralist to be. He is what pastoralists would want themselves to be. He is and so of course they they do. Yeah, they he he becomes divine for anybody who wants their flocks to increase. Hey, I want flocks like Demuzid. Hey, I want butter like Demuzid, I want cheese like Dumuzid, things like that. But there's so much You see, the pre-writing period in Sumer is it seems to have been this period of really forming an identity where the farmers are forming an identity and the pastoralists are forming an identity as because before that everyone had just been the same thing. I mean, agriculture had been developing for a while, but it seems like the cultural idea of being a farmer, being a pastoralist, or the third option being a fisherman, uh, which ties in a little bit here, those three lifestyles in Sumer are becoming identities. And this is where you get there's a famous debate poem where the the grain goes up before either on or enki or enlil, one of the two, but the the idea of grain goes up to the gods, and the idea of sheep goes up to the gods, and the two of them debate about which is better. And in that one precursor to Cain and Abel as well.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, absolutely. Yep.
SPEAKER_01:And the just farmer versus pastoralist, I mean it's it's kind of a meme now on the internet because of some anthropological work people are doing. Oh, farmers versus herdsmen. And I guess I mean you go back not that long to you've got the the ranchers and the farmers out west. It's a very long-running conflict. Yeah, it's a conflict, it's a theme. But this is really the origins when people are coming to understand themselves as either farmers or pastoralists. And this is where you get the story you already mentioned with Dumasid and Enkimdu, who is different from Enkidu. Some people, I've seen some people mix them up. It's very easy to mix them up, but Enkimdu is kind of Dumasid for farmers, much less famous because he's much less sexy. And I do mean that quite literally. He is a he's usually called a god just because we don't have the human aspect to him the way that we do with Dumasid, just because his stories don't survive the same way. But he's very much a god of canals and fertile fields, irrigation canals and fertile fields and having the land for growing grain. And so Dumasid as the excellent pastoralist and and Kim Du as the excellent farmer, they have a story where they are competing to win the heart of Inanna, who is the passionate, lovely lady that every everyone would like to win her heart until you win it, and then you realize you're better off not winning it. But the the the progress of that uh debate is pretty much the same as the grain versus sheep debate. And if you think there was an extended version of Cain and Abel where they were where they went into more detail about what they were offering up to God, the the fruits of the field or the animal sacrifices, if you think there was a greater debate there, which some people have claimed, then it's it's part of that larger tradition. But DumaZid wins because he has everything that women want. He specific, not just because he personally is great, but he, as the pastoralist, has everything women want. And this is like he has butter and milk. This is like an economic thing to a large extent. He has animal wealth, which is at least at this point, more highly thought of than land wealth, at least in the cultural sphere.
SPEAKER_00:That's another parallel that's true for the Nordics at this time period as well. You see this with the runic script, Fehu, the first rune there, with it. It means cattle or movable wealth, quite literally, for what's going on there. And on that same front, since we're talking about the her meaning Inanna choosing her husband, but Utu's suggestion, I guess you could say, it's more of a pestering, but as in my opinion, this is where we we use the term animal husbandry today. And this is that's actually a direct connection to Demuzid becoming husband of Inanna. And of course, she's the goddess, and she's the one that has that, and they're going for her divine favor, just like Cain and Abel are going for the divine favor, favor of Yahweh. So there's another parallel on that front as well.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, and but it's not just that he has the desirable thing, he's got animal wealth, so he's rich. He's got milk and wool, both of which are like domestic comforts. Yep. It's it's uh especially.
SPEAKER_00:But the milk, because you can only be there for a certain amount of time, otherwise it spoils. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And it's it's it's very comforting milk and wool. It's soft and warm and pleasant, and these are nice things that that ladies want, especially, and this is important, especially young unmarried women lust after Dumasid. And another part of that is just it's generally thought that in this part of history the pastoralists were probably physically healthier than most agriculturalists. And I've seen that in a bunch of different ways, a bunch of different places. But the idea is Dumasid as a pastoralist is just a taller and buffer than his farm than the farmers that he's competing against. And he's got wealth, he's got looks, he's got these comfort gifts that he can give out to the ladies. And so Inanna picks him Inanna as the stand-in archetype of the unmarried lady. That's that's why her brother Utu Shamash has to uh push her to get married. Because I mean, this when you read the love story of Inanna and Dumasid, it's so modern because it's very modern.
SPEAKER_00:When we when we No, it is, and I'm just laughing because I agree.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, when we look at marriage from the perception, from the from the standpoint of what was in the law, what was in the religious rituals, what are in the proper and appropriate customs, from that standpoint, we really get the idea that nearly all marriages in the ancient world were arranged marriages for economic, social reasons. And of course they were. But then there's you read about Inanna, and there's there's one poem, probably a song, where Dumasid comes up to Inanna while they're courting. This is separate from the Enkimdu rivalry. There's a million songs of just Dumasid and Inanna courting at various ways. And Dumasid goes over to Inanna's house, and even though they're gods, in a lot of the poetry, they are very explicitly cast as just people in a regular town or village of ancient Sumer. And so you could just replace it with random young boy goes up to random young girl, but the but Inanna and Dumasid become these archetypes there. Anyway, Dumasid comes up to Inanna or to her house and like whispers over the wall, hey Inanna, come with me, let's go, do things that your parents aren't going to approve of that might result in children. And Inanna's like, oh my, I would get in so much trouble if I do that. And Dumasid's like, look, all you got to do is tell your mother that you saw some of your girlfriends out dancing in the street and singing, and you were just out with them for a couple hours dancing in the street, and then they won't suspect anything, and we'll just go off to some shed somewhere and uh and make passionate love. And it's like the boyfriend, the irresponsible, the the attractive but non-socially fitting in boyfriend archetype. He's a little bit older, he's he's independent, he's got his own means, he's got cool presents, he brings, you know, he smokes cigarettes or whatever. The bad guys uh and and he's like, hey, let's go lie to your parents and let's go uh sleep around. It's it's very modern, it's fantastic. But that's that's him as that masculine archetype, but a very specific kind of masculine archetype, not a generic man, a it's it's a a young girl's first crush is very much how I've how I've equated it in other places. And I don't know if Baldur is like that, but I'd be interested. I'd be interested if Baldur's very attractive or not.
SPEAKER_00:Almost all of the Asiar gods are are attractive, and what's to put it this way for what's going on very briefly, there's another hybrid character. I say hybrid because she's was a Jotanar, then became a goddess after she marries one of the gods and that kind of stuff for what it is. Her name is Scotty. And by the way, it's potentially the entirety of Scandinavia, Scotty, Scott, Scandinavia, is named after her, which would mean Scotty's island, which would mean shadow island or harm island or injury island or something like that for what it is, because people used to think it was an island at one point, way back in the ancient time periods, and when that when scholars are writing some of these maps and stuff down. So it's a this particular being is so important that potentially the entirety of the Scandinavian peoples are named after her. Just to put this into perspective, and that she's the one that represents the land. Anyway, what happens is very briefly the the gods, uh her her father ends up stealing Edun after Loki causes a bunch of problems for them, and Edun with her life-giving apples make it so that way the gods are continuously renewed for youth and all that other stuff. So they're very much important for what it is. They Loki eventually gets Edun back and makes it so that way in the process, Scotty's father is killed. Alright? Now, one of the things that she's there ready to do war with with the with the Asgardians. That's what she's ready to do with this. And but they convince her that they would they don't want to do war, that they don't want any more bloodshed and all that. They'd rather have a truce, and they would rather give her recompense for what's going on there, alright? And and and and and repayment to her. And she hears them out what they have to say and in an agreement to it. And the the conditions were a husband of some sort that was going on. We'll come back to that one in a moment. The other one was to make it so that way you have to do something to make her laugh. And then as an added bonus, which wasn't part of the conditions, they take her father's eyes, put them into the heavens as stars, and so he's immortalized that way forever. That wasn't a rear part of the arrangement. There's a couple other things, but anyway, so you have to get her to laugh, which as she's like this battle hardened you know, Jotinar, which is usually translated to giantists, it's not actually accurate, it's its own separate thing, but we'll go with that for the sake of simplicity here. And she you have Loki who decides to go and get a goat. So this also potentially has to do with some of this pastoral stuff that we're talking about in a roundabout way, and he ties he he ties a rope around it and he ties the other end around his testicles. And they give this yanking back and forth thing until he falls into Scotty's lap, which eventually makes her laugh. So that condition one has been met. Now, condition two, they agree that she is allowed to choose a husband for herself, but she has to do so only by making it so that way she sees the feet of the gods that are there and whatnot. So basically you can see from like the knee down, is basically how it plays out for what it is. And she chooses one, it turns out not to be Baldur, but the key point for why I'm bringing this up is that she says that has to be Balder because there's nothing ugly on Balder and whatnot. There's nothing, there's no part in any way, shape, or form. It turns out to be another god named Nordr or Nerthus, depending upon how it plays out in certain certain things or what's going on in certain traditions. And when you look at it from that perspective, it is very clear, even in that small story, that like, bro, he is the god of gods in terms of how he looks and all that. He is literally like, what is that? He's he's he has all this shining light coming from him and all this other stuff. When you look at he he just has this like charisma off the charts for what it is for it. He's impervious to everything except mistletoe. Nothing can even harm him. That's how powerful he is. You could you could take you could take you know a nuclear weapon in today's world and have it dropped on his head, and he would just laugh it off like it was nothing, supposedly, if you follow the stories for what's going on there.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, I think very much the that's actually pretty interesting because nearly every god is attractive, of course, and unless they're specifically for some reason.
SPEAKER_00:Whatever the story purposes are, yes.
SPEAKER_01:And nearly every god in at least the Mesopotamian tradition has praised hymns about their strength. They are their oh, it's all about how strong it talks about how strong they are because you know, being strong is just Like being good for them. It's it's it's just part of goodness is strength.
SPEAKER_00:But they need that too in the Nordic slash Germanic peoples as well. 100% warrior culture.
SPEAKER_01:You don't have that as much with Dumasid, interestingly, which is why I think so many people equate him with a human that is just like somehow in a human archetype entangled in the divine. That's what Baldur too.
SPEAKER_00:He wasn't he's not very strong and all that. Yes, I mentioned he's impervious to things basically, but he doesn't fit the he's not a warrior like the other gods are that are that are male gods. He just doesn't, he doesn't do that, like in in terms of the action mythology, not in terms of like how video games portray him or whatever else and that kind of stuff. He he just he's not, he isn't, he's not a fighter, he's not a fighter at all.
SPEAKER_01:That's interesting because so what does happen for a sort of I don't want to say brief period of time because we're talking like five centuries, but in the grand sweep of Mesopotamia, that is kind of a brief time. Yeah, yeah, compared to thousands upon thousands of years, yeah. Uh you have the the rise of the Amorites, which my book, History and Myth from Babylon and the Amorites, covers this exact period, though I don't I don't have this story in there. Yeah, bonus content. There we go. The story of Dumasil, the the Amorites are a nomadic pastoralist people. They come in and they sweep away the old Sumerians, they beat them, take over their cities, and they sweep away most of the Akkadian cities to the point that nearly every king by the every important king by the 1800s BC is an Amorite for a while. And texts from this the old, what we call the old Babylonian period, which is Hammurabi, the great lawmaker, he's an Amorite. And from this period, you start to see Dumazid actually being praised for his strength. But it's not for his strength specifically. You see him praised as things like commander of the chariots, captain of the hosts, because being a pastoralist for these certain centuries, I mean, being a pastoralist, you're always fighting raids. You're always a raider. Yeah. And but in these centuries specifically, these pastoral raiders have taken over the world, basically. Or at least the part of the world they care about. And this is when you see Dumasid really start to become identified not just with as a pastoralist, but as a king. So Dumasid in the Sumerian period and the earlier period, he was one guy who had married Inanna. Inanna's had a bunch of boyfriends, a bunch of husbands. She is the the community bicycle, and uh ever and uh Dumasid is important in that. But Dumasid's important in that, and he does get identified in the Descent to the Underworld narrative. But the royal kingship idea of Dumazid doesn't come in until the Sumerian period has ended, wiped out by these Amorites, who seem to sort of self-identify with Dumasid. And at that point, Dumazid's marriage to Inanna becomes emblematic for the Amorit king's marriage to uh sacred marriage to Inanna. They're taking the Inanna royal wedding tradition from the Sumerian kings. The Sumerian kings of especially of Uruk had been marrying Inanna for at least a thousand years, if we were.
SPEAKER_00:I don't think forever at this point, forever.
SPEAKER_01:But they hadn't been doing it as Dumasid. They had been doing it as the king of Uruk, and Inanna loves Uruk.
SPEAKER_02:Right, right.
SPEAKER_01:When the Amorites show up, now they are increasing, it's increasingly the case that the king of the, or the the most one of the important kings of the Amorites, when they do marry Inanna, they are doing it more as Dumasid.
SPEAKER_00:Right, the archetype of Dumasid. Right.
SPEAKER_01:And so that he becomes he becomes a kingly archetype at that point, more than he was before. So now he is lover and king, and that's when you get the full melding of the sex poetry tradition. And my favorite example, of course, of Inanna and Dumasid sex poetry is Song of Solomon in the Bible, which is an Aramaic text from I want to say 400 or 300 BC, way after Solomon. But it's Solomon somehow ends up being identified with Dumazeb, because of course the Israelites, as part of their identity, they retain the we were desert wanderer nomad peoples.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you get the shepherd king idea for what's coming out of it.
SPEAKER_01:David the shepherd king, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You get that for what's happening with it. And so if you play that, obviously Dumazid is that, and so there's clearly that that's being played out with it, and then you have which would are are the precursor to a lot of the the Hebrew people and whatnot, you have the Hyksos and their shepherd kings for what's going on with that. We know that this is the case for it when they go and invade lower you know, excuse me, upper Egypt, uh, for what it is, the the the you know up in the up in the Delta region. That is lower Egypt, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because it's it's backwards from constantly.
SPEAKER_00:That's right, it's backwards, yeah. So when they they go and do that, they they make that happen for for what's going on there. And and so, you know, they they have that, and that's where some of these people go in there for a while, and and the point is that yeah, it makes complete sense that they would do that. I mean, they even have in the in the Jewish uh calendar and and whatnot the month of Tammuz, which is just literally Demuseed. It's literally Demuzeed, is what it is. So, yeah, makes sense to me. On on that front, if you look at the uh the the evolution of the Jewish timeline very briefly here in order to help put this in further perspective uh for what's going on, is that you have probably a mistranslation. I say probably because there's still some debate about this, but it doesn't say like for i idols and idolatry and that kind of stuff, it doesn't claim that there's like physical objects, or like you know, Anubis back here on my on my tapestry or whatever is is problematic. No, it actually is in the sense of that it's saying that they're shit gods, that they're not important gods, as if we would say, Oh, that's shit today, that's the absolute bullshit today, or whatever it is. That's how it actually be with it. So not to follow these other gods. So, in other words, it's not saying that these other gods didn't exist. It's saying that they're not worth going after and that you shouldn't worship them. So, in the very earliest versions, even inside of what's still left, uh, that's been canonized inside of the Bible as we know it today, they never claimed originally, if this theory is correct, which is gaining ground on it in terms of the etymological roots of stuff, that other gods didn't exist. And you can see that they even mention the Egyptian gods, they even say that they were real and some of the stuff or what was going on, that to help back this theory up, that they didn't exist, it's just they're not worth worshiping, they're not real true gods, is what it is. And like they're they're lower level, forget them. I'm the top god, basically, worship me, is how this plays out. Now, why am I bringing this up? Well, because David and Solomon, etc., they were still following the ancient traditions that you're talking about with the Song of Songs of having Ashtart be inside of it, or Asherah being inside of their temple for what's going on and being a part of that particular thing with it. And if you trace that back, it goes back to Ishtar, which of course is Inanna for what's going on there. It's the same thing, and so that's my guess as to why it's just uh it's like what they did with uh with with Marduk and Babylon and replacing him with the god beforehand that was in there for the creator god Enlil and that kind of stuff, right? So with with the Numa Elish, it's just the same thing. Okay, well, it's the same story, we like the story, but we don't want these characters here anymore. We want these characters, and we're placing them there because they're also part of our tradition, and they're doing basically the same thing, so might as well. That's my an understanding of it from the and the very brief form that I can give here. There's obviously a lot more to it, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01:The only thing I'd say is that David probably David seems to have been a Yahweh supremacist, it would have been Solomon bringing the pagan worship back into the temple, though it wouldn't have been very far removed.
SPEAKER_00:No, I mean he was David was definitely pushing it a lot more, but even he still had the divine feminine goddess in terms of the temple that he was there for. It was the one thing he kept from it and that was left over, and then obviously, like you said, Solomon really really brought it back type type deal for what's going on there. So, anyway, not that that's not our main focus and topic, so we'll go back to what we're focusing on, but yeah, it's an interesting parallel for sure.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm not really sure because yeah, just the evolution of DumaZid from being the bad boy, the bad boy that all the girls want, to being the I'm the king, shepherd king, uh married to Ishtar, married to Inanna. That's that is sort of his uh his grand arc. I should probably note some people if they're if they're into the uh mythology thing, they may have seen uh Dumazid the fisherman and that is and or the Dumasid in uh the Sumerian Kings list. And I will say this actually had confused me uh for quite a while. The Dumasid in the Sumerian Kings list is almost certainly not meant as a reference to uh the uh shepherd god Dumuzid. He is probably someone whose name was Dumuzid from what gets called the Sea Land, which is this swamp that's sort of near the end of the Persian Gulf.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And he would have been a fisherman, because he's from this sea land.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01:And it seems that he conquered the city of Uruk for a period of time and may have ruled over it for a while until he was defeated.
SPEAKER_00:And he's also supposedly an anti-diluvian king, if uh memory serves me correctly, and he's the fifth one of the anti-diluvian kings on the Sumerian list.
SPEAKER_01:Oh no, he is after the flood because in the list of the floor.
SPEAKER_00:Right, it's anti, not pre-deluvian, anti-deluvian.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, anti-flood. He is where exactly I don't know, but in the he fits in the he's clearly at the peak of Uruk's power because he fits in between the great Uruk kings Enmerkar and Louis and Gulbanda, and then you have Gilgamesh, either one or two or two just immediately after that. So he's some nobody from the fisherman lands that seems to have come and conquered Uruk for a little while and seems to have claimed Inanna as his wife, and then he gets overthrown, and then the rightful order is restored, politically speaking. But he is that is a separate mythic cycle, and it's interesting because, of course, being a fisherman, he's not a pastoralist, he's not a farmer, he is this sort of third-way kind of thing. And you'll see oh, what's the name?
SPEAKER_00:I think I have fishing goes back further than any of these things with it. We know we have found fishing hooks that go back at least 70,000 years ago. Oh, it might even be further inside of that in terms of archaeological evidence. I'm I'm not sure. I haven't looked into that specific one in a while, but the point is fishing has been done very long time. And if you're going with the three identities here, it is by far the oldest of them.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah. His name is also Goo Dam, G-U-D-A-M. And I remember, I don't remember if it's Rosicrucian or one of those related esoteric things. They have something about Goo Dam as like an esoteric fisherman mystic sort of thing. So he may have had his own esoteric tradition at some point, but it's not related to this DumaZid. I only vaguely remember it because I haven't done I haven't done that stuff in quite a while. Yeah. But yeah, so Doomazid pastoral archetype god, and he's every woman's dream. He makes your flocks wealthy, or he makes your flocks increase, which is wealth. He's got cosmic roles just through his divine kingship and also through his tie-in to the underworld story. And I guess he's got a sister, and the sister is quite the character all to herself, because the sister is really kind of sad. There's there's a praise poem to the lovers Ishtar and Dumasid, and it briefly mentions oh, I've got to find it. Let me it briefly mentions that Geshton Anna just has a real hard time of it all the time. Oh, her eyes were lacerated, her mouth she lacerated her mouth, she lacerated her place not spoken of to men, and she just cut herself all the way up. Then she went to the palace tavern and she was looking everywhere for Dumasid. She couldn't find Dumasid, she was so distraught because she couldn't find her brother, but she was just cutting herself all over the place, and then she like walks around town like this ghoulish cut-up figure in morning clothes, bleeding out everywhere, and she's just asking everybody, do you know where my brother is? And then in the meantime, it seems that her brother Dumasid is oh, just with Inanna, party party, and his sister is just distraught out of her mind, and that's like I don't actually know how to make sense of it, to be completely honest, but it's a very striking image.
SPEAKER_00:I have I have an idea of what might be going on there, but in order to put into context, we also need to be looking a little further on with things, which is actually when Demuzid has been taken into the underworld as a replacement for stuff. Do you remember when I was talking about how I was saying Geshtinana, Bellile, and Inana were playing the role of the tripartite goddess type thing? I am absolutely certain that that is what's going on there now after reviewing this information that I haven't in years, like I talked about to talk about this again uh here today with you. And if you go and you look at it, that three-part is showing up again. You have Gesti Inana, you have Inana herself, and then you have his mother showing up, and they're playing all three roles again, lamenting him while he's in the underworld and that kind of stuff. So if all three of them are actually the same being in some fashion or another, in terms of playing the ultimate goddess, let's say, and they're all just like parts of that notion because of the maiden, the wife slash mother, and then the you know, crone, uh, old crone and old woman type thing with it, and they're all just aspects of a much bigger archetype of the overall goddess figure for what's going on there, then it you put that into perspective for what's happening. This would also explain a lot of other parts of this mythology that's going on there. If you have it to where, as I have said before, Gestanana actually represents Inanna in her maiden form before she gets married and that kind of thing for what it is, then it would also be that she's looking for her brother. If you go back to Utu slash Shamash, that's there with it, it's heavily implied in the very beginning of stuff with it that he wanted to marry Inana himself for what's going on there. Realizing that that's not gonna work the way he wants with it, then he goes into the story of the other two that we've talked about already: the pastoral versus the farmer idea, and trying to get them her to choose between one of them and and whatnot. Now, the reason why I'm bringing that up is because, you know, they're Utu slash Shamash is the brother of Inanna. And if you play this same concept out, you have the Muzid being the brother of Gestinana. So it's almost as if they're trying to tell you that this is the same idea that's being played out in another way that's going on there for the maiden concept. So her lamenting and wondering where's her brother at, and that kind of stuff. It's not just because it's her brother, it's also her lover. And her being upset that he's gone with Inana, the other variant of her, that's still the same archetype that we're talking about here, makes it so that way it actually answers that question to a certain extent. It would also make it so that way it becomes very clear on the fertility aspects for what's happening there, meaning the story that has to do with obviously Demuzis is only there for six months out of the year, and the other six months are with Gestianana, that in a way it's going on in the underworld that's going there for that. And we also know that Geshtanana is somebody who is a scribe in the underworld that's happening there, and does certain aspects that are going on that. So there's the aspect of her going in there for her own purposes that she needs to be with it. So when Inanna comes to the gates and her sister, I mean uh the queen of the underworld, excuse me, Ereshigol is there wondering why the hell are you here? Basically, could it also be because she was in another variant of herself the scribe that was supposed to be there to take care of something? Oh no, I'm not here for that. I'm here for these other purposes. Uh-huh. Right. I don't believe you. Something's wrong for what's going on here. And it could also lead to the fact of her wanting to take the throne for herself on top of it, because it's a very it's a different aspect of Inana that's wanting to go and do that particular front that's going on with it. I'm not saying you have to agree with it, I'm just saying I have a possible explanation that goes along with that. Interestingly enough, if you go back to the Nordic tradition and that kind of thing with it, if you go and play this, it's the same themes are played out with another couple that are very, very likely the exact same beings, as that on a different form for what it is. So you have Baldur and Inanna, which would be in this uh variant, Dimuzid and Inanna, and then in a higher level you have another couple that's Freyer and Freya, and that kind of stuff. Now, Freya is very interesting because she's also associated with Venus just like Inanna is, and she's also associated with other things just like Inanna is, and her name literally means the lady. Okay, the lady of heaven, the queen of heaven type idea that's going on there. You have Freyer, which means the Lord, and their brother and sister, in fact, that they're twins in this instance for what's happening. And Freyer wants to marry another variant of Freya named Gerter, which is it's obvious that it's her. It's not even like no m most scholars don't debate this for what's going on there. And so it seems like it's playing out in another roundabout way, and it gives even more potentiality for the fact that this these ancient themes came for the Nordic tradition, came from ancient Mesopotamia, you know, through thousands of years of travel, and then got morph because you can't make it so that way, well, summer is bad when it's actually the good one for the Nordics. You have to change certain elements just to the environment and whatnot, but the same corner themes are there. Is this actually true or not? I don't know. That's not something I can answer here in this question. I just know I have a potential aspect for what's going on, and I'm 100% the tripartite goddess. I'm convinced of that is true of these characters and and whatnot, playing out. I'm just not saying that it is exactly the same thing. I would need to investigate this angle further to say one way or another. But this is the first thing that popped off my head based upon what you you know, remembering of what I remember of it, what you're telling me, as well as what I did in the last couple weeks here since we last met up.
SPEAKER_01:So see, I still think that's interesting, but it seems really bleak, if I have to be completely honest, because Geshton Anna is just the most miserable figure in Mesopotamian mythology. There's one story where so Dumasid and Inanna are married and they're living on a ranch. And because that's that's what you do, apparently. And see, and and because they're living on a ranch, they've got their extended family there. So Geshton Anna is also living in the house with them, and that's that's normal enough as it is.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's pretty normal for that time period. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And Geshton Anna is always portrayed as very doting on Dumasid. She's very motherly in a sense, very considerate and helpful, and just a great, a great sister all in all. And so Dumasid gets up from being with Inanna and says, Oh, I'm gonna go out and just get some desert air, some nice desert air, and he invites Geshton Anna out with him. And they go to the barn, and they you know they do some other stuff, and then they go to the barn where all their sheep are. And Dumasid says, Look at that little baby lamb, what is it doing to its mother? And I assume this is divine power, he's making this happen or something. I don't really know what what all is going on, but the the baby sheep is mounting its mother and in a very pornographic way. And Dumasid keeps poking at Geshton Anna and says, What's that sheep doing to its mother? What's it doing? And she's like, Well, I guess I guess he's I guess he's just you know copulating with his own mother, but she doesn't quite get it. And then at the end of the tablet, which thankfully is damaged and we can't really read what's going on, he is then like, hey, if that lamb is mounting its own mother, I should be mounting my own sister, and then he he violates her violently in the in the shed. And this is the brother that she is going to endure extreme. And she is constantly suffering for her brother. And I that's the part that I don't because it's so she she suffers when she lives with him, she suffers when he's not there, and he she continually harms herself when she's not when he's not there because she's looking for him and she's just cutting herself out of grief. And then when he's being taken by the demons to be taken down to the underworld, she is tortured round after round, never says a word. Perfectly loyal.
SPEAKER_00:So this also adds another layer to what I was talking about for the explanation, but you have to get to another point for it. Obviously, we have no idea truthfully what order these stories go in. Okay, I'm letting the audience know this ahead of time. We don't know. There's been theories, there's been speculation on it. Some of it is pretty concrete, some of it's like very much just guest work and hypothesis and whatnot. We we don't know 100% for what's going on here. So, for the sake of my particular theory that I'm putting forward, which I don't see anybody else doing, I'm not saying nobody else has, I just haven't read this from any scholarly stuff for what's been going on there myself. So here's what I see on this front. If you go with Geshtanana, is the maiden, the younger version of Inana. Then you have Inana, because she's getting married, so he's no longer going to be a maiden here for what's going on, which is why I've chosen her. Technically, you I guess you could flip it around. The only one that's not true is Bellily and of course, uh, you know, the mother figure that are literally Demuzud's mother. Those are the old crones, okay? They're the older ones that have already done it. We already know that. That that's not arguable in the tripartite part for what I'm bringing up here for this, okay? But I put Geshtanana as the younger version. It even fits with her being younger than Demuzid to begin with, and other things that we've talked about here for what it is. We also have where Inki is giving all the various Mies out to the various different gods and goddesses and that kind of stuff to do with that. And Inanna doesn't have any. And she goes to him and says, Well, what the heck? I don't I didn't get any. And he says, You don't need any, you already have it. As if he already knows what her destiny is supposed to become, and all that to begin with, which is quite clear. I mean, that's nothing. Inki knows destinies of so many other things, that that doesn't mean shit. That's like, okay, great. That's pretty obvious that he could know something like that. Fine. I don't need to give you one, you already have one. Trust me, dear, you don't need to worry about this. So if you take this same concept for what's going on, you have to where it's actually her role as the beginning portion where she is supposed to be in that state all of the time. And this is what sets off Inanna trying to go and take back power for herself to make it so she's no longer Gestinana, she's just Inana that's going on with it. And this sends her off to go conquer and do all these other things and get all this power and all these other things that are going along with that. And so when you come to the point again, where at the end of it, she's conquered all these different places. Places. She's gotten all these Mies underneath her that she has control over and whatnot. And now she's going into the underworld to go conquer everything. She's conquered Earth. She's conquered heaven. There's only one realm left that needs to be taken over for her and whatnot. And to sit on the throne that Ereshikal holds. And if she does that, she's done everything. She is the penultimate goddess and god that exists inside the Sumerian pantheon. No one can say anything because she has all three realms, right? Out of the three major realms that there are. So that's what she goes and tries to do, supposedly in this variant of the understanding of the story. And while she does that, she obviously fails. She knows she's going to die down there. That's why she sets it up ahead of time. But she's going to do something that nobody else has done. She's going to conquer death itself by coming back through the help of Enki and whatever else the stuff goes with. But she's going to do that for what's going on there. Now, what happens in this particular point of it is you have where all of these other people that the gala demons come up with, and they they, you know, to to they go to Ninshabur, they go to these other ones that are all of her son and another, you know, another priest and all that other stuff that's going on with it. She all tells them to go away. Why? Because they're all doing the proper thing of following the divine order and doing what needs to be done, the lamentations, all that other stuff with it. But her husband isn't. Her husband, at least in one version of the story, is sitting on her throne with slave girls that are entertaining him. Okay? This is the final straw for Gestonana in this particular instance for what's going on. Because now she's become Inana. She's no longer doing any of that stuff beforehand in order to try to claim power for herself. She's done with it. You have betrayed me for the final time. You've caused me this pain for the final time. I'm done with it. You didn't follow me in the divine order of things. You tried to absurp my power for what's going on here. I'm completely done with your bullshit. You're going to the underworld. That's what's happening there with the I don't want to play this game anymore. I'm tired of it for what's happening. Now you might be thinking, well, why does Gestanana then go and do all this stuff to try to prevent him from happening and go going in there and just suffering all the torture and all that other stuff that goes along with that? Again, it's because it's three different parts of the goddess all at the same time that are going there with it to kind of explain it. It's not just one, it's like you have to look at three different characters here that are all playing it, that are making that happen. So her role in that story is to show the suffering, the abuse, and all these other things with it, in order to make it show the next variant of her that doesn't allow that to happen, that doesn't want any part of it in any way, shape, or form, that doesn't want to make it so that way she's at, and she becomes this all-powerful deity, as at least as powerful as she can get for herself and that kind of stuff, that's going and creating her own destiny. It's the exact foil to the other one that's going on on that front for what's happening there. This is my personal interpretation of things with it. We also see going back to like the earth goddess concept that's there, like the you know, and the divine priesthood and all that other stuff that's happening uh with it, and then lowering of the rights down from heaven to men and that kind of stuff. You also see this part play out for what it is. They're now reliant upon her, meaning Inanna, for their powers and that kind of stuff. So it's a complete reversal of things with it, the taking away of patriarchal power and and that kind of thing, with it, and then the patriarchy trying to take it back through Dumazeed and that kind of stuff, and then ultimately failing, at least at that stage, for that, uh, and then her coming back into her own power, and then going and sharing that power and trying to have balance at the end of it, to where Gustinana is in the underworld for half the year, he is in the underworld for half the year. They both get to be above and not in the underworld and that kind of stuff and be in control of it, and to try to share and come back and make it so that way that's a case for it. She feels guilty from that one of her aspects of herself with it. She doesn't just want to do that, her more wiser self, the the crone at the end and all that other stuff, also wants to make it so that way he's brought back in order to make it so that way they can re-establish a proper balanced order of things where everything is fair for both sides for what's going on with it. This also, of course, doesn't just this also doesn't touch upon like the cycles of the seasons and all that, but that's all part of it for the balanced side of things with it, too. I'm just looking at it through this one particular lens right now, just to be clear for what's going on. And so this is my current, I'm not saying it can't change with new evidence that pops up, or my studying more things with that, but my current understanding of the of this situation that's going on here and why it's being done this particular way. Doesn't mean I'm right, absolutely not. There's no doesn't mean that, but it is an explanation that actually does explain this variant, which I haven't seen anybody else explain it.
SPEAKER_01:So no, there's something there's something psychologically valuable there. It's a it's sort of a template because especially when you see Dumasid as an archetype and Dumasid's relations with women as templates for not necessarily the best relationships always, but in fact it might be that all of his relationships are disordered in a sense because he's very often courting Inanna inappropriately or excessively. He is uh often taking taking marital rights before the marriage has happened. Though there is a time where they are married for a while. There is there is happy love poetry with Duma Zeb. But when you look at Geshtanana, she is I mean, you you you have to know that there was there was a male on female abuse in families in the ancient times. And especially if you do identify her partly with Inanna and have sort of a fluid identification there, then you have the sense of, hey, yes, there are women who are being traumatized by the men in their lives in a variety of ways, in in Inanna being usurped after her death, in Inanna being in having her death celebrated, or in Geshtin Anna's many sacrifices and direct abuses. But then the resolution where yes, you really want Duma Zid dragged down by a bunch of demons, but at the same time, Geshton Anna is also defending him to the last. And that but then in the end you do find resolution in a cycle that's not really that great to spend half the year in the underworld in order to have half the year of normal life. It's not a great resolution, but I think especially with the stuff you were talking about, there's there's possibly in that an archetype for ancient women to find uh resolution to various traumas. I don't know. That's just what I was thinking while you were talking.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the other part of it is if you look at who's the one that says it's it's Inana that dictates hey, this is the new, this is what I decree. You will be there for half the year, and you will be there for the other half of the year for what's going on. It's like the older version of herself that's become slightly more wise, slightly more thing, but the telling Demuzi, this is our relationship now, this is the other one, it's a balanced one. We are no longer going to be doing the old way of things for what's happening. So, in that instance, if you play it as the character as different variants of it and time as well, it actually adds to what you're bringing up right now, too.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, and for the woman in this to have dictating authority, whether as a queen or as a wife, that's something you just don't see anywhere else in Mesopotamia. Well, I don't want to say anywhere else, but very rarely in Mesopotamian literature at all. It's very patriarchal, but Dumasid is such a problem for the ladies around him that that I guess it becomes culturally acceptable at a certain point for the woman to say, to be through this myth, to be allowed to say, hey, I'm not taking that anymore.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Right.
SPEAKER_01:And that's also I don't know if it's true or not.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know if that's actually how they viewed it or not. Because the problem is we're looking at from something that was probably much older originally in terms of say oral tradition before it got written down. And we're talking about something that happened over thousands of years of storytelling, and I'm someone that's looking at it from my own modern sensibilities and my own understanding of things that are going on, and I don't have the full picture of what these people believed in terms of their religion, in terms of their politics, and all that other stuff that's going on there, their day-to-day lives, and all that other stuff. Do I have some inkling of what's going on? Yeah, because I've studied this stuff, I've studied other cultures that are similar, time periods, and all that other stuff with it. And so, you know, it could be completely fabricated theory that's just based upon my own understanding of archetypes in general and wanting a better resolution for stuff for it. But as I also see it, there is nothing that I'm bringing up that, at least in the literary sources, the actual that with it, I'm not talking necessarily some other aspects of archaeological findings or whatever, but just that has a logical internal consistency that's going on there that doesn't detract or take away from any of the other parts of the story in any way, shape, or form. And just it gives a full it gives a full fleshing out of a of a variant of a theory that's going on there. To to put this in another perspective for what's going on, I'm sure you're at least somewhat familiar, I mean tangentially, maybe it's not your main stuff with it, like with Homa and Soma, and the Greek god Dionysus being associated with wine for his stuff with it, and like mead and other things that are like that that are playing with it, well, something with the underworld, and then you know, if people who drink that they they gain some sort of resurrection or spiritual illumination or something along those lines with it. Well, Geshtinana literally she's associated with wine, she's the grape, she's the vine of the grapes that are there for what's going on with it. So that's another parallel to okay, who is the one that goes and conquers death in the stories? It's Inana that does. If that is still the same personage, it's just in a different person, same person, but with a different personality, a different archetype that's playing out there with it. It's her before she ferments and becomes the wine that she's supposed to be for what's going on on that front with it, and making it so she can resurrect and do all these other things that are going on there, which would also fit, like I said before, with Inki saying, you don't need it. You've already been given your domain. You will be the one who conquers death, you will be the one who does all these other things that nobody else can touch upon for what's going on when he's not handing out the me's to her, because like you don't need it, you don't need it for what's happening. This would also explain, both on a political level as well as this archetypal level that we're talking about here, why she gets him drunk, meaning in key with it, and then steals all the meas and gets all the powers from what's going on with it. He wants them back originally, but then agrees to just let her have it for what's happening because he realizes uh later on that, like, hey, you know, she's she's fulfilling her destiny now, the way she's supposed to be, that I had foresaw whenever it was that he foresaw in terms of the stories and that kind of thing with it. I'm just gonna let it go, I'm gonna let it be type deal for what's going on on that front. And then, of course, you get intoxication that comes from this that we were talking about earlier, with the divine ecstasy, the divine frenzy that we're talking about. Drunk and being drunk and drinking like you would with wine and that kind of stuff, puts you into that altered state of consciousness again, which is another metaphor for this type of stuff that I've brought up earlier and and whatnot. And so it all just kind of ties together on this particular front again. Again, I is it true? I don't know. I'm not trying to pretend that I do on this. Again, it just fits with all the data points that I have that I can see on this front for what's playing out there for this, and and therefore I view it as at least a valid hypothesis of not saying it's factual. I'm saying it's a valid hypothesis in my mind, though. And if you go with Enki being the patriarch and the one that controls all the meas, which are basically just various different powers of that each of the gods have in some form or another that they're associated with, and he's kind of the one that gives them out, that would be the patriarchal figure again, the father figure, the male being in charge of things with it, and then Inanna having to trick in some form or another, using, you know, getting him drunk and that kind of stuff, and then taking the meas away from him. It's it's another way of showcasing that she's coming into her own power and that women have another way out of this if they are able to make that occur and make it happen. So anyway, I won't ramble on, I'll get your thoughts at this stage.
SPEAKER_01:I think there's a lot there. I think I think what we have is something of a modern interpretation, but I also don't think that makes it wrong because we've got a psychological and we've got an archetypal view going on, and I think that both can be affecting the oral tradition, even without someone sitting down and saying, Hey, let's write something that is archetypally relevant to the Vikings, or or whatever, or let's write something that is a reflection of the trauma that I feel from losing my husband or whatever. I think it might still be there.
SPEAKER_00:I have a question for you before we go any further. It just really popped into my head that it was important. I don't know if there was a case for this or not. Do we know if if there are any surviving like manuals on poetry for like their rules that they had?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, how like how to write poetry?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, almost it's it's a shame because almost all the methodology was strictly oral, and they write down findings and things like that. Do you know who Snorri Stuhlerson is? Snorri Stoulerson, no. That's okay.
SPEAKER_00:He's a 12 1200s, well, 11, late 1100s, early 1200s writer, Icelandic writer and chieftain.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, he's the the edda, the poetic edda.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, poetic edda is its own separate thing for what's going on with it. Now, the reason why I bring it up is because he himself was good. This is again for the Nordic lens here, specifically. But if we're using this as a okay, this could also be translated to other ones, which I know for a fact it can. I'm not saying it is for specifically Sumeria, but it can be translated to other ones that we've seen. That's not even a question. We know that that's the case for. He explicitly states that in the rules of poetry, and the reason why he, at least according to him, for why he was writing this, is because even though people were forgetting their own history, they're forgetting their own poetry, they're forgetting their own understanding of things, the youth had forgotten how to interpret it and what was going on there. So he was writing a manual of not only did it have certain poems of the deities in it, the Nordic pantheon, but but also like the explanations as to what was going on at the very end of it, called the Skald Skopper Mall. He was writing it. That's what he claims for what he was doing it. Whether that's true or not, you can leave that up for your own debate. I don't care. I'm just talking about for what he claims that he was writing this particular thing with it. In it, though, he says you can replace a god or goddess with any other god or goddess, and you can know it by their attributes, their me's, their powers, and whatnot. So if I say tear's hammer and whatnot, we know the hammer is associated with Thor and that it's not Tyr, but you might use Tyr as the replacement for that particular deity in order to meet match all the rhyming schemes and the meters and all that other stuff that need to be there for what's going on. Because the whole point of oral tradition in terms of the rules for it is to make it so that way it's easy to remember because you're having to remember all the different things with it. In fact, someone that's a very good scald, a bard, if you will, and whatnot, they can memorize and the Mahabharata, okay, in terms of its length and whatnot, which would be literally this freaking big if it were translated over their lifetime, and it's it's massive, it's thousands upon thousands of pages long. They have to remember line after line after line. It takes years and years to get to that point, of course, but that's what they would do uh with it as the memory keepers of the lore and whatnot. So the reason why I was asking about the poetry thing is if there was, then we could use that as a definitive yes or no for some of these ideas that I had put forth for what's going on there. Because it's quite clear, even even with Snorri, that he he takes Odin as an example for what's going on. And Odin is explicit explicitly by him broken up into three different parts of himself. High, just as high, and most high is what it is in one of his particular examples for what's happening. So the tripartite god in terms of what's going on there. Well, the tripartite goddess theme that I've been trying to bring up and kind of explore here. If we could find that that is the case for it, then yeah, if we see that that's been proven in poetry, then my my theory becomes much more plausible. I'm not saying it is the case, but it's like, okay, now we have backing up for that, hence why I was asking on that particular front for uh for things with it. And of course, one thing we do know is that very clear, that they make very that Snori makes very clear is that the way the rules are, you you have to make things and metaphors, you have to make it so there's multiple layers of meaning for what's going on with it, and that you can't just like let's say I'm a I'm a Viking who's also a skull who was had some ships that came over uh to to attack us and whatnot. I I can't just say the ships came and attacked us because it's not poetry for what's going on there. I have to use a ferocious thing that gives a dread of it. Okay, so the sea wolves, well, sea wolves is still a little too like ships that are coming over that uh that was what's another name for the sea. So I would use Egger's wolves, he's one of the gods that's in charge of the sea for what's going on with it. All right, wolves a little too thing with that. Oh, how would I do with that? Egger's Frenrer, let's say. Frenrer is the main wolf that kills Odin and Ragnarok and that kind of thing. Ah, it's still a little too uh, it doesn't fit with the rhyme or meter that I'm going for. So you keep changing and keep changing it and keep changing it when you're writing it to eventually if you don't know the rules of poetry and you don't know like the landscape that everybody else is used to in terms of how they think, in terms of their religion, in terms of that with it, you're not gonna understand it. It gets so lost. And without Snori and his this surviving thing, we wouldn't understand shit today about the Nordic. We we'd be we'd be back in the 1800s still in terms of our understanding of stuff with this. It's not an exaggeration, besides maybe some archaeological findings, but in terms of like the history and the poetry, we'd be we wouldn't know shit without him, and quite frankly. And so why I'm bringing this up again is because I know it's translatable to other Germanic peoples and that kind of thing, 100%. I also know it's you know translatable to other Indo-European groups, it's the same concept that's there for what's going on. You can see this with the Greeks, you can see this with the various different Celtic peoples that are going on. They're just as brief examples. You can see this with what the Indus Valley civilization and the Vedic traditions and all that, but these people, the Indo the Indo-Europeans, are separate from the Sumerian ones, and the Sumerians weren't part of it. So I don't know if that same general concept, I'm not saying the exact same rules for all of them, because they don't have all the same rules. We're talking thousands upon thousands of years, but the same general trends can be applied to Sumeria, and if they can, well then definitely have another uh, you know, another way of looking at things that can really truly deep dive this for us. That's why I was wondering if there was any such thing that we knew, even if it's not like theirs, maybe there's a Babylonian version that was in like the library of Anbershapal or whatever, however you pronounce it, and that kind of stuff that survived that they claim came from. Okay, maybe it's not 100% accurate, but we know some parts of it are definitely going to be accurate, so you get where I'm coming from.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah. No, they they gave us very little methodology, intellectual methodology. They clearly had intellectual methodology, but it seems to have either not survived or more likely been purely oral.
SPEAKER_00:That'd be my guess is the second uh second one, the oral tradition for what it is.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I don't know, but no, it's there's a lot there, that's for sure. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:I'm looking through and again, this might be my own bias of pulling from so many different sources that I'm using techniques that you can use in one field that don't necessarily apply to this field. You get where I'm coming from?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean it is it is Semitic poetry, which has its own and I mean the Sumerians are not Semitic, obviously, but the Akkadians and Amorites that most of it filters through is Semitic, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And then the Sumerians and of course the Semitic peoples did end up having where the Indo-Europeans did come and influence them at some point. We know that. So we do know that at least say a couple steps removed from Sumerian stuff that's come down from us, it is possible that some of those archetypes and some of this we're talking about is completely there, which is why I ran with thinking it's not impossible. It's not impossible. If it's impossible, I wouldn't even know that thought.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the the Indo-Europeans come in end of the Middle Bronze Age, basically.
SPEAKER_00:For those of you can you give a time period for people who aren't familiar with that?
SPEAKER_01:Um you're looking at about 1600 BC. Uh plus or minus a couple centuries.
SPEAKER_00:I couldn't remember exactly. I was putting it around 4,000-ish years ago to 3,800 years ago. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's and and by then a lot of the archetypes in the broader Mesopotamian mythos have solidified bunt. That doesn't mean they don't share archetypes, either because of some deeper underlying, more universal human traditions, or yeah, or just because humans write the same kind of stories all over the place. Both of those are options. Aliens are, of course, always the third option.
SPEAKER_00:Uh I mean I I but I'm 100% convinced that there's other intelligent life forms out there in the universe. All right. It would, it's just astronomically improbable we're the only ones. Okay. It's just like there's nothing.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, for sure, for sure.
SPEAKER_00:I just don't think the only question is whether they came here and did anything that like influenced our society or not. That's the only real question for what's going on there in my mind, uh, for what's happening. And if they're still visiting us today, let's say, you know, that type of deal for what it is. You know, for all we know, we're just a fun experiment for them to see how their own civilizations came and arose and that kind of thing. Or we're the insane asylum of the uh galaxy that everybody comes and checks out because they're all well past where we're at, and they don't have a lot of these wars and problems that we still have, and they're just like, well, when are they gonna figure it out? When are they gonna figure it out? Like we're a giant Truman show for them or something. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01:I'll bet they're taking they're taking bets on all of our wars, probably. How much are the Assyrians gonna expand? I'll bet you 50 global credits. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know. I don't know. I I do know that there are certain mythologies that are very, very clear that yes, there were these alien beings that came here. Extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, we'll say. Does that make them physical beings, though? Because extraterrestrial, in my use, it's could also mean from another realm or dimension, and so they could have been contacting spiritual entities and whatnot. That's the other part of it for what's happening.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:There's there's a lot of depth there, and I mean it's not the main focus, but it's fun to think about a little bit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I say we don't have any methodology from the Mesopotamians, but like I talked about last time, we the one methodology that we do get from them in their commentary traditions is so esoteric and so alien to how we think of things that it just baffles, as far as I could tell everyone who studies it, where they chop the word up like I was doing with that into these etymologies. But it's not just etymologies, it's not straightforward. I mean, there there is a straightforward layer of these etymologies, but then it gets super esoteric, and it's like, what's going on?
SPEAKER_00:And you can forward me the information regarding that, or it doesn't have to be like the act, like the actual like PDFs or whatever, but like where I can grab that.
SPEAKER_01:So I can't I think I might even have that. It's there's a a cuneiform commentaries project put through by Yale.
SPEAKER_00:Because this would be something that could help either prove or disprove my current thoughts, you get where I'm coming from, if I could deeply study it.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, and I haven't actually looked at it in because you know they're I assume they're continually well, I say they're continually updating it, but it looks like they might not have updated it in a couple of years. But I'll send it to you. I'll put it down in the description box for anybody else who is interested in cuneiform commentaries, because they do get interesting to say.
SPEAKER_00:Do I need to know cuneiform at all in order to understand it, or do they put it in modern English for us?
SPEAKER_01:At least some of it is translated. How much is translated? I don't even remember.
SPEAKER_00:But yes. At least some of it is I can go in and look at the material that's available there and be like, okay, is this still a possibility? And if I see that there's connections there that I've seen with other traditions that I'm aware of, and be like, yeah, this is still a possibility, then I can keep running with the theory. If not, it's like, nah, I'm completely wrong. I'm I'm Insane person, let's move on. Well, it's like what I talked about before with the guest inana thing, where it was like a you got inana, and obviously that's very simple, it's still the other character with the you got guest guest, which means ear, and if you take the symbol from it and whatnot, the symbolic understanding, it means wise. So therefore, you got wise inana for what's happening there. Maybe there's more to it. I'm just talking about the simplicity that I remember off the top of my head for that, and and that kind of thing. So if you do all that, okay, great. You already know that there's some connection there for what it is. What's true, what's not, that's a different story for what's going on with it. Again, this is not necessarily how the Sumerians would have done it, but this is definitely how the Babylonians would have done it. And the Akkadians and stuff like that from that time period, if I'm not mistaken, correct?
SPEAKER_01:Possibly.
SPEAKER_00:But like I mean, like how they would have broken it down, the the cuneiform part. Not not necessarily that that's correct, but that's how they would have done it, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's I mean that's thank you. Yes, it's sort of like it's sort of like if we had one history textbook from nowadays, and it's just a Marxist history textbook. And then a thousand years from, you know, like if if a thousand years from now, archaeologists are looking, how did people nowadays do history? And all they have is one Marxist history textbook from communist China, and they're like, oh, the methodology was to assume this grand system that that predicted all of everything. And it's like, well, that was a methodology in use in our time, but it's not the only one. There's all the other ones. Right. There's this whole that that's the hard thing with making too many generalizations.
SPEAKER_00:I'm not trying to say it's a generalization, I just want to make sure that I'm not so off-kelter that it isn't even a methodology for that time period. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01:It is, yeah, definitely. All right.
SPEAKER_00:So my theory can stand at least for the subset of people minimum.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, it's at least one way of thinking about stuff. And there's just yeah, there's a lot going on there. Probably take more than a lot of people.
SPEAKER_00:We'll say at least from the esoteric group of people, the more mystery school-oriented tradition group of people for what it is. What I'm saying is definitely a plausible explanation. A plausible explanation.
SPEAKER_01:It's definitely possible.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I think we've done more on Dumasid than most people ever bothered to.
SPEAKER_00:I would agree on that, at least from what I've seen.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think I've gone.
SPEAKER_00:To me, I I feel like I you and I are just kind of scratching, I wouldn't say the surface, but like just below the surface and what that there's so much more that could be talked about here. You know, if you look at it from like uh the iceberg perspective, most people take the top five, 10%. I feel like we've gotten to maybe like 20, 25% or something like that. There's still another another all these other little details and elements that we're like nowhere near touching and that kind of stuff. Because we're not uh we're not devoting our lives to this one specific topic like some people do, so yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, I th I feel like to get deeper into DumaZid, you would need to look at magic and ritual, which is not ever something that I've really specialized in. And I don't actually know I don't know how much DumaZid ritual there is. I'm not an expert on it, but I do I can't remember seeing too much Dumasid magic in the various things I've read. But I would say that would be the getting deeper would be that. Yeah, I would say getting deeper would be looking at Dumasid as it relates to practice. Um because this is all this is at the mythic and archetypal level, and praxis would get you further, and then it would reinforce your mythic and archetypal understanding, or does it and then it would yeah, and then it would that would feed on it would feed on itself. I don't think it would dismantle much of what we have, too much of what we have, but that's how you would go further, and I'm not equipped to go further because I'm not gonna sit there and read magic because it's boring.
SPEAKER_00:Hey man, depends on the magical system. That's all I'm gonna say. That's for sure.
SPEAKER_01:Mesopotamian magic. Mesopotamian magic has the magic power to put me to sleep.
SPEAKER_00:No, when on on that on that notion of things in terms of the the magical system idea and and whatnot, it's it's quite clear that there are certain traditions that are like, whoa, that's fascinating, and that kind of thing. How does that work? And you know, regardless whether you believe in it or not, it's just like, huh, that's really cool. On that front, though, there were pockets that have been reported surviving in in Iraq of the Dumasid cult up until the 1800s. So it might actually be very possible to reverse engineer that a lot more than say some other traditions that didn't survive past a certain point at all. We also know that in general it survived uh up until the 1100s and that kind of thing, and in large swaths. So in this instance, there's a lot more written from other traditions, too, that could be a glimpse that could give us all the way back down into that system, much more so than say other ones where it's like, yeah, we don't have a chance of actually re redoing this, we just don't. It's all more or less speculation for what's going on. It's not like a living tradition, say like Shintoism or uh Hinduism or something like that, where it's like, okay, maybe it's changed somewhat over thousands of years, but there's enough here that we can go and figure out what has changed, you know, from the texts that are left and whatnot. So I, you know, I'm not saying I'm gonna do that. That's not something I intend to do. I'm not saying I won't do it either, but it is something that's at least plausible to do. It's not impossible. Like some of the other stuff. It's like, yeah, let's let's bring back a resurrect resurrected tradition that's been gone for thousands of years that we know next to nothing about. Say, like a mystery school tradition. Now, some of them you can't, there's lots of evidence for them on the archaeological level, and even some written, but other ones, like, there's nothing, there's literally nothing, you know, like the Orphics as an example. There's way more on them because the Orphic hymns than say on some other ones that wrote down literally nothing, and all we have is archaeological stuff and makes that way it's way more guesswork than than other ones.
SPEAKER_01:So at least in Mesopotamia, we still find texts every day.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, so yeah, because they wrote on clay, so we can at least we can still wrote down so much that we're grateful for that that we can fill in a lot of history for what's going on. Thank you for for you guys doing that stuff, and unlike other places where it's like, man, I wish there were so much more. The guys are interesting.
SPEAKER_01:The moral of the story is if you want something to last, carve it in stone. And stone carving tools are not expensive now. You could do it in your backyard, write whatever you want on a big old rock.
SPEAKER_00:No one's gonna last potentially thousands upon thousands of years, and you could become even more just like the person who made a complaint to somebody else from the Sumeria that's that way today, and it was probably one of it's the oldest recorded complaint in history that we have of in terms of writing a review for their product. Yes, that's the you could do that too.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, write up that that mean old bully from high school, say this guy's a bully, he's a terrible person, and people will remember it, people will find it someday. Yeah, that's the joy, that's the joy of of the the ancient stuff is that some of it's so strange and some of it's so very human.
SPEAKER_00:Human.
SPEAKER_01:It's uh oh, it's wonderful.
SPEAKER_00:Some things never change, other things are like do change, and it really showcases what are what's human, what's what's what's constant, and stuff, and other things are like, man, that was just completely bizarre. That's gotta be just situational to them, or that or that time period.
SPEAKER_01:And yeah.