#dingir

[depravednotdeprived]

Rings of Saturn - Dingir

[pl9090]

[exanima]

[death-metalhead]

[mastabas-and-mushussu]

Polytheist Ramblings: Nisaba

I was going to title this “Finding Sanctuary”, but I think this fits with my little series better.

I talk a lot about other gods, because their influences are many-layered. It’s easy to talk about a goddess of the mountains when you live there, or a god of the furious sun when you’re melting. But how to talk about a goddess you’re sworn to? There’s something about the relationship that just won’t out with words, which is ironic considering.

My Lady Nisaba colored like the stars, whose body is the flecked barley, She who holds the Book of Names and who had a hand in the creation of her scribes, the goddess I revere and adore, is... as I said, words fail. Except for the part where she literally IS the written word. And then I’m laughing at my laptop screen again.

But my mind was wandering the other day, and I started mentally constructing a hypothetical temple. Something small and unobtrusive, but interesting. Maybe someplace busy, like New York, with the old back-alley surprise shops and classy old courtyards surrounded by sprouting skyscrapers. I’m rather attached to America, but I could see something similar in London. Either way, some sort of divot in the walls of glass and steel, a high-walled courtyard with a heavy door. But the door is left open, and the walls are soft with vines. It’s guarded by twin stone lions. The same ones you sometimes see in the yards of people trying too hard to look regal, maybe. But it’s an old practice. Probably inspired by the New York Library. Possibly a reflection of the statues that guarded kings and old polytheist temples. Either way, there would be lions, and maybe a carving of the Anzu Bird over the lintel.

In this hypothetical little sacellum, no if ands or buts about it, there would be a public bookcase or two. I’ve seen them around town, and they’re absolutely brilliant. The paving stones would be covered in all sorts of book quotes in as many languages as I could convince a mason to try, including Braille. At the back there would have to be a statue, and some of my thinking is probably inspired by when I wandered Granada and would stumble on an aljibe with a mosaic of the Virgin over it. In my head this looks a little bit close to the Madonna, and I’m not sure what I think of that. But there’d be a little plaque on the wall explaining who she is, and a basket or two for whatever a person might want to offer. I like the idea of a prayer box, I’ve seen those before, where you write on a slip of paper and it stays in the box as a secret. Or the papers are burned. Either way, both fit with the goddess of the written word and the old ways of burning offerings to lift your prayers skyward.

I have a lot of ideas, and no real means or resources to focus on them, but ideas are nice. I was thinking about this temple idea, and I wondered to myself what her sacred animal would be. There’s no record of one. Lions and bulls and dragons are all staple parts of the old hymns, but... I wanted to see if anything had developed over the years. In America we’ve developed this idea of giving teachers an apple, which is why I offer them to her. We associate twin lions with libraries because of the New York Library. Maybe there was more, hiding away with the book curses and scriptoriums.

I typed “Ten Most Iconic Libraries” into Google.

A good percentage of them are related to monasteries, which makes sense. Some of them had royal sponsorship at one point or another. There’s nods to their local history, the obvious relish of architects given room to play, some modernized and some stately old monuments. But there was one little detail that kept popping up in the descriptions: quite a few of the oldest libraries had a... symbiotic relationship of sorts with resident bats.

Bats and small birds like to hole up in unusual places, true. Check out your local mall food court and keep an eye out in the airport as you drag your suitcase down the moving sidewalk to see for yourself what I mean. But apparently your friendly neighborhood pest control has a taste for bookworms.

(For the record, the term ‘bookworm’ refers to any insect with a taste for literature. This extends to moths who eat cloth bindings and beetles who tunnel through the paper like wood, as well as the beetles after your leather tomes.)

In ancient Sumer, bats and birds were associated with Nanshe, especially pelicans. More specifically, owls were associated with lilitu-demons and possibly Ereshkigal. But then, their libraries more closely resembled the cooling rack at your local college pottery class. Not something many bookworms wanted to nibble.

Cultures change and religions evolve. I think I’ve found my answers, at least to this question. Especially considering how sometimes the endless shelves remind me of a quiet crypt (Seriously, my first time in a proper old crypt that was my first comparison). Maybe I’m obsessive and seeing connections, maybe bats are my favorite animal and I’m biased. But it’s interesting, to see the evolution of the gods. It’s interesting, to run the thought experiments, to ask the “what if”s, to make yourself at home on the outskirts and then see places where society has already met you in the middle, unnoticed.

For that matter, colophons are pretty cool too.

Nisaba za3-mi2-zu dug3-ga-am3

[s-e-c-t-i-o-n-8]

[pagansquare]

Nabu, God of Writing and Wisdom

Nabu is one of the most important Mesopotamian deities.  His name can be interpreted to mean brilliant, one-who-names, announcer, or herald. Associated with Apollo by the Greeks, Mercury by the Romans, and Thoth by the Egyptians, he was the scribe and minister of Marduk, head of the pantheon.

Read more...

[chipperplacebo]

Deluge

It comes from the overpass and the awning and the carved relief. I see it only in the city, but I've read it comes from everywhere when the rain is so heavy that the air turns to a murky refracted green. I call it the deluge. Not just the rain, but a living thing. It sees me and I know there is intelligence in the glistening pareidolia of nothing between the shapes of the viaducts. I know it has a name.

I never asked my friends if they saw what I did. I learned long ago that minds of my nature survive only through a sort of hermitage, building their secluded cabins among the silence of trailed off sentences and 'never mind's. Books afford me a different sort of friendship, but there is no mutual understanding. They are just a stark record of a shared experience, made suspicious by the innate doubt of a world plagued by amnesia and confirmation bias. But they are all I have.

When the monsoons come, the deluge shows itself to me in those first heavy minutes. I am nearly always driving, or sometimes between buildings in a full sprint. I am always outdoors. When I think I can see it, I know it can see me; and more, it wants me to see. At first I had thought the name I had come up with was good enough, but shouting to it felt like hailing the raindrops instead of the form beneath. So I took to calling it by other names. Tlaloc. Chaac. Enki. Indra. Deng. No rainstorm ever called back to those trepidatious summons.

My interest never waned. I started to make deeper associations with those who thought they knew the name of the thing. It wasn't just the name. Those that got it right, got close to right, had other ideas. The ziggurat. A building designed not just to survive a flood, but to give it a place to live as it channeled back into nature. Astronomy. It comes from the stars, and every civilization that welcomed it had a way to listen. There were more similarities, but no more were needed. It had something to say, and the people wished to listen every so often.

Dreams came soon after.

Temples grown from bismuth oxide and serpent flesh patterns of a god etched into living slabs of cities rain slicked engines of steel and glass heaving as if they had been filled with azoth living water, like mercury. or fire.

It moved through my world like a waterfall subjecting every crevice and gutter to subjective gravity. It hunted for the dry spaces that man defiantly claimed it could not reach. Some structures were found lacking, and were drowned. Some proved lovely and playful, and try as it might the water could not enter. These structures stood only by merit of cleverness and clemency. Every so often it would look for those who did not fear it. Some were blessed, others taken. And then it found me. Like high priests of old, I knew where to stand. It climbed and plunged over my chosen ziggurat, investigating the offerings of dry stone and fast channels. I followed it inside, through the drains and grates to the arches below. It let me wade within it. I never saw it, but when I moved through it there were memories. Atavistic, dreams within dreams, of what it was before. As the motion stilled, the dreams faded to lesser dreams, until I stood only in a placid lake of rainwater below the streets of the city. Unliving. Unspeaking. Just inert water.

I still call it the deluge, but now it calls back to me.