Up From Below, the Primordial Goddess
During family movie night a few weeks back we watched Remember the Titans, the story of the ’71 T.C. Williams High School football team shortly after segregation of schools ended. It’s heartwarming, though formulaic, and mines that decades old feel-good vein of whites and blacks coming together to overcome their prejudice. First they hate each other, then after a hellish football camp they respect each other, yadi yadi yada they win the big game and diversity is their strength and prejudice is bad. Where would we all be without Hollywood sending us perennially reminders that we all hate each other?
Anyway, one of the characters named Sunshine, from California, makes his appearance onscreen with hippie clothes and long hair. Gary, the protagonist, calls him “fruitcake”, slang for gay, and the whole team temporarily overcomes their racial animosity and chuckle together over shared bigotry. In the next scene, Sunshine approaches Gary in the locker room and kissed him right on the mouth, provoking Gary to flip out and take a few swings at him. Sunshine bobs and weaves and then pushes Gary into a table and the fight is over. As it turns out, Sunshine was not gay, only baiting Gary to take a swing at him so Sunshine could put him in his place. Pretty innocuous scene. Or so we thought.
My daughter was troubled to the core, having what appeared to be a mini panic attack – laryngospasm, teary eyes, shaking, the whole deal. It had all the making of a trauma, though anyone looking from the outside would have certainly called this an over reaction.
And that was my first though. Too emotional. In fact, to my shame, when she called to me repeatedly in obvious distress about the scene, I responded with a calcified, “What? I didn’t kiss him.” Nice one. Solid delivery. Its always helpful to twist the knife with a bit of sarcasm when someone you love is traumatized. After all, she is going to have oodles of experiences in life that are much, much worse than what she saw, and a few extra layers of dead skin over the heart will do her good. Can’t hurt what is not alive, am I right? Apparently, I have yet to find the southern border of my insensitivity.
Well, thank God I was kept from that catastrophic obtuseness, mostly because of my wife, who encouraged me to dig deeper into this mystery. I swear, if we actually do have guardian angels mine would be requesting a new security detail.
Tenderly, in my right mind, I asked her to describe how she was feeling. What came to mind as she spoke was that the contents of this movie scene had capsized her world. Though unable to name it, something about it upset the order of creation way down in the pillars. This enemy, whatever it was, was old.
As she was describing this to me, a memory came to mind. Another episode, years ago, that happened upon my sister when she was in high school, again during a movie. I forget the movie, but it was some similar type of scene that was probably a bit scary, but no more so than dozens of other scenes in hundreds of movies. However, something about it shook her to the core and kicked off what has become a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety, one I am happy to say she is winning. My mother has also grappled anxiety, and her mother before her put them all to shame.
But this was more than mere anxiety, or some antiseptic DSM-V clinical anxiety disorder. As far as it goes, anxiety is the 21st century version of the fear of the means of death. When a person can be diagnosed with a mental disorder because of the weather changes too fast, this is a privileged anxiety; that anxiety has increased proportionally to our perceived level of control over our world. I believe what is underneath my daughter’s experience, and the experience of many others, is something much older, much fouler, and lives in the deep places of the earth, namely, Chaos.
Seeing this same sex, forcible kiss in front of her eyes upended the natural order of her world and demolished the categories which she has build her security and understanding of reality. Underneath the scaffolding of social order and predictability lies the gaping black maw of chaos where all binding structure is undone.
This is not a novel experience. Indeed, in one way all the structure of life and social order are bulwarks to keep the tireless and intrusive force of chaos out of our lives. Each time a child asks for the hall light to stay on and the closet door shut, the nearness of chaos is experienced in perpetuity. The scariest monsters are not the ones who will eat you, but the ones who can destroy your world while leaving your body intact to be ravaged by the darkness. Kids are not afraid of dying at the hands of the monsters, but by being subject to their wild whims and appetites. This is the kid version of FDR’s famous phrase, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” We have all had this feeling at some point in our lives, where the assumed order of our world drops from under us, reason abandons us, and we are subject to the mercy of uncontrollable and malevolent forces beyond understanding.
To show my solidarity with the emotion, I was riding home from work the other night, in the dark, on the bike path, listening to Henry James’s The Turning of the Screw. From the corner of my eye I saw a hulking beast laid out in a dead sprint paralleling the path. Adrenaline coursed and I pounded the pedals, and only after my heart rate jacked up, did I do a double take to realize it was a juniper bush minding its own damn business. Stupid, right? But in that millisecond my mind abandoned me, reason left, categories which prohibited this nonsense melted and I was at the mercy of some black beast coursing through the shadows, thinking only of me. Turns out, this feeling is wicked old, harkening back to the dawn of recorded time.
The Deep
Most ancient creation myths had some chaotic substrate from which a god or gods brought forth order. Cultures which predate the Hebrews by a thousand years had a well formed idea of disorder and the tremendous amount of attention required to maintain order. Sumerians, the oldest Mesopotamians culture, feared Tiamat, the goddess of the sea, representing the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos often depicted as a dragon. Egyptians imagined eight gods, four frog-headed males, four snaked-headed females, separated into pairs representing darkness, infinity, water and hiddenness, all swimming about in the watery chaos of pre-creation.
Interestingly, in Genesis we see similar concepts:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Genesis 1:1-2, ESV
Reading the first verses of the Genesis creation myth, we often gloss over the deep dark and jump to verse three, eager to turn on the light. But it is in these two verses where we encounter the primordial and terrifying deep, the void and the vacancy. The Hebrew captures some of the strange guttural, untranslatable words tohu vabohu which cannot be reproduced in English with anything resembling the Hebrew assonance, which throbs like an incantation, calling out the chaos by name, the waste and void.
The Hebrew word for “deep” is tehom, which means “the abyss, the sea”. Indicated in the graphic above, the Hebrews imagined the deep surrounding the land and occupying the vast hollows beneath it. Interestingly, tehom is cognate the Sumerian Tiamat, the creepy chaotic goddess. Too, it shares a missing article indicating that tehom was a proper noun – an identity, not a thing, and so formidable it almost seemed to have personality and intention. The root of the word is still found lingering in the region to this day in the coastal plain region of the Red Sea, called the Tihamah.
The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures written a couple hundred years before Christ, translates “the deep” with the Greek word abussos, where we get our word “abyss”. Not only is the deep referring to the physical depths of the ocean but also metaphorically stood for all the unseen, chaotic unrealities roiling in the abyssal darkness. Frequently “the sea” is used to represent the godless and dark gentile world set against the “land” which the Jews poetically used to refer to the good earth of Israel, where Yahweh ruled. Later, in second temple Judaism, the abyss came to be associated with the realm of the dead and evil spirits.
Sewing together these physical concepts of the depths and the chaos of the deep is a passage from Revelation, giving a first century Jewish understanding of the concept.
And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit [Greek: abussos]. He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit [abussos], and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
Revelation 9:1-2, ESV
First century Jewish lore believed the Temple of God stood on top of this shaft to the Abyss, plugging it up and keeping the evil spirits sequestered from the world; a cork for the volcano of chaos. Jesus is begged by a freshly exorcised demon to send into a pack of pigs, not the Abyss, which is apparently terrifying even for fallen angels.
Deep, darkness, chaos, formlessness, void, abyss, dragons, beasts, evil spirits – these oppose and held at bay by order, light, goodness and clarity. Psychologists have taken these ideas metaphorically to symbolize the chaos and unhinged desires of the id, the unfathomable subconscious. The Shadow of Jungian archetypes harbors some of this tremulous fear of what lies beneath the soft, firm grass of conscience and social structures where we safely live out out conscious lives.
Order From Chaos
From the watery chaos of Genesis 1, God brings order with the first and most necessary bifurcation, “Let there be light.” This phrase is cumbrous in English, adding parts of speech that are absent in the beautifully simple Hebrew, “Be light.” And light beed. God, making no preparations, using no intermediary means, and requiring no practice, called light into being with his Word of power. First, the governance of light dividing day and night. Next, sky and land, ordering what is above from below. Boundaries were fixed for the deep and the land; names are granted. Flora followed by fauna, including man. Adam and Eve are then married, establishing the governance of the family. Finally they are given mandates to bring order the dusty wilderness of the earth by making it a garden.
What I believe my daughter experience in that brief moment was the destructuring of the order on which her world was built and she tumbled into the roiling sea with the slimy things and Leviathan lurking beneath her treading toes. The absolute center of her stability is the relationship of her parents fused in marriage, her first encounter with the orderliness of an ordered universe of which God is proprietor. It is not Newtonian physics or philosophical certainty or systematic theology which tucks her into reality, it is her parents – a man and a woman – that sets her foundation. This is exactly the foundation that what was upended in the movie scene – that foundational category of man and woman bound in marriage. And if the category of mom and dad are destroyed, this also means the destruction of all categories whatever and nature is unraveled with a pull of the string leaving the girl adrift in the dark anarchic abyss.
To Stand on the Earth
If the ground underneath her was eroding, then what she needed was a strong dose of sovereignty. Faith in a God who makes something from nothing is good medicine for the yellowing heart. Together we read how God tamed the chaos, hooked it through the nose and wrangled it into order.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Genesis 1:3-5, ESV
As we read, earth took shape under her feet and hardened into a foundation with declarations of order which God had made. Afterward, she scampered upstairs and made this talisman and taped it to her door. God bless her dyslexic little mind.
Instead of numbing herself to the chill of space and arbitrariness of a chaos, or pouring cement into her chest cavity, we introduced her feet to the ground. Deserts teach men to love water; chaos teaches them to cling to ioder. Chaos is answered not with an insensate heart and a comfortable routine of the arbitrary, but the feeling of spoken earth between your toes.
Conclusion
Chaos is an old enemy and is always present outside the camp of family and culture, lurking at the edges of the wilderness. When the categories which God brought from the chaos are attacked by man, it is simultaneously an attack on the concept of categories themselves. To our demise, the order brought about by God is being systematically dismantled with the silly and mistaken notion that once we demolish everything down to the atomic level a new reality can be built. But there is only one reality; there is Christ or there is chaos. To not choose the former is to invite the latter.
Reason is not the antidote for anxiety, nor is callousness. Dred cannot be assuaged forever with barbiturates. Underneath the soul foundering we attenuate to mere anxiety is the roiling, turbulent and anarchic forces of chaos. Embedded in the dissolution of order is the dissolving of love, land, and light on which lives are built. And the only one who can bring order from chaos is the One who can call things that are not as though they were and bring something from nothing.
Thought Butter 