Enki and the embodied world.

• Author: Dickson, Keith
• Position: Enki and Ninhursag - Critical essay

The central and indeed paradigmatic role of the body in cosmogonic myths has been studied most extensively to date by Bruce Lincoln, with primary emphasis on the Indo-European (IE) tradition. (1) Within that tradition, a clear homology holds--microcosm to macrocosm and vice-versa--between body part and natural feature, as best represented by narratives in which an ancestral corpse first undergoes dismembering transformation and then reconstitution into the world at large, each body part matching some physical (and often societal) feature. (2) Moreover, rather than giving rise to a unilateral and merely static set of metaphorical correspondences--hair with trees, for instance, eyes with sun and moon, mouth with cave or fire, blood with channelled waterways, and so forth--Lincoln has convincingly argued that these homologies instead comprise the terms of a dynamic, reversible cycle of destruction and reconstruction worked out at the practical level in the relation between sacrifice and healing. These are experienced as complementary acts: the one dismembers, the other restores a body that at the same time figures as icon for the world itself. (3) Medicine, in this sense, is an authentically cosmogonic technology--by definition, the very first technology, in fact--just as sacrifice presents a kind of therapy of the primally chaotic world.

The Sumerian mythic narrative now generally known as "Enki and Ninhursag" (EN) offers a hitherto unexplored instance of a similar but still quite distinct typology at play outside the IE tradition. (4) I have recently argued that the myth, far from being an archetype of the story of the Fall in the Hebrew Genesis tradition, as scholars in the early decades of the last century were understandably all too eager to assume, falls squarely instead into the category of trickster-tales. (5) Its concern is chiefly to map the effects wrought by the passage of Enki, trickster god of sweet subterranean waters, through one after another of a series of natural and cultural sites Sumerian civilization marked out in the process of organizing its world. Both as a creative force and no less--perhaps even especially--as an agent of transgression, Enki successively either makes anew or else transforms City, Marsh, Riverbank, Garden, House, and Temple into habitable spaces; in turn, he is himself ultimately transformed into the creator and guarantor of an ordered realm--the "paradise" of Dilmun (6)--that comprises those and other significant venues. He does this principally through exercise of his sexual potency in the form of predatory encounters with a number of females, including (thus incestuously) his own offspring. (7) Through the course of his activities, physical landscapes are radically altered. The blank and arid scape of Dilmun ab origine, for example, becomes a rich and highly cosmopolitan mercantile center, while previously uncultivatable land becomes fertile. Moreover, the structures of various social institutions (economic trade), technologies (agriculture, herbal medicine), and behaviors (courtship) are also either created or at least delineated and confirmed.

The myth focuses (as does the present study) on two episodes in which those transformations culminate: (8)

(E1) (EN 197-217). In a parody of earlier scenes in which Enki prowls the border between marsh and dry land to stalk his female prey, the trickster turns his attention to eight plants that have just sprouted on the riverbank from his own semen spilled in a previous assault. (9) Predation is again his modus operandi, but here the narrative switches from a sexual to a culinary code as Enki now expresses his desire to "know the hearts" and "fix the destinies" of those plants. (10) Here too is parody, of course, since these terms more properly belong to the solemnity of generically more elevated "sacred myth," not the folktale burlesque of Enki's incestuous romp through the marsh. In the case of the plants in EN, this "knowing" and "fixing" come to pass as his sukkal Isimud names each plant in turn, plucks or cuts it from the ground, and hands it to Enki, who proceeds to devour it. The success of his aim is textually acknowledged: the anonymous narrator confirms that by these means Enki indeed comes to know and determine their essential natures. At the same time, however, the trickster's meal also makes him mortally ill--as at one and the same time the (overdetermined) result of bellyache, ridiculous male pregnancy, and a curse laid on him subsequent to his eating the plants. His imminent death threatens the stability of both human and divine worlds, since he is after all the source of vital water, and the gods are strongly moved to seek a cure.

(E2) (EN 250-278). The remedy takes the form of Enki's placement within the vulva of the naked birth-goddess Ninhursag, herself a primal source of life. (11) There then follows a punning set of verbal exchanges between Ninhursag and the incorporated trickster, a dialogue in which Enki names in descending order each of the eight body parts--head, hair, nose, mouth, throat, arm, ribs, and sides--in which he is afflicted with lethal pain, and Ninhursag (somehow) produces an offspring whose name puns with that specific part. The result is an octet of minor deities that presumably embody or at least hold sway over the curative powers of the eight plants Enki earlier swallowed in E1, and with which he was (self-)impregnated. The text of the myth does not expressly say as much, but its narrative structure strongly implies that it is precisely those same eight ingested as plants that are miraculously turned into gods within Enki's male belly/womb, itself embedded in the female womb of Ninhursag. (12) The ensuing network of correspondences thus implicitly links each (divinized) plant to a specific ailment in each of eight parts of the body. Ninhursag and Enki then cooperate again in assigning a function and social place to each newborn god, thereby "fixing the destiny" of each, just as the trickster earlier did for the eight plants. The story as a whole reaches closure with formulaic praise of Enki, who emerges last from Ninhursag's vulva as (somehow) restored to health--and along with him, the world as such--by this peculiar therapeutic intervention.

The narrative clearly aims at the establishment of what Lincoln calls "homologic alloforms" involving specific things--plant, body part, ailment, divinity--whose correspondences implicitly underwrite a magico-medical pharmacopeia. (13) will deal with these shortly. First, however, and perhaps even more significantly, attention needs to be focused on the acts whereby those homologies are determined. These are acts of naming; the narrative of EN as a whole in fact is chiefly organized by means of the rhetorical trope of enumeration. (14) Moreover, its overall structure suggests that those acts themselves are also meant to be homologous: the naming of body parts and nascent gods in the second episode (E2) responds directly with the naming of plants in the first (E1). In that initial passage, Enki questions his minister before proceeding to eat each plant--just as in a series of earlier episodes (EN 92-97; 112-17; c7-10), for that matter, he asks him about each of the females (his own offspring) he will subsequently rape on the same site (15)--and Isimud responds in each instance by pronouncing its name. A brief excerpt (EN 199-208) captures something of the formulaic archaism of the scene:

"Which is this one, which is this one?" "Master, the wood-plant," he says. He plucks it and he (Enki) eats. "Master, the honey-plant," he says. He pulls it for him and he (Enki) eats. "Master, the <...> plant," he says. He plucks it and he (Enki) eats. "Master, the plant anumun," he says. He pulls it for him and he (Enki) eats. This exchange takes place pursuant to Enki's stated desire to "know the hearts" and "fix the destinies" of the plants he has (somehow) fathered (EN 198, 217). While a pair of distinct acts attributed to separate individuals--naming (Isimud) and eating (Enki)--are involved here, it is most likely the case that the resultant "knowing and fixing" are meant to be understood as a hendiadys rather than as two different actions. (16) This is especially the case insofar as "knowing" in such contexts as these is generally an act that issues in verbal expression, specifically in the naming of the thing at issue. Elsewhere in the literature, the link between naming/knowing and fate is a common one, as is the centrality of both to narratives of the creation and organization of the world. The most familiar linkage of ideas of course appears in the opening lines of the Enuma Elish (EE), which designate the time before cosmogony as a time "when yet no gods were manifest, / nor names pronounced, nor destinies decreed" (Dalley 1989: 233); (17) the cosmogonic work that fills the last two tablets of the poem also directly confirms their association. Enki's eating of the plants in EN as a means of "knowing hearts" and "fixing destinies" may well be tricksterish parody, as some have argued, (18) but it should not be allowed to conceal the genuinely serious character of the act it evokes. The background to Enki's play in the marsh is the "high" narrative in which worlds brought forth from chaos are subjected to divine organization by means of the word in order to endow them with meaning and perdurance.

The god's own direct involvement in cosmogonic "knowing and fixing" of the more solemn type is perhaps clearest in the celebratory text "Enki and the World Order" (EWO), (19) which narrates (among other acts) his triumphal journey by barge throughout Sumer and also the outlying lands of the Indus Valley, Bahrain, and the nomadic wilderness. Along the way, Enki--"the lord who determines the fates" (EWO 218), "the lord of the destinies" (EWO 221)--assigns to each its proper nature and role in the new cosmic order (EWO 217; 220):

"My father (An), the king...