Tammuz

The Seba library treats Tammuz in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Eliade, Mircea, Hillman, James, Onians, R B).

In the library 8 passages

The paradigmatic myth of Tammuz (also extended to other Mesopotamian divinities) offers us a new ratification of this same optimism: it is not only the individual’s death that is ‘saved’; the same is true of his sufferings.

Eliade argues that the Tammuz myth paradigmatically extends lunar-cyclical optimism to personal suffering, providing archaic humanity with a cosmological justification for pain through the salvific pattern of descent and rescue.

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis

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Attis, Adonis, Hippolytus, Phaethon, Tammuz, Endymion, Oedipus are examples of this erotic bind. Each figure in each tale shows its own variation; the Oedipus complex is but one pattern of son and mother that produces those fateful entanglements of spirit with matter.

Hillman deploys Tammuz as one of several mythological paradigms for the puer’s fatal erotic entanglement with the Great Mother, a structure he reads as the archetypal ground of neurotic spirit-matter conflict.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

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It is on New Year’s day that Ishtar lies with Tammuz, and the king reproduces this mythical hierogamy by consummating ritual union with the goddess in a secret chamber of the temple, where the nuptial bed of the goddess stands.

Eliade identifies the Tammuz-Ishtar hierogamy as the cosmological template reproduced in royal ritual, linking sacred marriage to annual regeneration of terrestrial fertility and the renewal of time.

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis

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We may now compare the prayer to Tammuz for release from sickness: ‘The evil spy, the adversary who with me is bound and stands against me for evil… from me may he be detached. Grant me the breath of life and from my body remove him.’

Onians cites Tammuz liturgy as comparative evidence for the ancient concept of fate as a dynamic bond or demonic agency, illuminating the interplay between the thread of fate, the daimon, and petitions for bodily release.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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had for centuries joined their neighbors in the annual wailing for Tammuz; and now, in Asia Minor, Yahweh himself had received a Greek name, Theos Hypsistos, God the Highest.

Campbell uses the persistence of Tammuz lamentation rites among Israelites as evidence for the deep syncretistic substrate of Near Eastern religion that Yahwistic reform struggled, with limited success, to suppress.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting

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Tammuz, Babylonian god, 143

Campbell’s index entry places Tammuz within the comparative mythological apparatus of the monomyth, citing him as one of the Babylonian deity-exemplars relevant to hero symbolism.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015aside

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in the Cybele, Inanna, Venus, and Isis cultures of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian areas, the Boy-Who-Would-Be-Wounded was imagined to be the Great Mother’s lover and, at the same time, her son.

Bly’s discussion of Adonis and Attis implicitly encompasses the Tammuz pattern, presenting the wounded boy-lover of the Great Mother as the core mythological structure behind ritual male sacrifice in agricultural societies.

Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990aside

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