The Mother of the Gods, Slain to Make the World

Tiamat is the primordial goddess of the salt sea in Mesopotamian myth, and in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish she is both the origin of the cosmos and the enemy that must be destroyed to order it. At the beginning she mingles her salt waters with Apsu, the sweet fresh waters, and from their union the first gods are born. But when the younger gods' clamour disturbs the primeval quiet and Apsu is killed, Tiamat rises in wrath, spawning an army of monsters and champions to avenge him and destroy her descendants. The gods, terrified, turn to the young storm-god Marduk, who agrees to fight on condition that he be made king of the gods.

In the decisive battle he traps her in a net, drives the winds into her open mouth, and splits her body in two, and from the halves of her corpse he fashions the world, making the sky from one half and the earth from the other, her weeping eyes becoming the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates. The myth encodes a distinctly Mesopotamian theology: the ordered world is not created out of nothing but violently imposed on a prior chaos, and it is built, quite literally, out of the body of the defeated chaos-mother, an order that never wholly escapes the disorder from which it was made.