First, it is always a creation from something, that is, from a material matrix (and in particular Tiamat’s own body). Second, it is a creation primarily of places. The evolution of the created world into “ever greater complexity” is an evolution into ever more particular kinds of places, as the world becomes increasingly habitable for humankind.
In fact, the Enuma Elish proposes three major stages of creation, each of which is distinctively place-specific, (1) To begin with, we are presented with a watery world composed of two fluids, sweet and bitter, in intimate conjunction. From this aqueous admixture the early gods emerge—gods of the horizons of sky and earth, of the waters of the earth, and of the empty heaven. Theogony occurs as a differentiation of regions out of the primal scene of parental intercourse between Apsu and Tiamat. (2) Places of antagonism and conflict supervene as an Oedipal drama is enacted among the gods: Ea kills Apsu, and Marduk slaughters Tiamat. (3) Finally, the creation of the cosmos per se happens in and through Tiamat’s hulking carcass as the place-of-creation. Marduk, assuming his preordained role as “King of the cosmos,”33 constructs an ordered universe in which everything, gods and heavenly bodies, earth and human beings, has its proper place. “His glory touched the abyss”34 by virtue of the fact that he builds elaborately over the abyss itself. He fills it in with the plenary presences of particular places.
Throughout the Enuma Elish, place figures as a generative matrix. Although there is one reference to the “void” and two references to “chaos” in the text, each of these occurs as a retrospective interpretation of what has already taken place.35 What actually takes place, that is, arises as place, occurs in the form of a matrix—or, more exactly, of place-as-matrix. Just as there is no strict void at the start of this cosmogony (the void in question is the relative void of a not-yet-existent earth; but waters already exist), so there is no genuine chaos either: Tiamat is fluid but not chaotic. Nor is she disorderly—except when routed by Marduk!36 Taken on her own terms, she is an orderly being: orderly enough to give rise, thanks to Marduk’s eventual shaping actions, to the cosmos, the ordered world.
Order, and especially the order of place, is nascent in the matrix. Not just at the stage of elemental waters but also at the subsequent stages of conflict and creation, place occurs as matrix. Indeed, creation itself arises in the very place of destruction, the bloody scene of Marduk’s res gestae: “The creative act, which distinguishes, separates, measures, and puts in order, is inseparable from the criminal act that puts an end to the life of the oldest gods, [and is] inseparable from a deicide inherent in the divine.”37 In the final stage of this cosmogony, the two previous matrices, the elemental and the destructive, give way to the built matrix inherent in Marduk’s construction of a fully ordered world from the materials furnished by Tiamat’s dead body. A superfetation of gods, goddesses, and monsters from Tiamat’s womb-matrix is replaced by a superproduction of human beings and buildings on Marduk’s phallogonic part: continual birthing gives way to assiduous architectural ordering.38 Instead of void or chaos, everywhere there is plenitude and place, a plenitude of places, indeed plenitude-as-place, arranged as an ascending series of ever more specific matrices.39
And there is, to end with, the place of reenactment. For the Enuma Elish was recited at the beginning of the New Year festival at Babylon. It was recited not just anywhere in Babylon but “in a particular place, the inner room or holy of holies of the god Marduk, where his statue lived throughout the year.”40 This room was regarded as identical with the Ubshukinna, the Chamber of Destiny wherein Marduk was proclaimed “Great Lord of the Universe.”41 The Ubshukinna, too, is a matrix—a matrix of reenactment. In the complete ceremony, actors staged the combat between Marduk and Tiamat, the officiating priest crying out, “May Marduk continue to conquer Tiamat and to shorten her days!” More than a mere representation or recollection of aboriginal confrontation was at issue in this ritualized performance. The reenacted combat brought the world, as it was entering a new year, from a state of perilous preorder or nonorder, more radical than disorder, back to a renewed state of order. As Eliade remarks,
This commemoration of the Creation was in fact a reactualization of the cosmogonic act. . . . The battle between two groups of actors . . . [re]actualized the cosmogony. The mythical events became present once again. . . . The combat, the victory, and the Creation took place at that instant, hie et nunc.42
To this we need only add that the reactualized events also took place at that place, Marduk’s inner room at Babylon. Much like Tiamat’s own fertile body, this room served as a womb for continual rebirth—and not just as a scene of destruction and creation. The generative and the architectural, the primal matrix and the master builder, otherwise so fiercely antagonistic, combined forces in a common room of reenactment.
II
Much like Marduk, the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus has the unenviable task of converting an originally refractory space into a domain of domesticated places. Just as concertedly “male” as Marduk, the Platonic power figure substitutes the straight lines of geometry for the lethal arrows of pitched combat. But in both instances, a precosmic “female” body is at once the source and the limit of creation, and its massive preexistence demonstrates that the intervening god is far from omnipotent. Both epics make it clear that creation takes place only under certain circumstances—precisely those embodied in the hulk, the heft, of the world-body as it is initially given. Creation must occur in and with this body, which Plato names Necessity (anankē)—and also Space (chōra).
Space, then, is what must be there in the beginning, even before the act of creation occurs. In this respect, Plato only formalizes what we have found to be true in many previous accounts: the necessity of preexisting spaces (i.e., places, regions) for the occurrence of creation. For whatever comes to be must “come to be in a certain place.”43 Compared with such spatial necessity, time is secondary in status—merely a “moving image of eternity”44 that is devised by the Demiurge to keep track of the circular motions of the heavens. No more than in the first stanzas of the Enuma Elish is time essential to the primal state of the Platonic universe. In both cases, time is a distinctly late addition to the scene of creation. What matters first and foremost is the fate of space, its original standing and its subsequent vicissitudes.
Plato also uses the term “Receptacle” to designate the pregiven space with which the Demiurge must begin. As “the ‘nurse’ of all Becoming,”45 the Receptacle is no less deep, and no less fertile, than Tiamat. And it is no less maternal, since both the mythic and the philosophic entities require that creation involve a return to the womb, the womb of Nature (phusis) itself. It is altogether by and in the Receptacle construed as “mother”46 that the phallogonic paternal action of the Demiurge occurs—occurs within a matrix.
It never departs at all from its own character; since it is always receiving all things, and never in any way whatsoever takes on any character that is like any of the things that enter it: by nature it is there as a matrix for everything, changed and diversified by the things that enter it.47
The Platonic matrix is not, however, strictly material in character. Although it takes on material qualities, it is not itself composed of matter. As exhibiting or reflecting these qualities, it is more like a mirror of the physical than a physical thing itself.48 It has no qualities of its own, for, if it did, it could not be altogether receptive of the qualities of the things that occupy it, nor would it reflect them faithfully: “that which is to receive in itself all kinds must be free from all characters” (50e). Thus we cannot even characterize the receptive matrix as aqueous—as we are certainly encouraged to do at the beginning of the Enuma Elish and in Genesis. In fact, none of the four elemental qualities can be said to characterize the Platonic matrix: “the mother and Receptacle of what has come to be visible and otherwise sensible must not be called earth or air or fire or water” (51a). If the Sumerian and Old Testament matrices are expressly elemental, this is no longer possible in the Greek instance. As preelemental, Space or the Receptacle is “a nature invisible
