Mesopotamia offers some of the earliest extant corpora in which human beings attempt to answer a perennial question: how does the world come to be intelligible, and how do people participate in its ordering? Sumerian and Akkadian sources (creation hymns, temple liturgies, mythic epics) present an ontology in which cosmos and polity, ritual and reality, gods and humans are entangled in practices of ordering, naming, and enactment. Read relationally, these texts are not primitive cosmologies to be reduced to proto-science, nor naïve metaphysics to be debunked: they are performative grammars for enacting possibility.
Part I — Diagnostic (Relational Ontology Audit)
1. Dominant ontological moves
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Cosmogony as ordering: Creation myths (e.g., theogonic layers; ordering of waters, heavens, earth) frame creation not as material production ex nihilo but as securing pattern out of chaos. Reality is presented as something to be stabilised through naming, ritual, and power.
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Divine multiplicity-as-energies: Deities are frequently not atomic substances but vectors or capacities (storm, fertility, wisdom, fate). The gods personify tendencies in the world that can be invoked, negotiated with, and realigned.
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Ritual as re-actualisation: Temple rites and cultic speech are depicted as acts that reproduce or sustain cosmological order — the liturgy is not representation but repeated instantiation of a world-forming pattern.
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Naming and authority: Naming is an ontological operation (to name is to make stable); proper names, epithets and lists function as semiotic levers that instantiate cosmic relations.
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Human role as custodian/participant: Humankind appears as co-agents whose ritual and ethical action sustains the ordered cosmos and negotiates the gods’ dispositions.
2. What counts as ‘real’?
Reality is not simply the material surface; it is the patterned effect of ongoing enactment: the ordered temple precinct, the regular sacrificial cycle, the named fate. That which is stable — weather rhythms, polity, harvests — is evidence of successful instantiation; chaos is that which resists or exceeds ritualisation.
3. Agency and personhood
Agency is distributed: gods are capacities; kings, priests, and communities are nodes who actualise and enact the divine ordering. Personhood overlaps with function: a named deity is a locus of inclination and capacity; a king’s ritual act can enact priestly-divine potentials.
4. Time, change, and continuity
Change is cyclical and institutive: ritual repetition stabilises ephemeral actualities into durable patterns. Mythic time (cosmogony, heroic saga) is the template for cyclic performance; history is ritualised when it is read back into mythic patterns.
5. Common category errors (representational misreadings)
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Substantialising gods: Reading deities as metaphysical substances (rather than as functional vectors) produces the illusory question of how distinct ontological “things” interact.
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Seeing ritual as symbolic representation: Treating temple rites as mere symbol-to-referent mappings misses their role as instantiating practice — performative cuts that make particular patterns real in context.
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Reifying creation accounts as proto-physics: Misplacing mythic ordering as pre-scientific explanation rather than as prescriptive/semiotic acts of world-maintenance.
6. Where relational ontology dissolves confusions
Relational ontology replaces the substance/thing model with a triadic framework:
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System: temple cosmology, ritual grammar, pantheon as organised potentialities (what may be actualised).
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Instance: a particular ritual, named epiphany, the inaugural proclamation by a king — a cut that actualises a pattern.
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Construal: the first-order experience — communal sense of order, divine favour, seasonal stability — that confirms the enactment.
Viewed thus, Mesopotamian myth and cult are not primitive cosmology but methodologies for bringing forth order; apparent metaphysical oddities become intelligible as semiotic and performative strategies.
Part II — Metamorphic Reinterpretation (Mythopoietic Recasting)
If the diagnostic shows what a representational reading tends to misread, the metamorphosis asks: what happens if we tune the tradition’s own resources into a relational vocabulary? The aim is not to replace the ancient claims, but to recast them so that their imaginal power is preserved while their contribution to a relational ontology is clarified.
1. Recasting core motifs relationally
a. Chaos → Structured potential
Chaos (the primeval waters, the maw, the sea) is best read as a reservoir of undifferentiated potential. The act of creation in the myths is a liturgical and performative patterning of this potential, not a material fabrication. The mythic "cut" converts potential into patterned possibility.
b. Gods as vectors of readiness
Storm-gods, fertility-gods, wisdom-gods are not immutable substances but names for systemic inclinations and abilities — capacities within the world-field. Invoking Marduk or Enlil is enrolling these inclinations in social practice: naming them is an act of modulation that configures readiness for harvest, storm, fertility, or order.
c. Naming as instantiation
The catalogue of the gods, the lists of divine attributes, the proem-formulas function as ritual prescriptions that instantiate a cosmic grammar. Saying the name enacts a cut: it actualises the potentiality of a particular pattern (e.g., security, fertility) in the lifeworld.
d. Ritual and temple as ongoing actualisation
Temple rites are not metaphors about order; they are the processes that keep the system actualised. The temple sustains patterns of readiness (seasonal cycles, social hierarchy, cosmic favour) through repeated instantiation — precisely the relational move relational ontology foregrounds.
2. Practical reinterpretations (what survives and how it changes)
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Incantations and hymns become techniques for directing systemic inclination; they are proto-modal practices that re-type readiness into public obligation (or vice versa) when needed.
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Kingship is a ritual technology for aligning civic ability and inclination with cosmic potentials: enthronement rites actualise a pattern in which polity and cosmos resonate.
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Divine mandates (fate) are better read as mediated distributions of readiness: societies construe certain courses as “fated” when they are the habitual actualisations of a networked pattern of inclination + ability.
3. Ethical and hermeneutic consequences
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Agency: human ritual agency gains renewed dignity: humans are not mere survivors of cosmic force but co-actualisers who stabilise patterns of flourishing via enacted readiness.
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Meaning: texts and myths are no longer simply “about” origins — they are instruction manuals for participation. Reading them as such recovers their performative thrust.
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Continuity vs change: the persistence of institutions and cults is understood not as stubborn clinging to metaphysical truth, but as regularised instantiation — habitual cuts that maintain systemic coherence.
4. A mythic fragment (Liora vignette)
Liora stood at the edge of a great ziggurat as dawn loosened the dark. Priests in linen robes intoned an old list of names — not recited to report facts, but to set the air trembling with possibility. The first chant made the barley fields shiver in a new rhythm; the second seemed to press back the errant rainclouds. Liora felt something change in the space between hand and sky: not a thing moved into place, but a pattern had been braided anew. For an instant the town’s fear unknotted into readiness, the river’s murmur steadied into promise. The priests did not “call a god down” so much as re-tune the world’s inclinations; the names were not labels but levers. When she left, Liora carried the memory of a moment where language and ritual had made a cut through the field of potential, and the world — for a breath — was more hospitable.
Short takeaway
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Mesopotamian myth and cult enact a semiotic technology for patterning potential.
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Relational ontology reads gods as capacities, ritual as instantiation, and naming as effective modulation.
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This recasting preserves the myths’ performative power while dissolving representational category errors.
