Episode 66 – Jerry Springer Special – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 66 Show Notes

Source: Sumerian Mythology

This week on MYTH, it’s an old, old listener suggestion tale. You’ll see that water can get you pregnant, that you should never trust creepy men carrying fruit, and that a penis makes a great digging tool. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll meet the ancient aliens responsible for humanity. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 66, “Jerry Springer Special”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
This week’s story was suggested by Rose via email, who asked for a story about the ancient Sumerian god Enki. We’ve touched on him briefly back in Episodes 25 and 45, but Enki has mostly been a background character up until now. Enki was the Sumerian god of water, knowledge, crafts, creation, and (my personal favorite) mischief. That’s right, folks – he’s a trickster god! He was a major deity, appearing in stories from the third millennium BC all the way through the days of the Ancient Greeks (and may have been something of a prototype for the Greek God Poseidon). His first and strongest domain was that of Ab, which means fresh water though the word also means semen, and yes that fact is absolutely going to be important.
Some time after the actual act of creating the universe, and after time and the seasons had well and truly been established, our tale begins in Dilmun, the home of the gods on earth. It is a pure, bright, clean city, and the sacred home of the gods. It’s a Garden of Eden before the Garden of Eden was a thing – a place protected from all natural dangers. No one was killed and eaten by deadly predators, no one contracted a disease and got sick, no one grew old (though there is some uncertainty as to whether the people of the city were actually immortal or simply young and healthy right up until the day they finally died a natural death of old age), and nothing ever grew dirty. Nobody needs to bathe, nobody sails on the rivers because no one needs to go anywhere, nobody cries and nobody sings. Dilmun was less of a happy place than a place where there was and could be no sorrow – joy requires pain in order to be meaningful after all (although I’ve also seen the interpretation that the passages instead refer to the city being peaceful and without a need for workers or songs of lament). It was also very much a sterile place, stony and dull.
Enki, god of Magic and Sweet Waters, meets Ninhursag, goddess of the stony earth (and the earth itself to some extent) and they fuck. Through her passion and compassion, she wins Enki’s heart, and he proposes a union of some sort with her (often considered to be marriage). The goddess of the city, Ninsikila, gripes aloud that the city, nice as it was, didn’t really benefit her. She remembers the feel of his wetness (both his god-cum and literal water, given his divinity), and longs to provide the same to her city. Day and night, she hounded Enki and complained that her city had no docks to reach the rivers to seek out trade, no fields to plow and plant, and no way to make the population of her city happy and wealthy. There’s some confusion as to whether Ninsikila is a totally separate goddess from Enki’s wife or consort, the goddess Ninhursag, mother goddess of the mountains (which the various versions I’ve looked at have made more confusing instead of less). I’m going to assume they are, at least for the sake of this particular tale. He hears her cries and decides to grant her wish. He orders the sun god Utu to go to earth and bring fresh water to Dilmun (which some scholars have identified as being located in the modern kingdom of Bahrain, where the fresh waters of the Arabian aquifer blend with the ocean salt of the Persian Gulf (which was thought to be the goddess Nammu, the mother of Enki and the original Sumerian version of the Babylonian goddess Tiamat from Episode 25).
Working together, Enki and Utu create a mist that rises from the depths of the earth. Sweet, fresh water wells up from deep below the surface to fill the canals and wells of Dilmun, which allows the city to almost immediately become a bustling metropolis and trade center for the ancient world (and yes, the god’s water filling up the goddess’ city, thus bringing forth life, is absolutely meant to be sexual, especially given the double-meaning of the word ‘ab’). These waters formed the headwaters of the four great rivers of the world, including the Tigris and Euphrates. To get some privacy from the swarm of perfect, perky people now filling the city as well as to provide them with a way to feed themselves, Enki goes out into the marshes and uses his truly massive dick to dig out channels in the marsh. That done, he fills these new marsh channels with god-cum, presumably to fertilize the soil as this whole thing is basically an analogy for the creation of irrigation channels to feed the city. Enki forbids anyone from entering his marshy self-love dungeon except for Ninhursag, who he invites in to get all freaky. She gives him her best bedroom eyes, sneaks into the area with some secrecy for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, and the pair retires into the marsh to have sweaty god-sex.
As you probably know by know, gods are insanely fertile and Ninhursag get immediately pregnant from their wild monkey sex. Being a goddess, she manages to go from ‘not pregnant’ to ‘ just gave birth’ in only nine days and, even better, gives birth completely painlessly, as though her vagina had been well-lubricated with oil or butter (the exact translation differs from version to version). Thus is their daughter Ninsar, the Lady of Greenery and goddess of plants, brought into the world.
Given that she had gone from sperm and egg to baby goddess in only nine days, I have to assume that she grew to adulthood in a similarly accelerated fashion (some versions state that she also grew to adulthood in only nine days). Enki had wandered off as soon as he finished ejaculating, and Ninhursag had left for the Middleworld to give her essence that life might bloom. Ninsar grew quickly, blossoming (pun intended) into a radiant, beautiful goddess. As a nature goddess raised in the wilds, she loved to wander alone by the riverbank and bask in the rays of the sun. Enki was once more in the area (he was probably here with some regularity given that Dilmun is the city of the gods; I have to guess that he’d been deliberately avoiding running into his secret lover). Enki may or may not have realized that he’d gotten Ninhursag super pregnant (my guess is that he knew how fertile he was but didn’t want to be tied down, what with being a trickster and all), but he apparently didn’t recognize this luscious and nubile young woman walking along the river. He does use her name though, so maybe he does and just doesn’t care. At least one version states clearly that he met his daughter and stated that he was bound to her with ties even greater than fatherly love since he sees the face of his beloved Ninhursag in hers (though this may have been poetic license on the part of the translator). Yeah, this is going to get pretty gross pretty quick.
Enki had his advisor Isimud, a minor god who served as the messenger of the more powerful deities and, like the Roman Janus who would come after him, had one face that looked forward and another that peered behind him. “Isimud, should I just go and kiss that gorgeous young Ninsar over there? Doesn’t beauty that incredible demand to be kissed?” Isimud, who was apparently a total yes-man, agreed immediately, offering to navigate Enki’s ship for him so that he could sail over to, um, ‘meet’ Ninsar.
That was all the encouragement that Enki needed. He promptly boarded his ship and, with Isimud as his navigator, began to sail up the river to the place on the banks where they’d spied his daughter. Sail boats aren’t particularly loud, and Ninsar wasn’t exactly used to company (especially if Enki’s earlier order for everyone to stay out of the irrigated marsh was still in effect, which would mean that he almost had to know that this woman could only be his daughter, since anyone else would have been forbidden to enter). He leapt lightly onto the riverbank directly in front of the utterly shocked Ninsar.
Taken completely by surprise, the young goddess froze, unable to even speak. Enki didn’t wait for her to collect herself – he seized her in his strong arms, raped her, and then got back onto his boat and sailed away. One version claims that he stayed with her that night but, in the morning, found her face to be but a pale reflection of his true love’s face and bailed. Enki is still as crazy-fertile as ever and Ninsar immediately gets pregnant. She too gives birth in only nine days. Thus is Ninimma, Lady of the Pasture and a minor earth goddess, born with the same oiled-up ease as her mother had been. If you’re keeping count, this makes Enki both her father and her grandfather. Gross.
Even grosser, the cycle continues again. Ninimma too grows to maturity in only nine days, raised alone by her mother Ninsar; she too goes walking along the riverbank as a young, beautiful, nubile goddess and catches Enki’s eye. He again asks his yes-man counselor Isimud whether he should go and kiss this girl, and by girl I mean granddaughter and by kiss I mean rape and impregnate, and Isimud once more agrees to navigate the boat for Enki to go and do just that. He does, and Ninimma also gets immediately pregnant and gives birth in nine days through a buttery vagina to a daughter, Uttu, goddess of weaving (who’s name is also the word for spider and who is totally different from the sun god Utu from earlier), who also grows to adulthood in only nine days. For those keeping score at home, this makes Enki Uttu’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Gross.
And of course, Enki isn’t done with his chain of incest rape. Fortunately for Uttu, the women are now wise to how gross and dangerous Enki is, so Uttu’s grandmother Ninsar (who has been raped by Enki and then had her daughter suffer the same awful treatment) warns Uttu to be wary of Enki, and to avoid the riverbank. The passage describing exactly what advice she gives Uttu is fragmentary, but we do know that she warns that Enki, down in his marshes, can see them where they are and advices that Uttu demand a gift of cucumbers, grapes, and either apples or apricots from Enki if he comes around and tries to rape her like he has her mother and grandmother.
Uttu, forewarned, avoids the riverbank, but this does not deter Enki (giving much stronger credence to the idea that he knows exactly who he’s fucking and just doesn’t give a shit). One night, there is a soft knocking on Uttu’s door. She opens it to find Enki standing there (though he only identifies himself as the Gardener), and he immediately begins to try and seduce her with honeyed words and raw charm (as well as his rugged good looks, since he apparently took the time to make his face attractive, according to the text). At least he’s using words rather than just raping first and asking questions never like all the previous times, or mesmerizing her with the magic power of his truly massive dick, which he does to numerous mortal women in other stories. Uttu knew better than to listen, and she tells him that hell no she’s not going to fuck him – at least, not without a gift of cucumber, grapes, and either apples or apricots first. Only then will she let him anywhere near her vajayjay (the literal translation is ‘have hold of my halter’, which is more than a little kinky).
Enki figures that’s a pretty easy gift for a god in control of magic fertility semen-water, and he heads out to the garden immediately. He once more raises his waters, filling the garden immediately with fresh produce (and earning him a hug from a grateful gardener in a little bit of self-insertion from the ancient Sumerian gardeners who depended on Enki’s good graces to grow food). If Enki’s ginormous penis was as erect as it almost certainly was given his anticipation of his coming sex with his great-granddaughter and all of the depictions of him with a massive, throbbing dick, that had to be a weird, awkward hug for everyone involved.
Having completed his produce-related side quest, Enki returns to Uttu’s home to get his dick wet. Completely abandoning niceties like ‘asking’ and ‘using your inside voice’, Enki began to pound on the door and shout at Uttu to let him in and hike up her skirt right the fuck now. I would have expected that her demand for oddly specific fruits and vegetables would have been a ploy to prepare some devious escape from Enki’s advances (who is her great-grandfather remember), but apparently not. She opens the door and asks who is banging on her door at this hour. “Exalted Uttu, I am but a humble gardener who has brought you the fruits and vegetables that you requested.”
Satisfied with this price, Uttu opens the door and lets Enki in. His heart begins to pound at the sight of her sensual figure barely concealed beneath the thin linen of her summer dress. He gives her the basket of food and in exchange, she pours him a generous mug of beer. Again, this would be a great time to bust out a ploy, maybe get him too drunk to do anything or use her spider powers to tie him up, but it appears that Uttu was sincere in her offer and has decided to let Enki fuck her. Unlike the previous sexual encounters, the story lays this one out pretty explicitly, saying that “Enki aroused Uttu. He clasped her to the bosom and, lying in her crotch, fondled her thighs, fondled her with the hand. He clasped her to the bosom, lying in her crotch, and made love to the young woman and kissed her. Enki poured semen into Uttu’s womb…” which all sounds like a scene from an HBO show, but is a translation of the original text.
Unfortunately for Uttu, she apparently didn’t have a buttery vagina like her mothers before her. Instead, she cries out in pain from her thighs, her body, and her heart. I’m not sure if this is meant as an indication that she wasn’t as into creepy incest sex as she seemed or if the story has jumped ahead a little to her experiencing a painful pregnancy and/or childbirth, but either way, Ninhursag takes pity on Uttu. She’s aware of all the douche fuckery about, and she uses her goddess powers to pull the semen out of Uttu’s womb (apparently without her knowledge somehow). Ninhursag plants the semen into the soil (which might be her own body, since she is the earth goddess who is also the land itself) and grows eight plants, none of which have ever been seen before (though it’s unclear if these are specific new plants or meant to represent the beginning of cultivation in general): a tree plant, a honey plant, a vegetable plant, esparto grass (a tough, fibrous plant often used in crafts), an atutu plant (a climbing vine), an astaltal plant (a river reed), some illegible type of plant, and an amharu plant (unclear what this is, exactly), each of which might have been a specific remedy for a specific ailment of a different part of the body.
Some time later, Enki was resting in his marsh and from where he lay, he could see the eight new plants that his wife had grown. He didn’t recognize any of them, and assumed (correctly) that they must be new. He believes that he alone has the right to decree the destiny of all things and so he summons his two-faced messenger Isimud and they go investigate. One by one, Enki asks the name of each new plant, and Isimud tells him what it is, cuts it off, and gives it to Enki to eat. Using videogame logic, this somehow makes it possible for him to identify and know the heart of these (and I can’t stress this enough) brand new to existence plants.
Ninhursag comes back to tend to her plants that she had grown with painstaking care and a lot of motherly love (since these might be some variation on her children, grown in her soil from the semen of her cheating husband). She was understandably furious with Enki for taking these as his own the way he’s taken anything else he wants without stopping to even wonder if they are his to take or not. She curses Enki’s name and vows that, until the day he dies, she will never again look upon him with the life-giving eye. It’s not exactly clear what that phrase means, but it’s apparently a very serious matter. When the council of gods, known as the Anunnaki, heard this pronouncement, they sat down in dust in shock. Whatever the life-giving eye is, its removal immediately causes Enki’s health to start to fail. From the reaction of the other gods, I have to assume that it’s something dire for all of existence.
Luckily for Enki, there was a clever little fox who was bold enough to approach Enlil, god of wind, air, earth, and storms as well as the leader of the gods. “Oh mighty Enlil – Ninhursag is angry and doesn’t want to see any of her fellow gods, but she might talk to a cute little fox. If I can go and convince her to come back, what will be my reward?” Enlil offered to plant two birch trees in the fox’s honor and to make his name famous in his city. This is apparently good enough for the fox, who sets out on his quest.
Unfortunately for us, the passage describing this probably epic fox quest is only fragmentary. We do know that the fox went and prepared himself for this task by anointing his body (presumably with oil), shaking out and grooming his fur, and putting kohl (spelled kohl, and I can only guess that it’s some kind of eye shadow or something) on his eyes. He then went to see Enlil in his temple (for reasons that have been lost) but was unsuccessful in whatever he was after, so he tried Nanna and Uttu in their temples, and was likewise unsuccessful. He even tried Inanna (from Episode 45), but not even she could help.
Having failed with everyone else, the fox went to speak to Ninhursag herself, and told her that he had visited the others with no success and was seeking refuge with one who is…but then the text is again lost, so we still don’t know what the fox was after. From earlier context, it’s possible that he was seeking someone with medical knowledge (since the plants Enki had eaten were all medicines and he was suffering from some mysterious ailment), which would mean that none of the other gods were doctor enough to help – only Ninhursag had that knowledge. Of course, that’s all speculation.
Whatever transpired in the missing lines, the fox convinced Ninhursag that she wasn’t ready to let her lover die. She rushed back to the temple, forcing her way through doors that had been barred against entry, and finds Enki lying slumped against the dias at the end of the hall. He is not doing well, which leaves her only one option. She rushed through the temple, stripping out of her clothes as she went. She laid him down between her naked thighs, his head resting against her vagina (and yes, the story is exactly that specific), and fashioned some unknown tool. Then, she asked him where it hurt.
Eight times she asked him, and eight times he answered. Each time, she took the pain away from Enki and placed it inside her own body, healing Enki and giving birth to eight new goddesses: from Enki’s head came Ab-u; from his hair came Ninsikila; from his nose came Ningiriutud; from his mouth came Ninkasi; from his throat came Nanshe; from his arm came Azimual; from his ribs came Ninti; and from his sides came Ensag. As an aside, each of the goddesses born this way have names that are punny, based off of the specific part of the body they were born from. For instance, the word for ribs is ‘ti’ and the god born from Enki’s ribs is Ninti. Relieved at being cured, Enki sits up and looks upon his new children. With a smile, he decrees their destinies: Ab-u becomes the lord of plants; Ninsikila becomes the lord of Magan (an area rich in minerals); Ningiriutud marries Ninazu (a god of the underworld and of healing); Ninkasi becomes the thing that satisfies the heart (by which they mean beer, and I heartily agree with that sentiment); Nanshe (a goddess of social justice and prophecy) marries Nindara (the tax collector of the sea, whatever that means); Azimua (a goddess of healing and fertility) marries Ningiszida (another underworld and medicine god); Ninti (a goddess of life) becomes the lady of the month (I’m not sure what that means either, though it could be menstrual cycle related); and Ensag became the lord of Dilmun.
I’m guessing that Enki learned his lesson about shoveling random plants down your gullet if you don’t know what they are (since medicines can be poisons if used incorrectly), but it all worked out in the end and we got a goddess of beer. All praise Ninkasi! But before we go and raise a toast to my new favorite goddess, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s mythical place is Nibiru.
Many of the ancient Mesopotamian mythologies were interwoven, borrowing elements from one another with changes as needed. We’ve already seen some of the crossover between the Sumerian and Babylonian mythologies in this episode. Another nexus point, appropriately enough, is Nibiru, the mythical seat of power of the leader of the gods. The word in Akkadian literally meant ‘crossing’ or ‘point of transition’, and was usually used to refer to river crossings and fords. The capitalized version, on the other hand, referred to the star that was the throne of the leader of the gods (Enlil in Sumerian and Marduk in Babylonian cosmologies).
The passage describing Nibiru has survived in its entirety, but is so densely poetic that it’s impossible to pin down exactly what it refers to, beyond some star important to the mythology. It was conceived of as the post at the point from which all things turned. The name has been associated with parts of the Libra constellation as well as the planet Jupiter. By far, the most interesting interpretation of Nibiru comes from Azerbaijani author Zecharia Sitchin in his book The 12th Planet.
According to Sitchin, his research into the translations of 14 tablets related to Enki revealed that Nibiru is the homeworld for the ancient Sumerian gods, who were very real extraterrestrials who came to visit earth in the distant past. He claimed that Nibiru orbits the sun once every 3,600 years in an elongated elliptical circuit. No actual astronomical data exists to support this claim (and there were several apocalyptic theories back in 2012 that Nibiru would return from it’s long journey and smash into the earth, ending all life – which obviously didn’t happen).
The pseudoscientific theory goes that one of the moons of Nibiru (whose name was later changed to Marduk by a Babylonian ruler of the same name to try and steal credit) collided with the planet Tiamat (the creation goddess from Episode 25), which was once located between Mars and Jupiter. The collision split Tiamat in two, shattering one half and creating the asteroid belt that exists there now; the other half drifted away and became the Earth (hence the creation myth). He also claimed that Pluto (which he names Isimud, the two-faced counselor), was originally a moon of Saturn but was knocked off course by Nibiru’s gravity, resulting in its peculiar orbit.
His theory (which counts all eight planets, Pluto, the Moon, and even the Sun as the first 11 planets) is that Nibiru was home to a race of technologically advanced aliens that first arrived on Earth 450,000 years ago. They landed in Africa in search of minerals, especially gold, to repair their atmosphere and the so-called gods of ancient Mesopotamia are actually just the laborers of the Nibiru expedition. His take on the creation myth from Episode 25 is that the laborers who made up the Anunnaki mutinied and went on strike. To resolve the issue, Enki suggested creating humans as a labor force through genetic engineering. Furthermore, the ancient city of Ur, which was destroyed around 2000 BC, was a casualty of nuclear weapons used during the initial mutiny (resulting in the evil wind described in the Lament for Ur – a Babylonian poem bewailing the fall of the ancient city much like the Book of Lamentations from the Old Testament). Pretty much everyone with any kind of credibility has poked all kinds of holes in this theory, so it’s pretty much certain that we’re not the science experiments of ancient god-alien spacemen. Unless that’s what they want you to think…
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, we’ll head back to Latvia for the next part of the epic tale of the Latvian Hercules – Lacplesis the Bearslayer. You’ll discover that the Devil can get himself some hot pieces of ass, that hitting on a girl while you’re staying with her father is a bad idea, and that you should never climb in a woman’s hole without her permission. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll meet the creepy child ghost that sneaks into your room with a nightmare. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.