The Annihilation of the Ontological Feminine

The whole idea of (female) pollution is a reaction to protect the clarity of the system.”

—Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

“Women’s history is the history of the dehumanization of half the human race.”

—Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Mythology is Relevant

It was just a myth—an account of warring deities from ancient Babylon, written around 1800 BCE. At first glance, it seems no more remarkable than any other. After all, aren’t these stories just tales of flawed gods and their dramas? We rarely pay them much attention today. Even historians write about myth more from obligation than conviction.

But to dismiss any of this as irrelevant would be a profound mistake. Every myth matters. Each one reveals how people once understood their place in the cosmos. Most have been lost, their meanings erased. The story of Marduk and Tiamat survives—and that alone makes it worth examining.

This isn’t just a distant or “boring” clash between gods. It’s the erasure of Tiamat, the embodiment of wild feminine creativity, by Marduk, the sky-god of order. And that act—cosmic, violent, final—tells us almost everything about what we’ve come to believe, even now.

This is not just a story about civilization. It’s the blueprint—its operating instructions—and the source of its six-thousand-year grip on the world. The myth itself may be forgotten, but its consequences are not. Its logic—its architecture of power and division—echoes through the tales it spawned: sagas, legends, even fairy tales. Together, they shaped the world we live in. To ignore them is to misunderstand not just history, but ourselves.

In the first essay, we saw how men in the cities of Sumer laid the foundations of patriarchy between 4000 and 3500 BCE, and how by the end of that period, a male-only priesthood had seized political power. But the priests knew that wasn’t enough. To secure control and lock in the foundations of civilization, they set out to do what Marduk would later do in myth—annihilate the feminine.

Fortunately, that has proven impossible. Tragically, however, the early effort to erase the ontological feminine (O/F)—and its vital connection to nature—has never stopped. The damage runs deep. If we are to undo it, we must first learn how it happened.

The truth is found in the ruins of the ancient Near East (ANE).

The Long Undoing: Five Phases in the Erosion of the Ontological Feminine (O/F)

The assault on the feminine wasn’t a single act—it was a long, process that began after civilization got off the ground and continues to this day. The aim was nothing less than the destruction of the psyche—the full being—of all people. But this was carried out primarily through the systematic undermining of women and the O/F.

Table 2-1: The Five Phases of Annihilation of the Feminine

Chthonic Integration

This story begins in the long transition from hunter-gatherer life toward civilization, spanning roughly 9000 to 4000 BCE. During much of this period, women appear to have retained substantial social standing, while feminine generative capacities assumed increasing symbolic importance. Even as communities in the ancient Near East (ANE) began moving away from hunter-gatherer lifeways, the feminine remained closely associated with the natural world and its powers of fertility, regeneration, and renewal.

From roughly 12,500 to 9000 BCE, animistic understandings inherited from hunter-gatherer life remained widespread. Animals, places, natural forces, and other aspects of the surrounding world could possess presence, agency, or spirit. Within this relational world, sexual differences certainly existed, but they had not yet hardened into the elaborate gender hierarchies characteristic of later Civilization.

Around 9000 BCE, however, something begins to shift. The rituals and beliefs through which people understood their relationship with the world increasingly assumed a chthonic form—centered on local, earthbound presences associated with land, place, fertility, death, regeneration, and the recurring cycles of life. Many of these presences appear in feminine form. Although we cannot reconstruct precisely how the people themselves understood them, the growing importance of cultivation and regeneration likely strengthened associations between feminine generativity and the fertility of the earth.

For approximately the next five thousand years, this feminine-prevalent chthonic spirituality (FPCS) remained an important feature of small-village life. The Ontological Feminine (O/F)—the regenerative, embodied, relational dimension of existence—remained substantially integrated rather than separated from material reality. Women likewise appear to have retained considerable standing within these communities. This was not yet the world of developed patriarchal Civilization.

Yet the favorable spiritual position of the feminine did not mean that every material development during this period reinforced relational being. Surplus accumulation and storage, animal domestication, emerging inequalities, and increasingly differentiated forms of ownership and obligation were creating new material relationships. These developments did not themselves produce the later civilizational psyche, but they helped establish conditions upon which the direct materialistic reduction (DMR) of relational being could increasingly operate after roughly 4000 BCE.

Gods and Goddesses—Incorporation

By approximately 2350 BCE, we reach a fundamentally different point in the story. For the first time, contemporaneous evidence allows us to speak confidently of named GODs and Goddesses within a developing civilizational religious system. This did not mean that the older feminine-prevalent chthonic spirituality (FPCS) simply disappeared. Religious transformations rarely occur so neatly.

Instead, elements of the older spiritual world were incorporated into the new one. This helps explain why some of the earliest Goddesses could remain extraordinarily powerful. People whose spiritual lives had long been oriented toward feminine, earthbound, regenerative presences were not being asked simply to abandon the feminine. Familiar powers could survive in transformed form within the developing GOD/Goddess system.

This incorporation therefore should not itself be described as an annihilation of the feminine. Goddesses could command enormous reverence and retain attributes inherited from much older relationships with fertility, sexuality, regeneration, nature, and the cycles of life. But something fundamental had changed: these powers were increasingly personified, named, differentiated, and situated within a more formalized and increasingly transcendent religious order. FPCS had not simply vanished; parts of it were being translated into a different symbolic world.

Instrumentalization and Co-option—Goddesses

Incorporation created another possibility. Once feminine powers had entered the developing civilizational religious system, they could increasingly be made to serve purposes very different from those associated with their chthonic origins.

Inanna provides the most important example. She remained an extraordinarily powerful Goddess, but her powers became increasingly connected with warfare, political authority, kingship, conquest, sexuality, and the developing patriarchal order. The feminine was therefore not simply suppressed. It could be instrumentalized: its immense symbolic power appropriated and redirected toward the purposes of Civilization.

This makes co-option more complicated than simple replacement. A Goddess could remain revered while the meaning of her power changed. Indeed, retaining her stature could make the transformation more effective. Continuity softened discontinuity. Older attachments to feminine power could persist while that power was gradually incorporated into institutions and narratives increasingly removed from its earlier chthonic and relational foundations.

Inanna’s Descent marks an important point in this longer transformation. The feminine remains formidable, but it is now being worked upon within a radically different symbolic environment. Over subsequent centuries, Inanna herself would eventually recede from the central position she once occupied. What began as incorporation increasingly became appropriation, transformation, and loss.

Subjugation—Empire and Mythic Defeat

The rise of the Akkadian Empire around 2350 BCE introduced another powerful force into this process. Empire magnified hierarchy, warfare, conquest, extraction, and centralized authority. Gender was increasingly reorganized within institutions built around these practices, while the political and religious worlds became progressively intertwined.

The effects extended into everyday life. Warfare placed growing demands upon men as soldiers and agents of imperial expansion, while patriarchal authority became increasingly embedded in property, inheritance, household organization, and eventually law. The advantages accruing to men were profoundly unequal—elite men occupied positions radically different from those of ordinary laborers and soldiers—but women increasingly encountered a social order in which authority was formally structured around male power.

The religious transformation proceeded alongside the political one. Goddesses did not disappear, nor did their decline follow a simple straight line. But increasingly masculinized divine hierarchies could now reproduce and legitimize the hierarchies of empire.

The changing treatment of feminine divinity becomes especially revealing when powerful feminine figures are no longer merely incorporated or instrumentalized but defeated. The later destruction of Tiamat provides the most dramatic example. The primordial feminine is not simply displaced: she is conquered, killed, dismembered, and her body used to construct a new cosmic order. Myth now performs symbolically what Civilization had long been doing materially—subordinating an older relational and generative world to hierarchy, domination, and control.

The movement from Inanna to Tiamat therefore tells a much larger story. The Goddess could first be honored, then incorporated, instrumentalized, subordinated, and finally—in one of the most powerful myths inherited from the ancient Near East—symbolically annihilated. The Enuma Elish presents her as a primordial feminine power associated with the salt waters and as mother of the Gods. But the narrative transforms that generative primordial power into the great threat that Marduk must overcome.

He kills her.

The violence is not incidental to the creation of the new order. Marduk splits Tiamat's body and uses it to construct the cosmos. Her conquered body becomes material for a world ordered by the victorious male GOD.

This is one of the most extraordinary symbolic inversions in the history traced here. The feminine remains ontologically indispensable—the new cosmos is literally constructed from Tiamat—but feminine agency has been annihilated. Marduk still needs Tiamat's body, but he no longer needs Tiamat.

That distinction marks an enormous development.

The story also demonstrates how far symbolically mediated reduction (SMR) had progressed. Earlier DMR reorganized bodies, labor, resources, and physical space. Here sacred narrative reorganizes reality itself. A primordial feminine generative power can be defeated, dismembered, appropriated, and transformed into the passive substance upon which a masculine cosmic order is established.

The Enuma Elish therefore occupies a crucial position between the earlier Goddess traditions and what comes next. Tiamat has been deprived of agency, but the masculine divine order has not yet succeeded in dispensing with feminine materiality altogether. Her body is still necessary.

Later Hebrew theology will take the outsourcing one decisive step further.

There, GOD/G will no longer require a Goddess's body from which to construct the cosmos. Creative agency itself can be located in a transcendent masculine GOD/G. The feminine need not merely be conquered; it can become ontologically unnecessary within the creation narrative.

The trajectory traced by these three feminine spirits is therefore not a simple history of Goddesses losing status. It reveals three different operations within the much longer reduction of the Ontological Feminine:

·        Inanna is incorporated and instrumentalized.

·        Ninhursag is specialized and diminished.

·        Tiamat is defeated, dismembered, and appropriated.

The next transformation will be still more radical: the powers once embodied in feminine Nature—generation, creation, continuity, and the source of material existence itself—will increasingly be transferred to a transcendent GOD/G.

Outsourcing the Ontological Feminine

The Babylonian Precedent

The destruction of Tiamat brought the reduction of the Ontological Feminine to an extraordinary point. As we have just seen, Marduk destroys feminine agency while retaining feminine materiality. Tiamat is killed and dismembered, but her body remains indispensable: the victorious masculine GOD constructs his cosmos from her.

The Enuma Elish therefore represents far more than the triumph of one deity over another. It symbolically converts a living, generative feminine presence into material that can be divided, bounded, apportioned, and reorganized under masculine authority.

Thorkild Jacobsen described the Babylonian creation story as reflecting a transition from a vitalistic, organismic understanding of reality toward a more mechanistic one. That observation is crucial here. Tiamat ceases to be an autonomous presence and becomes usable substance. Her destruction thus represents an advanced form of symbolically mediated reduction (SMR): the living whole is divided into parts and those parts become components of an imposed cosmic order.

But Babylon had not completed the process.

Tiamat remained necessary. Marduk could destroy her agency, but he still required her body. The material feminine remained the substance from which creation proceeded.

The next development would go considerably further.

The Hebrew Transformation

The Babylonian exile of 586–538 BCE brought the Judean elite into prolonged contact with the intellectual, theological, and mythological traditions of Mesopotamia. Biblical scholarship has long recognized important relationships between Mesopotamian traditions and portions of the Hebrew scriptures, while major parts of the Hebrew religious tradition were composed, edited, or reorganized during and after the exilic period.

For the history of the Ontological Feminine, the consequences were profound.

The Hebrew tradition increasingly concentrated divine authority in a singular masculine GOD/G while simultaneously eliminating the need for a feminine divine partner in creation. This marks a decisive development beyond the Babylonian solution.

Marduk still needed Tiamat's body. GOD/G did not need a Goddess at all.

The significance of this change is difficult to overstate. Creation, generativity, cosmic authority, and the ultimate source of existence could now be attributed to a transcendent masculine GOD/G. The material world remained, of course, but its generative principle was increasingly represented as originating outside itself.

This is what I mean by outsourcing the Ontological Feminine.

The regenerative capacities actually manifested within material existence—birth, generation, renewal, continuity, and the creation of new life—were not eliminated conceptually. They were reassigned. Creation remained, but the creator became GOD/G. Generativity remained, but ultimate generative power no longer required a feminine body. Nature remained, but Nature was increasingly transformed from creative presence into creation.

The movement from Tiamat to GOD/G therefore constitutes an extraordinary ontological inversion. The feminine first supplies creation, then becomes the material upon which masculine creation acts, and finally becomes unnecessary to the theological explanation of creation itself.

The Purity Regime

This transformation of the cosmos had an embodied counterpart.

During and after the exile, priestly traditions increasingly organized Hebrew life around elaborate systems of distinction and separation: Israelite and foreigner, permitted and prohibited, sacred and profane, pure and impure. The purity legislation preserved particularly in Leviticus extended this classificatory system directly into bodily existence.

Mary Douglas demonstrated in Purity and Danger that these purity laws cannot adequately be understood as primitive hygiene. They belong to a symbolic system concerned with classification, boundaries, wholeness, and order. What does not occupy its prescribed place becomes problematic.

For the present argument, the treatment of reproductive embodiment is particularly important. Menstruation and childbirth—the most conspicuous manifestations of female reproductive biology—become subjects of elaborate purity regulation. The generative female body is therefore caught within a striking contradiction. Its actual capacity to create life remains indispensable, while the theological source of creation has been relocated elsewhere.

The Ontological Feminine has been divided.

Its most exalted attributes—creation, generativity, ultimate power, continuity—can be elevated into GOD/G, while material manifestations of female generativity become increasingly regulated and, under particular conditions, classified as impure.

This is more than ordinary patriarchy. It is an ontological reorganization of value.

Crass Dehumanization—The Female Body

Here crass dehumanization returns in a more intimate form, directed increasingly toward the female body in everyday life.Earlier stages could incorporate Goddesses, instrumentalize them, diminish them, or symbolically destroy them. But women themselves remained. Their bodies continued to menstruate, give birth, experience sexuality, and manifest precisely the generative capacities that theological transcendence had relocated elsewhere.

The purity system does not simply declare women themselves universally impure; its classifications are more complicated than that, and male bodies are also subjected to purity regulation. But its treatment of menstruation and childbirth is nevertheless revealing for this history. Female generativity itself becomes subject to elaborate boundaries and periods of impurity at the same historical moment that ultimate generativity is being concentrated in a masculine GOD/G.

The contrast could hardly be greater.

The woman gives birth, but GOD/G becomes Creator.

Nature generates life, but GOD/G becomes the source of Creation.

The embodied feminine remains indispensable to actual human existence while its ontological significance is progressively transferred elsewhere.

Toward the Masculinized West

A parallel development was occurring in the Greek world. It followed a very different history and should not be collapsed into Hebrew theology, but Greek heroic culture likewise privileged a heavily masculinized conception of consequential human action.

The Homeric epics celebrate a world structured substantially around male warriors, honor, competition, conquest, vengeance, courage, and public reputation. Powerful women and Goddesses certainly remain, but the paradigmatic heroic actor is overwhelmingly male.

The Hebrew and Greek traditions therefore contribute different elements to what would much later become the Western inheritance. Hebrew theology develops an increasingly transcendent masculine GOD/G alongside powerful systems of purity, separation, and bodily regulation. Greek heroic culture provides another enduring model of masculine agency: competitive, martial, individualizing, and oriented toward mastery and distinction.

Their eventual conjunction helped produce something neither tradition created independently: an increasingly masculinized Western mythos in which transcendence, abstraction, heroic agency, bodily hierarchy, and the devaluation of the feminine could reinforce one another.

This is also where the much later construction of “East” and “West” acquires importance. The feminization of the East would eventually become one means through which the developing West defined itself as its opposite—rational rather than sensual, disciplined rather than indulgent, active rather than passive, masculine rather than feminine.

Edward Said famously exposed this structure in Orientalism. But from the perspective developed here, its roots reach further down. Long before modern Orientalism, Civilization had already learned to assign valued characteristics upward and outward—to GOD/G, abstraction, masculinity, authority—while associating the body, materiality, disorder, sexuality, and Nature increasingly with a devalued feminine.

The annihilation of the Ontological Feminine was therefore never simply the disappearance of Goddesses or the subordination of women. Its deepest achievement was separation: separating generativity from the feminine, creation from Nature, authority from embodied existence, and ultimately human beings from the relational material world that produced them.

Yet the outsourcing could never be complete.

GOD/G could be declared Creator, but bodies continued to create bodies. Nature continued to generate life. The material universe continued to exist through relationships that no symbolic system could abolish.

Civilization could outsource the meaning of the Ontological Feminine.

It could never outsource its reality.