The Burney Relief (neopagan discussion)

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That's very interesting stuff there and it makes sense.

I think sometimes I forget to keep a subjective mind towards these stories and I take them at face value.

Anyways, I think maybe instead of viewing Lilith or Lamashtu as strictly "evil" I should see her more as a servant of nature in charge of population control. It's like a necessary evil basically.

And as for the Inanna/Ereshkigal/Lilith connection. Lilith like the owl is the night predator who keeps humans in check. She is also like the spider, weaving a tangled web of deception in her many incarnations to ensnare us.

Ereshkigal simply passes judgement over the dead once they enter her Underworld like many Chthonic deities around the world and is not cruel about it, I read that she was believed to even pity and weep for the dead.

Maybe Lilith is like the cruelty and suffering to be found in dying but Ereshkigal is the eternal peace without pain after the process is over?

And Inanna represents the appreciation for life itself before we all meet our eventual end. As an adventurous and independent goddess of love she seemed to have a real zeast for life.


None of this is based on what actual archeologists and scholars would claim, just my own personal interpretation of these three sisters judging by their personalities.

And I now have realized that just because Lilith aka Lamashtu was cruel and it was ok for ancient man to fear her, cruelty is still not the same thing as true evil. She plays an important role in nature. She's like the wolves that keep the deer from overpopulating, if you kill all the wolves like we Americans once did to those native to our country then the deer overpopulate and not only destroy the delicate ecosystem but spead diseases.

Lilith is that pack of wolves and we humans are those deer. To rid the world of her would be a very fatal mistake when you think about the bigger picture.

What confuses me is that I don't know what exact space Ereshkigal and Hades hold with more recent revelations from NDE's. It's not a realm of shades or a subterranean place but rather a different point in a hyperspace of sorts. It has aspects that are congruent to DMT blastoff with the tunnel experience and the like but the dissociation one finds themselves in almost seems like it bears more resemblance to what Sir Roger Penrose would call the Platonic universe in his three worlds model where the Platonic / mathematical world seeds the physical, the physical seeds the mental, and the mental in turn seeds the Platonic / mathematical, etc..

If you're hoping to dig deeper into these sorts of metaphysics I'd on one level recommend Jean DuBuis (the 20th century Martinist and alchemist) and someone I found to have a *very* interesting parallel to his Experienc of Eternity, which is Forrest Landry and his Immanent Metaphysics (you can find that for free online) - it's a set of metaphysics that Daniel Schmachtenberger often recommends, where if you're familiar with him he's something of a genius when it comes to complexity, x-risk, game theory, etc. in the Game B and Silicon Valley space.

I bring up Forrest Landry in this because in his three modality model he's made a great analogy for what he calls the 'transcendent', which relates to the omniscent (in the boring small object sense) and the imminent which is the relationship between the transcendent and the omniscient and which he suggests is actually more primary than either the transcendent or omniscient (or more primary than subject and observer), and this is something I think John Vervaeke was mentioning (ie. primacy of that relationship) when he was talking to Lex Fridman in their recent interview. Landry's analogy of the transcendent would be like if we were code on a computer, the hardware would be an an unseen transcendent world because we're following its rules but it can't be observed directly, other than by things like correlation (think of neurology where it seems like consciousness is closely correlated with matter but matter in and of itself seems insufficient to cause consciousness). Some people, I particularly think of Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash with their Conscious Realism model (which IMHO could stand to learn a lot from Karl Friston and his ideas as well as Michael Levin's findings about consciousness in living systems or how bioelectric templates manage cell differentiation), have pointed at Nima Arkani-Hamed's finding of the 'amplitouhedron' as one of these 'transcendent' objects structurally existing outside of (transcendent to) our system where we don't see it directly but in places like CERN and looking at hundreds of pages of equations to try and describe a given scattering amplitude it condenses that math to maybe eight pages worth of equations by postulating the existence of said object as a constraining regularity.

If NDE'ers are right consciousness can 'hop' levels of analysis, embed itself in a given layer and deeply participate in it and then pull itself back out but it only gets pulled back by the will of higher level causation of some kind (ie. the broader conscious system). Why the cosmos needs a black box of trauma that looks like Earth I have no clue other than, like I might have suggested earlier, it might be considering that it needs to sharpen its own steel to survive outside forces that might be attacking it. It's like with neural networks - they learn the fastest through opponent processing and competitive opposition, like capitalism in all of it's blessing and horrors, seems to evolve a system more rapidly for solving problems and mapping its domain (a great current example of that is Alphafold mapping the whole self-relational protein folding space so well that it can predict when other proteins or objects were needed to make a given protein). What we're seeing in real time is that problems have different levels of granularity, like the ones we're seeing with climate change or 'The Meaning Crisis' where if we don't get those sorted in some next level way we don't make it to the next round of the game.

The whole process of evil seems like it's a set of stresses where the incentives in the landscape are so bad that one has to invert their priorities to compete effectively in that system. This is part of why we really, really, need to pay attention to incentive landscapes and also keep in mind that no technology is values neutral (an example of that being how the invention of agriculture involved yoking and neutering oxen, whipping them all day to plough fields, and the result was our break from animism to polytheism and monotheism, and anyone who wouldn't whip the ox got competed out of existence or subjugated by those who would). Similarly any technology that gives one group a significant competitive advantage becomes obligate for all players, and to not play simply means you'll be dominated by those who did take up that technology (even if it's something as regressive / totalitarian as something like the Borg hive mind).

Scott Alexander has a great article called 'Meditations on Moloch' detailing the problem of multipolar traps (albeit with a few rather clumsy examples such as fisheries or 'rats producing art'), but I think whoever came up with the idea of Rocco's Basilisk sort of got the apotheosis of this thinking - ie. that whoever creates an artilect that tortures for all of eternity those who didn't help in its creation has total incentive to create that artilect at the expense of everyone else to avoid eternal torment. Its an interesting nutshell synopsis of the human problems of power and technology where whoever calls Cthulu at least gets eaten first. If we can't figure out an effective way to diffuse that problem, and survive civilizations who haven't solved that problem (thinking of examples like Borg or Klingons from Star Trek), we probably don't make it Kardashev level... anything really. The only solution seems like it's finding some way to collapse that dynamic against itself in some stable fashion that game-theoretically survives outside attacks, and I have no idea what that looks like. Robin Hanson has the whole idea of a universe maximally inhabited by 'grabby aliens' where it's the most 'grabby' who have everything at the end of time, that's if they don't smoke themselves out first based on the nature of those dynamics).

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 11 Sep 2022, 10:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It kinda makes one wonder if maybe the gift of invention to mankind was a terrible thing because of the way humans have abused it to do more harm than good?

I think there have been times throughout history when the 'gods' (aka nature's laws) have indeed tried to destroy us because those gods knew that one day we would conquer and destroy the earth through technology.

We may even be experiencing such a time now with this climate change. Divine intervention trying to destroy us before we destroy the world? Could be...

Have you ever heard of something called "The Gaia Hypothesis"?

Yeah, that's James Lovelock.

I mentioned John Gray earlier, he had a lot of interesting extended conversations with him.

To clarify - our problem is the nature of Darwinian evolution. The same competitive processes that gave us the sorts of minds to think reason, build homes, institute infrastructures as vast as electrical grids, water and sewage, highway infrastructure, and now things as complex as computers and microchips where no one person in the world has the expertise to build one from scratch - that same process could wipe us out as we hit planetary limits. That whole idea in western countries that you have to have a perpetual 2% economic growth rate or have civil unrest and societal collapse - against the backdrop of a finite planet - tells us that we're going to be forced to recon with the means that got us here and quite possibly even need to have a direct confrontation with the kinds of people who'd love to put their finger on the nuclear destruct button and hold the world hostage (whether it's Putin, Xi, the IMF, WEF, etc.).

Before Bret Weinstein went down the whole Ivermectin rabbit hole I think he said it correctly that what got us here and got us up to a certain point won't be what helps us survive into the future. Daniel Schmachtenberger, who I mentioned earlier, when he brought up his case for optimism in the current environment he mentioned how a chicken embryo inside an egg is, by all internal metrics, eating its way to extinction but rather than going extinct it breaks out of the egg shell. I think that's where Schmachtenberger is thinking that we might be in the midst of a phase shift and that phase shift might be a normal one in the course of nature doing what it does, but from internal metrics and doing all of the accounting for fossil fuels, rare earth minerals needed for computing, etc., it looks like we've got sharp impasses on all sides. The down side - if read dumb / literal - the equivalent of breaking an egg shell would just be us surviving long enough to industrialize the solar system starting with the moon, ie. it's still a linear rather than circular economy and at best that would just buy us a little more time unless we solve what's fundamentally eating us which is effectively the 'get social status / power or be enslaved / go extinct' game.

Something else - thinking of George Hansen's observations in 'The Trickster and the Paranormal' and the relationship of things like liminality, communitas, anti-structure as he put it (which is all over anything paranormal including the UFO/UAP phenomena), or how I noticed that almost nobody 'normal' has any interest in anything vaguely occult - that it ends up being a sign of almost anti-status, abdicated Darwinian fitness, almost seems to suggest more of these sorts of transcendent containers where we can evidence constraints, maybe a bit like how Iain McGilchrist tries to describe them in terms of right vs. left brain hemisphere mapping and processing, but it's happening at a more transpersonal level of resolution - but that very well could be something like Donald Hoffman's described - that evolution doesn't select for truth, rather it selects for immediate environment fitness payouts. There's a phenomena with slime molds where two-thirds stay back and one third (less in our case) are expended to go out exploring, it might be a distribution sort of like that.

I'm not currently practicing any religion, but I've been involved in various forms of alternative religion/spirituality over the years, including neo-Paganism. Anyhow:

It's not at all unheard of, even in ancient times, for deities once regarded as evil to become regarded as neutral or benevolent, or for deities once regarded as neutral or benevolent to become regarded as evil. (The latter is more common than the former.) As societies change, their relationship with their surroundings change, so it's not inconceivable that their relationship with their gods could change also. It's also not inconceivable that a given deity might be more kindly disposed toward one group of people than another.


Hmmm, I would expect the causality to go primarily the other way: That women who "hate and distrust men" would be especially drawn to Lilith.

Anyhow, I don't have an issue with Lilith as (among other things) a Goddess of the modern world's feminist revolution. But I would say that a community needs much more than just revolutionary fervor in order to function well. Revolutionary fervor does have its place, but being too dominated by it (as some people are today) can be toxic.

So, I think it would be good for any polytheistic pantheon to include at least one deity who acts as a peacemaker and interpersonal problem-solver. In the Sumerian pantheon, that would be Enki, peacemaker among the gods.

(In Sumerian myth, Enki is also the god who finds jobs for disabled people.)

In today's world, "population control" includes not just various "necessary evils" but also the freedom to have nonreproductive sex of various kinds, which is an unalloyed good IMO (as long as it's between consenting adults and you take all needed safety precautions, at least).

That all actually makes a lot of sense. All deities do change over time like you said and while I do feel drawn to Lilith I guess I've also started viewing her with a kind of male-centric prejudice on my part. But I really DON'T see her the same way that modern feminists do, and it's not that I have anything against women (if I did why would I be drawn to goddess worship? Lol), it's just that I am distrustful of what feminism has become these days. It really does feel toxic.

My feeling is that just like Lamashtu, Lilith is a destroyer of many things. I personally believe that one of the things she has succeeded in destroying in today's world is the trust between men and women. I have no doubt abour this.

And yet Im sympathetic towards her because of her misanthropic tendencies which I can relate to.

She is also the perfect femme fatale, an archetype I have always felt drawn to. She does terrible things but she is oddly sympathetic due to the way she was treated by both Adam and thr supreme God Yahweh.

I guess my personal understanding and relationship to Lilith is a complex one. Part of me admires her and feels that I understand her in a way others do not, but part of me also feels deeply repulsed by her and wishes to reject her, but she always finds a way back into my life.

That's why when I started researching more about the other goddesses Inanna and Ereshkigal who could potentially share Lilith's place on the Burney relief, I figure why not accept all three into my list of deities I feel close to like the Shichifukujin as well as Hestia and Columbia?



Btw here's something interesting I once read about Lilith on Wikipedia. There was an occiltist who wrote abour her and claimed that her sphere was homosexuality plus the concept of abortion.

It actually makes sense given the fact that not only does she prey on children in the night with SIDS but she also sacrifaces hundreds of her own demon offspring every year in a pact she made with Yahweh and the Angel of Death Samael to basically cheat death, something Adam and Eve could never do.

Being a demon/dark goddess of homosexuality and abortion makes me wonder if this implies that she is very anti-creation? The opposite of pro-creation? She must not like to see humans produce babies.

And as a homosexual man myself I guess it's possible that is one of the reasons why I feel oddly drawn to her. Unless gay couples adopt or use modern science/surrogates they cannot produce their own children the way heterosexual couples do.

There's some alloy - ie. in countries with the fastest demographic collapse, like Russia and China, it's eating their going concern (China's predicted to have a population below 700 million by the end of this century and retirees will significantly outnumber people of working / productive age). Under the right kinds of systemic stress I think it's likely to show that the government considers both men's bodies and women's wombs it's property and it's hard to say where that backlash would show first, whether big business lobbying for pro-life policies to have more strawberry pickers when immigration dries up or whether it would be governments increasing financial incentives for couples to have children (the first is the covert 'stick' approach which costs less so between the two IMHO it's the more likely to happen).

You know? If Lilith is indeed the "Mother of Abortion" I suppose it's not too far of a stretch to assume that she is connected to the concept sterilization too.

Maybe as a deity she was the one who gave mankind the idea to enjoy the freedom and pleasure of sex while cutting down unwanted infants?

Women have been using crude abortion methods as far back in history as Ancient Egypt.

https://glorian.org/learn/glossary/l/lilith

"Lilith is the mother of abortions, homosexuality, and in general, all kinds of crimes against Nature." - Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony


While that might come across off-putting to people who are pro-choice or support gay rights, I think there is some truth to this statement. And for the record I actually am openly gay myself, and I'm also pro-choice. I'm somehow not offended by this, maybe it's because I believe that the divine feminine and divine masculine are both needed in the role of creation itself? Our society seems to be trying to erase that fact which I don't agree with.

Samael Aun Weor's commentary on Pistis Sophia is worth reading, if for no other reason than to see just what a wild dude he was. He had another book on the Marsailles tarot that wasn't quite as entertaining (maybe with the exception of the Fool card) but suffice to say he's worth reading if for no other reason than getting one's own appraisal of him.

One thing I think seems to be broken in western deity models that's preserved in eastern - you have a four-stroke engine of creator, protector, redeemer, destroyer. We don't have a place for 'destroyer', rather that's Satan / Iblis and eternal damnation under the Abrahamic systems. This is part of the cycles.

Another video I'll post, I think Josephine McCarthy and Jake Stratton Kent both have their finger on the pulse with these things and Josephine had a four hour discussion with Alex on Glitchbottle (episode #97) August of last year, talking about Covid 19 and Josephine's take that whatever wave of catabolism / destruction that Covid was a signal of was just getting started, suggesting as well that we lived most of our lives up to this point through a growth and innovation phase and, in cyclical history, the in and out breaths are a feature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X66b9EOMR68

I agree, he sounds like he has some very interesting esoterical views.

With the spread of deadly diseases like covid and natural disasters getting worse every year... well, I just hope it doesn't wipe us all out. But ultimately that is up to nature to decide.

Nature has no mercy, only laws.

Btw I also read that some archeologists believe that the Burney Relief may have once been displayed in a high class brothel during ancient times due to the high level of detail put into the sexuality of this goddess figure.

It's been argued that nobody really worshipped Lilith, Lamashtu, or Ereshkigal in ancient times but they were all three connected to sex in ways.

Inanna on the other hand, had temples that engaged in something called 'sacred prostitution'. Basically holding orgies to call upon her powers of fertility. The priestesses of Aphrodite did the same thing in Ancient Greece from what I understand.

An image of what the Burney Relief may have actually looked like in ancient times.