Island Thirteen Lovers

on the Isle of Broken

Orbits
(Extract from: Muse of the Long Haul Thirty-One Isles of the Creative
Imagination)

Copyright, Dr Ian Irvine, 2013 all rights reserved. All short extracts from the texts discussed are
acknowledged and used under fair usage related to review and theoretical critique under international
copyright law.
Images: The Witch Circe ... [Changes the Men Accompanying Odysseus into Animals] Allesandro Allori,
1580 (mural). Second image: Marduk slays Tiamat, circa 2000 BCE photograph by George Lazenby, 2012,
(share alike 3.0). Third image of Charles gumerys Circe (1860) by Jastrow 2007, Share and Share alike.
Fourth Image: woodcut/engraving The Song of Solomon (in the public domain).
Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This piece is published at Scribd as part of a series drawn
from the soon to be print published non-fiction book on experiential poetics entitled: Muse of the Long Haul:
Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination.

Island Thirteen Lovers on the Isle of Broken Orbits

Ah! other thoughts than of my safe return
Employ thee, Goddess, now, who bidst me pass
The perilous gulf of Ocean on a raft,
That wild expanse terrible, which even ships
Pass not, though formed to cleave their way with ease,
And joyful in propitious wind from Jove.
Nolet me never, in despite of thee,
Embark on board a raft, nor till though swear,
O Goddess! the inviolable oath,
That future mischief thou intendst me none. 1

The Akkadian creation myth, the Enuma-Elish, has

interested me since the first time I came across it in
The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology back in
the early 1980s. When I first read it I was
unconsciously testing out Graves thesis regarding the
historic suppression of polytheistic and animistic
Goddess traditions prior to the advent of Judaic
monotheism. I suppose I was looking for the original
mythological break or split in the male psyche that
launched the patriarchal age that Graves associated
most particularly with Axial Age religions.
The sheer violence of the Enuma-Elish quickly came to symbolise for me some kind of
primordial rending of the male psychethe story of Eve and the Garden of Eden became, to my
mind, but a footnote to this earlier psychic catastrophe.
The poem celebrated the victory of the Babylonian god Marduka prototype for many a
future hubristic male warrior deityover Tiamat (primordial ocean/Mother Goddess). After a
dispute between the second generation of gods and the divine couple, Tiamat and Apsu, Apsu is
murdered by the god Ea. Tiamat seeks revenge on Ea and the other gods, but Ea now has a son,
Marduk.
Marduk and Tiamats armies clash, unfortunately for the planet, Marduks army is
victorious. Here is how Dhorme translates the showdown between Marduk and Tiamat:
They marched to war, they drew near to give battle.
The Lord spread out his net and caught her in it.
The evil wind which followed him, he loosed it in her face.
She opened her mouth, Tiamat, to swallow him.
He drove in the evil wind so that she could not close her lips.
The terrible winds filled her belly. Her heart was seized,
She held her mouth wide open.
He let fly an arrow, it pierced her belly.
Her inner parts he clove, he split her heart.
He rendered her powerless and destroyed her life.
He felled her body and stood upright on it.2
1
2

Homer, The Odyssey, trans, William Cowper, lines 204-213. J.M. Dent, 1920.
Tablet IV, vs. 93-104, Enuma Elish, as translated by Dhorme, and printed in The New Larousse Encyclopedia of

All of this violence is a precursor to Marduks creation of the cosmos. The dead mother Goddess,
Tiamat, turns out to be a fairly large corpse and Marduk being a strong fellow splits her gigantic
and fertile body in two producing heaven and earth. In meditating on Tiamats corpse Marduk
also conceives works of art! Thereafter he set up the stellar constellations and the various
homes of the gods. He also gave the sun and moon set paths across the heavens and constructed
gates for them to enter and exit throughin the process fixing the length of the year. Mankind
was next on the list but again something dead and bloodythe corpse of Kingu, an unfortunate
former ally God of Tiamatis used to mould the first man and womanhere at least the
Goddess Aruru gives Marduk a hand.3 Last to be created are the great rivers, the animals and the
vegetation of the world. All in all a fairly grizzly creation story!
Mardukassociated historically with the rise of the city of Babylonmakes full use of
his victory over Tiamat to increase his power over the other gods. In the ancient tablets the
scribes come close to describing him in ways later associated with the god of the Hebrews,
Jehovah:
Among lords the first
The Lord of Kings,
The shepherd of the gods.
According to that old Larousse Encyclopedia I purchased back in the early 80s he: absorbed all
the other gods and took over all their various functions and prerogatives. Another passage on the
same page describes him as follows:
When he is angered no god can resist his wrath,
Before the sharp blade of his sword the gods flee.
Terrible master, without rival among the great gods!

Nothing in history quite precedes this remarkable figure. To my young adult mind he sounded
like the archetypal warrior god puffed up with hubris due to his excessive physical strength and
set on dominating all aspects of the creation. The sort of figure who sacks cities, enslaves women
and children and seeks power over every aspect of his subjects livesnot the sort of character
who would be particularly sensitive in matters of love, nor the sort of fellow who would treat
women with much respect and dignity. As far as I was concerned this was precisely the kind of
masculinity I didnt want to live. Unfortunately it is precisely the kind of aggressive,
competitive, Social Darwinist masculinity that Western society still sees as heroicso long as
it is found among our own soldiers, sporting heroes, etc. To me this paragon of primordial
patriarchy was a kind of monster that any true man should seek to permanently eradicate from
his psyche.
Perhaps my young adult perspective represented a gross misreading of the historical and
mythological facts. Perhaps I was wrong to jump to the conclusion that the Enuma-Elish
represented the true Fall from paradise, as per a Gravesian interpretation, i.e. into polytheistic
patriarchy and thereafter into monotheistic patriarchy. Interestingly, Anne Baring and Jules
Cashford follow a similar reading of the myth:
Mythology, p. 53-54. See also commentary in Kramer, Mythologies of the Ancient World, p120-121.
3
Kramer, Mythologies of the Ancient World, p121.

The rise of the Babylonian cult of Marduk coincided with the glorification of war and
conquest that plunged the different peoples and races of the Near East into a struggle for
supremacy or survival, whose legacy of conflict has still not come to an end after 4,000
yearspresumably because the beliefs formulated then still govern human
consciousness.4

With the new emphasis on conquest, a supreme warrior God intent on pillaging cities, enslaving
whole peoples and expanding the Empire, as with the Assyrians and the rest down to the present
age, there would inevitably come a day, when women would say enough is enough. If the Enuma
Elish is a blue-print for the rise of self-sufficient male warriors and father gods, it also contains
the seeds of a future, necessary feminism, or female revolt against oppression.
I came across the story of Circe and her treatment of Odysseus and his men
in early 1990. Roger Sworder recited us then analysed this story of men
reduced to animals by a female magician on a remote mystical island. The
idea that one can be stranded on an island due to a combination of
enchantment and desire spoke directly to my experience at the timea
feature perhaps of any love relationship where incompatibility is an issue.
Three months after coming across the story in Studies in Western Traditions
1A I made the fateful decision to end my six year relationship.
It felt as though the twin curses of willessness and false hope
suddenly lifted (though, as it turned out, another quite different curse soon
replaced these two!). Id postponed the decision as long as possible since I
knew it would probably mean periods of separation from my daughter. The
decision felt impossible to make and at the same time incredibly urgent. It
turned out to be the hardest thing Ive ever had to do.
In Homers The Odyssey, Circe is a beautiful, intelligent and powerful women. She rules, so the
story goes, over an island of women. She is also a magician, a kind of herbalist/alchemist, as
well as a shrewd judge of the male psyche. She falls in love with Odysseus, but tragically is
forced to let him leave the Island when he gains magical help from Hermesspecifically the
means by which to resist Circes charms and potions.
In the Celtic story The Voyage of Maeldun the heroes also come upon an Isle of
Women not dissimilar to the isle ruled over by Circe. The travellers come ashore in order to
confront the rampart of a mighty dun, enclosing a mansion. Soon after they come across groups
of women, but no menone of the women, an especially skilled horsewoman, takes her bath
before the eyes of the sailors. A little while later a maiden invites them to enter the dun and says:
The Queen invites you.
Each man is given food and a willing maiden for the night. The hero, Maeldun, hooks up
with the queen and a night of passion ensues. When morning breaks, however, Maeldun and his
men are not permitted to leave the island. The queen says: Stay here, and old age will never fall
on you be no-longer wandering from island to island on the ocean. The charms of the women
keep the men spell-bound for three months, but eventually the men discuss their desire to return
to their homes and thus vote to leave the island and complete the journeys original task.
4

Baring and Cashford, Chapt. 7, Tiamat of Babylon: The Defeat of the Goddess, p. 285, The Myth of the Goddess.

Maeldun, however, still smitten with the queen, argues against departure: What shall we find
there that is better than this?
The complaints soon reach a fever pitch and Maeldun is forced to leave with his men. On
the first attempt, however, the queen returns from her duties early and comes riding up with a
clew of vine in her hand, which she flings after them. Maeldun catches it in his hand and the
queen, holding the other end, draws them back to land. As a consequence they are delayed
another three months. This happens twice more and the sailors surmise that Maeldun is in league
with the queen in some wayso great is his love for her. A plan is hatched and upon their next
attempt at escape another man grabs the clewwhich promptly sticks to him. Seeing the
situation is desperate one of the other sailors cuts the other poor fellows hand off. Immediately
the queen begins to grieve:
When she saw that, she at once began to wail and shriek, so that all the land was one
crying, wailing and shrieking.
All three of stories discussed above deal with the battle of the sexes in different ways. The first,
so far as I can tell, details the birth of andocentric social and religious institutions across ancient
Mesopotamia. These institutions would eventually lead to patriarchal polytheism (as per the
Olympians of Greece) and later, monotheism. The seeds for millennia of conflict and
misunderstanding between the sexes were sown with the ancient triumph of Marduk over
Tiamat. The other two stories are problematic love stories that bespeak an ancient split between
sexual desire and true lovethough they are told largely from the male perspective. The
seductive, possessive witch that resides on the edges of the andocentric civilised world is,
paradoxically, both an object of fear and an object of lust for men trapped in the cage of
patriarchy.
All three of these stories speak of the otherness of women to men after some kind of fall
(though not the Biblical fall). They also speak of an ancient mistrust between the sexes
mistrust, of course, hides fear and fear paralyses genuine love. In my opinion this inherited
subterranean gender war has created an impoverished literature of love in the West. In the case
of the Celts genuine love became a disruptive, inevitably tragic experience. Among Christians
the Madonna-Whore complex, as it is called, led an unrealistic Romantic idealisation of women
(especially in the Middle Ages) to exist alongside semi-pornographic witch fantasies suggesting
concomitant sexual obsessionsoften the two poles of attraction exist side by side in the same
person. I do not believe that the so-called sexual revolution has remedied this split to date. On
the whole we lack a literature of love capable of expressing both sexual passion and spiritual
transcendence through love.
After my separation from Dalia in December 1990 I realised that I knew nothing of any real
worth about women. The usual patriarchal social conditioning had made me more or less blind to
the true situation of womankind, both in modern societies and historically. On a trip back to New
Zealand in January 1991 (straight after the split) I contacted Alison again briefly only to feel
the old communication problems return immediately. Returning to Bendigo single, broke and
traumatised by the split I wasnt capable of committing deeply to a long-term relationship
throughout 1991. I still feel some remorse on this score since I spent some time with two women
during that year but couldnt in the end commit to eitherdespite them being generous and
giving human beings. In the early part of the year I got to know a dark-haired girl of GermanAustralian heritage called Mwe had a love of music and the humanities in common but saw

each other only intermittently due to her work and study commitmentsshe worked part-time in
a chocolate shop in central Melbourne whilst studying music at a local TAFE. Later that year I
gradually got to know and spend time with K a fellow Bendigo humanities student who also
loved alternative rock music. Both, given their creativity and love of ideas, contributed
significantly to my own creative and personal awakening that year.
Throughout 1991 circumstances made me see myself primarily as an absent father
attacks of guilt and corrosive worthlessness were frequent. Part of me was even toying with the
idea of returning to Dalia, and thus to deep incompatibility, for the sake of the children. This
was especially so after learning out of the blue that Dalia was pregnant again, this time with my
son, Marcus. Although nominally single I was thus very far from being footloose and fancy
freeindeed I developed, almost overnight, a small shock of grey hair in a spot above my
forehead just before Dalia and Lena left permanently for Auckland in March. I saw it as a
response to the emotional stress I was undera warning almost. I was also getting frequent
severe chest painsliterally a broken heart? It took me some time to realise that the years
spent addressing aspects of my emotional life had made me more open as a person than Id been
back in 1984the last time Id been single.
During that yeara lonely year in many respectI came to realise that the unconscious
idealisations Id been prone to throughout my adolescence were at the foundation of my
relational troubles. I instinctively felt that I had to somehow confront my own gender
conditioning before being able to commit again to a long-term relationship. Also, the father part
of me understood that entering into a relationship simply to avoid being alone would be
catastrophic for my kids.
In truth it wasnt until I met Sue in late 1991 that I could work through aspects of this
gender conditioning problem. Although we felt an immediate bond we didnt actually start
dating until February 1992 and it wasnt until August of 1992 that we moved in together.
Although Im superstitious about speaking openly concerning all things intimate (some ancient
fear of curses inherited from my British peasant heritage perhaps!) it seems important to
discuss the new sense of being in the world that Sues presence in my life gave rise to. On our
first meeting we experienced a kind of transpersonal timelessness simply through being
physically closeit was a transformative experience different to anything either of us had
experienced before. For my part, time and space seemed to collapse even as imaginative aspects
of my consciousness seemed to expand in all directions at great pace. I felt myself to be bathing
in a vast sea of energy/light that had a strange trance-inducing aura about it. All of this was
accompanied by a profound sense of well-being and existential calm.
The experience made me aware, ever after,
that genuine love possess a profound transpersonal
dimensionsomething almost never discussed in
contemporary Western culture; perhaps because both
Christianity and secular consumer capitalism distrust
any hint of sexual mysticism. I suspect that when
people say theyve found their soul-mate theyre
really saying that theyve experienced a transpersonal
epiphany through their encounter with the beloved.
Interestingly, the ancient Jewish poem The Song of
Songs (found in the Old Testament) seemed to me,
back in 1992, to best capture the transpersonal

dimension to the experiences alluded to above. A sample from The Song of Songs reads:
For, lo, the winter is past,
And the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grape
Give a good smell. Arise my love,
My fair one, and come away ...
Love and poetry (also love and creativity/inspiration/awen) have always been linked so not
surprisingly I was soon writing songs and poems out of this newthankfully reciprocated (this
time)state of being in love. Interestingly the quality of the writing also changeda new
sense of rhythm and formal wholeness appeared that saw many of the poems in particular
published in journals a decade laterincluding one piece that was to be published in several
national anthologies (e.g. Best Australian Poems and Agenda Anthology of Contemporary
Australian Poets)
The other fascinating thing that happened to me after meeting Sue was that for the first
time in my life I understood emotionally the phenomenon of Romantic Comedy. Our
relationship uncovered a whimsical lightness (even a gentle silliness) in my personality that
surprised me at the timehaving been a fairly intense, heavy, serious (almost cynical) etc.
person when it came to love previously (not that Id been a complete joke-free zone in other
areas of my life, however!). I can still watch Romantic Comedies and see Sue and I in the
various love-struck characters.
Not that falling in love again made me a shallow personlightness of being is not the
same as shallowness. Indeed from 1992 on I felt profoundly supported in all my musical,
academic and literary pursuits. Love makes every dream seem attainableit also has the power
to transform the way one looks at the darker aspects of existence. I remember, in particular,
some of our earliest discussions concerned oppression, from my perspective what it felt like to
have been born into a working class familyhow you thought, the limitations and internal
frustrations, but also the earthiness and honesty, that came with the terrain. I wanted Sue to
understand what it felt like to be both creative and working class. On the other hand, she wanted
me to understand the experience of being a woman in a society that tends to give men the
prominent social roles. I began to understand what many of the feminists were on aboutand it
was more than a mere intellectual understanding.
The other thing we instantly had in common were a love of the theories of Carl Jung
shed had some experience with Jungian modes of thinking as her family GP was, among other
things, a trained Jungian psychologist. From the first moment of our meeting then we had an
understanding of the mercurial/creative unconscious in common and this contributed to the
sense that I was with someone who wanted to live a life devoted primarily to creativity and the
arts.5 All of thisgiven the traumas of the previous 18 monthscame as an unexpected
5

Jung wrote three books on alchemy in which the figure of Mercurius figures strongly. At points in his
arguments(especially in the The Spirit Mercurius(in Alchemical Studies, pp191-250 Bollingen Series, Vol. 13,
1983) he argues that Mercurius reveals a basic identity with the collective unconscious.

revelation to me. Most importantly of all, I felt a new stability of soul that hopefully made me a
better father when I was able to be with Lena and later, Marcus. O that this stability and sense
of purpose had come to me much earlier in my life!

Author Bio (as at May 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist,
writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in
publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish
Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia)
and Takahe (NZ), as well as in a number of Australian
national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005
(Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005.
He is the author of three books and co-editor of three
journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing
and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as
the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and
social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative,
normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.