This all filled him with such aching nostalgia that his employer Pugin suddenly seemed repulsive and hateful, and was banished from consciousness, together with his Parliament.
Tatarsky remembered with a tender warmth how the books he had discovered had been selected from amongst the waste paper they used to be sent to collect after class. They included a volume of a left-wing French existentialist published in the sixties, a finely bound collection of articles on theoretical physics. Infinity and the Universe, and a loose-leaf binder with the word ‘Tikhamat’ written in large letters on the spine.
Tatarsky remembered the book Infinity and the Universe, but not the binder. He opened it and read the first page:
TIKHAMAT-2 The Earthly Sea Chronological Tables and Notes
The papers bound into the folder obviously dated from a pre-computer age. Tatarsky could recall heaps of samizdat books that had circulated in this format - two typed pages reduced to half-size and copied on a single sheet of paper. What he was holding in his hands seemed to be an appendix to a dissertation on the history of the ancient world. Tatarsky began remembering: in his childhood, he thought, he hadn’t even opened the file, taking the word ‘Tikhamat’ to mean something like a mixture of diamat (dialectical materialism) with histmat (historical materialism). He’d only taken the work at all because of the beautiful folder, and then he’d forgotten all about it.
As it turned out, however, Tikhamat was the name either of an ancient deity or of an ocean, or perhaps both at the same time. Tatarsky learned from a footnote that the word could be translated approximately as ‘Chaos’.
A lot of the space in the folder was taken up by tables of kings. They were pretty monotonous, with their listings of unpronounceable names and Roman numerals, and information about when they’d launched their campaigns or laid the foundations of a wall or taken some city, and so forth. In several places different sources were compared, and the conclusion drawn from the comparison was that several events that had been recorded in history as following each other were in fact one and the same event, which had so astounded contemporary and subsequent generations that its echo had been doubled and tripled, and then each echo had assumed a life of its own. It was clear from the apologetically triumphant tone adopted by the author that his discovery appeared to him to be quite revolutionary and even iconoclastic, which set Tatarsky pondering yet again on the vanity of all human endeavour. He didn’t experience even the slightest sense of shock at the fact that Ashuretilshamersituballistu II had turned out actually to be Nebuchadnezzar III, and the nameless historian’s depth of feeling really seemed rather laughable. The kings seemed rather laughable too: it wasn’t even known for certain whether they were people or simply slips made by a scribe on his clay tablets, and the only traces remaining of them were on those same clay tablets.
The chronological tables were followed by extensive notes on some unknown text, and there were a lot of photographs of various antiquities pasted into the folder. The second or third article that Tatarsky came across was entitled: ‘ Babylon: The Three Chaldean Riddles’. Beneath the letter ‘O’ in the word ‘Babylon’ he could make out a letter ‘E’ that had been whited out and corrected - it was nothing more than a typing error, but the sight of it threw Tatarsky into a state of agitation. The name he’d been given at birth and had rejected on reaching the age of maturity had returned to haunt him just at the moment when he’d completely forgotten the story he’d told his childhood friends about the part the secret lore of Babylon was to play in his life.
Below the heading there was a photograph of the impression of a seal - a gate of iron bars on the top of either a mountain or a stepped pyramid, and standing beside it a man with a beard dressed in a skirt, with something that looked like a shawl thrown over his shoulders. It seemed to Tatarsky that the man was holding two severed heads by their thin plaits of hair; but one of the heads had no facial features, while the second was smiling happily. Tatarsky read the inscription under the drawing: ‘A Chaldean with a mask and a mirror on a ziggurat’. He squatted on a pile of books removed from the closet and began reading the text beneath the photograph.
P. 123. The mirror and the mask are the ritual requisites of Ishtar. The canonical representation, which expresses the sacramental symbolism of her cult more fully, is of Ishtar in a gold mask, gazing into a mirror. Gold is the body of the goddess and its negative projection is the light of the stars. This has led several researchers to assume that the third ritual requisite of the goddess is the fly-agaric mushroom, the cap of which is a natural map of the starry sky. If this is so, then we must regard the fly-agaric as the ‘heavenly mushroom’ referred to in various texts. This assumption is indirectly confirmed by the details of the myth of the three great ages, the ages of the red, blue and yellow skies. The red fly-agaric connects the Chaldean with the past; it provides access to the wisdom and strength of the age of the red sky. The brown fly-agaric (‘brown’ and ‘yellow’ were designated by the same word in Accadian), on the other hand, provides a link with the future and a means of taking possession all of its inexhaustible energy.
Turning over a few pages at random, Tatarsky came across the word ‘fly-agaric’ again.
P. 145. The three Chaldean riddles (the Three Riddles of Ishtar). According to the tradition of the Chaldean riddles, any inhabitant of Babylon could become the goddess’s husband. In order to do this he had to drink a special beverage and ascend her ziggurat. It is not clear whether by this was intended the ceremonial ascent of a real structure in Babylon or a hallucinatory experience. The second assumption is supported by the fact that the potion was prepared according to a rather exotic recipe: it included ‘the urine of a red ass’ (possibly the cinnabar traditional in ancient alchemy) and ‘heavenly mushrooms’ (evidently fly-agaric, cf. ‘The Mirror and the Mask’).
According to tradition the path to the goddess and to supreme wisdom (the Babylonians did not differentiate these two concepts, which were seen as flowing naturally into one another and regarded as different aspects of the same reality) was via sexual union with a golden idol of the goddess, which was located in the upper chamber of the ziggurat. It was believed that at certain times the spirit of Ishtar descended into this idol.
In order to be granted access to the idol it was necessary to guess the Three Riddles of Ishtar. These riddles have not come down to us. Let us note the controversial opinion of Claude Greco (see 11,12), who assumes that what is meant is a set of rhymed incantations in ancient Accadian discovered during the excavation of Nineveh, which are rendered highly polysemantic by means of their homonymic structure.
A far more convincing interpretation, however, is based on several sources taken together: the Three Riddles of Ishtar were three symbolic objects that were handed to a Babylonian who wished to become a Chaldean. He had to interpret the significance of these items (the motif of a symbolic message). On the spiral ascent of the ziggurat there were three gateways, where the future Chaldean was handed each of the objects in turn. Anybody who got even one of the riddles wrong was pushed over the edge of the ziggurat to certain death by the soldiers of the guard. (There is some reason to derive the later cult of Kybela, based on ritual self-castration, from the cult of Ishtar: the significance of the self-castration was evidently as a substitute sacrifice.)