We Come From the Water

We come from the water. Our common ancestors from millions of years ago are shared with ocean dwellers today. Land animals only emerged 350 million years ago during the late Devonian period, the age of the fishes. Life itself began in the water, either in the oceans or in pools of water. In either case water containing amino acids is what the first single cellular organisms developed from. The first cities were founded by the water, and our great cities today are by bodies of water. Egypt grew around the Nile, Mesopotamia around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The first philosopher/scientist Thales thought that water was the fundamental element of the universe.

"Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, says that it is water (that is why he declares the earth rests on water). He perhaps came to acquire this belief from seeing that the nourishment of everything is moist and that heat itself comes from this and lives by this (for that which anything comes into being is its first principle)- he came to his belief both for this reason and because the seeds of everything have a moist nature, and water is the natural principle of moist things." Aristotle-Metaphysics

Another pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander is supposed to have said that humans originally developed inside the bodies of fish until they were able to look after themselves. This is symbolic both of the long time it takes for humans to mature as well as our oceanic ancestry. Since society developed near the water, before humans could develop their own industry and figure out ways to irrigate we were dependent on bodies of water.

"Animals come into being <from moisture> evaporated from the sun. Humans originally resembled another type of animal, namely fish." Hippolytus-Refutation of all Heresies

"Further, he says that originally humans were born from animals of a different kind, became the other animals can soon look after themselves while humans alone require a long period of nursing; that is why if they had been like this originally they would not have survived." Plutarch-Miscellanies

"Anaximander of Miletus says he thinks that from hot water and earth there arouse fish, or animals very like fish, that humans grew inside them, and that the embryos were retained inside up to puberty whereupon fish like animals burst and men and women emerged already able to look after themselves." Censorinus- On Birthdays

"The descendants of old Hellen actually sacrifice to Poseidon the Ancestor, believing that men grew from the moist substance, as do the Syrians. That is why they revere fish, as being of the same species and the same nurture as themselves. Here their philosophy is better than that of Anaximander. For he says, not that fish and men were born in the same surroundings, but that at first men came into being inside fish and were nourished there-like Sharks- only emerging and taking to land when they were able to look after themselves. So just as fire consumes the matter from which it was kindled (it's own mother and father, as the poet who inserted the marriage of Ceyx and Hesiod's poems said), so Anaximander, having declared that fish are at once fathers and mothers of men, urges us not to eat them." Plutarch-Table Talk

There's a similar "theory" out there today for our direct origins from the water. The heterodox "aquatic ape" hypothesis argues that homo sapiens evolved the physiological features different from other primates like lack of body hair and subcutaneous fat because our ancestors spent some of their lives in the water. There isn't much proof for this and it is a minority position. I first heard of it from the Mermaids: The Body Found mocumentary from the Discovery Channel when to my surprise I learned it was an actual hypothesis. The aquatic ape hypothesis does keep our aqueous heritage on the mind. 

Looking to mythology, the Babylonians supposedly learned the arts of civilization from an amphibious fish-man hybrid named Oannes, also known as Adapa a Promethean figure, who came from the ocean. Oannes is probably the fish-God Dagon who was worshiped by Semitic peoples: the Babylonians, the Philistines, and the Phoenicians. The temple Samson destroyed in the Old Testament was a Philistine temple to Dagon. The name Dagon means something like grain, referring to agriculture, knowledge of which is what inaugurated humans into civilization. 

"At first they led a somewhat wretched existence and lived without rule after the manner of beasts.

But, in the first year after the flood appeared an animal endowed with human reason, named Oannes, who rose from out of the Erythian Sea, at the point where it borders Babylonia. He had the whole body of a fish, but above his fish's head he had another head which was that of a man, and human feet emerged from beneath his fish's tail.

He had a human voice, and an image of him is preserved unto this day.

He passed the day in the midst of men without taking food; he taught them the use of letters, sciences and arts of all kinds. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge.

He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect the fruits; in short he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften human manners and humanize their laws.

From that time nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions.

And when the sun set, this being Oannes, retired again into the sea, for he was amphibious."

Oannes/Dagon is related or identical to the Sumerian God Ea/Enki, as well as Poseidon/Neptune of the Greeks and Romans. Enki was the patron god of man and resided in the first city Eridu. His temple was underwater, and he was described as half-man half-fish, like Oannes. Enki saved life on Earth from the great flood by warning Altrahasis (Utnapishtim in The Epic of Gilgamesh) in a dream and orders him to build a ship like Noah's Ark. 

There is a possible parallel between Dagon and the Egyptian god Osiris. Osiris was castrated and dismembered by his brother Set. Osiris's wife Isis recovered his body parts and brought him back to life, but didn't find his penis. His phallus was swallowed by a fish in the Nile. This fish supposedly became Dagon. 

The name Dagon and the description of him as amphibian teacher to humans, Oannes, may be related to the Dogon people of Mali, Africa. The tribe has a great knowledge of astronomy, claiming their gods come from the distant star Sirius, implying they had contact with or descended from an advanced civilization in their past like Egypt (or maybe aliens...). The Dogon worship ancestral spirits named the Nommo, which means "to make one drink." The Nommo are amphibious creatures with a humanoid upper body and legs with a fish torso and tail. The Nommo are the ones who taught the Dogon people astronomy, among other things. 

I and many people I suspect learned of Dagon and his status as a water god from HP Lovecraft's 1917 short story Dagon. In Dagon, the narrator is drifting in the Pacific ocean on a lifeboat after his ship is captured by German during World War I. The water south of the equator becomes black and thick enough to walk enough, supposedly what used to be the ocean floor has risen to the surface. Upon descending a mound he encounters a stone monolith covered with hieroglyphics of sea creatures, and disturbing amphibious humanoid creatures:

"I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shown disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well... They were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiseled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself."

After encountering the monolith, a monster emerges from the water . In an attempt to alleviate his traumatic experience the narrator seeks the same mythology mentioned earlier. "Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries." There's no consolation from the remnants of ancient history for him.

The shrine beneath the waves is that of Cthulhu, who like Enki/Ea had a palace under water. In the later story The Shadow Over Innsmouth 1931 the fish men are referred to as "the deep ones." The New England town of Innsmouth came into contact with the deep ones who a merchant Obed Marsh learned of from a tribe in the West Indies. The town was in economic trouble, and so Obed and his followers summoned the deep ones to increase their wealth. They build a church, the Esoteric Order of Dagon and offer human sacrifices and women to mate with the amphibious creatures. The offspring are born normal looking humans, but grow up to be fish-men and join the old ones in their cities underground. The US government shuts all of this down, arresting large numbers of people and destroys buildings, under the guise of enforcing prohibition. 

I was quite pleased to find out that Lovecraft based a lot of this on old Mesopotamian mythology. Many of his stories are about the unearthing of the inhuman origins of humanity which have been hidden away, to protect us from an inimical and indifferent universe. The further back one goes in human history, the closer one gets to the truth. 

It is with the rise of the Abrahamic religions begins the end of the water gods' hold over western culture.

1 Samuel 5.2-7
After the Philistines had captured the ark of God, they took it from Ebenezer to Ashdod.
2 Then they carried the ark into Dagon's temple and set it beside Dagon.
3 When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the LORD! They took Dagon and put him back in his place.
4 But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the LORD! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained.
5 That is why to this day neither the priests of Dagon nor any others who enter Dagon's temple at Ashdod step on the threshold.

The literal falling of Dagon before the ark is symbolic of the eclipse of paganism and the rise of Abrahamic monotheism. The God of Abraham does not subsist in and is not born of the primordial waters like the old gods.

Enuma Elish, Babylonian creation epic:
"When on high the heaven had not been named, firm ground below had not been called by name, naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, and Mummu Tiamat, she bore them all, their waters commingling as in a single body: no reed hut had been matter, no marshland had appeared, when no gods whatever had been brought into being, uncalled by names, their destinies undetermined-then it was that the gods were formed within them."

For the Abrahamic religions, the waters are divided by a firmament. God separates the heavens from the earth from the very beginning. The western pagan religions have it that the gods themselves are born of the primordial waters, matter precedes the gods. In Hesiod's theogony of the Greek gods the chasm or chaos is primary, less materialist and more "philosophical"; a transition to the religion of the Word.

Genesis
"Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day."

Notice God says and it is done, the word determining material reality. The conscious fulfillment of a wish.

As western society has progressed, we have moved away from worship of our origins in the water. Yet some say that the pope's current hat, the mitre, has its origins in the worship of Dagon the fish god. The opening of the mitre is a fish mouth! The high priests of Babylon it is said wore fish head hats and robes which resembled fish bodies. An alternative explanation is that of Jesus saying the apostles are to be fishers of men, which already sounds fishy. Perhaps the design is unconscious, a product of the Church originating in a pagan world.

Looking to the esoteric, the Pythagorean cult can give us symbolic meaning to our aqueous origins.

The first thing in existence was the monad, a single circle, self contained like the single cell, the life in the water or the embryo in the fluids of the womb. Then comes the dyad when one becomes two, though still linked together. The shape created by the two circles is the vesica piscis, the fish bladder; the physical origin of separateness from the mother, duality. The vesica piscis is the vagina, the passage of birth and also the urethra of the penis, from which fermenting semen comes. Also it is the fish symbol Christians use, the ichthys. The separation of life from the ocean for the first land dwellers is a symbolic recapitulation of the original separation. 

As millions of years pass, our aqueous ancestry is pushed back further into our physical development. The mammal fetus has gill pouches early on just like the fish, though these don't develop into functional gills and serve other functions. Western religion goes on to separates man from the waters early on, though still retaining aspects. Through irrigation we are able to have sedentary civilization further away from the source of water and see our labor and ingenuity as the fountainhead of civilized life. 

The human race's separation from the water is like the tale of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus's perilous journey home is so because of the antagonism of the god Poseidon, who is angry at Odysseus for killing the cyclops, his son. It is Poseidon who makes Odysseus' return home so long, the sublime power of the oceans which still have the capacity to overwhelm us. Most of the depths of the ocean are undiscovered and the surface of Earth is mostly ocean and sea. When we look for signs of life on other planets, we look for water. 

Thomas Hobbes' 1651 political treatise Leviathan uses the eponymous sea monster of the Hebrew bible as a metaphor for the political sovereign. The human ruler instills fear and the sense of greatness in followers by common consent to total coercive authority which replaces the terror of nature and God in providing order. Ancient societies declared their rulers as gods, giving special authority to their reign. Up to Hobbes' time Christian, rather than polytheist, absolute monarchists defended the divine right of kings, descended from Adam, to justify the sovereign's authority as higher than worldly performance. Hobbes applied the principles of the burgeoning scientific revolution, namely the law of inertia, to human nature and inaugurated a new form of political justification; the will of the people. Since humans are just matter conserving their state of motion like anything else in the universe, social order isn't natural but artificial. Society only works by external restraint on people's bodily motion which left alone will continue to the possible detriment of others. Before Galileo it was thought that a body required continual force to be in motion, a first mover, but if an object in motion conserves its state of motion then the threat of force isn't enough. It is the uncertainty of the state of nature in which there are no physical restraints on what people can do which requires humans to make their own leviathan. Only by common consent to a common power are we able to instill the fear that any individual will be prevented from breaking the law. 

This is the beginning of modern political thought; human political order as our own creation, understood with the same principles that govern the physical universe. No gods or first movers are required, every individual can understand why we have the law with their own reason and participate in the making of the law with the advent of liberal democracy. We have become the leviathan. A retracing of our evolutionary history and the beginnings of western religion can reveal our origins and hopefully give us a renewed understanding of our relationship to the water, our first home.