Subterranean waters: their symbolism in the works of Vladimir Karpets

In one of his early poems, Vladimir Igorevich Karpets wrote:

Forget earthly freedoms,

but bend your ear to the ground

And listen to the subterranean waters,

noisy there from time immemorial [1, p. 6].

In his later work, the theme of underground and irrational life will be treated by Karpets more than once. For example, he was quite concerned about the geological feature of Moscow, which lies directly on voids (in some places they begin only 100-200 meters deeper than the Moscow metro). The poet feared that under certain circumstances Moscow might sink underground, linking this with the fate of Lenin's mummy: “And the corpse will sink in the underground passages / Along with this stone void” [1, p. 95]. Slightly more difficult to interpret are Karpets' lines from “Songs of the Northern Firing Range”: “There, high up at the bottom... The Vedas of the living river, hidden under the grass, form a centuries-old circle” [2, p. 20]. The mystery of the subterranean imagery in Karpets' poem is due to the fact that where one might assume associations with black and satanic chthonicism, we see something entirely different. Karpets' subterranean waters are cleansed of dirt, preserve the Russian historical tradition, purify it of sins, and are a projection of the heavenly Paradise (“there, up above, at the bottom”, compares with the river into which Heinrich von Ofterdingen plummets in Novalis' novel).

Associations with Mother Earth, the materia prima are acceptable here (as in Klyuev: “The prophetic maternal darkness will roar, shine, divine”), especially since Karpets wrote repeatedly about the materia prima in his hermetic and artistic works, but in this case we are not interested in them, or rather, not them at all. When Karpets writes about groundwater, the very tone of his speech is somewhat different from Virgil's famous “If I do not bow to the heavenly gods, I will erect Acheron”. Echoes of a different, older tradition can be heard in his poem. Which one?

Soviet readers are accustomed to the translation of the Assyro-Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh by academician I. M. Dyakonov, which begins with the phrase “On him who saw everything to the ends of the world”. However, in the quarter century since Dyakonov's death, the meaning of the Akkadian text in light of the discoveries of new tablets and advances in the study of language has been significantly revised. The epic begins with the verse sha nagba Ö muru, ishdi mati, in which the accusative of the word nagbu, plural of nagb, was unintelligible. Dyakonov knew that there were some texts in which it means “everything, the totality”, and he made the mistake of reading sha nagba ī mura as “the one who saw everything”. Later it became clear that the main meaning of the word nagbu (and the only one in those cases where it is written with the Sumerian ideogram IDIM “source, underground waters”) is “source, underground waters, the realm of the god Ea”. Etymologically nagbu derives from the very rarely used Akkadian verb in qā bu “to deflower, to make a hole” and is associated with water making its way to the ground from below.

However, after this discovery, a new ambiguity arose: what did Gilgamesh see? An underground abyss or some origin? After all, the name of the underground water realm in Mesopotamian culture is well known: it is Apsu, the primary waters of chaos. But there are texts in which nagbu is also used in a similar context. The second line of the epic speaks in favor of the interpretation of nagbu as origins, where a clarification is given: the hero saw ishdu mati, “the foundations of the country”, where the word ishdu is “foundation”, often in a cosmological sense. meaning: the foundations of the Earth, of Heaven, i.e., practically “roots of the mountains” (the words riksu and kitsru with the primary meaning of “knot” were later also used as synonyms). Moreover, ishdu mati is an exact translation of the earlier Sumerian expression suhush kalama. But again: what “foundations of the country” did Gilgamesh see? Scientists' opinions are once again divided.

Some, like the author of the new canonical English translation of the epic by A. R. George, believed that it was only the customs and rituals of a given state. He was followed by V. A. Jacobson, who took on the task of correcting Dyakonov's translation in 2011 and, having just started it, died in 2015 [4, p. 20, 25]. Jacobson's translation begins with the words “Concerning the one who saw the abyss”. From his point of view, Gilgamesh saw the abyss underground and, for some reason, immediately separated by a comma: the laws of the land, which seems strange.

Others, such as the new translator of the world's oldest epic poem into Russian R. M. Nurullin, concluded that we are talking about the cosmological foundations not of the country, but of the land, of the earth as a whole: “The underground waters (nagbu) serve as the foundation (ishdu) on which, according to the beliefs of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the earth rested” [3, p. 200]. Therefore, Nurullin translated the first lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh as follows: “He who saw the origins, the foundations of the land”. Of course, this choice had to be supported by further arguments. Indeed, other Mesopotamian texts unrelated to the epic have been discovered in which Sumerian idim and Akkadian nagbu are used in the sense of underground sources and as synonymous with foundation. The Sumerian hymn to the city of Kish speaks of “a temple [pointed] toward the sky from a mountain, in the earth toward the springs” (e anshe kuram kishe idimam). In one of the Assyrian sources, “their gods descended into the underground waters” (uriduma il shunu uriduma nagabish): here we are talking about the synonym of nagbu and ishdu. Therefore, Gilgamesh was by no means the one who “saw everything” or even the one who “saw the abyss”, but he saw the very specific origins and foundations of the subterranean land.

What exactly are we talking about? It is presumed to be the episode at the end of the epic, when the hero dives into the bottom of Apsu and seizes the flower of immortality. However, there is also a version in which Gilgamesh saw that “source of rivers” where his ancestor Utnapishtim lives, who received immortality, this Babylonian Noah. It should be noted here that in Mesopotamian culture the source of any river was considered sacred. The Assyrian king Salmaneser III called himself “the one who saw the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates”, which he valued far more than his military campaigns. It was in Mesopotamia that the belief was formed that all rivers flow from a single source in Paradise, which is reflected in the very first page of the Bible, “One river went out from Eden to water Paradise; and then it divided into four rivers [branches]” (Gen. 2:10).

In this context, the sacred symbolism of underground water sources is understandable. It is never simply “water” (see the chapters on the metaphysics of water in A. G. Dugin's “Inner Ontologies”), but at the same time it is an indivisible symbol of wisdom and sophia. Although less commonly used than Apsu, the word nagbu means “wisdom, intelligence, the realm of Ea” in expressions such as “all sources of wisdom” and “the one who has reached the source of wisdom”. In other words, the underground waters are not something evil and chthonic in a negative sense; they are good and Sophia. This Sophia is personified by the Sumerian god Enki, also known as the Assyro-Babylonian Ea, who orders the world as the biblical Sophia of Wisdom (see the poem “Enki and World Order”). And when Karpets turned to the theme of subterranean waters as carriers of Tradition, in his youth it was the poet's brilliant insight into universal symbolism, and in later years it was a conscious appeal to the Mesopotamian theme. In his diary of the early 2010s, the thinker repeatedly made the derivation of the sacredness of royal power from Sumerian monarchical doctrines (a theme now developed in A. G. Dugin's Being and Empire). In Karpets's mind, this ancient source, from which Russia eventually adopted both the Sumerian double-headed eagle and the legend of the Babylonian white hood, was identified with the Russian theme of the prison, in which the divine wisdom of Ea is combined with adherence to traditional values, bonds, and the foundations not only of a country, but of the mainland.

Considering Vladimir Karpets' reverence for Emperor Paul I, it would be impermissible to ignore Pavlov's greatest conservative ideologue and the beginning of Alexander's reign: General M. M. Filosofov (1732-1811), who in his notes constantly repeated the concept of the “domestic firmament” as that unshakable set of Russian traditions that the monarchy is called upon to protect from the subversive onslaught of the liberal West [5]. If you translate “domestic firmament” into Akkadian from the Protocols of the Permanent Council of the Russian Empire of 1800, you will literally get ishdi mati...

A link is still missing in our conclusions so that the framework of continuity from Mesopotamian epic to Karpets' poetry can be directly recognized. This link exists and it is the name Ea. It was under the pseudonym “Ea” that the young Julius Evola signed most of his articles in the collections of the magical group “Ur” which he directed [6]. Karpets became acquainted with Evola's work quite early, as early as the early 1990s, and soon translated his youthful “Dadaist” poem “The Dark Words of the Inner Landscape”. True, the translation was not from the Italian original, but from a French translation, but given the extreme simplicity of the text, this does not substantially change anything. Meanwhile, in Evola the character “Ngara”, meaning will, says:

The serpent Ea is the

dark force of life, a formless movement

along a sinusoid in the spheres of the pre-existent:

Velia Vlaga, the depth that,

pulsing, spews out

unfertilized balls toward

the gravitational fields.

 

For the Serpent Velia Ea is silent, and sound is darkness,

and the people

who have surrounded themselves

Are tearing into sound. Deaf and dumb timpani are sounding in the holds.

 

It is also a circle,

it is impossible to see it, I know

for certain. And then there is the

night mara, the ultraviolet vegetation,

the horror screaming in the mirrors, krunkrungoram;

it is she who infects the blood

with the

tenacious and hopeless labor of millions of blacks in the

San Francisco mines.

<...>

so that Ea could crawl across

the desert and become nitrogen,

and his eyes would see only

the dance of Alpha [7].

The name of the undersea serpent Ea from Evola's poem was forever remembered by Karpets. In his last story, Himmler (2015), he played this character: a huge reptile 7 meters long and 1.5 meters wide, who lives in the basement of the main characters' house and eventually reveals his power. The heroine of the story, Anna, says, “But this creature, that ... Ea ... She ... has always been and is. And so it shall be” [8]. However, Karpets' text can also be interpreted in such a way that Ea may be a giant fish. The puzzle has been solved: the mystery of the hidden symbolism of Karpets' works has been solved by appealing to Mesopotamian mythology. In it, however, Ea is not a snake at all, but a half-fish, and he is a very wise and even cunning god who helps people. Both Ea and Apsu (Abzu) refer to the underground plane of space, but they are antonyms: Apsu is a black abyss of chaos, harmful blind matter, while Ea is the bearer of sophia and order, overcoming it and leading it to the shores. He is the leader of the Anunnaki gods, about whom even Vladimir Karpets often liked to speculate on social networks. His bold thinking dragged himself in search of the “foundations of the land” as deep as it was necessary to touch clean waters, uncontaminated by sin, to save his homeland. As the Sumerians said, “may the Anunnaki announce their fate while they are among us” (Anunnakene shagzua nam hemdabtarene). The Russian poet Karpets was ready to accept this fate. Was it just his subjective feeling?

Not at all. The center of Enki (Ea) worship was Eridu, the oldest of the Sumerian cities, which flourished in the fourth millennium BCE. According to the mythical King List, it was in Eridu that “royalty” (nam-lugal) originally descended from heaven. By the beginning of the written period, the city had lost its importance due to the retreat of the Euphrates riverbed, surviving only as the temple complex of Ea. According to legends, it was from the oil fields beneath Eridu that Enki (Ea) came to the surface to the people. And now, five thousand years later, in December 2023, the Iraqi government has decided to sell the entire Eridu oilfield to Russia. This brings full circle the exegesis of “groundwater” in Vladimir Karpets' metaphysics.

Notes:

[1] Karpets V. I., “The morning is deep”, M., 1989.

[2] Karpets V. I., “Century of the century”, M., 2016.

[3] Kogan L. E., Nurullin R. M., Gilgamesh I. M., “Dyakonova: an attempt at restoratio”, Bulletin of ancient history, 2012, No. 3, pp. 191-232.

[4] Yankovsky-Dyakonov A. I., “Who saw the origins”, in “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, SPb., 2020. pp. 5-26.

[5] Safonov M. M., Mikhail Mikhailovich Filosofov, “Countercurrent: historical portraits of Russian conservatives of the first third of the 19th century”, Voronež, 2005, pp. 66-80.

[6] Evola J. and the Ur group, “Introduction to magic”, Volume 1. Tambov, 2019; Volume 2. Tambov, 2022.

[7] Evola J., “Dark words of the inner landscape”, Evola J. Abstract art. M., 2012.

[8] Karpet V. I., “Himmler”, M., 2015. proza.ru.

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo