Ocean and the Limit of Existence

A chapter from the book, The Sacred History of Being, which explores the origins of philosophy in divine cult. Ideas about water and ocean were held in common around the Mediterranean in the first and second millennia B.C.E. These ideas are associated with creation and the generation of life. They are also associated with the idea of abundance, which features in the Babylonian creation myth, performed each year by the King and the priests. The liturgy tells us about the intellectual frame of their world, as they understood it.