Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
Bantam Spectra Trade Paperback
ISBN 0-553-35192-3
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Excerpts:
===================
Chapter 27...
speaking in tongues... the technical term is glossolalia... a neurological
phenomenon that is merely /exploited/ by religious rituals.
...
Pagan Greeks did it - Plato called them /theomania/. The Oriental cults
of the Roman Empire did it. Hudson Bay Eskimos, Chukchi shamans, Lapps,
Yakuts, Semang pygmies, the North Borneo cults, the Trhi-speaking priests
of Ghana. The Zulu Amandiki cult and the Chinese religious sect of
Shang-ti-hui. Spirit mediums of Tonga and the Brazilian Ubanda cult.
The Tungus tribesmen of Siberia say that when the shaman goes into
his trance and raves incoherent syllables, he learns the entire language
of nature... The Sukuma people of Africa say that the language is
/kinaturu/, the tongue of the ancestors of all magicians, who are thought
to have descended from one particular tribe.
... If the mystical explanations are ruled out, then it seems that
glossolalia comes from structures buried deep within the brain, common
to all people.
... C.W.Shumway observed the Los Angeles revivial of 1906 and noted
six basic symptoms: complete loss of rational control; dominance of
emotion that leads to hysteria; absence of thought or will; automatic
functioning of the speech organs; amnesia; and occasional sporadic
physical manifestations such as jerking or twitching. Eusebius observed
similar phenomena around the year 300, saying that the false prophet
begins by a deliberate supression of conscious thought, and ends in
a delirium over which he has no control.
...
Pentecost... From the Greek pentekostos, meaning fiftieth. It refers to
the fiftieth day after the crucifiction... christianity was hijacked
by viral influences when it was only 50 days old...
...
"And they were all filled with the Holy spirit... And all were
amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?""
Acts 2:4-12
...
Sounds like Babel in reverse.
...
Many Pentecostal Christians believe that the gift of tongues was given to
them so that they could spread their religion to other peoples without
having to actually learn their language. The word for that is 'xenoglossy'.
...
In the 16th century, Saint Louis Bertrand allegedly used the gift of
tongues to convert somewhere between thirty thousand and three hundred
thousand South American Indians to Christianity... Spread through the
population even faster than smallpox.

--
Pentecost ... the Romans were running the country, but there were a number
of Jewish religious authorities... the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the
Essenes.  ...the Pharisees... were hassling him [Christ] because they
were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version
of the religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat
to them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law.
...
The Sadducees were materialists... in the philosophical sense. All
philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material
world is the only world - hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary
universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material
world.
...
Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This
distinction between something and nothing - this pivotal separation
between being and nonbeing - is quite fundamental and underlies many
creation myths. ... Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European
root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word
'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste.
The same root gave use 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,'
which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.
... 'sword' ... From a root word with several meanings. One of those meanings
is 'to cut or pierce.' One of them is 'post' or 'rod.' And the other is,
simply, 'to speak.'
...
...the third group, the Essenes... lived communally and believed that
physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected. They were
constantly bathing themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves
with enemas, and going to extreme lengths to make sure that their food
was pure and uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the Gospels
in which Jesus healed posessed people, not with miracles, but by driving
parasites, such as tapeworm, out of their body. These parasites are
considered to be synonymous with demons. ... So to them there was no
difference between infection with a parasite, like tapeworm, and demonic
possession.
...
viruses and infection and something called a nam-shub... Nam-shub is a
word from Sumerian... used in Mesopotamia until roughly 2000 BC. the
oldest of all written languages.  ...
No other languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an
agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes
or syllables that are grouped into words - very unusual. ...
if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sould like a long
stream of short syllables strung together. ...
Would it sound anything like glossolalia? ... Does it sound like any
modern tongue? There is no provable genetic relationship between
Sumerian and any tongue that came afterward.
... What happened to the Sumerians? Genocide? ... They were conquered,
but there's no evidence of genocide per se.
...
At any given time, it appears that there are roughly ten people in the
world who can read [Sumerian]. ... One in Israel. One at the British
Museum. One in Iraq. One at the University of Chicago. One at the
University of Pennsylvania. And five at Rife Bible College in Houston, Texas.
...
A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent
would be 'incantation,' but this has a number of incorrect connotations.
Did the Sumerians believe in magic? ...
...quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. "Myths of Enki,
the Crafty God." New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989:
   "Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in
    Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile
    work... [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection
    between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete
    that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort
    the whole.'

---
Chapter 28...
The clay envelope is Sumerian. It is from the 3rd millenium BC. It
was dug up from the city of Eridu in southern Iraq.
The black stele or obelisk is the Code of Hammurabi, which dates from
about 1750 BC. The treelike structure is a Yahwistic cult totem from
Palestine. Its called an asherah. It's from about 900 BC.
...
The asherah and the Code of Hammurabi are in museums. The clay
envelope is in the personal collection of L. Bob Rife.
...
 Egypt was a civilization of stone. They made their art and architecture
of stone. So they invented papyrus and wrote on that. But papyrus
is perishable. So even though their art and architecture have survived,
their written words - their data - have largely disappeared.
 What about all those hieroglyphic inscriptions?
 Bumper stickers. Corrupt political speech. They had an unfortunate
tendency to write inscriptions praising their own military victories
before the battles had actually taken place.
...
Sumer was a civilization of clay. They made their buildings of it and
wrote on it, too. Their statues were of gypsum, which dissolves in water.
So the buildings and statues have since fallen apart under the elements.
But the clay tablets were either baked or else buried in jars. So all the
/data/ of the Sumerians have survived. Egypt left a legacy of art and
architecture; Sumer's legacy is its megabytes.
...
The Sumerians wrote on everything. When they built a building, they would
write in cuneiform on every brick. When the buildings fell down, these
bricks would remain, scattered across the desert. In the Koran, the angels
who are sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah say, "We are sent forth to
a wicked nation, so that we may bring down on them a shower of clay-stones
marked by your Lord for the destruction of the sinful."
...
The [clay] envelope contains the nam-shub of Enki.
...
It is a warning, it says, "This envelope contains the nam-shub of Enki."

 "Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion,
 There was no hyena, there was no lion,
 There was no wild dog, no wolf,
 There was no fear, no terror,
 Man had no rival.
 In those days, the land Shubur-Hamazi,
 Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the /me/ of princeship,
 Uri, the land having all that is appropriate,
 The land Martu, resting in security,
 The whole universe, the people well cared for,
 To Enlil in one tongue gave speech.
 Then the lord defiant, the prince defiant, the king defiant,
 Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy,
 The lord of wisdom who scans the land,
 The leader of the gods,
 The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom,
 Changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it,
 Into the speech of man that had been one.

That's Kramer's translation.
...
The nam-shub is both a story and an incantation. A self-fulfilling
fiction. ... in the original form, which this translation only hints at,
it actually did what it describes. ... changed the speech in men's mouths.
This is a Babel story ... Everyone was speaking the same language, and
then Enki changed their speech so that they could no longer understand
each other. This must be the basis for the Tower of Babel stuff in
the Bible.
...
...at one point everyone spoke Sumerian. Then, nobody did. It just vanished,
like the dinosaurs. And there's no good genocide to explain how that happened.
Which is consistent with the Tower of Babel story, and the nam-shub of Enki.
..Babel really happened... the vast number of human languages ... Tens of
thousands. In many parts of the world, you will find people of the same
ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under similar
conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in common with
each other. This sort of thing is not an oddity -- it is ubiquitous.
Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human
language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue.
...
...Babel was an actual historical event. That it happened in a particular
time and place, coinciding with the disappearance of the Sumerian language.
That prior to Babel/Infocalypse, languages tended to converge. And that
afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge diverge
and become mutually incomprehensible -- that this tendency is...
coiled like a serpent around the human brainstem.
... there was some /phenomenon/ that moved through the population, altering
their minds in such a way that they could no longer process the Sumerian
language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one
computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. 
.. the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus ... Enki was a real
personage... Enki invented this virus and spread it throughout Sumer,
using tablets...
--------
Chapter 30
the thing that looks like a tree [one of the artifacts]...
A totem of the Goddess Asherah... was the consort of El, who is also
known as Yahweh. ... She was also known by other names: Elat, her most
common epithet. The Greeks knew her as Dione or Rhea. The Canaanites
knew her as Tannit or Hawwa, which is the same thing as Eve.  ...
The etymology of 'Tannit' proposed by Cross is: feminine of 'tannin'
which would mean 'the one of the serpent'. Furthermore, Asherah carried
a second epithet in the Bronze Age, 'dat batni,' also 'the one of the
serpent.' The Sumerians knew her as Nintu or Ninhursag. Her symbol
is a serpent coiling about a tree or staff: the caduceus.
Who worshipped Asherah? ... Everyone who lived between India and Spain,
from the second millenium BC up into the Christian era. With the exception
of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms of
Hezekiah and, later, Josiah.
"I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they worship Asherah?"
Monolatrists. They did not deny the /existence/ of other gods. But 
they were only supposed to /worship/ Yahweh. Asherah was venerated as the
consort of Yahweh.
"I dont remeber anything about God having a wife in the Bible."
The Bible didnt exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection
of Yahwistic cults, each with different shrines and practices. The stories
about the Exodus hadn't been formalized into scripture yet. And the later
parts of the Bible had not yet happened.
"Who decided to purge Asherah from Judaism?"
The deuteronomic school - defined, by convention, as the people who
wrote the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.
"And what kind of people were they?"
Nationalists, Monarchists, Centralists. The forerunners of the Pharisees.
At this time, the Assyrian king Sargon II had recently conquered Samaria -
Northern Israel - forcing a migration of Hebrews southward into Jerusalem.
Jerusalem expanded greatly and the Hebrews began to conquer territory
to the west, east, and south. It was a time of intense nationalism and
patriotic fervor. The deuteronomic school embodied those attitudes in
scripture by rewriting and reorganizing the old tales.
"Rewriting them how?"
Moses and others believed that the River Jordan has the border of Israel,
but the deuteronomists believed that Israel included Transjordan, which
justified aggression to the east. There are many examples: the
predeuteronomic law said nothing about a monarch. The Law as laid down
by the deuteronomic school reflected a monarchist system. The
predeuteronomic law was largely concerned with sacred matters, while
the deuteronomic law's main concern is the education of the king and
his people - secular matters in other words. The deuteronomists
insisted on centralizing the religion in the Temple in Jerusalem,
destroying the outlying cult centers. And there is another feature...
found significant... Deuteronomy is the only book of the Pentateuch
that refers to a written Torah as comprising divine will:
  'And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for
   himself in a book a copy of his law, from that which is in charge
   of the Levitical priests; and it shall be with him, and he shall
   read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear
   the LORD his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these
   statutes, and doing them; that his heart may not be lifted up
   above his brethren, and that he may not turn aside from the 
   commandment, either to the right hand or to the left; so that
   he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in
   Israel." Deuteronomy 17:18-20
So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized,
self-propogating entity.  ... according to what [was] just quoted...
the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host-
the human- makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and
read it. ...
...
After the deuteronomists had reformed Judaism, instead of making sacrifices,
the Jews went to synagogue and read the Book. If not for the deuteronomists,
the world's monotheists would still be sacrificing animals and propogating
their beliefs through the oral tradition.
---
... a connection between Asherah and Eve. Eve - who's biblical name is
Hawwa - is clearly the Hebrew interpretation of an older myth. Hawwa
is an ophidian [associated with serpents] mother goddess. And both
are associated with trees as well. Eve... is considered resposible
for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of
/knowledge/ of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just fruit -
it's data.
---
... the Essenes thought that tapeworms were demons. If they'd known what
a virus was, they probably would have thought the same thing.
... according to the Sumerians, there was no concept of good and evil
per se.
... According to Kramer and Maier, there are good demons and bad demons.
 "Good ones bring physical and emotional health. Evil ones bring
  disorientation and a variety of physical and emotional ills ...
  But these demons can hardly be distinguished from the diseases they
  personify ... and many of the diseases sound, to modern ears, as
  though they must be psychosomatic."
---
"Who wrote the Adam and Eve legend?"
This is a source of much scholarly argument. ... Nicolas Wyatt's radical
interpretation of the Adam and Eve story supposes that it was, in fact,
written as a politcal allegory by the deuteronomists.
"I thought they wrote the later books, not Genesis."
True. But they were involved in compiling and editing the earlier books
as well. For many years, it was assumed that Genesis was written sometime
around 900 BC or even earlier - long before the advent of the deuteronomists.
But more recent analysis of the vocabulary content suggests that a great
deal of editorial work - possibly even authorial work - took place
around the time of the Exile, when the deuteronomists held sway. 
So they may have re-written an earlier Adam and Eve myth. They appear
to have had ample opportunity. According to the interpretation of
Hvidberg and, later Wyatt, Adam in his garden is a parable for the king
in his sanctuary, specifically king Hosea, who ruled the northern
kingdom until it was conquered by Sargon II in 722 BC.
---
Chapter 33 pg 234...
"Where did Asherah come from?"
Originally from Sumerian mythology. Hence, she is also important in
Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, Hebrew, and Ugaritic myths,which are all
descended from the Sumerian... so the Sumerian language died out, but
the Sumerian myths were somehow passed on in the new languages...
Sumerian was used as the language of religion and scholarship by later
civilizations, much as Latin was used in Europe during the Middle Ages.
No one spoke it as their native language, but educated people could read
it. In this way, Sumerian religion was passed on.
"... what did Asherah have to do in Sumerian myths?"
The accounts are fragmentary. Few tablets have been discovered, and these
are broken and scattered. ... The surviving Sumerian myths exist in fragments
and have a bizarre quality.  ...compar[able] to the imaginings of a febrile
two-year-old. Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated -- the
characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not
say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind.
"Like instructions for programming a VCR [?]"
There is a great deal of monotonous repetition. There is also a fair amount
of what [could be] described as "Rotary Club Boosterism" -- scribes extolling
the superior virtue of their city over some other city.
What makes one Sumerian city better than another one ... [are] ...
Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code
of laws, but on a more fundamental level. ...
Sumerian myths are not 'readable' or 'enjoyable' in the same sense that
Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally different
consciousness from ours. ...
Akkadian myths came after the Sumerian and are clearly based on Sumerian
myths to a large extent. It is clear that Akkadian redactors went through
the Sumerian myths, edited out the (to us) bizarre and incomprehensible
parts, and strung them together into longer works, such as the
Epic of Gilgamesh. The Akkadians were Semites -- cousins of the Hebrews.
"What do the Akkadians have to say about her?"
She is a goddess of the erotic and of fertility. She also has a destructive,
vindictive side. In one myth, Kirta, a human king, is made grievously
ill by Asherah. Only El, king of the gods, can heal him. El gives
certain persons the privilege of nursing at Asherah's breasts. El and
Asherah often adopt human babies and let them nurse on Asherah -- in one
text, she is wet nurse to seventy divine sons.
--
... how Asherah made Enki sick... How this story is translated depends
on it is interpreted. Some see it as a Fall from Paradise story. Some see
it as a battle between male and female or water and earth. Some see it as
a fertility allegory. This reading is based on the interpretation of
Bendt Alster... Enki, and Ninhursag -- who is Asherah, although in this
story she also bears other epithets -- live in a place called Dimun.
Dilmun is pure, clean and bright, there is no sickness, people do not
grow old, predatory animals do not hunt. But there is no water.
So Ninhirsag pleads with Enki, who is a sort of water-god, to bring water
to Dilmun. He does so by masturbating among the reeds if the ditches letting
flow his life-giving semen -- the "water of the heart," as it is called.
At the same time, he pronounces a nam-shub forbidding anyone to enter this
area -- he does not want anyone to come near his semen... why not, the myth
does not say. ... Dilmun is now better than before. The fields produce
abundant crops and so on. ...[Sumerian agriculture was entirely dependent
on irrigation] ... So Enki was responsible ... for irrigating the fields
with his 'water of the heart'. ... But Ninhirsag - Asherah - violates
his decree and takes Enki's semen and impregnates herself. After nine days
of pregnancy she gives birth, painlessly, to a daughter, Ninmu. Ninmu
walks on the riverbank. Enki sees her, becomes inflamed, goes across the
river and has sex with her. ... She has another daughter after nine days
named Ninkurra, and the pattern is repeated. ... Enki has sex with
Ninkurra too... and she has a daughter named Uttu. Now, by this time,
Ninhursag has apparently recognized a pattern in Enki's behavior, and so
she advises Uttu to stay in her house, predicting that Enki will then
approach her bearing gifts, and try to seduce her. ... Enki once again
fills the ditches with the 'water of the heart' which makes things grow.
The gardener rejoices and embraces Enki. [the gardener is] just some
character in the story. He provides Enki with grapes and other gifts.
Enki disguises himself as the gardener and goes to Uttu and seduces her.
But this time, Ninhursag manages to obtain a sample of Enki's semen
from Uttu's thighs. ... Ninhursag spreads the semen on the ground, and
it causes eight plants to sprout up. ... [Enki] eats them, in some sense
he learns their secrets by doing so.  ... Ninhursag curses Enki, saying
"Until thou art dead, I shall not look upon thee with the 'eye of life'."
Then she disappears, and Enki becomes very ill. Eight of his organs
become sick, one for each of the plants. Finally, Ninhursag is persuaded
to come back. She gives birth to eight dieties, one for each part of
Enki's body that is sick, and Enki is healed. These deities are the pantheon
of Dilmun; i.e., this act breaks the cycle of incest and creates a new
race of male and female gods that can reproduce normally. ...
Alster interprets the myth as an 'exposition of a logical problem:
Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could
ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?
... the myth can be compared to the Sumerian creation myth, in which
heaven and earth are united to begin with, but the world is not really
created until the two are separated. Most Creation myths begin with
as 'paradoxical unity of everything, evaluated either as chaos or as Paradise'
and the world as we know it does not really come into being until this is
changed. I should point out here that Enki's origial name was En-Kur,
Lord of Kur. Kur was a primeval ocean - Chaos - that Enki conquered.  ...
But Asherah has similar connotations. Her name in Ugaritic, 
'atiratu yammi' means 'she who treads on (the) sea (dragon).'
... so both Enki and Asherah were figures who had in some sense defeated
chaos. ... this defeat of chaos, the separation of the static, unified
world into a binary system, is identified with creation.
--
Enki was "en" of the city of Eridu. ... "en" is a priest-king of sorts.
The "en" was the custodian of the local temple, where the "me" -- the
rules of society - were stored on clay tablets. ... [Eridu] is in southern
Iraq.  ... as Kramer has it, Enki is the god of wisdom -- but this is
a bad translation. His wisdom is not the wisdom of an old main, but
rather a knowledge of how to do things, especially occult things.
'He astonishes even the other gods with shocking solutions to apparently
impossible problems.' He is a sympathetic god for the most part, who
assists humankind. ... The most important Sumerian myths center on him.
As I mentioned, he is associated with water. He fills the rivers, and the
extensive Sumerian canal system, with his life-giving semen. He is said
to have created the Tigris in a single epochal act of masturbation. He
describes himself as follows: "I am lord. I am the one whose word endures.
I am eternal." Others describe him: 'a word from you -- and heaps and piles
stack high with grain." "You bring down the stars of heaven, you have
computed their number" He pronounces the name of everything created ...
In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it. He is referred to,
in various myths, as "expert who instituted incantations," "word-rich,"
"Enki, master of all the right commands," as Kramer and Maier have it,
"His word can bring order where there had been only chaos and introduce
disorder where there had been harmony." He devotes a great deal of effort
to imparting his knowledge to his son, the god Marduk, chief deity of
the Babylonians.
So the Sumerians worshipped Enki, and the Babylonians, who came after
the Sumerians, worshipped Marduk, his son. ... And whenever Marduk got
stuck, he would ask his father, Enki for help. There is a representation
if Marduk here on this stele - the Code of Hammurabi. According to
Hammurabi, the Code was given to him personally by Marduk.
[Marduk is handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture]
They were emblems of royal power. Their origin is obscure.
Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the "me"
and the gis-hur, the 'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe.
To quote from Kramer and Maier again, "[They believed in] the existence
from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive
assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations,
known as "me", relating the cosmos and its components, to gods and
humans, to cities and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.
Kind of like the Torah ... but they have a kind of mystical or magical force.
And they often deal with banal subjects - not just religion.
... In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into
giving her ninety-four "me" and brings them back to her home town of
Uruk, where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing.
Inanna .. is hailed as a savior because "she brought the perfect execution
of the "me".  [Execution... like executing a computer program..]
Apparently they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities
essential to society. Some of them have to do with the workings
of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious
ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them
are about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning,
building, farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires.
The operating system of society.
In any case, Enki was the guardian of the "me". So he was a good guy, really.
He was the most beloved of the gods.
--
"If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?"
This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed his
behavior was not always consistent with modern norms.