On Getting Off by Damon Young

Author:Damon Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000, HEA042000, SOC032000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2020-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Alone with Enki

On the Banality of Jerking Off

The black-headed man was standing in a valley. Perhaps there were waters below him; sweetwater, discoverable in caves and springs. But the soil was sandy there, and nothing grew. There were no canals, no shell middens by the shore, no herds of sheep and goats. There was not a drop of fresh water to drink. He was alone in a wasteland, listening to little but wind and his own breath.

So the man did the most obvious and helpful thing: he masturbated. ‘[H]e stood up full of lust like a rampant bull, lifted his penis, ejaculated and filled the Tigris with flowing water.’

So says the story of Enki in ‘Enki and the World Order’, told over four thousand years ago in Western Asia. The trickster-god of a freshwater lagoon, Enki made the Euphrates and Tigris rivers with his semen, and dug and filled irrigation ditches with his penis. In doing so, this divine craftsman created Mesopotamia — literally ‘between rivers’ in Greek — and hence civilisation itself.

To the west, during the same millennium, the Egyptians of Heliopolis believed the god Atum was similarly creative. Depending on the version of the tale, Atum either wanked the air and water gods into existence, or spat them so — having ejaculated into his own mouth.

In the Satapatha Brahmana, written later in Iron Age India, the great progenitor god Prajapati masturbated into Agni. Agni was his son, but also primordial fire — and the flames were hungry. There was nothing for Agni to eat. In fact, there was nothing at all, aside from Prajapati. So Prajapati made the first sacred milk, used in the Vedic sacrificial rite: the agnihotra. ‘And Prajapati, having performed offering, reproduced himself,’ reads Julius Eggeling’s Victorian translation, ‘and saved himself from Agni, Death, as he was about to devour him.’

So, the world here begins sophomorically: with a dude tugging himself, and offering his cum to the world like a birthday present.

I told Ruth about this, Enki’s gift: ‘How like a man,’ she said with a half-smile.

Touching Nothing

Compare this to the biblical cosmogony: the Lord simply speaks. There is clay later, of course; and Eve, formed from a rib. But before anything, there is a sky sprite who is more sigh than flesh: ‘The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ The god does not travel on foot. His ruach or spirit — from the Hebrew for ‘breath’ — soars. So this deity is no craftsman, shaping the cosmos with his calloused fingers. And he is certainly no wanker, spilling cum to help make the earth fertile. The heir to Near Eastern animist beliefs, the Lord is one of atmospheres; one whose power is like winds. His speech makes things so. ‘God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth,’ reads Genesis. ‘And it was so.’

So Hebrew and Christian myth begins as the very antithesis of Enki and his fellow jerk-offs: the Holy Spirit is a hands-off creator.

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