The Tablet of Destinies by Roberto Calasso

If the gods have the power to end life, this means nothing without the register where the significance of life and death is recorded. This clay tablet is the one mes above all others it is the summation of the gods’ sovereignty. The most crucial of the mes is the Tablet of Destinies. Moreover, this solidity underlies the logic of blood sacrifice: for magical transactions, some real element-the most real, in fact-has to change hands. They have a solidity about them that refuses our modern, disenchanted conceptions of magic and religion distant, they remain. These mes are magical objects and crafts, and the gods vie for them. Just as time manifests physically in Dilmun, so the powers of the gods are worn as ornaments-the mes both powers and laws. While other contemporary ways of presenting ancient mythology will try to bring out their explanatory role-with regard to the structure of the cosmos, for instance-the telling of these narratives, in Calasso’s hands, homes in on exactly this aspect of being remote.

Utnapishtim is called “the Remote.” Indeed, Mesopotamian mythology is the oldest, most distant, in recorded history. The background to these stories consists in the creation of man-because the gods needed a substitute-and the Great Flood that almost ended mankind. Eager to speak after centuries of solitary existence, he relates to Sinbad the extensive mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia: of the gods Apsu and Tiamat, Ea and Ishtar, and the heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Utnapishtim the Remote, an immortal man, lives in Dilmun-a place where time assumes physical form. Different from its predecessors, The Tablet of Destinies stages a dialogue, between Utnapishtim and Sinbad the Sailor. This book, The Tablet of Destinies, the last volume to the series, is likewise a work about blood sacrifice and the genesis of meaning. Most of his written work belongs within a sequence of studies on the role of sacrifice in modernity and in ancient religion, the first of which was The Ruin of Kasch (1983). ROBERTO CALASSO, the Italian writer and publisher, died in 2021.

The Tablet of Destinies by Roberto Calasso