Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald,

currents and trends through a mythic lens.

The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it

through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald. All that's happening on this green jewel in space.

The Emerald. There's a story from ancient Sumeria, and it goes a little something like this.

The goddess Inana had a sacred willow tree at the center of a temple, a tree whose wood was going to be used to fashion her very own throne,

the throne of the goddess. But she found when she went to cut it that a serpent had coiled itself

among the tree's roots, and an eagle had nested high in its branches. So she went to the hero, Gilgamesh, who drove out the serpent and the eagle.

As a reward, Inana fashioned a drum and a striker, a piqu and miku for Gilgamesh,

imbued with the power of the sacred tree. Such was the power of the drum, brimming with the vital force of the goddess herself,

that no one could resist it. Anyone who heard this drum would be subsumed into a state of rapture.

But Gilgamesh wasn't ready for a tool of such power. He went around causing mischief with the drum.

He lit a fire in men's hearts with the drum's booming rhythms, set them fighting against each other. He used its enchanting

sound to seduce women. He drove people wild with the sound of the drum. So finally, the gods

intervened and cast the drum and striker into the underworld so that it could be recovered by a seeker more worthy of its sublime power.

So, yeah, this is an old story, and it contains some profound truth about what is the simplest one could say of the instruments, and also the

most profound of tools, the drum. The drum is powerful, the story teaches us. It induces rapture. That

rapture ultimately can lead right back to source, right to the world tree, right to the throne

of the goddess from which it is made.

This vision of the wood of the drum being the same wood of the world tree

can be found from Siberia to Mongolia to Lapland to the Amazon.

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