I’m kind of a sucker for polytheistic playfulness, but even so I love your literary grounding and evocative definition of Space Mom, as an initially scary but ultimately calming guide through her chaotic domain.
If I want to reach back to earlier versions, there’s also Eris (disliked by the Greeks but beloved of Discordians), and arguably even better than Eris is the Sumerian goddess Tiamat!
Tiamat is the “the chaos of primordial creation”, who is female but with strong reptilian themes as well. In Sumerian mythology Tiamat is killed by Marduk, the king of the gods whose crown is made out of a ring of eyes that vigilantly look in every direction, and whose power is to speak the truth.
After killing her, Marduk used her body to make the entire world. If you contrast “Tiamat vs Space Mom” preferring the Space Mom iconography would argue that you need to make friends with chaos. You need to work on desensitizing yourself to fear so you can freely look into the shadows, not clench up and get ready to fight.
Moden visual adaptations of Tiamat leanonouter space motifs but her original context for the Sumerians was salt water, and the ocean, and especially the estuary where salt water and fresh water chaotically mix on a cycle a bit less than 13 hours long that is somehow related to the moon.
In MtG iconography, Tiamat is Blue/Black and Marduk might be White/Black, with the separation along the White/Black axis representing simplistic dualisms… the emotional triumph of understanding over fear, moral triumph of good over evil, the familial triumph of males over females, the astronomical importance of the sun over the moon, and the political triumph of law over crime.
Isbell’s snake detection hypothesis argues that primate visual acuity evolved over the last ~100M years (with detection of literal predatory snakes as the biggest driver of the pixel count in our eyeballs) thereby installing “snake monsters” as a symbol that our brains reliably imagine and pareidolically react to because false negatives on the snake monster detection task are very expensive. Some of the “symbolicly loose” psychology people (who don’t write off Jung as “not even wrong”) have picked up on this and used it to justify connecting snake iconography to mythology and therapeutic stories.
Space Mom (seen as a friendlier version of Tiamat) is a more balanced take on blue far mode. She is never “here and now”. She is always “out around the edges”, either requiring a journey to reach, or else part of ancient history and possibly the deep future. She represents the dramatic schism between future eutopias and dystopias. And back when you acquired your mother tongue, in a time you forgot, back when you weren’t even you (as far as continuity of memory goes) back when your only words were <crying> and <not crying>, she was with you and helped you to learn… and if you calm your fear of the dark she still can.
This helped me see how Space Mom as described might be primarily something other than terrifying. Usually descriptions of it read to me like fully general praise of hiding things, which is pretty deeply sketchy. But, exploring places that aren’t well-lit yet makes sense.
Cool link! I had not heard of her before but I see the echoes. To summarize some of the resonances I think I see...
I noticed that the Sutra about her is the Heart Sutra, and it arose as part of the Mahayana correction to the early ascetic “small raft” Buddhism, and was claimed to have been the secret teachings of Buddha that couldn’t be taught in the initial version of Buddhism because the people were not ready…
It is claimed to have been technically there at the beginning, but not in an obvious way.
The secret teachings were mythologically kept by the king of the snakes in his underwater kingdom for a full turn of history, until a reincarnation of Buddha arrived named Nagarjuna, where “Naga” means snake and “Arjuna” means something like “bright shining silver” and is the name of the central hero of the Bhagavad Gita. Thus Nagarjuna, the teacher of the lesson, had a name that basically meant “Illuminated Snake Hero”.
The ideas were mythologically acquired by: going underwater, making friends with the snake king, then studying the snake king’s secrets (that he got from Buddha).
These lessons, that Prajnaparamita is the embodiment of, are given the concept handle of “shunyata” (“emptiness”) and basically seems to be a denial of local naive realism? That is to say: there are no permanent things whose meaning and reality are independent of context. So if you take this seriously and ask “But what’s the context?” over and over for anything and everything, recursively, then perhaps eventually you always get to Prajnaparamita as the contextual “Mother of All”.
Epistemically speaking, chasing Prajnaparamita is valuable, because you learn the context of your current naively local truth. However you’ll never get to her and go past her, because she represents the edge of knowledge… she is always “the farther away context of which you are currently ignorant”. As you learn, she always retreats into the background, representing the new edge of knowledge.
Prajnaparamita’s name literally means “perfect wisdom”, and while she is technically unattainable, it is useful to try to approach her :-)
If you look at the emotional differences in the symbolic choice of Tiamat vs Prajnaparamita, then Tiamat pushes all the ideas into a single fundamentally bad kind of watery chaos that must be destroyed in a violent way for goodness and masculine knowledge to triumph. On the other hand Prajnaparamita has all the emotionally negative aspects sublimated into the process of pursuing her (into the watery domain of the snake king), and is seen as fundamentally good in herself.
Both kinds of symbolism are “mixed”, but one valorizes the heroic killing and re-use of “scary female mysteries” while the other justifies “painful exploration” as worthwhile pursuit of the ultimate ineffable female context.
Calling out some of these echoes, I think I see different arrangements of many of the same concepts. Also, the arrangement of the concepts in the “Space Mom” framing seems closer to Prajnaparamita than Tiamat.
I’m kind of a sucker for polytheistic playfulness, but even so I love your literary grounding and evocative definition of Space Mom, as an initially scary but ultimately calming guide through her chaotic domain.
If I want to reach back to earlier versions, there’s also Eris (disliked by the Greeks but beloved of Discordians), and arguably even better than Eris is the Sumerian goddess Tiamat!
Tiamat is the “the chaos of primordial creation”, who is female but with strong reptilian themes as well. In Sumerian mythology Tiamat is killed by Marduk, the king of the gods whose crown is made out of a ring of eyes that vigilantly look in every direction, and whose power is to speak the truth.
After killing her, Marduk used her body to make the entire world. If you contrast “Tiamat vs Space Mom” preferring the Space Mom iconography would argue that you need to make friends with chaos. You need to work on desensitizing yourself to fear so you can freely look into the shadows, not clench up and get ready to fight.
Moden visual adaptations of Tiamat lean on outer space motifs but her original context for the Sumerians was salt water, and the ocean, and especially the estuary where salt water and fresh water chaotically mix on a cycle a bit less than 13 hours long that is somehow related to the moon.
In MtG iconography, Tiamat is Blue/Black and Marduk might be White/Black, with the separation along the White/Black axis representing simplistic dualisms… the emotional triumph of understanding over fear, moral triumph of good over evil, the familial triumph of males over females, the astronomical importance of the sun over the moon, and the political triumph of law over crime.
Isbell’s snake detection hypothesis argues that primate visual acuity evolved over the last ~100M years (with detection of literal predatory snakes as the biggest driver of the pixel count in our eyeballs) thereby installing “snake monsters” as a symbol that our brains reliably imagine and pareidolically react to because false negatives on the snake monster detection task are very expensive. Some of the “symbolicly loose” psychology people (who don’t write off Jung as “not even wrong”) have picked up on this and used it to justify connecting snake iconography to mythology and therapeutic stories.
Tiamat is THE dragon in Sumerian mythology. In Chinese mythology, dragons are often good, but fickle. In Western mythology dragons used to be mostly bad, but in more recent cinema they become the beloved black pets that let social misfits fly above the ocean who might grow up to talk like Sean Connery as they help con men gain a conscience and topple unjust kings.
Space Mom (seen as a friendlier version of Tiamat) is a more balanced take on blue far mode. She is never “here and now”. She is always “out around the edges”, either requiring a journey to reach, or else part of ancient history and possibly the deep future. She represents the dramatic schism between future eutopias and dystopias. And back when you acquired your mother tongue, in a time you forgot, back when you weren’t even you (as far as continuity of memory goes) back when your only words were <crying> and <not crying>, she was with you and helped you to learn… and if you calm your fear of the dark she still can.
This helped me see how Space Mom as described might be primarily something other than terrifying. Usually descriptions of it read to me like fully general praise of hiding things, which is pretty deeply sketchy. But, exploring places that aren’t well-lit yet makes sense.
A Buddhist friend of mine says that Space Mom is a good match for Prajnaparamita.
I’d never heard of her before, but maybe something resonates there.
Cool link! I had not heard of her before but I see the echoes. To summarize some of the resonances I think I see...
I noticed that the Sutra about her is the Heart Sutra, and it arose as part of the Mahayana correction to the early ascetic “small raft” Buddhism, and was claimed to have been the secret teachings of Buddha that couldn’t be taught in the initial version of Buddhism because the people were not ready…
It is claimed to have been technically there at the beginning, but not in an obvious way.
The secret teachings were mythologically kept by the king of the snakes in his underwater kingdom for a full turn of history, until a reincarnation of Buddha arrived named Nagarjuna, where “Naga” means snake and “Arjuna” means something like “bright shining silver” and is the name of the central hero of the Bhagavad Gita. Thus Nagarjuna, the teacher of the lesson, had a name that basically meant “Illuminated Snake Hero”.
The ideas were mythologically acquired by: going underwater, making friends with the snake king, then studying the snake king’s secrets (that he got from Buddha).
These lessons, that Prajnaparamita is the embodiment of, are given the concept handle of “shunyata” (“emptiness”) and basically seems to be a denial of local naive realism? That is to say: there are no permanent things whose meaning and reality are independent of context. So if you take this seriously and ask “But what’s the context?” over and over for anything and everything, recursively, then perhaps eventually you always get to Prajnaparamita as the contextual “Mother of All”.
Epistemically speaking, chasing Prajnaparamita is valuable, because you learn the context of your current naively local truth. However you’ll never get to her and go past her, because she represents the edge of knowledge… she is always “the farther away context of which you are currently ignorant”. As you learn, she always retreats into the background, representing the new edge of knowledge.
Prajnaparamita’s name literally means “perfect wisdom”, and while she is technically unattainable, it is useful to try to approach her :-)
If you look at the emotional differences in the symbolic choice of Tiamat vs Prajnaparamita, then Tiamat pushes all the ideas into a single fundamentally bad kind of watery chaos that must be destroyed in a violent way for goodness and masculine knowledge to triumph. On the other hand Prajnaparamita has all the emotionally negative aspects sublimated into the process of pursuing her (into the watery domain of the snake king), and is seen as fundamentally good in herself.
Both kinds of symbolism are “mixed”, but one valorizes the heroic killing and re-use of “scary female mysteries” while the other justifies “painful exploration” as worthwhile pursuit of the ultimate ineffable female context.
Calling out some of these echoes, I think I see different arrangements of many of the same concepts. Also, the arrangement of the concepts in the “Space Mom” framing seems closer to Prajnaparamita than Tiamat.