Babylon (4 page)

   
‘The first point that must be taken into consideration,’
he wrote in his concept,
is that the situation that exists at the present moment in Russia cannot continue for very long. In the very near future we must expect most of the essential branches of industry to come to a total standstill, the collapse of the financial system and serious social upheavals, which will all inevitably end in the establishment of a military dictatorship. Regardless of its political and economic programme, the future dictatorship will attempt to exploit nationalistic slogans: the dominant state aesthetic will be the pseudo-Slavonic style. (This term is not used here in any negative judgemental sense: as distinct from the Slavonic style, which does not exist anywhere in the real world, the pseudo-Slavonic style represents a carefully structured paradigm.) Within the space structured by the symbolic signifiers of this style, traditional Western advertising is inconceivable. Therefore it will either be banned completely or subjected to rigorous censorship. This all has to be taken into consideration in determining any kind of long-term strategy.

   
Let us take a classic positioning slogan: ‘Sprite - the Uncola’. Its use in Russia would seem to us to be most appropriate, but for somewhat different reasons than in America. The term ‘Uncola’ (i.e. Non-Cola) positions Sprite very successfully against Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, creating a special niche for this product in the consciousness of the Western consumer. But it is a well-known fact that in the countries of Eastern Europe Coca-Cola is more of an ideological fetish than a refreshing soft drink. If, for instance, Hershi drinks are positioned as possessing the ‘taste of victory’, then Coca-Cola possesses the ‘taste of freedom
’,
as declared in the seventies and eighties by a vast number of Eastern European defectors. For the Russian consumer, therefore, the term ‘Uncola’ has extensive anti-democratic and anti-liberal connotations, which makes it highly attractive and promising in conditions of military dictatorship.

   
Translated into Russian ‘Uncola’would become ‘Nye-Cola’. The sound of the word (similar to the old Russian name ‘Nikola’) and the associations aroused by it offer a perfect fit with the aesthetic required by the likely future scenario. A possible version of the slogan:

   
(It might make sense to consider infiltrating into the consciousness of the consumer the character ‘Nikola Spritov’, an individual of the same type as RonaldMcDonald, but profoundly national in spirit.)

   
In addition, some thought has to be given to changing the packaging format of the product as sold on the Russian market. Elements of the pseudo-Slavonic style need to be introduced here as well. The ideal symbol would seem to be the birch tree. It would be appropriate to change the colour of the can from green to white with black stripes like the trunk of a birch. A possible text for an advertising clip:

   
Deep in the spring-time forest I drank my birch-bright Sprite.

   After reading the print-out Tatarsky brought him, Pugin said: ‘"The Uncola" is Seven-Up’s slogan, not Sprite’s.’

   After that he said nothing for a while, simply gazing at Tatarsky with his black-button eyes. Tatarsky didn’t speak either.

   ‘But that’s OK,’ Pugin said, eventually softening. ‘We can use it. If not for Sprite, then for Seven-Up. So you can consider you’ve passed the test. Now try some other brand.’

   ‘Which one?’ Tatarsky asked in relief.

   Pugin thought for a moment, then rummaged in his pockets and held out an opened pack of Parliament cigarettes. ‘And think up a poster for them as well,’ he said.

   Dealing with Parliament turned out to be more complicated. For a start Tatarsky wrote the usual intro: ‘It is quite clear that the first thing that has to be taken into consideration in the development of any half-serious advertising concept is…’ But after that he just sat there for a long time without moving.

   Exactly what was the first thing that had to be taken into consideration was entirely unclear. The only association the word ‘Parliament’ was able, with a struggle, to extract from his brain, was Cromwell’s wars in England. The same thing would obviously apply to the average Russian consumer who had read Dumas as a child. After half an hour of the most intensive intellectual exertion had led to nothing, Tatarsky suddenly fancied a smoke. He searched the entire flat looking for something smokeable and eventually found an old pack of Soviet-time Yava. After just two drags he chucked the cigarette down the toilet and dashed over to the table. He’d come up with a text that at first glance looked to him as if it was the answer:

PARLIAMENT- THE NYE-YAVA

   When he realised this was only a poor low-grade calque on the word ‘uncola’, he very nearly gave up. Then he had a sudden inspiration. The history dissertation he’d written in the Literary Institute was called: ‘A brief outline of parliamentarianism in Russia’. He couldn’t remember a thing about it any more, but he was absolutely certain it would contain enough material for three concepts, let alone one. Skipping up and down in his excitement, he set off along the corridor towards the built-in closet where he kept his old papers.

   After searching for half an hour he realised he wasn’t going to find the dissertation, but somehow that didn’t worry him any more. While sorting through the accumulated strata deposited in the closet, up on the attic shelf he’d come across several objects that had been there since his schooldays: a bust of Lenin mutilated with a small camping axe (Tatarsky recalled how, in his fear of retribution following the execution, he’d hidden the bust in a place that was hard to reach), a notebook on social studies, filled with drawings of tanks and nuclear explosions, and several old books.

   This all filled him with such aching nostalgia that his employer Pugin suddenly seemed repulsive and hateful, and was banished from consciousness, together with his Parliament.

   Tatarsky remembered with a tender warmth how the books he had discovered had been selected from amongst the waste paper they used to be sent to collect after class. They included a volume of a left-wing French existentialist published in the sixties, a finely bound collection of articles on theoretical physics.
Infinity and the Universe,
and a loose-leaf binder with the word ‘Tikhamat’ written in large letters on the spine.

   Tatarsky remembered the book
Infinity and the Universe,
but not the binder. He opened it and read the first page:

   
TIKHAMAT-2 The Earthly Sea Chronological Tables and Notes

   The papers bound into the folder obviously dated from a pre-computer age. Tatarsky could recall heaps of
samizdat
books that had circulated in this format - two typed pages reduced to half-size and copied on a single sheet of paper. What he was holding in his hands seemed to be an appendix to a dissertation on the history of the ancient world. Tatarsky began remembering: in his childhood, he thought, he hadn’t even opened the file, taking the word ‘Tikhamat’ to mean something like a mixture of diamat (dialectical materialism) with histmat (historical materialism). He’d only taken the work at all because of the beautiful folder, and then he’d forgotten all about it.

   As it turned out, however, Tikhamat was the name either of an ancient deity or of an ocean, or perhaps both at the same time. Tatarsky learned from a footnote that the word could be translated approximately as ‘Chaos’.

   A lot of the space in the folder was taken up by tables of kings. They were pretty monotonous, with their listings of unpronounceable names and Roman numerals, and information about when they’d launched their campaigns or laid the foundations of a wall or taken some city, and so forth. In several places different sources were compared, and the conclusion drawn from the comparison was that several events that had been recorded in history as following each other were in fact one and the same event, which had so astounded contemporary and subsequent generations that its echo had been doubled and tripled, and then each echo had assumed a life of its own. It was clear from the apologetically triumphant tone adopted by the author that his discovery appeared to him to be quite revolutionary and even iconoclastic, which set Tatarsky pondering yet again on the vanity of all human endeavour. He didn’t experience even the slightest sense of shock at the fact that Ashuretilshamersituballistu II had turned out actually to be Nebuchadnezzar III, and the nameless historian’s depth of feeling really seemed rather laughable. The kings seemed rather laughable too: it wasn’t even known for certain whether they were people or simply slips made by a scribe on his clay tablets, and the only traces remaining of them were on those same clay tablets.

   The chronological tables were followed by extensive notes on some unknown text, and there were a lot of photographs of various antiquities pasted into the folder. The second or third article that Tatarsky came across was entitled: ‘ Babylon: The Three Chaldean Riddles’. Beneath the letter ‘O’ in the word ‘Babylon’ he could make out a letter ‘E’ that had been whited out and corrected - it was nothing more than a typing error, but the sight of it threw Tatarsky into a state of agitation. The name he’d been given at birth and had rejected on reaching the age of maturity had returned to haunt him just at the moment when he’d completely forgotten the story he’d told his childhood friends about the part the secret lore of Babylon was to play in his life.

   Below the heading there was a photograph of the impression of a seal - a gate of iron bars on the top of either a mountain or a stepped pyramid, and standing beside it a man with a beard dressed in a skirt, with something that looked like a shawl thrown over his shoulders. It seemed to Tatarsky that the man was holding two severed heads by their thin plaits of hair; but one of the heads had no facial features, while the second was smiling happily. Tatarsky read the inscription under the drawing: ‘A Chaldean with a mask and a mirror on a ziggurat’. He squatted on a pile of books removed from the closet and began reading the text beneath the photograph.

   P. 123.
The mirror and the mask are the ritual requisites of Ishtar. The canonical representation, which expresses the sacramental symbolism of her cult more fully, is of Ishtar in a gold mask, gazing into a mirror. Gold is the body of the goddess and its negative projection is the light of the stars. This has led several researchers to assume that the third ritual requisite of the goddess is the fly-agaric mushroom, the cap of which is a natural map of the starry sky. If this is so, then we must regard the fly-agaric as the ‘heavenly mushroom’ referred to in various texts. This assumption is indirectly confirmed by the details of the myth of the three great ages, the ages of the red, blue and yellow skies. The red fly-agaric connects the Chaldean with the past; it provides access to the wisdom and strength of the age of the red sky. The brown fly-agaric (‘brown’ and ‘yellow’ were designated by the same word in Accadian), on the other hand, provides a link with the future and a means of taking possession all of its inexhaustible energy.

   Turning over a few pages at random, Tatarsky came across the word ‘fly-agaric’ again.

   P. 145.
The three Chaldean riddles (the Three Riddles of Ishtar). According to the tradition of the Chaldean riddles, any inhabitant of Babylon could become the goddess’s husband. In order to do this he had to drink a special beverage and ascend her ziggurat. It is not clear whether by this was intended the ceremonial ascent of a real structure in Babylon or a hallucinatory experience. The second assumption is supported by the fact that the potion was prepared according to a rather exotic recipe: it included ‘the urine of a red ass’ (possibly the cinnabar traditional in ancient alchemy) and ‘heavenly mushrooms’ (evidently fly-agaric, cf. ‘The Mirror and the Mask’).

   
According to tradition the path to the goddess and to supreme wisdom (the Babylonians did not differentiate these two concepts, which were seen as flowing naturally into one another and regarded as different aspects of the same reality) was via sexual union with a golden idol of the goddess, which was located in the upper chamber of the ziggurat. It was believed that at certain times the spirit of Ishtar descended into this idol.

   
In order to be granted access to the idol it was necessary to guess the Three Riddles of Ishtar. These riddles have not come down to us. Let us note the controversial opinion of Claude Greco (see
11,
12), who assumes that what is meant is a set of rhymed incantations in ancient Accadian discovered during the excavation of Nineveh, which are rendered highly polysemantic by means of their homonymic structure.

   
A far more convincing interpretation, however, is based on several sources taken together: the Three Riddles of Ishtar were three symbolic objects that were handed to a Babylonian who wished to become a Chaldean. He had to interpret the significance of these items (the motif of a symbolic message). On the spiral ascent of the ziggurat there were three gateways, where the future Chaldean was handed each of the objects in turn. Anybody who got even one of the riddles wrong was pushed over the edge of the ziggurat to certain death by the soldiers of the guard. (There is some reason to derive the later cult of Kybela, based on ritual self-castration, from the cult of Ishtar: the significance of the self-castration was evidently as a substitute sacrifice.)

   
Even so, there were a great many candidates, since the answers that would open the path to the summit of the ziggurat and union with the goddess actually did exist. Once in every few decades someone was successful. The man who answered all three riddles correctly would ascend to the summit and meet the goddess, following which he became a consecrated Chaldean and her ritual earthly husband (possibly there were several such simultaneously).

   
According to one interpretation, the answers to the Three Riddies of Ishtar also existed in written form. In certain special places in Babylon tablets were sold imprinted with the answers to the goddess’s questions (another interpretation holds that what was meant was a magical seal on which the answers were carved). Producing these tablets and trading in them was the business of the priests of the central temple of Enkidu, the patron deity of the Lottery. It was believed that the goddess selected her next husband through the agency of Enkidu. This provides a resolution to the conflict, well known to the ancient Babylonians, between divine predetermination and free will. Therefore most of those who decided to ascend the ziggurat bought clay tablets bearing answers; it was believed the tablets could not be unsealed until after the ascent had begun.