[3] According to the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer in the second edition of his study "The Golden Bough" (iii.
[4] It celebrates the triumph of Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon, over the forces of Chaos, symbolized in later times by Tiamat.
[5] In Babylon, the battle was acted out at the royal court with the king playing Marduk, and his son-rescuer as Nabu, the god of writing.
Once freed from the powers of the underworld, the king would enact the rite of hieros gamos on the 10th day of the ceremony.
The high priestess was known as the entu, and her ritual act of intercourse with the king was thought to regenerate the cosmos through a reenactment of the primordial coupling of the cosmic parents An and Ki, who had brought the world into being at the dawn of Time.