The Myth of Telepinu

notes

The Telepinu Myth is the most important and best preserved of the Hittite "vanishing god" myths — a group of narratives in which a deity (always a god associated with fertility, agriculture, or weather) becomes angry, disappears, and must be found and appeased before the world can resume its normal functioning. The Hittite corpus includes several vanishing god myths featuring different deities (the Storm God, the Sun God, the goddess Inara), but the Telepinu version is the fullest and most detailed. Telepinu (whose name may derive from the Hattic language substrate and may relate to a word for "strength" or "power") is the son of the Storm God in the Hittite divine family. His disappearance causes a comprehensive agricultural and biological catastrophe: crops fail, animals reject their young, fire will not kindle, and the gods themselves grow hungry. The detail that he put his shoes on the wrong feet is the mythological explanation for why the world has gone wrong — the god left in disorder, and disorder followed him. The text is significant in the history of comparative mythology because it provides one of the clearest ancient examples of the dying-and-rising god pattern that has been widely discussed in comparative religion: a fertility deity disappears (taking fertility with him) and is eventually found and restored (whereupon fertility returns). Comparative mythologists including James Frazer and Theodor Gaster placed this text at the centre of their accounts of the origins of fertility religion. Later scholars have been more cautious about generalising too broadly, but the structural parallel with the descent of Inanna, the mourning for Dumuzi, and the seasonal mythology of Persephone and Demeter is undeniable. The ritual performed by Kamrusepa the healer (stanzas 71–90) is one of the fullest examples in Hittite literature of the analogical magic that characterised ancient Near Eastern healing and restoration ritual. Each simile — "as the malt dissolves in water, so let your anger dissolve" — is simultaneously a description and a performative act: by saying what anger is like, the ritual practitioner changes what anger does. The honey and oil similes follow the same logic. The myth's closing section — Telepinu's care for the king and the restoration of agricultural abundance — confirms the text's ritual function: it was performed as part of royal ritual, probably in spring, to ensure the fertility of the land for the coming agricultural year.

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