Book:    Snow Crash
Viewed: 63 - Published at: 2 years ago

He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult to
understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?"
"This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed,
his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms."
"I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, and
so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is a
metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process. This whole myth
stinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because they
probably had no concept of pure water -- it was all brown and muddy and full of
viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier of
information -- both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water --
his semen, his data, his me -- flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it
to flourish."
"As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major rivers,
the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from -- they took
it directly from the riverbeds."
"So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information -- clay.
They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out -- got rid of the water. If
water got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they baked it and
drove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat, then the tablet
lasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I sound like a
maniac?

( Neal Stephenson )
[ Snow Crash ]
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