Methods of Evocation

Tiamat, whose name stems from the word tiamtum (meaning sea), is an ancient Mesopotamian sea goddess who represents the primordial chaos before the organized world. She is later defeated by another god named Marduk and used to create order and the world in the creation myth for the Mesopotamian religion. According to another myth, at the beginning of time, Tiamat interbred with Abzu, thus creating the first gods in Mesopotamian mythology.

The symbolism of a struggle against chaos represented by a sea serpent was used as the groundwork for a multitude of other creation myths and concepts, and was even carried over into uncanonical biblical texts. This mythological trope is now referred to as chaoskampf, which follows the general outline of a hero creating order out of chaos by engaging in battle with a villainous sea serpent. Examples of this in the aforementioned biblical accounts are found in the Book of Enoch, where God slays a sea beast named Leviathan (which he created, but is prophesied to launch the world into chaos) and uses it to feed his people. Another example of a chaoskampf-type myth can be found in the Aztec religion, in which before anything was created by the gods there was only a massive ocean which was home to a crocodilian creature named Cipactli. When the first four gods (Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, Xipe Totec, and Quetzalcoatl) came into being they discovered that whenever they materialized an object it would fall into the ocean at which point Cipactli would devour it, so, in an epic battle they joined forces to slay Cipactli before making the land out of its corpse.