Tartarus meaning

Meaning

Descent of Descents, Bottom of Bottoms

Boundary of Boundaries, Event Horizon

Etymology

From an emphatic doubling of ירד (yarad), to descend.

From an emphatic doubling of תאר (ta'ar), boundary.

Related names

• Via ירד (yarad): Ararat, Jared, Jordan, Marduk, Raddai

• Via תאר (ta'ar): Caphtor, Gether, Rimmon-methoar, Taralah, Tarshish, Tartan, Torah

The name Tartarus belongs to the Hellenistic idea of an underworld or realm of the dead, which correlates or perhaps even competes with the more familiar Hades, but differs from the latter in that Tartarus is much more remote and deep: famously as far below Hades as the earth is below the sky (Iliad.8.16), where the Olympians (Zeus and company) incarcerated their parental Titans (Kronos and company: Iliad.14.279). Hesiod additionally declared that a bronze anvil would take nine days of falling to get from heaven down to earth, and an additional nine days to reach Tartarus — and this says very little about how the Greek thought of acceleration in a gravitational field and much more about how they saw the relationship between the cultural evolution of society, and the role of metallurgy (see χαλκος, chalkos, bronze) in its ultimate salvation (see εννεα, ennea, nine).

Before we write these observations off as pagan myths, we must first appreciate that the same world is observed differently by different minds. When our family dog wanders about our living room, she can't be expected to understand what a TV is, or even a painting or a photo on the wall, a book on its shelf, a table, or the mail that awaits attention in a small stack on the corner of it. But she nevertheless notices these objects, and incorporates them into her worldview according to priorities that we humans have little to no idea about. And she also knows precisely who of us humans over the last day or so sat where and ate what, who used whose shampoo and who slept with whom and who is anxious and who is not. She can't begin to guess how we humans would incorporate such knowledge into our human worldview, or the complex social conventions enforced or violated in said traffic, but she knows these things much better than we humans do, and may even be somewhat aware that we humans don't, or care less about them than she because the human world is so very much larger and continuously overwhelms the minutiae of daily domestic life, which is the dog's whole world.

Our dog is not equipped with the faculties to understand the human world, or even that such a world exists, and accepts our authority because there's food at the end of that, but not because she comprehends that we know things she doesn't. The dog doesn't know that our house is part of a city that is exhaustively legislated, comes with shopping malls and offices and churches that the dog will never see the inside of, that fellow humans built our house, and that we bought it, with money that we made from being useful to other humans. Such economy is not within the scope of our dog, and if our dog vaguely suspects that there is something about humanity that goes way over her head, she cannot begin to construct any kind of know-how about that world. As far as the dog knows, and is equipped to know, she is much better than her humans at mapping out the immediately visible world, and since her humans are clearly inferior, she understands herself to be the great protector of it all, and the food she receives a well-deserved homage.

Greeks and Hebrews, likewise, look at the same world, and although one of them doesn't really comprehend how big the world of the other is, both look upon the same features of the same world at large. And whatever it was that they saw, the Greeks named twelve Olympians who ruled the human world from their afar mountain, whereas the Hebrews named twelve tribes who were tasked with bringing governance and blessing to all the families of the earth (Genesis 28:14, Isaiah 9:6, Ephesians 3:15), by means of legislation that likewise originated from some Holy Mountain (Psalm 2:6, Isaiah 2:3). The Greeks venerated the three brothers Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, whereas the Hebrews upheld a matrix of three sets of three brothers, that related via a broken symmetry, infinitely more complex and comprehensive: Cain, Abel and Seth, then from Seth: Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and finally from Shem: Abraham, Nahor and Haran.

Meanwhile, the Bible does not play in time, or on the stage of time, or else time would be greater than the Bible, which includes the Law. Instead, the Law is greater than time and time obeys the Law (which is how we know that time is an effect of, and thus subject to, the laws of physics and not vice versa). The laws of physics are not the only laws, because there are also laws of biology and laws of consciousness. And all these are iterations of a single fractal pattern (1 John 5:8), which is why things in heaven correlate to things on earth (Exodus 25:40, Matthew 6:10, Hebrews 8:5). But all this means that the story of the Flood of Noah is not about a physical flood but a mental one, which is how Jesus could say: "they knew not until the flood came" (Matthew 24:39).

The Bible tells the story of how language came to be on the earth, and how script developed, until finally the Hebrew king Solomon and Phoenician king Hiram built the Temple of YHWH in Jerusalem, and modern humanity could commence and build a world based on information management rather than simply reacting to enemies, wild beasts, diseases and the weather. That implies that the Greek story of the Titans, who are eternally confined to the depths of Tartarus, corresponds to the pre-conscious generations of Cain, who were wiped out in the Flood, as it covered the תהום (tehom), or the "deep" (Genesis 7:11), whose flood gates were finally closed (Genesis 8:2, and see Revelation 17:15).

Our name Tartarus occurs only once in the New Testament, namely in 2 Peter 2:4, and in the same verbal form as is used in the Iliad: ταρταροω (tartaroo), to Tartarize, that is to confine to Tartarus (Il.14.279). Evidently embarrassed by this liberal or perhaps generous use of Greek mythology, and despite our name appearing in all Greek manuscripts of Second Peter, the vast majority of popular translations omits this name and either blatantly ignores it or else resorts to evasive paraphrases about dark pits and such. But the author of Second Peter knew what they were doing, or so it may be assumed. Like a shepherd who plays catch with his dog, for no other reason than to enjoy reality through the eyes of his best friend, so Peter's use of this name here is neither accidental nor without meaning, and at the least serves as a very respectful nod to the mythology that the author's target audience would have been intimately familiar with.

Verbs derived from names are uncommon, and there are only two words like this in the New Testament: "to Tartarize" in 2 Peter 2:4, and "to Judaize" in Galatians 2:14. Somewhat comparable are the adverbs Hebrewishly (John 5:2, 19:13, 19:17, 19:20, Revelation 9:11 and 16:16), Jewishly (Galatians 2:14), Hellenically (John 19:20 and Acts 21:37), Lycaonianically (Acts 14:11) and Romanly (John 19:20).

The name Tartarus is hugely old, and like Hades, originated as the name of a mythical ruler, whose realm became synonymous with the underworld, or rather some extra bad version or sub-region of it. In our article on Hades, we explain that despite the implications made by the stories, the mystical versions of these realms (the underworld where dead people are stored) do not correspond to physical or geographical locations but rather represent legacies and social memories of past lives and fashions, realities, traditions and proprieties, whose living evolutions were halted and whose authorities were replaced, and whose mere echoes remain with us in fading circles of existential smoke.

Where our name came from, and what common Greek words it might relate to, is no longer obvious. It clearly consists of an emphatic doubling — which is quite common in Greek, think of words like βαρβαρος (barbaros), barbarian, and λαιλαψ (lailaps), a very bad storm, and even more so in Hebrew, think of מאד מאד (me'od me'od), "very very", or ubiquitous constructions like "creepers that creep" or "abounding with abundance" or "he said, saying ...".

And that leaves us to explain the element "tar", whose doubling brings to mind the familiar word "tartar" (a patty made of minced meat, which probably originated as a patty of garbage meat and slaughter residue), which ultimately derives from the Aramaic term דורדא (durda), dregs (the debris that settles in old wine), from the verb דרד (dared), to take down, or take away whatever is down (i.e. to empty the ash tray beneath an altar). This verb corresponds to the Hebrew verb ירד (yarad), to go down or descend (which is what one does when one enters Sheol: Numbers 16:30):

From this verb ירד (yarad), to go down, come the names Jordan (means Descender), and, possibly most notable in our present context, the name Jared (Descent), which belonged to the father of Enoch, who famously walked with God and was rather taken up (Genesis 5:19).

In our article on the many Hebrew roots of Greek, we discuss the strong influence that the Phoenicians had on the Greeks. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician abjad (which also resulted in the Hebrew alphabet) along with a hefty pallet of handy Semitic terms that streamlined the Greeks' journey onto their famous Golden Age. By that time, the glory of the Phoenicians had waned significantly, the purple trade had given Tyre literally a bad smell, and Tyre's daughter Carthage was well on her way to develop the mental illness for which she was deeply detested by Greeks and Romans alike (the Carthaginians had taken to burning children alive as sacrifice to God: see Matthew 15:21-22), and which certainly helped the Romans decide to erase that vile place from the face of the earth in 146 BCE.

About a century after that, the historian Strabo evaded the Semitic origin of the name Tartarus by stating that Homer had made it up as a variant play on the name of the legendary city of Tartessos (Ταρτησσος), the western-most city that anybody had ever heard of, which existed in geographical limbo beyond the Pillars of Hercules (beyond which, its motto claimed, there was nothing), where even the sun descended, "drawing black night over the earth", whilst the night was widely recognized to be "a thing of evil omen and associated with Hades" (Str.3.2.12).

What Strabo evidently didn't realize was that Tartessos had been a very real city, which had been situated on the Atlantic coast of Spain, where it was created long before Carthage in the 8th century BCE, as a Phoenician colony to aid the precious metal trade from Spain to Canaan. Despite the later motto of the Pillars of Hercules (that's the modern Strait of Gibraltar), the physical world went on, and what ended at the pillars was the militarized policy of Rome's Mediterranean κοσμος (kosmos). What continued was a world of free trade and open negotiations, where law enforcements by military patrols were abhorred and tribes united into voluntary federations with nothing but their honesty and fidelity to seal their pledges. This world, this anti-Imperial and pro-Republican world, extended as far as Britain, whose name strongly reminds of (as may very well have been preserved due to its proximity to) the familiar Hebrew term ברית (berit), meaning covenant.

In modern times, this legendary city of Tartessos, in turn, has been proposed to be the same as the Biblical city of Tarshish. There no real hope for a consensus in this matter, but the Encyclopedia Britannica says "probably yes", Carlos Zorea from the University of Alcala in Madrid resolutely asserts "certainly yes" (POLIS 28, 2016, pp 157-188) but A. Andrew Das from Cambridge University says "probably not", and explains that the evidence isn't as convincing as is often claimed (New Test. Stud. 54, pp 60-73).

This city of Tarshish in turn is frequently compared to or even equated with Tarsus, where Paul hailed from, and although the similarities are obvious and free for anyone to interpret, here at Abarim Publications we surmise that our name Tartarus ultimately derives from a term that worked like familiar emphatic formulas such as "song of songs" or "holy of holies", in that it both exemplified and summarized the whole of all תאר (ta'ar), boundary or limit:

Here at Abarim Publications we don't know either, of course, but if we were to guess we would guess that our name Tartarus is of Semitic origin and describes an Event Horizon, and particularly the diodic boundary of the Great Flood, that confined most of early humanity to oblivion and only let Noah and his family to seed the next era of humanity on earth.

However, even in Greek traditions, Kronos was eventually released from his dungeon in Tartarus and allowed to govern the μακαρων (makaron), "blessed", νησοι (nesoi), "islands", which were situated somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, in the utopian expanse beyond the western boundary of the regulated world. In more realistic reports, these Blessed Islands were said to be situated a few days sail from Spain, to be two in number, and endowed with a cool and wet climate.

In the corresponding Semitic tradition, there are the Cainite twin-brothers Jabal and Jubal, the fathers of music, shepherding and tent-living, whose patriarchy obviously survived the flood and became the foundation of modern society as well as the Hebrew templar tradition (which started with a tent). Their half-brother was Tubal-cain, the forger of all things metal, whose tradition of technology obviously also survived the flood, and came to play a major part in modern society.

The crucial and proverbial competition offered by the line of Seth (from whom came Noah) is clearly presented as superior, other-worldly superior, even next-worldly superior, and that is the tradition of information management: language and script, without which the traditions of tent living and metal working would not have survived or even blossomed.