Enki, Shen Nong, and the Alembic Body

ABSTRACT Chinese myths of Shen Nong (神农), the ‘Farmer God’ and inventor of pharmacology, evince a pattern evidenced elsewhere in the corpus of world myths. This is the pattern in which an ancestral body functions as a transformative space into which raw, dangerous stuff enters and from which it re-emerges as wholesome food or medicine. The same pattern appears in the Sumero-Babylonian myth of the trickster god Enki, likewise patron of both agriculture and herbal healing. A comparison of relevant myths from these two cultures throws light on the nature of traditional cosmologies, and especially on the place of the human body at the centre of a network of analogies in whose terms an understanding of the world is constructed.