... old is this idea of two distinct, and generally opposing principles, the light and the dark? The Babylonian cosmology carries us a long way back, but not to the beginning of such mystical conceptions. For in that cosmology Marduk is a well-developed god of light, with Tiamat as his antithesis, the goddess of the dark, and the nature and course of the deadly contest between them has taken form in ... — Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer