Therese & Tiamat — Roger Taylor

Therese & Tiamat is a novella and a fantasy, but rooted in real history. It is about the unnoticed, their enemies, about their escape and their dream-time. Its subject is a French woman, largely unnoticed, alive in the C18th, who was midwife to the French Revolution and its Terror. Therese Levasseur is this woman. She lived with Jean Jacques Rousseau as his servant. A reputed dullard and shrew. She was scolding ditch-water in the eyes of the intelligentsia and so they were blind to how she was a tributary leading back to the sea of Tiamat. Tiamat is a Babylonian sea-dragon and goddess. She is pure myth. She represents life in the warm waters of the primeval sea before the urge to leave these waters and be human: life before culture and civilization, life as ecstatic dream. It is this Therese glimpses as she comes to terms with Rousseau's betrayal of her and the trauma it introduces into her life. Her way back to Tiamat requires the destruction of her society and she does this by leading Rousseau's theoretical enterprise far beyond territory he would ever have had the courage or desire to cross alone. She is the unseen muse in Rousseau's life, she drives him mad and then she kills him.