Beyond School

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books. [↩]

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

A good thousand years before the Israelites were putting the final touches, in their scriptures, on the God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims,² the Mesopotamian gods of Gilgamesh were already ancient. And a good thousand years before Adam and Eve committed their first sin and brought death into the world by disobeying that God³, the “Adam” of the Sumerians – Gilgamesh’s sidekick, Enkidu – had committed his earlier “original sin.”⁴

In this lecture, I’m going to argue that Enkidu’s “sin” — which had nothing to do with disobeying any god, nor with his epic and far-from-shameful sex with Shamhat — cost our race far more than Adam and Eve’s. And we’re only now, in this generation, really able to appreciate that truth. Call it a 4,000-year-old prophecy that we’re now seeing unfold all around us.

It happens in Book V of Gilgamesh, and for the life of this modern, scientifically-minded skeptic, this “prophecy” is far more true and far more disturbing than anything we see in Eden, or perhaps in the whole Bible. If it doesn’t haunt you a bit by the end of this lecture, then one of us has problems.

The funny thing is, it happens in such a subtle form that it’s easy to miss. And it’s that subtlety that makes me want to state, for the millionth time in this series, that the poets who wrote Gilgamesh were among humanity’s finest ever.

Funnier still, it happens in the very suckiest episode in all of Gilgamesh: the slaying of the monster Humbaba.

Predictably, the well-meaning sadists who produce our suckiest literature textbook anthologies seem to always inflict this episode on our high school students. These out of touch souls seem to think teens will find monster-slaying scenes really cool. Between movies like Harry Potter that let us see and hear monsters like the Dementors almost sucking our souls out, and video games that let us chop the bastards’ heads off ourselves and be covered in their blood and gore, this Humbaba scene in Gilgamesh doesn’t stand a chance. It ranks about as high on today’s adventure scale as an exposed Victorian ankle ranks on the scale of modern sexiness.

So fear not: this English teacher isn’t going to insult your intelligence by arguing that this this chapter is good for its scary monster. There’s terror enough in this chapter – reality-based terror, at least in my reading of it – for us to need no supernatural special effects.

Background: Before the Divine Divorce

Adam and Eve’s original sin reflects a recent, radical stage in the evolution of Israelite religion: the separation of the divine from the realm of Nature. It’s the first religion we know of that saw God outside of Nature, transcending it. Unlike all the other religions in the Near East up to that time, the Jewish religion saw God not as created within Nature, but as creator of it. So it makes sense that the “original sin” in the book of Genesis is disobeying that God. He’s the King, the Lord, the Master of the Universe. He ordered Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and they disobeyed. That’s the sin.

We can play with some of the depths of this myth some other time, because there’s much more beneath the surface of this seemingly silly “I told you not to eat that fruit” story. But the point I want to make here is that this myth only makes sense within the revolutionary worldview of a certain set of Hebrews around 1,000 BCE. It doesn’t make sense inside the older Mesopotamian view of the Gilgamesh poets.

Their gods are not divorced from Nature. They live in it, they have natural bodies and functions, they even have divine animals like the Bull of Heaven (which, as we see later when it takes what the British might call an “epic shite” on Enkidu, has divine-but-natural bodily functions).

As importantly, there’s no “Master of the Universe” god in the Mesopotamian worldview, so there’s nobody to give absolute “commandments” like “Thou shalt not eat that fruit.” One god might be stronger than another, but that doesn’t make him or her all-powerful over all the others. Remember from Lecture 1 that these gods, additionally, don’t seem to think the Biblical god’s authoritarian commandments are the best way to deal with humans anyway: they didn’t punish Gilgamesh for deflowering all his subjects’ brides, and they didn’t command him to stop – or, as so often in the Bible, declare he be stoned to death. Instead, they pulled that totally mysterious and totally cool trick of creating Enkidu to somehow, wtf?, give Gilgamesh an experience that will wise him up and make him stop being such a royal ass. In short, they weren’t punishing “sin” – they were curing stupidity.

And yet I still claim that Enkidu, in Book V, commits an “original sin.” So what gives?

A Question of Balance

Let’s recap Enkidu’s story, because Enkidu is more interesting than Gilgamesh in this episode. It ain’t about the hero here.

As we’ve seen, Enkidu starts as a sort of “wild-man Adam,” created out of dust and outside of civilization, to be the “balance” who will “bring peace” to Gilgamesh and his city.⁵ Unlike Adam, Enkidu lives in a nature that we recognize as realistically Darwinian: animals prey on other animals in Enkidu’s Nature, and Enkidu seems one animal among many in the way he drinks at the watering hole with them and runs as fast as the gazelles. The only difference we see between Enkidu and the other animals is his role in defending animals from predators. So Enkidu seems compassionate, and in a very specific and important sense: he’s compassionate toward natural creatures. His most outstanding trait, in this stage of innocence, is that he’s a defender of Nature.

Then along comes the prostitute Shamhat, you’ll remember, and her civilizing mission: she seduces him into civilization with that epic six-day roll in the hay (and boy, how Enkidu must have needed, like that later god in Genesis, to take a day of rest on the seventh). Similar to Samson, Enkidu loses much of his physical power after this epic sex scene, can’t sprint like he used to, and so forth – but he gains language, the ability to share ideas and conversation, the need for friendship, and the desire to follow Shamhat into the city and meet Gilgamesh. Still, though, Enkidu seems not to have lost his character as the compassionate defender: he wants to fight Gilgamesh after hearing of his bride-stealing ass-hattery.

Remember the “double that balances” motif? The “balance” seems to be thrown off when natural Enkidu leaves the wild, and crosses the gateway into civilized Gilgamesh’s city. It’s like both guys are now sitting on the same side of the see-saw – the city side. Nature’s left hanging in mid-air now.

Then they fight, Enkidu loses, and he and Gilgamesh become fast friends. Enkidu likes clothes and bread and beer, and life is good – until Gilgamesh gets that royally wild hair up his royally dumb ass to go kill Humbaba, who he calls a “monster.”⁶

Enkidu, Defender of Animals, tells Gilgamesh it’s a really bad idea to kill Humbaba, and reminds him that he’s not just a monster: he’s the divinely-appointed Guardian of the Cedar Forest. Enlil put him there to keep the forest, which is sacred to the gods, untouched by man, and off-limits to him.

Gilgamesh cares no more for the virgin forest than he cares for the virginity of his brides. Whether he’s taking his metaphorical axe to the virgin brides, or his literal one to the virgin cedars, it’s all the same to this swaggering dumb jock of a king: if it redounds to his glory and gives him an heroic notch for his belt, his name won’t die and he’ll achieve everlasting fame.

After Enkidu loses the argument, he tries to get the city elders to talk sense into Gilgamesh with their religious “knowledge” and urgings to fear the gods. At their pious warning that no human could succeed at this task against the gods’ will, Gilgamesh laughs possibly the first heretic’s laugh in history – or literature, anyway – and off he and Enkidu go to slay the monster.⁷

Off they go, straight through the gate from civilization, and back into Nature. Our “balance that doubles” motif has now seen both men jump onto the Nature side of the see-saw. Now it’s civilization that’s left hanging in mid-air – and hanging, the way I see it, fatefully.

The Original Sin – Literally

By the logic of the “double that balances” motif, everything hangs on Enkidu now. He originally balanced the civilization-symbol Gilgamesh by being the Nature-symbol “defender of animals” in the wild. He threw things out of balance by “crossing over” to civilization. Now we’ve got Gilgamesh crossing over into Enkidu’s original realm with him, balancing Enkidu’s earlier “crossing-over.” We know Gilgamesh has predatory motives for this trip: he’s going to kill the Forest Guardian, and chop down the “highest cedars.” So the question is, is Enkidu going to stay true to his original role, when he was “innocent” and Adam-like, of defending nature’s creatures against predators – even if the predator is now his friend and king?⁸

(to be continued)

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. let’s put that at around 622 BCE in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, when King Josiah’s reforms wiped out the Jewish worship of Baal and Asherah [↩]
3. in Genesis 2, which was written around 1,000 BCE [↩]
4. I know that “original sin” is a Christian, not a Jewish, doctrine, but grant me the poetic license. [↩]
5. The Bible’s story of Adam and Eve was written in Jerusalem, scholars think, at about the same time David conquered that city and made it his capital around 1,000 BCE. That’s a full 3,000 years later in history than the founding of civilization in cities like Uruk. This is significant: it corrects the view that Genesis is a story from the beginning of civilization, when it’s actually precisely mid-way between the founding of Uruk and today. If Gilgamesh is pictured as the letter “A”, and our time the letter “Z,” the Jewish scriptures would be not “B” or “C,” but “M.” In strictly chronological terms, the period from the Jews’ King David in 1,000 BCE to the life of Jesus in the First Century CE are really the “Middle Ages” of the 6,000 years between Sumer and today.

   This may help explain why the Judeo-Christian story of humanity’s “state of nature” – the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 – rings so false, while the Sumerian story of Enkidu rings more true: the authors of Genesis came too late in our history to have any ancestral memory of man’s true, historical state of nature. What we know now of human evolution tells us the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is fiction – fiction with depths that give it the status of a fascinating myth, in the best sense of the word, but fiction nonetheless. Not so for the Sumerians and, through them – via Gilgamesh – the Babylonians. Since the people of Uruk were among the first to transition from neolithic life within nature to civilized life isolated from it, it’s no wonder that the story of Enkidu living as an animal among animals in nature is much closer to the truth of human evolution as we now know it through science. Unlike Adam and Eve, then, which is clearly a myth, Enkidu is just as clearly closer to history. Yes, he was made, like Adam, from clay, but the similarity ends there. Enkidu is not in any paradisal Eden, living a life of pre-lapsarian ease; he’s more of a primate living a Darwinian existence, drinking among other animals at a watering hole, fighting off predators in the kill-or-be-killed struggle to survive in the wild. He has the ring of less of myth than of legend – of something closer to dimly-remembered truth. [↩]

6. In his Introduction to Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell, who wrote the version of the epic I’m primarily using for these lectures, compares Gilgamesh here to our previous Royal Dumb-Ass in Chief George W. Bush when he decided to invade Iraq, and it’s an interesting parallel. I’m going for a reading less topical and more timeless here, though. [↩]
7. Now give me a medal, because I just summarized the 10,000 or so words of all the previous lectures in a few paragraphs. [↩]
8. And while we’re at it, it’s worth getting abstract for a second to entertain the idea that, on the symbolic level, Enkidu is Humbaba, in a sense. They’re both, after all, guardians of nature. If Gilgamesh kills Humbaba, he’s in a weird sense also killing Enkidu. Maybe that’s a stretch, but reading symbols often is. Whatever. [↩]

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. This Lecture ~ 9. The Original Original Sin ]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

I have a love-snore relationship with Book IV of Gilgamesh. On first read, in fact, it was snore-only, and no love. That changed on the second read, so stay with me.

First, the Snores

On the surface, it’s a tedious chapter that recounts the journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu from the gates of Uruk to the edge of the Cedar Forest, home of the “evil” monster/”sacred” forest guardian Humbaba, whom Gilgamesh has decided to kill for glory. They travel a thousand miles every three days, only stopping for a lunch break at the 400th mile, and on the eve of the third day they pitch camp – where else – on the heights of a mountain-top where, closest to the gods in heaven, Gilgamesh apparently has better reception for dreams from the divinities. Enkidu encloses Gilgamesh in a magical circle of flour, a gust of wind portends a divinatory dream will indeed visit him. He goes to sleep, has by all appearances a very bad dream, wakes up terrified, and tells it to Enkidu. Enkidu then interprets the dream favorably, against all common sense, and Gilgamesh swallows it.

This happens five very repetitive times. The only thing that changes in each repetition is the content of the dream, and the outrageousness of Enkidu’s wishful interpreting.

In the first dream, Gilgamesh dreams a mountain falls on him and Enkidu. Enkidu tells him the mountain is Humbaba, who will fall like that mountain. (Never mind that the dream suggests they’ll both be crushed under him.)

In the second dream, the mountain falls only on Gilgamesh and pins him down, and a “shining man” frees him. Enkidu says the mountain is again Humbaba, and the shining man the sun-god Shamash (remember, Gilgamesh’s goddess-mother Ninsun prayed to Shamash to aid her son against Humbaba).

In the third dream, the heavens roar, the earth heaves, all goes dark and silent. Lightning incinerates the trees and all is ash. Enkidu really reaches on this one, saying the heavens are Humbaba, who is powerless to harm Gilgamesh.

In the fourth dream, an eagle with a lion’s head and flames shooting from its mouth attacks Gilgamesh, and a “young man” kills the eagle. Enkidu, *snore*, says the eagle is Humbaba, and the man is Shamash.

In the fifth dream, things get a bit “wtf”: a giant bull, whose bellow shatters the earth and clouds the sky with dust, pins Gilgamesh to the ground, but a man pulls him up, puts his arm around him, and gives him water. More “wtf” still, Enkidu out-does himself by interpreting the bull – get this – as Shamash, and the man as Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh’s father.

It’s not quite as bad as the “begats” in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Numbers (and if God wrote the Bible, this snorer proves He needed a merciless editor), or the Catalogue of Ships in Book II of The Iliad, but it’s close.

Next, the Love

I’m an English teacher. One of the more obnoxious parts of my job is getting all preachy to students who whine that this or that book is “boring,” and telling them that a bored person suffers from a boring mind. There’s always a way, I preach, to turn lead into gold. You just have to stop snoring and wake up, and do that little “reader-response” trick of bringing your own experience and mental connections to the text.

And when I do that with this chapter, it gets a little fun. Let me count the ways.

On Dreams, Magic, Gods – and Poets

That whole “dreams comes from heaven” bit, for example. On the face of it, this motif in Gilgamesh is one of thousands of examples in ancient literature of early humanity’s mental childishness. Faced with questions for which they had no certain answers – Where do we come from? What happens to us after we die? What are these visions we experience in our sleep, and what causes them? On and on – our earliest ancestors settled on answers that today’s toddlers might swallow, but not today’s adults.

The whole thing brings to mind an analogy that, while I know it’s facile, I’m still fond of, and find compelling on many levels: the metaphor of (Western? Intellectual?) human history as the development of an individual human. Antiquity represents our early childhood, gullible enough to swallow Santa Claus; the Middle Ages is our later childhood, accepting whatever we’re told by our authoritarian father-figures in the Church; the Renaissance is our adolescence, rebelling against those fathers and creating new identities, seeking new truths; the Enlightenment is the prime of our adulthood, the cooling of that rebellious passion as we turn more earnestly to our work; we could throw Romanticism in there as a mid-life crisis, though I won’t push it; and our own Modernity – say, 1850 to today – that’s us past our prime, muddled and venal, physically and mentally flabby, caring more about comfort than work, sliding into mediocrity and, soon, senility. (The divine Oscar Wilde points to the same thing in reverse order with his maxim, “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.”)

So our “young” Gilgamesh and Enkidu “know” that dreams come from the divine, are portents, omens, Things To Be Taken Seriously. Before you join me in a condescending smile, stop with me and ask yourself how many people you’ve known who are still so childish in their beliefs. Can you think of anybody like the man I met years ago who heard God speak to him from his television set – not once, but many times – and never once thought to ask himself, “Should I seek psychiatric help?” Or the good but hyper-religious friend who called me during my waiter shift at my Los Angeles restaurant to breathlessly tell me he had encountered God – and who over the next several months dressed – in Los Angeles – like Rasputin, cassock and Eastern cross necklace and all, and gathered a troupe of disciples around himself renamed after Jesus’ original twelve? Or any number of the no-less-extreme, though more socially accepted (and very well-fed) men on our radios, televisions, and megachurches who claim to talk to God on a regular basis? People who talk about auras, horoscopes, astrological charts, End Times, Nostradamus, on and on?

Ask yourself, better still, if you’re still childish in any similar way. I was once. In fact, I was just like Gilgamesh in this chapter: In my truth-seeking twenties, way back in the late 1980s, I went to an Oregon mountain-top, had a friend sit me inside a magic circle, and prepared to fast there for three days in hopes of receiving a vision from the gods – specifically, the Native American gods of the Pacific Northwestern Sundance religion. The punchline: we had to cancel the “vision-quest” because a) one of us had forgotten to bring a meat-offering for the bird-spirits, and you couldn’t have a vision-quest without a bird offering any more than Gilgamesh apparently could without that magic flour; and b) my helper-friend had a romantic crisis with his girl-friend, and had to run back to his distant town in order to patch things up.

(Gilgamesh was lucky Enkidu didn’t have a high-maintenance girlfriend.)

Don’t think for a minute that I regret those years. And don’t think, either, that I don’t enjoy being able to laugh at them from a completely different mental space 20 years later. Above all, to tie this tangent back to the “intellectual history as individual development” analogy, do think that the reason I was able to outgrow that childish stage was that I went on to study history from antiquity to the present in college, and to grow in that process to intellectual maturity – which, believe me, means much intellectual humility and skepticism, lest you think I’m prideful by saying this. (Nutshell: At the end of a semester of immersion in Greek and Roman studies, I wanted to be a Classicist; at the end of the next semester of Medieval Studies immersion, I wanted to be a monk – and actually called a monastery asking how I could; the following semester’s immersion in Renaissance and Modern Studies thankfully pulled me past that stage, and left me more of a Marxist than anything. Readings since then have pulled me beyond that stage too.)

So the childish magical thinking we chuckle at in Gilgamesh survives all around us, 5,000 years later, all over the world. I’ve traveled much of that world as an adult, and seen it. I saw it in my native United States, where spells said over water, bread, juice, and the like, are believed to magically transform them. I’ve seen it in Europe in the same manifestations. I’ve seen it in Kosovo, as a NATO peace-keeper trying to protect the people who drop to their knees five times a day on the streets to point in a magical direction and pray from being killed by their fellow country-men who believe in a different magic. I saw it in a Buddhist monastery in the Yunnan province of China near the Tibetan plateau, when an ancient monk put a magic string around my wrist. I saw it in Bali, Indonesia, at a Hindu temple full of incense and drumming with monkeys scrambling in trees overhead. I’ve seen it most recently at my Korean mother-in-law’s fresh grave-site, where her family visits and speaks no words of their own to her, but instead opens their magic book above her and reads from it, sings its songs, and then leaves. (I always talk to her at that point, fully doubting she hears at all, just because it seems so heartless to leave without saying a simple “We loved you.”) And I’ve wished for each of those countries that its people could have the opportunity to study history, or travel the world and observe it like I’ve been lucky enough to do, or both, so they could start questioning all the tribal, divisive magics separately claiming to speak their many One Truths on our inseparable, indivisible One Planet spinning through this One never-fully-explainable mystery called the cosmos.

Back to Gilgamesh, Who We Never Really Left – and His Poets

Reader-response. Connecting our experiences to what we read, riffing off the connections. All the above does connect, in this reader’s mind, anyway, to one thing about this snorer of a chapter in Gilgamesh that I love. It’s this: I can’t help but suspect the poets behind this work of being far less childish than their place at the infancy of civilization suggests they should be. Even more, I see signs in this chapter of a sensibility that is startlingly modern: I see these poets as laughing at the childishness of the religious beliefs of their culture.

The clues are in Enkidu’s interpretations of Gilgamesh’s five “dreams from the gods.” It’s not just that Enkidu gives different interpretations of the dreams – for example, Gilgamesh’s “helper” being Shamash in Dream Two and Four, but Lugalbanda in Dream Five. These are noticeably strange, and I always tell my students that if something is strange – is a “wtf?” – in literature,  the author(s) want us to notice them. The poets may indeed want us to notice how contradictory the interpretations are, and laugh at them a bit.

But the more laughable thing, the most interesting “wtf?”, lies in the increasing outlandishness of each interpretation. Dream One doesn’t raise a brow: the falling mountain represents the falling Humbaba – reasonable enough, so we’ll take it seriously. Dream Two doesn’t phase us either: the falling mountain is again Humbaba, and the god Gilgamesh’s mother prayed to for help, Shamash, is the helper in the dream. Enkidu’s interpretation of Dream Three gets more interesting, though, and upsets our expectations: Gilgamesh seems to die unaided in this one – it ends, remember, in “darkness, silence, and ash” – and Enkidu’s interpretation that the dream shows Humbaba is “powerless to harm” Gilgamesh doesn’t satisfactorily explain away that deathlike ending. Anybody awake in the audience, then or now, would presumably notice this slight “wtf,” and wake up a bit. It’s not reasonable enough to satisfy.

The interpretation of Dream Four, though, returns to reason, and lulls the alert reader’s misgivings: the eagle-monster is Humbaba, and its killer who comes to the King’s aid, Shamash – still delivering the help Ninsun begged him to give her son. This makes Dream Three’s interpretation seem a minor fluke. All is again as it should be in the land of story-telling logic. We should take this dream-interpretation stuff seriously. All that flour and favorable mountain-top wind works some serious magic to call down the attention of the divine.

Then comes Dream Five, which I swear strikes me as one of the grandest practical jokes ever played on priest by poet. No listener with the slightest hint of intelligence can take its interpretation seriously: Enkidu tells Gilgamesh the giant bull who almost kills him in this dream – who is his enemy – is not Humbaba this time, as we’d expect, but, wtf?!, Shamash, who in the previous dreams has been Gilgamesh’s divine helper. More wtf still, the helper in this dream is Gilgamesh’s father who comes out of nowhere and, though a former king himself, is still hard to see as a match for the sun-god from whom he saves Gilgamesh.

Remember, this poem was worked and re-worked over at least 1,500 years. That’s ample time for the court poets to find an interpretation for this dream less jarring on the audience’s imagination and less insulting to its intelligence. Yet there it stands, thumbing its outlandish nose at us all, with all its authorial authority. Why did the poets keep this detail as it is?

In my most mischievous imagination, they did it to confront their ancient audience with a choice: You either believe the authorities – us – and our sacred tale, no matter how absurd – or you learn the lesson we’re trying to point to here: sometimes you have to face facts, show some skeptical courage, and call nonsense by its name. This dream interpretation stuff is for the birds.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but wonder how many priests’ feathers were ruffled by this scene over the thousands of years of its telling.

A closing question: the interpretation of dreams – oneiromancy, for any students out there wanting extra points on their Gilgamesh essays – was a widespread religious superstition in the ancient world. The Hebrews did it, the Greeks did it, even educated fleas did it – but did any of those other “childhood cultures” do it with the implicit skepticism and ambiguity I argue we see here?

If not, those Sumero-Babylonians were awfully mature for their Age.

[Next: Lecture 9: Gilgamesh and the Original "Original Sin"]

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. This Post ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

We last left Gilgamesh laughing at the elders for urging him to fear the gods and doubt his own ability to do what none have done before. We noted it was perhaps the first Humanist’s laugh in world literature, 2,500 years before Socrates laughed similarly at the pious believers in Zeus.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu are almost, almost ready to embark on their quest to kill Humbaba, the guardian of the sacred Cedar Forest who is sacred to the god Enlil, but evil to several other gods and goddesses, in the wonderfully grey and grown-up moral sphere of the Sumero-Babylonians, so different from the black-and-white moral simplicity of other, more familiar, religions.

But before we follow them out the gate, we have one more stop to make with our two heroes: the Temple of Ninsun, the goddess who is Gilgamesh’s mother. It only makes sense to visit your mother before you leave to court death (I did the same with my best friend when we left my hometown in the ’80s to hitchhike across America all summer, come what monsters may). It makes more sense when she’s a goddess who might pull some divine strings to help you survive your adventure.

It’s an episode with a few details worth pausing over.

Worship on the Heights

We see in this scene, for example, another instance of Sumero-Babylonian religious ritual that causes me envy: their “worship on the heights.” We saw it before in the Temple of Ishtar, the pyramid-like ziggurat atop which, under sun or moon and stars I don’t know, the king seems to have made ritual love to Ishtar’s high priestess. We see it in this scene when Ninsun, after first bathing in “water of tamarisk and soapwort,” arrays herself in “her finest robe, a wide belt, / a jeweled necklace,” and “her crown,” then ascends to the roof of her temple to light incense to accompany her skyward prayer to the sun-god Shamash.

(Can I pause to share that I learned to speak, read and write the Arabic language when I was in the rightly oxymoronic U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence branch back in the ’90s, and that a word I learned there made this prayer-scene a bit mind-bending? The word was not quite “Shamash,” but it was close. It was “shahms” (شمس) – the Arabic word for, you guessed it: sun. The word stretches back to the beginning of human history, and beyond into prehistory. The young god of today’s monotheistic Arabs, Allah, may have taken the throne of heaven from Shamash in Arab religion a mere 1,400 years ago ; but in their language, he still shares heaven with that 6,000-year-oldest god. Shamash still shines on them today.)

We’ll see more of this preference for open-air, panoramic, sky-as-cathedral worship later. I just love it. Synagogues, churches, and mosques should cast a fresh look at their rooftops, and ask if there’s any potential to get closer to the Unnameable up there, instead of down below. [Self-critical update: It occurred to me later that the rooftop heights seem reserved for the elites only - kings and goddesses, so far, in this case. They ascend alone, and return below to the other devotees, from what I can see. I still like the idea, however unsupported it is on second look.]

A Prayer in Babylon’s Defense

Anyway, on her temple rooftop, under the azure dome of Shamash’s sky, Ninsun has her moment on the world-literary stage. She doesn’t blow it.

She asks Shamash the question every mother of a hot-blooded son asks: “You have granted my son / beauty and strength and courage / – why have you burdened him with a restless heart?” Whether intentional or not, I find it interesting that Ninsun’s list of her son’s gifts lacks the gift of wisdom.² Wisdom is what Gilgamesh will gain by the end of the tale – or perhaps only we will, by knowing his story.

Ninsun then goes on to utter what I like to call her “Ode to the Sun” which, in Mitchell’s adaptation³, deserves a place in our anthologies of the world’s religious poetry:

O Lord Shamash, glorious sun,
delight of the gods, illuminator
of the world, who rise and the light is born,
it fills the heavens, the whole earth takes shape,
the mountains form, the valleys grow bright,
darkness vanishes, evil retreats,
all creatures wake up and open their eyes,
they see you, they are filled with joy….

If any eight lines of verse can serve to refute all the Bible’s Babylon-bashing – an example of what mythologist Joseph Campbell calls one culture’s “mythic assassination” of its enemy’s culture – these eight have my vote. They’re not deep or fancy, and that’s their merit: the simple reverence of the lines, especially the image of all creatures waking to be filled with joy at the sight of a new day – they bespeak a gentle gratitude and majesty that gives the lie to the “whorish” slurs cast by the Hebrew and Christian texts. It’s wonderful that the Babylonian text can finally speak for itself again. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the cuneiform-imprinted clay tablets containing the epic lay mute and buried under the Iraqi sands for over 2,000 years, until they were uncovered by a British traveler around 1850, and then translated about 25 years later. So from the time of roughly Socrates, through the Roman Empire, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and half the modern period, this story was lost to the world, buried in silence. We’re unbelievably lucky to be alive to hear its ancient voice today. It’s a form of time-travel most of our forebears could not enjoy.)

The Visit Ends, the Adventure Begins

Ninsun goes on to do what so many mothers do who fear for their child’s success: she asks the god to cheat for him. When Gilgamesh and Enkidu close in battle with Humbaba, she asks Shamash to pin him with every wind known to nature – East Wind, West Wind, North and South, with tornadoes and gale and hurricane wind thrown in for good measure – to “make it easy” for her son to kill him.

She then descends and returns to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and adds one more civilized gift to the recently-civilized Enkidu: a family. Ninsun tells Enkidu that she is adopting him as her son, places an amulet around his neck, and tells him to be a good brother to Gilgamesh. And Enkidu, gentle as ever (but not for much longer, as we’ll see), weeps. He has a mother now, and a brother.

An interesting detail in this adoption scene shows us more about the heirodules, or “temple prostitutes” in Ishtar’s cultic service, that we met in the first lecture. Ninsun says she adopts Enkidu “as a priestess takes in an abandoned child.” So we learn that the cult of Ishtar served a charitable function in Sumero-Babylonian society by serving as orphanages. I wonder what more the scholars can tell us about that.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu then take their weaponry and march past the cheering young men and the well-wishing elders to the gate, and beyond. That weaponry, by the way? Each had an axe that weighed “two hundred pounds,” knives with gold mountings, quivers and bows and armor “weighing more than six hundred pounds.”

You have to wonder if there were ever any Sumerian or Babylonian fundamentalists who took these details literally – and if there were any Sumero-Babylonian literature teachers who countered them with the question we ask of our own variety of literalist today: “Can you say hyperbole?”

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. Since the Gilgamesh court poets polished this epic over 15 centuries, I lean toward “intentional.” [↩]
3. which in this case hews close to the original [↩]

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ This post ~ 7. A Goddess Prays 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Since the last “lecture” five long months ago, I’ve left Gilgamesh and Enkidu stuck at the gates of Uruk, ready to journey to the Cedar Forest to kill the “evil” – or, depending on which god or mortal you listen to, “sacred” – monster Humbaba. Life got in the way since then. Click the footnote if you’re curious how.²

Since I need to ease back into this world after such a long hiatus, let’s pause to catch an idea regarding that “evil or sacred” detail before it flits away. It’s worth lingering on.

One Pleasure of Polytheism

That Humbaba could be considered “sacred” by the god Enlil, but “evil” by the sun-god Shamash and the goddess Ninsun (who is also Gilgamesh’ mother), suggests that religious dogmatism and absolute certainty about questions of good and evil, right and wrong, did not plague polytheistic religions the way they do religions with only one god – especially ones claiming, moreover, to possess the divinely-authored book.  Nobody claimed divine authorship of Gilgamesh, as far as I know. So the Sumero-Babylonians must have felt a nice bit of intellectual freedom to dispute it and discuss it as a result.

I’m not denying that rabbis, theologians, and imams have endlessly disputed their texts too, of course. I’m just saying that there’s still a difference between a religious text acknowledged to be the work of humans, like Gilgamesh, and one attributed to the godhead itself, that seems to make an essential difference in how a culture relates to it.

Me? I’d prefer the Sumerian option. Whoever the first priest in history was to come up with the claim that “these are God’s very words,” or “God wrote this book,” was, wittingly or not, a political genius. Look at the power that gives members of our priestly classes to this day. People are more comfortable disputing an Einstein or a Darwin than they are their humble neighborhood preacher. It’s mind-boggling, really. (And, come to think of it, literally.)

Anyway, before leaving Uruk, I want to linger on a couple more details from Book III that I didn’t mention in the last installment. They happen after Gilgamesh announces his plan to kill Humbaba to Enkidu, and before he and Enkidu leave. They’re minor, but interesting enough – especially in light of what comes later.

I’ll try not to be a spoiler.

The Birth of Something New

We left Gilgamesh justifying his decision to commit, in Enkidu’s view, a sacrilege by arguing that, on the contrary, his act was heroic. In lines that Achilles would echo in the Iliad a thousand years later, Gilgamesh articulates the classic heroic answer to the classic existential question, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

We are not gods, we cannot ascend
to heaven. No, we are mortal men.
Only the gods live forever. Our days
are few in number, and whatever we achieve
is a puff of wind. Why be afraid then,
since sooner or later death must come?

So since immortality is impossible, what’s the next best thing in life? An immortal name. In other words, that thing we call “fame.”

I will make a lasting name for myself,
I will stamp my fame on men’s minds forever.

The Greeks would call this pure hubris – another great man thinking he’s a bit too great, and setting himself up for a tragic lesson thereby. As it turns out, the people of Uruk seem to see things this way too. First Enkidu, in tears, and then the city elders called to Gilgamesh’s throne to hear the announcement, ask Gilgamesh the same pointed question:

How can any man, even you,
dare to enter the Cedar Forest?
Who among men or gods could defeat [Humbaba]?

Everybody is counseling Gilgamesh to live his life restrained by traditional religious piety – Humbaba is Enlil’s guardian, thus holy; don’t defy the gods. They advise prudence instead of passion; humility, instead of hubris.

Moreover, none of them believes Gilgamesh can achieve the goal he’s set for himself.

And when the elders finish their pleas, what is the King’s response? First, in another instance of that “double that balances” motif, since Enkidu is crying at his side: laughter. And after that, no response at all, other than a “Let’s get moving” to Enkidu. Gilgamesh has chosen bravery over cowardice, fame over oblivion, the chance of greatness over mediocrity. He’s chosen free human will over traditional religious fear.

This just might be the first written example of Humanism in the history of our species. And the court poets who polished this story over 2,000 years have several “wtf twists” about this in store for us yet.

More soon. I promise.

1. This series based on the beautifully poetic 2004 Stephen Mitchell translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. I got sucked into the presidential campaign first, then into interviewing for a radio job and a writing job over six weeks or so after that (I got them both, thank goodness), and then into applying and interviewing for a new teaching job beginning this summer (which worked out well too – I’ll be in Singapore by July to settle in and begin teaching Asian history there). On top of that, we’re still dealing with mourning in my family over my mother-in-law’s passing, and with the ominous mood of the global meltdown. Strange times. [↩]

More Winter cleaning. I’m going to be posting a lot of scholarly essays from my college years on these pages so I can toss the paper copies. Paper’s a bear to box and ship when you live the global vagabond’s life.

I took a Greek tragedy and comedy class in college. We studied, among other works, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The professor had a point of view – and a smugness about it – with which I strongly disagreed. He wanted to defend Sophocles as a believer in Free Will. I didn’t see it, and didn’t like his refusal (or inability) to see beyond his own interpretation. So this paper – a 14-page effort for a 5-page assignment, which was typical of me in college – takes it to him.

I haven’t read it since writing it in 1994, so the argument will be as new to me as to anybody else who likes this sort of thing. And that professor? He asked if he could keep a copy for his files. So maybe I managed to put a chink or two in his armor-plated head. [I just finished typing it. I like it, the academic Latinate notwithstanding, and the "sheer tedium," as I acknowledged in the essay, of cataloguing the millions of textual details supporting that Sophocles emphatically pushed his pen against Free Will in the play. My favorite part is the end, which goes into the political and intellectual context in which Sophocles wrote the play: the rise of humanism and atheism in classical Athens.]

I also went to great pains to link, using Apture, to Wikipedia articles that will pop up on the page for anyone wanting further reading about any of the characters, ideas, books, or scholars named. I did it as a demonstration of how much richer academic writing can be online than in print form. (Which is an interesting counterpoint to the Slow Blogging post from earlier today.)

Here’s the start, after which I’ll fold the rest into the permalink:

Of Kings and Strings:
Sophocles Contra Free Will in the Oedipus Tyrannus

Clay Burell
7 December 1994

Did Sophocles intend for his audience to understand the Oedipus Tyrannus [OT] as a “tragedy of fate”? Did he mean to demonstrate through Oedipus that freely-willed and self-determined actions are illusory through and through, that in reality they are the pulls of fate so softly on our puppet-strings that we don’t sense them?

To humanistic and Christian sensibilities, such a total denial of human freedom in the face of destiny is abhorrent. Very tellingly on this point, E. R. Dodds labels the fatalistic interpretation of the OT nothing less than a “heresy.” While admitting that “certain of Oedipus’ past actions [ie, his parricide and incest] were fate-bound,” here he draws the line: “everything [Oedipus] does on stage from first to last he does as a free agent.”¹ But when Dodds substantiates this claim with a list of Oedipus’ allegedly free actions, the very language he uses to describe each of these actions paradoxically undercuts his own argument: Oedipus freely chose to consult Delphi, Dodds asserts, because pity for the Thebans “compelled” him to; he freely chose to act on the Delphic response because piety and justice “required” him to; he made the free choice to extort the damning truth from the herdsman because he “cannot rest content with a lie, he must tear away the last veil from the illusion”; finally, he freely decides not to heed the advice of Teiresias, Jocasta, and the herdsman to stop the investigation because “he must read the . . . riddle of his own life.”² The compulsory adverbs – “compelled,” “required,” “cannot,” “must,” “must” – while not pointing to divine fatalism, suggest at least that Oedipus was determined by his own character. Being who he was, he could not act any differently than he did.

[Read the rest below the fold - especially if you want to argue about Free Will, about which I'm still a strong skeptic....] Read the rest of this entry »

1. Dodds, 42. [↩]
2. ibid., 43. [↩]

Body Language: Blue-Eyes in Front, Brown-Eyes in Back

Preface: What I Learned from the Comments on My “Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist” Post

I was surprised that my story of anti-black racism in the American South drew strong reactions in the comment thread from readers in New Zealand, Australia, England, and regions of the American Mid-west (where there were no African-Americans, but there were Native Americans).

I start with this point to urge Americans and non-Americans to at the very least watch the film linked below. It’s one of the most remarkable moments in education I’ve ever seen. And it should resonate on a global, and not merely American, scale.

A Day for History

It’s November 4, 2008, an Election Day in the US that, barring a miracle or a crime, will live as long as human history does.

It makes me regret that I’m not teaching US History this year, and able to share this hopeful teachable moment the way I shared the hopeless US invasion of Iraq when teaching World History in 2003.¹  So consider this little post a fantasy of what I would somehow squeeze into my syllabus this week – which I also fantasize someone reading this post might do in the real world.

It has to do with an online documentary goodie that I’ll deliver at the end of this post, but first, a little background from a great book:

“Emotional Objectivity”: A Paradox

Toward the end of his must-read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen writes:

When two-thirds of American seventeen-year-olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century, or 22 percent of my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea, we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance. This is resistance [to " 'learning' isolated, incoherent, and meaningless data"] raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even those details of American history that educated citizens should know. Still less do they learn what caused the major develpments in our past. Therefore, they cannot apply lessons from the past to current issues.

Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or rebut historical referents used in arguments by candidates for office,² sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowedge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss.

Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick. We remember where we were when we heard of the attack on the World Trade Center because it affected us emotionally. . . . As textbook critic Mrs. W. K. Haralson writes, “There is no way the glowing, throbbing events of history can be presented fairly, accurately, and factually without involving emotion” (Loewen, 342-3). [Emphases added.]

Linger on the paradox in that last line. In essence, it argues that without emotion, historical objectivity is a fallacy, and this goes against the popular conception of objectivity as a dispassionate stance – “Present all sides and let students come to their own conclusions.” While some history teachers I have known and worked with understood that “all sides” (yes, a problematic concept) can be presented with the emotions attaching to those respective sides, but without crossing the line into indoctrination, more have mistaken this tightrope-walk for a breach of the objective ideal of the profession.

Loewen and Haralson, though, claim that without experiencing the emotions of history, students find it irrelevant and boring, and really don’t learn it more deeply than is necessary to pass the class. Garbage in and out.

The Connotative Maelstrom of a “President Barack Hussein Obama”

Without getting too deep about all of this – I swore I’d keep this post short – just look at all of the strands of major themes in U.S. history woven into that title: President Barack Hussein Obama. Race and racism. The legacy of slavery. The challenge of Islam and post-9/11 terrorist fears. Intermarriage and single parenting. Black liberation theology. FDR and the Great Depression.  JFK in an African-American Camelot. Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jim Crow. Now factor in the race against McCain, a Vietnam Cold Warrior.  On and on go the tropes attached to this man, and back and back into US history go all the attendant hopes and fears. It reminds me of a long-ago post in which David Warlick plays with the idea of teaching history backwards, from the present to the past. All of these issues could begin with explorations of the Obama presidency, and trace the causes of its controversy that make it so historical.

This is more than a “teachable moment;” it’s a full-blown teachable year.

But I’ll stop there, confess again my envy of all US history teachers worldwide, and move on to deliver a plug to a documentary that PBS Frontline makes available to us all, online, for free. It’s called:

A Class Divided

If you take no other recommendation from me ever in your life, take this one. I had read about this famous lesson before, and about the documentary film, but had never watched it myself. So I just took a break during this post to watch it with my wife, and it jolted me in ways text couldn’t.

This third-grade teacher put the emotion in history, and judging by the film, taught her third-graders a lesson that changed them not “until garbage out,” but for life.

From the PBS FRONTLINE site:

This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE’s history. It is about [Jane Elliott,] an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives. . . .

[O]n the night of the day that Martin Luther King was murdered, [Jane's] memories and experiences had coalesced into an idea of how she might give her third-graders a sense of what prejudice and discrimination really meant.

Jane took a deep breath and plunged in. “I don’t think we really know what it would be like to be a black child, do you?” she asked her class. “I mean it would be hard to know, really, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves, wouldn’t it?” Without real interest, the class agreed. “Well, would you like to find out?”

The children’s puzzlement was plain on their faces until she spelled out what she meant. “Suppose we divided the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people,” she said. “Suppose that for the rest of today the blue-eyed people became the inferior group. Then, on Monday, we could reverse it so that the brown-eyed children were inferior. Wouldn’t that give us a better understanding of what discrimination means?”

So I’ve said enough. If you do watch it, I’d love to read any thoughts in comments. The social engineering aspect of the lesson is particularly gnarly. After seeing its results, though, and hearing the views of the townspeople about it, is this something you think should be used in classrooms around the world? Have you any stories of such a thing, or lessons similar to it?

Whatever the case, here’s to Jane Elliott, a new hero in my teaching pantheon.

1. And any Surge Enthusiasts out there, please note Petraeus and other generals are far from sharing the blithe forecasts of Bush, McCain, and others in Washington. Several bombings this week in Iraq show how fragile that peace is. [↩]
2. For more on this angle, see yesterday’s post on the correlation of successful fear-mongering campaigns to voters’ educational levels [↩]

Gilgamesh - the Earth's oldest religious epic - in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards. ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Let me state at the outset that this lecture is about Gilgamesh, though at times it will be so only north by northwest – because this lecture will be speaking of Gilgamesh in the context of a death in the family, and that family’s attempts to make meaning of life in the face of that death.

It’s the same struggle Gilgamesh experiences in the world’s oldest religious story.

~     ~     ~

Death, Consolation, and the Problem of Evil

My wife lost her mother two weeks ago. Her mother was a good woman, and passionately Christian. Yet her life was ended at a young 64 by a stroke followed closely by a terminal cancer. My wife, on the one hand, cannot understand how the god her mother loved so much would end her life so early; and on the other hand, my wife now feels pulled to explore her mother’s religion in order to understand and, she hopes, experience the happiness this religion gave her mother.

The question my wife keeps asking is “Why?” It’s an old and bedeviling question in Christianity, one that theologians have a term for: theodicy, “the problem of evil,” in a universe purportedly controlled by a god said to be both all-powerful and all-good. If he is these things, then how could he stand by and watch this devout woman die such a slow and tragically early death?

Had this death occurred before I began this series on Gilgamesh, I probably would have offered insights about our reaction to death and loss from Buddhism and Taoism.

I’m not a Buddhist because I find reincarnation as improbable – and as devoid of compelling evidence – as I find notions of heaven and hell (though Buddhism’s lack of a permanent hell makes it a more humane metaphysics than Christianity or Islam, in my view). But the Buddha’s teachings on how we create our own suffering by letting our fear and desire master us strike me simply as psychological, not religious, wisdom.

Fearing death is unwise like fearing old age is: it’s part of the natural order – and there’s the Tao – so fearing it is unprofitable. Add to that that death is an unknown, and as far as evidence goes, most probably is nothing more than oblivion on the order of an eternal and peaceful sleep without dreams, and there seems little cause for fear. Sadness, yes, but not fear.

Desiring immortality or, more to the point, to see our deceased loved ones again in an afterlife, is equally painful. In our most honest, quiet, interior moments, I can’t help but suspect that we all harbor extreme doubts that there’s an eternal reunion of friends and family in any heaven. But our desire that this be the case, despite our secret honesty, sets the stage for inner conflict, for anguish, as hope battles skepticism and desire battles realism in our breasts. Resolution favors doubt on this question, and thus, so long as we side with our desired fantasy over the evidence of our senses, we don’t find peace.

It really boils down to a conflict between naturalism – what we guess or reason by observing nature – and supernaturalism: the teachings about unobservable things from ancient tribal books and their interpreters in today’s various priestly classes.

But to repeat: I would have offered the above perspectives had this death occurred before my studies of Gilgamesh. That’s not the case. And I am as surprised as the next person that I find myself now believing that Gilgamesh offers a wisdom about death and how it is best dealt with that is superior to that of Buddhism.

As I mentioned in my last post, the three days’ mourning and funeral for my Korean mother-in-law here in Seoul was dominated by one book: the Bible. There was one other book present during those rites, and it was my copy of Gilgamesh. As the Korean mourners and I sat on the floor with the Christian preacher leading her flock in readings, songs, and prayers – none of which I could understand, of course – I found it entirely appropriate to read this other ancient meditation on mortality and the meaning of life, since it was, after all, from a religion and a book that lived in people’s hearts for four thousand years at least – twice as long as Christianity has lived so far – and which informed and influenced the Bible as well.

When I was told that it looked disrespectful to be reading this book as the Koreans looked to their own ancient book for guidance, I put the book away. When in Rome and all of that.

But I got the chance, later, to explain to my wife why that book was profoundly relevant to the occasion. Call it a rehearsal for this post. Here goes.

A Bit of Homosexuality and a Macho Fight Scene: Ho Hum

The last lecture concluded with Shamhat – the temple prostitute who played a “holy Eve” by sexually elevating the “animal Adam” Enkidu into civilization – leading Enkidu to the city to experience its glories and to meet Gilgamesh, its king. We noted the contradiction of Enkidu’s feelings about meeting the king.  On the one hand, he looked forward to Gilgamesh satisfying his new yearning for “a true friend”; but on the other hand, he declared he would challenge Gilgamesh to a fight for two reasons: first, to stop the king’s unjust practice of taking each new bride’s virginity before her husband on her wedding day; and second, simply to show he was physically mightier than the king.

I find the story from this point to the end of the fight scene only marginally interesting.  Gilgamesh has a few dreams portending Enkidu’s arrival that disturb him, and we see the unsurprising evidence that this ancient culture, like so many others, saw dreams as possible messages from the divine.  Beyond that, we see hints that male friendship in this culture might be homosexual – which won’t surprise anybody familiar with similar hints about Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, practically all the Athenians of classical Greece’s Golden Age (these normal homosexuals – who gave us democracy, philosophy, tragedy, comedy, and so much more – considered straight men queer), and the Bible’s King David and Jonathan.²

Then comes the big fight scene: Gilgamesh shows up to taste his latest bride, but Enkidu blocks his way. Their fight is predictably over-the-top, half saloon-brawl in a cliche cowboy movie, half the Incredible Hulk, and finally Gilgamesh pins Enkidu. Enkidu’s a good sport: he acknowledges that Gilgamesh is his superior, that he has the right to rule, and declares his loyalty. They kiss, hold hands, and walk back to the palace.

Another WTF Plot Twist: The Quest to Kill Nature’s “Evil” Guardian

I’m intimidated at this point, because the plot turn that happens here, just a third of the way into the story, connects to everything that happens from this point forward. It’s a huge and intricate tapestry of meaning from this point on, and I honestly don’t know if I’m equal to the task of holding all the threads together. I’ll do my best, though.

The plot turn I speak of is this: After an unspecified period of time during which Gilgamesh and Enkidu cement their friendship in the city, Gilgamesh gets a wild hair up his behind and announces to Enkidu that he has a new mission: He and Enkidu are going to travel to the Cedar Forest, a sacred place which men are forbidden to enter, in order to kill its “evil” guardian, the “monster” Humbaba, and chop down the tallest cedar tree in the forest.

Enkidu, remember, was originally a semi-animal in the wild, running with the gazelles and fighting off the lions that preyed upon them. He knew the Cedar Forest, knew it was sacred to the god of the wind, Enlil, and knew that Humbaba, being appointed by Enlil to protect the forest, was thus not a creature so easy to label as “evil.” So Enkidu begs the hot-blooded young king to drop this idea.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu argue about this, and the interesting thing about the argument is this: Enkidu frames his argument in terms of the sacred. The forest is holy, Humbaba is its divinely-appointed guardian, and so to kill Humbaba would be a sacrilege. Gilgamesh, though, frames the argument not in terms of the sacred, but in terms of the heroic.

Let me assure you that, as an English teacher, I’ve always inwardly groaned at how often other English teachers trot out the unit on “the Hero’s Journey.” It’s not a bad thing, this theory. Anybody who’s read books like Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces knows how fascinating the subject is. What makes me groan is its popularity. It’s the “Hotel California” or “Stairway to Heaven” (or, god help us, the “Free Bird”) of English units, trotted out so many times that even the wormiest of us booky types must get tired of it after the thousandth listening. The other thing that makes me groan is that, in the wrong hands, it becomes as formulaic as the dreaded, crappy five-paragraph essay. There’s something dangerous about prescribing to students that they take every story under the sun and shoehorn it into the Hero’s Journey formula. By reducing stories to that framework, we can ignore what’s unique or surprising that doesn’t fit so nicely into that shoe.

So trust me, I offer the following as one of the few times I want to talk about a story in these terms.

What’s interesting about Gilgamesh to me, more than anything, is really the mind of the poets who polished and revised this story from its early Sumerian version around the 23rd century BCE to its later Babylonian version in the 12th century BCE. Unlike other ancient books that were edited and revised by countless hands over many centuries – the Bible comes to mind more than any other book I know – Gilgamesh seems to have gained in coherence and consistency of vision over time, rather than becoming, like the Bible, more contradictory and less coherent.

And the vision all these Gilgamesh poets so sharply refined is one that, contrary to appearances, is deeply anti-heroic.

You don’t realize it in the current scene. Gilgamesh answers Enkidu’s religious argument with an argument based on heroism. His motives boil down to these two: first, he wants to achieve something no other mortal has achieved, and so – since “none of us can escape death,” he says – gain immortality for his name, in stories of his exploits; and second, he wants to rid the world of “evil.” He doesn’t respond to Enkidu’s arguments at all. Instead, he chides Enkidu for being cowardly, and finally wins Enkidu over by this shaming tactic.

So the “Hero” argument wins the day. We’ll see, by the end, that it was a fool’s argument as well.

Before closing this installment, a couple more observations:

The “Double That Balances” Motif, and Another “Genesis, Backwards” Trope

To step back from the canvas for a second to take a larger view, we should review the original “wtf plot twist” so far: the god Anu’s “solution” to Gilgamesh’s oppressive behavior as king by creating Enkidu as a “double that balances” him, and “so brings peace” to Uruk.  In the first stage of this pattern, we saw Gilgamesh as symbol of the city, and Enkidu as symbol of nature; Gilgamesh as civilization, Enkidu as animal; Gilgamesh as two-thirds divine, one-third human, Enkidu as two-thirds animal, one-third human.

Now, though, we’ve seen Enkidu seem to upset that balance by crossing over to Gilgamesh’s side. Sex with Shamhat erased his original animal innocence and replaced it with full humanity; his journey to the city took him out of the realm of nature; and though he resists Gilgamesh’s urge to kill Humbaba and violate the Cedar Forest, his ultimate submission again places him now on the same side as Gilgamesh, rather than opposing him as a “balancing double.”

But look what is about to happen:  Gilgamesh is about to lead Enkidu out of the city – out of his own territory – and into Nature, the original domain of Enkidu. So in a sense, we see Enkidu cross into civilization only to – wtf – see Gilgamesh now “balance” this by entering Enkidu’s territory.

Note, further, that something is imbalanced about all of this nonetheless: because while Enkidu, when in his original state of animal innocence, protected the other animals from predators and, more significantly, human trappers, Gilgamesh is entering nature with the opposite intention: to conquer it, to kill its guardian, and to exploit its natural resources - the “tallest cedar” – for the benefit of civilization.

That was wordy, I know. I’m getting tired. But I hope you can see how very, very deep this is.

As I said in the very first lecture, this is the story of possibly the first walled city in human history. That means it’s the story of the first civilization to wall itself off from nature, and radically exploit nature in order to develop its civilization.  Since pre-civilized humans worshiped nature for hundreds of thousands of years in the paleolithic and neolithic ages, it seems quite reasonable to suspect that the people of the first city, cutting down forests for buildings and mining the earth for gold, silver, and the lapis lazuli so loved by the Sumerians, must have felt a certain fear as they violated Nature for the good of their city life.

That’s what’s so radical, to me, about the coming episode in the Cedar Forest. It’s holy to the gods. Man should not violate it. Humbaba is only “evil” from the viewpoint of the city people who want lumber for more housing, temples, markets. From the viewpoint of most of human pre-history, Humbaba is closer to an angel of the lords.

And Gilgamesh wants to kill him.

To pre-empt the type of comment that I frequently get accusing me of one-sidedness, let me make this clear: Civilization is glorious in this poem, according to its poets. They sing its praises with unambiguous adoration. And they surely understood that civilization thus required the lumber, the minerals, the precious stones, and all the other natural resources sacred to the gods.

And that’s one of the beauties of this classic: we see the earth’s first advanced civilizations rightly celebrating its achievements while at the same time worrying about its effects on the natural order around it.

In that sense, Gilgamesh feels closer to me – as I read the daily accounts of global warming’s acceleration and the death of the seas through acidification and over-fishing – than any other ancient book. If we’re the Omega of civilization, due to our unrestrained exploitation of nature in the name of civilization, then Gilgamesh is the Alpha. And that’s deep to me – and another reason this classic doesn’t suck.

And it’s just the beginning.

As for the “Genesis, Backwards” thing? We’ve seen how Gilgamesh is the opposite of “Genesis” in terms of woman and sexuality (both good), and in terms of most of the “Seven Deadly Sins” (not deadly, not sins).  Now we see another radical difference from the Judeo-Christian in this older religion: In Gilgamesh, the gods created nature and forbade mankind to violate it. In “Genesis,” though?

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:26

While there are various ways to interpret this text – and ReligousTolerance.org gives a nicely balanced overview of those ways – it’s beyond dispute that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god comes nowhere close to the Sumerian and Babylonian position on nature in Gilgamesh. In this book, nature was not created for humanity at all; on the contrary, the gods defend Nature from us.

Wtf indeed. It’s an ancient wisdom never more relevant than now.

And if you haven’t noticed, let me spell it out: in my view, the Tanach (what Christians call “The Old Testament”) seems, more and more, to be the polar opposite of Gilgamesh.  Up to now, I’ve been playing with phrases like “Adam and Eve, Backwards,” and “The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards.” But really, since both of those things come later than the culture of Gilgamesh – and the Biblical Judeans were conquered by the Babylonians, deported by them, and had their temple destroyed by them – it seems far more accurate to call the Bible “Gilgamesh, Backwards.”

More on that later too. And oh yes: death.

~ ~ ~

The Gilgamesh Series So Far:
1. Gilgamesh: Dangerous Questions
2. The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job
3. Adam and Eve, Backwards
4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards
5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero – Backwards
6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man

1. This series based on the beautifully poetic 2004 Stephen Mitchell translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. Please note I that I speak here of “hints” of homosexuality. Google or Wikipedia will give you more info. [↩]

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic - in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. this post ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

~     ~     ~

Beyond the Giggles: More on the “Seven Days’ Erection”

As we saw last episode, seven days of sex with Shamhat, the temple prostitute of the goddess Ishtar, gave the innocent, wild, and Adam-like Enkidu² more than seven days of carnal pleasure: “knowing what a woman is” in this way also humanized him, making him lose his animal essence, making his “mind grow,” making him understand language, making him suddenly yearn for that most civilized thing – friendship.

It’s worth speculating that Enkidu’s epic sexual marathon with Shamhat might itself be another “gift of civilization,” since animals, so far as I know, don’t draw out the raw sexual act across days, don’t turn it into a sacred art form the way Ishtar’s hierodules³ do, and thus don’t experience this natural act with anywhere near the range of sensations, thoughts, and emotions that humans do. Without being literal about the sex scene’s “seven days” – any more than Bible readers should be literal about the forty days of Noah’s flood or of Jesus’ meditation in the desert, which are probably the ancient culture’s variation of our own “dozens” or “hundreds” or “millions,” when we just mean to say “many” in a hyperbolic way – the fact remains that the poets of Gilgamesh chose to emphasize that Enkidu’s sexual initiation was no animalistic quickie, but instead something lasting an unusually long time. Why? Because what humans can learn through erotic love, seen as sacred, cannot be learned in a hurry.

Some of you will think I’m crazy at this point, but I’ll counter by pointing out that Hinduism is another major religion that does not damn sex as a sin, does not freak out at this centerpiece of the natural order, and on the contrary, has among its sacred scriptures the Kama Sutra, which is essentially a Sanskrit sex manual aiming to instruct men and women in the arts of love-making – so that families, with happier husbands and happier wives, can be stronger.⁴

So after one last bit of love-making in their natural paradise, Shamhat gives Enkidu one of her robes – you have to love the “Adam as cross-dresser” bit – and they begin their trip to Uruk, the only big city in that mind-bogglingly distant ancient world, twice as far from us in time as the Bible.

The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards: Enkidu’s Moral Education Continues

They stop on the way at some shepherds’ huts, where Enkidu creates quite a stir. The shepherds all compare him to King Gilgamesh in strength and stature, and speculate who would win if the two supermen came to blows. ESPN, Sumerian-style. Whatever.

More interestingly, though, they provide Enkidu with his next taste – literally – of civilization: bread and beer. Shamhat, still the teacher and initiator, tells Shamhat:

“Go ahead, Enkidu. This is food,
we humans eat and drink this.”

Let’s stop here and think about the pattern so far of Enkidu’s “civilized education”: the first stage was sex, a physical pleasure; and now we come to bread – eating – another physical pleasure, and beer, which is complicated.

Because beer is not just the “drinking” equivalent to “eating,” the way water or milk would be.  Beer is an intoxicant.

How would most of today’s Christian preachers advise us to regard this food and drink? I can only point to the status of “gluttony” – the love of food – as one of the “Seven Deadly Sins,” and to the general disapproval of alcohol among most serious Christians today⁵ to support my argument that these two “civilized gifts” would be unpopular in Christian circles.

But in Gilgamesh, again, we see that religious viewpoint turned upside-down.  Enkidu eats the bread until he’s full, and more interestingly, likes the beer so much he drinks “seven” pitchers – after which:

his heart grew light,
his face glowed, and he sang out with joy.

No moralizing at all here. Beer is a good thing. (And please note, I think there are secular arguments against beer now, in the age of the automobile and drunk driving, that make alcohol one of the worst intoxicating substances to encourage – not because it’s sinful, but because so many irresponsible people don’t know how to drink, and don’t know better than to drive after doing so. In the pre-automobile age, though? It’s harder to argue that there’s something wrong with a beverage that makes our “heart grow light” and our voice “sing out with joy.”)

This pattern of “Good, Blessed Things” being the opposite of what we see in popular Christian morality today is something to remember. We’ll return to it later, when we ask the question, “Why does the Bible forbid and demonize the things that the Sumero-Babylonian culture praises as good?” Those of you who know Jewish history – and that Christianity is essentially a radical form of Judaism – probably have the same type of answer to that question that I do. But that’s later.

Back to the story. Enkidu undergoes a couple more transformations into civilized life while with the shepherds: he gets a hair-cut, takes his first bath, and oils his skin, thus becoming, according to the poet, “fully human,” and “handsome as a bridegroom.”

Do I have to point out that caring about your appearance could qualify as the sins known as “vanity” or “pride” in the Christian tradition? And that this is yet another detail in the overall pattern that the flesh is good?

Finally, the poet follows up this last detail with evidence that Enkidu, though now more of a city-type and hedonist, enjoying sex, food, beer, and a good hair-cut and skin treatment, is still morally innocent.  My evidence?  After enjoying all these things, Enkidu takes the night shift for the shepherds, watching and protecting their flocks as they sleep, and retaining that compassion for nature’s living things that was among his chief traits “before Shamhat.”

I’ll stop there for now, after this warning: those of you who think, based on this series so far, that Gilgamesh is a text that unambiguously argues that civilization is better than nature, that humanity without limits or divine punishment is “good,” and so forth?  You have another thing coming.  As we work our way through the changes that both Enkidu and Gilgamesh undergo throughout the rest of this story, I hope you’ll agree that this ancient story is far more subtle, more disturbing, and to repeat, more wise than we would expect.

Next episode: 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero – Backwards

The Gilgamesh Series So Far:
1. Gilgamesh: Dangerous Questions
2. The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job
3. Adam and Eve, Backwards
4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards
5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero – Backwards
6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man

1. All quotes taken from the beautifully poetic 2004 Stephen Mitchell translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. please don’t take the Adam comparison too literally; there are differences distinguishing Enkidu and Shamhat from Adam and Eve that we have to recognize also. [↩]
3. “Hierodule” is the word for a temple prostitute in the ancient world. [↩]
4. The Kama Sutra is more than that, and much of its caste-system dogma is objectionable, which is inevitable when seen with modern, post-scientific and post-democratic eyes; but the point remains: Hinduism, like the Sumero-Babylonian religion, embraces the sexual and erotic as social goods, when practiced with a sacred consciousness instead of a dark, taboo, guilt-ridden one. [↩]
5. Though I’m damned if I can find much scriptural precedent for the sinfulness of drinking alcohol in the Bible – can anybody help? [↩]