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.

9 Comments

• At January 7, 2010, hjarche wrote:

  A modern reader doesn’t read on his knees http://is.gd/5Ph7J via @cburell | yes, that’s the big shift!

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 7, 2010, Micah Sittig wrote:

  "Modern"?

• At January 7, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Would you take, "since the Renaissance" (okay, and before Theodosius, maybe)?

• At January 7, 2010, “On Two Ways of Reading” (Maxim) at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] comments Print This Post Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its [...]

• At January 8, 2010, Hellen wrote:

  How do I teach that? Or how do I know if what I am doing is facilitating "taking the authority back" for my students? Is this something that can only happen for an experienced, mature reader?

  More ques than answers.

  .-= Hellen´s last blog ..THIS I BELIEVE =-.

• At January 8, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Hellen,

  That it doesn't seem to be a habit of most (?) adults says to me that getting them while they're young and raising them to at least have an inkling that "mature" reading exists is a good idea. That's why I'm playing with aphorisms to point, bumper-sticker style, to what may be a mystery for them now, but through repetition may stick in their memory so they don't forget such a skill exists after they leave me.

  That most adults don't read at all beyond fluff (in America, anyway) tells me likewise that it's a good idea. Maybe they don't read because they were never introduced to liberated reading. Maybe that introduction will turn some people onto the pleasures of reading and thinking that seem endangered practices in American culture.

  On a simpler level, encouraging or requiring them to criticize the people, ideas, and events in their history or liberal arts classes -- to pass judgment on these things -- may be a good start. Then they can graduate to justifying their judgments with reason and evidence.

  I like the phrase "habits of mind." This is an unrelated stab at the general concept.

• At January 14, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  Sage words indeed. If the reverse of the Socratic method is provoking students' doubts, far as "truth", more precisely, facts, students can question you through that mechanical appendage permanently attached to the tip of their finger tips in the form of iPhones. I don't mind that they look for facts or doubt me but surf the phone for the facts while I'm lecturing is down right annoying ;-) Not legitimately lamentable as your point perhaps. I see your point; they have the facts but not the truths or thinking outside the box critical skills.

  I have to veered off a little from yoru path, although it`s more for EAP ``English`` English-class than adult EFL. I have always like the book ``How to Read a Book (Touchstone book) by Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles Lincoln Van Doren`.

  I still make notes on margins... How would you do that with ebook readers such as Kindle or ``iTablet``? I am ambivalent about the these new devices for future readers. (Obviously I`m a Kinesthetic learner :) ...The prospect of traveling with thousands, (maybe long 100s) of books in one little 4x10 plastic encasing is very seductive. Cheap too! The average novel is just below $10.

  Great post as usual. Looking forward to the next.

• At January 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Chuck,

  First, I feel your pain about the ereader bit. I haven't tried them out yet, but some are starting to integrate social highlighting and annotating, where readers can share and see each other's responses to passages on the "page," which is an interesting development. Somebody on Twitter shared this link with me: http://www.thecopia.com/

  In 10 years things should be interesting, but right now it's all primitive. I've read arguments that cost levels after purchasing a certain number of books because ebooks are cheaper, but again, I don't know.

  Time to plan the day's lesson. Thanks for stopping by.

  I love How to Read a Book and use it too.

• At January 16, 2010, tonnet wrote:

  Modern reading: “It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.” http://is.gd/6kyX0

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Related posts:

1. Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...
2. “On Two Ways of Reading” (Maxim) Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads...
3. Beach-Side Thoughts on History, to My Students So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

[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.

9 Comments

• At June 28, 2009, Kate wrote:

  Hi Clay - I'm glad to think about Gilgamesh again -

  This seems a question of who is civilized, if you excuse the term. Enkidu seems to have - like all good protagonists - the choice to change. But change to what?

  Enkidu can choose to live with nature or above nature. Gilgamesh seems to have made his choice. He feels that he is above nature or that nature is there to serve him.

  (Christianity translates this in Genesis 1:26 "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." [king james] It's ordained. But I like Enkidu's choice better.

  Enkidu can choose to not play god. Who do we wish to be?

  On another topic - Lolita. I sat in a meeting the other day with three left-brained white male English teachers - and one admitted that the reason he wouldn't dream of teaching the book was his fear of the parent body. So sad. I just found it creepy as a 17 year old, so my prejudice is just as bad. I return to teach 12 year olds, so Nabokov is not on the syllabus.

  .-= Kate´s last blog ..Four types of tears =-.

• At June 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  I'll hold off on Enkidu's choice since it's the subject of the next installment, but as for the English teachers, I can't fault them for fearing for their livelihoods (and I know you're not, either). It's just another factor of schooliness that keeps us from hitting teens educationally where they probably already live.

  And I certainly wouldn't expect 12 year olds to handle it - except for the occasional ilk of Dolores....

• At July 23, 2009, Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets | Beyond School wrote:

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

• At July 23, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 1: On Gilgamesh | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Later posts in the "Unsucky Gilgamesh" series: 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 ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets 9. The Original "Original Sin"] [...]

• At August 30, 2009, Jonathan Chambers wrote:

  Clay, I just received my first "Gilgamesh SPAM"... take it as a compliment, or as a dementor/scary monster, or possibly as yet another actor in the polytheistic mythological tradition?

  Jungian sensibilities (and vast series of Joseph Campbell lectures) aside, I hope you're enjoying Singapore, and that they "get you".

  .-= Jonathan Chambers´s last blog ..It’s a goal! =-.

• At September 6, 2009, Tamara wrote:

  I am 34 yrs old and in the second year ( nearly third)of college trying to get my teaching degree.

  My English class is doing essays on Gilgamesh.

  I am having trouble with some of the answers required in all the symbolism within the epic. Can you help me to understand the symbolism between woman, evil and the relationship of civilization to nature?

  If you can,..it would help tutor me in something that has long since been studied. I hate to fail and love to learn and am dis-satisfied with myself that something I read nearly 20 years ago has so escaped me. I do not wish to sound incoherent or just plain dumb.

  Sincere thanks,

  Tamara

• At September 6, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Tamara, I'm so sorry to answer this way, but beyond what I've written in the nine posts so far, I don't have time to discuss G right now. I'm in the middle of week 3 of my first year teaching in a new school in a new country, and barely have time to breathe.

  I will say that symbols are something that are inferred by the reader anyway, so there are no clear-cut right/wrong answers to the types of questions you asked, as much as there are well-argued and -supported versus weakly-argued and -supported answers.

  Have you talked to your prof or other students in your class? Prayed to Google for insights? Read the book again, and its preface/intro? (Mitchell's intro is longer than his translation. It may help.)

  Good luck,

  Clay

• At September 8, 2009, Elizabeth Barrette wrote:

  This is a wonderful analysis of Gilgamesh, particularly the original sin being Enkidu's abandonment of Nature. Indeed, compare the land then and now: the Fertile Crescent is pretty much all desert today, with no forests left to hold the water table in place.

• At October 2, 2009, Joel wrote:

  Hi Clay

  Discovered this site today looking for Gilgamesh (link on Wikipedia) and enjoyed immensely your observations on the story. I've been reading it but unlike your dream student did not initially appreciate the depths of symbolism contained within. This has notched-up my already significant interest in the ancient world.

  I guess I'm commenting in hope that the series continues. Your site reminds me of the brilliant philosophy blog by Todd Park Mohr, which seemed to collapse pretty much as soon as I'd discovered it. Just hoping this one doesn't go the same way. I know you're busy but just thought I'd express my interest.

  I'll put the ancient wisdon on hold in the meantime and explore the other topics you've posted.

  I also wondered if you'd considered an audio podcast? Then I could listen in the car which would be sweet.

Related posts:

1. Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...
2. Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

[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.

14 Comments

• At March 18, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 1: On Gilgamesh | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Later posts in the "Unsucky Gilgamesh" series: 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 ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets] [...]

• At March 18, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 3: Adam and Eve in Bizarro-World | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: this post~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 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] [...]

• At March 18, 2009, Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero - Backwards: Unsucky English, Lecture 5 (Gilgamesh, cont’d) | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [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 [...]

• At March 18, 2009, Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] 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 [...]

• At March 19, 2009, Irena wrote:

  I stumbled upon your website in an attempt to develop an argument relating this famous "Deluge" to the seven deadly sins. Now, I speculated that my very thesis in itself has been beat-to-death by college students (or the "dreamy" high school student from your early post) for centuries, but I'm not a quitter, so I googled anyway. I found this site close to the top on the relevance scale of my search and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT! Your style, approach, innovativeness and ideas held me captivated! Reading this has helped me take a lighter look at my topic, too - something my Western Civ professor probably won't appreciate nearly as much as my own sleep-deprived attention span, but his field is medieval study anyway...

  Thank you! I'll be back for more.

  Irena Milasinovic

  Colorado Springs, CO

• At March 19, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for that, Irena. Encouragement like that keeps me going.

  And it is fascinating, isn't it, to speculate about the influences of this culture on the Biblical ones?

• At March 20, 2009, Kate Tabor wrote:

  I've been rolling this post around in my head for a couple of days, and it all bumps up against reading and seeing Watchmen with my Science Fiction class and thinking about books that have boring stretches.

  What you call "the childish magical thinking" of Gilgamesh is also evident in the subtext of Moore/Gibbons graphic novel. The characters in the novel want the 'signs' to mean the things they want them to mean. Only a so-called crazy person can see reality. In the same way, some of us want to believe that going shopping will save the economy from itself or that it is possible to get 25% return on a legal investment. That's "childish magical thinking" in capital letters.

  Meanwhile, there's the boring book problem. I always like to have one novel in class that stretches the reader's ability to stay focused. It gives us such a fine opportunity to talk about reading strategies (like the excellent one that you suggest in your post). Books that require the reader to think and the class to work together to understand are like a fine meal with some unfamiliar dishes or like Michael Doyle's oysters. Worth the trouble, and delicious.

  Kate Tabors last blog post..Meme Mash Up: 7 things and Music

• At June 26, 2009, Gilgamesh and the Original Original Sin: Unsucky English Lecture 9 | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] 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 [...]

• At June 26, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Lecture 9 is up: Gilgamesh and the Original "Original Sin".

• At June 30, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 6: Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [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 [...]

• At June 30, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 4: The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards (Gilgamesh, Book Two) | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [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 [...]

• At June 30, 2009, The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: this post ~ 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 ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets] [...]

• At July 23, 2009, Emasaurus wrote:

  This site is brilliant. I use stumbleupon most days but only very rarely do I get a gem like this.

  I'm in Uni and I often have to read the most dry, boring, convoluted, protentious crap about film and literature. There is no reason why everyone can't write as you do...clearly, humourously and intelligently.

  These essays/lectures are fascinating, I'm hooked. Well done and please keep going :)

• At July 23, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Emasaurus, it's so nice of you to take the time to let me know. Your second and third -- oops, third and fourth, I mean -- sentences could very well serve as a blurb for the book version of this series. You nail my philosophy and my purpose for these lectures in them.

  I'm in the middle of a relocation from Seoul to Singapore, so as soon as I'm settled in, I can't wait to get back to this project. Please share it with other students, too?

  Good luck with school :)

Related posts:

1. Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...
2. Gilgamesh and the Original “Original Sin”: Unsucky English Lecture 9 (part one) [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

[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

24 Comments

• At March 16, 2009, Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero - Backwards: Unsucky English, Lecture 5 (Gilgamesh, cont’d) | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [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]1 [...]

• At March 16, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 4: The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards (Gilgamesh, Book Two) | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [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]1 [...]

• At March 16, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 3: Adam and Eve in Bizarro-World | Beyond School wrote:

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

• At March 16, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 1: On Gilgamesh | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Later posts in the "Unsucky Gilgamesh" series: 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 ~ 7. A Goddess Prays] [...]

• At March 16, 2009, The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: this post ~ 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 ~ 7. A Goddess Prays] [...]

• At March 16, 2009, Lynne wrote:

  I heard about Gilgamesh on your website. The next week, I bought and read the book. I must say, it is a very interesting read. Since then I've been reading your Unsucky English Lectures. The author does a good job at explanations, but your lectures have provide invaluable insight to further understanding the story. I look forward to your next posts.

• At March 17, 2009, Kate Tabor wrote:

  Wisdom ( for him or for us) comes through what Gilgamesh experiences. I was reminded of another Mitchell translation - of the Bhagavad Gita - and Arjuna's question about evil actions, even those actions that seem to go against our nature.

  "Arjuna said:

  What is that drives a man/to an evil action, Krishna.

  even against his will,/as if some force made him do it?

  The Blessed Lord said:

  That force is desire, it is anger,/arising from the guna called rajas;

  deadly and all-devouring,/that is the enemy here.

  As a fire is obscured by smoke,/as a mirror is covered by dust,

  as a fetus is wrapped in the membrane,/so wisdom is obscured by desire.

  Wisdom is destroyed, Arjuna,/by the constant enemy of the wise,

  which, flaring up as desire, /blazes with insatiable flames.

  Desire dwells in the senses, /the mind and the understanding;

  in all these it obscures wisdom /and perplexes the embodied Self.

  [3.36-40]

  Ninsun's prayer of thanks (the balance of desire) reflects her wisdom. We could/should all learn from her.

  Kate Tabors last blog post..Bone tired

• At March 17, 2009, Kester wrote:

  Re: "Babylon Bashing," there's quite a bit of Assyria bashing as well (although, I daresay, they kind of deserved it.) But I think it's understandable given the captivity they experienced. They were relatively glowing about the Persians, though, especially Cyrus.

  Re: the prayer itself, it is beautiful, as are many of the prayers from that period. Sometimes I wonder how cuneiform (or any pictographic writing) influenced literature, especially poetic structure. Like, did they "rhyme" symbols instead of syllables? I LOVE the sign "Dingir." And the sign "ama-gi" (freedom). It looks like the dingir sign appears in the middle of ama-gi. I wonder ...

  Re: Shamash/Sun, I was surprised to learn the etymological connections between the English word "day" and the PIE word for "sun" (also the name of their sun god) which eventually gave rise to "theos," "Zeus," "deus," and "dia" as well as the Romantic words for "day" and "god" such as "dia" and "dios". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyeus)

  Personal story, once upon a time, my family tried to quit using the name "Easter" and substitute it with "Resurrection Sunday" instead so as not to invoke the goddess Ishtar. What I find funny is that, if we were to really follow that line of thought, we'd have to rename all the days of the week (most of which honor Norse gods), the months of the year (Roman gods) and even our word "day." Also, it's funny that Ishtar has nothing to do with Easter, but rather Eostre.

  (PS. I've also heard that "day" is related to another PIE word meaning "to burn" and not to that sky god at all.)

  Kesters last blog post..You might be a Redneck Jedi if...

• At March 17, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Kester, interesting as usual. I'm surprised you didn't catch the fairly sloppy treatment of "worshipping on the heights" that I updated in the post.

  Tell me more about your background in cuneiform and proto-Indo-European. Interesting. My connection between Shamash and Arabic "sun" is pure speculation. I should have framed it as a question instead of an assertion.

  I had trouble with this one. It's been tough getting back into the swing - especially when the Humbaba and Bull of Heaven scenes are among my least favorite....

• At March 17, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Lynne, thanks for the encouragement. I agree that Mitchell's intro and commentary are very well-done. I try not to read them as I go through this, because there's so much else to observe.

  Feel free to jump in with your own observations, by the way :)

• At March 17, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Oh, and re: Babylon-bashing, I agree they had their obvious axe to grind about their conquerors. What I wanted to underline was the different picture we're privy to since the re-discovery of the texts in the 19th c.

  And FWIW, it's fun to discover you're an etymology freak too. My Arabic dictionary (Hans Wehr version at $250 a pop) is a treasure that way. It's such a pure, unalloyed language. The three-letter radicals give birth to so many derivations that connect concepts un-related in English. Like SHa-Ri-Ban for "mustaches," and SHa-Ra-Ba for "to drink." Picture the bedouin context in the Arabian desert and you'll see the logic in that connection. Those droplets in the mustache were surely precious between oases...

• At March 17, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Kate, there's so much Buddhism in that quote, huh?

  The nice thing about being non-religious is how lovely it makes religious studies ;-)

  I've always admired the Unitarians for being able to enjoy all texts.

• At March 17, 2009, Lynne wrote:

  Well, I can try and make some intelligible observations and comments. (I'm an engineer, not an literary critic.)

  I never completely understood why Gilgamesh and Enkidu felt compelled to slay Humbaba in the first place. Sure maybe it can be, on some level, compared to people going on a safari to slay rhinos or other potentially dangerous animals to gain pride, honor, remembrance, you name it. Still, how honorable of a fight is it when its 3:1, favoring your side, and you were unprovoked? Not to mention that your opponent was pinned by four winds and asks for mercy, but you decide to decapitate him anyways! They're the aggressors in this case, not the heroes they claim to be.

• At March 17, 2009, Kate Tabor wrote:

  That's also the beauty of being a literature teacher. We get to enjoy all texts as well!

  Kate Tabors last blog post..If I had a theme song

• At March 18, 2009, cburell wrote:

  Number 8 is up: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets

• At March 18, 2009, Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays]1 Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 [...]

• At March 18, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 6: Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] 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 [...]

• At March 19, 2009, Kester wrote:

  Clay,

  Thanks. Regarding "worshiping on the heights," I actually don't disagree. Many of my favorite OT figures and Christians weren't necessarily tied to temple worship. David danced naked before the ark. many of the monastic, at least the eremetic, saints lived in the middle of nowhere out in nature. St. Francis was effulgent about his pan-en-theism. And the so-called "Celtic Christians" gained a reputation for worshiping in nature. One of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, says in one poem: "The earth is charged with the grandeur of God ...".

  That said, in almost all religions it seems that the official worship happened inside and was well-regulated. The top level of the ziggurat was only accessible by the priests and that was where the god lived. It seems that "worship on the heights" has always, and in all places, been the place that the layman spoke to God/the gods.

  I am an armchair philologist. I love the history of words and, of all the far-distant roots, the PIE culture and language is the most interesting to me. As for cuneiform, I like to immerse my students in the culture we're studying as long as we're studying it. So, we make our own pictographic writing system and, eventually, turn it into an alphabetic one. While learning about Mesopotamia, they (try to) memorize the prologue to the Enuma Elish in ancient Sumerian (assuming my pronunciation is correct) and write letters to each other in cuneiform. Stuff like that. Anyway, I learn some stuff while researching for lessons.

  What I find endlessly interesting is the juxtaposition of pictographic and phonetic writing systems. I find the pictographic ones more interesting, although the phonetic ones seem to promote greater democracy. And how would one translate pictographs when, say, the cuneiform sign for "dingir" can be star, sun, heaven, god, or Anu? It does kind of support your theory that man becomes the ultimate arbiter of the meaning when translation is so contextual. Perhaps that is why the Hebrews preferred phonetic systems, so that the word mean the word and only the word (not that they didn't end up putting their own spin on things as well.)

  I think about stupid stuff, too. Like, the phonograph is not a great technological advancement. Really, it would have been easily made using the technology of the Sumerians. What if, instead of a writing system, they had recorded everything? How would that have changed the culture?

  Finally, regarding Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, although those aren't my favorite parts either, I expect they were the favorite parts of the Mesopotamians. And they're ALWAYS the parts they include in juvenile literature or social studies books.

• At April 9, 2009, Debbie wrote:

  Hi Kester,

  Why do you say that phonetic writing systems promote greater democracy? Wouldn't they be less accessible?

• At April 9, 2009, Kester wrote:

  Hi, Debbie.

  It took over a decade to become a scribe in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It's still incredibly difficult (or so I've heard) to learn Chinese writing (which still has thousands of characters). Whereas it only took me a week to learn and recognize the shapes and sounds of the Spanish, Runic and Greek alphabetic writing systems. (Of course, learning all their vocabulary is a different matter.) And anyone can learn another phonetic writing system, and even a workable vocabulary, in about a year of concerted effort.

  Thus, the writing of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians was only available to a select few, while the writing of the Jews and Greek was available to most everyone. Pictures can be subjective if you haven't memorized them all, but an alpha just says "ah" and that's it.

  For another example, my students are adept at writing their notes in class in such a way that I can't decipher them using a complicated system of pictographs, symbols and some phonetic writing that would have made the Egyptians weep with frustration and Chinese green with envy. The specific purpose of writing in such a way is to keep me out of the loop.

  Kesters last blog post..Excerpts from "Rebellion" from "The Brother's Karamazov" by Dostoevsky

• At June 26, 2009, Gilgamesh and the Original Original Sin: Unsucky English Lecture 9 | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] 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 [...]

• At June 26, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Lecture 9 is up: Gilgamesh and the Original "Original Sin".

• At February 12, 2010, Steve wrote:

  Wonderful stuff! I've been going through this entire series in a single sitting and am truly awed by the thought and revelations you have had regarding this great work.

  Thought you'd be interested to know (if you even come this far back, and see these old comments) that the word for 'sun,' in Hebrew, is an even closer 'shemesh.' Those are soft e's, as in bed. Goes to show...

• At February 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Steve, for mini-lessons in Hebrew linguistics like you just gave, I'd go back to posts from the Paleolithic.

  Goes to show indeed. Thanks for the addition and the kind words.

Related posts:

1. Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...
2. Gilgamesh and the Original “Original Sin”: Unsucky English Lecture 9 (part one) [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

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.

32 Comments

• At February 17, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 1: On Gilgamesh | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] Next: 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 [...]

• At February 17, 2009, The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: this post ~ 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.] [...]

• At February 17, 2009, Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero - Backwards: Unsucky English, Lecture 5 (Gilgamesh, cont’d) | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] 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 [...]

• At February 17, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 3: Adam and Eve in Bizarro-World | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: this post~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man] [...]

• At February 17, 2009, Bob Brussack wrote:

  "People are more comfortable disputing an Einstein or a Darwin than they are their humble neighborhood preacher." -- I've been struck by this more than once attending a friend's funeral and hearing that the only true gate to eternity is the door of the preacher's church.

  By the way, I hadn't known about Apture before visiting your site. Cool app. Very cool.

• At February 17, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  It's a striking thing, isn't it Bob? Loved the sauce in your added twist.

  And Apture is indeed a nifty tool.

• At February 18, 2009, Kate Tabor wrote:

  Nice to see Gilgamesh back, Clay. A couple of things occurred to me as I read your post.

  The first after reading this: "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."

  How can we get back there? I've been having a case of the churchy heebeejeebees lately as the church I am vacationing from (as a Roman Catholic married to a Jew) has been doing its best to further alienate me (ecumenical conversation pointless; Holocaust denying priests reinstated, blah blah, blah). One of my facebook 'friends' from high school posted this status update: "P-B- is I love going to church. Seriously, it is one of the awesome things in life."

  And then there was this comment on her status: "A-B-E- I feel the same way, and can you imagine how much people like us will LOVE heaven?!"

  I can't even begin to describe how uncomfortable/frightened/nauseous that makes me -

  Point 2: You remind us that Gilgamesh was advised to be prudent not passionate; humble instead of proud. And no one believes that he can do what he says he is going to. He chooses "bravery over cowardice, fame over oblivion, the chance of greatness over mediocrity...free human will over traditional religious fear." Well, I teach American Literature and in this I see the characters of Hester Prynne, Sethe, Dick Hunter (from Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger) Jay Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Huck Finn, Tom Joad, as well as Henry David Thoreau! Gilgamesh seems to be the the ur-hero of all protagonists.

• At February 18, 2009, Charlie A. Roy wrote:

  @ Clay

  The question of the problem of evil is perhaps one of the most intriguing out there. For me the Christian answer lead to my faith taking on an adult form. The answers to the problem are either: atheism, polytheism, idealism, or perhaps biblical theism. Atheism denies God so no problem, polytheism attributes good to the good gods and evil to the bad gods, and idealism pretends evil doesn't exist. The Christian answer is much more complex but perhaps one of the most overlooked passage in the New Testament was Luke 13 and Jesus' comment on the tragedy of the tower of Siloman. Perhaps a conversation for another time.

  @ Kate

  I would agree the branch of ecumenism seems to be bending in a disturbing way as of late.

  Charlie A. Roys last blog post..Watching Web 2.0 Deepen Learning

• At February 18, 2009, Kester wrote:

  This is a general response to the entire series so far. You have several premises which I would like to address. These will be very brief, although I may flesh them out later in my own blog.

  1. Civilization is good.

  I don't see how this is supported by the text. On the one hand, one could argue that Gilgamesh showing off his walls to the boatman supports it, but it seems that the wooing of Enkidu, making him "fit" for civilization, also robs him of his power and innocence. That is, to be civilized is to be separate from and feared by nature.

  2. Sex is good.

  Again, I don't see how the text supports this. First, Shamat uses sex, basically, to rob Enkidy of vitality and power (taking his breath/life with her kisses). Second, Enkidu initially curses her for corrupting him as he is dying. Third, even when he is blessing her, one of his blessings is that she will steal the husband of the wife who has seven children. Even if they thought it was good then for prostitutes, even temple prostitutes, to do this, I hope we would disagree!

  3. How the Bible is A) derivative and B) substandard

  I absolutely agree that the Bible is obviously influenced by the cultures in which the Hebrews sojourned. "Job" is a monotheistic retelling of "The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer." "Ecclesiastes" reads like a longer version of "The Babylonian Theodicy." And the 10 Commandments are a shortened version of the 42 Laws of Ma'at. I would argue that shows their unfolding understanding of their God.

  Further, I would argue that you do the Bible a disservice. Some random observations (attempting to limit my observations to the Old Testament):

  - The Bible is more feminist. In Gilgamesh, Enkmidu never considers Shamat as a potential friend. It must be a male. In the Bible, Adam's mate is a woman.

  - In the contest between Dumuzi (Tammuz) and Enkmidu (which reflects Cain and Abel), Ishtar chooses Dumuzi (the shepherd) over Enkmidu (the farmer) like God chooses Abel (the shepherd) over Cain (the farmer). Although Ishtar did prefer Enkmidu initially. But, later in the Bible, Cain kills Abel and then makes the first city. I think that's important. The first city, with walls and pollution and war and such was made by the first murderer.

  - This isn't from Gilgamesh, but why did the Mesopotamian pantheon make humans? Why, as their slaves! To work for them, make food for them, and give them an easier life. Why did the God of the Bible make humans? To put them in paradise, to love them, to make them happy.

  - In both Gilgamesh and the Bible, the woman gives "the fruit" to the man. But it is significant that, in the Bible, it is only when the woman AND the man have eaten that their "eyes are opened." In Gilgamesh, the woman is, basically, the snake ... the tempter (or "ress").

  I could go on, but moving on to your claims in this post:

  4. Polytheism isn't dogmatic

  First, polytheistic priests are every bit as dogmatic as monotheistic ones. Hammurabi didn't hem or haw in his Code (given by Shamash). Anu didn't give a waiver. So don't blame God if monotheists are assholes. Second, so what if they argue about what is right and wrong? They're petty and they play games with humans, from Gilgamesh to the Iliad to ... ummmm ... some other famous polytheistic text, the gods are worse than my students. Third, as Socrates would say, if there are gods, and the gods are not in agreement, then there must be a higher Good to which they aspire. It is that Good that I, and other monotheists, worship and hope to emulate. It is in our attempt to force others to follow our interpretation that we fail, not in our attempt to follow Truth.

  5. Gilgamesh is a humanist.

  He might be. He certainly defies the gods and his own mortality. But, like Odysseus, he is dashed against the immovable rocks of gods and fate. If anything, the poem says, "Try as you might, you will fail. Maybe, if you're lucky, and especially pathetic, you'll be remembered." Even Odysseus became a priest of Poseidon in the end.

  So, there you go. I think you are confusing God with His followers. We're raging assholes. Please don't blame Him for us. And, for all its failings, I must laud the Old Testament for this. It takes the hopelessness of Mesopotamian mythology and philosophy and the aristocracy of Egyptian religion and changes it into something much more humanist, hopeful and plebeian.

  All that said, I love Gilgamesh and many, many thanks for pointing me to the Mitchell translation. Wow! Excellent read (which most Gilgamesh renderings are not).

• At February 18, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Kester, real quick - excellent challenges and extensions. I love it. If only authoritative books made space for readers challenges in the same way.

  I'll respond more soon. No time right now. Just wanted to say thanks for taking the time, and again. More soon.

• At February 18, 2009, Kester wrote:

  Thanks for responding and I look forward to hearing more. Two quick notes. Pardon my "Enkidy" typos and "The Babylonian Theodicy" is supposed to be "Dialogue of Pessimism."

  Kesters last blog post..κύκλος κλαν

• At February 18, 2009, Kester wrote:

  Don't forget Discordianism. I think there might be a future for something called "Ismism" which would be, I suppose, belief in belief?

  Kesters last blog post..κύκλος κλαν

• At February 18, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Charlie, I'd love to hear your take on how the Tower analogy applies to theodicy. My ears for Luke 13, which I just re-read, must not be long enough. It didn't speak to me. Why is "repenting or perishing" a key to the existence of evil? (And that's assuming we agree that this seems to be the thrust of both the Galileans' executions and the Siloman tower analogies.)

• At February 19, 2009, Speroni wrote:

  @Charlie

  Morality (ideas of right and wrong or good and evil) really have little to do with religion, even though religion. If we were to take the bible at face value, we would still have slaves and women would be 3rd class citizens, the fact is morality continues to grow, even though God's word stagnates. I like this explaination of morality better.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development

  Also, food for thought:

  http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html

  @Kester

  Don't forget Pastafarianism:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

  @Gilgamesh

  Man you have a chip on your shoulder. Already king of the first and greatest city and you have to go around killing innocent evil monsters to prove a point. Hubris, as it has been mentioned, shall be your downfall.

  Speronis last blog post..We are indeed

• At February 20, 2009, diane wrote:

  Clay,

  I didn't analyze or deeply ponder this little essay, just followed the shiny words in delight. Humanism - yes! How wonderfully attainable and...human.

  dianes last blog post..Five Changes to Education--A new Meme

• At February 22, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Speroni, that "Stages of Moral Development" link is a keeper. Thanks for dropping it.

  (Sorry your comment was stuck in the spam queue for so long. Chalk it up to an insane backlog.)

• At February 22, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Kester, okay, as promised (and hurried!):

  1. I think I've said on several occasion that civilization is given a very ambiguous treatment in my view. I'm tracing it, and won't wrap it up until I wrap the series up.

  2. I've already talked about sex being complex in this work too. I'm not going to get ahead of the series by addressing parts of the text I haven't reached yet, so stay tuned. But I hope you'll meet me at least on the contrast of sex and gender seen in Gilgamesh/Shamhat in comparison with Genesis/Eve, and Sumero-Babylonian culture v. ancient Hebrew?

  3. We agree the Bible is derivative of the more ancient culture of Mesopotamia. "Substandard" is a value judgment, and can't be applied in a blanket manner. I'll continue trying to qualify any comparisons that way as I go. But since you subscribe to the Biblical belief system, it seems, and I don't in many ways, we're bound to disagree about a lot.

  4. I was making a simple observation: in a polytheistic system in which god A says "x is good," and god B says "x is bad," it seems individuals within that context have little choice but to reflect and decide which god they believe is right. In a monotheistic system in which there is nothing but single dictates by a single god, I argue there is less room for such moral deliberation.

  I don't think we should attribute Platonic idealism to Socrates. That came in Plato's later dialogues, long after Socrates' death and Plato's departure into abstractions we have no evidence Socrates entertained. Socrates is a mouthpiece in the later dialogues for Plato's unfolding philosophical journey. (I don't buy Plato, either, fwiw. Neither did Aristotle.)

  5. I'm not finished with my take on the lessons of the epic re: Gilgamesh's "humanist revolt." It's not so simple, I agree, and will argue as I go.

  Love your humble and salty close. I don't find it so easy to exculpate religious texts from their consequences in human society, though.

  I do agree that the Old Testament did advance Middle Eastern social ethics in several admirable ways - but you have to grant that those advances were ultimately racist and authoritarian, insofar as they only applied to "the Chosen," and still demanded unquestioning obedience from those Chosen.

  Peace out for now.

• At February 22, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks Diane. I can't wait for life to slow down so I can speed up.

• At February 23, 2009, Kester wrote:

  Speroni,

  I considered Pastafarianism, but I'm prone to nightmares. Speaking of mares, if I were to stray from my current beliefs, I think I'd become a worshiper of the Invisible Pink Unicorn. (http://www.invisiblepinkunicorn.com/ipu/home.html) In addition to being more friendly, it's also invisible (so as not to cause aforesaid nightmares).

  Regarding morality and the relationship to religion, let me twist that a bit. For some theists, our religion is not so much adherence to a religion, but the end of a search for Truth. Think less Inquisition and more Socrates. In that sense, religion has quite a bit to do with morality.

  [Spoiler redacted - Clay] (Sorry, Kester!)

  I thank you for the links as well. Food for thought.

  Kesters last blog post..κύκλος κλαν

• At February 24, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Speroni, @Kester,

  Do you guys mind if I edit out the parts of your comments that play "spoiler" for those who haven't read the full story?

  A weird question, I know :P

• At February 24, 2009, Speroni wrote:

  Sorry about that, you can rescind the last comment.

  Speronis last blog post..We are indeed

• At February 24, 2009, Kester wrote:

  Clay, feel free to delete this if it is a spoiler (you might be going to flesh out this idea later, even though it's already happened in the text you've covered). But you had hinted at Enkidu as Gilgamesh's lover. I had wondered about that myself, because it says they embraced "as a husband embraces a wife". I wonder what exactly that means. Does it mean physical or emotional intimacy?

  Also, Clay, I will respond to your comments soon. Need to ponder them some more.

  Kesters last blog post..κύκλος κλαν

• At February 24, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Kester,

  The possible homosexuality is as ambiguous to me as it is to you, I think. I normally respond to the question with a shrug anyway, because it seems pretty clear that sexual norms change dramatically in space and time. Were Achilles and Patroclus lovers in the Iliad? Jonathan and David in the Old Testament? I don't know.

  I've never had much interest in the question until now, though, so thanks for bringing it up.

  Because if not only non-marital/non-monogamous heterosexual activity, but also homosexual, are suggested as normative in this text, it supplies us with another interesting possible causative argument for the pretty harsh anti-homosexuality in so much of the Jewish Law in the Torah.

  If Eve is an example of Hebrew ressentiment of the Goddess-culture surrounding it - and especially that of Judea's Babylonian conquerors - then maybe the "abomination" of homosexuality is similarly what Joseph Campbell calls a "mythic inversion" of an enemy's culture.

  It's possible. Not sure how plausible. Thoughts?

• At February 25, 2009, Kester wrote:

  Hey, Clay.

  Given Greek culture, I'd be willing to bet that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers. Women seemed, at best, vessels for procreation to them. Given Jewish culture, I'd say no for Jonathan and David, despite David's assertion that Jonathan's love was "better than the love of a woman." But I wouldn't be surprised, either. Perhaps the myriad commands regarding it (although there aren't quite as many as I once thought) are evidence that it was rather common.

  But I don't know enough about Mesopotamian culture in that regard to hazard a guess. It seems that, for the Greeks, the homosexuality went hand in hand with a denigration of women. Only a male could be an equal, thus, only a male could be a true lover. There seems to be a similar denigration of women in Mesopotamia if the Cuneiform Codes and even "Epic of Gilgamesh" can be taken as evidence. I note that especially when Enkidu seeks a "true friend" which he apparently can't find in Shamat. And I definitely sense an attitude of "if it feels good, do it" (or him).

  I'm never sure what to make of homosexuality in the Bible. It's only mentioned once, and in a glancing way, in the NT. In the OT, it's mentioned several times, but in the same lists as "disobedient to parents", touching dead people and such. Unclean or disruptive to the community, not evil. Even Sodom and Gomorrah doesn't seem to be about homosexuality as Ezekiel 16 lists their sins as the following: pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Sounds more like the U.S. than anything.

  If I were to guess, it seems like the OT connects marriage with procreation. Don't "spill your seed" or get it on with a dude 'cause it won't make babies. But that's a guess. Most of the things labeled as "serious" sins make sense to me. That one ... I just don't get it.

  Also, if it were "mythic inversion," I would think it would be more associated with Egypt than Babylon. Abraham had come from Ur, but Israel hadn't been established in Canaan yet when the majority of the Torah was written.

  Regardless, I think it entirely plausible that Gilgamesh and Enkidu found physical pleasure with one another. The Celts did it before battles. The Bushido has codes regulating homosexual relationships. Now that I think of it, I'd kind of be surprised if they didn't. But it's hard to base it on hard evidence because I just don't know what "embraced like a husband embraces a wife" might have meant 5,000 years ago.

  More on Eve in another response.

  Kesters last blog post..κύκλος κλαν

• At February 25, 2009, Kester wrote:

  OK, Clay, here we goooooo ....

  1 & 5. Will reserve judgment on civilization and "Gilgamesh as humanist" for now ... but would like to throw in that, if my Cain/Abel theory holds, whatever might have been meant by "fill the earth and subdue it" is NOT what we have done.

  (Skipping 2 for a moment)

  3. We probably will disagree about the Bible, although I definitely don't idolize it as many Christians do, nor do I think God dictated it word for word. The "Brick Testament" does a fine job of pointing out some of the idiocy in the pages. (http://www.thebricktestament.com/) That said, I think almost all religious works are derivative, especially polytheistic ones. Also, I would say that, because the Hebrews were OF the ancient culture of Mesopotamia, it is their culture as well. It's not derivative if it partially belonged to you in the first place.

  4. I might agree that Polytheism is kind of an ancient version of post-modernism, except the texts don't back it up. When one didn't properly obey a given god, that god would show you who is boss 'till you did and you were sunk unless some other god came to your aid. Thus, it was less about human decision-making and more about which god was the most powerful.

  I agree about Platonic Idealism and Socrates. However, it is generally agreed that, of all Plato's works, the "Apology" (in which Socrates made the argument that there must be a higher good than the gods) is a fairly accurate representation of Socrates' thought moreso than Plato's.

  (On a related note, I wrote a children's book meant to be the first in a series to introduce the ideas and personages of philosophy to kids so as to better teach it in middle and high school. I'd love to get your response to it.)

  But I will agree on this. Whether polytheist or monotheist, it seems that the human ultimately becomes arbiter of what s/he believes to be true. In a post-Hume world where even basic cause-and-effect relationships can be questioned, it must be so. And I'm willing to concede that polytheistic gods, while more petty about taking offense, seem to give more leeway about right and wrong.

  2. Regarding sex and gender in Mesopotamian vs. Hebrew culture, I can agree there is a difference, but I think that Hebrew wins out. I'll limit my answers to the parts of the text you've already covered:

  - Eve vs. Shamat: Eve succumbs to the tempter and tempts her husband. Only when he eats is innocence lost. Shamat IS the temptress, sucking the life from Enkidu and taking his innocence. The OT serpent says "you will be like God ..." Shamat says, "you are like the gods..." Enkidu, realizing that she has taken his innocence, is angry with her even then, long before ... what happens later.

  - As I've already mentioned, Eve is the partner for Adam. Enkidu seeks another male. Why is Shamat not good enough?

  - In both the OT and the Cuneiform Codes, women can be considered 2nd or 3rd class citizens. I certainly wouldn't say the OT was any worse.

  - Mesopotamian religion certainly seemed more laissez faire about sex in general. But that attitude seemed tied in with a certain disdain for women, an objectification I find disconcerting. Gilgamesh orders Shamat to lure Enkidu. I'm not a statist regarding prostitution (really, about anything); but it bothers me. It makes me wonder how many of the "sisters of the gods" at the temples chose their vocation willingly. I don't like the fear and disgust at menstrual cycles in the Bible, but I am at least as disturbed by the way women seem to be receptacles of male lust in Gilgamesh.

  - Will hold off on Ishtar as represented in the text. But you know what I mean.

  Regarding religious texts and their influences on society, I agree. But I see that with almost any text. Marx led to Stalin. Nietzsche led to Hitler. Both of those were devoid of God. Mohammed led to Bin Ladin. Bible led to Bush. Aztec mythology led to a veritable assembly line of human sacrifice. The only reason the Bible seems worse is because the Christian Church ended up on the top of the heap for a long time.

  That said, I hold Christians more accountable than the others. They are more culpable... WE are more culpable if only because we had an Example to live up to, and we failed miserably. What's worse, we stamped His name on our racism, our genocide, our intolerance and our wars. If I believe in Truth, then I have to be honest about the bad stuff, too.

  Thanks for engaging me on this. If I sound like a jerk, it's more because I'm really interested and passionate. And I know you have a billion other responses to get to as well. (I'm jealous.) Take your time.

  Kesters last blog post..κύκλος κλαν

• At February 27, 2009, Blog: Beyond School | Bscopes Feeds wrote:

  [...] Blog: Beyond School tagged with: education Post: http://beyond-school.org/2009/02/17/gilgamesh-6-the-new-man/ [...]

• At March 10, 2009, Freestyle Pen: Part of the problem or part of the solution? wrote:

  [...] School Unsucky English, Lecture 6: Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man 2 weeks [...]

• At March 16, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 7: A Goddess Prays | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [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]1 [...]

• At March 16, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  FYI, number 7 is up: A Goddess Prays

• At March 18, 2009, cburell wrote:

  Number 8 is up: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets

• At June 26, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Lecture 9 is up: Gilgamesh and the Original "Original Sin".

• At July 4, 2009, Gilgamesh and the Original Original Sin: Unsucky English Lecture 9 | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] no human could succeed at this task against the gods’ will, Gilgamesh laughs possibly the first atheist’s laugh in history – or literature, anyway – and off he and Enkidu go to slay the [...]

Related posts:

1. Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...
2. Gilgamesh and the Original “Original Sin”: Unsucky English Lecture 9 (part one) [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...
3. Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

14 Comments

• At December 12, 2008, spgreenlaw wrote:

  "And yes, that means books."

  Ah, but what if they are e-books? Gotcha.

  But seriously. Since taking the time to think about things that I post, I find myself reading more. It's delightful. Part of the reason is that because I am chasing down ideas, some of them old ones that have been stewing in the back of my mind for some time, I get to wonder where I heard that before or what so-and-so thinks on the subject. So, writing in a measured way has led me to think in a measured way, which has forced me to really read again. The fact that I'm already feeling better about the whole thing so soon is remarkable.

  Oh, and I took Boing Boing off my google reader account a few days ago. They were updating too much for me to deal with, and I had to fight the compulsion to click to every single new article Doctorow posts about DRM. Rehab is tough, man.

  spgreenlaws last blog post..A Frost poem would be cliché, wouldn’t it?

• At December 12, 2008, Will Richardson wrote:

  Hey Clay,

  In J school, my Principles of Reporting prof handed back my first article with four words at the top: "Cut it in half." When I did the revision, he handed it back with five words at the top: "Cut it in half, again." I got the point.

  What I love about my favorite essayists, Donald Murray, Anna Quindlen and others, is their ability to squeeze out the most meaning from every word. And I know that was the product not just of vision but re-vision, and then more re-vision. I loved the way Donald Murray used to write and reflect on his process, the way he positioned the reader in the task, the way he heard his reader hear his sentences. I learned much from the way he made his process transparent, and I wish he was alive today to be blogging about it.

  I think that is the good and bad of fast writing/blogging. We don't take the time to revise, to re-vision a post in the same way. Yet, I feel like my ability to revise as I write has found new heights simply by doing it over and over and over for seven years in these online spaces, and that that revise-as-you-go posture doesn't necessarily mean less quality or less depth. In fact, I think on balance, I might trade all that depth for the scope and scale of what I can connect to now. It's like for me, deep reading comes in the synthesis of ideas from many disparate parts. It's like I've trained my brain to make those connections, to compose it's own compilations and collections, to do the stuff that authors of books used to do for me. To make an attempt, at least, of creating its own "longer river of time." And I can go deep into the pools when I desire to do so. (Let me show you the marked up pages of my current book in hand.) But I can also find comfort in the rapids.

  This isn't (I don't think) a defense of fast reading or fast blogging as much as it is a defense of this reality of information and an acquiescence to the reality of "continuous partial attention" or "ambient awareness" or what ever the cool description of the month is. As I think you suggest, both slow/fast reading/blogging have value. The rub is how do we get the most from both at the same time, and, in turn, how do we help our kids do that as well.

  PS...How ironic to have a countdown clock for revision once a comment is published. So much for slow commenting. ;0)

  Will Richardsons last blog post..The Ultimate Disruption for Schools

• At December 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  S.P.,

  I know you were kidding (mostly) about e-books, but they do open the door to that ADD/Obsessive-compulsive urge to check the reader/blog/news/Twitter etc. That's why "off-line" seemed key.

  As Will says in the next comment, and as I didn't say well enough, it's no "either/or," but a question of balance. History has the accelerator to the floor, so I can't not do online reading. But it also has a back-story to serve as context and deeper well, so I can't - or shouldn't - neglect the more focused study of books. Yet I do exactly that.

  And I can't even bring myself to unsubscribe to Boing Boing.

• At December 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Will, I hear you on the "revise-as-you-go" piece. That's what I was trying to get at with the daily writing work-out that blogging gives us.

  An aspect of this I didn't mention, and that really comes out when you picture you and me, both well over 40, and S.P. (21) and Morgante (16?), is age. We immigrants grew up with books to give us our big picture of history and all the details on its canvas. That was a long, sustained process of construction. For me, at least, books were key in that. (Hm. Teaching was even more key.)

  Would I have such a coherent big picture if I were a native, reading websites in my youth more than I read books? I can't know. But I wonder what Morgante and S.P. and other youths would say.

  How do you piece together the "great conversation" of ideas over time, in grandest liberal arts fashion, classic-to-classic and idea-to-idea (what Nietzsche calls the "conversations from peak to peak through the centuries," to roughly paraphrase), without slowing down, reading those primary and secondary sources, and weaving them into coherence over years of youth - if you don't read books? Can you do that online?

  I mean, I know Project Gutenberg and such are there, but those old public domain translations generally fail to speak to us, especially the young, in voices and styles we're comfortable with. That's what struck me about S.P.'s post, particularly. You could hear his conscience telling him his time at 21 was better spent reading Kropotkin and Marx, without other readings open on other Firefox tabs doing the siren bit when he's trying to concentrate on keeping his course.

  "How to help our kids do that as well" indeed.

  But to end this, you're clearly right to say that it's not either/or. It's more how much of each - which I'm just wondering doesn't change depending, among other things, on age.

• At December 13, 2008, Morgante Pell wrote:

  In short, I completely agree: the ideal intellectual development involves a mix of slow and fast reading/blogging.

  At 15, I definitely don't have the same historical perspective as any of you. I haven't even made a dent in reading the classics, and everything has always seemed to be fast.

  Luckily, I have had great teachers over the years who encouraged me to explore the classics—offline. I make time for both – though most of the day is spent online, I do some slow reading everyday.

  However, I do think there are major benefits to fast reading. Primarily, it is far more accessible than slow reading. While Clay, Will, and I might voluntarily read the classics in our free time, most students won't. However, there are plenty of students willing to subscribe to a few blogs which interest them. In terms of development of literary enthusaism, fast reading can be far more effective than slow, dead-paper reading.

  As you said, there are places for both slow and fast bloggers. Fast bloggers are, in every sense of the word, journalists. Fast blog is perfect for covering anything like politics, which moves fast. The problem I see is when people attempt to approach topics more appropriate for slower thinking with a fast blogging attitude. A sad example of this I see is the educational discourse: education really doesn't move so fast that it is important that responses be immediate. Educational pedagogy and theory evolves slowly, not with the quick shifts of politics.

  There is no question that fast blogging can make you a better writer over time, but I believe a healthy dose of self-reflection is required to enjoy maximum improvement. Otherwise, it is easy to get stuck in the same tired and poor style.

  Clay, I absolutely agree that length isn't the critical factor. But length:ideas is. The greats actually all have very good length to idea ratios, but schools tend to just focus on forcing increased length rather than depth of ideas.

  So length, to repeat, is not the problem. The perennials teacher-answer to the perennial student-question - “How long does it have to be?” - “Not too short and not too long: just long enough to meet the demands of the assignment” - holds true for a writer’s self-assignments too.

  You must have had different teachers than me, since many of mine will tell me 3 pages, even when I could easily fit the critical ideas in 1.

  P.S. I once subscribed to Boing Boing, but quickly unsubscribed due to the deluge of pointlessness. On the other end of the spectrum, I long ago unsubscribed from bgblogging, finding the massive word counts too high for the few ideas.

• At December 13, 2008, Will Richardson wrote:

  First, really glad to see you back online and blogging Morgante. Missed your voice.

  I'd agree that most students wouldn't read the classics if they weren't exposed to them in school, but I have to say that most adults wouldn't read them either, myself included. Unlike Clay, I was not moved by the "greats" and I fully admit that says something about both my tastes and my intellect.

  I'm frustrated by the slow education reality. I wish I could fast blog it out of existence. And I agree that our attempts to trumpet each of the molecules as they move one at a time from the past into the future are by and large fruitless in terms of providing a deeper understanding of what's happening. We need the perspective that only time can give to understand it deeply.

  But having said that, those bursts provide some powerful, useful glimpses along the way. That's what I find so appealing...

  Will Richardsons last blog post..Networked Learning: Why Not?

• At December 13, 2008, Paul C wrote:

  'And that makes our thoughts more like mayflies flitting on that river than old growths towering beside it. Not much timelessness there.'

  I must admit that my blogging has resulted in less time for reading the classics and more time in flitting through my latest Google Reader posts. But it's posts like yours where I can relish the well turned phrase and the long sentence rich with imagery.

  Paul Cs last blog post..Blogger Discovery

• At December 14, 2008, Jonathan Chambers wrote:

  There are two basic types of blogging: the relayers and the synthesizers. The relayers manage to bounce information into our consciousness so that we can digest it, and the synthesizers manage to creatively process the information so that we can process the information at a new, deeper level so that we can act on information at a new creative level. Both are useful.

  The act of "slow blogging" is encouraging deeper synthesis, although without the surface level of relay of basic ideas, we may not reach some of the synthesis that may be possible if we don't continue to offer some of the "raw materials" as ideas in our blogging.

  It's up to each of us to judge how we manage information, and if we should manage to slowly distill concepts to the point of "slow blogging" then that's a catalytic convertor that may or may not be borne out in the process of transmission.

  It all boils down to choice - a choice to listen, to read, to convert, to process, to synthesize, to make an idea more relevant, or whether we choose to simply log ideas and accrue knowledge until we can connect a series in a beautiful, intricate pattern that will be recognized as eloquence.

• At December 14, 2008, Justin wrote:

  I'm going to paraphrase something I heard from a TED talk that succinctly exppresses my view, and that is that a blog should be like a dress, short enough to keep interest, but long enough to cover the subject.

• At December 14, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hm. If I said anything suggesting my push for "books" was a push for "classics," my mistake. While there's nothing like a grounding in the real Homer and Plato (both very readable and enjoyable in the right translations) and Bible and so forth for actual knowledge of what they're about (otherwise, you're at the mercy of professors or preachers, god save you), I'm thinking as much of simply long books period. Histories of the Renaissance, of the Scientific Revolution. Theories of statecraft or biographies of Darwin or Jefferson. Whatever. Just more big picture arguments and meditations than are afforded by even the best blog posts or online articles.

  Somehow related to all of this is my own recent attempt to "slow blog" my thoughts on what Gilgamesh tells us about our past and present. The task was not well-served by serial posts. It slammed me to the limits (my limits, I guess) of blogging - and it showed me that some ideas are so slow, so big, so long they belong in books.

  Hm. Can you imagine Howard Zinn writing a People's History of the United States online to the same effect? And can you imagine getting the coherent perspective of that epic history by reading all the ideas as short posts from different bloggers or wikipediers around the web?

  Is this frame even valid? You tell me. It's almost 4 a.m., so I'm suspect.

• At December 14, 2008, Morgante Pell wrote:

  Clearly, some ideas (particularly large ones) are best developed through cohesive books.

  However, I would actually disagree with your frame: I think any piece which is built around chronology (however distant) can work well on a "blog." Indeed, this format might even add to the air of discovery: the "story" must reveal itself over time, just as it originally was.

  I'm sure we agree that not all books worth reading are "classics."

• At December 14, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  the dreaded page length question:

  "How long should it be Ms. Tabor?"

  "Long enough to explain your thinking."

  "Is that three pages?"

  "I won't know until I read it."

  Okay, that's simplistic, but I always tell students that I don't weigh their papers before I read them. Nor do I decide to read or not read a blog post based on length.

  As a blog writer, I have started to post about events in my teaching life when I am still in the middle of synthesizing my understanding of the event, but still the posts come out long. Long enough to "cover the subject" - at least for me.

  Kate Tabors last blog post..Putting all the pieces together

• At December 14, 2008, Tom wrote:

  I know I just posted on this over where I am, but to restate ...

  "Uh-huh." "Yep." "What he said." "You're right." "She makes a good point."

  To jump on Kate's comment, my reply is "as long as you think it needs to be." I'd rather murder the essay AFTER it's written :)

  Toms last blog post..Insert size matters joke here

• At December 16, 2008, Jabiz Raisdana wrote:

  Sorry couldn't stay long enough to comment, because I have 77 other blogs to skim today. I did catch some of what you and the other commenters said, as I read every other line of your work.

  Seriously, sometimes it is all too much and we have to decided how to adjust accordingly. I am still try to find a happy medium. Thanks for a great post.

  Seriously I want to get my reader down to zero so I can rest. This behavior can't not be productive.

  Jabiz Raisdanas last blog post..Parrots on the Sill

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

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....]

This notion of character as a determining force in Oedipus’ tragedy is part of Sir Maurice Bowra’s interpretation. With Dodds, Bowra agrees that the parricide and incest were fixed in Oedipus’ fate before he was born. The oracle to Lauius shows that. But, contrary to Dodds, Bowra asserts that all of Oedipus’ other actions both before and during the action on stage were the work of a daimon carrying out Apollo’s will.³ In Bowra’s view, the gods “force” on Oedipus the discovery of his monstrous identity.⁴ It could not be otherwise.

On the Daimonic

Obviously, at this point some clarification is needed concerning this concept of the daimonic. The daimonic was an ill-defined entity even among the Greeks. At bottom, it was used in two senses, one internal to the individual, and the other, external. In the external sense, a daimon was held to be “the veiled countenance of divine activity, . . . the driving power of events around us, unpredictable and not of our own enacting – something like fate, but without any person who plans and ordains being visible.”⁵ Pindar writes of the “daimon active about me” in this external sense, and in describing it as “steered by an all-powerful mind of Zeus,” underlines its subordination to the divine will.⁶ Plato reports a customary belief in the assignment by lot of an individual daimon to each person at birth.⁷ Additionally, daimons were held responsible for human happiness (eudaimon) and unhappiness (kakodaimon).⁸ All of this is very in keeping with Bowra’s notion that the events unfolding around Oedipus were unfolded by a daimon doing Apollo’s bidding.

In its other usage, the daimon was active inside the individual, especially during the performance of a “peculiar activity.”⁹ It was “an occult power, a force that drives man forward where no agent can be named.”¹⁰ Socrates named the famous inner voice that at unpredictable times commanded him not to do or say something his daimon.¹¹ Heraclitus, at the vanguard of Greece’s emergent philosophical enlightenment, perhaps defines the daimon most comfortably for us in his peremptory denial of its very existence: “Character is for a man his life and daimon.”¹²

One could argue that Heraclitus’ explanation of a religious term with a scientific one is no explanation at all, but merely a substitution that leaves the mystery – and the apparent fatality – of human will intact. Paris’ argument with Hector in the Iliad (III:50-70) – that Hector’s blaming him for being a lady’s man was unjust because he was helpless to refuse “the gifts the gods bestow on mortals at birth” (in his case, the gifts of Aphrodite) – is very adequate to meet Heraclitus’ challenge. Likewise, Oedipus certainly did not will his own natural gift of intellect, curiosity, and the will to command.

But the question at hand is how Sophocles implicitly answers the question in the OT. And it is one of the two crucial questions of the tragedy (more on the other one later). For if Sophocles meant to imply, as Dodds asserts, that Oedipus, while unavoidably fated to fulfill the prophecy of parricide and incest from the oracle at Delphi, was nonetheless free to escape Teiresias’ prophecy that he would discover his pollution, blind and banish himself from Thebes – then one very simple conclusion follows from this: namely, that humans may hope for a margin of freedom in the face of divinely-willed fate.

Sophocles did not want his audience to walk away from this tragedy with any such hope. There is ample evidence both within and outside of the play to support the contrary case: that Sophocles meant for Oedipus to be seen as utterly powerless to circumvent the will of the gods – as pronounced to him not only by the Pythian, but also by Teiresias.

In Sophocles’ text, as Bowra asserts, Apollo and his daimonic agents hover invisibly around every event in Oedipus’ life, both before and – contrary to Dodds – during the action on the stage.

Fate Before the Action on Stage

Apollo’s oracle to Laius determined Oedipus’ mountainside exposure, of course, before he was ever born. Mount Cithaeron, the site of Oedipus’ rescue is, the chorus states, a sacred precinct of none other than Apollo (ll. 1103-4). That the drunk’s accusation of bastardy sent Oedipus to Apollo’s oracle at Delphi at precisely the time that Oedipus’ true father, Laius, “decides” to travel to Delphi himself is too coincidental to be mere “chance” – Apollo hovers around this event too.

Again, Apollo’s priestess, by refusing to answer Oedipus’ question regarding his true parentage and instead informing him that he will kill his father and marry his mother, leaves him in the ignorance that will compel him never to return to his supposed parents in Corinth – and leads him straight to his true mother in Thebes. Furthermore, as Stephen Halliwell notes, the “threeway” at which Oedipus is provoked to slay Laius is another sacred precinct of Apollo.¹³ (and Halliwell further notes that Sophocles altered the location of this crossroads, which in the traditional myth joined Plataea, Potnaie, and Thebes, by making it the juncture connecting Corinth, Delphi, and Thebes. This strongly suggests that Sophocles intended, with this alteration, to implicate Apollo in the entirety of Oedipus’ fate).¹⁴

Also too coincidental to be anything but divine design: Oedipus arrives at Thebes precisely when the Sphinx was afflicting the land with its riddle – a test of intelligence irresistible to Oedipus. Too coincidental, furthermore, is Oedipus’ arrival to unriddle the Sphinx at precisely the right time to win Jocasta’s hand as his reward – neither before Creon announced this prize, nor after someone else had won it.

And how explain the inexplicable delay of the plague until Oedipus’ children had reached adulthood and the clues to Laius’ murder had grown very cold? Oedipus’ triple pollution should have incurred the plague immediately. Apollo, bringer of plague, obviously delayed it to fulfill his own design.

Fate During the Action on Stage

Within the play itself, Oedipus’ first action in response to the plague was to consult Apollo at Delphi. It was, furthermore, the oracle’s counsel that Oedipus curse with banishment the murderer of Laius.

Teiresias is said to share in Apollo’s knowledge by the chorus, and calls himself “Loxias’ slave” (411); his refusal to share his knowledge provoked Oedipus’ anger, which in turn provoked his politically valid charge of treason against Creon (who advised Oedipus to consult Teiresias in the first place) – which furthermore sets up Jocasta’s disclosure of the site of Laius’ murder in her ironic attempt to prove the impotence of oracles and seers. Moreover, Teiresias – “Loxias’ slave” – does predict Oedipus’ self-blinding and exile in Apollo’s name (and, significantly enough, “against [his, Teiresias'] will” (357-8) ). Teiresias furthermore affirms the inevitability of Oedipus’ fate in his explicit claim that “of themselves things will come, although I hide them and breathe not a word” (341-2).

Jocasta’s prayer to Apollo is immediately answered by the “chance” arrival of the Corinthian messenger with the news of Polybus’ “coincidental” death in Corinth. The chorus, in its deluded exultations over the Corinthian’s news, ironically speculates that Apollo might be Oedipus’ true father. Again, the Corinthian messenger arrives by “chance” at the same time the herdsman does, thus ensuring that the mystery of Oedipus’ birth can be brought to its horrible light. And by daimonic “coincidence,” these same two men, the Corinthian messenger and the herdsman, who meet at the palace on the day of Oedipus’ ruin, are the same two men who met on Cithaeron to save the infant Oedipus from death by exposure. And what, furthermore, is Jocasta’s plea – “God save you, Oedipus, from the knowledge of who you are” (1068) – but an ironically precise quote of Apollo’s injunction from the temple at Delphi, “Know thyself”? – and another piece of evidence that Sophocles intended to emphasize the invisible manipulations of the god?

More evidence of this is seen in the second messenger’s claim that Oedipus was uncannily “led by some invisible guide,” that “some daimon showed him the way” (1201) to Jocasta’s hanging corpse, and again when the chorus asks Oedipus what daimon led him to put out his eyes. Oedipus similarly addresses his daimon when he comes onstage after blinding himself, “Daimon, how far have you sprung?” (1312) (Hogan notes this line could just as validly be translated, “Daimon, from where have you leapt?”, which more strongly emphasizes the fatalistic interpretation). The chorus in the fourth and final stasimon sings, “Oedipus, you are my pattern of this” (i.e., of the inevitable mutability of happiness) – “You and your daimon” (1193-4). Similarly, it denies any freedom of will to Oedipus when it sings, “Time who sees all has found you out, / against your will, your marriage was accursed” 91213-4). Finally, Oedipus states that he put out his eyes so that they may not see “the crime I have committed or had done on me” (1271-2).

As the sheer tedium of such a long list of textual clues attests, it is clear that Sophocles overwhelmingly intended his audience to see Apollo and his daimon determining Oedipus’ every step. Most critics are in fact content to accept this as the case, in every respect but one: Oedipus’ self-blinding.

It was Apollo, friends, Apollo,
that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion,
but the hand that struck me
was none but my own (1329-33).

That this explanation given by Oedipus is too ambiguous to settle the question is shown by the fact that Dodds cites it as proof that the act was freely done, whereas Bowra cites it as proof of the contrary, that Apollo willed and Oedipus’ hands obeyed. In my own view, three arguments support the claim that Apollo was responsible for the act.

First, the parallel to Teiresias’ fateful blindness, which Hera inflicted on him because of his transgression against the gods: Oedipus had similarly transgressed against Apollo in his “god-like” human intelligence that rivaled and, in the case of Teiresias’ inability to unriddle the Sphinx, surpassed the powers of Apollo’s seer. Likewise, the priest’s supplication of Oedipus and the chorus’ turning to him to dispel the plague in the beginning of the play transgress somewhat on Apollo’s domain. And Oedipus’ ultimate transgression, of course, was to try to outwit the fate the god pronounced to him.

The second argument comes from the hand imagery in the play. Jocasta was reported to have died “of her own hand” (1237), just as Oedipus claims to have been blinded by his. In both cases, the daimonically coincidental orchestration of events leading up to these actions were by no means random nor planned nor willed by them – they both did violence to themselves in response to Apollo’s set-up. And the third and final hand image of the play, in which the herdsman’s hands are twisted behind his back, not of his own but of Oedipus’ will, invites the parallel image of Apollo forcing Oedipus’ hands to his own eyes.

The third argument involves what I referred to earlier as the “second central issue” of the play, which is namely that of the validity of prophecy. Dodds and others in the free will camp are willing enough to allow that Delphi pronounces nothing less than divinely willed fate, but they refuse to assign the same status to the pronouncements of Teiresias – that is, of seers. Yet the OT is in the end a vindication not only of Delphic priestess voicings from the Omphalos, but also of Teiresias’ readings of “the birds screaming overhead” (966). And if the guiding presence of the gods is confirmed in the flight of birds and the falling of lots, why should it be denied the same presence behind the actions of mortals? Sophocles’ intent in the OT is precisely to show that the gods leave nothing to chance – that chance is a notion stemming from the blindness of mortals to see the divine design that governs all. In this sense, the validity of seers is of more importance than that of oracles – because seers confirm  the presence of the divine behind the seemingly chance events in the natural world.

From the denial of the seers’ powers, the denial of this divine presence in the daily world is but a short step. From there, similar erosions of the old faith would logically terminate in atheism – or, in Sophocles’ terminology, the belief that “chance (tyche) is all in all” (977). It is just this process of religious erosion that Sophocles is combating in the OT. And since the institution of seers is the most vulnerable to attack, Sophocles defends it above all – through his vindication of Teiresias’ prophecy. And since Teiresias foresaw Oedipus’ self-blinding, it follows that Oedipus was destined to perform it and did not freely choose it.

Sophocles’ Assault on “Chance” (Tyche) in the OT

This explains the thematic refutation of tyche (i.e., “chance” or “luck”) that so strongly comes to the fore in the middle of the play. Teiresias taunts Oedipus that his “very luck (tyche)” with riddles was in actuality instrumental in bringing about his ruinous fate (422). Oedipus’ exultant claim to be the “child of lucky chance (tyche)” (1048) is soon transformed into the choral lament for “luckless Oedipus” (1195). And even Oedipus’ very name, which the Corinthian messenger explains is from the “tyche” (chance) event of his having been found with pierced ankles as an infant (1036), is implicitly a grim irony for the gods’ enjoyment – since its second meaning is that “seeing is knowing.”

In this way, the OT is nothing less than a dramatic demonstration that Apollo’s oracles and his seers are infallible, and that the gods steer all events. Further proof that Sophocles intended this is strongly suggested by Oedipus’ inquiry into the validity of oracles and seers in the mode of a legal trial – which ends, of course, in complete vindication of them both. A parallel pattern emerges in Jocasta’s glaringly sophistic – and ultimately invalid – manner of arguing against the validity of Apollo’s agents:

Human beings have no part in the craft of prophecy.
Of that I’ll show you short proof (708-10).

She proceeds to employ the rhetorical enthymeme (i.e., the argument by example), viz.: because the oracle to Laius proved groundless, that of Teiresias is probably groundless as well. Ironically, of course, this very refutation offers Oedipus his first hard proof that he may indeed be the pollution Teiresias proclaimed him to be – and compels the chorus, in the final stasimon, to echo Jocasta’s sophism with consummate irony by labeling Oedipus as an argument-clinching “example” (i.e., enthymeme) of human impotence in the face of the gods’ will (1193).

The Historical Context: Philosophy, Atheism, and Politics in Late 5th Century Athens

The historical context of the OT gives ample testimony to support the view that Sophocles intends the play as a defense of the gods’ omnipresence in human affairs. By the time of the tragedy’s performance around 428 BCE, Greek religion had been undergoing rapid erosion for a full century. The Milesian ontologists had since the mid-6th century explained the order and processes of the cosmos by principles having nothing to do with the gods.¹⁵ Around 500, Heraclitus had already ridiculed such central Greek religious practices as prayer, which he likened to “conversing with houses,” and expiation of blood with blood, which was “like washing off mud with mud.”¹⁶ Xenophanes had denied Olympian polytheism in the name of his transcendentally rational and non-anthropomorphic nous well before his death in 480.

With the convergence of the sophists on Athens in mid-century, the erosion quickly intensified. Protagoras, in Athens by 450, scandalized the religious traditionalists with his rhetorician’s teaching that every assertion – including “The gods exist” – is subject to rational debate.¹⁷ Reason, not tradition, was his criterion for truth – much like Oedipus, when he rejects Teiresias’ seemingly irrational revelation. Protagoras’ book, On Gods, explicitly argued that knowledge of the gods’ existence was strictly impossible.¹⁸ Equally unsettling to the foundations of religious belief was his epistemological relativism, summed up in his famous maxim,

Man is the measure of all things, for things that are that they are, for things that are not that they are not.¹⁹

These philosophical speculations were complemented by a growing current of impiety and outright atheism in the following decades. One Diagoras, from the island of Melos, publicly revealed the sacrosanct secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries in order to “thus make them ordinary.”²⁰ Athens responded to this outrageous impiety by issuing an empire-wide indictment for his arrest.

Nor did seers escape the attacks of skepticism. Democritus’ explanation of such subjective religious experiences as visions, oracles and revelations as eidola – phantoms and illusions with natural psychological causes – although later than the OT, nonetheless indicates the atmosphere of intellectual religious doubt permeating the empire in the fifth century.²¹ And in 438, ten years before the OT was performed, the seer Diopethes apparently felt threatened enough to push a bill through the Athenian assembly outlawing all who engaged in atheistic or scientific speculation. This was enough to send Anaxagoras, Pericles’ favorite philosopher, in quick flight from Athens.

Finally, there were ample political reasons to doubt the gods – and most of all, Apollo and his oracle at Delphi. Ever since Delphi proclaimed its support for Sparta at the beginning of the Pelopponesian War, Athenian patriots were all too willing to discount its powers of prophecy. Had not the oracle been egregiously mistaken when, before the Persians invaded in 480, she predicated catastrophic defeat for the Greeks? Such mistakes were now recollected with all the fervor of wartime.²²

Likewise, worship at Apollo’s shrine in Athens suffered a radical decline in precisely the days during which Sophocles must have been composing the OT. As Thucydides reports, the Athenians actually ceased their sacrifices to the god to end the current plague in the city, because they noticed the pious and impious alike fell to it.²³

Sophocles served, it must be remembered, as a priest at Apollo’s shrine in Athens. As a tragedian, moreover, he served Dionysus. The wave of atheism and impiety breaking over the city could not but have filled him with foreboding: surely he felt he was witnessing the unraveling of common beliefs that had once culturally united the Greeks. In this atmosphere of crisis, it makes abundant sense to read the Oedipus Tyrannus as a Greek jeremiad, a cautionary tale teaching, through the fate and character of Oedipus, that such displeasure with the gods as was outlined above does nothing to dispel their power. As Athens was unhappy with Delphi for siding with her enemy, so it might be unhappy with Apollo for so cruelly destroying the great and noble Oedipus. Still, as with Oedipus – and, it would turn out, with Athens – Apollo would be vindicated. No matter how strong the will of a hero, or of a people, may be, the Oedipus Tyrannus aims to demonstrate that human will is nonetheless by no means free.

Bibliography

E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex,” Greece and Rome 13: 37-49 (1966).

C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy, (Oxford, 1944).

Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, (Harvard, 1985).

Stephen Halliwell, “Where Three Roads Meet: A Neglected Detail in the Oedipus Tyrannus,” Journal of Hellenistic Studies 100: 22-37 (1980).

1. Dodds, 42.
2. ibid., 43.
3. Bowra, 182.
4. ibid., 39.
5. Burkert, 180.
6. ibid., 181.
7. ibid., 181.
8. ibid., 181
9. ibid., 180.
10. ibid., 181
11. ibid., 181.
12. ibid., 181.
13. Halliwell, 188.
14. Burkert, 315.
15. ibid., 315.
16. ibid., 317
17. ibid., 318
18. ibid., 317
19. ibid., 318
20. ibid., 318
21. ibid., 316
22. ibid., 319
23. ibid., 319

1 Comments

• At December 10, 2008, Oedipus, the Wordle | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] reaction? It’s funny what a single 15-page literary essay that you decide to post does to the results of a Wordle. Any guesses on the topic of that [...]

Related posts:

1. Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...
2. Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.