Beyond School

[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.]

[Note: This and the next post take a detour from "lecture" to "story-telling." Gilgamesh is still the focus, but I want to show with these two posts the ridiculous pressures teachers are under to not offend anyone when trying to teach classic literature. I'll return to lecture mode in post #4.]

~     ~     ~

So you’re in Week Three of your two World Literature classes for those wonderful, squeaky-clean ninth-graders.¹

You spent Week One warming them up with a couple of fun David Sedaris shorts.  “Big Boy” - the story of Sedaris’ epic Easter Sunday struggle to flush someone else’s stuck turd down the toilet, so the person waiting outside the door won’t think it was his - is only a page and a half long, and is suitably light and hilarious for a first read. It’s also the perfect story to trot out for the lesson on plot.

And schooliness aside, it serves to start the conversation about how real literature finds grist for its alchemical mill everywhere, from the ridiculous to the sublime, and is not the trite moralistic stuff they’ve probably been taught to believe it is in k-8 English classes.²

“From the bathroom to the bedroom to the throne of God,” you intone, “literature knows no limits. Get used to it. You’re in high school now.”

Sedaris’ “Us and Them”³ is equally fun but infinitely more subtle, with its narrator making his bad self seem good and his good enemy seem bad, and is another perfect vehicle for trotting out the “unreliable narrator” lesson:⁴

“Beware of the authority of the author, kids,” you warn them, “in every book you read and speech you hear - including mine.

Suspect the narrator.

This story’s narrator made a fool of you. Worse yet, he made you a hateful fool.

Sedaris showed you that narrator was a hateful ass, but had his narrator tell you that he was the good guy.  Sedaris also showed you a good, kind character,  but had his narrator tell you this kind person was the bad guy.  And every one of you believed the narrator instead of your own eyes.

You followed the bad guy, and joined him in hating the good guy. All because you are suckers who trust the authority of the written word.

Look how dangerous books are, how books can blind you if you don’t think. Sedaris just showed you that books can turn you into hateful followers of hateful writers - while all the while thinking you’re the “good people.”

Can you think of any other books that do that?  They surround us. Maybe you’ll notice them after experiencing this story. But you probably won’t.

Learn from it. It’s probably the most important lesson anybody could ever teach you in life, but you won’t get that. Learn to see with your eyes, instead of continuing to try - as all of you did in this story - to see with your ears.”

Wickedness Incarnate: David Sedaris

You don’t tell them that Sedaris, being gay, knows from experience how many bad “good people” find it good to hate good “bad people.” One thing at a time. Almost all of these kids have been conditioned once a week since infancy to hate gays and other types different from them. Let them read more Sedaris on their own for now - they’re all begging to borrow your personal copies - and come to love him as a person first.

Then tell them.

~     ~     ~

That was all good fun. You like them and they seem to like you. And they’re annotating the margins of what they read, as you require, more than they text message their friends in a year - thinking back at the text, inscribing it with their own interpretations. Life’s good.

In Week Two, you’re ready to lay the foundations for the chronological survey of (mostly Western) literature you’ve been lucky enough to design from scratch. You’re not yet ready to plunge into mythologies of Gilgamesh, Genesis, Hesiod and Homer, because you want them to write their own myths first - from the imagined perspective of the pre-historic, pre-literate, pre-scientific, and pre-iPod tribes that originated all those myths in the Stone Age.

The best way you can figure to bring fire to the imaginations of these 14-year-olds is not with an ancient book. Instead, you dim the lights, draw the blinds, fire up the LCD projector, and show them “The Dawn of Man,” that great paleolithic prelude to that great space-age myth in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(The Youtube clip below leaves out about half of it, but it’s a good taste:)

As they watch, you’re driving them crazy by pausing the film, pointing to details and asking questions, probing and pushing.

“What is that? … Exactly! Paleolithic war!”

“And what is that? … Brilliant! The discovery of tools, of technology!”

“And that? Yes, yes, yes - the first murder. ‘Cain and Abel,’ the evolutionary version.”

When it’s done, the lights go up, and you ask them if they understand now why Kubrick is a name to remember. Then, you give them their first major writing assignment of the year: decide on some aspect of the natural or subjective world that you, like the homos in Kubrick, don’t understand, that fills you with maybe wonder, maybe fear, maybe both - but above all, with the need to “explain” it. “Points taken off if any of your explanations are drawn from what was claimed or known in later stages of human history.”⁵

When they turn in the final drafts of their myths, my god are you impressed with their imaginations. Daniel, particularly, blows you away with that scene in which his god reaches into his own mouth, drives his hand down his throat into his chest, withdraws it with a fireball he then flings into the sky - and which has stayed there to this day, giving light to us all. You want to throw a parade for his brilliance, and really don’t care that the grammar is non-standard. He’s Korean, after all. You’ll take broken grammar with perfect imagination over a broken imagination with perfect grammar any day. Broken grammar you can fix.

Now You’re Ready for Gilgamesh

You’re so excited you can’t stand it. The Kubrick and the creative mythologizing maybe, just maybe, prepared these young imaginations for the world’s oldest story.

You’d read Gilgamesh yourself in college, maybe a time or two since then, in uninspired translations, but you haven’t read the Mitchell translation from 2004 that your students are reading. You’d ordered it the year before after skimming a copy in the school library. You know Mitchell from other works he translated, and this one looks fine indeed.

You’ll read it for homework just like your students do. It’s a stimulating thing to do anyway.

The first chapter was fun: a “Prelude” that was both an introduction of the hero (with nice rhetorical use of the “delayed subject” to create suspense, using the pronoun “he” for several pages before ever telling us “he” was Gilgamesh), and an ode to that other star of the story, Uruk: the primal city itself.

Good enough, fun, interesting.  We’re just warming up.

“Tonight I want you to read Book One,” you tell them. “And be sure to annotate it. I’ll check next class.”

You go home that night and read Book One yourself, just like your students.  And just like them, no doubt, you have one of the most unforgettable experiences of your years in school - as a student or teacher.

Because you read about the stuff covered in the last post - Gilgamesh outraging his subjects by helping himself to their brides, the chief god Anu telling the goddess Aruru to solve the problem by creating a double for Gilgamesh “to create balance and bring peace,” and Aruru doing just that by creating the one-third human, two-thirds animal named Enkidu - but you read more, too, that you hadn’t counted on.

It’s all good stuff at first. Finally, this 2004 translation dresses this regal story in the stylish regalia it merits. You’re annotating like a madman:

“Enkidu wild, an animal drinking among gazelles at a watering hole. Shades of Darwin - and Kubrick!”

“Hm. Enkidu as ‘animal rights activist?!’ - he frees animals from traps, saves them from hunter.”

“Hunter goes to Gilgamesh to complain.”

On you scribble. You notice an interesting parallel between Anu and Gilgamesh, and it makes you really admire the Sumerian story-tellers who crafted this story, and wonder at this second piece of evidence of a radically non-punitive and jarringly humanistic response to law-breakers or disturbers of civic order in this old culture.⁶  Because just like Anu dealt with Gilgamesh’s excesses by setting him up for an experience that will presumably give him the wisdom to outgrow those excesses,⁷ Gilgamesh reacts to the news about Enkidu with a similarly unexpected twist.

He doesn’t send out a posse to capture or kill the wild man, and he doesn’t gird himself for battle with the wild man himself.  Instead, you read, he tells the farmer:

Go to the temple of Ishtar,
ask them for a woman named Shamhat,
one of the priestesses who give their bodies
to any man, in honor of the goddess.

“WTF?!” you annotate in huge letters.

What you read next is intriguing too - but gosh, you can’t help but get a bit uncomfortable imagining your 14-year-olds reading it that night too:

“Take her into the wilderness. [-Gilgamesh continues]
When the animals are drinking at the waterhole,
tell her to strip off her robe and lie there
naked, ready, with her legs apart.”

Another huge interrobang - ?! - in the margin. A bit more graphic than that Victorian version you read years ago.  You’re nervous now, and read on:

“The wild man will approach. Let her use her love-arts.
Nature will take its course, and then
the animals who knew him in the wilderness
will be bewildered, and will leave him forever.”

End of section, you note with relief. Thank goodness.

~     ~     ~

A few pages later, though, when Shamhat does accompany the farmer to the watering hole, the jitters come again.

Shamhat and the farmer wait for three days, and Enkidu finally comes. “The man was huge and beautiful,” you read. “Deep in Shamhat’s loins / desire stirred….”

Then the bomb drops:

Shamhat stripped off her robe and lay there naked,
with her legs apart, touching herself.
Enkidu saw her and warily approached.
He sniffed at the air. He gazed at her body.
He drew close. Shamhat touched him on the thigh,
touched his penis, and put him inside her.
She used her love-arts, she took his breath
with her kisses, held nothing back, and showed him
what a woman is. For seven days
he stayed erect and made love with her,
until he had had enough.

Undeniably beautiful, wonderfully erotic, but again, nothing like those Victorian versions you read back in the day. And my god, you wonder how you’re going to deal with the lecture tomorrow. Most of the kids go to Sunday school (we’re talking today’s Korea here, where you’ll see more crosses in a city block than you’ll see in all of Alabama) - and yeah, they’re all “in high school now,” but only three weeks in. And they’re all only freaking fourteen.

“Touched his penis, and put him inside her”? - wtf indeed. Interrobang.

Sweat.

Next: Shamhat’s Lessons: On Civilizing Sex (Or, “Adam and Eve, Backwards”)

The “Unsucky English Lectures” Series So Far:

1. Gilgamesh: 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

–

David Sedaris photo by Sporky

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. for you non-Americans, those are 14-year-olds in their first year of high school [↩]
2. ”Big Boy” is from the laugh-until-you-bleed Me Talk Pretty One Day. [↩]
3. full story here, great student webcam-review here [↩]
4. ”Us and Them” is from the also-brilliant Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. [↩]
5. You put them through their paces by familiarizing them with the writing process, using the Six Traits of Effective Writing model that they will follow all year. [↩]
6. But “beware the author,” you remind yourself. The story might not reflect the reality of Sumerian life. Yet it still reflects, if nothing else, an intended motif on the part of the poet. These unexpected reactions of Anu and Gilgamesh to troublemakers do clearly share, at root, a belief that experience, not authoritarian “Thou shalt nots” and punishments for disobedience, is the key to self-improvement and social order. And you’re deeply intrigued by this. [↩]
7. that “wtf plot twist” we discussed this in the first Gilgamesh essay [↩]

“Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read!”
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy song,
Every child may joy to hear.
–William Blake, Songs of Innocence

“And I stained the water clear”: look at that line a few times, and see the beauties of that exquisitely ambiguous modifier, “clear.”  It’s a line to cherish.¹ And it has to do with the thoughts below - after which, in the next post, we’ll get to an also exquisite sacred sex scene (and I’d like to call it a love scene to avoid the appearance of sensationalism, but it’s not a love scene) from Gilgamesh, along with laughs, I hope, about trying to teach it to today’s teens, in today’s classrooms. But first, an interlude:

When “Corrupting the Youth” is Good

“Good people” can be dangerous.

Socrates and Jesus, for example, in the eyes of the “good people” of their times,  were both criminals. ² They were criminals because they challenged those good people’s conventional views of religion, of the sacred, of moral right and wrong.

How do you know?

They both attacked the gods of their day. Socrates questioned both the truth and the righteousness of the Olympians; and Jesus (though less consistently) similarly questioned the teachings and the righteousness of the Hebrew priests and the “good” church mosque temple-going Christians Muslims Jews around him.  Both were reviled by the good people back then, and both paid with their lives for the same “sin”: critical thinking. The good Athenians killed Socrates with poison, the good Hebrews - the Romans, actually - killed Jesus on the cross.³

Today, we do well to revere Socrates and Jesus for pushing human thought forward.  We would also do well, though, to see their examples as reminders of something else we tend to forget: namely, that good people of any age often appear, in historical hindsight, to be the opposite of good. Again, good people - pious people - killed these two men.

Socrates today is held up to students as the model of that practice called “critical thinking.”  But in his own day, that very act, critical thinking, led to criminal charges against him for this :  “Corrupting the young by teaching new gods.”

Look at that. Socrates was killed why?  Because the adults in his society didn’t like the questions he was entertaining with their kids - about religion.  He was killed for asking, around young people, what we all see as a common sense question today - “Why do we believe in Zeus?”⁴

As a teacher who loves common sense, finds it less common than we think, and loves the idea of giving more of it than of grammar to the young in my classrooms, that story has always made me nervous.

I love critical thinking for many reasons, but the biggest one is this: it requires, always, an honest awareness in the thinker that he or she may be wrong.  Socrates, while less a hero of mine due to recent readings I’ve done about his politics, still wins my respect with this classic one-liner:

I only know that I know nothing.

Scientists understand the wisdom of that statement, and so do philosophers.  Priests and their “good people” followers, though, show no understanding of this wisdom. They assert truth-claims without evidence, and worse, they attack modern-day versions of Socrates and Jesus for thinking critically about their beliefs.

Schools are very bad places for a teacher to promote critical thinking about anything important.  The cliché “critical thinking” in schools is only allowed for safe subjects - an oxymoron I’ve mentioned many times in these pages.  Touch a subject that will offend a single parent or student, and your job is at stake.  That’s why so many classes are so boring.  They refuse to acknowledge the many elephants in the room, or to state that the emperor is wearing no clothes - especially when it comes to whichever god and flag are flying above your country.

And that’s why so many types of hugely influential beliefs that make no sense persist today.  Kids go through twelve years of school without those beliefs ever being touched by a serious question, they graduate, and bam: the beliefs live on for yet another generation: Bush really is communicating with God, while in the same universe, Bin Laden, in another country’s school system, really is obeying the Word and will of Allah.  McCain and Obama consent to be interviewed on national TV with Rick Warren, and thus legitimize a man whose ministry supported a “Left Behind” video game in which post-Rapture Christians kill non-Christians on the streets of New York - and they’re the good guys.  To question these things is not important?

I say it is. We see the Crusades of the 11th Century  being re-played now in the 21st.  Maybe questioning will reduce their chances of continuing into the fourth millennium, if we make it that far.

*    *    *

Critical Thinking as a Litmus Test

Reading the comments on my last post (the first Gilgamesh essay), and of the people who also commented on it on StumbleUpon,⁵ it occurs to me that critical thinkers serve as litmus tests for the people who disagree with them.  They fall into two categories:  those who challenge the thinking, and thus pass the test and prove themselves fellow critical thinkers; and those who attack the thinker instead of the ideas, and thus fail the test and show themselves to be non-critical thinkers, like the poisoners and crucifiers of old. Thank goodness free speech is now protected by law.

If the first Gilgamesh “lecture” had happened in a classroom instead of here, those non-critical thinkers would have been demanding my resignation - because they don’t want their children to think beyond what they, the parents, believe. ⁶ It’s funny how parents don’t care if their kid goes more deeply into, say, math than them; that’s fine. But have my kid go more deeply - and more critically - into religion than I ever did?  Into politics and my country’s history?  That’s a different beast altogether.  As a rule, parents aren’t okay with that at all.

So that’s the challenge to critical thinking in so many of our classrooms today, and a reason for its boredom-inducing absence. If only teachers felt secure in speaking their minds, there could be incredible discussions in classrooms.

And for the record: I share my questions about sacred cows not because I delight in doing “ee-vil.”  We may as well accuse Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Voltaire, Darwin, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and millions of other reformists dead and alive of “loving evil” for imagining - and speaking of - better visions of the Good or more sensible versions of the True.

I share these questions because first, I love asking them; second, it’s my way of supporting others who are asking them; and third, imperfect as all of us are, I believe these questions have vital value for happiness, intelligence, well-being, and, um, education. In my eyes, as much as your preachers or your parents, I am trying to do good. I’m just doing it by my own lights, instead of by the teachings of childhood.  I left those teachings long ago, by reading more than the preachers showed me. (I also discovered, in the cult of the early Christian leader Valentinus, an extinct version of Christianity I actually admire. It’s almost Buddhist. See Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels’ eye-opening, and very readable, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas for more.)

How can we think? Magic-based science (Creation Museum, Kentucky, USA)

And then there’s the issue of fairness. Millions of preachers clog the airwaves daily with their claims. Creationists attack science and infest science classrooms and textbooks.  It’s only fair that equal time is given to those of us who want to challenge them with critical thinking.

My last point:  Critical thinking can “corrupt the youth” on one condition: that youth fail to think critically themselves, as they read.  As long as the young think - chew - before swallowing this, or any, adult’s words, they’re not “corrupted” at all. No matter what those adults say.

I don’t know if any of this helped “stain the waters clear.”  I hope it did.

*    *    *

Now on to more fun with Gilgamesh, one of the wisest and - in the “sacred sex” scene that is the next post’s topic, also one of the most beautiful - books I’ve ever read.

Wait a minute. It just hit me.  My god, I’m about to discuss the oldest sex scene in the history of mankind.  Not a bad way to spend an evening.

It should be up in a day or two.

Please keep the comments critical, and thanks for doing that in such a friendly way in the first post.  And sorry for the length.  This was no fun to write, but I had to get it out.

–

Photo credits: Human Questions by AmberflyKezzie ; Creation Museum by rauchdickson

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. See the word as an adverb modifying “stained.” [↩]
2. They were both considered something like “bums” by the good people too - Socrates wore tatty clothes, Jesus was a homeless guy - but that’s a different story. [↩]
3. Since this crucifixion episode, by the way, has been used to justify Christian Antisemitism and the slaughter of Jews for over a thousand years, I have to add this point to keep my conscience clean: Jesus may not have been crucified at all; he may not, in fact, have ever lived at all, according to many serious scholars. (A comprehensive discussion of the evidence is laid out, among many other places, in a long chapter of The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?, by ex-minister and professor of New Testament Greek Tom Harpur, who seems to want to radically reform Christianity the way Jesus, if he did exist, wanted to radically reform Judaism.)  It’s a fascinating question for those who care to think critically about important things. If it’s true, after all, that means the Jews were framed and persecuted by the Christians for an execution that never happened, and that American voters today are electing leaders on the basis of faith in a phantom. [↩]
4. It goes deeper than this, really, since many used it as a pretext for other grudges. But the interesting thing is that this pretext still held in a court of law, and it’s what he was convicted and killed for: teaching common sense. [↩]
5. and for the record, as I’ve already said, I agree that the tone in that post is lame at times, and will work on that, and find such feedback helpful, when polite [↩]
6. My own resignation was demanded once by a pair of parents - from a long line of preachers - for including the ideas of Bishop Spong as a contemporary descendant of Martin Luther in a history unit about the Reformation. Maybe I’ll tell that full story one day. Right now, I’ll just say that my assistant principal at the time commendably held firm and told them they were free to leave. Instead, they pulled their son from my class and put him with another teacher.  No chance he think beyond his parents’ beliefs that way. [↩]

Come on in, Ned. And bring your kids.

[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]

To My Few Student Readers: Please Stay

I’m bored writing for adults these days, and most of my readers are adults. If you’re a student, can you send this link to your friends, put it on Facebook, Stumble it, etc? I want students as my audience for this series, because I want to share with you all a series of posts, beginning today and continuing for years, probably, about:

Why the Classics Only Seem to Suck

I don’t blame students who think classic literature sucks.¹

They have millions of good reasons to think that. They may, for example, have:

1. teachers who aren’t that great at reading, writing, or teaching, or
2. great teachers at not-so-great schools that are afraid to let them read the most controversial literature (almost all schools are really afraid of students and their parents), or
3. English worksheets that turn literature into anatomy tests (”Identify which phrase below is an example of onomatopoeia” and similar dentist drills), or
4. five-paragraph essays to write in which the teacher in #1 tells them that they “must not use ‘I’, must have a topic sentence in the first line of each paragraph,” and a million other rules that real writers (we just excluded most teachers there) ignore altogether, or
5. a lack of time to read the books assigned in English class, what with all the other homework (they want to have a little time of their own to just live their life, after all, to maybe read stuff they want to read - so why not just read the Sparknotes summaries?), or
6. over-their-head levels of language complexity or adult content that they really shouldn’t be expected to comprehend (language) or care about (a middle-aged housewife’s psychology) until they’re well out of high school, or
7. dry lists of words and terms to memorize for that most ultra-sucky thing of all - that thing which more and more schools and parents seem to think education is now - the S.A.T.

My Promises for This Series

I promise not to bore you with trivia or showy diction - to use “use” instead of “utilize.”  And I promise to try to give you enjoyable ideas of why, despite the pain of many English classes, this thing called literature, played with naturally, gives pleasure.  Much classic literature is wonderful.  I get more pleasure out of a used one-dollar copy of a Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde play than I do out of my $5,000 home theater.  When I want a buzz, I choose books over booze and bongs. Good literature is the best drug out there.

Added Bonus: I’ll throw in a “big picture” tour of the history of literature from the earliest story ever told - today’s post - forward through the centuries to the Greeks, the Hebrews and their Bible, the Romans, the fascinatingly whacked Middle Ages and the lovely Renaissance, the supremely dangerous Shakespeare and the often-kinky Romantics, straight on up to a few choice books from our modern times. (That’s another thing that annoys me about so many English classes I’ve had to teach: they rip all books out of their historical context, and disconnect them from their times and each other. It’s like studying butterflies pinned under glass instead of watching them fly among the flowers.)

I’ll also avoid constipated scholar-talk in favor of the conversational, occasionally dangerous style of a teacher who can tell you the truth, as he sees it, about these books without fear of being fired for ruffling the feathers of the fearful “three P’s”: parents, principals, and preachers.

Great books are often door-openings to dangerous places, places polite society fears and deems off-limits.  When those doors open in a classroom, teachers often refuse to enter.  There’s always the student who can’t handle it, who complains to one of the three P’s, and forces the conversation to remain, safe and proper, in the well-lit hallway.

Not so here where, away from school, we can touch the taboos, and experience how literature can be a threat and a danger to who we are, to how we’ve been conditioned to see life, to our culture’s status quo.

Doris Lessing really nails the connection between schools and the status quo better than I could dream of doing, so I’ll close this section with her:²

“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.” - Doris Lessing

Now here goes.

Starting at the beginning - literally: c. 3,000 BCE

Let’s start with the oldest story ever told (or at least that we have written down), the first story in the history of our species, the story whose title, tragically, will make your eyes roll and your feet head for the exit door the minute you hear it, because it’s associated with your lifetime of aversion to classroom classics.

I’m talking about Gilgamesh.

Don’t leave.

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

It’s one of the coolest books you’ll ever read.  It comes from one of the earliest cities, literally, on Earth - but it’s so alien to everything we Judeo-Christian types have been conditioned to think of as “good and evil,” “right and wrong,” that it seems a work of science fiction or fantasy more than anything else.

Really, don’t leave. You’ll miss the part about a religion that sees sex as a good and holy thing.

I’m not making this up.  Here’s the background:

Gilgamesh is the story of a Sumerian king who actually lived and ruled around 2,700 BCE. That’s almost 5,000 years ago. The city itself was a thousand years old when the story was written, so we’re talking a story from a civilization 6,000 years ago.

Stop and let that sink in.  The Bible is only half that old, with the “Old Testament” reaching its final form around 400 BCE, and the “New Testament” not being slapped together until around 330 CE (or A.D., if you’re out of touch with proper scholarly conventions).  So Gilgamesh is more than twice as old as the Bible. The Bible’s a pup compared to this story, and as I’ll argue, the Bible is less wise, in many deep and fundamental ways, than this Sumerian book as well.

Moving on:  The king’s city, Uruk, was such a walled and templed and terraced wonder that the citizens themselves were blown away by it.  Since the story is from an age close to the agricultural revolution, when we stopped wandering around as nomads and living more like herd animals than humans, we get a sense, when we read this story, that the people who wrote it are totally aware of what a cool thing they’ve accomplished by making one of the world’s first grand cities - first, do you hear?

Looking out from Uruk’s walls across the sandy plains of what is today Iraq (Uruk was not far from later Babylon and today’s Baghdad³ ), you would have seen no other cities.  Cities, to repeat, were new, and Uruk was one of the first.  When you read this story, it’s like the story-teller remembers the days before the city was invented, the days of wearing animal skins and being goat-herders or hunter-gatherers.  And you can clearly tell he loves his city all the more for the different kind of life it makes possible - the civilized life.

It’s a story, then, of humanity basically crowing its pride over creating civilization by creating that Most Needful Thing for civilization to exist at all: a city.  If someone were to have written a blurb on the back of the book back then (which he couldn’t have done because the “pages” were actually baked clay tablets stacked like bricks in the library, all covered in reed-imprinted cuneiform), he would have written something like,

Unlike our neighbors in every direction, we aren’t hunter-gatherers, goat-herding nomads, or farmers in country villages.  We’re civilized. We built a city.  And we’re damned proud of that.

Luckily, since Uruk was civilized, it had court poets instead of flag-waving idiots to tell the story a bit more gracefully, and to tweak it and revise it over a couple thousand years to make it just so.

On Sex, Good and Bad

I have to be careful about sex here, because the story itself is.

Rendering of a ziggurat in Uruk (PD-self from Wikicommons)

On the one hand, the city had temples (like the ziggurat pictured right) dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, the goddess of love, fertility, procreation, and - strangely - war. (Aphrodite is basically the Greek version of the much older Ishtar, and Venus the Roman version. You knew that.)

We’re so blind today to the seeming magic through which sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy to the creation of life from the womb of woman, that it takes a bit of imagination-work for us to appreciate how much sense it would make to pre-civilized and first-civilized humans to consider sex, pregnancy and birth, and above all women, as magical, sacred things.

That the Sumerians did consider sex sacred is clearly shown by this fact:  the temples of Ishtar were staffed with priestesses whose role was to have sex there, in the temple - whether only with the king or other elites, or with everyone, I don’t know.  These temple prostitutes were not “sinners,” were not “immoral”; they were respected every bit as much as Pastor Teds and Imam Abdullahs in churches and mosques around the world today.

And sex was not a “sin.”  It was a holy thing.  Check out “heiros gamos” on Wikipedia for the juicy (but deep) details.  (And stay tuned for my own theory, when we get to the Bible one of these days in this series, of how Ishtar and the Sumerians influenced the Jewish priests who wrote the Bible’s Genesis to make Eve such a bad character in the story, and sex - everybody’s favorite hobby, to riff off Woody Allen - such a bad, guilty act.)

So in Uruk, it may have been your duty as a good, gods-fearing citizen, to go to “church” occasionally to have sex with a temple prostitute.

In class, this point would get giggles from the immature or freak-outs from the ever-present class prudes, and the following idea would never sink in - which is sad, because it could lead to possibly deep and beautiful ideas such as this:

Think of how different it must have been, as a young person entering puberty, not to be shamed for suddenly discovering sexuality, but to instead, I imagine, be congratulated by family and society, maybe brought to “church” - the temple - to have that sexual awakening honored and instructed through some religious initiation.  To be welcomed into this magical new stage, rather than met with the silence and denial puberty is usually met with in our own culture.  “Abstinence-only” sex education would be laughed at in Sumer, and priests, parents, and schools would be comfortable with this natural thing.  There were far fewer locked doors, hidden materials, and guilt-burdened consciences for boys and girls back then, I suspect.

But it could also lead to less “beautiful” but still “deep” questions like this: For the “prostitute,” how was “temple prostitution” then different from prostitution now? Since sex wasn’t shameful then, was prostitution also not shameful?  Were the temple prostitutes abused and frowned upon the way many prostitutes are today?⁴  Or were they protected from abuse by the temple, and by the reverent treatment of those they served there - treated less like today’s “whores,” in other words, than like today’s preachers?   Since they surely thought of sex differently than we in the West do in the Judeo-Christian framework - and we inherited much of that framework whether we’re religious or not - it’s not an easy question to answer.⁵

(Do you see the “science fiction” side yet?)

But on the other hand, there was such a thing as “bad sex” in this story - and it’s what gets the plot rolling.

King Gilgamesh was a bit of a jerk when it came to sex.  Because he was king, and above the law, he had more choices than his wives or the temple prostitutes.  And the choice he made struck everyone involved - even the gods, who looked on from heaven - as really, really wrong: Gilgamesh chose to treat himself to the bed of every new bride on her wedding day - before her husband did.

So the people of the kingdom get understandably offended by this cocky king, and their complaints finally make it to the ears of the gods: the big-daddy god in particular, Anu (think Zeus and you’re close enough).

And here’s another place I think it gets deep and beautiful - but first let me take a detour to mention a couple of important things that connect to the beliefs of Jews and Christians and Muslims today.  The “deep and beautiful” stuff won’t work unless you know this.

On God, His Leadership Style, and His Fore-Fathers

First, the Gilgamesh epic is from a culture⁶ that spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and that dominated the Middle East for thousands of years before Judaism, the religion of the Bible and of Jesus, even existed.

Second, the Hebrews who first settled Israel over a thousand years after the Gilgamesh story knew this dominant culture, and included many Sumerian myths in the Bible; two well-known examples are the Six-Days’ Creation and Noah and the Flood in Genesis (the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, will be a major character by this story’s end, by the way - and will tell the original and much older Sumerian version of the Flood later adapted in Genesis). You can read the Sumerian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, yourself to see the similarities.  It’s only a few pages long.

But the differences between the Sumerian and Judeo-Christian gods are even more interesting.

The most interesting difference to me is that the Sumerian religion had male and female gods and, more importantly, that the main Sumerian “god the father” type was, like most fathers, married. It’s always seemed weird to me that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is alone, unmarried.  Zeus had Hera, the Sumerian Anu had Aruru, but Yahweh, the “God” of the Bible?⁷  No female for him.  You have to wonder why the Hebrews took the female from heaven, who did it, when, and how.  I do, anyway. But I’ll share those thoughts down the road.

The other interesting difference is in the morality - I almost want to say “leadership style” - of the two father gods. To see the difference, let’s do a thought experiment:  pretend Gilgamesh did his wife-stealing stunt in Jerusalem, that Gilgamesh was a Hebrew and his god was not Anu but Yahweh, the god of the Jews and Christians.

When that God hears that Gilgamesh is deflowering all the wives of all “His people” - “coveting” more than his neighbors’ (and subjects’) “asses” and therefore breaking one of the Ten Commandments - how do you think that God would react?

People will argue with me here, but I don’t see how they can win: that God deals with sinners, rebels, and others who disobey him with this “leadership decision”: punishment.  He’s an “angry God,” as he says himself. ⁸ It’s hard to see that God doing much but using angry force to punish Gilgamesh and make him change his ways.  Human obedience is what matters to that God, as I read him; human wisdom comes a distant second.  You want evidence?  God’s instructions for dealing with people who disobey his laws, over and over (in Deuteronomy especially), is to simply kill them. And Adam and Eve received one hell of a punishment because of their disobedience, too.

Back to the Story: “What Would Jesus Anu Do?”

But the earlier Sumerian god, Anu?  His reaction to Gilgamesh’s adulterous outrage is totally intriguing, and in my view, totally cool.  I like this god.

He doesn’t say “Punish him.”  He doesn’t say “Kill him.”  Instead, he turns to Aruru, the goddess who the Sumerians believed created humanity from earthly clay, and tells her to do it one more time.

He tells her, more interesting still, not to create any old human, but instead a special type. “Now go and create,” he tells her,

“a double for Gilgamesh, his second self,
a man who equals his strength and courage,
a man who equals his stormy heart.
Create a new hero, let them balance each other
perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.”

And so she does.

I’m going to stop here for the moment, and just share why I think Anu is a god worthy of the title.  Because by creating a “double” for Gilgamesh instead of simply killing him on the spot, he shows that to him, “sin” is a lack of wisdom.  As you’ll see, he creates this double so that Gilgamesh may have the experiences he needs to grow wiser.  I also think he’s just plain smooth for not freaking out and throwing a temper tantrum, but instead coolly coming up with this mysterious idea:

“Make a double for him. That should do the trick.”

What a wtf plot twist. Love it. Suspense accomplished.

And it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of man for a God to have: not “fallen” and in need of salvation, not infantile and in need of a list of Commandments to unthinkingly obey, not tainted by any “original sin,” but instead: capable of growing through experience, of learning and finding his own way, of finding “balance” that brings “peace.”

That “double,” by the way?  His name is Enkidu - and he’s Gilgamesh’s double in a curious and fascinating way: Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human; Enkidu, on the other hand, is - get this - two-thirds animal, one-third human. Gilgamesh is the king of civilization; Enkidu is a wild-man living naked in the wilderness, alone with no human companionship.  But this animal-man is actually innocent and good - shades of some pre-Biblical Darwinian understanding that, hello?, humans are indeed animals in the animal kingdom, and that that bit of natural obviousness is nothing to freak out about?

Before Closing:

Challenges, corrections, extensions, additions, and anything else are welcome. More on Gilgamesh soon.⁹

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

~     ~     ~

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. thanks to Tom, by the way,  whose post partly inspired this and who turned me on to that article. [↩]
2. and thanks to R. Greco for this gem [↩]
3. that’s right: the US military is occupying and bombing the earliest civilization in the Middle East, and for any of you familiar with Mosul, that’s where the clay tablets holding the Gilgamesh story were uncovered, after two thousand years of sand-buried silence, by a British guy in the late 1800s [↩]
4. And - are there prostitutes today that don’t feel ashamed, aren’t abused or frowned upon, and actually find fulfillment in their profession?  Aren’t the questions endless? [↩]
5. Thanks to the Salon.com forum that mentions this post for pointing out this angle. [↩]
6. it’s complicated: the earlier Sumerians, whose language was not related to the Semitic Hebrew and Arabic, were overthrown by other races, including the Akkadians and Babylonians, whose languages were both dialects of Semitic Assyrian, and who kept the story alive [↩]
7. Yahweh is a Hebrew name for what English-speaking Jews and Christians call “God” [↩]
8. And boy, I just opened the floodgates to a million evangelists to explain how Jesus marked a change in God’s law, a new covenant, with mercy replacing wrath, et cetera. But I’m going to side with the Jewish people on this one, for the sake of argument, and stick only to their original, non-Christian texts. The Torah above all.  I’m talking about that God as the literary character we read about in Jewish religious literature. [↩]
9. and if you decide to buy the book, be sure to buy the Mitchell translation pictured above. All the other ones I’ve seen are pretty crappy in comparison. This one’s fantastic. [↩]

In my perfect America, the evangelical radio stations choking out the dial are spreading the gospel of Science, not that of a religion of the downtrodden classes of the Roman Empire.  Yes, science has its dark side, but so do the evangelicals’ “gods.”¹  In my book, churches and laboratories are close to tied on the scoreboard of Good and Evil.²

In my perfect past, the high school English teacher in Tennessee, whom I called from Los Angeles years after graduating to share with her that I had discovered literature and declared it my major in college, would not have answered that long-distance announcement with, “But Clay, the only thing I want to know is if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior” - she would have instead answered, “But Clay, be sure to take a lot of science too. In its own way, it has as many wonders as poetry and mysteries as religion.”

In my perfect k-12 years, I would have come to admire science then the way I do now, and would have dedicated my life to becoming a scientist.  Too late for that now.

But if I’d had Doyle as a science teacher - or even been able to just read Doyle’s wonderful stories and thoughts about science - chances are strong that I would have seen that light before it was too late.

In other words, Doyle is a science teacher whose writings about that subject are addictive. Half Steinbeck, half uncle you’d always wished for, the voice and perspective just do me right. He makes his back yard, his New Jersey coast, the trees outside his classroom window come alive like only a good science-storyteller can.  Do yourself a favor and check him out.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. sorry, but I count “God” and “Jesus” as two, and Christianity as polytheism. Nobody gets the Trinity thing - not even the theologians. Which makes sense, since it doesn’t make sense. [↩]
2. Just read Deuteronomy or Revelation, or study history or current events. [↩]

Gloucester: O! let me kiss that hand!
Lear: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
–Shakespeare, King Lear, IV.vi.131-2

I don’t mean to get morbid here, it being summer and all, but I’ve been spending a good bit of time lately in the Intensive Care Unit with my mother-in-law, and the sights there of “old age, sickness, and death” are as forceful today as they were when they slammed into the mind of the young Buddha 2,600 years ago.¹

They put me in mind again of Will’s post, “My Blogging Legacy,” about how all his digital offerings may one day serve, as Will put it,  “as a piece of my brain [that] lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.”

To cut to the chase, this post is offered from that angle. It’s the first of about ten pieces that I wrote for a multiculturalism in education class I took in Mallorca, Spain about six summers ago. The professor, Dr. Tonya Huber, assigned us to select any “artifact” from our lives, write about it as a piece of our culture, and connect it to the pedagogical issues of the course. Because I love to write, because I was alone in an apartment with a balcony under soft Mediterranean moons perfect for writing, and because I was there alone with nothing to stop me from writing midnights to sunrises on that balcony, filling coffee cups and ashtrays and pages and pages (my wife was Stateside at the time), I ended up writing ten pieces that pretty much formed a skeletal autobiography.

I want to post those here, simply because I don’t write on any space but this one. (As a side-note, I wonder how many other people chafe at the pressures to “stay on topic” because they’ve somehow been pigeonholed as “edubloggers,” when really, they never signed any such contract. And maybe it would be fun for other people to spend the summer giving edu-topics a rest, and turning to personal narrative to make this ’sphere a little more, well, personal. You never know what affinities we may discover for each other as a result.)

So to steal a line from Petrarch, one of the coolest dead white males I know, consider this the first of ten “Letters to Posterity“ á la Will’s “blogging legacy” theme. Here’s clip one:

Ambivalent Apostasy

or,

Fear and Trembling at “Camp Joy”

Artifact: King James Bible

Date: August, 1972-present

From preschool to sixth grade, my maternal grandfather was my closest extended family relationship. I remember taking walks with him in my neighborhood before I was old enough to go to school—he always carried a walking stick that he would swing rhythmically in full circles as he walked, and I would pick up any old stick and imitate him as I walked beside him. He was an extremely handsome, curly-haired, square-jawed man with a glint in his blue eyes. Although I didn’t know it at the time, he had quite the womanizing past—but around the time I was born, he was rendered impotent by testicular cancer.

Apparently this was the trigger for his conversion from womanizing to proselytizing: he converted to the Southern Baptist faith and became a fervid evangelist to all, including me, his grandson. Visits to his house always found him with the Bible in his lap—he read two chapters a day, and claimed he’d read it through in its entirety several times. I remember one visit when I was apparently, in his eyes, overdue for a haircut. He opened the Book in his lap to chapter and verse which spelled out in no uncertain terms the absolute wrongness of a man (and boy) wearing long, womanly hair. The message was clear: get a haircut to be right with God.

So my Tennessee upbringing included in its macroculture the evangelical perspective. It didn’t require that my family regularly attend church—mine didn’t—for me to be gripped, one evening when I was maybe five years old, with such terror that I tore down the stairs from my bedroom to my parents’ bedroom and leapt sobbing into their bed. When they asked why I was so upset, I told them that I knew that I would go to heaven, but they would go to hell, and I would never see them again through all eternity.

At any rate, when I was 11 years old, my grandfather persuaded my parents to enroll me in the largest Southern Baptist summer camp in the American southeast: “Camp Joy.” Each night, the 400-odd campers, pubescent boys all, were herded into an outdoor revival tent, captive audiences for a sermon that fed us such vivid images of the sufferings of eternal hell that, when the call to come forward and be saved was issued, I was among the first to answer (again, that pubescent bit is key: what healthy 11-year-old boy isn’t guilty of epic “self-abuse” on the scale of Solomon, but without, unfortunately to the lad, Solomon’s thousand concubines?). I came forward, almost trotting, as all closed their eyes in prayer, was taken outside by a camp counselor, and instructed to repeat the magic formula that would save me from the torments the speaker had taken such trouble to invent for us. Tears streaming, I sputtered the formula in total fear and trembling, and was told by the counselor that I was saved.

I went back to my cabin that night and compared notes with another boy in my group, Lance, who was also saved. We both noted that we felt different since accepting the Lord in our hearts.

Later that week, all who had come forward were baptized. After the baptism ceremony (the baptismal water of which was suspected as the cause of a severe case of empitigo, a breaking out of scabs on my face and body, the week after camp, which is the best rorschach scene for medievalism - “It was demons leaving him!” - or modernism - “Didn’t they use chlorine in that tub?” - that I can imagine), awards were given for “Camper of the Week.” After announcing the second and first runners-up, they announced the winner.

Though they mispronounced my last name, I realized I had won. They awarded me with this Bible, inscribed with my (misspelled) name. Looking back on it now, I think I won because a) I ran fastest to the altar; b) When converting, I cried more than the other boys; and c) I was a real goody-goody at that age.

On the last day of camp, some Southern Baptist radio station - the biggest in the Southeast, I was told - interviewed the two “runners-up” and me, in that order, beauty pageant-like. The second and first runners-up, when asked about the experience at Camp Joy, answered in ways any healthy boy would: “Oh, it was great! I rode horses, played baseball, shot bow-and-arrow, made lots of new friends,” etc.  I picture my father at home nodding his approval as he listened.

Then it was my turn.

My voice was always deep, even as a child, and slow. Call it a drone (massive doses of caffeine became my remedy for that in recent years). So when asked the same question, drone I did:  “Well, I wuz saaaved, and I took the Looord into mah heaart, ‘n’ I wuz Baaa-ptiiized….”  I’ve always pictured my dad, the sports buff and former football coach, dropping his head and shaking it back and forth slowly, wondering what his father-in-law had done to his boy; I would have done so if I were him. But he was a good sport and never mentioned anything. (My grandfather died shortly after that, in true Faulknerian fashion, of a self-inflicted shot to the chest from a 12-gauge shotgun, and so, thus, did his influence upon my development. For a brief spell I pictured him watching me from heaven behind my locked bedroom door, an uncomfortable experience that soon, thankfully, passed as well.)

I took this Bible home and read it cover to cover in the summer between sixth and seventh grade. Since it’s a crazy-quilt of tracts cobbled together for the Roman emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea three entire centuries after the life of Jesus (if indeed he was an historical character at all, which scholars debate), and without any sort of editors’ introduction to tie all those chapters together so the reader knows what the heck it’s all about, it’s not something I’d recommend anybody try.

When I reached adolescence shortly after, in my junior high years, my circle of friends and I started experimenting with what I’ll euphemistically call “expansive thinking.” One conversation we had concerned what our reactions, as a planet, would be if Martians were to come to earth and reveal to us their divine revelations in a book entirely devoid of God, Jesus, and all that we ‘knew.’ This and similar conversations (not to mention the tendency I noted of my Christian community to justify hateful treatment of certain groups by virtue of Biblical authority) shortly led to my disavowal of Christianity.  Call it my hillbilly Rastafarian stage.

In my twenties and thirties, I would develop an interest in world religions and out of philosophical interest read the Bible again, as well as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and other key theologians. But I never considered rejoining the Christian faith.

Then a funny thing happened. I was forty years old and living in China, and my then-wife and I were in the States sifting through my library to decide what books to donate to Goodwill, and which to ship (at exorbitant cost) to China. I put the prize Bible from Camp Joy in the “donate” stack, but my wife, though not a Christian herself, urged me to keep it because it was “part of my story.” So I kept it.

I only kept a few other books. Most of them, it turns out, are in the Christian tradition: William Blake’s poetry and etchings and John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions particularly.

Why would Christian works still loom so large in my preferred reading, when there was little chance of me ever returning to the faith? First, I think it reflects my discomfort with living a life completely devoid of a routine and communal spiritual/moral focus. Though I cannot rationally (or, after reading Deuteronomy and Joshua, among other books, morally) accept the tenets of Christianity, I am at the same time uncomfortable with the alternative of having no spiritual community or fellowship at all. I still desire the inclusion in the structure of my life of regular, communal reflection on spiritual matters—the weekly church meeting on Sundays structure is very appealing to me. My rejection of Christianity unfortunately means, in American culture, that there are few if any substitutes to replace it. Consumerism and hedonism do not fill this vacuum—and unfortunately, the one satisfying alternative I have found, Unitarian Universalism, does not exist in Shanghai.

Second, the Bible is ironically a source of the concern for social justice that infuses the radical elements of progressive society. As such, I won’t categorically condemn its followers. I prefer the company and the agency of many good-hearted Christians I have known to that of many non-Christians I have known, while I have also known many non-Christians who are better practicing “Christians” than professing ones. I also note the incremental gains made for multiculturalism and tolerance within its tradition: a case in point is the recent nomination for arch-deacon of an openly gay cleric in the Anglican Church.

Third, my experience of apostasy turns out to be part and parcel of the cultural script of “Aggregate Individualism,” in which “individuals are strongly encouraged to separate from their ascribed relationships such as family, relatives, community, and religion” (Choi, 234).  Would I have been better off never to have encountered evangelical Christianity? Though the full answer to this would be “in many ways, yes, and in many ways, no,” I think that the engagement with moral and religious questions this experience gave me prepared me for later, culturally-transcendent explorations of non-Western religions—above all, Buddhism, Taoism, and the Native American Sun-Dance and Peyote religions. While I may regret the monolithic hold of Christianity on the environment of my childhood, and wish that Buddhism or any number of naturalistic spiritualities had captured me first, Christianity nonetheless allowed me to cut my teeth on it, and developmentally wrestle with its doctrine and its paradigm. I would be spiritually skinnier without that encounter.

Related to this is the issue of the value of Aggregate Individualism itself. We Westerners—including, perhaps especially, the intellectuals—pride ourselves on transcending and leaving behind our “families, relatives, community, and religion” (Choi). Such accomplishments would be frowned upon by collective cultures. There is a curious irony in the fact that the Western intellectuals of the classic Aggregate Individualistic pattern very often valorize the ‘relational,’ culturally-conservative collectivism of ‘other’ cultures — cultures that would never dream of approving of individual separation from culturally sanctioned affiliations with traditional familial, communal, and (religious-) institutional structures. Culturally atomized, we very often valorize cultural conformity—toward non-Western cultures, at any rate. I only observe this irony…I don’t know what to make of it.

So how is this relevant to culturally responsible pedagogy? It makes me aware that I should respect “even” the Christian roads that my students may be traveling, and strive to communicate with them in terms of their own scripts, rather than condescendingly “tutoring” them from my own. Whether they renounce or affirm their faith is immaterial to the real issue, which is whether they become conscious shapers of their scripts toward their fellow human beings. In the final analysis, we can’t wish Christianity away. Pragmatically, the best we can do is to try to foster a critical and reformist impulse toward it—and within it.

—

References: Kim, Uichol and Choi, Soo-Hyang: “Individualism, Collectivism, and Child Development: A Korean Perspective,” Cross-cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, Patricia Marks Greenfield, Rodney R. Cocking.

—

¹Speaking of the Buddha, here’s a clip from the BBC’s The Life of the Buddha that I’ve used in Asian history classes. It’s brilliant, and my students loved it. You’ll see why in this segment, in which Gatauma, under the Bo Tree, faces the twin “demons” of Fear and Desire and, with some wicked good special effects, vanquishes them both to attain Englightenment.  I made a viewing guide that I’ll share with anybody who’s interested in using it in their classes. The whole show is available here:

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)