Beyond School

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

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

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

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

~     ~     ~

Death, Consolation, and the Problem of Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before closing this installment, a couple more observations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Gilgamesh wants to kill him.

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

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

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

And it’s just the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ ~ ~

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

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

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

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

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. this post ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards]¹

~     ~     ~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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]

~     ~     ~

So there I was: caught, before all my new 14-year-old students’ eyes, with Enkidu’s pants down - and his mythic Sumerian wee-wee in hoo-hoos I knew nothing of.¹ And because so many of these Korean kids were evangelically Americanized, I wondered if it would cost me my job.

When we would come to Genesis later in the semester, I knew I’d be walking the netless tightrope over the heads of the many 14-year-olds who had predictably swallowed whole, since before their first teeth, their literalist childhood teachings about Adam, Eve, and the Six Days’ Creation.

But I had no idea I’d be dealing now, in tender Week Three of their high school careers, with this whopper of a sex scene between Shamhat, the temple prostitute, and Enkidu, the innocent, half-neanderthal and half-Adam “wild man” - and his jaw-dropping seven days’ erection: ²

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.³

Again, in the schooly translation I read when I was in high school, somebody had forgotten to include that part.

But the alley cats were out of the bag. Since we were all reading this translation for the first time together that night, half of my students were surely at that very moment in pop-eyed sync with me, “wtf?”-ing their margins and asking the same questions:

Would the “good people” students tell their parents? Were those parents emailing or calling the principal at the very moment we were all sitting there gawking at these lines? Tomorrow, when the monster lumbered into the school-building to corrupt their young, would a mob of torch-bearing parents send this poor, misunderstood Frankenfreak to his tragic end?

"Help! It's that English teacher!"

All that monster wanted was to give their kids the deepest, most relevant, coherent, and beautiful year of literary studies they would ever receive. And now, because of an unexpectedly graphic scene about what birds, bees, and each of these parents do - or did, at least once, when they made the shiny-eyed wonders brightening my classroom - would it all come down in flames?⁴

And would they make allowances for the fact that I first found the book in the school library? If I went down, should I bring the librarian with me? (Joking. Joking.)

I was jealous, suddenly, of math teachers. They never had problems like this.

But there was nothing to be done, for now, but finish the homework by finishing Book One. In the end, I realized, it all depended on whether these three-week-old high schoolers could handle it. I couldn’t wait to check the chapter annotations I’d assigned.

I finished the chapter and went to sleep.

The Next Day

“Beautiful.”

“Profound.”

“Deep.”

“Lovely.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. All the students’ annotations sang this section’s praises. Not a single immature reaction.

I was so proud of them. And I was saved.

The class discussion was even better.

“It’s a different culture, so it’s not surprising that sex would be treated with a different outlook,” said one.

Answered another: “The sex scene itself is wonderful for its simple narration of the events we study in biology - the voice is so objective, it’s almost scientific.”

A third: “And that shows how radically different this culture saw sexuality. It’s just another thing in life, described as simply as the weather, or a flower, or a beautiful sunset. It’s not pornographic or anything. It’s just part of life.”

A fourth: “But it’s more than that.”

“Explain that,” I said. “What do you mean?”

This student went on to give the most perfect explication of what happens after the sex scene, and what a deep, beautiful, mysterious, and alien point of view the world’s earliest civilization had, 2,000 years before King David and 3,000 years before Jesus, about the meaning of sexuality.

Before Shamhat

Shades of Shamhat?

“Look at what happens to Enkidu after the sex scene,” he said, “and compare it to who he was before it.

“Before it, Enkidu was this weird wild man, created by the goddess Aruru - in exactly the same way, by the way, that the later god of Genesis created Adam - from clay - which makes me wonder if this isn’t another Judeo-Christian-Islamic borrowing from the older Sumerian/Babylonian culture.

“He was ‘one-third man, two-thirds animal,’ remember: the perfect ‘double,’ just as the god Anu ordered, for the ‘one-third man, two-thirds divine‘ Gilgamesh. And I mean ‘perfect’ in the ‘balancing’ sense too. Remember, Anu said Gilgamesh’s ‘double’ should ‘balance’ him - to bring ‘peace’ to Uruk by making Gilgamesh stop snatching all the new brides from his subjects’ beds.

“But the ‘balancing’ doesn’t stop there,” he continued. “It gets deeper.”

“How?” asked another.

“Setting, basically. Gilgamesh is the king of the first city in the world, and he knows that and is proud of it. He’s proud of civilization.  I would argue he sort of symbolizes it.

“But the setting associated with Enkidu?  ‘Wilderness’ - Nature. Enkidu drinks with gazelles at watering holes, runs with them (and as fast as them), and knows nothing, literally, about cities and civilized humankind.

“So Enkidu ‘balances’ Gilgamesh by symbolizing Nature - the opposite of the city, and its civilization, which literally has a wall to keep Nature out.

“But it gets deeper still, this ‘balance.’ Because contrary to what we’d expect, ‘civilized’ Gilgamesh is not superior to ‘wild and natural’ Enkidu. We see that because Enkidu saves the other animals from the ‘civilized’ hunter’s traps. He’s compassionate, this natural man. And he’s innocent. Gilgamesh, though, is screwing the brides of every groom in town. The civilized king is glorious, yes - he built Uruk’s walls and is semi-divine, after all - but he’s also really flawed by his heartlessness. Enkidu ‘balances’ this, too.

“Finally,” he continued, “Enkidu ‘balances’ Gilgamesh in his physical strength. It’s like Achilles and Hector in the Iliad - perfectly matched superhero types. So that’s it: Aruru did a bang-up job of creating exactly what Anu ordered - a ‘balancing double’ to Gilgamesh.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Who was this kid? I had to break in: “Did you steal my annotations?” I asked. “Who are you? I haven’t memorized all of your names yet.”

“Not now, Mr. B.,” he said. “I’m on a roll. Don’t interrupt. I’ve only covered the ‘before Shamhat’ Enkidu. I want to get to the ‘after Shamhat’ stuff now.”

Could I adopt this kid? Buy him from his parents? He was too good to believe.

“Wow. My apologies. Go for it.”

After Shamhat

“I’ll keep it short. It’s this: Gilgamesh’s mysterious ’solution’ to the ‘problem’ of the wild man worked brilliantly - though I don’t quite get why. Sex with this prostitute from the goddess Ishtar’s temple transforms Enkidu. And it does it in clear stages. I numbered them when I annotated.

“First, this sacred sex lifted him above the other animals that he used to hang out with. He doesn’t realize it - this is the weird thing - but the other animals do. They all run away from him when he tries to rejoin them at the watering hole.

“It’s mysterious, for sure,” he said, while I fought back exultations over this kid’s genius. “But the best guess I can give is this: All animals have sex, so it can’t be the simple sex that makes the other animals realize he’s no longer like them. So the only thing I can figure is that the poet is trying to say that sex seen as a holy thing - initiation into Ishtar’s mysteries, maybe? - is what separates man from animal. Seen this way, it’s not a brute act with Shamhat.

“And did you notice,” he went on, “that thing where Enkidu tries to run after the fleeing animals - before Shamhat, he was as fast as them, remember - but now he can’t catch up with them? Where is it . . . . yeah, here:

He tried to catch up
but his body was exhausted, his life-force was spent,
his knees trembled, he could no longer run
like an animal [he emphasized this line], as he had before.

–doesn’t that remind you of the story of Samson and Delilah in the Bible? It did me. I tell you, Mr. B., you’re right about that one. You see a million things in Gilgamesh that you thought were unique to the Bible. My preacher says the Bible is ‘the word of God.’ Well if that’s true, God sure seemed to plagiarize a lot from the Sumerians and Babylonians.

“But he also reverses them. Because in the Bible, Delilah is bad for Samson, while in Gilgamesh, Shamhat is good for Enkidu.”

“I never thought of that,” said another. “I think I see what you’re saying.”

“Yeah. It’s all there. The next thing that happens because of Shamhat is deeper still: Enkidu realizes - where is it -

‘his mind had somehow grown larger.
He knew things now that an animal can’t know.’

“So what are these things he ‘knew’? It doesn’t say. But it reminds me of the scene in Genesis where Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and it doesn’t tell us what they learned either. All it does is show us that they covered their private parts.

“But here, they don’t cover anything, and no god gets angry. Instead, Enkidu just keeps transforming. Since the bell’s about to ring, I’ll rush: the next thing he learns sitting ‘at Shamhat’s feet’ is language and communication:

‘He understood all the words she was speaking to him.’

“And man, those words were interesting:

‘Now, Enkidu, you know what it is
to be with a woman, to unite with her.
You are beautiful, you are like a god.’

“‘You are like a god‘” he repeated. “So what’s happening here? Gilgamesh is ‘two-thirds god,’ remember. Is it okay, Mr. B., to read into this that sex with Shamhat maybe makes Enkidu less of a ‘balance’ to Gilgamesh now?”

“It’s okay to read anything you want into it, as long as you can justify your interpretation with good evidence. And you’re doing fine so far.”

“Because I was thinking that again, it was Gilgamesh that sent Shamhat in the first place. He wants to bring Enkidu over to his ‘civilized’ side. And it seems like it worked.”

“How?”

“Because the next thing that happens is that Shamhat tells Enkidu that he should not ‘roam the wilderness and live like an animal,’ but should instead come with her to Uruk, to Ishtar’s temple, and to Gilgamesh’s palace. And he goes. Because of Shamhat, a temple prostitute, Enkidu is no longer an animal. He’s closer to the gods now; and because of Shamhat, Enkidu is about to become civilized.

“And that’s like Adam and Eve upside-down and inside-out.”

Bizarro-World

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s obvious,” he said. “Eve seduced Adam and the result was God’s curse. Shamhat seduced Enkidu and the result was Ishtar’s blessings of godliness and civilization for Enkidu.”

“Strictly speaking, weren’t Adam and Eve cursed for disobeying their God?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s still pretty opposite. After all, the gods here aren’t giving any orders at all - the absence of orders is the opposite of their presence, right? - and the result of the seduction is a blessing, the opposite of a curse.”

“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see what happens. It’s been ten years at least since I read this story, remember - and I’ve never read this version, either. I’ve forgotten most of it. So I’m as clueless as you about what will happen next.”

“There’s just one thing I wanted to ask, though,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“The plot’s really weird. The gods create Enkidu to make Gilgamesh change his ways.  But now, instead, we see Enkidu changing, not Gilgamesh. What’s going on?”

“It’s a mystery to me, too. We’ll see. But you left one thing out.”

“What?”

“You didn’t mention the last way that Enkidu changed: when Shamhat described Gilgamesh to him, isn’t his reaction confusing? The narrator tells us Enkidu ‘felt‘ something ‘deep in his heart . . . . the longing for a true friend.’ So that’s one more point for your theory that Shamhat civilizes him - he wants to escape his solitude and join human society, enjoy friendship.

“Again, that’s what he felt. But what he says is totally unexpected:

‘Take me with you
to . . . the palace of Gilgamesh the mighty king.
I will challenge him. I will shout to his face:
I am the mightiest! I am the man
who can make the world tremble. I am supreme!’

“Those hardly sound like words of friendship to me,” I said. “So maybe the gods’ plan for Gilgamesh is not as off-track as it seems.”

End of Class

The bell rang.  I turned off the alarm, and rose to get ready for work. An interesting bit of fantasy that was. “Too good to believe” indeed? I could only hope. I’d find out after the shower and drive to work.

~     ~     ~

Just kidding. I wouldn’t pull that on you. Here’s the real story:

Most of the annotations from the girls in the class were minor variations on: “ewwwww.” Sometimes three w’s, sometimes ten.

The boys? Smiley faces in the margins.

I wonder if those gender reactions for this age group are cross-culturally similar, or different. And I don’t know.

I imagine I tried to elicit discussions like the points made by the dream student above.

When I explained to them that I was as shocked as they were to read the scene, and was afraid they wouldn’t be able to handle it, they all assured me it was unexpected, yes, but nothing they hadn’t seen before online, on TV, in the movies.

“But it was weird to see it in English class.”

Next episodes: 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards

~     ~     ~

Can You Take a Minute?

If anybody has made it this far, I’d appreciate feedback on the three approaches I’ve tried so far in this Gilgamesh series. Number One was straight lecture style; Number Two was told as a “teacher story,” but in the second-person “you” point of view - I wondered if that would make the experience more immediate for readers, but also feared it might get old, especially if I continued it for months. This one was still a “teacher story,” but told in first person, with heavy Socratic dialogue.

If any of you care to share which of the three you think I should stick with, I’d be very appreciative.

Photos:
Belly-Dancer by macwagen
Bizarro World © DC Comics,
used under Fair Use Law

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

1. I stole this “wee-wee/hoo-hoo” line from Bill Maher’s brilliant “New Rules” rant about how American Puritanism silenced John Edwards, the most important voice for the poor “since Robert Kennedy,” per Maher. It’s very relevant to the discussions we’re having in this series. [↩]
2. And did I later joke in class, “This guy’s a walking Viagra commercial”? Or, “And you thought the Six Days’ Creation was impressive”? Or, “Talk about needing a rest on the seventh day”?  I don’t remember. But if asked, please say that I did. [↩]
3. all excerpts taken from Stephen Mitchell’s admirable 2004 translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
4. If you think I’m exaggerating, check out this and this from readers who have seen it happen to other teachers. [↩]

[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 [↩]