The reading of Gilgamesh that anchored my compassion for the West
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The following is a paper written for Dr. Elden Golden’s doctoral seminar at the Union Institute & University on 2/13/13
Reflections on Gilgamesh
I have been befuddled by my utterly emotional response to The Epic of Gilgamesh. I have concluded that my reaction is tied to Hope Nash’s Wolff observation of there being three core deaths that anchor the epic in “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Heroic Life.” Wolff identifies these moments as: 1) Enkidu’s loss of connection with the animal world after he lays with Shamhat the priestess from the temple of Ishtar; 2) Enkidu’s death; and 3) Gilgamesh’s own failure to be sleepless (398). Wolff’s reading has helped me understand that my reaction has been a deep sense of sadness, which is the recognition of the depth of the loss of the wild element in us, of the loss of connection to the part of ourselves that links us to the world outside of verbal language, and of the loss of a sense of magic or connection to the divine.
These are all Dyonisian elements that are sorely lacking in contemporary culture. My sadness recognizes that their loss predates even the vanquishing of the Americas and that it is tied to the very beginnings of the building of walls. I am left to wonder if there is any hope at all of regaining our hearts as a culture or if that nostalgic angst is now simply a perpetual pang etched into the expression of the human psyche. What is evident is that this sense of loss is operating beneath the place of consciousness and is archetypal in nature. As such, the way it operates and lands on the soul and the body transcends the realm of verbal language and simply appears in my emotional landscape. Like a newly discovered peak that suddenly appears, it looms over the horizon of my emotional world and can no longer be ignored.
In thinking about how archetypal knowledge operates in the subconscious realm, I cannot help but think that biologist Humberto Maturana-Romesín says that human consciousness arises as a result of the following conditions: 1) life in pods or small groups; 2) organized around the females; 3) for the purpose of gathering and sharing food; and 4) for the purpose of experiencing intimacy. While reflecting about these four conditions, it strikes me that these are exactly the types of conditions that can give rise to a Dyonisian culture. If we consider that Enkidu is a metaphor for the Dyonisian, the Enkidu’s emergence into his full humanity illustrates the elements of Dyonisian culture. Enkidu moves from cohabitating with a pack of animals to becoming part of humanity. Enkidu acquires his human consciousness through his week-long sexual exchange with Shamhat. He gathers and shares food with other humans. Lastly, he encounters intimacy in his relationship with both Shamhat and Gilgamesh that directs his every action throughout the epic even unto death.
Enkidu and Shamhat’s weeklong foray’s graphic description serves to illustrate humanity’s organization around female pleasure and around the experience of pleasure in the female. Shamhat is aware of her desire for Enkidu and proceeds to make herself available to him by showing him her desire for sexual intercourse with him.
The man was huge and beautiful. Deep in Shamhat’s loins desire stirred. Her breath quickened as she stared at this primordial being...
She stripped off her robe and lay there naked, with her legs apart, touching herself. Enkidu saw her and warily approached. He sniffed 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. (78)
Enkidu, unaware of desire in general, finds himself completely drawn to Shamhat. Neither demonstrates any sense of shame or resistance to their desire to experience pleasure with and in the other. Shamhat is a woman that is fully in her body. She was able to experience desire and it was this desire that led the way to Enkidu’s emergence as a full human being. The experience of this type of desire demarcates his belonging to the human species and not to the rest of the natural world. Pleasure is a gateway to humanness. The story of Enkidu’s humanization (78-86) highlights what in the old Babylonian world constituted the core aspects of humanness. By carefully reading each of the described activities in which Enkidu engaged, I was reminded of those moments in my life when I feel the most alive. It is this sense of aliveness, of the full experience of sensation and connection, that I believe I experience the fullness of my own humanity.
The experience of pleasure itself is an initiation into the human realm. Shamhat as priestess is a vehicle for the emergence of human consciousness through the experience of pleasure and love. And it should not be ignored here either that sex also engenders new generations of humans. Pleasure then is a driver of the emergence of human consciousness as well as new humans. Pleasure drives our biological and cognitive evolution. Maturana asserts that our biology is a biology of love. In other words, our evolutionary trajectory has been driven largely by love, by the experience of pleasure, and by what he calls the pleasure of well-being. Maturana and Gerda Verden-Zöller, explain in The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love:
We modern humans are sensual and tender animals. We caress each other, we enjoy body nearness and contact. Caresses evoke in us physiological well-being. We caress each other not only with actual touches, but also with words, with the tone of our voices, with our regard, or with what we do. All these caresses evoke in us physiological changes that constitute well-being. In us the hand is, so to speak, a caressing organ, and the touch of the hand is physiologically healing. But not only that, we enjoy all sensorial dimensions as sources of pleasure and well-being, as features of what can be called the aesthetics of living.
We do not know how our ancestors behaved, but we can assume that as primates who possessed a caressing hand...they were also sensual and tender animals that, like us, lived in the conservation of the relational configurations of caresses and mutual care in both adulthood and youth. (61)
For Maturana and Verden-Zöller, the pleasure of well-being is the experience of our full humanity. The pleasure of well-being is the sense of living in accordance to our biological mandate, which is love.
We are saying that we think the fundament of human living is love, and that cooperation in humans arises through the pleasure of doing things together in mutual trust, not through the manipulation of relations. We do not say that love is the only emotion under which we human beings live. Of course not. Certainly, we human beings flow or can flow in our emotioning through all the emotional dimensions that we can live. But we claim that it can be argued biologically that we are the kind of beings that we are because love has been the emotion that has grounded the course of the evolutionary history that gave origin to us. (51)
In this manner, Enkidu and Shamhat’s relationship serve as a metaphor that encapsulates millions of years of human evolutionary processes rooted in the organization of human consciousness around the pleasure of well-being and the enactment of love-based evolution. Maturana and Verden-Zöller recognize that dynamics of domination and submission are also powerful drivers of human action and that to some extent domination and submission are powerful human traits. They differentiate love as a biological driver of our evolution, while they understand domination and submission to be political ones.
We think that even though we modern human beings live greatly immersed in the dynamics of domination and submission, that is, in political struggle, we are not political animals. Indeed, we claim that human beings belong to an evolutionary history in which daily life was centered on cooperation and not on domination and submission. In other words, we claim that we human beings are not political animals because we belong to an evolutionary history in which the basic emotion or mood was love and not competition and aggression. This is a biological claim, not a philosophical one. (50)
After his experience with Shamhat, Enkidu is led into the life of community. Shamhat takes him to meet the shepherds. There, he is admired and fed.
They led him to their table, they put bread and beer in front of him. Enkidu sat and stared. He had never seen human food, he didn’t know what to do. Then Shamhat said, “Go ahead, Enkidu. This is food, we humans eat and drink this.” Warily he tasted the bread. Then he ate a piece, he ate a whole loaf, then ate another, he ate until he was full, drank seven pitchers of the beer, his heart grew light, his face glowed, and he sang out with joy. He had his hair cut, he washed, he rubbed sweet oil into his skin and became fully human. (85-6)
Enkidu then proceeded to cooperate with the shepherds. “When the shepherds lay down, Enkidu went out with sword and spear. He chased off lions and wolves, all night he guarded the flocks, he stayed awake and guarded them while the shepherds slept” (86). Maturana and Verden-Zöller identify that cooperation is the enactment of the biology of love. They define cooperation as “doing things together in love, in trust and mutual acceptance, in the pleasure of the doing together” (72). Enkidu’s life therefore was organized in a small group (the shepherds), around a female (Shamhat), for the purposes of gathering and sharing food (shepherding and eating and drinking), and intimacy (lovemaking with Shamhat). He lived a fully human life that is until he met Gilgamesh.
Enkidu’s foray into the politics of domination and submission begins when he encounters Gilgamesh, who is a metaphor of humanity’s political processes. Enkidu hears of Gilgamesh’s domination over all the grooms and brides of the kingdom when a man comes by the place where he is busy making love to Shamhat. He hears about a wedding that is taking place and of how the bride must wait for Gilgamesh on the marriage bed. “It is he who mates first with the lawful wife. After he is done, the bridegroom follows. This is the order that the gods have decreed. From the moment the king’s birth-cord was cut, every girl’s hymen has belonged to him” (87). Enkidu proceeds to look for and wait for Gilgamesh to arrive at the wedding and challenges him. Enkidu then overpowers Gilgamesh and proceeds to forego his right to make Gilgamesh submissive. Instead, Enkidu names Gilgamesh’s gifts as a way to befriend him.
“Gilgamesh, you are unique among humans. Your mother, the goddess Ninsun, made you stronger and braver than any mortal, and rightly has Enlil granted you the kingship, since you are destined to rule over men.” They embraced and kissed. They held hands like brothers. They walked side by side. They became true friends. (89)
Enkidu modeled the politics of cooperation engendered by a biology of love.
Enkidu follows Gilgamesh in his journey for domination of the natural world and of the divine. Enkidu crosses a line that warrants his death when he defies the will of the gods when urging Gilgamesh to kill Humbaba. The advent of Humbaba’s curse (127) brings with it Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s “inconsolable” grief. This terrible outcome is foreshadowed by Gilgamesh’s five ascents to the mountaintops (105, 107, 109, 111, 114) where he engages in ritual with Enkidu as his guardian and guide and has dreams that Humbaba will bring despair and loss to their lives. Enkidu interprets the dreams for Gilgamesh, a role that establishes him as a type of gatekeeper between the ordered world from which Gilgamesh emerges and Enkidu’s own transcendent realm and by this I mean that Enkidu’s role transcends what is the apparent finality of the reality of both of their embodied lives. He has transcended the purely physical realm and by virtue of his experience also cements the role of spirituality and ritual in the expression of that which is genuinely human.
When Enkidu died, I experienced the deep grief of his loss, a sadness that perhaps the full experience of one’s humanity only leads to nothingness. I grieved along Gilgamesh and set about my own sojourn hoping all along that perhaps he would arrive at a different understanding than the one that loomed over my own horizon. Wolff acknowledges that the epic illustrates the existence of a core triumvirate that makes us who we are: animal, human, and god. She says that, “in the epic, formed as it is of mythological sources, animal merges with man, and god with animal; and these combinations sometimes reverse direction or exchange terms.” (394)
I experienced a full engagement with Enkidu’s description as half animal half man and then his eventual disclosure as a spiritual and ceremonial medicine man. I believe that this is so because I fundamentally recognize each of those roles in my own life. The animal me, the human me, the divine me straggles back and forth in the daily throes of my modern life. There are aspects of each of those parts of me that are unrecognized and isolated in our culture. How they relate to each other often changes and surprises me. Learning to understand these parts of me has been a lifelong journey with little guidance in this individualistic culture. However, while reading Gilgamesh, I was comforted that those parts of me showed up as parts of Enkidu and as parts of Gilgamesh; that they were anchored as core aspects of that which makes us human millennia ago and in our earliest literary work no less. I think this is what makes this epic so particularly compelling and heartbreaking for me.
I believe Gilgamesh’s long grief points to the emergence of a humanity that desperately is trying to stabilize the chaotic and unpredictable dynamics of the animal-human-god triumvirate. In seeking a full resolution to both his sense of loss and fear of death, Gilgamesh carves a pathway towards the Apollonian. His uncanny search for relief and freedom ends in his acceptance of his role as king of the realm within the walls. There, the king can choose and control whether he is human or god, the animal (embodied in the Humbaba character) is dead and the appeal to the inherent instability in the triumvirate died along with Enkidu. The world Gilgamesh chooses is one that is bound by the physicality of death, that is cut off from the divine, and that rests on the production and control of what is purely not animal nor god. Wolff describes Gilgamesh’s last stance as that of a “man who accepts the defeat of his hopes [and who] makes no more attempts to close the gap between man and god. His spirit is suddenly that of an elder of Uruk, and he returns to the city, apparently content merely to be its king.” (398)
The Epic of Gilgamesh can therefore be seen as the telling of the defeat of humanity by the animal and divine realms. According to this story, we have been put in our place by the vastness and unpredictability of the world and have been destined to inhabit the linear expanse of time between birth and death. Our cities are our kingdoms because they exist within the landscape that is made possible by our limited physical, cognitive, and emotional prowess. Acceptance is our only option. Thus, my sadness, that even then, millennia ago, the seeds of our very destruction show themselves in this epic. I have to ask whether we even have to make a choice. Why not stay in the discomfort of the instability of the ever-changing relationships between our animal, human, and divine selves? Has our experiment in fact worked? Are we any more or less human now that we have created a world where neither the animal nor the divine can penetrate the walls of our materialistic and individualistic ways of understanding?
I am driven to imagine what a society full of Enkidus and Shamhats might look like. Surely, there would be no walls. Our lives would be organized around our groups of choice, around the women, and we would share all the things that sustain and please us. Pleasure would be the primordial emotional space we inhabit. Such are the characteristics of the Dyonisian, apparently the type of biological process that saw us be born into this iteration of humanity that we embody. Maturana and Verden-Zöller state that “...we humans are cooperative animals dependent on love at all ages” (54). As such, it seems that the Dyonisian is better suited to the sustenance of life and of humanity. It is Enkidu, after all that serves as the illustration of the ideal human being, one that loves, cooperates, and freely engages in the experience of pleasure. I believe it is possible to reconstitute our selves in this manner despite the politics of domination and submission engendered by the Apollonian. We may need to face the very real possibility of our own demise in order to return to ourselves. However, I believe the way back is mapped out in our very DNA, through the enactment of our deepest yearnings and desires, not by shutting those down and pretending they do not exist. We ought to invite the animal and the divine to fully come online, to reconstitute us and so that we can experience our full human expression, that of animal/human/divine beings around whom the universe organizes.
Works cited
Maturana, Humberto R. “The End of Leadership.” Matríztica Institute, Quincy, Massachusetts. 4 April. 2008. Lecture.
Rowesin, Humberto M., Verden-Zöller, Gerda, et al . “The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love.” Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008. Print.
Mitchell, Stephen. “Gilgamesh.” New York, NY: Free Press, 2004. iBook.
Wolff, Hope Nash. “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Heroic Life.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 89.2 (1969): 392-398.
