Gilgamesh: The Way It Is
With Friends
Feraco
Myth to Science Fiction
7 October 2014
The epic spares no time in
moving from triumph to tragedy.
Once Gilgamesh and Enkidu
defeat Humbaba and return,
triumphant, to Uruk, Ishtar
appears.
She is the goddess of sex, love,
fertility – and war.
The seeming contradiction in
those roles merely serves to
highlight the violence at the heart
of powerful love.
While she pops up without
preamble, it’s worth noting that
Ishtar has a larger role in the entire
epic than in Mason’s verse
narrative.
Yet even with her abrupt
entrance, her motive is clear:
Gilgamesh has won glory, and in
changing into his kingly attire
appears even more beautiful than
before.
She’s easily drawn to new things,
as well as to power, and (as a
goddess) is accustomed to getting
her way.
But no sooner does Ishtar preposition
Gilgamesh than the king rebukes her,
and fiercely at that.
Mason cuts much of what Gilgamesh
says (the Mitchell translation includes
three-and-a-half uninterrupted pages
of verbal abuse), but what he does
include is more than enough to register
our hero’s disapproval.
Initially, we’re left wondering why
Gilgamesh reacts as he does to Ishtar’s
advances; after all, he’s not married,
we’re told she’s beautiful, and we still
remember the king’s overwhelming
loneliness from the epic’s beginning.
Yet as he continues through his
litany of insults, a pattern emerges.
As Gilgamesh lists every lover
Ishtar has taken, we become wellacquainted with her history of
betrayal and pain.
Those she convinces to love her
know only grief in the end.
She turns on those she grows
satisfied with and forces them to
suffer – and she grows satisfied
with everyone in time.
Gilgamesh points out that it’s naïve
to assume that a goddess could love a
mortal.
After all, he’s part god, and that alone
had been enough to separate him from
the mortal world until Enkidu came
along. (In this way, she is as he was.)
Note that by alluding to her romantic
past in the crudest way possible, and by
rejecting her advances, Gilgamesh isn’t
just causing as much offense as he can.
He’s refusing the ultimate
temptation, to join with that which
transcends our mortal limits.
This results in a very
complicated scene, with at least
three questionable elements.
Gilgamesh may not crave what
Ishtar represents sexually, but he
soon comes to want what she
represents personally –
immortality, power beyond even
his human reckoning.
Once Enkidu dies, he’ll give in to
the pursuit of that temptation far
more readily.
Furthermore, one could argue that
Gilgamesh shows great wisdom in
resisting Ishtar’s advances; most would
simply surrender to instinct and submit
to her wishes.
On the other hand, is rejecting a
goddess – let alone intentionally hurting
(and therefore infuriating) one – really a
sign of wisdom?
Remember, wisdom matters here; the
story’s supposed to be about how
Gilgamesh learns to come to terms with
the things he can’t change, and he’s
supposed to be demonstrating nēmēqu.
At any rate, Gilgamesh makes his
scorn and displeasure clear, and Ishtar
goes straight to Anu, her father.
She demands the right to unleash the
Bull of Heaven on Uruk:“I will send
[Gilgamesh] something / He would
never wish to dream. / There will be
more dead / Than living on this earth.”
By the end of the epic, we’ll learn in
time that Ishtar’s perfectly capable of
slaughtering mankind if she’s moved to:
She’s the one who unleashed the Great
Flood that only Utnapishtim and his
family survived.
Anu tries to calm her at first,
asking her whether she’s
considered every consequence of
the action she’s about to take.
Successfully bringing the Bull to
Earth to kill Gilgamesh will cause a
famine, he says; you’ll destroy all of
your beloved humans again if you
don’t have them set aside enough
grain to survive, and you regretted
doing so last time.
But Ishtar is immovable, as
implacable in her rage as
Gilgamesh once was in his tyranny –
yet another parallel that, weirdly
enough, doesn’t flatter our kingly
protagonist.
Ishtar insists that she’s learned from
her past, and that she’s taken enough
steps to ensure that some of us will survive
this time.
Moreover, she threatens to shatter the
gates of the Underworld, unleashing a
million dead souls, unless her father
complies.
In the end, Anu simply isn’t wired to
resist his daughter’s demands; just as with
Gilgamesh in the beginning of the epic,
Ishtar has no equal to keep her in check,
and no satisfactory outlets for the
emotions that overwhelm her.
She is a creature of instinct and desperate,
insatiable need, and where those qualities
combine with divine power, tragedy usually
follows.
So Ishtar brings the Bull down,
whereupon the beast’s snorting and
stamping fractures the world.
In an instant, three hundred of
Gilgamesh’s warriors plummet to the
center of the earth.
But Enkidu sets on the creature before it
can do any more damage; Mason devotes a
single short passage to his victory.
In other translations, Gilgamesh is the
one to kill the Bull while Enkidu holds it in
place; Mason shows Enkidu killing it
instead, which perhaps makes more sense,
considering that the gods condemn him
and not his king. (If Gilgamesh kills both
Humbaba and the Bull, why is Enkidu the
one to perish?)
Once the Bull dies, Ishtar flees to
the top of Uruk’s walls, cursing
Gilgamesh (and, in Mason’s
version, Enkidu).
Enkidu responds by ripping the
Bull’s leg from its carcass and
flinging it at her – which, in
hindsight, is perhaps not the most
well-considered move.
For the epic spends no time
basking in its heroes’ glory; it’s too
busy making them suffer.
That very night, Enkidu dreams of a
meeting between the gods.
Almost all of them are furious, Enlil
particularly so: Gilgamesh and Enkidu
have killed our Forest Guardian,
Gilgamesh and Enkidu have chopped
down our trees, Gilgamesh and Enkidu
have slaughtered our Bull of Heaven
and desecrated its corpse, and
Gilgamesh and Enkidu have dishonored
one of our own.
Both must die, but Enlil wants
Enkidu’s blood alone; he says
Gilgamesh should be spared because
he’s two-thirds divine. (He does not
acknowledge Shamash’s culpability in
the affairs he describes.)
To his credit, Shamash – who, as it
turns out, is Ishtar’s husband/brother (I
know, I know…it’s the gods) – interjects
on Enkidu’s behalf, at least in Mason’s
translation. (In Mitchell’s, he’s as
furious as the rest of them.)
No reason is given for this split
between the gods; Shamash apparently
didn’t consult any of the others before
sending Gilgamesh on his quest, but
none of the surviving tablets explain
why.
It is, perhaps, a decision whose
reasoning made inherent sense to
contemporary audiences, and whose
explanation has now been forever lost.
This whole business strikes
audiences as unfair, to say the least.
Gilgamesh didn’t exactly request to
be visited by the Bull of Heaven; he and
Enkidu fought to protect the city and its
people.
For that matter, Gilgamesh’s initial
desire to attack Humbaba is not entirely
his own: Shamash sent him to do his
bidding, even over Ninsun’s objections.
How can our heroes be justifiably
killed for serving the dictates of the
gods?
Does their willingness to resist the
fates that divinities set up for them
warrant death?
It’s important to consider this
development – this entire section,
in fact – in the context of Sumerian,
Akkadian, and Babylonian
attitudes.
Remember, as always, that these
cultures considered death an
unfair interruption of mankind’s
potential.
Here, the larger forces
responsible for birth, fate and
death are portrayed as flawed,
shallow, irrational, untrustworthy,
capricious, arbitrary, – even
abusive.
In many ways, the section
provides more ammunition for the
camp that sees Gilgamesh as a
“rebellion against death” rather
than as a simple chronicle of a
man’s adventures.
What better justification for
claiming death is unjust than to
show those who introduced death
to the universe in an unkind light?
So we see the tension humans
felt while regarding the divine, the
joy of knowing life given by gods,
the agony of seeing that life taken
away by the same deities, and the
anger that results from not
understanding the greater
meaning of the bigger picture.
And we are again confronted
with that ancient question: why do
the good sometimes perish?
In the meantime, Enkidu knows
the end is near.
Mason cuts his enraged,
frustrated reaction a bit short,
keeping only the portion where he
curses the harlot, Shamhat, for
introducing him to civilized life.
He also curses the trapper whose
visit to Uruk caused Gilgamesh to
send Shamhat to the Steppe, as well
as the great door he and
Gilgamesh built from the trees in
the Cedar Forest. (He never curses
Gilgamesh, interestingly enough.)
It’s not a dignified moment.
To be fair, few of us can greet
death with any sort of equanimity,
whether we’re the ones dying or
merely losing someone.
We’re much likelier to rage, as
Enkidu does, at the unfairness of
what’s befallen us; most people fall
before they’re ready to go, and
Enkidu himself is certainly no
exception.
Moreover, his death isn’t even a
glorious one.
There are no epic battles for him
to fight, no invaders against whom
he must defend his adopted city, no
sacrifices he can nobly make.
He’s forced to just sit and wait
for the gods to kill him, unable to
do anything to change or
challenge his fate.
Shamash comes to him then (at least in
other translations), and tells him this:
Enkidu, why are you cursing the priestess
Shamhat? Wasn’t it she who gave you fine
bread fit for a god and fine beer fit for a king,
who clothed you in a glorious robe and gave
you splendid Gilgamesh as your intimate
friend? He will lay you down on a bed of honor,
he will put you on a royal bier, on his left he will
place your statue in the seat of repose, the
princes of the earth will kiss its feet, [and] the
people of Uruk will mourn you…
(Does it matter if people mourn for you or
honor you in death?)
What’s left unsaid is that none of this
happens without Shamhat’s “conversion” of
Enkidu; he simply would have lived out his
days on the Steppe, never knowing the
companionship or love he discovered in the
city.
After this, Enkidu calms himself
somewhat. Before he passes on, he has
one last conversation with his friend:
A man sees death in things.
That is what it is to be a man.You’ll know
When you have lost the strength to see
The way you once did.You’ll be alone and
wander
Looking for that life that’s gone, or some
Eternal life you have to find.
And Gilgamesh, for all his terrible strength
and prowess, proves powerless in the face of
the gods’ demands.
He can find no words with which to
convince them to reverse their decision, can
perform no feat of strength to prevent them
from carrying out their will.
In Mason’s translation, Enkidu dies not
from fighting the Bull of Heaven, but from the
wound he suffered while battling Humbaba as
Gilgamesh stood paralyzed – a wound that
resulted from his prior crippling at Humbaba’s
gate, a crippling that the king trivialized at the
time.
In others, he simply falls ill, expiring slowly
over twelve days as Gilgamesh stands by
helplessly.
The ending’s the same either way: Enkidu
slips from the world, and Gilgamesh is utterly
alone once more.
Why am I to die,
You to wander on alone?
Is that the way it is with friends?
At this point, Gilgamesh begins to revert to
his old ways – fixated only on one thing, he
grows maniacal in his desire to relieve himself
of pain.
The only nourishment
He knew was grief, endless in its hidden source
Yet never ending hunger.
All that is left to once who grieves
Is convalescence. No change of heart or spiritual
Conversion, for the heart has changed
And the soul has been converted
To a thing that sees
How much it costs to lose a friend it loved.
This three-page section immediately
following Enkidu’s passing is one of my
favorites in the epic; it has some truly profound
things to say about grief, why we grieve, and
how we recover.
Gilgamesh eventually travels through
the desert – the literal and metaphorical
one – in search of Utnapishtim.
The book refers to him as “the one
who survived the flood,” and here we see
another parallel with a Biblical
archetype: whereas before we saw
Enkidu cast out of Eden, we’re now told
of Ishtar’s Flood, which wiped out
virtually everything except Utnapishtim,
his family, and the animals he could
save.
But the Flood here isn’t merely a
reference to an overabundance of
water; if Gilgamesh is any indication,
water isn’t the only thing that can
drown a man.
The king is now driven to take
back what the gods wrongfully
took from mankind.
He aims to defeat death, and
searches for the only man who can
live forever.
What Gilgamesh discovers
during his journey will ultimately
determine whether he will be
successful – whether he will
recover from pain…or drown in it.