~ Siduri ~ Part 1

The Abundant and Alchemical Embrace of the Underworld

[>Part 2 here<] [>Part 3 here<] [>Part 4 here<]

Before reading the almost five thousand-year-old texts that gave rise to this story, I dreamt of Siduri several times. Although I didn't yet know her name, she lovingly rocked me back to life. These are dreams that I won't share, but they were the key to this eco-mythological framework of mourning and love.

The encounter between Gilgamesh inspired this tale in three parts, here called the Great Auroch, and Siduri, the Veiled Goddess. This part of the epic was recorded in the oldest Babylonian versions – because in the most recent ones Siduri almost disappears, losing her name and becoming a young prostitute attached to the banal pleasures of Life, who only shows the violent hero the way in his search for immortality. To articulate what Siduri instinctively and intuitively instilled into me, I took my time and read books and articles that structured and rescued her value, dignity, and presence as a Veiled Goddess. Specifically in the work of researchers Tzvi Abusch (2015), W. F. Albright (1920) and M.L. West (1997), who have been invaluable in giving body and context to Siduri's immanent wisdom.

This will be the first of a series of articles on Siduri. I’ll start with three short stories.

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The great Auroch lost in the abyss

The great Auroch, as his people called him, was anguished and lost, wandering through the stony and bare landscape. He had lost his important king's robes and was wrapped in a lion's skin, suffering and aimless. Everything hurt. Grief and loss over his twin had seeped into his soul, breaking his will and sucking the life out of him. He felt abandoned and empty. Through the mountains and the steppe, he continued in agony and aimlessly. His twin, a man of living clay and primal Nature, the son of silence and rock, from the cradle of the mountains, raised by the animals and suckled with their milk, had run wild with the gazelles and drunk the dew with the herds. He had been powerful and free. He looked after the steppe, wandering all day in the mountains, freeing animals from hunters' traps, feeding on herbs and roots, and knowing the language of dreams and water. The man of living clay did everything for the Great Auroch; for him, he travelled to the world of the dead and back. Later, the son of silence and rock saddened his heart fatally and definitively by the violence done together with the Great Auroch.

Together, they had destroyed enemies and allies, forests, animals, relics, tools, and relations with the gods. Together, they killed the Cosmic Bull and cut down the Cedar Forest. They annihilated the god's home, and the goddess's throne, by force and violence. They felled the sumptuous cedars that grew along the mountainside, which no longer cast their pleasant and cheerful shadows. Furthermore, they both cut down the trees covered in hundred-foot-high vines, with resin dripping down like raindrops, swallowed up by the ravines. They silenced the birdsong that filled the woods. The stork and the rooster stopped bringing joy to the forest that had now been cut down, the mother monkeys were also silenced, and the babies never stopped crying.

In the end, the living clay man, brave and sacred, also succumbed to anger and pain, guilt and agony. The mule and donkey of the mountains, the panther of the steppe, broke down, his heart cracked, and his body withered. Not even the screams and tears that claimed him returned. The violence done outside echoed inside. Like the forest, the son of silence and rock disappeared and died. After six days and seven nights watching over his body, the Great Auroch, as they called him, was now walking in despair, alone and aimless.

After so much walking, he doesn't remember how he ended up here. But he also climbed mountains. Someone may have brought him here by boat. In the confusion of his anguished mind and his heart, heavy and empty with the finiteness of life, he can only remember the setting sun, blinding on the horizon, and the brightness of the morning star. He doesn't know how he got here. Suddenly, she glimpses a faint light, and from it emerges a garden of dazzling beauty, an orchard full of precious stones.