~ Siduri ~ Part 2
The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Matrix of the Modern Western Psyche
[>Part 1 here<] [>Part 3 here<] [>Part 4 here<]
Perhaps Necessity, Perhaps Inspiration
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.
Eco-anxiety has been my companion for decades, and it moves in waves of presence and oblivion. It rises and falls in anguished gasps of pain and loss, not for me in particular, but for Life.
The concept of the Anthropocene, which purports to designate the geological epoch "of man,"1 is characterised by a massive collapse of ecosystems, mass extinction, rapid planetary warming and civilisational disintegration and the extinction of numerous life forms, including human beings. I don't want to think about it; it's a gigantic and threatening problem with too many emergencies and catastrophes. I would rather not face the consequences – "Mommy, am I going to live through everything I'm supposed to?" my eldest daughter, who was seven then, asked me.
And then there’s the "Baseline Shift Syndrome", representing the result of moving away from actual natural conditions, which creates a shift in the perception of ecological change that varies from generation to generation –like calling summer the "fire season" is now normal, which would have been frightening two decades ago. Floods, fires, extreme drought, hurricanes, mass migrations, increasingly deadly and violent conflicts and genocide, famine, and desertification. Destruction, loss and collective grief.
The denials and illusions of civilisational, technological and human exceptionalism (in the global north) exhaust me of how dangerous, illusory and immature they are.
As Vanessa Andreotti says: "What if we knew (in our skin, flesh and bones, not just in our heads) that a great social and ecological collapse is inevitably on the horizon and that, in 10 to 20 years (or less), what is familiar will no longer be viable because we have crossed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries? What if we could respond collectively today from a cultural space of emotional serenity, relational maturity, intellectual discernment and intergenerational responsibility?"
I often return to the abyss of ashes where the ground swallows and the heart rips apart, where everything is heavy and difficult. The immobilisation and the pain. But Siduri held my hand and brought me to an ecstatic, intermediate place in the psyche that embraces and validates, where I could cry, laugh and celebrate Life in resonance. I felt Life and energy emerging again. Siduri brought me back to the place of the body, in the flow of emotions, to rhythmically giggle through mourning and Life. She introduced me to the threshold, an eco-psychological and mythical landscape of love and grief in an immanent and natural cycle.
The Epic of Gilgamesh - Matrix of the Modern Western Psyche
Many authors have worked on this ancient epic as a story of psycho-ecological warning, a myth of tension between the domesticated and civilised in opposition to the wild and sacred, as valid 4700 years ago as it is today. It is a myth that, among many other things, helps us to uncover the roots of the arrogance of the modern psyche, in the hubris and separation between humanity and wild animal and ecological nature.
Gilgamesh, a tyrannical and violent king between the mythical and the historical, is the first recognisable king of what is considered civilisation and domestication, over wild nature. It is said that the epic was conceived by the exorcist priest Sîn-leqi-unninni (between 2700 and 2500 BC), but there is much disagreement, as it is the work of multiple voices and hands. It cannot be called a single, unified story, as what remains are fragments in Sumerian, Hittite, Babylonian and others, which scholars are still trying to piece together into coherent accounts. This epic was circulated over two thousand years in the ancient world, being read, told, sung, modified and transformed. Although lost for millennia, the clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions recounting Gilgamesh's adventures were rediscovered in the nineteenth century.
Their reconstruction has revealed the foundations and perhaps the origins of the arrogant modern Western psyche. In its deep fear of the monstrous impermanence of Nature, in the desacralisation of places, in praise of civilisation's technology, the dissociation, and lack of reciprocity and responsibility with Life’s poly-formic dialogues.
Naturally, Gilgamesh is considered a great statesman and builder king, for having urbanised and civilised the city of Uruk; at a time of significant population growth, there was a need to create new security structures and food for the people. My premise in this analysis is that there are other ways of doing this that don't require violent control of nature, and the consequent repression of women and denial of somatic wisdom.
In the different fragments found so far of this mythical journey from the Bronze Age, there is an insidious movement: from immanence to transcendence, the violent subjugation and silencing of the ancestral fertility goddesses – it is the movement from harmony to conflict and the domestication of Nature and its cycles.
In the story, reconstructed today, the relationship between the king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, and the gods, was quite unnerving. What seems most important to Gilgamesh is his own political survival and timeless legacy. He is the model of the strategic tyrant, who sacrifices people, resources, air, sea, Nature, everything, and everyone to remain in power.
Gilgamesh walled off the city of Uruk, which depended on the seasonal floods of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for agriculture. Today, a deserted area, the Fertile Crescent, is an example of the desacralisation of the place. Thousands of years of irrigation have dissolved salt deposits in the soil bed and ended up poisoning the land, leading to the collapse of agriculture in the region. The pressure of feeding the ancient Mesopotamian cities overwhelmed and depleted the soil, and intensive irrigation increased fertility for a brief period but accelerated the salinisation of the soil, and ever since. The Fertile Crescent is not fertile any more.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is, among many other things, an ecological cautionary tale for today's technological excesses, as it presents, in mythical language, the challenges that both the culture of that time and our current civilisation face in the Anthropocene.
Although we don't live in Ancient Mesopotamia, we are heirs to this hubristic way of perceiving the world and our place in it. The ancient threads of what has become an ecocidal legacy run loose in the deepest layers of our unconscious; our decisions are based on erecting walls of control that leave impermanent Nature out, despite all the consequences of this isolation. So profound is this legacy in our metabolism that it ultimately influences us in the range, capacity, and possibility of response and relationship.
"Changing the narrative doesn't change the response," warns Vanessa Andreotti, who says that the current challenge is not a conceptual one about "worldview." But a profound paradox of fears and actions that shape our biochemical response: "[being] best framed as an epigenetic and neurobiological problem." Andreotti goes on to say that "the modern neurophysical and neurochemical configuration affects and limits not only how we think, but also how we process our feelings, fears, traumas and insecurities, how [...] we relate to knowledge, the self, reality, rights, identity, pain, loss, Grief, Life and Death. These are all conditioned neurophysical responses that we involve in human constructions and narratives."
In other words, we all have a series of neurochemical addictions and dependencies that directly influence the way we think and act about things. It's not a question of changing metaphors and symbols so that we magically relate to the world differently, but a complex and constant practice of maturation and responsibility.
Andreotti says that "neurodecolonization requires us to face up to the damage we've inflicted and compost the metaphorical and literal shit we've accumulated. We cannot simply 'jump' to a different way of being or relating to the world, imagining that we are already there. [...] The amount of work ahead of us to deactivate harmful patterns and reactivate capacities for relationship and responsibility that have been exiled from our current modern system [is immense]."
~~~
[>Part 1 here<] [>Part 3 here<] [>Part 4 here<]
In the following articles, I want to focus on the eco-mythical shards of this complex epic, mainly on the three figures I have chosen to feature in the tale: The Great Auroch (Gilgamesh), his Wild Twin (Enkidu) and the Veiled Goddess (Siduri).
Their relationships hold the mythical keys to moving into the territory of ecological mourning, affectionate and ritually offered by Siduri.
References
Abusch, Tzvi. Male and Female in the Epic of Gilgamesh: Encounters, Literary History, and Interpretation. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.
Albright, W. F. "The Goddess of Life and Wisdom." The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, vol. 36, no. 4, 1920, pp. 258-294. The University of Chicago Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/528330.
Barron, Patrick. "The Separation of Wild Animal Nature and Human Nature in Gilgamesh: Roots of a Contemporary Theme." PPL - EBSCO, 2002, pp. 377-394.
Brown, Adrienne Maree. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Edited by Adrienne Maree Brown, AK Press, 2019."
Climate Change: From Gilgamesh to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The Marginalia Review of Books, April 22, 2022, https://themarginaliareview.com/climate-change-from-gilgamesh-to-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/. Accessed September 30, 2023.
Dijk-Coombes, Renate M van. "'He Rose And Entered Before The Goddess': Gilgamesh's Interactions With The Goddesses In The Epic Of Gilgamesh." Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, vol. 44, no. 1, 2018, pp. 61-80. Stellenbosch University.
Dolph, Steve. "The Nature of Our Ruin: Part 1 - PPEH Lab." PPEH Lab, 17 December 2015, http://ppehlab.squarespace.com/blogposts/2015/12/17/the-nature-of-our-ruin-part-1. Accessed September 30, 2023.
Grahn, Judy. "Ecology of the Erotic in a Myth of Inanna." International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, 2010, pp. 58-67. http://dx.doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2010.29.2.58.
McClellan, Andrew M. "Opinion: A Warning from the Dawn of History Echoes in Today's Debate Over Climate Change." Times of San Diego, October 9, 2021, https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/10/09/a-warning-from-the-dawn-of-history-echoes-in-todays-debate-over-climate-change/. Accessed September 30, 2023."
(rude diagnostic exercise) - Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures." Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, https://decolonialfutures.net/modern-colonial-infrastructures/. Accessed September 30, 2023.
Sentesy, Mark. The Ecological Predicament Of The Epic Of Gilgamesh. Draft ed., 2022.Sin-leqi-unninni. He whom the abyss saw: Epic of Gilgamesh. Autêntica, 2017.
Verlie, Blanche. Learning to Live with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation. Routledge, 2023.
West, Martin Litchfield. The east face of Helicon: west Asiatic elements in Greek poetry and myth.
A term generated by the arrogant western anthropocentric lens and already outdated. We can also use Capitalocene, Necrocene or Anthropocide. All refer to an excess of forceful human extraction, with the outcomes of mass extinction and the unbalance of the spectrum of weather patterns (to put these interconnected wicked problems in a very limited way). Connected to what Arturo Escobar would call “Devastation Ontologies,” or Achille Mbembe Necropolitics.
Siduri’s Nectar
Fermented Wisdom at the Edge of the Underworld
These posts have been updated and edited in a printed book.
At the misty thresholds where life ferments into death, and death feeds new forms of life, stands Siduri. Forgotten goddess, veiled innkeeper, alchemical oracle. Before she was erased and reduced to a mere roadside distraction in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Siduri was a guardian of paradox and pleasure, an elder of ecological wisdom and sacred hospitality.
In this mythopoetic and eco-relational text, Siduri’s Nectar distills an ancient dream into contemporary ferment. Woven from years of study, ritual, grief, and dream, Sofia Batalha reclaims Siduri’s presence from the margins of myth and invites readers into a sensual, cyclical ecology of mourning and renewal.
Through storytelling, dreams, etymologies, lamentation, and the symbolic nectar of fermentation, Siduri’s Nectar offers an invitation to sit on the warm stone beside the veiled goddess, to sip from her cup, to mourn what must be mourned, and to feel your way, again and again, back into life.
This is a book for those: tending grief that won’t resolve into solutions; composting illusions of control and superiority; dreaming with the earth, not above her; seeking an embodied mythic literacy beyond patriarchal and extractive logics.
I’m working to make all posts open to everyone. Paid subscriptions help support the depth of this research, allowing these narratives to continue gestating outside institutional and market demands. You’re invited to support if you feel called, but your presence here, as a living witness, is already part of the story.
Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.
This is not a hero’s journey. This is a remembering.