~ Siduri ~ Part 3

The Great Auroch & Enkidu

[>Part 1 here<] [>Part 2 here<] [>Part 4 here<]

The Great Auroch (Gilgamesh)

In the eco-mythological approach – let me remind you that this is a mytho-poetic (re)interpretation of this myth and its characters –, Gilgamesh, the unpunished representative of the arrogant and dissociated modern Western psyche, is at war with himself. He violates the places and disowns the Goddesses, oppresses his people, and only cares about his immortality –he can represent an entire lineage of kings, or even an entire tribe, and not necessarily an individual.

I called him the Great Auroch because some authors describe him as a bull by birth and behaviour, and 4700 years ago, herds of Aurochs, now extinct, were still grazing on the steppe – aurochs (whose name means "Ur-ox") were 1.80 metres tall and had horns 30 cm long. The last aurochs died in Poland in 1627. In modern Kurdish – one of the two official languages of Iraq, i.e. Mesopotamia – Gilgamesh means horde of buffaloes/aurochs, strength, and savagery. Gilgamesh, the violent tyrant king at war with the gods and Nature, in favour of domestication and civilisation, paradoxically draws his destructive strength from Nature itself.

Paul Shepard, in The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, comments on the role of the bull: "Heroes have taken on the power of the bull in the quest for eternity. The sacred bovids, beginning with the fertile cow and progressing to the virile bull, were finally degraded to a mere substance in the hands of humanised deities. Throughout the Old World, men interceded in the rites associated with the goddess and her "corrupt" tyranny of the animal demon. This masculine triumph was foreshadowed in the myth of Enkidu, a Sumerian hero of the first bullfight, marking the transition from the power of the bull to men themselves."

Wild Twin (Enkidu)

The Wild Man, created from clay by the gods in response to the people's complaints about the violence of the tyrant Gilgamesh, brings the innocence and power of a direct relationship with the mountain and the steppe. I incorporated Enkidu into this tale according to the Double, Wild Twin, or Daemon logic. In the book Tales of the Serpent and the Moon, I mentioned that the Double is a primal concept, being the animal part of one's own self, like an image reflected in a mirror because it is its complementary opposite. The Double brings the image of integration between the domesticated and the wild, rescuing this essential and primordial relationship from exile. If there is one, the goal is some form of reintegration, relationship, and dialogue with our complex ecology.

The loss of Enkidu is not an individual mourning, but a collective mourning of the extinction of the primordial relationship with nature that he represents. Enkidu's tragic journey throughout the Epic of Gilgamesh recounts his origins as the chthonic guardian of the mountains and the animals, right up to his corruption, domestication and subsequent annihilation. The subversion of his sacred role as guardian of nature and cycles is so profound that he is the one who assists Gilgamesh in material and metaphorical ecocide – in the felling of trees and the killing of animals, in insubordination to divine entities and guardians of nature.