~ Siduri ~ Part 4

The Tabernacle Goddess And Ophidic Guardian Of The Tree-Of-Life

Šī-dūrī sābītu

As I mentioned earlier, in the most recent fragments of the Epic – some 1500 years removed from the original story – Siduri loses her divine character. Becoming a prosaic prostitute (here, according to the modern concept, also devoid of sacredness), devoted to the basic pleasures of Life. Gilgamesh aggressively approaches her in his inexorable quest for individual immortality. The tavern-keeper loses her name, her advice disappears, and her presence is reduced to a line. Her character and presence are belittled and demeaned as a hedonist, never comparable to the great hero's transcendent spiritual concerns.

After all, she is just a banal young tavern wench, with a brothel to satisfy male pleasures, which generates a mixture of shame and humiliation at her real ability to help a king and hero in his quest for the transcendent.

In fact, this debasement happens systematically throughout the various versions with all the sacred female characters, which makes this story a valuable document of the rise of dissociated patriarchy and addiction to transcendence and conquest.

As an example, we also have the priestess of Inanna-Ishtar, Shamhat, whose presence has been reduced to "prostitute" or "sacred girl of the temple." In fact, she is a hierodule, which means "servant of the goddess," occupying a vital position in the temple. Her functions, linked to the cult of Inanna, would include ecstatic sexual rites (sacred prostitution is difficult for modernity to grasp, as there is no awareness of its ceremonial complexity, which would involve lengthy ceremonies devoted to beauty, tenderness, sensuality, and consensus). Moreover, in Inanna’s temples, hierodules were both sacred virgins and blessed prostitutes. The demeaning of the feminine and Nature can also be found in Gilgamesh's refusal and offence against the very deity of fertility, Inanna-Ishtar, which I won't go into here.

The eco-mythological keys to Siduri are many, primal and profound. I'm not going to explore them in academic terms (in transcriptions of comparative, linguistic, historical or ethnographic studies). I'm interested in where it brought me and how she presented herself in our shared dreams. Furthermore, I intend to convey the sensations Siduri imprinted and anchored in me: the cathartic entanglement with the nourishing decomposition of fragments, pains, sorrows, passions, and joys in the fertile soil of her garden of paradise.

So, if Gilgamesh represents the arrogant and self-centred modern psyche and the Anthropocene, today totally part of our neurochemical responses in our relationship with the world (infrastructure of the unconscious); Enkidu is wild Nature itself, with the cutting and extinction of the relationship and the consequent pain that this civilisational wound brings to us all; Siduri represents the place where, in humility, we are invited to rescue the potent somatic alchemy of affection and ritual presence as a ground and visceral relationship. The place where we can dance with our monsters, listen to our howling and knead and ferment the emotions we have forgotten.