Gilgamesh: The King who Refused to Die

Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Gilgamesh is neat because he's got that core epic,
which as far as we can tell, alot of ancient gods and ancient
figures don't have a core epic,they have a bunch of stories.
But then have for Gilgamesh tohave that sequence of events

(00:25):
that really does seem to be acore narrative that really
defines him.
It makes it into the oldest, theoldest epic, which is, I guess,
what they put on the cover ofall the books, the Gilgamesh
books.
It's the oldest epic.
But it's interesting to sit andreally think about that because

(00:48):
it's clearly composed and itdoes have episodes.
And there's a decent chance thatthe episodes in the epic were
separate stories at some pointas part of a larger corpus of
here's the things that thischaracter does.

SPEAKER_01 (01:07):
Well, we know that that's the case for it, at least
for some of the stories, mainlybecause like Enkidoo dies in an
earlier version of it and thensuddenly appears again randomly
and not in his like shade form,I guess you could say.
Uh and that kind of thing, likeactually physically present
there as he's already supposedto be dead later on in the story

(01:27):
for what's going on there.

SPEAKER_00 (01:29):
Um that is Enkidoo in the underworld, where he goes
and becomes a shade.
And that's not part of the epic.

SPEAKER_01 (01:38):
Um, no, I'm just saying that we do know that
that's part of this.
Yeah.
That we do know that at least atsome point that there were
separate stories and whatnot,and that the epic definitely
combines certain elements ofearlier stories that were
already there with it.
I I liken it to the Arthurianmyth and tradition for what was
going on on that front, whereyou have all these different

(01:58):
stories and all these peopletalking about it from maybe from
different perspectives and allthat other stuff for writers and
that kind of stuff.
But then we get Mallory and hislike official one that everybody
knows, and it's kind of thatwith it.
And it took hundreds of yearsfor Mallory's version to come
into being.
I think that's kind of whathappened is you have all these
various different Sumerian poemsand like stories about Gilgamesh

(02:21):
and whatnot, and then the epicof Gilgamesh as we know it
today, and that kind of stuffwas compiled by somebody who
took all of the stuff with itinside of Akkadian time periods
and whatnot.
That's seems to be the generalconsensus that I can find on
people with it.

(02:42):
They even abscribe it to oneparticular scribe that did all
of that.
So it doesn't mean it's true.
It's still conjecture on thatfront, but it's conjecture
backed up with a lot of factsthat seemed to be the case for
it.

SPEAKER_00 (02:56):
So yeah, I just I just find it interesting that
they have the the model ofmaking an epic so early in their
history, but then they justdon't do it again.
You have everybody every othermythic figure for the rest of
Mesopotamian history just has acollection of stories.

(03:18):
And like I guess you contrastthat to like the Indian
tradition where everything getscompiled into massive, massive
texts.
It's just an interesting wave.
And you know, about the timewhen they're compiling the Epic
of Gilgamesh is about the timewhen they are in communication

(03:43):
with the Indus ValleyCivilization.

SPEAKER_02 (03:46):
Yes.

SPEAKER_00 (03:46):
And so I I wonder if turning Gilgamesh into an epic
was actually an Indus Valleyidea.

SPEAKER_01 (03:56):
It very well could be.
I know for a fact, I don't knowhow much the Indus Valley
Civilization had influence overMesopotamia in relation to which
was more culturally dominant interms of sharing of ideas, if
you will, and whatnot.
I do know in the variancebetween Sumeria and Egypt, Egypt

(04:17):
was the culturally dominant oneand influenced Sumeria way more
than the other way around, so tospeak, on that front for that.
I do know that obviously theIndus Valley civilization and
the Sumerians slashMesopotamians were very much in
contact with another with oneanother and had
cross-fertilization, if youwill.

(04:38):
But I don't know if that'sdefinitively where that idea
came from.
It very well could be, though,because if you look at the only
other major influence duringthat time period that they could
have had in terms ofcivilization for that, it was in
terms of written records thatthey were doing, keyword being
written records here for what'sgoing on.

(04:58):
It would would be Egypt, and youknow, they didn't really have
this whole epic idea going oneither, you know, for the most
part.
For what I'm not saying theynever made one, I'm just saying
like they weren't into it asmuch as the all the Indian epics
that started to come into beingduring this time period and
whatnot.
So it very well could be thecase that that is an influence

(05:20):
there, but it could also just bethat it sprung up completely
organically on its own andwhatnot.
And we, you know, I don't Idon't know the history of that
enough to know definitively thatthat was the case.

SPEAKER_00 (05:31):
I don't think anybody could say, but I would
say that Gilgamesh would be agreat Bollywood action movie.

SPEAKER_01 (05:40):
Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 (05:41):
Fantastic.
Absolutely.
Over the top, absolutely great.

SPEAKER_01 (05:52):
For what's going on from their from their stuff with
the and and that kind of stuff.
They might add their own littleflair, their own little flavor
to it, and that kind of thingwith it, but they you know, to
make it so it hits more with theIndian audience, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 (06:04):
Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 (06:05):
But you didn't you wouldn't have to change much,
no.

SPEAKER_00 (06:07):
You just have to add a dance, a song and dance in
there every year and everyone.

SPEAKER_01 (06:11):
Every once in a while.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (06:13):
Oh, it'd be great.
Now I want that.
And I'm never gonna I don't knowif we'll ever have it.
Sunday was.

SPEAKER_01 (06:31):
So it the the it's permeated the consciousness more
so, and so it's I would saysomething about him popping up
at some point, whether it's aBollywood or not, is at least
possible.
We I mean, you know, we'vestarted to see this with animes
popping up and and whatnot,where he's one of the people
that's in inside of it.
So it's not it's not impossible.

(06:51):
It's already hit mainstreamculture in that regard, right?

SPEAKER_00 (06:55):
So and now I can't I can't remember Mohenjo Daro.
They do the Indians do have theconnection to the old the old
the Indian movies have thatconnection.
There's a very fun movie,Mohenjo Daro, about the city of
Mohenjadaro.
Well, it's I mean it's about ahandsome guy who falls in love

(07:17):
with a priestess, but it's inMohenjadaro, and it's it's a
wonderful little movie.
Oh, it's good.
I don't remember where I wasanymore, but Gilgamesh is cool.

SPEAKER_01 (07:33):
So on on the front of Gilgamesh, him being the
oldest epic, you know, that wehave, at least it's still
around.
And maybe there was older stuffthat we've lost, but that still
exists.
One of the things that isinteresting with it is the
there's unequivocally star loreinside of it that goes on with

(07:56):
it.
We see this with like the bullof heaven idea that that pops up
for that, and this makes it sothat way we're dealing with, at
least for that part of thestory, what could be termed a
stellar cult of some sort interms of their influence on some
of these things with it.
And why I'm bringing this up isbecause if you look at the

(08:20):
zodiacal signs and whatnot.
Now, they're not all the samefor all cultures and whatnot,
but they are pretty similar formost cultures, and obviously
they have their variance interms of how they perceive them
and like their shapes and sizesand whatnot, but the most of
them have 12 earths, sometimesthe 13th one, and but they also
have one character, oneconstellation, no matter what,

(08:44):
that is kind of the ring bearer,if you will, meaning that the
other ones go around and it'salways Orion.
That's always Orion for whathappens there.
And it seems to me that some ofthese other parts of the story
that are going on here arehaving to deal with Gilgamesh

(09:07):
taking the role of that centraltheme and character of Orion.
He plays that.
You could see this with thetwelve labors of Hercules or
Heracles, if you want to.
He's the Orion character, andthe twelve are to represent each
one of these constellations andthat kind of stuff that goes on
there, as well as the associatedmythology and lore that goes

(09:27):
with them and whatnot.
And so if you are part of thisancient stellar culture, I mean
very, very ancient, way beforeany records are written down or
whatever, stuff like tens ofthousands of years ago, and you
know that the gods up there, akathe stars, are ever permanent
and they're not going to goanywhere, even if that's we know
today that it's not true, thatthey only last for billions of

(09:49):
years, but for all intents andpurposes for human views so they
are in you know immortal.
That what happens is that theyuse the as above so below
principle, as within so withoutprinciple that's there with it,
and they use this these beingsthat are made up in the

(10:12):
constellation to representcertain certain aspects of
ourselves, certain archetypes,certain spiritual
understandings, and then theymake stories and create them
around that and give it to teachlessons to the people around
them and whatnot, and that leadsto a two at minimum a two-tier

(10:32):
system, if you will, of uhexoteric version, meaning what
you're told to just basicallybear understand and whatnot, and
an esoteric, more hidden, deepermeaning tradition, which they
were the keepers and guardiansof for this stuff, with it.
And the reason why I'm bringingthis up is because it is clear

(10:52):
when you are reading the epic ofGilgamesh, and I'm speaking
specifically the epic here, notnecessarily some of the other
things that we're talking aboutearlier, like another world and
Inky Doo and all that otherstuff that goes into it, is that
it is all about a search forimmortality in some capacity or
another.
And the entire point of doingthat on a spiritual level and

(11:17):
whatnot is always esoteric.
It is always esoteric on thatparticular front for what's
happening there.
And we'll we can talk more aboutthat in a moment when we get to
more of it if you want to, forwhy that's the case for that.
But everything that he does,even his rejection of Inanna
that goes on with that, the bullof heaven has certain things

(11:37):
that you can play with that thatwill become more apparent for
stuff that's that way with it.
His going and looking for theNoah character that you know, in
terms of that, the Sumerian one,Unapashtim and whatnot, that's
there.
All of that has to do with asearch for immortality that he

(11:58):
thinks he deserves, because inthe at least in the epic
version, not necessarily theSumerian version, but the
Akkadian version, Babylonianversion, he's two-thirds divine.
So he seeks that out, whateverthe hell that means, which is
very cool.
Because I'm I, as far as I'maware of, he's the only
character I've come across thatisn't like semi-divine, meaning
like half or something likethat.
He's two-thirds.

(12:19):
So there's that too.

SPEAKER_00 (12:21):
So he's just that little bit better than everybody
else.

SPEAKER_02 (12:25):
Yep.

SPEAKER_00 (12:26):
That's great.
So I was thinking what might bethe best way to structure it is
if we just real quick go throughthe the overview of the story,
and there are I think I thinkthere will be natural pausing
points through that.

(12:46):
And that'll structure us.
So right, so Gilgamesh was a wasalmost certainly an historical
king of Uruk around 3,000 or2800 BC.
And he must have been veryimportant, we would assume.

(13:09):
He must have been successful insome way.
And historically, he is rulingat the time when the city of
Uruk is very important.
This is the city of Uruk isculturally Sumerian, but it's a
different kind of Sumerian thanwhat we get in the more in the

(13:32):
later more historical period,where Sumer is a bunch of
city-states that are competingfor power with each other, that
where where all the differentcity-states are in recorded
history, all the differentcity-states are kind of equal,

(13:53):
not absolutely equal, of course,but they're the kingship, the
idea of kingship over theregion.

SPEAKER_02 (14:01):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (14:02):
Each and the idea of kingship passes from city to
city as one gets a little morepowerful, then another gets a
little more powerful.
Uruk appears to have dominatedfor about a thousand years the
entire region.
It seems to have been thepreeminent city for about a
thousand years.

(14:23):
And Gilgamesh is coming ateither the peak or the strong
tail end of Uruk's domination ofthe region.
So he is a very important kingin a very important city.
And I don't think it's known whyhe gets this story attached to

(14:45):
him.
But who really knows?
The the legendary Gilgamesh is,like you said, two-thirds
divine.
He is but depending on how youunderstand qubits, because the
qubit is a length of measurethat changed in definition over
time.

(15:06):
He could be 16 feet tall and hecould be nine feet tall.
And actually, the the epicitself seems to be a bit
inconsistent about how large heis, because if you look at like
the weights of his armor and hispanoply and the kind of weights

(15:26):
that he's carrying around, thatimplies somebody much closer to
16 feet tall.
But then he also walks intonormal people's houses and he
has intercourse with lady normalhuman ladies, which would just
anatomically doesn't work forsomeone who's 16 feet tall.

SPEAKER_01 (15:49):
Not unless they're also 12 feet tall or something.

SPEAKER_00 (15:52):
Yeah, no, and I don't want I don't want to hear
about some weird Reddit pageabout 16-foot-tall pornography.
There, I know it exists.
I don't want any anything to dowith any of that.
But so it's the size ofGilgamesh is just large, or you

(16:13):
could say larger than life.
And the scale of his divinity islarger than anyone else's scale
of divinity, unless you knowthey are a god.
Yeah, because he is the bestthat a person can be.
And really, you probably can'teven be that good unless you're

(16:33):
Gilgamesh.
He is like defining quality asbeing a little bit better.
So he is he finds himself to bethis gigantic superman, the
strongest person in acivilization defined by
strength, where power comes fromstrength.
He is called Lugal, which is akingship title that's just

(16:59):
starting to become big in hisera, which just means strong
man, as opposed to a priestking, which in the past there
had been priest kings.
So he is very much a ruling bystrength, and he has a lot of
strength.
And he has no moderatinginfluence, which is not good.

(17:20):
He uh throws bad parties to thepoint that he is bankrupting the
city, he is being very rowdy anddisrupting the city, he is
stealing women, which isimproper, and he's doing
improper things with thoseladies, and he's just generally
causing a ruckus, and no one canstop him.

(17:42):
And the people of Uruk call upto the gods and they say, Hey
gods, I don't know what you'redoing with this giant guy, but
I'd really like if you calm himdown a little bit.
And the gods get together andthey say, Well, maybe what he
needs is a friend, a friend tosettle him down.

(18:02):
And I mean, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 (18:06):
Is the point, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (18:08):
And and so they create Enkidu, and Enkadu is a
man of the wilds, whereGilgamesh is a man of the city
and of civilization.
Enkadu just emerges from thewilderness, and he is friends
with all the animals.
He's he's like a nine-foot-tallDisney princess, talking to the

(18:32):
deer, having hanging out withthe birds.
He's running around nakedthrough the wilderness.
And uh then he as a giant strongwild animal, he starts you know,
raiding, pillaging farms andstuff because that's what the
wilderness does.
The wilderness is a threat.

(18:53):
And so now the people, and nowuh Gilgamesh needs to figure out
hey, we've got this threat toour city.
What am I gonna do about thisthreat?
He goes out there and it's youknow, it's a long story, but
they he figures out, oh, it'sthis wild man.

(19:14):
What's the way to tame andcivilize a wild man?
He gets a divine prostitute ofInanna, and it's this is I'm
fairly certain the oldestconfirmed reference to the
divine prostitution practice,which of course would be famous

(19:34):
all the way until Greek times.
The Greeks would comment on itas, oh, how scandalous.
But he gets this divineprostitute to go over there.

SPEAKER_01 (19:43):
Ironic coming from them.

SPEAKER_00 (19:45):
Yes, yes.
The Greeks have very littlecapacity for self-reflection in
terms of making fun of otherpeople and not seeing that they
deserve to be made fun ofthemselves.

SPEAKER_01 (19:58):
But for the exact same rate.

SPEAKER_00 (20:02):
Yeah.
So Enkidu meets this divineprostitute out in the
wilderness, and they sleeptogether for either seven days
or nine days, or some extremelylong period of time, but finally
he's got all his manly energyworked out of him.
And having been contaminated bya woman, by a human woman, he is

(20:29):
now civilized.
And the animals can smell it onhim.
Oh, he's got city smell on him.
The animals go away, so he isdriven into the city of Uruk,
and he's very mad that this thathe has been tricked in this way.
He's very mad.
He busts in, he says, Who didthis to me?

(20:50):
Everybody says, Go fightGilgamesh.
They fight.
It's a Bollywood actionsequence, it's absolutely
fantastic.
And then they eventually stopafter three or four days, and
they just can't stop laughingbecause they're having so much
fun wrestling with each otherthat they become lifelong

(21:12):
friends.
Lifelong, I guess, being the keyword in all of this.
So then they go out and theyhave adventures.
Gilgamesh and Enkadu haveadventures, is seems to have
been its own genre of stories.
The most famous, they go over toLebanon.
They want to cut down a bunch ofcedar trees because that's what

(21:34):
Mesopotamian kings do.
They conquer, they cut cedarsfrom Lebanon.
But there's a monster overthere, the Humbaba, that
represents the nature, thewildness of nature, and they
they beat him up, thusconquering nature, and they get
all the trees.
They have a war against Agga ofKish, who, Agga of Kish, is an

(21:58):
historical person.
And this might have been anactual historical war because
the legend that we have involvesGilgamesh going to the town
council.
And the town council says, hey,let's not start a war for a
bunch of nonsense.
And then Gilgamesh goes to abunch of youths, like you know,

(22:22):
young teen boys and 20-year-oldmen, and says, Hey, let's let's
provoke a war.
And he sort of forms aconstituency of young men in the
city to overrule the traditionalpower structure of the old
conservative men.
And then they have this war withAga of Kish.

(22:44):
That's a neat little historicalnote.
There are almost certainly a lotof other stories of Gilgamesh
and Enkidu having adventuresthat have just been lost.
And this is also where you fitin the story that you were
talking about earlier whereEnkidu dies, but it's not the
story where Enkidu dies, if thatmakes sense.

(23:07):
Gilgamesh and Enkadu, Gilgameshand Enkidu are playing some kind
of game with a ball and a stick.
There's we don't know if it'slike golf or if it's like polo
or if it's like soccer.
We don't really know what theywere doing, but it was a very
popular game, ball and stick,and they're playing, and then

(23:28):
they one day Gilgamesh happensto drop his ball and stick down
into the underworld, into agiant hole that leads to the
underworld.
And how you do that, I don'tknow.
Like I knocked a baseballthrough a neighbor's window
once, but I assume it's sort oflike that.

(23:51):
It really, it really in thestory, it seems kind of like
that.
Oops, I guess it's in theunderworld now.
So Enkadu goes down to theunderworld, and he can only come
back as a spirit because onceyou go in the underworld, you're
dead.
I mean, then he the whole theactual point of that story is to

(24:12):
is moral, and it ends with avery long formulaic list of
dialogues.
So for instance, Gilgamesh,Gilgamesh and Enkadu, they sit
on a bench.
Gilgamesh says, What'd you seedown in the underworld?
And Enkadu says, It's all kindsof stuff.
And Gilgamesh says, Did you seea man who only has one son, who

(24:37):
died with only one son?
And then Kadu says, Yeah, I sawhim.
And Gilgamesh says, How is hedoing in the underworld?
And then Kadu says, Oh, he weepsbitterly, and his he is driven
into the wall by a wooden spike.
But the man who has two sonssits on a few bricks eating
bread.

(24:57):
With three sons, he's drinkingfrom drinking water from a water
skin.
And then it goes on and on up tosix sons, you're going to be
happy in the underworld.
With seven sons, you're going tobe the companion to the gods in
the underworld.
The palace eunuch is propped inthe corner like a useless stick.

(25:17):
The woman who never gave birthis like a broken chamber pot.
The people who don't givefunerary offerings or who don't
receive funerary offerings arestarving.
The people who lied to the godsspend eternity drinking urine.
So it is, in a sense, like thatparticular story is a lot like

(25:40):
Dante's divine comedy, whereDante goes into the underworld
and reports on how all thepeople in hell and purgatory and
heaven are doing.
And so it's a it's a genre thatwould have had each of these are
self-contained stories, not partof the wider mythic cycle, but
it would have had its own, itwould have had a lot of variety

(26:03):
in it.
Uh it's it would have had itsown life going on to it.
It's quite it's good stuff.
Anyway, the period of Enkidu andGilgamesh being bros ends with
Gilgamesh insulting Inanna.
So Gilgamesh has, after all ofthese adventures, become even

(26:28):
more glorious and wonderful andpowerful.
And this is where the epic picksup again.
Everything before this is sortof like prelude that the
audience would have beengenerally familiar with.
The real meat of the epic startswith Inanna being insulted.

(26:48):
Inanna sees Gilgamesh, he'sreal, you know, real sexy, 16
feet tall.
The ladies like tall men, andhe's 16 feet tall.
And he and Inanna sneaks in toGilgamesh while he's bathing in
his palace, and he says, Hey,Gilgamesh, and she says, Hey
Gilgamesh, let's let's getmarried.

(27:11):
And Gilgamesh says, No, I don'twant to get married because you
have ruined the lives of everyone of your lovers.
And he goes on, he providesreceipts, he names names,
everyone whose life that she hasruined, he throws it in her
face.
And funny enough, she was wasnot a big fan of him uh

(27:33):
rejecting her in quite that way.

SPEAKER_01 (27:36):
Why?
You you mean did that she didn'tlike being talked to that way?
Oh my goodness, who would havethought?

SPEAKER_00 (27:43):
Yeah, and so uh instead of dodging a bullet, he
seems to have uh caught himselfhis own separate bullet.
Because if if Inana was going todestroy him while they were
together, he she is now likedoubly certain to destroy him
now that she is absolutelyenraged.
And she is a goddess ofpassions, par excellence, and

(28:08):
she is in 100% passion mode.
And so she goes to her father,who in this story is on, and
says, Hey, can I have the bullof heaven, please?
And he he says, Why would youwant that?
And she says, I want to killGilgamesh.
And and he's like, I don't wantto give you the bull of heaven,
and I don't want you to killGilgamesh.

(28:29):
And she says, Please, Daddy,please, you have to.
I'm your pretty little princess.
He goes, Oh, okay.
And that is also a power ofInanna.
I know we already talked aboutInanna, but you can't ever not
talk about Inanna.
But it's the I'm Daddy'sprincess begging for a treasure,

(28:56):
begging for a treat.

SPEAKER_01 (28:58):
That is kind of worse than that in certain
variants.
I mean, what you're saying istrue, but in one of the
variants, you know, she is doingthat and she's just gonna like
cry and all that other stuff andmake it so that way her yelling
and wails can be heard all overthe realm, various different
realms and that kind of stuff.
But in another variant of it,she threatens to raise all the

(29:19):
dead from the underworld andhave them eat all the living, if
not given that with it, justjust to showcase how much of a
not only has things maybepotentially changed and their
meanings of certain things, butalso just how it's not
necessarily just her playing thewoe is me princess archetype,
but also the I'm gonna destroyeverything if you don't.

SPEAKER_00 (29:42):
I mean, I mean, I do sort of see that as Ishtar still
pouting, as Inanna pouting.
Oh, it's completely still dead.

SPEAKER_01 (29:51):
I'm just trying to showcase to the audience that
it's not some of it's not justidle threat, is the point.

SPEAKER_00 (29:57):
Oh, yeah, no, she's yeah, she's uh a fairly fairly
powerful in her own right, uh,which makes it all the more
interesting that for all of herpower, like she is a person with
the plausible ability to conquerthe underworld, who makes
mountains bow down to her, whoshe is extremely destructive

(30:22):
when she wants to be, which isfairly often.
And she does not feel uhcompetent to defeat Gilgamesh.
And there's almost certainly amasculine and feminine energy
going on in this in this fightbetween Gilgamesh and Inanna.

(30:44):
Very archetypal masculine andfeminine battle of a sort.
Yeah, and so she ends up beingunable to physically overwhelm
Gilgamesh, and she is unable touse her feminine wiles against
Gilgamesh, which is often herprimary power.

(31:06):
So she gets the bull of heavenand throws it at the city of
Uruk.
And the bull of heaven runsaround, starts beating stuff up,
and Gilgamesh and Enkidu go downand fight it.
And the fight is portrayed verymuch like just another adventure

(31:27):
of Gilgamesh and Nkadu.
The structure of the story isnot that different from the
Humbaba fight, from the Aga ofKish fight, and from other
divine fights against likethere's an action hero god
called Ninurta, and we have anumber of his battles where he

(31:49):
goes off and fights people.
The structure of the fight isvery similar.
But then Enkadu is gored by thehorns.
And this is subvertingexpectations for the audience.
This is, I mean, the hero can bewounded, but then Enkadu becomes

(32:12):
very ill and he dies a w alittle while after, despite
everybody's attempt to heal him.
And this is not how these sortof stories usually go.
He uh not only is it notGilgamesh that died in exchange
for the the insult that he puton Inanna, it's it's uh Enkidu,

(32:37):
a not unrelated person, but uhnot the primary, not the guy
that rejected Inanna.

SPEAKER_01 (32:44):
Not the one that is doing the primary offense, let's
say her mind.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (32:50):
Yeah, and so I mean this that is something a lot I
know a lot of people havefocused on the Gilgamesh versus
Inana and the Bull of Heavenversus Enkidu specifically.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu both fightthe bull, but you could see it
in a divine archetypal way asGilgamesh and Ishtar are

(33:15):
fighting, and Enkidu and theBull of Heaven are fighting on a
lower realm sort of thing whereGilgamesh and Ishtar are
fighting as masculine versusfeminine, whereas Enkidu and the
Bull of Heaven are both thestrength of wilderness.

(33:38):
They are both the strength ofnature.
But a bull is the most powerfuland large domesticated animal
that most Mesopotamians wouldhave seen in their entire lives.
It is it is a symbol ofstrength, but it's the symbol of

(33:59):
strength that people have takencontrol of.
Enkadu is also a wild man thathas been taken control of and
domesticated by Gilgamesh.
And so, in a sense, they're verysimilar, but there's you could

(34:20):
potentially see two sides ofdomestication there, where
Enkidu is still a little wild,whereas the bull has lost its
wilderness and gained more ofthe power of civilization in
him.
I don't know if you havethoughts on either the masculine
feminine.

SPEAKER_01 (34:40):
I have lots of thoughts of this.
So firstly, I want to backtrackjust a tiny bit on the Bull of
Heaven notion and whatnot.
We've brought up before inanother episode that we've done
here and whatnot, how Inanna isgoing into the underworld.
And one of the reasons that shegives to it, gives for it in one

(35:02):
of the variants of the story isto make it so that way she's
there for the funeral ofEreshikol's husband.
Now, this is interesting becausehe is also, and for by certain
scholars, the bull of heaven,that there is no difference
between that, that Ereshikol'shusband is the bull of heaven,

(35:24):
and then the bull of heavenbeing slain is what leads to
Inanna going into the underworldand everything that comes out
from that with it.
So, in a way, the these storiesare all directly linked to each
other, which is kind of whywe've talked about this and why
we brought it up.
I'm not saying that it'sdefinitively proven that this is

(35:44):
the case for it, because thereare some scholars that are in
contention against this, butgenerally accepted at least as a
plausible theory.
So we'll just leave it, I'm justputting that out there for
what's going on with it.
Now, why I had mentioned earlierthat this doesn't is incomplete
with certain things with thattoo, is because when you were
talking about when Inkidu waslaying with the divine

(36:09):
prostitute and whatnot, Inana's,you know, prostitute that's
being sent there, there is theyfound a tablet that was
discovered in 2015, I want tosay, and not fully analyzed and
read until 2018 and put into therest of the stories later on and
became public consciousnessaround that same time period and

(36:30):
whatnot, that gives a variancein terms of the dates for what
it is.
So you were correct when it sayssix days and seven nights that
he laid with her for that onthat part.
I know you also mentioned nine.
Nine's another important number,but not in this particular
instance for what's happening.
And then, but then another onewas found later that basically
shows that they were with eachother for two weeks, which is

(36:52):
what's like a small break inbetween for what was going on
there.
So the point is, I mean, that'spart of this new stuff that was
part of the lacuna that wasmissing that I was talking
about.
So I just want to comment onthat briefly before we move on.
Now, as to the masculine andfeminine things, I'm gonna put
that to the side for a momentand I'm gonna sidestep it and

(37:15):
we'll come back to that.
I want to focus on the bull, andI'm gonna focus on Inky Doo and
Gilgamesh and how they'reactually two foils, if you will,
related to the bull.
And forget Inana for just asecond.
She's not part of this equationfor what I'm going with here
with it.
Are you familiar with the cultof Mithras or the cult of

(37:37):
Mithras?
Okay.
So inside of it, for the sake ofimmortality argument that I was
bringing up earlier for some ofthese things that are happening
and the beginning of all this,is that in the cult of Mithras,
the bull represents the lower,one of one of the things it can
represent.
I shouldn't say this is the onlyrepresentation, but one of the

(37:59):
main important representationsthat it has is that it
represents the lower basedesires, the more animalistic
part of humanity and that kindof stuff with it, and that you
have to overcome that if youwant to reach higher spiritual
illumination and that kind ofstuff for what's going on there.

(38:19):
So if you look at the twocharacters that there are with
it, you have Gilgamesh, who isable to overcome, and one of the
one of the most base desiresthat the Mithras cult is trying
to overcome here is sexual lust,which he rejects in the form of
Inanna and her advances towardshim and whatnot, now being

(38:42):
played out for what it is.
This is why you can look at itas he overcomes that, which is
why he isn't slain by the bullof heaven.
But Inky Doo is feral.
He's still, thus, he has somecivilization to him and whatnot,
but as you mentioned before,he's just another variant of the
wild man and whatnot, and he'sstill there with it, and he

(39:04):
isn't able to overcome theselower, more base desires for it.
So the bull inevitably slays himfor what's happening there with
that.
This is a take on it that Ipersonally have.
I'm not sure if other scholarsagree or see this with it.
I'm not saying that my take iscorrect.

(39:24):
I'm just saying this issomething that I have not seen
put forth when I've researchedthis stuff with it.
Now, to be fair, I haven't deepdived a bunch of theories onto
this with other people, and I'msure there's somebody else who's
seen this at some point forwhat's going on.
But it's the first thing that Isee that's being played out with
this particular notion here whenI see that.
It's the contrast between thetwo.

(39:46):
The bull slays one because heisn't able to overcome his baser
instincts and whatnot, and theother one is.
And of course, we know the cultof Mithras came out of the same
region.
The problem is we don't know howold it is, and we don't know all
of its mysteries and all theother stuff with it.
There's a lot of speculation andconjecture for it.

(40:08):
So there's that side of thingsfor it.
As for the masculine andfeminine playing off of each
other for what's going on there,part of why all of Inanna's
lovers end in misery or demiseor something else happening to
them is well, because sherepresents, as we talked about

(40:31):
before in one of our otherepisodes, she represents the
notion of the divine kingshipbeing moved to humanity and and
whatnot.
And she's going to have multiplelovers because she represents
the earth goddess that's doingthat you have to marry and that
kind of thing with that.

(40:51):
So, of course, the lover isgoing to come to a terrible end
for what's happening there withit, because it's inevitable that
that's going to happen as itmoves to the next lover, and
that's why she has so many forwhat's happening on this front.
It's just part of what'shappening there for it.
So, this is also why she'senraged with Gilgamesh for

(41:12):
what's happening there.
It's because it's like, well,yeah, this was inevitable.
Everybody that marries me whogains my power and gains my
influence and gains my affectionand all of that, it's part of
the package deal for being withit and that kind of thing.
You don't have a say and whetherthat's going to be it or not.
And if you want to be king, youhave to accept me.

(41:34):
You don't have a choice for whatit is.
And he rejects that notion, soto speak, at least in this
variant of the story.
But ironically, it also spurshim, because the death of Inky
Doo, to go search forimmortality and all these other
things that are going on there.
So it's that's why I'm saying ifyou start looking at it, it's

(41:55):
all of these various differentunderstandings of the search for
immortality in some capacity oranother, and his failed attempts
to actually come to success withthat on the uh ultimately in the
end for what it is.
But he ends up having a goodlife anyway, and he does achieve

(42:15):
a type of immortality.
We are still talking about himfive thousand-ish years later,
you know, and and that kind ofstuff, much like Achilles
achieved his form of immortalitythat he was looking for and and
whatnot, that he would beremembered forever and that kind
of stuff, which is what the mosthuman aspects of these things

(42:37):
that come with it are.
So those are my very let's saynon completely spending an hour
on this thought that there arewith it.
I can go further onto thesethings if you want on anything
with it, but those are those arewhat I see in terms of anything

(42:57):
that's immediate and easy tounderstand.

SPEAKER_00 (42:59):
Yeah, no, I like the I like that idea of the bull as
the as the baser instincts thatGilgamesh is able to overcome,
and Enkidu is not, because ofcourse he is captured because of
his inability to overcome thatbaser instinct.
Yeah, no, I like it.

(43:20):
So, what happens next in ourstory is that Enkidu dies.

SPEAKER_01 (43:26):
And spoiler alert.

SPEAKER_00 (43:31):
You've had 5,000 years to read this.
If you haven't read it by now,you're out of luck.
Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh issad.
And Gilgamesh is not just sad,he is Romance is over.
Yeah, he is he is thrown into aprofound depression, which

(43:53):
appear which initially hisdepression is focused around
Nkadu and the bromance.
Wah wah, my friend is dead,yeah, and everyone's like, Yeah,
Gilgamesh, get over yourselfnow.
It's been it's been long enough.

SPEAKER_01 (44:13):
Just for the audience, not just like they're
time to get over it when it'sbeen like a week or a month, or
this is like long, long time.
I forget exactly how long, butit's like years, so yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (44:23):
He goes into a very prolonged depression, but that
depression morphs because Idon't want to say he gets over
enkadu, but it becomes less of awah, wow, nkidoo is dead, and it
becomes far more of a oh mygoodness, I'm also gonna die.

(44:46):
And that becomes the source ofhis, I think, more profound
depression.

SPEAKER_01 (44:54):
It's it's a catalyst, it's a catalyst, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (44:57):
Yeah, it's a catalyst, and everybody's like,
Yeah, you're gonna die.
That happens, get over it.
But he didn't want to get overit.
He he it's existential.
It's my divine right not to die.

SPEAKER_01 (45:11):
I am two-thirds divine, you're just regular
humans.
Of course it's normal for you.
This isn't normal for me.
What are you talking about?
You know, that type of idea.

SPEAKER_00 (45:20):
Yeah, but I'm even beyond that, even beyond him
being special.
This is the this is theexistential angst that people
have had since for as long asthere have been people.

SPEAKER_02 (45:31):
Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (45:33):
Yeah, I mean, elephants seem to get depressed
when people around with theirfriends die.
Animals, animals, at least someof them have some awareness of
death.
And yeah, death is not is not isnot fun.
I have it died, but I I have iton good authority, it's

(45:55):
undesirable.
And so he uh eventuallyeventually people are like, hey,
cheer up, go on an adventure,deal with it.
And he's like, you know, I'm anadventurous kind of fellow, I

(46:15):
bet there's a way to liveforever.
And there are a couple differentthings that go on here, but
basically they all come down tohe hears that there's a way to
live forever.
And that search for immortalityultimately has people tell him,

(46:39):
hey, go hunt down this fella,Utnapishtum.
Utnapishtum is the Sumerianname, Ziyad Sura is the Akkadian
name.
I really hope I didn't get thatbackwards.
There's a couple other namesthat he's got in different
civilizations, but he'sbasically biblical Noah.

(47:00):
He is the guy who survived theGreat Flood, and uh in the
Mesopotamian version, he becameimmortal as a result of
surviving the flood.
And that's all that Gilgameshknows at this point.
That's all that anybody knows.
No one's quite sure where he is.

(47:21):
There, and I mean no one inmodern times is quite sure where
he is because there's differentattributions for where he's
located.
In some versions, he's locatedat the source of the four
rivers, which uh actually seemsto be like the biblical Garden
of Eden is at the source of theTigris, Euphrates, Gihon, and

(47:45):
Pishon rivers.
And that seems to be a memory ofwhere of the this same this same
utnipishtim is in at the sourceof the four rivers, sort of
thing.
But the I think the version thatwe have that makes the most

(48:06):
sense says that Utnapishtum isat the southern continent.
And I think you'll get somepeople that say that this is
Antarctica.
Actually, I think in in theoldest stories podcast, when I
did this, I was under theimpression it was Antarctica.
More and more I'm seeing peoplesay that it's probably somewhere

(48:28):
in Africa, was the idea, becausethe very early sailors did have
knowledge of at least the Hornof Africa and possibly the
southeast coast of Africa, maybeMadagascar, possibly.
So they seem to have had somedistant knowledge that there was
stuff down there.

(48:48):
And Ziyatsura was down there,Napishton was down there.
And so he goes on a grand quest.
And the grand quest isfantastic.
I have not, I may be wrong, Ihave not seen different versions
of this sequence of him leavingUruk to get to Ziadsura, which

(49:11):
may mean that there's only oneversion of this story in terms
of the primary events thathappen.
And this is not, I think, Ithink this is not, hey, there
were a bunch of Gilgameshadventures that all got put in
here.
I think this is a composedsequence.
So he starts going west from Ur.

(49:33):
I I want to sorry, just yeah.
Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 (49:36):
I wanna I want to say that to my knowledge,
there's only at least for forthe atrahasis portion here, if
you will, that that that thatthis is it.
There is no other variant of itthat I'm aware of either.
That doesn't mean there aren'tvariants, uh, there aren't
different copies of it orwhatever.
Oh yeah, yeah.

(49:57):
But it's the same, it's the samestory, it's the same structure,
it's the same stuff with the I'mnot personally aware of any
other I in other words, I agree.
Like as far as I can tell, it'sthe same.

SPEAKER_00 (50:08):
So yeah.
And so we can take this journeyfrom Uruk to Atrahasis, which is
another Utnapishtem.
Uh he's got a lot of names.
This is one journey, even thoughit has multiple stops.
So he heads west, probablybecause west is the direction of

(50:32):
death.
It's the setting sun.
The Egyptians considered it verystrongly the direction of death.
And he uh starts a lot ofcultures do.

SPEAKER_01 (50:43):
In fact, all cultures that I'm aware of that
have any esoteric inclinationsdo.

SPEAKER_00 (50:48):
So okay.
Yeah.
And so heading west, he ends upat the Straits of Gibraltar.
Of course, they don't call itthe Straits of Gibraltar, but
it's very clearly it's two, it'stwo mountains at the end of the
Mediterranean Sea that that flowout, and the the waters pass
through these two mountains, andthey flow out into the endless

(51:11):
ocean.
I'm just always fascinated byhow much geographical knowledge
the they have in the Sumerianperiod.
They clearly have boat peoplegoing out the Mediterranean,
they have boat people going downAfrica, they have boat people
going all the way to India,possibly to Southeast Asia, to

(51:33):
Burma and Thailand.
But that's neither here northere.

SPEAKER_01 (51:39):
It is amazing like how much they knew and how far
they had traveled.
Like it is absolutely insane forthat era.

SPEAKER_00 (51:46):
Yeah.
And I mean, they they knew thatyou could see Gibraltar from the
African coast.
They mention it specifically inthis Gilgamesh story, that these
are two mountains that you cansee from one another.
And as is historically wellknown, each of the mountains was
guarded by a scorpion person, agiant scorpion person.

(52:10):
And Gilgamesh has to fight thegiant scorpion people, and then
he passes between thesemountains, which serve as a gate
to the edge of the world.
He gets to the edge of the worldand he's like, Oh, where do I go
now?
And he looks down and he sees agiant tunnel.
And he knows that this is thetunnel that the sun passes under

(52:32):
when it goes away at night.
Because of course, forGilgamesh, the world is flat.
The world is uh is a flat disklike this.
Everybody's hanging out up here.
The sun comes up, it goes overthe world, and then it passes
under the world through atunnel.
And so he waits till waits tillnightfall, and then he goes into

(52:59):
the tunnel and he startsrunning.
He starts running because heknows he's only got 24 hours to,
or he's only got a certainnumber of hours to make it
through because the sun spends12 hours in this tunnel, then 12
hours in the sky, and so he'sgot to get out the other end of
the tunnel before the sun comesthrough here.

(53:23):
And the sun is very fast becauseit crosses the entire world
multiple times.

SPEAKER_01 (53:27):
This also goes back to the idea that I was talking
about, and and and that kind ofstuff too, with it in terms of
him representing Orionultimately for what's going on
there.
Because it anyway, there thatit's this is just this stuff is
even more definitive proof atsome point.
We can go into that if you want.

(53:48):
Please continue with the withthe narrative.

SPEAKER_00 (53:50):
Yeah, so he gets through the tunnel under the
world, he makes it out, and hein the story, of course, to be
dramatic, he makes it out justas the sun is about to catch him
because that's more exciting.
Get it'd be a good Bollywoodmovie again.
Then he could probably do a sundance right after with Shamash,

(54:11):
the sun god, dancing around withhim.
It'd be fantastic.
Anyway, he's now at the fareastern edge of the world, and
he come and he's continuestraveling west from there.
And he goes by the Garden ofEden, and I mean it's got a
different name, but it isbasically the Garden of Eden.

(54:32):
And he just sort of walks by itand he's like, Oh, yeah, I saw
the Garden of Eden as I went by.
It's like, wait, wait, wait,wait, wait, no, pause there and
tell us more about that.

SPEAKER_01 (54:42):
Man, that's not important.
I'm on an adventure.

SPEAKER_00 (54:46):
He walks right by the Garden of Eden, and oh, I
sure wish, I sure wish we had across-cultural uh description of
the Garden of Eden instead ofjust walking by it and glossing
it over.
Yeah, yeah, here's this greatparadise garden.
It's just over there, you know,on the eastern edge of the
world.
It's great.

(55:07):
I didn't hang out there verymuch.
And then he turns south fromthere to cross the southern
ocean.
And he reaches a ferryman.
And we've talked about ferrymanbefore, the ferryman myth.
And the the waters that he hasto cross over are the waters of

(55:28):
death.
And the ferryman is the only wayto cross the waters of death.
If you touch the waters, youdie.
And there's some drama here, andit's I don't know if you see any
deeper meaning in his encounterwith the ferryman, because he
the ferryman has he the ferrymandoesn't paddle the the oars.

(55:52):
The ferryman's got oh spin alittle bit golems, something
like golems or familiars, littlehelper assistant dudes that are
his boat boat that pilot hisboat.

(56:13):
Yeah, that are yeah, they're hisrowers.
And Gilgamesh ends up killingall of them and breaking all of
his oars.
And the the ferryman's like, whydid you do that?
How are we gonna get across?
And Gilgamesh is like, I I justI just paddle, don't worry about
it.
It's gonna be fine.
I'm real strong.
I don't know if you if you haveseen anything deeper about that

(56:36):
or if it's just a humorousanecdote on his way to the
underworld.

SPEAKER_01 (56:41):
I can guarantee you any stories that have to do with
the search for immortality don'thave much humor in them in terms
of an antidote.
They all an antidote, theyalways have some deeper meaning
behind it.
Doesn't mean it can't be put inthere for humorous purposes,
too, but there's always anotherlayer, is the point.
I know that to be the case forfor every other tradition that

(57:03):
I've studied with that.
So I'm going to make the it isan assumption because I haven't
I can't haven't definitivelylooked into it.
The same assumption for theSumerians that that's the case
for it.
And it's not just like anIndo-European thing, it's true
of even Native Americans and allthat other stuff with it.
Because you have to understandwhen these people are telling

(57:24):
these stories, originally theywere oral for the most part,
even if they are changed whenthey're written down or through
other influences and all that,they viewed them as sacred
truths.
And if it's a sacred truth, likewe view them as myths now today
and whatnot, but all a myth isis a religion that no one
believes in anymore.
All right.
They were sacred truths to thepeople that were originally

(57:46):
doing with it and that kind ofstuff.
And that doesn't mean that therecan't be humorous components to
it, but those humorouscomponents are also going to
contain sacred truths to them,is the point for what it is.
Whether I can decipher that ornot is a completely different
thing, or whether anybody elsecan, because we've lost certain
things that are going on there.
That's up for debate andinterpretation, but I guarantee

(58:10):
you that there's something elsethat's going on here.
And so I'm not front, I'm goingto pull from another tradition
that I'm aware of that mighthelp give us a little bit of
insight into what is possiblygoing on here to a certain
extent.
And this is gonna go to theNordic tradition.
So in the Nordic tradition, youhave a being who takes on very

(58:34):
similar characteristics ofGilgamesh and and whatnot, and
uh and and and is this case isThor.
Okay, and Thor, whether youunderstand it or not, at this
stage, is on his own quest forimmortality.
It's very subtle.
You have to understand all ofthe stories, and you have to
understand all the stuff that'sgoing on there, because even the

(58:55):
gods can die, right?
Edoon has to give their applesin order for them to be
rejuvenated, at least for theNordic tradition and that kind
of stuff and and whatnot.
So they're looking for he'slooking for his own form of
immortality in the this versionof the story.
But people who aren't aware ofall the subtle clues and details
don't view it this way, just tobe clear.

(59:16):
This is an esotericinterpretation of it rather than
a more literal one.
Just put that forth.
Anyway, he is on a quest, andthere is a he's supposed to be
going with another god named Tyrand whatnot.
And Tyr is supposed to be halfgiant and half something else.
This point is extremelyimportant for what's going on

(59:39):
here, and they are going to grabsome sort of ancient cauldron
type thing that they need tohave for Egger's hall.
Okay?
And Egger is the one who is theYotinar, the giant of the sea,
just like we're talking.

(01:00:00):
About here, and he has ninedaughters that are all there in
his hall that are supposed to bedifferent waves of things for
it.
And he needs the cauldron forthe mead, okay, for what's going
on there, which I also has to dowith the story, uh, in the sense

(01:00:22):
of what we're talking about herewith Gilgamesh, because he comes
across an ale, a divine alemaiden himself in these
adventures that he goes on thattries to dissuade him from going
into it, which ironically isactually one of the names, one
of the epithets of Inanna slashEstar for what's going on there.

(01:00:45):
Now, most scholars will say thatit isn't her.
I'm not convinced that it isn't,but I'm also not convinced that
it is her, and some sort ofother variant for what's going
on there.
I just want to bring that up asanother thing for what's
happening.
And in the Nordic tradition, youneed to have nine knights that
you go and do these things withit, which is true of many other
traditions, is you have topartake in.

(01:01:06):
So anyway, we go back to Thorand his search for this cauldron
and whatnot, he has to enterinto the giant realm, the realm
of the dead, in another sensefor what it is.
And in the Nordic tradition,that's north.
And the reason why it's north isbecause the colder you go, get
the the more that you freeze,and that equals death to them

(01:01:28):
for what's going on there, forwhat it is, because how cold the
nights are for them, and thewinters are for them, and and
that kind of stuff.
And so you don't want that, youwant heat.
If you're in that far north,heat equals good, cold equals
bad, okay?
So that's kind of where that is.
Anyway, Tyr somehow disappearsfrom the story.

(01:01:49):
We don't know where he goes atthis point, but he gets on a
boat with another giant, andthey take the head of an ox.
Here's another thing with the oxidea that we've talked about and
whatnot, and making it so thatway they use the head of the
most prized ox to go fishinginside of it and whatnot.

(01:02:14):
And the Jotunar is the onethat's doing the rowing, but he
wants to stop and doesn't wantto go out any further.
And Thor's like, no, we need togo out further, and keeps
wanting to go out further andfurther and further until they
get to an area no one's beenbefore.
Much like how Gilgamesh is doingon his side of things with it.
And so he puts the head into thewater with it, and he catches

(01:02:37):
one of the heads because ofJormungunder, the great sea
serpent, the great snake andwhatnot.
Which, if you translateJormungunder's name, it means
great magic.
Okay.
So it means great magic, andit's an alchemical thing because

(01:02:59):
he is not supposed to let go ofhis tail until Ragnarok, one of
his heads is always biting thetail of it until the time of
Ragnarok, which is clearly theOuroborus eating its own tail
over and over again.
So why am I bringing this up interms of a comparison for what's
happening with it, is that ifyou compare it with the fairyman

(01:03:24):
idea, there's another sceneright before this that all this
happens where it's Odin who isin the guise of the Ferryman,
who refuses to allow him across,meaning Thor across to the other
side with it, and telling himyou need to go and do your own
things, and they hurl insults ateach other and whatnot.

(01:03:45):
It's humorous if you don'tunderstand what the deeper
meanings behind it are, muchlike the scene of him kind of
killing all these golem-likecreatures that are there for
that.
And it's kind of showcasing, inmy opinion, that this is there's
some sort of current that'sthread between all of these
stories here that are going onwith it, as we've talked about

(01:04:07):
before.
I don't know all the details,but I'm just but clearly there's
something there.
And that on the the case of itwith Gilgamesh, it's like he's
not ready to do stuff.
And part of the reason why heisn't able to achieve his
immortality yet is because hedoesn't understand the rules

(01:04:28):
that there are in the otherworld, and that he isn't fully
prepared for that.
While he's able to conquer hisbaser, lesser stuff with it, as
we talked about with the slayingof the bull and whatnot, the
slaying of the ox, that he isnot capable of going all the
way.

(01:04:48):
And we know that this is playedout again in other stories, too,
of which are in the Greektradition and whatnot.
You see that with the Iliad andthe Odyssey and whatnot, with
Odysseus, he can't go all theway with it either for his
stuff, which we also know theytook certain story structures
from Gilgamesh.
This is undisputed.

(01:05:09):
And then on that front, for whatit is, this one to me has always
been the most fascinatingbecause it's based upon it's a
real person that did this, butsomehow he still thinks that he
can go and do this, which isAlexander the Great.
Most people have no idea, butthe entire point of everything
he was doing was not to conquerthese other worlds, these other

(01:05:30):
lands, these other peoples, andall that.
That was the outcome of what hedid with it, but it was his
search for immortality.
He went first to Egypt to try togain immortality there.
That failed.
Then he went to what we knowtoday as you know, Persia area

(01:05:50):
and whatnot, you know, and thatkind of stuff with it, the
Persian Empire, and he goesthere and he's seeking out their
variant of it.
But when he gets there,according to the myths and
legends surrounding him andwhatnot, Marduk, the great god,
is dead, who was supposed to beable the one that could give him
immortality for what it is.
And so now he's looking forOkeanis, which all he knows is

(01:06:13):
to the east, according to hisunderstanding of things with it.
So he keeps heading further andfurther east until he gets into
the Indus Valley region andwhatnot.
And then eventually his troopswant to turn around and all
these other things.
But everything he was doing interms of his quest and his
marches and everything he didwith his people was actually
about him playing the archetypeof Gilgamesh and his quest for

(01:06:38):
immortality and ultimatelyfailing at it, yet again for
what's happening here.
And I'm seeing a lot ofparallels for all these
different things that arehappening on it there.
Obviously, I don't know exactlywhat the Sumerian stuff with it
is, but something also happensin the Nordic tradition where
it's very clear that the Nordicpeople get fed up with dealing

(01:07:00):
with the ferryman.
And they know this is the casewith it, because what they do is
that they make their own boats.
They put people in boats tocross to the other side on their
own.
So there were two ways to get tothe other side.
If you didn't have a boat thatthere was with it, or you

(01:07:21):
couldn't get on the ferryman'sbelt, which is what the other
way for what it is, because youhave to pay a coin or pay
something in various differentforms for what's going on with
it and all that, you could takethe main bridge across, right?
But that's what everybody commonfolk did, and they had to wait
in line and take their turn andall this other stuff, and it was
a long, arduous process to gothrough that way.
So they would they would preferthe ferryman because it takes

(01:07:42):
less time.
But eventually somethinghappened, it seems, to where
they're just like, fuck it,we're done with this bullshit.
We don't want to even deal withthe ferryman anymore.
What if we have our own boats?
What if we just put everybody inboats and make it so that way we
go across from what's happeninghere on that, which actually has
its own esoteric meanings againbehind it and whatnot.
But there is the humorous aspectthat comes along with that.

(01:08:07):
So just for whatever that'sworth at this long tirade that
goes in this weird discussionfor what's going on with it, I
know there's something morethere.
I just don't necessarily knowwhat it is, because I haven't
studied Sumerian mythologiesdeep enough.

SPEAKER_00 (01:08:22):
Yeah, I would say you don't see the boatman very
often, and this particularappearance of him is not very
well detailed.
A lot of the times in cuneiformwriting, the writing is just

(01:08:42):
like notes.
You often don't get the fullstory, and the notes are just
there so that you remember.
And the thing about thewinemaiden, you're between the
Garden of Eden, the reason heturned, he knows where the
boatman is is because Gilgameshencounters Saiduri, the
winemaking goddess.

(01:09:03):
And she is like, hey, go hangout with uh go hang out with the
ferryman.
Urshanabi.
I have his I pulled his name outon my notes.

SPEAKER_01 (01:09:12):
Yes, Urshanabi.
Urshanabi.

SPEAKER_00 (01:09:14):
Yeah, which is an interesting name.
But and then his his he's gotthe men of stone, is what
they're called, which there aremultiple men of stone in in
Mesopotamian legend.
And here they do seem likeconstructs made of stone.
In other places, they getidentified with the mountain

(01:09:37):
people, and they're just people,but non-civilized people.

SPEAKER_01 (01:09:43):
Here they stone thing is interesting because it
actually has a parallel with thethe giant notion that I was
talking about inside of theNordic stuff for what and Celtic
for that matter.
And what happens is that some ofthese structures, these stone
megalithic structures that arethere with it, they're because

(01:10:06):
the the giants were turt turnedinto stone when they stayed too
late in the sun and whatnot, andbecame part of that stuff with
it.
So obviously, stone and giant orother worldly beings that are
similar to giants are all partof that, and it seems like
there's another layer to ithere.
And a lot of times the giantsare also in some capacity or

(01:10:28):
another confused with othermountain men known as dwarves
and that kind of stuff.
And the dwarves are in anothersense also people that are part
of this other world, meaninglike not our reality, but like a
more divine reality or like inthis some other layer of reality
and that kind of thing forwhat's happening.
And it's in I'm just seeinganother parallel to that there

(01:10:52):
for what's going on with it.
It's not perfect, but I'mthinking there's some sort of
strand here through time andspace that pulls all of this
together and whatnot, becauseyou know the fairyman myth can
be traced back to a minimum of30,000 years ago for what it is.
So that's and maybe older, but Idon't know.
Point is that some of thesethings are so old that they have

(01:11:13):
nothing to do with oneparticular culture in any way,
shape, or form.
They're just like taken up byeverybody.

SPEAKER_00 (01:11:18):
So yeah, so the the specifics here, because it might
make a difference, of what wewhat we have is not very much.
Gilgamesh, for some reason, doesnot want to just talk to the
ferryman.
I'm not sure we know why hedoesn't want to talk to the
ferryman.

(01:11:39):
Instead, the ferryman and hismen of his own are sitting sort
of at the water's edge, out inthe out in nature, and just
hanging out, having their littlecamp, and Gilgamesh sneaks up
and then he jumps on theferryman, smacks him with the
flat of his ax, pins him down,incapacitates him, knocks him

(01:12:02):
out.
And then the men of stone arelike, What are you doing?
And Gilgamesh is like, or hedoesn't even talking.
They're just like, oh mygoodness.
And then Gilgamesh and the menof stone just start fighting.
And Gilgamesh hacks all the menof stone up into the men of
pebbles.
And then he throws all the hethrows all of the rocks into the

(01:12:26):
waters of death so that nobodycan ever retrieve the men of
stone.
And he doesn't really explainwhy he has shattered them all
and thrown them all into thewaters so that they can never be
reconstructed again.
Uh, he just like, hey, this isthis is what I'm doing.
And then the Urshnabi theferryman gets up and he's like,

(01:12:49):
Hey, what are you doing, bro?
And Gilgamesh is like, Youshould take me across these
waters.
And he's like, I can't.
And Gilgamesh is like, I'll row.
Don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_01 (01:13:02):
And that's right, which is the same idea that was
going on with that there.
So if you go back to the storyof the ferryman concept that I
was talking about, where Thor isthere and it's Odin in disguise
that's there with it.
The whole reason why he even hasto take the fairyman, according

(01:13:23):
to the esoteric interpretationthat's going on here, is because
he's too dense.
He's too physically dense totake the rainbow bridge, the
bifrost, or the beefrost, or thebilfrost, depending upon how you
want to translate it andwhatnot, back into Asgard and
that kind of stuff.
He is too physically heavy.
He represents the earthly power,the man of power that's going

(01:13:46):
there with it.
And it's clearly stating thatthe earth is dying, his mother
is dying, which is the earth andwhatnot, and that you need to go
and do stuff to help her.
And the only way he can go dothat, meaning Thor, is by going
through this transformationalprocess that transforms him from
this being of I'm just oh machoand all this other stuff, which

(01:14:10):
is all well and good, but that'sonly good on the physical plane.
It doesn't help you in theethereal planes that are there
with it, which are much more youneed you need to be light, you
need to be more sophisticated,you need to have a higher level
of understanding of things, youneed to be able to do all these
other things with it.
And you know, Thor goes throughthis transformational process in

(01:14:32):
the poetic edda of making it sothat way he still has his manly
powers at the end of the day forwhat's going on with it, but he
has to go through more of thefeminizational aspects of things
in order to do that.
And that's this war ofconsciousness that we were kind
of talking about before betweenthe masculine and the feminine

(01:14:53):
side of things that were goingon there between Inanna and
Gilgamesh, right before the bullof heaven that caused all of
that to continue onward, andit's playing off of those themes
to a certain extent there too,for what's going on.
Because obviously Gilgamesh isthe penultimate version of this
mighty hero idea that's going onhere that is all about the

(01:15:17):
masculine energy.
But in order to enter thespiritual realms, in order to
get to that divine function, theimmortality that he's seeking on
that level with it, he has togive up that and move forward
with it.
And this shows showcases howhe's able to do that from the
various different types ofimmortality and ways of going

(01:15:37):
forth with it.
Because in the Nordic tradition,and not just the Nordic
tradition, and all othertraditions that are of
Indo-European variants forwhat's going on, it is the
maiden with the mead archetype,if you will, that is the one who
bestows that to them in somecapacity or another, which is

(01:15:59):
why when he meets up with her,she's telling him how, meaning
Gilgamesh here, how to go intothe underworld and do it
properly and get his immortalitythat he is seeking for what's
going on with that.
You can see this with the greatDasana in the Vedic tradition.
You can see it called Madhu inthe Vedic tradition instead of
Mead, which is where it comesfrom.

(01:16:19):
You have Soma and Homa andKekion and Ambrosia, and you
have all these different thingsthat are showing up in all the
various different parts ofEurasia, that there isn't even
northern Africa that's going onthere for this stuff that's
playing a role on thatparticular front for it.
And we know the story isultimately about his immortality

(01:16:41):
in some capacity or another.
That's not even like if youdon't interpret it that way,
you're not reading the story,bro.
I don't know what else to tellabout it.
And so when he rejects Inana inthe beginning of stuff for
what's happening there, he'srejecting the bridal chamber

(01:17:04):
notion of things that goes on tothat, which is part of what I've
briefly talked about here, andI'm not going to get into
details here, the livingresurrection tradition that I'm
trying to sh begin to showcaseand underline and all that other
stuff that's there with that.
They had this thing called thebridal chamber, and it was the
marrying of the masculine andfeminine principles, and only by

(01:17:28):
doing that could you reach thislevel of immortality that
they're talking about here andlooking for.
So he rejects that notion ofthings for what it is.
And he fails to do so on thatfront because he rejects Inana.
Then you have him go, and hedoesn't understand the maiden
with the mead concept, if youwill.
I know it's not actually what'splaying out here in the Sumerian

(01:17:48):
version, but just for the sakeof simplicity for what it is
with it, there's certain thingsthat don't go the way that he
wants there with it.
So then he goes and tries tofind, you know, the point is
that every step of the way, hekeeps like misunderstanding
immortality.
He keeps on misunderstandingthis realm and all of that, and
he makes certain progress, buthe can't quite grasp it and go

(01:18:11):
all the way to the end, and heultimately fails for what's
going on there, for what'shappening.
Even the plant that's taken awayfrom him by the end by the snake
and all of that.
It's very reminiscent of likethe apples that Edun would give
to the gods to revitalize themand give them longer life and
that kind of stuff for what'shappening there, in terms of the

(01:18:33):
Nordic tradition and and inother traditions as well, for
what's happening.
I mean, the Isle of Avalonreally means the Isle of Apples
for proof of that, in terms ofthe Celtic stuff that's going on
there for that.
So when I'm looking at this froma comparative mythology point of
view and whatnot, and putting itall together, it is very, very

(01:18:53):
clear what the story is aboutand why he keeps failing, in my
opinion, for that.
But he still gains a type ofimmortality, like I talked about
before, talking about it forthousands of years afterwards,
and how to live a great life andall these other things, and
being larger than life and allthat, which is ultimately on the

(01:19:15):
what most of us are are capableof achieving.
Not saying we will achieve it,but this is how we as human
beings can do that.
So I think I'll shut up herebecause I'm togging the
conversation.

SPEAKER_00 (01:19:30):
No, it's uh it's good stuff.
That's good stuff.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 (01:19:35):
So But this is why I study other traditions.
It helps build in.

SPEAKER_00 (01:19:39):
That's good stuff, yeah.
And so that is the that's sortof the end of Gilgamesh's
journey.
He gets to the ferryman and hegets on the boat and he rows
over with the ferryman toUtnapishtam's island.

SPEAKER_01 (01:20:01):
And that's an important part here.
The island.

SPEAKER_00 (01:20:05):
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a tiny island whereno normal person can get to.
Uh, it's not a hundred percentclear if it's actually meant to
be on the same earth as the restof us.

SPEAKER_01 (01:20:20):
No, I guarantee it's not.

SPEAKER_00 (01:20:23):
But certainly Gilgamesh is a very good thing.

SPEAKER_01 (01:20:25):
It fits the same notion of the island of Calypso
for Odyssey, for the Odyssey andOdysseus, excuse me.
It's the Isle of Avalon, like wetalked about.
It's not a real place in anyway, shape, or form that's going
on there for some of the Celticstuff.
The story that I was talkingabout earlier with Thor needing
to grab the cauldron for Egger'sHall.

(01:20:45):
Egger's Hall is set on an islandthat is the wind shielded
island, is what it translatesto.
Wind being a metaphor formotion, and anything that moves
eventually dies.
Anything that's still and isalready perfect and doesn't need
to change can have immortality.

(01:21:07):
It's protected from the wind, italso comes from this, like uh is
from an eagle that flaps itswings, and the it it it the the
what it does is literallycreates winds of death.
So that's what it is in theNordic tradition.
So when it's talking that it'ssaying it's wind shielded, it's
literally an other world placethat is beyond death and that

(01:21:27):
kind of stuff with it.
And if you go on it with lookingat it from every tradition that
I'm aware of that has this typeof stuff in it, there's not a
single one of them where thatisland is actually supposed to
be a real physical, tangibleplace in this world.
Doesn't mean they can't give itreal world locations.
That's not what I'm talkingabout there.
But it's like a layer overanother part of it, if you will,

(01:21:49):
and it's clearly not real.
It's it's it's esoteric in itsmeaning, it's it's ineffable in
its meaning, and it's supposedto be somewhere else for that.
I know that that's the case forit.
That's not a that's notconjecture.
This part's not conjecture.
There's too much for it to bethat there's too many traditions
that that's for the case for it.
So I'm not aware of a singletradition that it's not true for

(01:22:12):
that has an island ofimmortality, is the point.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (01:22:17):
So he gets to the island, and Utnapishtam's there,
and Utnapisham's also got awife, and she's there.
And they Utnapishtam and hiswife are like, Hey, it's
Gilgamesh, good to meet you.
Glad you're here.
What are you looking for?
And he's like, I'm looking forimmortality.
And Utnapisham's like, well, youcan't have it.

(01:22:39):
And Gilgamesh is like, but Iwant it.
But I want it, bro.

SPEAKER_01 (01:22:45):
You got it.
How did you get it?
I want it.

SPEAKER_00 (01:22:47):
Yeah, and that's that is that is exactly where
the dialogue ends up.
How did you get immortality?
And this is where we get theflood myth.
And the flood myth, of course,is its own topic for some other
day.
It's its own, it's its ownthing.
Just to go through it real fast,Utnapishtun was a king in Sumer

(01:23:11):
in the days before the GreatFlood.
In this is, of course, this isdifferent from the Noah story,
but it's the same architecture.
He's a king uh in Sumer beforethe flood, and I think he's king
of Shurapak.

(01:23:32):
I'm not totally sure.
I can't remember.
Yes, okay.
Yeah, he's the king of Shurapak,and the gods are going to
destroy the world with a giantflood because the people are
being too noisy.
Noisy being literally noisy, butalso noisy being a metaphor for
an excess of chaos and evil.

SPEAKER_01 (01:23:54):
Which it gets back to the shout that Inanna was
going to do that was going to behurt all over the place with
just creating chaos in some formor another.

SPEAKER_00 (01:24:04):
Yeah, noise, yeah.
Evil in Sumerian religion isconceived of differently from
evil in the biblical tradition,but it's often equated with
noise.
Evil and noisy are very similar,as anyone who has had small
children will tell you.
So the whole world's gonna bedestroyed.

(01:24:26):
And Enki, the god who createdhumanity, is like, man, I sure
wish that all of humanity didn'thave to be destroyed.
And so he goes and very sneakilytells Utnapishtum, hey, whole
world's gonna get flooded.
You should build you a boat.
And Utnapishtam builds himself aboat, and or rather, he orders

(01:24:46):
the construction of a boat forby all of his the people on his
city, and then he doesn't letthem in his boat.
He gets on his boat with hisfamily and he watches all the
people who built the boat drown,which is wonderful.
This is this is a king ship atits at its peak.
Peak kingship.

(01:25:07):
And so then there's a giantflood, it goes on for a long
time, then the waters dry up,the earth is once again a blank
slate, and all the gods arelike, all right, we have a blank
canvas, we can make anything wewant on here.
Oh my goodness, what is that?
Why is there still a person onthis earth?
What has happened?

(01:25:28):
How did we go so very wrong?
And Utnapishtam is like, hey, Iguess I survived, don't worry
about it, just let me keepliving.
And the gods say, No, I'm afraidwe can't do that because the
gods had sworn, Enlil inparticular in this version of

(01:25:49):
the story, Enlil had sworn todestroy all mortal life from the
surface of the earth.
And Utnapishtam was a king, hewas just a mortal person.
And Utnapishtam says, Well, youcould you could try not
destroying all of humanity.
And Enlil says, Oh no, I Ivowed.

(01:26:09):
It's in the tablet of destinies.
I have to do this.
He is now committed.
And they sit around thinking,are there any other
alternatives?
And they decide that, you know,if we make Utnapishtim and his
wife immortal, then all mortalswill have been wiped off the

(01:26:30):
face of the earth.
Right.
And it's very much a gloriouslylegalistic solution.
And so the gods go for it.
And that is how Utnapishtam andhis wife become immortal.
They then have children, andtheir children are not immortal,
but that that is the uh they arethe progenitors of the rest of

(01:26:53):
humanity.
And then the two of them retireto their secret island because
if I was immortal, I would alsohave a secret island.
I don't actually think that partis explicitly explained.
You're just supposed to know.
Of course, anishon lives on anisland.
Why wouldn't you?
So Gilgamesh is like, you know,I don't think that applies to

(01:27:17):
me.
He's listened to this story, andhe's like finding a legalistic
solution to an oath made duringthe Great Flood, that's not
really something that I can,that's not a wagon I can hop
onto.
And Upisham's like, yeah, that'swhat I told you.
You can't be immortal.

(01:27:40):
Then Gilgamesh is like, oh man,what would make me immortal?
And then Apishtam's like, look,if you catch the eye of the
gods, you will become immortalif they would gift it to you.
And that right there is a linethat he that goes over the

(01:28:01):
Gilgamesh's head, but I think isdirected directly towards the
audience.
If you catch the eye of thegods, you can become immortal.
But Gilgamesh is like, I don'tunderstand what that means.
I'm not a clever person, I hangout in the gym all the time.
I'm just a gym bro.
And gym bros are often veryclever, but Gilgamesh was not.

(01:28:25):
So when the Pishtum says, Here,listen, I will do a challenge
for you that will catch the eyeof the gods.
If you can stay awake for sevendays and seven nights, then you
will be granted immortality.
I will intervene on the gods'behalf and give you immortality.

(01:28:45):
If you can stay up awake forseven days and seven nights.
And there are I've seen twoversions of this.
One, the gods immediately send amist of sleep upon him and he
falls asleep.
The other one, he's just sotired from his long journey
because he has not slept sinceEnkidu died by some account.

(01:29:09):
And he is now finally resting onthis island and he falls asleep
right away.
And he is going to sleep forseven days and seven, or uh six
days and seven nights.
But whatever.
He's going to sleep for a week.
And Utnapishtam and his wife arelike, you know, Gilgamesh, he's

(01:29:32):
a very proud guy.
He's not going to admit thathe's fallen asleep.
So every day they bake a loaf ofbread and they put it in front
of him.
And then when he wakes up, he'slike, All right, I'm ready to
start.
And they're like, You just sleptfor a week.
And no, I didn't.
I didn't sleep for a week.
I didn't remember it.
And they're like, You totallydidn't.

SPEAKER_01 (01:29:52):
You wouldn't remember it because you were
asleep, bro.

SPEAKER_00 (01:29:54):
Exactly.
And so they they're like, seethis bread.
We've baked one loaf of bread.
Bread a day and the the oldestbread is hard and moldy, the
newest bread is fresh, you sleptfor a week, that's the proof.
And he's like, oh heck, I guessit's I guess it can't be
immortal.

(01:30:14):
That's a shame.
That challenge right there is avery strong linkage of sleep and
death.
And the idea being that youcannot stay awake for seven days
because there is an aspect ofthe inevitability of death baked

(01:30:36):
in every time you go to sleep.
So don't go to sleep tonight.
Don't even close your eyes.
Death is coming for you.

SPEAKER_01 (01:30:45):
Well, I mean, and I don't know what it is in the
Sumerian off the top of my head,but in the Greek tradition,
death and sleep are brothers.

SPEAKER_00 (01:30:54):
Yeah, I mean it's it's sleep is often a metaphor
throughout Semitic languages fordeath.
It's just, I mean, it's just auniversal human uh theme.
So then he says, please, please,please, I really, really, really
want to live forever.
And Utnapishtam says, well,okay.

(01:31:16):
Well, I mean, they, you know,they go back and forth for a bit
because you got to stretch thesestories out.
But Utnapishtam says, you know,there is a magic plant.
And if you eat the magic plant,then you're gonna live forever.
And he's like, Well, where's themagic plant?
And he's like, at the bottom ofthe ocean.
And Gilgamesh says, Well, okay,I'll go to the bottom of the

(01:31:39):
ocean.
And he says, No, no, it's thebottom of the ocean under the
world because in theMesopotamian worldview, the
earth is flat for sure.
But it's seated in a bowl.
And that bowl is full of water.
So if you dig down through theearth, you'll eventually get to

(01:32:02):
the water that the continent,the one continent, is floating
on.
And so down, and then if you getto the bottom of that bowl,
there's one little plantsticking up.
Or actually, there's a wholefield of these plants.
Yeah, it's it's more than oneplant.
Yeah, it's just yeah, yeah.
You know, but but you're notgonna get them.

(01:32:24):
But so Gilgamesh is like, allright, I can do that.
So he grabs the ferryman, andferryman is now his buddy for
this, for at least for a littlewhile.
And they go over to they getback to the real world, and they
journey to this particularlocation.
And we're not really told muchabout where this particular

(01:32:47):
location is, it's just whereUtnapishtam had told Gilgamesh
to go.

SPEAKER_01 (01:32:52):
Either in that instance, it's either one of two
things that that was.
It's either a location thatbasically everybody knew
already, like the audience fortheir time period.
She didn't have to say anythingbecause it was just baked into
the society and whatnot.
Or two, it really doesn't matterbecause it's not a real
location.
It's actually just graphed overthe real world and it's still in

(01:33:12):
the mythological realm.

SPEAKER_00 (01:33:14):
Mm-hmm.
There is an idea that it mightbe the center of the earth,
which is not interestingly,Mesopotamia.
Uh, in Mesopotamians did thinkof themselves as living in the
center of the world, but theyalso seem to have thought there
was a geographic center of theworld separate from them being

(01:33:36):
the political civilizationalcenter of the world.

SPEAKER_01 (01:33:39):
So they're they are the seat of the world in terms
of power, but they are notgeographically the exact center
of it.

SPEAKER_00 (01:33:46):
Which is which is a little bit interesting.
Like the Chinese thought theywere in the middle of the world.

SPEAKER_01 (01:33:51):
Yeah, but both were true.

SPEAKER_00 (01:33:54):
Yeah.
But anyway, Gilgamesh gets tothis place and he starts
digging.
And it's uh it's just likeMinecraft.
He digs straight down until hereaches the water, and then he
starts swimming straight down tothe bottom.
He holds his breath real big andhe gets the gets to the one
plant and he makes his way backup.

(01:34:18):
And it, you know, it's just thevery limit of his abilities to
do all of that.
It's all very difficult.
Then when he gets back up, hehas poked a hole in the bottom
of the the boat of that is theearth.
And so the water from underneathcomes out and it floods the

(01:34:38):
whole area.
And so you're never gonna findthis place again, is the idea.
Because the water he dug downand all the water came spewing
up, and now you can't identifythat land ever again.
So he's got the one plant,you're never gonna find where to
dig again.
So then he's real happy and hestarts heading back home and he

(01:35:00):
pauses to take a bath.
And while he's taking a bath,this is a very I don't know if
this is common motif in othercivilizational stories.
I think I've heard it in Greekstuff, but the Greeks borrow a
lot from Mesopotamia.
He's taking when when acharacter is taking a bath,
frequently their stuff getsstolen.

(01:35:22):
Which a yeah, I don't know, Idon't know how widespread that
is in the world, but you seethat a lot.
And I think I think it comesfrom a very practical, pragmatic
uh human experience.
You take your bath and yourstuff gets stolen.
You go in the pool and someonetakes your stuff off your bench
if nobody's watching it.

SPEAKER_02 (01:35:43):
Right.

SPEAKER_00 (01:35:44):
Um and the snake, a snake comes by, eats the
immortality plant, and this iswhy snakes shed their skin.
This snakes shedding their skinis metaphorically them being
reborn.
Snakes are now immortal.
Gilgamesh will never beimmortal.
I'm sure you have thoughts onthat.

(01:36:05):
That's sort of the end of that.

SPEAKER_01 (01:36:07):
They're they're the regenerative principle.
That's the same idea of like thethe you know, Jormangunder
eating his own tail and whatnotin order to regenerate things
and that kind of stuff.
You also have where the snakesare in the underworld or
literally beneath the earth forwhere they live and whatnot.
And so they're an underworldcreature and archetype for what
it is.

(01:36:27):
If you go back a little bit to Iforget the name of the tree off
the top of my head that that itis, starts with an H, I believe,
but the one that Gilgamesh endedup helping Inanna turn into a
bed and uh into a throne andwhatnot that was going there
with it.
You have the snake at thebottom, you have some other, and
you have a couple othercreatures that are inside of it,

(01:36:49):
which is representative of atype of tree of life that's
going on there with uh, and thenthis is very important for
what's happening.
That particular part is alsoindicative of the whole
bridegroom thing for what'sgoing on, the throne for the
kingship, and the bridal chamberfor where you would go to have
the sex that would be necessaryin order to make it so that way

(01:37:14):
you would have the merging ofthe divine masculine and the
divine fig feminine on thatparticular spot in spiritual
ecstasy and whatnot, alsopossibly a real ritual and
reality that they did in orderto make it so that way that
would come to fruition and thatkind of thing.

(01:37:35):
In terms of Gilgamesh goingthrough the center of the earth
and going down and getting thedivine plant, let's say, that g
grants immortality and whatnot,and then it being covered by
ocean or water of some sort forwhere the area is, it's very
interesting because there'ssomething called the Earth Diver

(01:37:58):
motif.
And the Earth Diver motif is oneof our oldest myths that can be
traced back to probably 140,000years ago and whatnot, and it
has to do with where they havethis being that is changed a lot
throughout time and whatnot.
So there's not one particularthing with it, but they go down

(01:38:19):
and they have to go all the waydown through the bottom of the
ocean.
And when they get to the bottomof the ocean, they have to take
some sort of speck of land orwhatever and bring it back up.
And when they do that, it startsgrowing the land and whatnot.
So it seems to be a directreflex of that particular notion
from that, where it instead ofthat you go through the earth

(01:38:41):
because it's already there withit, then you get to where the
water is, so it's an inversionof that story, and when you do
that, all the water comes outinstead of the land for the
creation myth that's going onhere, which is our oldest
creation myth, the one that'sfrom 140,000 years ago.
But one of the key points tothat creation myth is that in a
lot of the variations of it,that the figure that's doing

(01:39:03):
this is not God or a godlikefigure or whatever it is.
It's some other being that'sthere with it, sometimes even
the devil or and that kind ofthing that's going on.
But the person falls asleepwhile they're doing it.
And I'm thinking that they tookthat same notion because of the
sleep idea and grafted it ontothis story and then did a reflex

(01:39:26):
of it.
We've seen this reflex and otherthings with it, where like the
cattle raiding myths and thatkind of stuff are what it is.
Originally that the notion oflike a princess and whatnot
being captured by a dragon andtaken away, it was originally
cattle that was there, and itwas due to a poor translation by

(01:39:47):
one of these games of telephonesfor various different
civilizations that changed it,but it was the it was the cattle
that was important for what'shappening with it.
So why I'm bringing this up interms of the reflex for it's
changing here, is that you haveinstead of Thor going to slay
the dragon to get the ox backand whatnot, you have him

(01:40:09):
slaying an ox to get the dragon.
When he puts the head out for itinside of the story for what's
going on there.
So something changed a littlebit in terms of the reflexes
here along the way.
But again, when you're dealingwith something that this point
would be probably 135,000 yearsold in in terms of where it is
for the story of it, of course,there's going to be some reflex

(01:40:31):
that changes a little bit hereor there for what's happening on
that front.
So it's when you're in the bath,of course.
There's the practical side thatyou've already brought up.
We're going into the more of theallegorical side here.
Yeah.
When you're in the bath and andthat kind of stuff, what what
are you doing?

(01:40:51):
You're you're cleansingyourself, right?
You're making it so that way youare removing all of the grime
and the dirt and the sweat andall the other stuff that's going
on there for what's happening.
And it's literally a type ofbaptismal thing almost for what
that particular point as well.

(01:41:13):
And what's happening here isthat at every stage of the game
that has been going on inside ofthis story of Gilgamesh
searching for immortality, hehas been found like just out of
reach of it the entire time forit.

(01:41:33):
And it's the same thing here,where even after he's done this
and he's achieved the stuffthat's impossible again for
anybody else to do with it, he'sstill found lacking in some
capacity after he has gonethrough this ritualistic
sanitation process in quotationmarks, and that what's left and

(01:41:55):
what's revealed for it is it'snot supposed to be for you.
This was never your destiny.
It doesn't matter for what'sgoing on here, it doesn't matter
how hard you try, it's not foryou to do in any way, shape, or
form, get over it, basically.
Type deal.
You can try as many differentways as you want to gain

(01:42:16):
immortality.
You are stuck with the only onethat immortals are allowed to
have, which is your name beingcarried on and remembered
through the stories and whatnotfor as long as human beings have
memory of you and that kind ofstuff.
That is your immortality.
That is what needs to be donehere.
You did not win the favor of thegods to make it so that way you

(01:42:38):
can go and do this.
It's not your birthright likeyou think it is because you're
two-thirds divine.
It's not a thing.
Sorry, bro, but that's thereality.

SPEAKER_00 (01:42:48):
Man, you're gonna make Gilgamesh cry.
Talking like that.
That's not what he wants tohear.

SPEAKER_01 (01:42:56):
It's not what he wants to hear, but he is
incapable of hearing it fromthese various different
adventures that he goes on andthese various different things
that happen to make it.
So the gods have to make itclear to him, and eventually he
realizes he needs to give up.
This is the final straw for him,where he's like, well, it's time
to go home, I guess.
It's time to settle down and allthat.
I've tried it this way, thisway, that way, blah, blah, blah,

(01:43:18):
blah.
None of them have worked.
I've rejected these other thingsfor what's going on.
I began on a quest for it.
I was unable to obtain it, andthat's what happens.
But but there's something,there's something very important
here for what's going on there.
If you take it kind of as agrail quest, if you will, and
and that kind of stuff, meaningthe sense, uh, the search for
something that's mystical andbeyond this world in this

(01:43:39):
instance for what's going on.
It's supposed to transform you.
In this case, transform him intoan immortal being and and
whatnot, right?
Almost everybody fails at thatquest.
And no matter what tradition itis, that's the point, though, is
that it's only for a select few.
You can do everything right, andit's still not going to be yours

(01:44:02):
for what's happening.
You have to have the divinefavor of the eyes of the gods
that they talked about before.
Like you have to do somethingthat makes it so that way you
are graced with this destiny.
It is not something you havecontrol over 100% for what's
going on with it.
You can long for it, you canlearn yearn for it, but it
doesn't mean that you'reguaranteed to have it in any

(01:44:24):
way, shape, or form.
Your intentions have to be pure.
You have to make it so that wayyou are an empty vessel coming
into this and all of that.
And in a lot of ways, thesepeople who are seeking it and
this transformational thing,they're not seeking it for
themselves.
They're seeking it for divineservice of some sort.
And those are the ones who areable to go and make that happen.

(01:44:48):
In the case of like the knightsof the round table for Arthur
and whatnot, there's many ofthem that go on it, hundreds of
them that go on the quest withit.
But there's only like six orseven of them that even get a
glimpse of the grail, even get aglimpse of it, okay?
And even out of that, there'sonly three of them, possibly
four, due to changes that weremade to the character from

(01:45:10):
change that are that way withit.
I say changes that he wassupposed to be the grail winner,
but then they didn't like howattached he was to a goddess
figure, the church and whatnot,so they changed certain aspects
of him and whatnot.
I I'm pretty sure he wassupposed to be or the original
grail winner, but they changedit so he makes gets other things
with it.
They couldn't care kill thecharacter off because he was too
popular, but they had to makechanges to his to his meta his

(01:45:34):
destiny in terms of writtenform, but not his original
destiny, if you will.
Anyway, point is that there'sthree of them that get it.
Only three.
And fourth that has to do withthe grail mysteries that get
that is very important to thequest, and a fifth one.
Now I'm gonna focus on the fifthone here for a moment, because
the fifth one fits verysimilarly to what we're

(01:45:55):
expecting for Gilgamesh.
The fifth one is Lancelot.
Okay.
Lancelot, for all intents andpurposes, is one of the greatest
knights ever in terms of KingArthur's domain and realm and
whatnot.
But he is unable to get thegrail.
Why?
Because he has one characterflaw, one thing that holds him

(01:46:18):
back, one shortcoming, accordingto the stories that makes us
that way.
He is unable to perceive themysteries of it on the deepest
levels for it and bring it backto fix the problems that there
are inside of Arthur's kingdomand heal the wasteland.
It's his love for the queen,Guinevere, and whatnot, and the

(01:46:42):
fact that they constantly sleeptogether behind Arthur's back
and that kind of thing that'sgoing on there.
It's and one character flaw.
Again, if you take literally,yes, it's problematic, but
there's a the if you take itesoterically, it's saying he had
too much of an attachment tothis one thing that made it so
that way he couldn't get it.
And quite frankly, what probablyis Gilgamesh's greatest flaw in

(01:47:08):
all of this isn't the fact thathe starts off as a complete and
utter douchebag in the beginningof the stories and all of that,
because it doesn't matter whereyou start, it matters what you
do to change yourself and gothrough the transformation
process here.
And if you're able to transformyourself completely for what's
going on, then you can do it.
But he isn't able to do that.

(01:47:30):
And the thing that holds himback, in my opinion, is what my
in this is his desire forimmortality, him wanting it so
badly that it consumes him tothe point to where he he's
willing to do anything to dothat with the catalyst of Inky
Doo for what's going on thereand Inky Doo's death.

(01:47:50):
His intent behind theimmortality is selfish.
It is not to make it so that wayit is something else that comes
out of this for what'shappening, and it's to benefit
others as well for what's goingon there, and that's why he
doesn't achieve it, and that'swhy the gods don't bestow it
upon him from a metasmetaphorical sense for it.

(01:48:11):
It's that it's basically sayingif you just do this for your own
glory only, you won't achieveit.
You have to be able to make itso that way there's something
else that you're willing to doto give back for it and and
whatnot, which is why you haveto catch the eye of the gods.
You have to earn their favor,and the way to do that is by

(01:48:32):
doing something for them back inreturn, not just being
self-centered on yourself likeGilgamesh is.
And I think that that's hisundoing on this ultimately.

SPEAKER_00 (01:48:47):
That pretty much pretty much encapsulates the
whole thing right there.
You should uh you should write abook.
That's that's yeah.
The uh the end of the story forthose of you who have not read
my book History and Myth fromSumer and a Cad, the end of that

(01:49:12):
story, which you can read in inthe book, is now that he's now
that he's lost all that all hishopes for immortality, he very
sadly plod, plod, plods his wayback to the city of Uruk.
And the narrator really focuseson the bricks of Uruk, on the
walls, on the palace.

(01:49:35):
And he goes, he sits on histhrone and he either writes down
or tells the story, and it'sthat that's how we have the
story.
There is an implication thatUruk is more, at least more
immortal than any one king ofUruk is.

(01:49:59):
And not just the building.

SPEAKER_01 (01:50:01):
I mean, it would do it in the center for a thousand
years, so you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (01:50:05):
Yeah, I mean I mean the the political idea, the
culture, the the city itself,that a person is a part of the
city.
Even Gilgamesh is a part of thecity, and that's why he was
doing so bad at the start of theat the start of the story.

(01:50:28):
Even though he had everythingthat a man would want, he had
the power to take whatever hewanted, but he was living for
himself, not for the wider city.
At the end of it, he sits downon the throne of Uruk.
He has abandoned his ownadventures, he has abandoned

(01:50:51):
pursuing things for himself, hisimmortality, the only one he's
gonna have.
We talk a lot, we really focus alot on the immortality of fame
and a person's name and aperson's story living to
forever.
It's very much a Greek and Romanthing.
They probably did have that too.

(01:51:11):
They did have not probably, theydid have that to an extent.

SPEAKER_01 (01:51:15):
Yes, I'm not saying it's as exaggerated as the Greek
and Roman, to be sure.

SPEAKER_00 (01:51:19):
But much more it's much less of a thing.
You're much more to be livingfor a larger society, for the
gods, for the community.
Not that the gods and communitywere seen as different things.

SPEAKER_01 (01:51:36):
It's all no, they're just different spheres within
that greater scheme of things.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (01:51:41):
Yeah, it's all one for the community.
It's a very communitarian sortof ethic, very civilizationally
focused aspect.
Which is neat because they'rethe first civilization and
they're very civilizationfocused.
But yeah, that's that's howthat's how Gilgamesh himself

(01:52:04):
would have seen it.
Because for all that for allthat his story plays into
various esoteric and comparativethings, he himself would not
have been plugged into the widerworld except to the extent that
these underlying motifs arecommon to all of humanity.

(01:52:31):
Yes.

SPEAKER_01 (01:52:32):
So while we're on this front, there's something in
the Nordic tradition where thereis an actual poet.
His name is Bragi, okay?
And he becomes deified inside ofthe mythology itself and
whatnot.
He's probably named after thegod that's named Bragi rather

(01:52:54):
than the inverse, meaning thathe started off that with it.
And the reason why I'm bringingthis up is because he ends up
marrying Idun, the goddess thathas the apples and whatnot.
We talked about that that arefor the Aesir and that kind of
stuff.
Now, since we're on the topic ofGilgamesh and kind of
immortality, is the theme we'vekind of been looking at through

(01:53:14):
here out and whatnot is I'mwondering if this is the case
with Gilgamesh.
Is if that because he embodied,like so Braggie embodied the the
penultimate poet and whatnot.
The bard, the well in this casescald, but bard for anybody else
who doesn't know what Scald is.

(01:53:35):
He was that with it, thegreatest storyteller, the
greatest like lord keeper of hispeople and his traditions and
all that other stuff that weregoing on for that time period.
He becomes deified and puts intoit.
He even is allowed to go toValhalla, even though it's
supposed to be for onlywarriors, due to the fact of who
he is and what he is and allthat.
You understand that's howimportant he is.
And I think that that's kind ofwhat's happening in terms of a

(01:53:59):
similar sense with Gilgamesh,with us not being able to
determine whether he's real ornot, even though he probably was
real, and how he's grafted ontoa mythology or uh or in this
case an epic minimum around himand all that, but it's because
he meets all of thequalifications that there were
during his time period of whatwas expected of him to be a

(01:54:21):
great king, to be a great this,to be a blah blah blah, and all
of that, and making it so thatway because he was perceived as
having everything that thepeople wanted and all that other
stuff, that he became a largerthan life character in reality,
that it also led to him becominga larger than life character and
having a been grafted onto themythology as well, if you will.

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Gilgamesh: The King who Refused to Die

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