Gilgamesh: The Oldest Religious Hero

February 26, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us seek our fullest humanity. We may be about 1/3 beast, 1/3 human and 1/3 divine, but none of the three parts is whole enough, or wise enough, to guide us.

Let us try to become integrated in every way – all our parts, all our people, are the necessary elements of our fullest humanity, and our most complete strength.

The excellence we seek is a fragile, beautiful thing. We seek the ability to live our passing lives, alive with awareness and compassion, excited by the human-scale joys that come from fully participating in the passing but precious splendor of people who have come alive to the challenges of life and the joy of living them.

As the theologian Howard Thurman has said, “Let us find what makes us come most fully alive, and go do it – because what the world most needs is people who have come alive.”

Amen.

SERMON: Gilgamesh, the Oldest Spiritual Hero

One of the ironies of religion is that we go to our faith traditions to seek what we feel are the most important truths – the truths we should guide our lives by – but what we mostly do is tell stories. Those stories can structure our lives, determine how we live, what we take to be sacred. Yet, at bottom, they’re stories. And if we change our stories, it can change our life. That’s what a conversion experience is about: changing your center to live out of a new story.

In Western religion, we’re trained to explore and interpret stories from the Bible for insights into reality, ethics, etc. In Hindu countries, they don’t use the Bible, but use the many stories in their Mahabharata and Ramayana stories, and some of the philosophical writings like the Upanishads, etc.

Like the Hindus, the ancient Greeks used lots of gods, while the Buddhists used stories without any gods at all.

But for most of us, religion is about forming the right kind of relationship with God, much as subjects form a relationship with their master. Not to care about God is seen as not caring about life, goodness, character or ethics – and, of course, our eternal future for most of those in Western religions. For this God controls eternal damnation or reward, though the terms of it are made by the priests and rulers, since this God, like all gods, isn’t really part of our world except through the stories about him.

But long before the Hebrews, long before the Greeks, over 1500 years before the Hindus, there was an earlier high civilization in Sumer, with a very different kind of story about life, the gods and immortality.

It is the epic of Gilgamesh. It was only unearthed and translated in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I don’t think you can overstate just how deeply different and disturbing it is to all Western religious thought. First, it disturbed Western thinkers because it contains the ancient story of a flood, and a couple who made an ark to survive it, told centuries before the Genesis story and generally accepted as the main source of the story of Noah and his ark.

That was in the 1870s. But by the 1890s, some scholars were making far bolder claims. They said this myth is not only older than the Bible, but also better than the Bible, that it was a mythology to which we could relate more naturally in our modern world.

So this morning, I want to introduce you to this story that’s older than all of the world’s religions, older than all their gods, and explore a little of what it’s saying, and why it may well fit our modern world better.

Ironically, even the Gilgamesh story seems to be claiming that their modern world is no longer served by the ancient world of gods and stories of immortality. Their central concern is with the reality of death, and the stories of immortality, which they finally reject as belonging to ancient times, but not their modern age.

Gilgamesh was a historical figure, from the dawn of our recorded human history. He ruled about 4600 years ago in the city of Uruk in what is now southern Iraq. He was an ancient Sumerian. He knew he was a Sumerian, but he did not know that he was ancient. In fact, he saw himself as very modern. He lived about two centuries after the Sumerians had been the first to invent writing, so they rightly felt that they were far more advanced than any people who had ever lived before them.

In the century after his death, the historical memory of this ruler was transformed into myth. At first, his story was recorded in a series of short poems. 1,000 years later, these stories were woven into an epic, and became known throughout the near East.

Thousands of fragments of this epic have been recovered, and we have about 3,000 lines of this story, which achieved its final form around 1300 BC.

The two main characters in the story are Gilgamesh, who is described as 2/3 divine and 1/3 human, and Enkidu, a kind of mirror image, who seems about 1/3 human and 2/3 animal.

Enkidu was created as a kind of wild anti-hero to Gilgamesh, as his opposite. Gilgamesh sent a woman out into the woods to tame him. Enkidu stays with her for just a week, and is transformed into someone human and urban. I know women who hear this and think doing that in a year, let alone a week, would be a miracle, though I don’t know too many men who think so.

Once he becomes more human, Enkidu challenges and fights with Gilgamesh, and it’s a draw: they’ve met their match, their shadow side, their complement. They become companions, and friends. It was through this bond with his complement that Gilgamesh first learned true friendship – and some of the modern psychological readings of that seem pretty obvious.

Together, they go to kill an evil monster that belongs to the gods, to prove themselves more powerful. And they are: together, they can defeat evil.

The great goddess Ishtar wants Gilgamesh to marry her, and promises him love and peace – she is the goddess of love, fruitfulness and war. But he isn’t interested, says her love leads only to war, and recounts many stories of how she has betrayed her lovers. She is furious, and sends the bull of heaven to kill them both. But Enkidu kills the mighty bull of heaven.

Here are men – or one man who has integrated his animal, human and divine natures – with no fear of the ancient supernatural powers. In fact, they can hold their own against them, and defeat most of them. I don’t know of another religious tradition with such a story.

Enkidu, however, dies from wounds suffered in the fights with the supernatural monsters – at least partly as retribution demanded by the gods for their destruction of the Bull of Heaven – and Gilgamesh discovers loss, grief, and death.

Gilgamesh now roams the earth wondering if it’s possible to avoid death. He finds the old Noah-type figure (Utnapishtim) who, with his wife who survived the great flood, were granted immortality.

Utnapishtim says he was warned by the gods of the flood, so he, his wife and artisans built and survived on the ark. But he says this cannot happen again, and the gods’ granting of immortality was a one-time deal, long ago but not in modern times.

Gilgamesh still wants to gain immortality. As he prepares to leave, the old Noah tells him of the plant growing at the bottom of the sea, called “the old one becomes a child,” and says if Gilgamesh uses it, he won’t grow old. Gilgamesh finds the plant and is going to use it. (This is like taking a pill to solve the problem.) But the plant falls into the water, and a snake steals it, which is why snakes can renew their skin.

You might ask, “Well, what would have happened if Gilgamesh had eaten that plant?” The answer is that then he would have to have discovered, either that the plant didn’t work or that he did something wrong, and lost his only chance at it. Because the story, remember, was written by people who knew that we don’t have immortality, and wrote an imaginative story to say that there are irreversible reasons why we don’t and can’t.

So Gilgamesh knows that he can neither get the cure or the pill, and has accepted that the quest for immortality is in vain.

Now Gilgamesh confronts reality anew. This is his conversion experience, and it changes everything. Here was his spiritual journey:

1. First, he seeks the cure for the fact that we must die – having the gods grant immortality. But that doesn’t happen any more; the gods are useless for this. And even Ushnapishtim, the last human to become immortal, is lonely and grieves for his lost son, so immortality can’t be the answer to human yearning anyway.

2. Then he wants a “pill” – a magic way, not involving the gods, to become immortal, to eat of the plant called “he who is old becomes young again.” But that also only worked once, with the snake, and isn’t available in his modern times.

3. Finally, he understands that neither gods nor natural routes can lead us beyond the fact that we’re born, we live, and we die and become part of the world of the irretrievably dead. Even kings die: even the rich, even the talented, even us.

4. What, then, does the human condition offer? What is a reality-based solution to this longing? Many things. Friendship, sex, relationships, families, children who survive us, the fact that we can memorialize friends, heroes, beloved people – and that we can aspire to become a memorable person. We can achieve things that will live on in the memory of others. We can build things. We are part of cities and states that live on and carry our passions and memories and the tales of our deeds forward.

When we integrate our animal, human and divine aspects, we have great power; we can even destroy evil. And that’s a good thing. Even when gods send the evil against us, we can destroy it. Still, we die.

The Gilgamesh story is saying that the gift of immortality, either from the gods or from a “pill,” belonged to the mythic past, not the reality-based present. Whether it once happened in stories, it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t happen now; it isn’t the reality in which we live.

How is this good news? Because it empowers us in the real world. If we enter the fantasy worlds, we’re subject to those who control the stories, but who have no real information that we don’t have: just stories.

Gods have their own rules. We need a world with human-sized rules and dependable friendship and love, not subject to the whims of gods who wouldn’t care about us. And we don’t need the gods – we can simply refuse to deal with them (Ishtar), or make perfunctory bribes to them (Shamash) without caring about them.

We can live a human-scale life. We lose good friends, we lose those we love, but can memorialize them, tell their stories, write poems, build statues. We can create families, cities, and seek to become a memorable person in the lives of others.

Like one of our own modern authors (Borges) has said, we die twice. The first time is when our body gives out. Then the second and final death comes when there is no one left to tell our story. Gilgamesh accepted the first death, but said the human condition offers us chances to postpone the second death through telling our stories, writing poems, epics, memorializing those who have mattered to us, building families, cities, and participating in the joys of this fragile, transient, precious life.

The goal of human life is not absorption into the moment like other animals, and not an immortality that would breed indifference to transient things, like the gods we have sanctioned. What is available to humans is an excellence located between the beasts and the gods, and available to neither of them. It consists of participation in life, joy, creativity and wisdom.

So the gods prove to be useless, and Gilgamesh must learn to deal with life and the world the way they really are in these modern times of 4600 years ago. This isn’t atheism, it’s growing past the time when it was useful to think in terms of gods; it’s outgrowing the gods by coming into our full humanity.

What, then, is the “divine” part of us? We don’t share the gods’ immortality, or their aloofness to human pains. Perhaps it is our imagination, our ability to gain a kind of fragile wisdom available neither to animals nor gods. Gods don’t need wisdom, animals don’t either: they are living too much in the present to need a perspective that can reach beyond the present.

And what is wisdom? Perhaps it’s dealing with the fact that we live, love and will die, in ways that can lead us to that lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul and a more integrated and authentic existence that magnifies our life force rather than dissipating it. The love of gods who don’t live within our human constraints isn’t helpful, precisely because they don’t empathize with our limitations.

What is essential about human excellence is precisely its fragility. We who live and will die nevertheless love, make friendships, build cities, find joy, create children and invest our love and lives in them. We can watch them grow, as we also grow through the stages of life. Gods can’t do that. But like the gods, our imaginations can range far beyond us: that’s the “divine” part of us. We can create things that were not there, that are tender, beautiful, precious and passing, as we also are. Gilgamesh chooses this fully human and participatory life over gods and immortality.

Nearly two thousand years later, in Homer’s Odyssey Odysseus will also choose his wife Penelope over an immortal existence with the goddess Circe. These choices of the human over the immortal are rare in world literature, and among our most courageous and hopeful stories.

After all, as Gilgamesh might have said, he was a modern man, and nostalgia for the ancient ways no longer serves us. It is time to grow up, time to grow beyond the gods and into our full humanity which is, in its way, even better than the gods.