Gilgamesh

Library of Ashurbanipal / The Flood Tablet / The Gilgamesh Tablet by Fæ via Wikipedia

Gilgamesh is a legendary Mesopotamian king of ancient Sumer as depicted in the Epic of Gilgamesh, written around 2000 BCE in cuneiform on twelve tablets of clay.

Renowned for his matchless strength, Gilgamesh went into combat with a rough monster-man, Enkidu who was sent by the Gods to keep Gilgamesh in check.

Although Gilgamesh won the bout, the harrowing battle did humble him. He and Enkidu eventually became friends. The Gilgamesh epic also portrays several accounts, some fragmentary, of a Great Flood.

Ea, the Lord, says he will cause a flood and tells Atramhasis to

Enter [the ship] and shut the door…[Bring in] to it thy grain, thy goods and chattels; Th[y wife], thy family, thy relations, and the craftsmen. [Game] of the field (and) beasts of the field, as many as eat herbs, [I will s]end unto thee, and they shall guard thy door.”¹

This is similar to the Biblical account of Noah, and to some extent the Hindu story of Matsu.

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¹ Alexender Heidel.  The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1946, p. 110.

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Gemini

Gemini by Justinsanity via Flickr

Gemini (May 21-June 22) is the third and a spring sign of the zodiac, symbolized by the cosmic twins and associated with the planetary ruler of Mercury. Its element is air.

Astrologers claim that the twins archetype symbolizes a creative, dynamic union between complementary forces. If this archetypal pattern becomes negative and unbalanced (e.g. Cain and Abel, Daedelus-Icarus), the high-flying Gemini is susceptible to crashing.

Gemini has also been associated with the mythical dyads of Castor and Pollux (Greece), Romulus and Remus (Rome), and Gilgamesh and Enkidu (Babylonia), along with the philosophical concepts of Yin and Yang (China).

From its planetary ruler Mercury, Gemini is commonly said to be speedy, inspired, curious and perhaps unpredictable.

Prominent Gemini are Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, Clint Eastwood, Paul McCartney, Angelina Jolie, and former director of the CIA and then U.S. President George H. W. Bush.¹

In 1965-1966, a series of manned orbiting USA spacecraft  were called Gemini.

The idea of Gemini has appeared in pop culture, most notably in music. The Moody Blues, in their 1981 comeback album, Long Distance Voyager, penned a top 20 hit called “Gemini Dream.” David Bowie, in his 2002 album Heathen recorded Norman Carl Odam’s song, “I took a trip on a Gemini Spaceship.” And the Japanese pop band Alice Nine released a studio album called Gemini in 2011.

In Canada, the annual awards for excellence in English language TV are called the Gemini Awards.

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¹ For more, see http://www.vegaattractions.com/celebrity/gem.html

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Hero

Theseus in the Labyrinth by Morrigan's Lover via Flickr

In depth psychology and New Age publications we often hear about the Hero. This kind of usage isn’t referring to a Martin Luther King, Neil Armstrong or Terry Fox.  While these individuals certainly were heroic, and heroes by the usual definition of the word, they weren’t necessarily heroes from the perspective of depth psychology or New Age spirituality.

The psycho-spiritual idea of the Hero is really talking about an archetype of the Hero. And the notion of the archetype can be traced back to the Greek philosopher Plato and his theory of Eternal Forms or Perfect Ideas. After Plato, the idea of the archetype was remixed by various medieval thinkers. We need not go into their complicated theories here.

What’s important for us is how the Swiss psychiatrist, C. G. Jung, adapted the ideas of the Archetype and the Hero into one concept—namely, the archetype of the hero. The Jungian archetype differs from the Platonic formulation, most notably because Jung’s archetypes involve eternity but are grounded in the human body. Plato’s archetypes are just “out there.” They are imprinted in the eternal soul and have some kind of relation with matter but they are not grounded in matter.¹

For Jung the archetype indicates the psychological contents of a proposed collective unconscious. He says the archetypes are inherited patterns encoded in the body, universally shared by mankind. Not unlike the gods and goddesses of ancient times, archetypes apparently have a psychic life of their own that extends beyond everyday consciousness and concerns.

Ancient Egyptian tomb

According to Jung, when the conscious ego encounters the archetype, the individual experiences a sense of the numinous. This encounter may be psychologically constructive or destructive, healing or disorienting. The type of effect that the numinous has on consciousness depends on the psychological stability and maturity of the individual, as well as the character and intensity of the numinosity, itself.

Visible manifestations of the archetypes appear as archetypal images. Jung distinguishes these recognizable images from the archetype proper, which Jung says can never be fully known. So the archetypal image of the Hero may appear in many different forms, but there’s only one Hero archetype.

Joseph Campbell built on Carl Jung’s idea of a hero archetype in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell says that the idea of the hero’s journey to the underworld (and return to everyday life) is found throughout world myth and religion.

Typically, the hero is born into a problematic setting. Two biblical examples would be the infant Moses and Jesus Christ. Moses was abandoned as a baby, left in a basket to float down the Nile river. Jesus Christ was born in a manger because his parents were forced to flee the paranoid anger of King Herod “The Great” (c. 73-4 BCE) who hoped to kill the infant Jesus by ordering the killing of all children in Bethlehem under age two.

Campbell says the next phase of the budding hero’s life is a “call to adventure.” The hero usually doesn’t want to be a hero but is slowly drawn into his or her historical, perhaps sacred role. At this stage he or she may exhibit some kind of superhuman powers and insight.

A definite turning point in the hero’s journey is precipitated by some kind of crisis. The hero is either sucked into a whale’s belly (e.g. Jonah), dismembered (e.g. Osiris), abducted (e.g. Sita, Eurydice), abandoned (e.g. Joseph), hanged (e.g. Odin), sent on a ‘night sea’ voyage (e.g. St. John of the Cross) or a strange journey (in literature, Alice in Wonderland), forced to fight a threatening dragon (e.g. St. George, Beowulf), drawn into battle with relatives (e.g. Arjuna) or demons and monsters (e.g. Gilgamesh, Hercules), all of which point to a passage from the everyday into a supernatural world of danger and magic (again, in Jung’s terms, the collective unconscious).

Renart the (trickster) fox, drawn by Ernest Griset, from a children's book published in 1869 via Wikipedia

At this time the hero encounters mythical beings and beasts. Some are helpers, others are tricksters, and yet others are enemies. In learning how to discern among these mythical creatures, the hero faces a series of life-threatening tests (e.g. Odysseus binds himself to his ship’s mast to prevent the Sirens from luring him to his death; Jesus rejects the temptation of Satan in the wilderness, in the holy city and on the mountain).

The hero’s journey continues to the inner depths of an abyss, a dragon cave, a bottomless ocean, a deep underworld pit or, in modern myth, a Death Star or a Borg cube. At this point the hero hopefully discovers what the alchemists call the lapis (philosopher’s stone or inner human). There may be atonement with a father or a father figure, a sacred marriage, a theft, or perhaps a bargaining for the elixir of immortality.

Having found the proverbial Holy Grail within, the hero gains profound insight into the eternal, infinite connections among life, death, space, time, heaven and hell. But like Theseus after slaying the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth, the hero must return to the world of day to day living. After his or her return to everyday life, he or she is symbolically reborn.

Concerning the journey to and from the underworld, the Hero understands well Plato‘s comments from his famous Cave Analogy about entering and exiting the cave.

The eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, coming from light into darkness as well as from darkness to light… the same applies to the soul.²

In practical terms, the hero’s quest is often confusing due to the sheer magnitude of fast paced change that’s involved. Not everyone finds their way out of the collective unconscious. Some simply go mad.

In myth and religion, Theseus found escaped from the labyrinth because he’d unwound a ball of thread that Ariadne had provided in advance. Moses and the persecuted chosen people were delivered from the Egyptians by the miraculous parting (and subsequent closing) of the Red Sea. And Jesus, after his death, descended to hell for three days before ascending to heaven.

Parallels among mythic and religious stories about the hero obviously differ in important details. In fact, the content of hero stories often varies quite radically. And each story arguably has a qualitatively different effect on those who invest their energy into them. However, Jung and Campbell contend that all the Hero stories display a basic structural similarity.³

The Wisdom of Solomon via Wikipedia

In psychological terms hero stories point to a circular passage from ego → archetypes → self → archetypes → ego. On returning, being rescued or resurrected, the hero is transformed. He or she may reclaim former elements of the older personality but these are put to a new purpose, integrated within a new sense of self.

On the social level, the hero brings to society various boons of wisdom, and possibly miraculous abilities, gained from the underworld.

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¹ For an unusually good summary of Plato’s theories about the soul, see Herschel Baker, The Image of Man: A Study of the Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (1961).

² G. M. A. Grube (trans.), Plato’s Republic, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974, p. 170 [par 518a].

³ Campbell notes that the film Star Wars is a contemporary reenactment of the hero myth, rendering ancient stories and motifs into images that speak to people today.

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Ishtar

BritishMuseum | Old Babylonian, probably 1792 - 1750 BC. The Queen of the Night represents an ancient Babylonian goddess, probably Ishtar or Ereshkigal. It might also represent Lilitu, called Lilith in the Bible - via Wikipedia

Ishtar is a Mesopotamian goddess of fertility, ‘sacred’ prostitution¹ and war, later associated with the planet Venus as a goddess of love.

In the Gilgamesh epic, Ishtar journeys to the underworld in an attempt to rescue her brother and lover Tammuz.

If thou openest not the gate to let me enter,
I will break the door, I will wrench the lock,
I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors.
I will bring up the dead to eat the living.
And the dead will outnumber the living.²

As she enters each successive door in her descent, she is commanded to take off a specific piece of jewelry or clothing item. By the time she reaches the abyss she stands entirely naked.

Joseph Campbell points out how this story has obvious Jungian implications. To attain knowledge of the inner self, one must dispense with (or, at least, gain a new perspective on) all the trappings of worldly life. Unfortunately, Ishtar does not succeed. The evil underworld queen Ereshkigal imprisons Ishtar and she becomes ‘one of the dead.’

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¹ Rightly seen as abhorrent today, the idea and practice of  ‘sacred’ or temple prostitution was widespread in the ancient world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution

² Parallel myths and different scholarly interpretations of Ishtar’s descent to the underworld shed more light (or perhaps create more ambiguity) on this ancient mythic theme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar.

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Mesopotamia

Overview map of ancient Mesopotamia via Wikipedia

Mesopotamia in the Greek language means “land between the rivers” and in Saharan/Basque, “here [the rivers] flow lazily [after] a period of tumbling down the wild mountains.”

This exotic sounding description points to the ancient region lying between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Upper Mesopotamia belonged to the Assyrians, reaching from Baghdad to the Eastern Turkey foothills.

Lower Mesopotamia was home to the Sumerians and Babylonians, who settled from the alluvial plains at the top of the Persian Gulf to Baghdad.

The lower Mesopotamian area is thought to be the cradle of the world’s first cities, appearing in the fourth millennium BCE. The early Mesopotamians had a complex religious tradition, one mentioned often – and usually denounced as paganism - within the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

Mesopotamian religious beliefs were somewhat pessimistic, as most of the dead entered a shadowy, dusty underworld:

To the dark house…
To the house which none leave who have entered it,
To the road from which there is no way back,
To the house wherein the entrants are bereft of light,
Where dust is their fare and clay their food,
[Where] they see no light, residing in darkness…
[And where] over door and bolt is spread dust.¹

The Sumerians asked philosophical questions about the origins of life, their identity and cosmology, but their answers conformed with their myths and were less about original thinking and more about what they believed the gods told them. In Jungian terms, their religious thinking was absorbed by archetypal energies instead of their being able to differentiate the ego from these powerful forces.

In other words, when it came to religion, these ancient peoples were in a kind of archetypal bondage and didn’t really have the ability to think freely.

Of course, the same argument could be made for much of humanity in the 21st century. The only difference, one could say, is that our myths have become more detailed and specialized.

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¹ Jack Finegan, Myth and Mystery: An Introduction to the Pagan Religions of the Biblical World (Baker Book House, 1989: 35).

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Matsya

Incarnation of Vishnu as a Fish via Wikipedia

Matsya is the first avatar of Visnu in Hinduism.

Matsya is a fish who saves the first man, Manu, from a flood by acting as a vehicle upon which Manu rides to safety.

Scholars have pointed out the obvious parallel to Noah.

And the Sumerian myth of Gilgamesh also contains a flood story similar but not identical to the Biblical account.

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Noah

Image via Wikipedia

Noah is a a pivotal figure in the Biblical Book of Genesis. He’s depicted as a righteous man and the son of Lamech.

God commands Noah to build an ark, gather up all existing animals and board them in pairs, along with his family so as to escape a massive flood (Genesis 6-9).

In Genesis 10 Noah’s sons Japheth, Ham and Shem are described as the ancestors of all the countries of the Earth.

Later in the Bible, Noah is mostly remembered for his outstanding faith. Although modern criticism has arisen over Noah’s cursing his son Ham after he saw Noah drunk and naked in his tent.

Some feel that this is a Jewish rationalization for conquering the Canaanites and also for bigotry among the Abrahamic religions against those of Black African ancestry, believed to be descendants of Ham.¹

The flood myths of Gilgamesh and Matsu are often cited as parallels to the Noah story (or myth, depending on how you look at it). But there are important differences, most notably in the concept of God, which is central to the Noah story (or myth).

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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham

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Tammuz

Gilgamesh by litmuse

Tammuz

According to the Gilgamesh epic, Tammuz is a dead Babylonian god of vegetation residing in the underworld and adored by his sister Ishtar and her counterpart in Syria, Astarte.

Tammuz returned from the underworld for a brief duration on a yearly basis. His yearly descent to the underworld was met with mourning and funeral ceremonies.

As with so many dying and rising gods in world mythology, anthropologists believe that the myth of Tammuz represents the agricultural cycle.

Gilgamesh is the Story by Benry Yip

But the myth also bears a psychological interpretation. Residing in the underworld could represent a quiet, contemplative life.

Yearly moments of ‘return’ could symbolize necessary periods of interaction with those adhering to a given culture’s understanding of everyday life.

Add to this, report errors, suggest edits or voice your opinion by posting a comment