Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [54]
The refrain of the barmaid goddess Sidduri, from the old Babylonian edition, expresses this resignation most clearly in her famous carpe diem speech:
As for you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,
Make merry day and night.
Of each day make a feast of rejoicing,
Day and night dance and play!
Let your garments be sparkling fresh
Your head be washed; bathe in water.
Pay heed to a little one that holds on to your hand.
Let a spouse delight in your bosom,
For this is the task of a [woman.]32
Sidduri tells Gilgamesh, in effect, to give up his life of adventuring, settle down, marry, and have children. Immortality is not achievable for humanity in this strict, three-tiered world. This version of the epic counsels its readers to appreciate life and not to hope for more of life’s pleasures after death. It also says that although manly feats bring renown, maturity brings the steadiness of a householder. We find a quite similar sentiment expressed in Ecclesiastes 9:7-10.
Without the twelfth tablet, though, the story of Gilgamesh is framed with an inclusio: the beginning and end are an identical paean to glorious Uruk, the city Gilgamesh rules. The consolation for Gilgamesh is the city-the human accomplishments of city building, government, law, and sexuality (which is a civilized pleasure to be taken in great quantities in the story)-that is solace against the loss of friends and the knowledge of death. And that is what all who read the epic story in its various Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian versions, were to learn as well. Both the beginning and the ending of the poem glorify the city of Uruk and, through this city, the major cultural achievement attained in the fertile crescent. It is from this achievement that we mark the beginning of civilization:
Observe its walls, whose upper hem is like bronze;
behold its inner wall, which no work can equal.
Touch the stone threshold, which is ancient;
draw near the Eanna, dwelling-place of the goddess Ishtar,
a work no king among later kings can match.
Ascend the walls of Uruk, walk around the top,
inspect the base, view the brickwork.
Is not the very core made of oven-fired bricks?
As for its foundation, was it not laid down by the seven Sages?
One part is city, one part orchard, and one part claypits.
Three parts including the claypits make up Uruk.33
Implicit in the reactions of Gilgamesh to the death of his friend Enkidu are the same psychological stages of mourning which we perceive in ourselves. For instance, Gilgamesh goes through the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross notices in terminal cancer patients facing the prospect of their own death in her book On Death and Dying. It seems important to note then that this myth could well have served therapeutic functions for the society that read it, exemplifying both the fear and despair of losing friends and even a desperate attempt to get them back. Like the myth of Orpheus in the Greek world, our heroes and we ourselves fail to achieve immortality or to avoid loss. Stories like this teach its readers that, in the end, acceptance and resignation, followed by reattachment to life and enjoyment of its benefits, is the only proper outcome of grief.34
At the same time, the epic suffers from the Kübler-Ross dilemma we spoke of in the introduction. Just as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross herself eventually espouses both sides of the immortality debate, so does Mesopotamian culture when it makes Gilgamesh lord of the Underworld as well as the hero who learns to look at death soberly. It alternately asks us to live without denial and offers us Gilgamesh the god as an exemplar of helpful denial.