The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [14]
The forest is ‘the Country of the Living’, or simply ‘the Country’, lying somewhere on the outer bounds of earth and reality. In the middle of it is the mountain, which is both a seat of the gods and the underworld, the sender of dreams. But the forest is also related to that ‘Garden of the Sun’ which Gilgamesh will enter on a later journey, to meet again the great sun god, not in a dream, but face to face, for ‘the Country belonged to Shamash’. The forest is oddly familiar, so is its guardian. ‘Thou shalt see a vale like a great water-way and in the middle of the vale thou shalt see a great tree with the tips of its branches greener than the greenest fir-trees. And under the tree is a fountain.’ So Cynon is directed by the keeper of the forest in his wanderings, ‘through the world and its wilderness’ as told in the late Welsh romance from the Mabinogion. There he found ‘the fairest vale in the world, and trees of equal height in it, and there was a river flowing through the vale and a path alongside the river’. Although this is twelfth-century Welsh it describes what Gilgamesh and Enkidu saw when they entered the cedar forest in almost the same phrases: the cedar in front of the mountain, the glade green with brushwood, and the broad way where the going was good.
The guardian of the forest in the romance had power over animals, which grazed around him in the glade, and the guardian of the cedar forest in the Semitic poem could ‘hear the heifer when she stirred at sixty leagues distance’. This Humbaba is the perennial Monster Herdsman, like the ugly man with a club whom Cynon met or the Green Knight of the northern romance; he is a divinity of wild nature who would not alter through centuries any more than the forests themselves; but in the Sumerian poem he has a fiery aspect as well, perhaps connected with the volcano.
After what appeared to be a successful conclusion of the forest episode there comes a great act of glorification of Gilgamesh the King: robed, crowned, and in almost divine beauty, like Odysseus after his ordeal with the waves when Athene gave to him godlike beauty. At this moment the goddess Ishtar sees and desires him in love; she tries to woo him with tempting promises, after which comes a remarkable passage: the taunting of the goddess by a disdainful mortal. There is something here of Anchises, the herd-boy on Mount Ida, who in the Homeric Hymn was wooed by Aphrodite to his hurt, for ‘He who lies with a deathless goddess is no hale man afterwards’, or proud Hippolytus, or Picus and Circe in Ovid. So Ishtar is accused by the memory of her unfortunate lovers who survived miserably, one as a bird with a broken wing, another a wolf or a blind mole; for this Ishtar has the power of Circe, and these seem like fragments from some once popular Babylonian ‘Metamorphoses’.
Next follows the killing of the ‘Bull of Heaven’, a monster that personifies the seven years’ drought which was sent by the angry goddess in punishment for her rejection by Gilgamesh. Anu at first refuses to create the bull, but when Ishtar threatens to break in the doors of hell and bring up the dead to eat with the living, he acquiesces, for this is not an idle threat, but was actually accomplished, as told in another poem. The acrobatic feat by which the bull was killed is like that performed in the bull games of Crete.
It is through hubris that disaster comes. Enkidu refused the prayer of Humbaba for mercy, and he insulted Ishtar. Gilgamesh seems less guilty; he was moved by Humbaba’s prayer, though when they had killed the bull and the young men and singing girls crowded round to admire him, he let them cry, ‘Gilgamesh is most glorious of the heroes, Gilgamesh is most eminent among men.’ So retribution falls first on Enkidu. He is warned by a dream. He sees the gods in council and we hear the ominous question ringing out, ‘Why do the great gods sit in council together?’ Anu pronounces impartially, as is fitting in so lofty and remote a person: ‘One of the two must die.’ Shamash comes to defend them,