The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [436]
In the ancient Middle Eastern legend of the Fall, one of the most significant consequences of Adam and Eve emerging to a new kind of self-consciousness was that for the first time knew they were going to die. Because, in emerging from the instinctive state of nature, human beings had developed a sense of their own individual, ego-centred existence, separate from the unity of all life, they now knew, unlike any other animals, that this would one day come to an end. Yet still within them was the half-remembered knowledge that they were part of that totality of life which continues in `eternity, irrespective of the finite little lives of each separate organism which temporarily embodies it. Out of this sense that they were part of that `eternity came the belief that those who died might be reunited with it; and this belief took two forms, each of which was to have enormous influence on the developing consciousness of mankind.
The first of these beliefs, essentially collective, reflected the attitude of the living towards those who had died before them. One of the most widespread characteristics of societies in the earlier stages of humanity's emergence from a state of nature was their intimate sense of being part of a chain of life stretching back into the past. As can still be seen in certain parts of the world today, such cultures are marked by a profound reverence for the `ancestors, who are looked on as a living presence. The highest duty of the living is to please the ancestors, by maintaining those inherited customs and beliefs which enshrine the tribe's collective spiritual identity. This gives significance to every aspect of their lives. In such a culture the death of any individual is seen merely as marking the moment when he or she merges back into a collective whole, which connects them in turn to the spirit which animates the universe.6
Eventually, however, a second attitude towards death began to emerge, centred more on the attitude of individuals to their own death, and on the possibility that they themselves might survive death in some personal form. It was this which in early Neolithic times, as we see in Egypt and across Europe, led to the practice of placing of food and other `grave goods' in their tombs, to assist them on their journey after death. So haunting did this dream of personal immortality become that it plays a key part in that first story of which we have historical record, thought to date back at least to the third millennium BC.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was the central inspiring myth of the civilisation which sprang up in the fertile, originally forested plains between the two great rivers which defined Mesopotamia. The story of the great hero Gilgamesh, two thirds divine and a third human, divides into three main parts. He begins as an unruly king, physically strong and powerful, but entirely at the mercy of his physical appetites, such as insisting on the right to deflower every maiden in his kingdom as she reaches the time of marriage. He is an embodiment of the untrammelled human ego. The turning point is when the gods arrange for him to meet Enkidu, a true child of nature who has grown up with wild beasts and never been part of human society. Enkidu is tamed when a harlot is sent out into the wilderness to seduce him. When she exposes her naked beauty to him he succumbs, with the result that all the wild creatures flee from him. He has emerged from the state of nature to become human. But his real role in the story is to represent the hero's shadowy alter-ego. Enkidu is as strong and unruly as Gilgamesh, and when they first meet they fight. But after this they are so inseparable they are like two halves of one person, making a new whole. By thus splitting into two, confronting his `natural self' and becoming self-aware, Gilgamesh begins to mature, to develop a sense of selfless responsibility. And it is this which, when his kingdom