The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [437]
However, when Enkidu strikes the third and fatal blow which kills Gilgamesh's Humbaba, we see the giant's death has been far from an unmixed blessing. Gilgamesh and Enkidu go on to fell all the trees of that great forest of which Humbaba had been the guardian. Nature is being forced into retreat before the growing power of men to subdue it. This may have seemed a triumph for advancing human consciousness. But, as we now know, it was that clearing of the Mesopotamian forests to make way for agriculture which was eventually to reduce those lands through soil erosion to arid desert, bringing an end to the civilisations they had supported. Humbaba had not in fact been so much a personification of human egotism as a spirit of unconscious nature, crushed by the ego-consciousness of man.
This leads on to the next episode, which shows the Queen of Heaven, Ishtar, angry at the slaying of Humbaba, deciding to tempt Gilgamesh by offering herself to him as a bride. If only he will succumb to her embraces, she promises him riches, glory and power over all the earth. But Gilgamesh rejects her, pointing out that everyone else she has ever seduced has ended up being emasculated or humiliated. Ishtar is here like the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, playing the role of the Temptress/Dark Mother, that Mother Nature from whom the hero must escape if he is to reach fully conscious autonomy. In vengeance for Gilgamesh's rejection she sends the Bull of Heaven to kill him, and after it has launched two ferocious assaults, inflicting death on many of his warriors, the third encounter ends in glorious victory as, with Enkidu's help, the bull is slain. For this triumph, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are acclaimed by the people as the greatest of heroes. But Ishtar is so enraged that she wins agreement from the other gods that one of the two must die. The price of separation from nature is the knowledge that we are mortal. The episode ends with Enkidu sinking to his death, leaving Gilgamesh to grieve bitterly over the `brother' he has lost. The great hero, who has enjoyed such earthly glory, is now all alone, facing the realisation that he too must one day die. He has come to his `central crisis. Having lost that which was most dear to him, facing the certainty of extinction, he must now confront the central task of the `second half of life, as he sets out on his own on a long hazardous Quest for the secret of immortality.
The final episode shows Gilgamesh wandering despairingly through the wilderness and eventually coming to a great mountain whose twin peaks rise to heaven and whose roots reach far down into the underworld. This is the Self, combining the consciousness of the heavenly upper world with the dark unconscious, buried from view. Gilgamesh enters the mountain, where for 12 leagues he journeys underground through impenetrable darkness, where no mortal man has travelled before. After travelling ever further into the unconscious, he finally emerges into blazing light and the `garden of the gods' and here he has three encounters. Each of the three people he meets exclaims in turn how worn and starved Gilgamesh is looking, and to each he explains how the death of Enkidu has brought home to him that he must die. The first is Shamash, god of the sun, justice and wisdom, attributes of full-developed consciousness. The second is a young woman Siduri, an anima-figure tending her vineyard and making wine, who tells him he must seek out Utnapishtim, the only mortal who has ever been granted eternal life. The third is the ferryman who can carry him over the waters of death to meet Utnapishtim.
After further ordeals, Gilgamesh finally reaches his goal and meets Utnapishtim, `the far off one; who tells him how he came to enjoy immortality. This was the episode which particularly electrified the Victorian public when