PART II
He saw the lions round him glorying in life; then he took his axe in his hand, he drew his sword from his belt and he fell upon them like an arrow from the string, and struck and destroyed and scattered them.
In the distant past, there was the idea that all things gave and received energy. This exchange was vital and it was essential. It was thought that a very real correspondence existed between all creatures and things — minerals, the living soil, the living waters, plants. Much as a letter is sent and awaits an answer, these gave and received from one another.
And there was the magical idea that the structure of a thing was connected with its name; that to change the name was to change its inherent qualities. Such as Adam, who is formed of clay: adamah. Adamah is an active principle; it refers to the tilled soil and the earth with which one builds an altar. And, its color is red. Dam is the word for blood.
Adam’s nature is also volcanic. He is made in darkness, in secret, deep within the earth, and he is red with fire. The early stage of his creation is called the glowing. There is an ancient book written in Syriac in which Adam’s face is described as being as beautiful as the sun. His body and his face, his eyes — all glow mightily like the sun. So you see, Adam cannot be disassociated from his name. He is red hot, volcanic, earthly, magnetic.
Plato tells us that every living thing is hot and has a flame residing within it. When in the darkness God breathes into Adam’s nostril and brings him to life, this breath is called nefach: the breath that kindles fire.
Once, a person had two names: a secret name that assured his safety and potency, and a serviceable, everyday name. Creatures and plants — like the owls and lotus blossoms and willow trees of Egypt — had names whose very sounds were the instruments of spiritual energy. But when Adam gives names to things of fire and breath, his singular power, his privilege, and his alienation, are openly declared, and Eden’s capacity to inspire and regenerate is compromised.
Moral complexity is not Adam’s forte, nor is clairvoyance. He is the son of Yahweh after all, and domination is to his taste. Like a grocer, he parcels out the animals: those that creep upon their bellies and thrive in confusion — the venomous scorpion, the snake — these he despises. The docile cattle he enthralls, and in envy, fear, and ignorance, demonizes the wild beast. The intuition that all forms surge from the same flame, the same breath, and that all living things are siblings — Adam obscures.
Which brings us to another seminal myth that persists not only because of its tragic beauty, but its psychological acuity: the story of Enkidu, that other man-as-he-was-in-the-beginning, and Gilgamesh his king. The story of Enkidu and Gilgamesh is, above all, one of alienation and guilt, of notoriety confused with and exchanged for eschatological salvation, and an ecstatic journey devolving into a progression of violent and self-defeating acts that lead to an apocalypse — the very apocalypse we face: the obscuration of Nature. In this way it can be read as a parable of our own age in crisis.
Gilgamesh the king is above all a builder of cities, and the story opens with a walk through Uruk, a great city masterfully built of oven-fired brick. One third of Uruk is given over to quarries of clay, and close at hand the forests provide fuel for the kilns. This is how Gilgamesh makes his mark upon the world, in brick. And he is like a brick wall. A tyrant and a rapist, he is unyielding and incontournable. So abusive has he become, the gods are called upon to intervene. And so, in silence, “The goddess conceives an image in her mind; she dip[s] her hands in water and pinche[s] off clay which she let[s] fall in the wilderness.”4 A falling star, Enkidu blazes to Earth.
Like Adam, Enkidu is made of clay; like Adam, he glows. Born of fire and breath, I think he is like the sacred vowels of the Arabs, which open the door to sublime understanding. Vowels like the Mîm, the Wâw, and the Nûn that Ibn ‘Arabî describes so passionately — that have no beginning and no end and contain the infinite possibilities of the created, the imagined world. Such is Enkidu’s promise: a lucent world of infinite possibility. A savage man, he lives in perfect understanding among the creatures of the forest. It is significant that before he is made he is dreamed. Above all, the epic of Gilgamesh is a revelation of the profound significance of dreaming.
Word of Enkidu’s strength and beauty reaches the king. But before they meet, Enkidu blazes into Gilgamesh’s dreams, first as a meteor too heavy to be lifted and then as a gleaming axe fallen to the street. When he asks his mother the meaning of his dreams, she tells him Enkidu is “the brave companion who rescues his friend in necessity.”5 Yet the only thing Gilgamesh needs to be rescued from is himself. The great builder of Uruk has gone terribly astray. Like a bright blade in the mind, Enkidu has been made not only to stop him, but to transform him.
A spark that dissolves the night, a fallen star, and also Gilgamesh’s twin, his mirror, the revelation of his entombment — the meteor’s terrible weight exemplifies the king’s affection, his leaden soul. His name obscured, Gilgamesh’s agony will become his own.
As you will recall, a temple whore is sent into the forest to seduce Enkidu and weaken him. His match in sexual vitality, they come together like forces of nature. Enkidu gluts on her richness and abandons his innocence for her own brand of wildness — an artful and deceitful sexuality. First she exhausts him, then she makes a man of him, a bread-eater and a killer. He is now ready, like any thug, to wrestle with the king and lose. He is reduced to Gilgamesh’s hireling, his “axe” and his shadow. “I am weak,” Enkidu laments. “My arms have lost their strength, the cry of sorrow sticks in my throat.”6 Debased, robbed of selfhood, Enkidu is prepared to destroy everything he loves. When he dies, it will be in shame. He will say, “Once I ran for the water of life, and now I have nothing.”7 The luminous dreaming of the story’s beginning collapses into nightmare.
Enkidu and Gilgamesh set off together to destroy the cedar forest, its tree of life — which Gilgamesh will have made into a door — and Humbaba, the forest’s ferocious protector. Like the rich domains Herodotus describes weeping incense and rife with beasts, the forest grows on a mountain. The cedar mountain is not only home to all the gods, but it stands above the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness. The place of all our darkest fears and greatest potencies, it exemplifies the unconscious mind. It is, the text tells us, the place from which dreams are sent to men, and on their journey, Gilgamesh will not cease to dream. These dreams will never encourage both men but will always be warnings of the mortal damage they are about to inflict upon themselves and their world. And it is no accident that once the forest has been destroyed, torn up by its roots, Gilgamesh will fall speechless to the ground, weighted down in the terrible dark of nightmare. He tells Enkidu,
I seized hold of a wild bull in the wilderness, it bellowed and beat up the dust till the whole sky was dark, my arm was seized and my tongue bitten. .
I dreamed again. We stood in a deep gorge of the mountain, and beside it we two were like the smallest of swamp flies; and suddenly the mountain fell, it struck me.8