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Grail Sciences
Grail Sciences is a Podcast that reveals the most occulted (hidden) information on the planet about how we as a species create our reality both individually and collectively. Come join us on a journey of self-discovery and freedom and learn how to change the world by changing your own story and become a Master of Destiny.
Grail Sciences
Gilgamesh: The King who Refused to Die
Gilgamesh is the oldest and greatest hero of recorded human legend. The epic as a whole questions what it means to be human, warns of the dangers of spurning a beautiful woman, and meditates deeply on the meaning of immortality. All that plus a good adventure story at the same time! James Bleckley of the Oldest Stories Podcast sits down with Nathaniel Heutmaker of the Grail Sciences Podcast to discuss this ancient tale from both an historical and an occult perspective.
The Grail Sciences Podcast covers the deeper meaning of the Holy Grail and a variety of occult topics. Nathaniel is deeply read in a variety of world traditions, and expertly weaves it all together over at grailsciences.com/
The Oldest Stories Podcast covers the history, myth, and culture of ancient Mesopotamia, from the invention of writing until the fall of Nabonidas. James has been filling out the story of the oldest civilization for over 6 years at oldeststories.net
Gilgamesh is neat because he's got that core epic, which as far as we can tell, a lot of ancient gods and ancient figures don't have a core epic, they have a bunch of stories. But then have for Gilgamesh to have that sequence of events that really does seem to be a core narrative that really defines him. It makes it into the oldest, the oldest epic, which is, I guess, what they put on the cover of all the books, the Gilgamesh books. It's the oldest epic. But it's interesting to sit and really think about that because it's clearly composed and it does have episodes. And there's a decent chance that the episodes in the epic were separate stories at some point as part of a larger corpus of here's the things that this character does.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we know that that's the case for it, at least for some of the stories, mainly because like Enkidoo dies in an earlier version of it and then suddenly appears again randomly and not in his like shade form, I guess you could say. Uh and that kind of thing, like actually physically present there as he's already supposed to be dead later on in the story for what's going on there.
SPEAKER_00:Um that is Enkidoo in the underworld, where he goes and becomes a shade. And that's not part of the epic.
SPEAKER_01:Um, no, I'm just saying that we do know that that's part of this. Yeah. That we do know that at least at some point that there were separate stories and whatnot, and that the epic definitely combines certain elements of earlier stories that were already there with it. I I liken it to the Arthurian myth and tradition for what was going on on that front, where you have all these different stories and all these people talking about it from maybe from different perspectives and all that other stuff for writers and that kind of stuff. But then we get Mallory and his like official one that everybody knows, and it's kind of that with it. And it took hundreds of years for Mallory's version to come into being. I think that's kind of what happened is you have all these various different Sumerian poems and like stories about Gilgamesh and whatnot, and then the epic of Gilgamesh as we know it today, and that kind of stuff was compiled by somebody who took all of the stuff with it inside of Akkadian time periods and whatnot. That's seems to be the general consensus that I can find on people with it. They even abscribe it to one particular scribe that did all of that. So it doesn't mean it's true. It's still conjecture on that front, but it's conjecture backed up with a lot of facts that seemed to be the case for it.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, I just I just find it interesting that they have the the model of making an epic so early in their history, but then they just don't do it again. You have everybody every other mythic figure for the rest of Mesopotamian history just has a collection of stories. And like I guess you contrast that to like the Indian tradition where everything gets compiled into massive, massive texts. It's just an interesting wave. And you know, about the time when they're compiling the Epic of Gilgamesh is about the time when they are in communication with the Indus Valley Civilization.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And so I I wonder if turning Gilgamesh into an epic was actually an Indus Valley idea.
SPEAKER_01:It very well could be. I know for a fact, I don't know how much the Indus Valley Civilization had influence over Mesopotamia in relation to which was more culturally dominant in terms of sharing of ideas, if you will, and whatnot. I do know in the variance between Sumeria and Egypt, Egypt was the culturally dominant one and influenced Sumeria way more than the other way around, so to speak, on that front for that. I do know that obviously the Indus Valley civilization and the Sumerians slash Mesopotamians were very much in contact with another with one another and had cross-fertilization, if you will. But I don't know if that's definitively where that idea came from. It very well could be, though, because if you look at the only other major influence during that time period that they could have had in terms of civilization for that, it was in terms of written records that they were doing, keyword being written records here for what's going on. It would would be Egypt, and you know, they didn't really have this whole epic idea going on either, you know, for the most part. For what I'm not saying they never made one, I'm just saying like they weren't into it as much as the all the Indian epics that started to come into being during this time period and whatnot. So it very well could be the case that that is an influence there, but it could also just be that it sprung up completely organically on its own and whatnot. And we, you know, I don't I don't know the history of that enough to know definitively that that was the case.
SPEAKER_00:I don't think anybody could say, but I would say that Gilgamesh would be a great Bollywood action movie.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. Absolutely. Over the top, absolutely great.
SPEAKER_01:For what's going on from their from their stuff with the and and that kind of stuff. They might add their own little flair, their own little flavor to it, and that kind of thing with it, but they you know, to make it so it hits more with the Indian audience, if you will.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But you didn't you wouldn't have to change much, no.
SPEAKER_00:You just have to add a dance, a song and dance in there every year and everyone.
SPEAKER_01:Every once in a while. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, it'd be great. Now I want that. And I'm never gonna I don't know if we'll ever have it. Sunday was.
SPEAKER_01:So it the the it's permeated the consciousness more so, and so it's I would say something about him popping up at some point, whether it's a Bollywood or not, is at least possible. We I mean, you know, we've started to see this with animes popping up and and whatnot, where he's one of the people that's in inside of it. So it's not it's not impossible. It's already hit mainstream culture in that regard, right?
SPEAKER_00:So and now I can't I can't remember Mohenjo Daro. They do the Indians do have the connection to the old the old the Indian movies have that connection. There's a very fun movie, Mohenjo Daro, about the city of Mohenjadaro. Well, it's I mean it's about a handsome guy who falls in love with a priestess, but it's in Mohenjadaro, and it's it's a wonderful little movie. Oh, it's good. I don't remember where I was anymore, but Gilgamesh is cool.
SPEAKER_01:So on on the front of Gilgamesh, him being the oldest epic, you know, that we have, at least it's still around. And maybe there was older stuff that we've lost, but that still exists. One of the things that is interesting with it is the there's unequivocally star lore inside of it that goes on with it. We see this with like the bull of heaven idea that that pops up for that, and this makes it so that way we're dealing with, at least for that part of the story, what could be termed a stellar cult of some sort in terms of their influence on some of these things with it. And why I'm bringing this up is because if you look at the zodiacal signs and whatnot. Now, they're not all the same for all cultures and whatnot, but they are pretty similar for most cultures, and obviously they have their variance in terms of how they perceive them and like their shapes and sizes and whatnot, but the most of them have 12 earths, sometimes the 13th one, and but they also have one character, one constellation, no matter what, that is kind of the ring bearer, if you will, meaning that the other ones go around and it's always Orion. That's always Orion for what happens there. And it seems to me that some of these other parts of the story that are going on here are having to deal with Gilgamesh taking the role of that central theme and character of Orion. He plays that. You could see this with the twelve labors of Hercules or Heracles, if you want to. He's the Orion character, and the twelve are to represent each one of these constellations and that kind of stuff that goes on there, as well as the associated mythology and lore that goes with them and whatnot. And so if you are part of this ancient stellar culture, I mean very, very ancient, way before any records are written down or whatever, stuff like tens of thousands of years ago, and you know that the gods up there, aka the stars, are ever permanent and they're not going to go anywhere, even if that's we know today that it's not true, that they only last for billions of years, but for all intents and purposes for human views so they are in you know immortal. That what happens is that they use the as above so below principle, as within so without principle that's there with it, and they use this these beings that are made up in the constellation to represent certain certain aspects of ourselves, certain archetypes, certain spiritual understandings, and then they make stories and create them around that and give it to teach lessons to the people around them and whatnot, and that leads to a two at minimum a two-tier system, if you will, of uh exoteric version, meaning what you're told to just basically bear understand and whatnot, and an esoteric, more hidden, deeper meaning tradition, which they were the keepers and guardians of for this stuff, with it. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is because it is clear when you are reading the epic of Gilgamesh, and I'm speaking specifically the epic here, not necessarily some of the other things that we're talking about earlier, like another world and Inky Doo and all that other stuff that goes into it, is that it is all about a search for immortality in some capacity or another. And the entire point of doing that on a spiritual level and whatnot is always esoteric. It is always esoteric on that particular front for what's happening there. And we'll we can talk more about that in a moment when we get to more of it if you want to, for why that's the case for that. But everything that he does, even his rejection of Inanna that goes on with that, the bull of heaven has certain things that you can play with that that will become more apparent for stuff that's that way with it. His going and looking for the Noah character that you know, in terms of that, the Sumerian one, Unapashtim and whatnot, that's there. All of that has to do with a search for immortality that he thinks he deserves, because in the at least in the epic version, not necessarily the Sumerian version, but the Akkadian version, Babylonian version, he's two-thirds divine. So he seeks that out, whatever the hell that means, which is very cool. Because I'm I, as far as I'm aware of, he's the only character I've come across that isn't like semi-divine, meaning like half or something like that. He's two-thirds. So there's that too.
SPEAKER_00:So he's just that little bit better than everybody else.
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:That's great. So I was thinking what might be the best way to structure it is if we just real quick go through the the overview of the story, and there are I think I think there will be natural pausing points through that. And that'll structure us. So right, so Gilgamesh was a was almost certainly an historical king of Uruk around 3,000 or 2800 BC. And he must have been very important, we would assume. He must have been successful in some way. And historically, he is ruling at the time when the city of Uruk is very important. This is the city of Uruk is culturally Sumerian, but it's a different kind of Sumerian than what we get in the more in the later more historical period, where Sumer is a bunch of city-states that are competing for power with each other, that where where all the different city-states are in recorded history, all the different city-states are kind of equal, not absolutely equal, of course, but they're the kingship, the idea of kingship over the region.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Each and the idea of kingship passes from city to city as one gets a little more powerful, then another gets a little more powerful. Uruk appears to have dominated for about a thousand years the entire region. It seems to have been the preeminent city for about a thousand years. And Gilgamesh is coming at either the peak or the strong tail end of Uruk's domination of the region. So he is a very important king in a very important city. And I don't think it's known why he gets this story attached to him. But who really knows? The the legendary Gilgamesh is, like you said, two-thirds divine. He is but depending on how you understand qubits, because the qubit is a length of measure that changed in definition over time. He could be 16 feet tall and he could be nine feet tall. And actually, the the epic itself seems to be a bit inconsistent about how large he is, because if you look at like the weights of his armor and his panoply and the kind of weights that he's carrying around, that implies somebody much closer to 16 feet tall. But then he also walks into normal people's houses and he has intercourse with lady normal human ladies, which would just anatomically doesn't work for someone who's 16 feet tall.
SPEAKER_01:Not unless they're also 12 feet tall or something.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, and I don't want I don't want to hear about some weird Reddit page about 16-foot-tall pornography. There, I know it exists. I don't want any anything to do with any of that. But so it's the size of Gilgamesh is just large, or you could say larger than life. And the scale of his divinity is larger than anyone else's scale of divinity, unless you know they are a god. Yeah, because he is the best that a person can be. And really, you probably can't even be that good unless you're Gilgamesh. He is like defining quality as being a little bit better. So he is he finds himself to be this gigantic superman, the strongest person in a civilization defined by strength, where power comes from strength. He is called Lugal, which is a kingship title that's just starting to become big in his era, which just means strong man, as opposed to a priest king, which in the past there had been priest kings. So he is very much a ruling by strength, and he has a lot of strength. And he has no moderating influence, which is not good. He uh throws bad parties to the point that he is bankrupting the city, he is being very rowdy and disrupting the city, he is stealing women, which is improper, and he's doing improper things with those ladies, and he's just generally causing a ruckus, and no one can stop him. And the people of Uruk call up to the gods and they say, Hey gods, I don't know what you're doing with this giant guy, but I'd really like if you calm him down a little bit. And the gods get together and they say, Well, maybe what he needs is a friend, a friend to settle him down. And I mean, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Is the point, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And and so they create Enkidu, and Enkadu is a man of the wilds, where Gilgamesh is a man of the city and of civilization. Enkadu just emerges from the wilderness, and he is friends with all the animals. He's he's like a nine-foot-tall Disney princess, talking to the deer, having hanging out with the birds. He's running around naked through the wilderness. And uh then he as a giant strong wild animal, he starts you know, raiding, pillaging farms and stuff because that's what the wilderness does. The wilderness is a threat. And so now the people, and now uh Gilgamesh needs to figure out hey, we've got this threat to our city. What am I gonna do about this threat? He goes out there and it's you know, it's a long story, but they he figures out, oh, it's this wild man. What's the way to tame and civilize a wild man? He gets a divine prostitute of Inanna, and it's this is I'm fairly certain the oldest confirmed reference to the divine prostitution practice, which of course would be famous all the way until Greek times. The Greeks would comment on it as, oh, how scandalous. But he gets this divine prostitute to go over there.
SPEAKER_01:Ironic coming from them.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes. The Greeks have very little capacity for self-reflection in terms of making fun of other people and not seeing that they deserve to be made fun of themselves.
SPEAKER_01:But for the exact same rate.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So Enkidu meets this divine prostitute out in the wilderness, and they sleep together for either seven days or nine days, or some extremely long period of time, but finally he's got all his manly energy worked out of him. And having been contaminated by a woman, by a human woman, he is now civilized. And the animals can smell it on him. Oh, he's got city smell on him. The animals go away, so he is driven into the city of Uruk, and he's very mad that this that he has been tricked in this way. He's very mad. He busts in, he says, Who did this to me? Everybody says, Go fight Gilgamesh. They fight. It's a Bollywood action sequence, it's absolutely fantastic. And then they eventually stop after three or four days, and they just can't stop laughing because they're having so much fun wrestling with each other that they become lifelong friends. Lifelong, I guess, being the key word in all of this. So then they go out and they have adventures. Gilgamesh and Enkadu have adventures, is seems to have been its own genre of stories. The most famous, they go over to Lebanon. They want to cut down a bunch of cedar trees because that's what Mesopotamian kings do. They conquer, they cut cedars from Lebanon. But there's a monster over there, the Humbaba, that represents the nature, the wildness of nature, and they they beat him up, thus conquering nature, and they get all the trees. They have a war against Agga of Kish, who, Agga of Kish, is an historical person. And this might have been an actual historical war because the legend that we have involves Gilgamesh going to the town council. And the town council says, hey, let's not start a war for a bunch of nonsense. And then Gilgamesh goes to a bunch of youths, like you know, young teen boys and 20-year-old men, and says, Hey, let's let's provoke a war. And he sort of forms a constituency of young men in the city to overrule the traditional power structure of the old conservative men. And then they have this war with Aga of Kish. That's a neat little historical note. There are almost certainly a lot of other stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu having adventures that have just been lost. And this is also where you fit in the story that you were talking about earlier where Enkidu dies, but it's not the story where Enkidu dies, if that makes sense. Gilgamesh and Enkadu, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are playing some kind of game with a ball and a stick. There's we don't know if it's like golf or if it's like polo or if it's like soccer. We don't really know what they were doing, but it was a very popular game, ball and stick, and they're playing, and then they one day Gilgamesh happens to drop his ball and stick down into the underworld, into a giant hole that leads to the underworld. And how you do that, I don't know. Like I knocked a baseball through a neighbor's window once, but I assume it's sort of like that. It really, it really in the story, it seems kind of like that. Oops, I guess it's in the underworld now. So Enkadu goes down to the underworld, and he can only come back as a spirit because once you go in the underworld, you're dead. I mean, then he the whole the actual point of that story is to is moral, and it ends with a very long formulaic list of dialogues. So for instance, Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh and Enkadu, they sit on a bench. Gilgamesh says, What'd you see down in the underworld? And Enkadu says, It's all kinds of stuff. And Gilgamesh says, Did you see a man who only has one son, who died with only one son? And then Kadu says, Yeah, I saw him. And Gilgamesh says, How is he doing in the underworld? And then Kadu says, Oh, he weeps bitterly, and his he is driven into the wall by a wooden spike. But the man who has two sons sits on a few bricks eating bread. With three sons, he's drinking from drinking water from a water skin. And then it goes on and on up to six sons, you're going to be happy in the underworld. With seven sons, you're going to be the companion to the gods in the underworld. The palace eunuch is propped in the corner like a useless stick. The woman who never gave birth is like a broken chamber pot. The people who don't give funerary offerings or who don't receive funerary offerings are starving. The people who lied to the gods spend eternity drinking urine. So it is, in a sense, like that particular story is a lot like Dante's divine comedy, where Dante goes into the underworld and reports on how all the people in hell and purgatory and heaven are doing. And so it's a it's a genre that would have had each of these are self-contained stories, not part of the wider mythic cycle, but it would have had its own, it would have had a lot of variety in it. Uh it's it would have had its own life going on to it. It's quite it's good stuff. Anyway, the period of Enkidu and Gilgamesh being bros ends with Gilgamesh insulting Inanna. So Gilgamesh has, after all of these adventures, become even more glorious and wonderful and powerful. And this is where the epic picks up again. Everything before this is sort of like prelude that the audience would have been generally familiar with. The real meat of the epic starts with Inanna being insulted. Inanna sees Gilgamesh, he's real, you know, real sexy, 16 feet tall. The ladies like tall men, and he's 16 feet tall. And he and Inanna sneaks in to Gilgamesh while he's bathing in his palace, and he says, Hey, Gilgamesh, and she says, Hey Gilgamesh, let's let's get married. And Gilgamesh says, No, I don't want to get married because you have ruined the lives of every one of your lovers. And he goes on, he provides receipts, he names names, everyone whose life that she has ruined, he throws it in her face. And funny enough, she was was not a big fan of him uh rejecting her in quite that way.
SPEAKER_01:Why? You you mean did that she didn't like being talked to that way? Oh my goodness, who would have thought?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and so uh instead of dodging a bullet, he seems to have uh caught himself his own separate bullet. Because if if Inana was going to destroy him while they were together, he she is now like doubly certain to destroy him now that she is absolutely enraged. And she is a goddess of passions, par excellence, and she is in 100% passion mode. And so she goes to her father, who in this story is on, and says, Hey, can I have the bull of heaven, please? And he he says, Why would you want that? And she says, I want to kill Gilgamesh. And and he's like, I don't want to give you the bull of heaven, and I don't want you to kill Gilgamesh. And she says, Please, Daddy, please, you have to. I'm your pretty little princess. He goes, Oh, okay. And that is also a power of Inanna. I know we already talked about Inanna, but you can't ever not talk about Inanna. But it's the I'm Daddy's princess begging for a treasure, begging for a treat.
SPEAKER_01:That is kind of worse than that in certain variants. I mean, what you're saying is true, but in one of the variants, you know, she is doing that and she's just gonna like cry and all that other stuff and make it so that way her yelling and wails can be heard all over the realm, various different realms and that kind of stuff. But in another variant of it, she threatens to raise all the dead from the underworld and have them eat all the living, if not given that with it, just just to showcase how much of a not only has things maybe potentially changed and their meanings of certain things, but also just how it's not necessarily just her playing the woe is me princess archetype, but also the I'm gonna destroy everything if you don't.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I mean, I do sort of see that as Ishtar still pouting, as Inanna pouting. Oh, it's completely still dead.
SPEAKER_01:I'm just trying to showcase to the audience that it's not some of it's not just idle threat, is the point.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah, no, she's yeah, she's uh a fairly fairly powerful in her own right, uh, which makes it all the more interesting that for all of her power, like she is a person with the plausible ability to conquer the underworld, who makes mountains bow down to her, who she is extremely destructive when she wants to be, which is fairly often. And she does not feel uh competent to defeat Gilgamesh. And there's almost certainly a masculine and feminine energy going on in this in this fight between Gilgamesh and Inanna. Very archetypal masculine and feminine battle of a sort. Yeah, and so she ends up being unable to physically overwhelm Gilgamesh, and she is unable to use her feminine wiles against Gilgamesh, which is often her primary power. So she gets the bull of heaven and throws it at the city of Uruk. And the bull of heaven runs around, starts beating stuff up, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu go down and fight it. And the fight is portrayed very much like just another adventure of Gilgamesh and Nkadu. The structure of the story is not that different from the Humbaba fight, from the Aga of Kish fight, and from other divine fights against like there's an action hero god called Ninurta, and we have a number of his battles where he goes off and fights people. The structure of the fight is very similar. But then Enkadu is gored by the horns. And this is subverting expectations for the audience. This is, I mean, the hero can be wounded, but then Enkadu becomes very ill and he dies a w a little while after, despite everybody's attempt to heal him. And this is not how these sort of stories usually go. He uh not only is it not Gilgamesh that died in exchange for the the insult that he put on Inanna, it's it's uh Enkidu, a not unrelated person, but uh not the primary, not the guy that rejected Inanna.
SPEAKER_01:Not the one that is doing the primary offense, let's say her mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and so I mean this that is something a lot I know a lot of people have focused on the Gilgamesh versus Inana and the Bull of Heaven versus Enkidu specifically. Gilgamesh and Enkidu both fight the bull, but you could see it in a divine archetypal way as Gilgamesh and Ishtar are fighting, and Enkidu and the Bull of Heaven are fighting on a lower realm sort of thing where Gilgamesh and Ishtar are fighting as masculine versus feminine, whereas Enkidu and the Bull of Heaven are both the strength of wilderness. They are both the strength of nature. But a bull is the most powerful and large domesticated animal that most Mesopotamians would have seen in their entire lives. It is it is a symbol of strength, but it's the symbol of strength that people have taken control of. Enkadu is also a wild man that has been taken control of and domesticated by Gilgamesh. And so, in a sense, they're very similar, but there's you could potentially see two sides of domestication there, where Enkidu is still a little wild, whereas the bull has lost its wilderness and gained more of the power of civilization in him. I don't know if you have thoughts on either the masculine feminine.
SPEAKER_01:I have lots of thoughts of this. So firstly, I want to backtrack just a tiny bit on the Bull of Heaven notion and whatnot. We've brought up before in another episode that we've done here and whatnot, how Inanna is going into the underworld. And one of the reasons that she gives to it, gives for it in one of the variants of the story is to make it so that way she's there for the funeral of Ereshikol's husband. Now, this is interesting because he is also, and for by certain scholars, the bull of heaven, that there is no difference between that, that Ereshikol's husband is the bull of heaven, and then the bull of heaven being slain is what leads to Inanna going into the underworld and everything that comes out from that with it. So, in a way, the these stories are all directly linked to each other, which is kind of why we've talked about this and why we brought it up. I'm not saying that it's definitively proven that this is the case for it, because there are some scholars that are in contention against this, but generally accepted at least as a plausible theory. So we'll just leave it, I'm just putting that out there for what's going on with it. Now, why I had mentioned earlier that this doesn't is incomplete with certain things with that too, is because when you were talking about when Inkidu was laying with the divine prostitute and whatnot, Inana's, you know, prostitute that's being sent there, there is they found a tablet that was discovered in 2015, I want to say, and not fully analyzed and read until 2018 and put into the rest of the stories later on and became public consciousness around that same time period and whatnot, that gives a variance in terms of the dates for what it is. So you were correct when it says six days and seven nights that he laid with her for that on that part. I know you also mentioned nine. Nine's another important number, but not in this particular instance for what's happening. And then, but then another one was found later that basically shows that they were with each other for two weeks, which is what's like a small break in between for what was going on there. So the point is, I mean, that's part of this new stuff that was part of the lacuna that was missing that I was talking about. So I just want to comment on that briefly before we move on. Now, as to the masculine and feminine things, I'm gonna put that to the side for a moment and I'm gonna sidestep it and we'll come back to that. I want to focus on the bull, and I'm gonna focus on Inky Doo and Gilgamesh and how they're actually two foils, if you will, related to the bull. And forget Inana for just a second. She's not part of this equation for what I'm going with here with it. Are you familiar with the cult of Mithras or the cult of Mithras? Okay. So inside of it, for the sake of immortality argument that I was bringing up earlier for some of these things that are happening and the beginning of all this, is that in the cult of Mithras, the bull represents the lower, one of one of the things it can represent. I shouldn't say this is the only representation, but one of the main important representations that it has is that it represents the lower base desires, the more animalistic part of humanity and that kind of stuff with it, and that you have to overcome that if you want to reach higher spiritual illumination and that kind of stuff for what's going on there. So if you look at the two characters that there are with it, you have Gilgamesh, who is able to overcome, and one of the one of the most base desires that the Mithras cult is trying to overcome here is sexual lust, which he rejects in the form of Inanna and her advances towards him and whatnot, now being played out for what it is. This is why you can look at it as he overcomes that, which is why he isn't slain by the bull of heaven. But Inky Doo is feral. He's still, thus, he has some civilization to him and whatnot, but as you mentioned before, he's just another variant of the wild man and whatnot, and he's still there with it, and he isn't able to overcome these lower, more base desires for it. So the bull inevitably slays him for what's happening there with that. This is a take on it that I personally have. I'm not sure if other scholars agree or see this with it. I'm not saying that my take is correct. I'm just saying this is something that I have not seen put forth when I've researched this stuff with it. Now, to be fair, I haven't deep dived a bunch of theories onto this with other people, and I'm sure there's somebody else who's seen this at some point for what's going on. But it's the first thing that I see that's being played out with this particular notion here when I see that. It's the contrast between the two. The bull slays one because he isn't able to overcome his baser instincts and whatnot, and the other one is. And of course, we know the cult of Mithras came out of the same region. The problem is we don't know how old it is, and we don't know all of its mysteries and all the other stuff with it. There's a lot of speculation and conjecture for it. So there's that side of things for it. As for the masculine and feminine playing off of each other for what's going on there, part of why all of Inanna's lovers end in misery or demise or something else happening to them is well, because she represents, as we talked about before in one of our other episodes, she represents the notion of the divine kingship being moved to humanity and and whatnot. And she's going to have multiple lovers because she represents the earth goddess that's doing that you have to marry and that kind of thing with that. So, of course, the lover is going to come to a terrible end for what's happening there with it, because it's inevitable that that's going to happen as it moves to the next lover, and that's why she has so many for what's happening on this front. It's just part of what's happening there for it. So, this is also why she's enraged with Gilgamesh for what's happening there. It's because it's like, well, yeah, this was inevitable. Everybody that marries me who gains my power and gains my influence and gains my affection and all of that, it's part of the package deal for being with it and that kind of thing. You don't have a say and whether that's going to be it or not. And if you want to be king, you have to accept me. You don't have a choice for what it is. And he rejects that notion, so to speak, at least in this variant of the story. But ironically, it also spurs him, because the death of Inky Doo, to go search for immortality and all these other things that are going on there. So it's that's why I'm saying if you start looking at it, it's all of these various different understandings of the search for immortality in some capacity or another, and his failed attempts to actually come to success with that on the uh ultimately in the end for what it is. But he ends up having a good life anyway, and he does achieve a type of immortality. We are still talking about him five thousand-ish years later, you know, and and that kind of stuff, much like Achilles achieved his form of immortality that he was looking for and and whatnot, that he would be remembered forever and that kind of stuff, which is what the most human aspects of these things that come with it are. So those are my very let's say non completely spending an hour on this thought that there are with it. I can go further onto these things if you want on anything with it, but those are those are what I see in terms of anything that's immediate and easy to understand.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, I like the I like that idea of the bull as the as the baser instincts that Gilgamesh is able to overcome, and Enkidu is not, because of course he is captured because of his inability to overcome that baser instinct. Yeah, no, I like it. So, what happens next in our story is that Enkidu dies.
SPEAKER_01:And spoiler alert.
SPEAKER_00:You've had 5,000 years to read this. If you haven't read it by now, you're out of luck. Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh is sad. And Gilgamesh is not just sad, he is Romance is over. Yeah, he is he is thrown into a profound depression, which appear which initially his depression is focused around Nkadu and the bromance. Wah wah, my friend is dead, yeah, and everyone's like, Yeah, Gilgamesh, get over yourself now. It's been it's been long enough.
SPEAKER_01:Just for the audience, not just like they're time to get over it when it's been like a week or a month, or this is like long, long time. I forget exactly how long, but it's like years, so yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:He goes into a very prolonged depression, but that depression morphs because I don't want to say he gets over enkadu, but it becomes less of a wah, wow, nkidoo is dead, and it becomes far more of a oh my goodness, I'm also gonna die. And that becomes the source of his, I think, more profound depression.
SPEAKER_01:It's it's a catalyst, it's a catalyst, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a catalyst, and everybody's like, Yeah, you're gonna die. That happens, get over it. But he didn't want to get over it. He he it's existential. It's my divine right not to die.
SPEAKER_01:I am two-thirds divine, you're just regular humans. Of course it's normal for you. This isn't normal for me. What are you talking about? You know, that type of idea.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but I'm even beyond that, even beyond him being special. This is the this is the existential angst that people have had since for as long as there have been people.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, elephants seem to get depressed when people around with their friends die. Animals, animals, at least some of them have some awareness of death. And yeah, death is not is not is not fun. I have it died, but I I have it on good authority, it's undesirable. And so he uh eventually eventually people are like, hey, cheer up, go on an adventure, deal with it. And he's like, you know, I'm an adventurous kind of fellow, I bet there's a way to live forever. And there are a couple different things that go on here, but basically they all come down to he hears that there's a way to live forever. And that search for immortality ultimately has people tell him, hey, go hunt down this fella, Utnapishtum. Utnapishtum is the Sumerian name, Ziyad Sura is the Akkadian name. I really hope I didn't get that backwards. There's a couple other names that he's got in different civilizations, but he's basically biblical Noah. He is the guy who survived the Great Flood, and uh in the Mesopotamian version, he became immortal as a result of surviving the flood. And that's all that Gilgamesh knows at this point. That's all that anybody knows. No one's quite sure where he is. There, and I mean no one in modern times is quite sure where he is because there's different attributions for where he's located. In some versions, he's located at the source of the four rivers, which uh actually seems to be like the biblical Garden of Eden is at the source of the Tigris, Euphrates, Gihon, and Pishon rivers. And that seems to be a memory of where of the this same this same utnipishtim is in at the source of the four rivers, sort of thing. But the I think the version that we have that makes the most sense says that Utnapishtum is at the southern continent. And I think you'll get some people that say that this is Antarctica. Actually, I think in in the oldest stories podcast, when I did this, I was under the impression it was Antarctica. More and more I'm seeing people say that it's probably somewhere in Africa, was the idea, because the very early sailors did have knowledge of at least the Horn of Africa and possibly the southeast coast of Africa, maybe Madagascar, possibly. So they seem to have had some distant knowledge that there was stuff down there. And Ziyatsura was down there, Napishton was down there. And so he goes on a grand quest. And the grand quest is fantastic. I have not, I may be wrong, I have not seen different versions of this sequence of him leaving Uruk to get to Ziadsura, which may mean that there's only one version of this story in terms of the primary events that happen. And this is not, I think, I think this is not, hey, there were a bunch of Gilgamesh adventures that all got put in here. I think this is a composed sequence. So he starts going west from Ur. I I want to sorry, just yeah. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I wanna I want to say that to my knowledge, there's only at least for for the atrahasis portion here, if you will, that that that that this is it. There is no other variant of it that I'm aware of either. That doesn't mean there aren't variants, uh, there aren't different copies of it or whatever. Oh yeah, yeah. But it's the same, it's the same story, it's the same structure, it's the same stuff with the I'm not personally aware of any other I in other words, I agree. Like as far as I can tell, it's the same.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah. And so we can take this journey from Uruk to Atrahasis, which is another Utnapishtem. Uh he's got a lot of names. This is one journey, even though it has multiple stops. So he heads west, probably because west is the direction of death. It's the setting sun. The Egyptians considered it very strongly the direction of death. And he uh starts a lot of cultures do.
SPEAKER_01:In fact, all cultures that I'm aware of that have any esoteric inclinations do.
SPEAKER_00:So okay. Yeah. And so heading west, he ends up at the Straits of Gibraltar. Of course, they don't call it the Straits of Gibraltar, but it's very clearly it's two, it's two mountains at the end of the Mediterranean Sea that that flow out, and the the waters pass through these two mountains, and they flow out into the endless ocean. I'm just always fascinated by how much geographical knowledge the they have in the Sumerian period. They clearly have boat people going out the Mediterranean, they have boat people going down Africa, they have boat people going all the way to India, possibly to Southeast Asia, to Burma and Thailand. But that's neither here nor there.
SPEAKER_01:It is amazing like how much they knew and how far they had traveled. Like it is absolutely insane for that era.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I mean, they they knew that you could see Gibraltar from the African coast. They mention it specifically in this Gilgamesh story, that these are two mountains that you can see from one another. And as is historically well known, each of the mountains was guarded by a scorpion person, a giant scorpion person. And Gilgamesh has to fight the giant scorpion people, and then he passes between these mountains, which serve as a gate to the edge of the world. He gets to the edge of the world and he's like, Oh, where do I go now? And he looks down and he sees a giant tunnel. And he knows that this is the tunnel that the sun passes under when it goes away at night. Because of course, for Gilgamesh, the world is flat. The world is uh is a flat disk like this. Everybody's hanging out up here. The sun comes up, it goes over the world, and then it passes under the world through a tunnel. And so he waits till waits till nightfall, and then he goes into the tunnel and he starts running. He starts running because he knows he's only got 24 hours to, or he's only got a certain number of hours to make it through because the sun spends 12 hours in this tunnel, then 12 hours in the sky, and so he's got to get out the other end of the tunnel before the sun comes through here. And the sun is very fast because it crosses the entire world multiple times.
SPEAKER_01:This also goes back to the idea that I was talking about, and and and that kind of stuff too, with it in terms of him representing Orion ultimately for what's going on there. Because it anyway, there that it's this is just this stuff is even more definitive proof at some point. We can go into that if you want. Please continue with the with the narrative.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so he gets through the tunnel under the world, he makes it out, and he in the story, of course, to be dramatic, he makes it out just as the sun is about to catch him because that's more exciting. Get it'd be a good Bollywood movie again. Then he could probably do a sun dance right after with Shamash, the sun god, dancing around with him. It'd be fantastic. Anyway, he's now at the far eastern edge of the world, and he come and he's continues traveling west from there. And he goes by the Garden of Eden, and I mean it's got a different name, but it is basically the Garden of Eden. And he just sort of walks by it and he's like, Oh, yeah, I saw the Garden of Eden as I went by. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, pause there and tell us more about that.
SPEAKER_01:Man, that's not important. I'm on an adventure.
SPEAKER_00:He walks right by the Garden of Eden, and oh, I sure wish, I sure wish we had a cross-cultural uh description of the Garden of Eden instead of just walking by it and glossing it over. Yeah, yeah, here's this great paradise garden. It's just over there, you know, on the eastern edge of the world. It's great. I didn't hang out there very much. And then he turns south from there to cross the southern ocean. And he reaches a ferryman. And we've talked about ferryman before, the ferryman myth. And the the waters that he has to cross over are the waters of death. And the ferryman is the only way to cross the waters of death. If you touch the waters, you die. And there's some drama here, and it's I don't know if you see any deeper meaning in his encounter with the ferryman, because he the ferryman has he the ferryman doesn't paddle the the oars. The ferryman's got oh spin a little bit golems, something like golems or familiars, little helper assistant dudes that are his boat boat that pilot his boat. Yeah, that are yeah, they're his rowers. And Gilgamesh ends up killing all of them and breaking all of his oars. And the the ferryman's like, why did you do that? How are we gonna get across? And Gilgamesh is like, I I just I just paddle, don't worry about it. It's gonna be fine. I'm real strong. I don't know if you if you have seen anything deeper about that or if it's just a humorous anecdote on his way to the underworld.
SPEAKER_01:I can guarantee you any stories that have to do with the search for immortality don't have much humor in them in terms of an antidote. They all an antidote, they always have some deeper meaning behind it. Doesn't mean it can't be put in there for humorous purposes, too, but there's always another layer, is the point. I know that to be the case for for every other tradition that I've studied with that. So I'm going to make the it is an assumption because I haven't I can't haven't definitively looked into it. The same assumption for the Sumerians that that's the case for it. And it's not just like an Indo-European thing, it's true of even Native Americans and all that other stuff with it. Because you have to understand when these people are telling these stories, originally they were oral for the most part, even if they are changed when they're written down or through other influences and all that, they viewed them as sacred truths. And if it's a sacred truth, like we view them as myths now today and whatnot, but all a myth is is a religion that no one believes in anymore. All right. They were sacred truths to the people that were originally doing with it and that kind of stuff. And that doesn't mean that there can't be humorous components to it, but those humorous components are also going to contain sacred truths to them, is the point for what it is. Whether I can decipher that or not is a completely different thing, or whether anybody else can, because we've lost certain things that are going on there. That's up for debate and interpretation, but I guarantee you that there's something else that's going on here. And so I'm not front, I'm going to pull from another tradition that I'm aware of that might help give us a little bit of insight into what is possibly going on here to a certain extent. And this is gonna go to the Nordic tradition. So in the Nordic tradition, you have a being who takes on very similar characteristics of Gilgamesh and and whatnot, and uh and and and is this case is Thor. Okay, and Thor, whether you understand it or not, at this stage, is on his own quest for immortality. It's very subtle. You have to understand all of the stories, and you have to understand all the stuff that's going on there, because even the gods can die, right? Edoon has to give their apples in order for them to be rejuvenated, at least for the Nordic tradition and that kind of stuff and and whatnot. So they're looking for he's looking for his own form of immortality in the this version of the story. But people who aren't aware of all the subtle clues and details don't view it this way, just to be clear. This is an esoteric interpretation of it rather than a more literal one. Just put that forth. Anyway, he is on a quest, and there is a he's supposed to be going with another god named Tyr and whatnot. And Tyr is supposed to be half giant and half something else. This point is extremely important for what's going on here, and they are going to grab some sort of ancient cauldron type thing that they need to have for Egger's hall. Okay? And Egger is the one who is the Yotinar, the giant of the sea, just like we're talking. About here, and he has nine daughters that are all there in his hall that are supposed to be different waves of things for it. And he needs the cauldron for the mead, okay, for what's going on there, which I also has to do with the story, uh, in the sense of what we're talking about here with Gilgamesh, because he comes across an ale, a divine ale maiden himself in these adventures that he goes on that tries to dissuade him from going into it, which ironically is actually one of the names, one of the epithets of Inanna slash Estar for what's going on there. Now, most scholars will say that it isn't her. I'm not convinced that it isn't, but I'm also not convinced that it is her, and some sort of other variant for what's going on there. I just want to bring that up as another thing for what's happening. And in the Nordic tradition, you need to have nine knights that you go and do these things with it, which is true of many other traditions, is you have to partake in. So anyway, we go back to Thor and his search for this cauldron and whatnot, he has to enter into the giant realm, the realm of the dead, in another sense for what it is. And in the Nordic tradition, that's north. And the reason why it's north is because the colder you go, get the the more that you freeze, and that equals death to them for what's going on there, for what it is, because how cold the nights are for them, and the winters are for them, and and that kind of stuff. And so you don't want that, you want heat. If you're in that far north, heat equals good, cold equals bad, okay? So that's kind of where that is. Anyway, Tyr somehow disappears from the story. We don't know where he goes at this point, but he gets on a boat with another giant, and they take the head of an ox. Here's another thing with the ox idea that we've talked about and whatnot, and making it so that way they use the head of the most prized ox to go fishing inside of it and whatnot. And the Jotunar is the one that's doing the rowing, but he wants to stop and doesn't want to go out any further. And Thor's like, no, we need to go out further, and keeps wanting to go out further and further and further until they get to an area no one's been before. Much like how Gilgamesh is doing on his side of things with it. And so he puts the head into the water with it, and he catches one of the heads because of Jormungunder, the great sea serpent, the great snake and whatnot. Which, if you translate Jormungunder's name, it means great magic. Okay. So it means great magic, and it's an alchemical thing because he is not supposed to let go of his tail until Ragnarok, one of his heads is always biting the tail of it until the time of Ragnarok, which is clearly the Ouroborus eating its own tail over and over again. So why am I bringing this up in terms of a comparison for what's happening with it, is that if you compare it with the fairyman idea, there's another scene right before this that all this happens where it's Odin who is in the guise of the Ferryman, who refuses to allow him across, meaning Thor across to the other side with it, and telling him you need to go and do your own things, and they hurl insults at each other and whatnot. It's humorous if you don't understand what the deeper meanings behind it are, much like the scene of him kind of killing all these golem-like creatures that are there for that. And it's kind of showcasing, in my opinion, that this is there's some sort of current that's thread between all of these stories here that are going on with it, as we've talked about before. I don't know all the details, but I'm just but clearly there's something there. And that on the the case of it with Gilgamesh, it's like he's not ready to do stuff. And part of the reason why he isn't able to achieve his immortality yet is because he doesn't understand the rules that there are in the other world, and that he isn't fully prepared for that. While he's able to conquer his baser, lesser stuff with it, as we talked about with the slaying of the bull and whatnot, the slaying of the ox, that he is not capable of going all the way. And we know that this is played out again in other stories, too, of which are in the Greek tradition and whatnot. You see that with the Iliad and the Odyssey and whatnot, with Odysseus, he can't go all the way with it either for his stuff, which we also know they took certain story structures from Gilgamesh. This is undisputed. And then on that front, for what it is, this one to me has always been the most fascinating because it's based upon it's a real person that did this, but somehow he still thinks that he can go and do this, which is Alexander the Great. Most people have no idea, but the entire point of everything he was doing was not to conquer these other worlds, these other lands, these other peoples, and all that. That was the outcome of what he did with it, but it was his search for immortality. He went first to Egypt to try to gain immortality there. That failed. Then he went to what we know today as you know, Persia area and whatnot, you know, and that kind of stuff with it, the Persian Empire, and he goes there and he's seeking out their variant of it. But when he gets there, according to the myths and legends surrounding him and whatnot, Marduk, the great god, is dead, who was supposed to be able the one that could give him immortality for what it is. And so now he's looking for Okeanis, which all he knows is to the east, according to his understanding of things with it. So he keeps heading further and further east until he gets into the Indus Valley region and whatnot. And then eventually his troops want to turn around and all these other things. But everything he was doing in terms of his quest and his marches and everything he did with his people was actually about him playing the archetype of Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality and ultimately failing at it, yet again for what's happening here. And I'm seeing a lot of parallels for all these different things that are happening on it there. Obviously, I don't know exactly what the Sumerian stuff with it is, but something also happens in the Nordic tradition where it's very clear that the Nordic people get fed up with dealing with the ferryman. And they know this is the case with it, because what they do is that they make their own boats. They put people in boats to cross to the other side on their own. So there were two ways to get to the other side. If you didn't have a boat that there was with it, or you couldn't get on the ferryman's belt, which is what the other way for what it is, because you have to pay a coin or pay something in various different forms for what's going on with it and all that, you could take the main bridge across, right? But that's what everybody common folk did, and they had to wait in line and take their turn and all this other stuff, and it was a long, arduous process to go through that way. So they would they would prefer the ferryman because it takes less time. But eventually something happened, it seems, to where they're just like, fuck it, we're done with this bullshit. We don't want to even deal with the ferryman anymore. What if we have our own boats? What if we just put everybody in boats and make it so that way we go across from what's happening here on that, which actually has its own esoteric meanings again behind it and whatnot. But there is the humorous aspect that comes along with that. So just for whatever that's worth at this long tirade that goes in this weird discussion for what's going on with it, I know there's something more there. I just don't necessarily know what it is, because I haven't studied Sumerian mythologies deep enough.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I would say you don't see the boatman very often, and this particular appearance of him is not very well detailed. A lot of the times in cuneiform writing, the writing is just like notes. You often don't get the full story, and the notes are just there so that you remember. And the thing about the winemaiden, you're between the Garden of Eden, the reason he turned, he knows where the boatman is is because Gilgamesh encounters Saiduri, the winemaking goddess. And she is like, hey, go hang out with uh go hang out with the ferryman. Urshanabi. I have his I pulled his name out on my notes.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, Urshanabi. Urshanabi.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, which is an interesting name. But and then his his he's got the men of stone, is what they're called, which there are multiple men of stone in in Mesopotamian legend. And here they do seem like constructs made of stone. In other places, they get identified with the mountain people, and they're just people, but non-civilized people.
SPEAKER_01:Here they stone thing is interesting because it actually has a parallel with the the giant notion that I was talking about inside of the Nordic stuff for what and Celtic for that matter. And what happens is that some of these structures, these stone megalithic structures that are there with it, they're because the the giants were turt turned into stone when they stayed too late in the sun and whatnot, and became part of that stuff with it. So obviously, stone and giant or other worldly beings that are similar to giants are all part of that, and it seems like there's another layer to it here. And a lot of times the giants are also in some capacity or another confused with other mountain men known as dwarves and that kind of stuff. And the dwarves are in another sense also people that are part of this other world, meaning like not our reality, but like a more divine reality or like in this some other layer of reality and that kind of thing for what's happening. And it's in I'm just seeing another parallel to that there for what's going on with it. It's not perfect, but I'm thinking there's some sort of strand here through time and space that pulls all of this together and whatnot, because you know the fairyman myth can be traced back to a minimum of 30,000 years ago for what it is. So that's and maybe older, but I don't know. Point is that some of these things are so old that they have nothing to do with one particular culture in any way, shape, or form. They're just like taken up by everybody.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, so the the specifics here, because it might make a difference, of what we what we have is not very much. Gilgamesh, for some reason, does not want to just talk to the ferryman. I'm not sure we know why he doesn't want to talk to the ferryman. Instead, the ferryman and his men of his own are sitting sort of at the water's edge, out in the out in nature, and just hanging out, having their little camp, and Gilgamesh sneaks up and then he jumps on the ferryman, smacks him with the flat of his ax, pins him down, incapacitates him, knocks him out. And then the men of stone are like, What are you doing? And Gilgamesh is like, or he doesn't even talking. They're just like, oh my goodness. And then Gilgamesh and the men of stone just start fighting. And Gilgamesh hacks all the men of stone up into the men of pebbles. And then he throws all the he throws all of the rocks into the waters of death so that nobody can ever retrieve the men of stone. And he doesn't really explain why he has shattered them all and thrown them all into the waters so that they can never be reconstructed again. Uh, he just like, hey, this is this is what I'm doing. And then the Urshnabi the ferryman gets up and he's like, Hey, what are you doing, bro? And Gilgamesh is like, You should take me across these waters. And he's like, I can't. And Gilgamesh is like, I'll row. Don't worry about it.
SPEAKER_01:And that's right, which is the same idea that was going on with that there. So if you go back to the story of the ferryman concept that I was talking about, where Thor is there and it's Odin in disguise that's there with it. The whole reason why he even has to take the fairyman, according to the esoteric interpretation that's going on here, is because he's too dense. He's too physically dense to take the rainbow bridge, the bifrost, or the beefrost, or the bilfrost, depending upon how you want to translate it and whatnot, back into Asgard and that kind of stuff. He is too physically heavy. He represents the earthly power, the man of power that's going there with it. And it's clearly stating that the earth is dying, his mother is dying, which is the earth and whatnot, and that you need to go and do stuff to help her. And the only way he can go do that, meaning Thor, is by going through this transformational process that transforms him from this being of I'm just oh macho and all this other stuff, which is all well and good, but that's only good on the physical plane. It doesn't help you in the ethereal planes that are there with it, which are much more you need you need to be light, you need to be more sophisticated, you need to have a higher level of understanding of things, you need to be able to do all these other things with it. And you know, Thor goes through this transformational process in the poetic edda of making it so that way he still has his manly powers at the end of the day for what's going on with it, but he has to go through more of the feminizational aspects of things in order to do that. And that's this war of consciousness that we were kind of talking about before between the masculine and the feminine side of things that were going on there between Inanna and Gilgamesh, right before the bull of heaven that caused all of that to continue onward, and it's playing off of those themes to a certain extent there too, for what's going on. Because obviously Gilgamesh is the penultimate version of this mighty hero idea that's going on here that is all about the masculine energy. But in order to enter the spiritual realms, in order to get to that divine function, the immortality that he's seeking on that level with it, he has to give up that and move forward with it. And this shows showcases how he's able to do that from the various different types of immortality and ways of going forth with it. Because in the Nordic tradition, and not just the Nordic tradition, and all other traditions that are of Indo-European variants for what's going on, it is the maiden with the mead archetype, if you will, that is the one who bestows that to them in some capacity or another, which is why when he meets up with her, she's telling him how, meaning Gilgamesh here, how to go into the underworld and do it properly and get his immortality that he is seeking for what's going on with that. You can see this with the great Dasana in the Vedic tradition. You can see it called Madhu in the Vedic tradition instead of Mead, which is where it comes from. You have Soma and Homa and Kekion and Ambrosia, and you have all these different things that are showing up in all the various different parts of Eurasia, that there isn't even northern Africa that's going on there for this stuff that's playing a role on that particular front for it. And we know the story is ultimately about his immortality in some capacity or another. That's not even like if you don't interpret it that way, you're not reading the story, bro. I don't know what else to tell about it. And so when he rejects Inana in the beginning of stuff for what's happening there, he's rejecting the bridal chamber notion of things that goes on to that, which is part of what I've briefly talked about here, and I'm not going to get into details here, the living resurrection tradition that I'm trying to sh begin to showcase and underline and all that other stuff that's there with that. They had this thing called the bridal chamber, and it was the marrying of the masculine and feminine principles, and only by doing that could you reach this level of immortality that they're talking about here and looking for. So he rejects that notion of things for what it is. And he fails to do so on that front because he rejects Inana. Then you have him go, and he doesn't understand the maiden with the mead concept, if you will. I know it's not actually what's playing out here in the Sumerian version, but just for the sake of simplicity for what it is with it, there's certain things that don't go the way that he wants there with it. So then he goes and tries to find, you know, the point is that every step of the way, he keeps like misunderstanding immortality. He keeps on misunderstanding this realm and all of that, and he makes certain progress, but he can't quite grasp it and go all the way to the end, and he ultimately fails for what's going on there, for what's happening. Even the plant that's taken away from him by the end by the snake and all of that. It's very reminiscent of like the apples that Edun would give to the gods to revitalize them and give them longer life and that kind of stuff for what's happening there, in terms of the Nordic tradition and and in other traditions as well, for what's happening. I mean, the Isle of Avalon really means the Isle of Apples for proof of that, in terms of the Celtic stuff that's going on there for that. So when I'm looking at this from a comparative mythology point of view and whatnot, and putting it all together, it is very, very clear what the story is about and why he keeps failing, in my opinion, for that. But he still gains a type of immortality, like I talked about before, talking about it for thousands of years afterwards, and how to live a great life and all these other things, and being larger than life and all that, which is ultimately on the what most of us are are capable of achieving. Not saying we will achieve it, but this is how we as human beings can do that. So I think I'll shut up here because I'm togging the conversation.
SPEAKER_00:No, it's uh it's good stuff. That's good stuff. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So But this is why I study other traditions. It helps build in.
SPEAKER_00:That's good stuff, yeah. And so that is the that's sort of the end of Gilgamesh's journey. He gets to the ferryman and he gets on the boat and he rows over with the ferryman to Utnapishtam's island.
SPEAKER_01:And that's an important part here. The island.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, it's a tiny island where no normal person can get to. Uh, it's not a hundred percent clear if it's actually meant to be on the same earth as the rest of us.
SPEAKER_01:No, I guarantee it's not.
SPEAKER_00:But certainly Gilgamesh is a very good thing.
SPEAKER_01:It fits the same notion of the island of Calypso for Odyssey, for the Odyssey and Odysseus, excuse me. It's the Isle of Avalon, like we talked about. It's not a real place in any way, shape, or form that's going on there for some of the Celtic stuff. The story that I was talking about earlier with Thor needing to grab the cauldron for Egger's Hall. Egger's Hall is set on an island that is the wind shielded island, is what it translates to. Wind being a metaphor for motion, and anything that moves eventually dies. Anything that's still and is already perfect and doesn't need to change can have immortality. It's protected from the wind, it also comes from this, like uh is from an eagle that flaps its wings, and the it it it the the what it does is literally creates winds of death. So that's what it is in the Nordic tradition. So when it's talking that it's saying it's wind shielded, it's literally an other world place that is beyond death and that kind of stuff with it. And if you go on it with looking at it from every tradition that I'm aware of that has this type of stuff in it, there's not a single one of them where that island is actually supposed to be a real physical, tangible place in this world. Doesn't mean they can't give it real world locations. That's not what I'm talking about there. But it's like a layer over another part of it, if you will, and it's clearly not real. It's it's it's esoteric in its meaning, it's it's ineffable in its meaning, and it's supposed to be somewhere else for that. I know that that's the case for it. That's not a that's not conjecture. This part's not conjecture. There's too much for it to be that there's too many traditions that that's for the case for it. So I'm not aware of a single tradition that it's not true for that has an island of immortality, is the point. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So he gets to the island, and Utnapishtam's there, and Utnapisham's also got a wife, and she's there. And they Utnapishtam and his wife are like, Hey, it's Gilgamesh, good to meet you. Glad you're here. What are you looking for? And he's like, I'm looking for immortality. And Utnapisham's like, well, you can't have it. And Gilgamesh is like, but I want it. But I want it, bro.
SPEAKER_01:You got it. How did you get it? I want it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that's that is that is exactly where the dialogue ends up. How did you get immortality? And this is where we get the flood myth. And the flood myth, of course, is its own topic for some other day. It's its own, it's its own thing. Just to go through it real fast, Utnapishtun was a king in Sumer in the days before the Great Flood. In this is, of course, this is different from the Noah story, but it's the same architecture. He's a king uh in Sumer before the flood, and I think he's king of Shurapak. I'm not totally sure. I can't remember. Yes, okay. Yeah, he's the king of Shurapak, and the gods are going to destroy the world with a giant flood because the people are being too noisy. Noisy being literally noisy, but also noisy being a metaphor for an excess of chaos and evil.
SPEAKER_01:Which it gets back to the shout that Inanna was going to do that was going to be hurt all over the place with just creating chaos in some form or another.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, noise, yeah. Evil in Sumerian religion is conceived of differently from evil in the biblical tradition, but it's often equated with noise. Evil and noisy are very similar, as anyone who has had small children will tell you. So the whole world's gonna be destroyed. And Enki, the god who created humanity, is like, man, I sure wish that all of humanity didn't have to be destroyed. And so he goes and very sneakily tells Utnapishtum, hey, whole world's gonna get flooded. You should build you a boat. And Utnapishtam builds himself a boat, and or rather, he orders the construction of a boat for by all of his the people on his city, and then he doesn't let them in his boat. He gets on his boat with his family and he watches all the people who built the boat drown, which is wonderful. This is this is a king ship at its at its peak. Peak kingship. And so then there's a giant flood, it goes on for a long time, then the waters dry up, the earth is once again a blank slate, and all the gods are like, all right, we have a blank canvas, we can make anything we want on here. Oh my goodness, what is that? Why is there still a person on this earth? What has happened? How did we go so very wrong? And Utnapishtam is like, hey, I guess I survived, don't worry about it, just let me keep living. And the gods say, No, I'm afraid we can't do that because the gods had sworn, Enlil in particular in this version of the story, Enlil had sworn to destroy all mortal life from the surface of the earth. And Utnapishtam was a king, he was just a mortal person. And Utnapishtam says, Well, you could you could try not destroying all of humanity. And Enlil says, Oh no, I I vowed. It's in the tablet of destinies. I have to do this. He is now committed. And they sit around thinking, are there any other alternatives? And they decide that, you know, if we make Utnapishtim and his wife immortal, then all mortals will have been wiped off the face of the earth. Right. And it's very much a gloriously legalistic solution. And so the gods go for it. And that is how Utnapishtam and his wife become immortal. They then have children, and their children are not immortal, but that that is the uh they are the progenitors of the rest of humanity. And then the two of them retire to their secret island because if I was immortal, I would also have a secret island. I don't actually think that part is explicitly explained. You're just supposed to know. Of course, anishon lives on an island. Why wouldn't you? So Gilgamesh is like, you know, I don't think that applies to me. He's listened to this story, and he's like finding a legalistic solution to an oath made during the Great Flood, that's not really something that I can, that's not a wagon I can hop onto. And Upisham's like, yeah, that's what I told you. You can't be immortal. Then Gilgamesh is like, oh man, what would make me immortal? And then Apishtam's like, look, if you catch the eye of the gods, you will become immortal if they would gift it to you. And that right there is a line that he that goes over the Gilgamesh's head, but I think is directed directly towards the audience. If you catch the eye of the gods, you can become immortal. But Gilgamesh is like, I don't understand what that means. I'm not a clever person, I hang out in the gym all the time. I'm just a gym bro. And gym bros are often very clever, but Gilgamesh was not. So when the Pishtum says, Here, listen, I will do a challenge for you that will catch the eye of the gods. If you can stay awake for seven days and seven nights, then you will be granted immortality. I will intervene on the gods' behalf and give you immortality. If you can stay up awake for seven days and seven nights. And there are I've seen two versions of this. One, the gods immediately send a mist of sleep upon him and he falls asleep. The other one, he's just so tired from his long journey because he has not slept since Enkidu died by some account. And he is now finally resting on this island and he falls asleep right away. And he is going to sleep for seven days and seven, or uh six days and seven nights. But whatever. He's going to sleep for a week. And Utnapishtam and his wife are like, you know, Gilgamesh, he's a very proud guy. He's not going to admit that he's fallen asleep. So every day they bake a loaf of bread and they put it in front of him. And then when he wakes up, he's like, All right, I'm ready to start. And they're like, You just slept for a week. And no, I didn't. I didn't sleep for a week. I didn't remember it. And they're like, You totally didn't.
SPEAKER_01:You wouldn't remember it because you were asleep, bro.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And so they they're like, see this bread. We've baked one loaf of bread. Bread a day and the the oldest bread is hard and moldy, the newest bread is fresh, you slept for a week, that's the proof. And he's like, oh heck, I guess it's I guess it can't be immortal. That's a shame. That challenge right there is a very strong linkage of sleep and death. And the idea being that you cannot stay awake for seven days because there is an aspect of the inevitability of death baked in every time you go to sleep. So don't go to sleep tonight. Don't even close your eyes. Death is coming for you.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, and I don't know what it is in the Sumerian off the top of my head, but in the Greek tradition, death and sleep are brothers.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean it's it's sleep is often a metaphor throughout Semitic languages for death. It's just, I mean, it's just a universal human uh theme. So then he says, please, please, please, I really, really, really want to live forever. And Utnapishtam says, well, okay. Well, I mean, they, you know, they go back and forth for a bit because you got to stretch these stories out. But Utnapishtam says, you know, there is a magic plant. And if you eat the magic plant, then you're gonna live forever. And he's like, Well, where's the magic plant? And he's like, at the bottom of the ocean. And Gilgamesh says, Well, okay, I'll go to the bottom of the ocean. And he says, No, no, it's the bottom of the ocean under the world because in the Mesopotamian worldview, the earth is flat for sure. But it's seated in a bowl. And that bowl is full of water. So if you dig down through the earth, you'll eventually get to the water that the continent, the one continent, is floating on. And so down, and then if you get to the bottom of that bowl, there's one little plant sticking up. Or actually, there's a whole field of these plants. Yeah, it's it's more than one plant. Yeah, it's just yeah, yeah. You know, but but you're not gonna get them. But so Gilgamesh is like, all right, I can do that. So he grabs the ferryman, and ferryman is now his buddy for this, for at least for a little while. And they go over to they get back to the real world, and they journey to this particular location. And we're not really told much about where this particular location is, it's just where Utnapishtam had told Gilgamesh to go.
SPEAKER_01:Either in that instance, it's either one of two things that that was. It's either a location that basically everybody knew already, like the audience for their time period. She didn't have to say anything because it was just baked into the society and whatnot. Or two, it really doesn't matter because it's not a real location. It's actually just graphed over the real world and it's still in the mythological realm.
SPEAKER_00:Mm-hmm. There is an idea that it might be the center of the earth, which is not interestingly, Mesopotamia. Uh, in Mesopotamians did think of themselves as living in the center of the world, but they also seem to have thought there was a geographic center of the world separate from them being the political civilizational center of the world.
SPEAKER_01:So they're they are the seat of the world in terms of power, but they are not geographically the exact center of it.
SPEAKER_00:Which is which is a little bit interesting. Like the Chinese thought they were in the middle of the world.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but both were true.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. But anyway, Gilgamesh gets to this place and he starts digging. And it's uh it's just like Minecraft. He digs straight down until he reaches the water, and then he starts swimming straight down to the bottom. He holds his breath real big and he gets the gets to the one plant and he makes his way back up. And it, you know, it's just the very limit of his abilities to do all of that. It's all very difficult. Then when he gets back up, he has poked a hole in the bottom of the the boat of that is the earth. And so the water from underneath comes out and it floods the whole area. And so you're never gonna find this place again, is the idea. Because the water he dug down and all the water came spewing up, and now you can't identify that land ever again. So he's got the one plant, you're never gonna find where to dig again. So then he's real happy and he starts heading back home and he pauses to take a bath. And while he's taking a bath, this is a very I don't know if this is common motif in other civilizational stories. I think I've heard it in Greek stuff, but the Greeks borrow a lot from Mesopotamia. He's taking when when a character is taking a bath, frequently their stuff gets stolen. Which a yeah, I don't know, I don't know how widespread that is in the world, but you see that a lot. And I think I think it comes from a very practical, pragmatic uh human experience. You take your bath and your stuff gets stolen. You go in the pool and someone takes your stuff off your bench if nobody's watching it.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Um and the snake, a snake comes by, eats the immortality plant, and this is why snakes shed their skin. This snakes shedding their skin is metaphorically them being reborn. Snakes are now immortal. Gilgamesh will never be immortal. I'm sure you have thoughts on that. That's sort of the end of that.
SPEAKER_01:They're they're the regenerative principle. That's the same idea of like the the you know, Jormangunder eating his own tail and whatnot in order to regenerate things and that kind of stuff. You also have where the snakes are in the underworld or literally beneath the earth for where they live and whatnot. And so they're an underworld creature and archetype for what it is. If you go back a little bit to I forget the name of the tree off the top of my head that that it is, starts with an H, I believe, but the one that Gilgamesh ended up helping Inanna turn into a bed and uh into a throne and whatnot that was going there with it. You have the snake at the bottom, you have some other, and you have a couple other creatures that are inside of it, which is representative of a type of tree of life that's going on there with uh, and then this is very important for what's happening. That particular part is also indicative of the whole bridegroom thing for what's going on, the throne for the kingship, and the bridal chamber for where you would go to have the sex that would be necessary in order to make it so that way you would have the merging of the divine masculine and the divine fig feminine on that particular spot in spiritual ecstasy and whatnot, also possibly a real ritual and reality that they did in order to make it so that way that would come to fruition and that kind of thing. In terms of Gilgamesh going through the center of the earth and going down and getting the divine plant, let's say, that g grants immortality and whatnot, and then it being covered by ocean or water of some sort for where the area is, it's very interesting because there's something called the Earth Diver motif. And the Earth Diver motif is one of our oldest myths that can be traced back to probably 140,000 years ago and whatnot, and it has to do with where they have this being that is changed a lot throughout time and whatnot. So there's not one particular thing with it, but they go down and they have to go all the way down through the bottom of the ocean. And when they get to the bottom of the ocean, they have to take some sort of speck of land or whatever and bring it back up. And when they do that, it starts growing the land and whatnot. So it seems to be a direct reflex of that particular notion from that, where it instead of that you go through the earth because it's already there with it, then you get to where the water is, so it's an inversion of that story, and when you do that, all the water comes out instead of the land for the creation myth that's going on here, which is our oldest creation myth, the one that's from 140,000 years ago. But one of the key points to that creation myth is that in a lot of the variations of it, that the figure that's doing this is not God or a godlike figure or whatever it is. It's some other being that's there with it, sometimes even the devil or and that kind of thing that's going on. But the person falls asleep while they're doing it. And I'm thinking that they took that same notion because of the sleep idea and grafted it onto this story and then did a reflex of it. We've seen this reflex and other things with it, where like the cattle raiding myths and that kind of stuff are what it is. Originally that the notion of like a princess and whatnot being captured by a dragon and taken away, it was originally cattle that was there, and it was due to a poor translation by one of these games of telephones for various different civilizations that changed it, but it was the it was the cattle that was important for what's happening with it. So why I'm bringing this up in terms of the reflex for it's changing here, is that you have instead of Thor going to slay the dragon to get the ox back and whatnot, you have him slaying an ox to get the dragon. When he puts the head out for it inside of the story for what's going on there. So something changed a little bit in terms of the reflexes here along the way. But again, when you're dealing with something that this point would be probably 135,000 years old in in terms of where it is for the story of it, of course, there's going to be some reflex that changes a little bit here or there for what's happening on that front. So it's when you're in the bath, of course. There's the practical side that you've already brought up. We're going into the more of the allegorical side here. Yeah. When you're in the bath and and that kind of stuff, what what are you doing? You're you're cleansing yourself, right? You're making it so that way you are removing all of the grime and the dirt and the sweat and all the other stuff that's going on there for what's happening. And it's literally a type of baptismal thing almost for what that particular point as well. And what's happening here is that at every stage of the game that has been going on inside of this story of Gilgamesh searching for immortality, he has been found like just out of reach of it the entire time for it. And it's the same thing here, where even after he's done this and he's achieved the stuff that's impossible again for anybody else to do with it, he's still found lacking in some capacity after he has gone through this ritualistic sanitation process in quotation marks, and that what's left and what's revealed for it is it's not supposed to be for you. This was never your destiny. It doesn't matter for what's going on here, it doesn't matter how hard you try, it's not for you to do in any way, shape, or form, get over it, basically. Type deal. You can try as many different ways as you want to gain immortality. You are stuck with the only one that immortals are allowed to have, which is your name being carried on and remembered through the stories and whatnot for as long as human beings have memory of you and that kind of stuff. That is your immortality. That is what needs to be done here. You did not win the favor of the gods to make it so that way you can go and do this. It's not your birthright like you think it is because you're two-thirds divine. It's not a thing. Sorry, bro, but that's the reality.
SPEAKER_00:Man, you're gonna make Gilgamesh cry. Talking like that. That's not what he wants to hear.
SPEAKER_01:It's not what he wants to hear, but he is incapable of hearing it from these various different adventures that he goes on and these various different things that happen to make it. So the gods have to make it clear to him, and eventually he realizes he needs to give up. This is the final straw for him, where he's like, well, it's time to go home, I guess. It's time to settle down and all that. I've tried it this way, this way, that way, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of them have worked. I've rejected these other things for what's going on. I began on a quest for it. I was unable to obtain it, and that's what happens. But but there's something, there's something very important here for what's going on there. If you take it kind of as a grail quest, if you will, and and that kind of stuff, meaning the sense, uh, the search for something that's mystical and beyond this world in this instance for what's going on. It's supposed to transform you. In this case, transform him into an immortal being and and whatnot, right? Almost everybody fails at that quest. And no matter what tradition it is, that's the point, though, is that it's only for a select few. You can do everything right, and it's still not going to be yours for what's happening. You have to have the divine favor of the eyes of the gods that they talked about before. Like you have to do something that makes it so that way you are graced with this destiny. It is not something you have control over 100% for what's going on with it. You can long for it, you can learn yearn for it, but it doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to have it in any way, shape, or form. Your intentions have to be pure. You have to make it so that way you are an empty vessel coming into this and all of that. And in a lot of ways, these people who are seeking it and this transformational thing, they're not seeking it for themselves. They're seeking it for divine service of some sort. And those are the ones who are able to go and make that happen. In the case of like the knights of the round table for Arthur and whatnot, there's many of them that go on it, hundreds of them that go on the quest with it. But there's only like six or seven of them that even get a glimpse of the grail, even get a glimpse of it, okay? And even out of that, there's only three of them, possibly four, due to changes that were made to the character from change that are that way with it. I say changes that he was supposed to be the grail winner, but then they didn't like how attached he was to a goddess figure, the church and whatnot, so they changed certain aspects of him and whatnot. I I'm pretty sure he was supposed to be or the original grail winner, but they changed it so he makes gets other things with it. They couldn't care kill the character off because he was too popular, but they had to make changes to his to his meta his destiny in terms of written form, but not his original destiny, if you will. Anyway, point is that there's three of them that get it. Only three. And fourth that has to do with the grail mysteries that get that is very important to the quest, and a fifth one. Now I'm gonna focus on the fifth one here for a moment, because the fifth one fits very similarly to what we're expecting for Gilgamesh. The fifth one is Lancelot. Okay. Lancelot, for all intents and purposes, is one of the greatest knights ever in terms of King Arthur's domain and realm and whatnot. But he is unable to get the grail. Why? Because he has one character flaw, one thing that holds him back, one shortcoming, according to the stories that makes us that way. He is unable to perceive the mysteries of it on the deepest levels for it and bring it back to fix the problems that there are inside of Arthur's kingdom and heal the wasteland. It's his love for the queen, Guinevere, and whatnot, and the fact that they constantly sleep together behind Arthur's back and that kind of thing that's going on there. It's and one character flaw. Again, if you take literally, yes, it's problematic, but there's a the if you take it esoterically, it's saying he had too much of an attachment to this one thing that made it so that way he couldn't get it. And quite frankly, what probably is Gilgamesh's greatest flaw in all of this isn't the fact that he starts off as a complete and utter douchebag in the beginning of the stories and all of that, because it doesn't matter where you start, it matters what you do to change yourself and go through the transformation process here. And if you're able to transform yourself completely for what's going on, then you can do it. But he isn't able to do that. And the thing that holds him back, in my opinion, is what my in this is his desire for immortality, him wanting it so badly that it consumes him to the point to where he he's willing to do anything to do that with the catalyst of Inky Doo for what's going on there and Inky Doo's death. His intent behind the immortality is selfish. It is not to make it so that way it is something else that comes out of this for what's happening, and it's to benefit others as well for what's going on there, and that's why he doesn't achieve it, and that's why the gods don't bestow it upon him from a metas metaphorical sense for it. It's that it's basically saying if you just do this for your own glory only, you won't achieve it. You have to be able to make it so that way there's something else that you're willing to do to give back for it and and whatnot, which is why you have to catch the eye of the gods. You have to earn their favor, and the way to do that is by doing something for them back in return, not just being self-centered on yourself like Gilgamesh is. And I think that that's his undoing on this ultimately.
SPEAKER_00:That pretty much pretty much encapsulates the whole thing right there. You should uh you should write a book. That's that's yeah. The uh the end of the story for those of you who have not read my book History and Myth from Sumer and a Cad, the end of that story, which you can read in in the book, is now that he's now that he's lost all that all his hopes for immortality, he very sadly plod, plod, plods his way back to the city of Uruk. And the narrator really focuses on the bricks of Uruk, on the walls, on the palace. And he goes, he sits on his throne and he either writes down or tells the story, and it's that that's how we have the story. There is an implication that Uruk is more, at least more immortal than any one king of Uruk is. And not just the building.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, it would do it in the center for a thousand years, so you know, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean I mean the the political idea, the culture, the the city itself, that a person is a part of the city. Even Gilgamesh is a part of the city, and that's why he was doing so bad at the start of the at the start of the story. Even though he had everything that a man would want, he had the power to take whatever he wanted, but he was living for himself, not for the wider city. At the end of it, he sits down on the throne of Uruk. He has abandoned his own adventures, he has abandoned pursuing things for himself, his immortality, the only one he's gonna have. We talk a lot, we really focus a lot on the immortality of fame and a person's name and a person's story living to forever. It's very much a Greek and Roman thing. They probably did have that too. They did have not probably, they did have that to an extent.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I'm not saying it's as exaggerated as the Greek and Roman, to be sure.
SPEAKER_00:But much more it's much less of a thing. You're much more to be living for a larger society, for the gods, for the community. Not that the gods and community were seen as different things.
SPEAKER_01:It's all no, they're just different spheres within that greater scheme of things. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's all one for the community. It's a very communitarian sort of ethic, very civilizationally focused aspect. Which is neat because they're the first civilization and they're very civilization focused. But yeah, that's that's how that's how Gilgamesh himself would have seen it. Because for all that for all that his story plays into various esoteric and comparative things, he himself would not have been plugged into the wider world except to the extent that these underlying motifs are common to all of humanity. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:So while we're on this front, there's something in the Nordic tradition where there is an actual poet. His name is Bragi, okay? And he becomes deified inside of the mythology itself and whatnot. He's probably named after the god that's named Bragi rather than the inverse, meaning that he started off that with it. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is because he ends up marrying Idun, the goddess that has the apples and whatnot. We talked about that that are for the Aesir and that kind of stuff. Now, since we're on the topic of Gilgamesh and kind of immortality, is the theme we've kind of been looking at through here out and whatnot is I'm wondering if this is the case with Gilgamesh. Is if that because he embodied, like so Braggie embodied the the penultimate poet and whatnot. The bard, the well in this case scald, but bard for anybody else who doesn't know what Scald is. He was that with it, the greatest storyteller, the greatest like lord keeper of his people and his traditions and all that other stuff that were going on for that time period. He becomes deified and puts into it. He even is allowed to go to Valhalla, even though it's supposed to be for only warriors, due to the fact of who he is and what he is and all that. You understand that's how important he is. And I think that that's kind of what's happening in terms of a similar sense with Gilgamesh, with us not being able to determine whether he's real or not, even though he probably was real, and how he's grafted onto a mythology or uh or in this case an epic minimum around him and all that, but it's because he meets all of the qualifications that there were during his time period of what was expected of him to be a great king, to be a great this, to be a blah blah blah, and all of that, and making it so that way because he was perceived as having everything that the people wanted and all that other stuff, that he became a larger than life character in reality, that it also led to him becoming a larger than life character and having a been grafted onto the mythology as well, if you will.