Listen to me Shamash!

Drew A. Hyland has a point when he argues in 1973 against philosophy as a Hegelian view of history. And he is also right to mark out the importance of the Epic of Gilgamesh. From my perspective of the 21st century I always thought the story was silly. A comic-like story of a sexually ambivilant superhero. What was that thing he had going with Enkidu? All that wrestling in the dust. Enkidu Shams and Gilgamesh Rumi.

But Gilgamesh wasn't Superman, he wasn't, as Tarantino suggested in Kill Bill II, a snide critique on the weakness of men or Chabon's Kavalier and Clay fantasizing about saving all our grandparents from the ovens of Treblinka and Aushwitz. Gilgamesh headed straight for the ovens of Ishtar. The figure of Gilgamesh is worthy of being the first human figure in myth. greater. Gilgamesh would fight for humanity's dignity and place in what Pythagoras was to call the kosmos. Gilgamesh, as quoted by Hyland says:

"Shamash, listen to me, listen to me Shamash, listen to what I have to say. Here in the city people die oppressed in their hearts, people perish with despair in their hearts. I have looked at what happens at the crematorium and in the cemetries. I have seen the bodies roll into the flames, and that is going be my fate too. Indeed, I know this is true, because even the cleverest and strongest amongst us won't find any heavan or live for ever, and even the greatest of us aren't able to encompass the Earth and command it to obey at will. So, that's why I want to walk through the valley of this country of death: because I have not yet done what I should have. I haven't yet made my mark. I will go to that country."

The story of Gilgamesh is heartrending, not comical. Later on the story was mirrored in the Eleusinian Mysteries in an interesting sex role reversal with Demeter trying to rescue Persephone. Up until Gilgamesh people had no claim to controlling their destinies, they were sacrificed to cruel gods and they died anyway. But Gilgamesh was a story that bravely claimed our right to aspire to controlling our destiny as people and even conquer death. Claim the right of deserving humans, our boys and girls, to challenge the cruelty of nature and the gods. We are more than dust returning to dust, than breaking toys.

Gilgamesh helps us to turn and make a stand and challange what needs to be challnged. In his time there was little hope the dream of this challenge could ever be met. Now, seven or eight thousand years later, the dreams of millenia of people, to be more than the playthings of fate is achievable.

You know the mystical symbolists are wrong. The image of the breaking of the Tower of Babylon is not a symbol of the destruction of illusion, of Maya. It is a symbol of the breaking of the hope, a symbol of the destruction of hope that the story of Gilgamesh offered.

The symbol of the Tower was a symbol instituted by sacrificers of people, nihilists. The priests determined to crush the aspirations of humanity in witch hunts and religious narratives. Floods and the end of times to put us in our place. Or so said the preists. Power flows from harnessing the river of the lost, the helpless and the hopeless. Power flows from the despair of human victims into cruel hands: The hands of social Darwinians, the bullies of the market, mechanisms that keep people passive, the media helping to create a self-censoring self-regulating social mediocrity.