Sex, death, Gilgamesh, and the birth of consciousness

Starting with sex and ending with death…
thus bracketed, time to contemplate the interval.

– Bianco Luno

He Who Saw the Deep…

– The Epic of Gilgamesh

We tell stories to understand.1

In literature, we tell stories to understand ourselves and our context. In the Western world, the oldest surviving story is the Epic of Gilgamesh from some 5000-5500 years ago. That it can still move us after all this time is testimony to its enduring power. It can do this because it connects sex, love, friendship, triumph, hubris, loss, grief, violence, and death2 – and, by making the connection between these, documents the origin of consciousness itself: the point we learned how and when we stopped being merely animals but discovered we were not gods either. We learn by eliminating those possibilities, calling what remains “human.” The consciousness meant here is not mere access consciousness – the kind we share with other living things, the kind that informs us of what there is around us that may help or hurt us – but reflective consciousness: an awareness that we are here – at all, wondering why ourselves, why we do things, why things happen to us, why anything... Philosophy got started with this kind of consciousness. So if the Epic can tell us something about the origin of reflective awareness, it is philosophically relevant.

It is also a beautiful story, told in language of great expressive power (admittedly, via the inspiration of translators and poets). It dates from near the beginning of the invention of non-plastic art and culture. For centuries, its stories circulated orally before being pinned down in cuneiform, a form of writing that was originally devised to record business dealings, but blossomed into what eventually became the vehicle for what truly separated us from the natural world, but without firmly placing us in any other world.

We can guess something about the contents of the mind that creates a stone implement or edifice, but we are told in literature expressly, in stories. We still have the task of interpreting what we are told, a task that further exercises our imagination and deepens self-understanding.

Resources

Introductions (videos)

“The First Known Story Ever Written | analysing the Epic of Gilgamesh.” Archaeologist Fig Tree retells the Gilgamesh story. Her lively hour-long presentation is an excellent introduction for those new to the story.

“The Series of Gilgamesh | A Philosophical Introduction” presented by Mathias Warnes is a more ambitious survey and analysis of the epic. The three-hour tour goes deep into its cultural significance. It touches on how the self was first constructed. How trauma makes us human, how, though animals perish, only humans die. How the universe, once crawling with gods, is now bereft of them… how this and much more first dawned on us.

Translations into English

These are freely available and there are many more translations, all incomplete because new material is still being discovered. Some are more scholarly, and some are more readable and poetic, though loose, renderings.

Nancy K. Sandars (1960)
Spelling and error correction by John Paulose
http://www.aina.org/books/eog/eog.pdf

Maureen Gallery Kovacs (1998)
Electronic Edition by Wolf Carnahan
http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab1.htm

Andrew George (1999)
https://content.cosmos.art/media/pages/library/the-epic-of-gilgamesh/8cc34b563d-1598904500/gilgamesh.pdf

About the Epic (reading)

“Political Philosophy in the Epic of Gilgamesh,” Alexander van Eijk. “What I want to do in this paper is introduce one work from antiquity, the Epic of Gilgamesh, into the canon of political philosophy. It is the oldest piece of literature we know, first written around 1800 BC and touches on all manner of issues from government, to sexuality, to mourning and to human nature. As will hopefully become clear throughout this investigation, the Epic is a veritable treasure trove of interesting ideas and the canon of political philosophy could be much enriched by its continued scholarship.”

1. In science, an hypothesis, a theory, a natural law… are stories with varying degrees of conviction attached to them, but all attempt to organize experience at the edge of our senses with an effort to make sense of it. “Making sense” of things is about organizing them so they serve some project of ours, the basic one being survival. And beyond that, a more luxuriously one is to flourish. In the case of science, in the service of technology, stories with enough precision prepare for us for acting on the environment toward those same ends. (We note that the “truth” of a story is less relevant than we might think. If the truth (in the sense of the correct picture of the lie of things independent of our agenda) were crucial to our stories, we would be hopeless. Perhaps we are in a hopeless situation… But the fact we are still here shows just how inessential truth – as opposed to fruitful suspicion – is for us. We are this far along because we suspect many things, and so far these have by and large worked to secure our place – not because we know them. We will reserve the term “knowledge” for a suspicion that dead-ends at a theoretical point immune to augmentation or correction.)
2. Adventure, of course, too. It’s got it all.