Gilgamesh (3 page)

The poem says nothing about Gilgamesh's relationship to Shamhat. Does he know how skilled she is because he has made love with her himself at the temple? Is he a regular client? Or has he just heard of her prowess? All we are told is that he knows she is the right woman for the job.

Shamhat is one of the most fascinating characters in
Gilgamesh.
If we want to appreciate her role as an ancient Babylonian cultic prostitute, our imagination needs to bypass any filters of romantic love, Judeo-Christian morality, male lubricity, or female indignation. Actually, we have no word in English for what Shamhat is. The Akkadian words
£arïmtu
and
ßam£ätu
certainly do not mean “prostitute” in our sense of the term, a woman who sells herself for personal gain. She is a priestess of Ishtar, the goddess of love, and, as a kind of reverse nun, has dedicated her life to what the Babylonians considered the sacred mystery of sexual union. In opening to the anonymous man who appears before her in the temple, young or old, handsome or ugly, she is opening to Everyman-that is, to God. She has become an incarnation of the goddess, and with her own body reenacts the cosmic marriage. As a pure servant of eros, she is a vessel for the force that moves the stars, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

In a passage about the attractions of Uruk that was added in the Standard Version, Sîn-lēqi-unninni mentions Ishtar's priestesses with enormous pride:

How the poet loves his city! The great wall, the colors, the finery, the music and dancing-they all form the texture of the continuous celebration of life that makes this passage so alive. Part of the enjoyment he conveys is that in Uruk male sexual desire is so abundantly gratified. But it is the lovely, joyful priestesses, themselves gratified in the act of gratification, who light up his portrait of the city. Their laughter and sexual glow is for him one of the principal glories of civilization.

The trapper finds Shamhat and tells her of the king's command. Shamhat has been trained in the art of surrender, and I imagine her as giving her full consent to the mission, dangerous though it might be. The creature she will be offering herself to is, after all, an unknown. He may be ferocious, he may be more beast than man, he may even tear her to shreds, for all she knows (and she probably
knows that the very sight of him filled the trapper with dread). But she agrees to go-calmly, as I imagine her, trusting in her art and in the power of eros.

The waterhole is a three days' hike through the wilderness, and the poet could easily have inserted dialogues here between the young priestess of Ishtar and the trapper. What was she feeling on the long and perhaps physically taxing walk? Was she afraid? What did she ask him about his life, about Enkidu? Was he dazzled by her sexual presence? Was he tempted? Did they make love, or was that forbidden? What did he ask her, and what did she answer, about the life of the city, about her experiences in the temple, about Gilgamesh the king? The poet compresses all the dramatic possibilities of these three days into two lines:

The economy of his art is exquisite.

For another two days Shamhat and the trapper wait at the waterhole. When Enkidu appears, Shamhat follows directions (not that a skilled priestess of Ishtar would have needed directions), and events unfold just as Gilgamesh predicted they would. It is a deeply moving episode, especially if we have in the back of our minds the Genesis myth of the loss of human innocence. Here Shamhat plays the role of Eve, but she is a benign seductress, leading Enkidu not into the knowledge of a polarized good and evil, but into the glories of sexuality, the intimate understanding of what a woman is, and
self-awareness as a human being. There is no serpent in this garden, no anxious deity announcing prohibitions and punishments. Again, the poet's economy is superb. The seven days of lovemaking are described in the simplest of terms; compressed into seven lines is a whole epic of sexual initiation. Enkidu, in his innocence and trust, follows where his penis points, and discovers in himself an elemental potency, a state of perpetual erection. For Shamhat's part, however frightened she may be as the enormous hairy creature approaches, she takes him in lovingly, and keeps taking him in for seven days-a feat that is at least equal to any of the showier male heroics later in the poem.

There are no traces of puritan consciousness in the culture of this poem: sex is seen as a civilizing event rather than as something dangerous to the social order. One would be interested to know precisely what the love-arts of a Babylonian priestess were, but this also the poet leaves to the imagination. Whatever the graphic details, Shamhat obviously does her job well. Adept and lavishly generous, she totally justifies Gilgamesh's confidence in her.

At the end of seven days, when he has had enough of the nonstop lovemaking, Enkidu tries to rejoin his animals, but they dart away
at full speed, like the fawn that emerges with Alice from the wood where things have no names. Enkidu no longer has the unconscious mind of an animal or the vital force he had as a child of the wilderness. Something has been lost, but it is not paradise. In fact, Enkidu is about to enter another kind of paradise: civilization, the city where every day is a festival. Walking back to Shamhat, he realizes that although he can no longer run like an animal, he has gained something that more than makes up for his lost powers. In knowing Shamhat sexually, his mind has been enlarged: he has begun to know himself. He sits down at her feet, and as he listens he discovers that he can understand human language. He also discovers for himself what the Lord God realizes for Adam in Genesis, that “it is not good that the man should be alone.” In this longing for a true friend, he intuits what he was created for.

Shamhat not only initiates Enkidu into self-awareness between her civilizing thighs; she invites him to Uruk, gives him human clothing, and teaches him to eat human food in the hut of some shepherds who live conveniently nearby. She acts as a patient, loving mother as she guides him through this rite of passage. The scene at the shepherds' table is both hilarious and touching, with its shame-free awareness that initiation into humanity means knowing what it is to be sexual, intoxicated, and clean.

We get three further glimpses of Shamhat: as she and Enkidu make love yet again, as she humbly carries out a request of his, and finally, as she accompanies him to Uruk. Then, having completed her mission, she is gone.

G
reat-walled Uruk, city of gardens and temples and public squares, is the paradise of Shamhat's description, but it is also a place of suffering, where the people cry out because of Gilgamesh's tyranny. The two realities coexist; they appear according to one's perception, the way light is either particle or wave; it all depends on how one approaches the city. When she invites Enkidu to Uruk, Shamhat suggests that he approach with the eyes of appreciation, that he stand before Gilgamesh and “gaze with wonder” at his magnificence.
But Enkidu isn't ready for this. He needs to approach him as a tyrant and an adversary.

Shamhat did in fact introduce Gilgamesh as a tyrant the first time she mentioned him, without a hint of the panegyric that is to follow:

Enkidu's response is surprising. He doesn't bristle or become white with anger, as he does later when he hears of Gilgamesh's apparent right to sleep with any about-to-be-married virgin. He intuits something in Gilgamesh beyond his brute strength and callousness. His longing is a recognition that floats up toward the surface of his consciousness, a recognition, before the fact, that however unjust Gil-gamesh may be, they are meant for each other.

But immediately he shifts from this poignant, introspective silence to an aggressive stance that matches Gilgamesh in arrogance. “I will challenge him,” Enkidu says.

If a strong young gorilla had the power of speech, this is what he might cry out to the alpha male with his harem of wives. The challenge is touching in its primitiveness. There is no Homeric subtlety or eloquence here, just testosterone speaking.
Another hero? I will fight him!
Enkidu needs to test himself, to enter civilization with a chip on his shoulder the size of a cedar trunk. Shamhat, speaking as his teacher, suggests that he approach Gilgamesh from a different perspective:

But Enkidu is having none of it. Nothing can bring him out of his male challenge mode.

The specific impetus for the trip to Uruk comes from the mouth of a young man who passes Enkidu and Shamhat, as they are making love again, on his way to Uruk for a wedding that he has
catered. Enkidu's curiosity is aroused more highly than his passion; heinterrupts the coitus and sends Shamhat over to make inquiries. The young man describes what will happen at the end of the ceremony:

“As he listened,” we are told, “Enkidu's face went pale / with anger,” but we aren't told why he is angry. Is this the indiscriminate fury of a young challenger? Is he feeling moral outrage at Gilgamesh's
ius primae noctis?
If so, hasn't he understood that this is a ritual act sanctioned by the gods?
Is
the act sanctioned by the gods, as the young man says, or is this statement propaganda issuing from a sexually predatory tyrant? (We know that the gods have sent Enkidu to balance Gilgamesh's oppression, but we don't know the precise nature of that oppression. It is entirely possible that Gilgamesh, as the embodiment of the divine male principle, does have the right to sleep with every bride on her wedding night, but that he is appropriating other young women as well. It is also possible, as some scholars think, that the oppression has nothing sexual about it,
that Gilgamesh, as a gigantic superjock, has been exhausting the men in athletic contests, and the women are worn out from taking care of them.) Finally, if the young man's report is accurate and if Enkidu has understood it correctly, is he rebelling against the divine order? Or, alternatively, does he accept the divine order and simply want to replace Gilgamesh as the stud planting his seed in the virgins of Uruk? We simply don't know.

This not-knowing is an interesting position to be in as a reader. (It will become even more interesting in the monster-slaying episode of Books III-V.) One thing it means is that we don't take sides. Yes, Gilgamesh is a tyrant, but he is also magnificent. Yes, he mates with the lawful wife, but this apparent sexual predation may be in the divine order of things, and to oppose it is not necessarily virtuous. Every negative about him is balanced by a positive. Of course, from another perspective, it is clear that the whole world of Uruk is out of balance because of Gilgamesh's manic excesses and that Enkidu has been created to restore that balance. It is equally clear that the confrontation between the two heroes is not going to be a struggle between good and evil. There are too many ambiguities here for the mind to settle in a position of moral certainty. This leaves us with the raw emotion of Enkidu's anger, which, unexplained and uninterpretable, serves to move him from the shepherds' huts to the great city.

As Enkidu enters Uruk, he is mobbed like a celebrity. He may be gigantic, he may have a savage past, but he is fully human now, and, recognizing his innocence, people are not too frightened to approach him, as the trapper was. The crowds treat him with a mixture
of awe and tenderness, marveling at his enormous body and kissing his enormous feet as if they were doting mothers kissing the most luscious morsels of infant flesh. Enkidu finds his way to the marriage house and plants himself in front of the door, immovable.