1. New! > Study Aids folder on WebCT OWL Cumulative files > Tropes, Icons, Definitions, etc. [updated weekly]

Transcription

1 CLC 1023: Sex and Culture Lecture #5: The Wild Man and the Whore Gilgamesh, Tablet 1 PLAY (while class is entering): Steppenwolf s 1968 hit Born to be Wild Slide 1: Title Slide [Image >Babylonian Cylinder Seal] Male Figure Before a Goddess Drawing Aside Her Mantle (and Exposing Herself) Cylinder seal and impression Syria (ca B.C.) Hematite 23 x 11 mm Seal no. 945 Source: Pierpoint Morgan Library ( Slide 2: Announcements 1. New! > Study Aids folder on WebCT OWL Cumulative files > Tropes, Icons, Definitions, etc. [updated weekly] 2. Copy of the CLC 1023 Coursepack ( Sex and the Cities ) on the reserve shelf in the Pride Library. Slide 3: Topics Covered Last Class 1. Sexual Personas Blonde Venus / Black Venus 2. Ishtar / Inanna = the Babylonian Venus 3. Sexual Space inseparable from Sexual Act 4. Cultural Synergies among Foundational Concepts 5. Sexual Troping of the Space /Act Synergy: E.g. Walking on Sunshine > a metaphor for orgasmic uplift / release Slide 4: The Big Q What is the ancient Sumerian/Babylonian term for Ishtar s magical sex-power? Slide 5: ANSWER Hi-Li Note: the image of Ishtar expressing her Hi-Li as if it were milk about to spurt from her breast > her erotic power literally nurtures the heavens as well as the earth, the realm of the star-gods as well as the domain of the city.

2 Her titles Queen of Heaven and Mother of the Fruitful Breast reveal her close relation to two other important Babylonian deities a god and a goddess who play significant roles in the epic of Gilgamesh. FIRST, and most obviously, Ishtar/Inanna is closely related to the Babylonian Mother goddess. Slide 6: The Babylonian Earth-Mother Here s an image of the Babylonian Earth-Mother ARURU (from an ancient cylinder seal) Note: In the epic of Gilgamesh, the Earth Mother is also known as Belet-Ili. She becomes, in effect, the mother of all humanity, including the Wild Man Enkidu. We hear about her shaping Enkidu out of clay early on in Tablet One: lines : Slide 7: Creation of Enkidu The goddess Aruru, she washed her hands, took a pinch of clay, threw it down in the wild. In the wild she created Enkidu, the hero... [translated by Andrew George, Penguin edition, 2003] Slide 8: The Babylonian Sky Father Aruru is ordered to shape Enkidu out of clay by the Father of the Gods, the Babylonian Sky Father, whose name ANU simply means Sky (AN in Sumerian). ANU is also the Father of ISHTAR. Ishtar receives her heavenly powers from her father ANU and her celestial Hi-Li (raining down on earth like astral or planetary influence) is essential for sustaining the nutritive/reproductive order of terrestrial nature. In the epic of Gilgamesh, ANU does not father Enkidu by inseminating the Earth Mother or by raping a mortal woman (as Zeus will rape Leda). Rather, ANU keeps his distance from the earth and simply thinks up Enkidu conceives his heroic design and then commands Aruru to carry out his plan, to do all the messy construction work in the material world. It s admittedly difficult for us modern readers to cast our imaginations back to the erotic world of these three ancient deities. We know their names and we know their actions and we even have some archeological evidence for the kind of spaces reserved for them on earth and in the heavens.

3 But how is it possible for us to recover the vanished Mesopotamian world-view of their worshippers, the religious context in which the epic of Gilgamesh was compiled and preserved for many centuries? We can begin to do so just by contemplating how old the epic in which their names still resound really is... Slide 9: Time Travel Go back one thousand years. We re in the period when the barbarian kingdoms were constructing what we now know as medieval Europe, and with it, developing a Christian culture that since Late Antiquity had been resolutely opposed to the very notion of pagan fertility goddesses and astrological sky gods.. Slide 10: Time-Travel Go back another thousand years. The first Roman emperor Augustus Caesar is ruling the Mediterranean world. He is worshipped as a god throughout the Empire. Slide 11: Time-Travel And another thousand years...to the time of King David, and his son Solomon, who was born about the turn of the first millennium BCE. Slide 12: Time-Travel Back to 2000 BCE: earliest known fragments of the Gilgamesh epic (in the Sumerian language). The standard version of the poem as we know it today was probably compiled around 1200 BCE by a Babylonian priest-exorcist name Sin-Liqe-Uninni. Slide 13: Time-Travel But the hero-king of the epic probably ruled over the city of Uruk many centuries before such fragments of his story were created on clay tablets. We have to go back yet another thousand years before we reach the historical period in which Gilgamesh s historical namesake ruled over Uruk (a city that predates Babylon by many centuries) ` Slide 14: Enkidu the Wild Man As you can tell from the theme song for today, we ll be focusing our literary attention on the Erotic Icon of the Wild Man. As Steppenwolf sang in the chorus to their memorable rock anthem: Like a true nature's child We were born, born to be wild We can climb so high I never wanna die Born to be wild Born to be wild

4 Enkidu was literally born to be wild > in the first tablet of the epic, as we have seen, the Mother Goddess Aruru i.e. Mother Earth, the Babylonian version of the Magna Mater or Great Mother takes a pinch of clay and throws it into the wild where she fashions Enkidu s hairy body from it. Enkidu, who is born in the wild and embodies the erotic energy of the wild, is in effect a true nature s child. Though born in the wild and born to be wild, Enkidu will also climb high in the cultural world and though he (like his friend King Gilgamesh) will not want to die, his death will be the direct result of their violent encounter with the Love Goddess Ishtar. Today we re going to consider how Enkidu came to move from his wild birthplace into the domain of the city through the sexual intervention of one of Ishtar s sacred priestesses, Shamhat > who will emerge as an early embodiment of another prevailing erotic icon in literary history: The Great Whore. Slide 15: Shamhat the Whore A Cautionary Note about the word Whore The modern English word whore comes with a strong religious charge of moral disapproval (as in the biblical phrase The Great Whore of Babylon ). You must try to erase that bad meaning from your mind when you re reading Gilgamesh. Any of the usual synonyms for whore prostitute, harlot, slut, skank, come with heavy pejorative senses, too, and so are really no better than whore. Somehow sex industry worker just doesn t work either, even though it sounds more descriptive. Shamhat is sometimes referred to as a sacred prostitute, a temple worker whose job is to unite the male citizens of Gilgamesh s city with their goddess Ishtar through ritualized intercourse. She is a human embodiment of Ishtar s magical Hi-Li power. Anthropologists sometimes use the Greek term hierodule for this role (it just means sacred prostitute ) but I m not going to use the term hierodule because it s a mouthful and it s unfamiliar to most people. So I ll continue to use the word whore (despite its problems) for Shamhat, but she s presented in the poem in a very positive light as a priestess in effect a sexual agent of the Babylonian Venus > Ishtar. Shamhat is definitely NOT born to be wild. In fact, her role is very civilized and (as we ll see) very civilizing. Since we re talking about her in iconographic terms, let s just review the foundational concepts of the course: Slide 16: Conceptual Foundations (review chart) Erogenous Zones: Sexual Spaces / Sexual Acts Erotic Icon / Sexual Persona Sexual Discourse: Terms and Tropes Taboo and Transgression

5 PREVIOUSLY (in the past four lectures) we explored these foundational notions from a broad theoretical perspective, with illustrations drawn from all over the cultural map and from many different historical periods. TODAY I ll begin to apply concepts from all four of these boxes to ancient Sumerian and Babylonian literature, focusing on the first tablet of the epic Gilgamesh. Slide 17: Box > Sexual Spaces / Sexual Acts I d like to start us off by considering the Space /Action synergy in Gilgamesh. What broad spatial categories does the poem chart out for us in the first tablet? I ve already suggested them in my introductory comments on Enkidu and Shamhat. ASK CLASS: When we first meet Enkidu, what sexual space does he spring up in and belong to? ANSWER: The Wild = NATURE 1. imagined as pure, undefiled by human intervention 2. identified as the uplands, home of wild beasts (e.g. gazelles) but also spirits, demons, ancient gods and goddesses like Aruru 3. charged with Hi-Li through Ishtar s control of the sun and other cosmic forces Slide 18: Nature / Culture Tablet One clearly distinguishes it from the world of all other human beings, specifically the domain of King Gilgamesh and his subjects, who include Shamhat. The Kingdom = CULTURE 1. imagined as a joint project of human beings and divine beings 2. identified with the walled city and its surrounding agricultural lands 3. charged with Hi-Li, too, but mediated through the rituals of Ishtar s temple On which side of the Nature / Culture Divide would you say that sex takes place in Tablet One? It happens on both sides of the border, of course, but in the poetic world of Gilgamesh, it is represented in very different ways on either side. On the Nature side, we have to imagine it without human taboos (which resulted from the invention of culture). Sex is what gazelles do to reproduce doing what comes naturally, instinctively coupling without a sense of selfconsciousness or inhibition or ritual. A prompting from the Mother Goddess Aruru. Slide 19: Nature / Culture as sexual spaces Let s call this ancient Nature a vast (indeed cosmic) erogenous zone where Sex happens without Taboo. It isn t really transgressive because the birds and the bees and the gazelles have

6 sex without an awareness of the taboos on violence or on erotic contact. When Sex is brought under the regulation of the TABOO / TRANSGRESSION synergy, it becomes a complex set of human actions and its participants are mindful of the social, political, economic, and religious rules governing it for the preservation of the productive work-life of the City. Culture is therefore also an erogenous zone, or at least certain clearly designated spaces in it are > such as Shamhat s quarters within or near the Temple of Ishtar. Slide 20: Sex without Taboo / Sexuality under Taboo For the purposes of clarity, I ll use the modern term sexuality to refer to sex under the regime of taboo > Sex when it is regulated and represented and given meanings under Culture is what I ll mean by Sexuality. Sexuality only emerges under the regime of Taboo > which is the regime of the CITY. I would predict that many of you know (and cherish) this very distinction > you ve probably entertained it for most your life and it has a strong impact on your attitudes towards the erotic life. You sustain this distinction every time advertisers tell you about the sex appeal of a natural woman or urge you to apply a natural look to your face in order to attract erotic attention. Here s the distinction spelled out: SEX = a natural biological given outside of history, a condition / activity of the erotic body going back to the beginnings of the world [comparable to the eternal Hi-Li transmitted to Enkidu s body by the gods] SEXUALITY = the cultural appropriation of the human body and its physiological capacities by an IDEOLOGY with a history of institutions and power-relations > sexuality is thus always associated with POWER and its institutions, and therefore with the exercise of power in HISTORY At first glance this distinction seems to hold up very clearly in the Gilgamesh narrative. In the first meeting of Enkidu and Shamhat we seem to see a sexual representation of the elementary binarism of NATURE (sex) / CULTURE (sexuality) What is the institutional centre or source of Culture in Gilgamesh? Slide 21: Uruk as Hub of Culture in Gilgamesh ANSWER: The legendary city of URUK. To enter the poem is imaginatively to enter the City, which is described in a memorable verse as a great walled space subdivided into different zones. READ: See its wall like a strand of wool, View its parapet that nine could copy! Take the staircase of a bygone era, Draw near to Eanna, seat of Ishtar the goddess, That no later king could ever copy!

7 Climb Uruk s wall and walk back and forth! Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork! A square mile is city, a square mile date-grove, a square mile is clay-pit, a square mile the temple of Ishtar: Three square miles and a half is Uruk s expanse. [trans. Andrew George, Penguin edition, 2003] Slide 22: Uruk surrounded by Farm Lands Surrounding this prototypical Mesopotamian city are farm lands where all the wheat and other crops that sustain the population are grown in carefully irrigated fields. The farmers typically dwell within the city walls and emerge to cultivate the land so that the farm lands are literally an extension of the City s culture. Slide 23: Farm Lands surrounded by Pasture Beyond the farm lands are the pastures where the shepherds tend their flocks > grasslands too far from the rivers to be irrigated and rendered arable. Slide 24: Hunters cross Nature / Culture Boundary Beyond the pastures are the wild uplands, the domain of undomesticated animals, the realm of nature (though that word is anachronistic: Nature in Gilgamesh s world is the pure realm of divine energies apart from human agency.) Hunters from the cultural domain pass back and forth across the border, as we see in Tablet One when a hunter trapping animals near a water-hole catches a glimpse of Enkidu running with the gazelles. Slide 25: Enkidu in the Wild (Nature) Besides running with the gazelles, Enkidu protects the animals from the hunters. He fills up the hunter s pits with earth and pulls up the snares the hunter has left behind him., Enkidu is first represented as a liberator of trapped animals > hence, he s an economic threat to the livelihood of the hunters. Who are they going to call to tame the Wild Man? Slide 26: Shamhat moves across the Nature / Culture Border The hunter s father wisely suggests that the Wild Man be trapped himself, but obviously not in a snare. They go to Gilgamesh s palace in Uruk and complain about the Wild Man s activities in the wild. King Gilgamesh sends Shamhat back with the hunter and his father to trap Enkidu. Unbeknownst to the hunter, ENKIDU has been created by the Mother Goddess as a distraction for King Gilgamesh.

8 (An erotic distraction, as it turns out, but more about that in our next class!) Right now I d like to focus on what happens when Shamhat, after waiting a couple of days by the water-hole with the hunter, catches sight of the Wild Man. Slide 27: Shamhat s Seduction: Excerpt from Tablet One READ ALOUD: (section of tablet one) Shamhat unfastened the cloth of her loins, She bared her sex and he took in her charms. She did not recoil, she took in his scent: She spread her clothing and he lay upon her. She did for the man the work of a woman, His passion caressed and embraced her. For six days and seven nights Enkidu was erect, as he coupled with Shamhat. [trans. Andrew George, penguin edition, 2003] Slide 28: Cartoon Strip of this scene (illustrator: Gordon McAlpin). This recent American strip version of Shamhat s striptease is notably COY. What s missing from the scene that literally stands out in the poem? ANSWER: ENKIDU S EPIC ERECTION But the artist has captured one significant details: the gazelles shun Enkidu when he gets up from Shamhat s blanket. Why? Well, we ll come back to that question in a few minutes. Here s another modern visualization of Shamhat s seduction scene: Scene 29: Still from 2002 Vienna Opera Production of Gilgamesh This is clearly a more adult version of the scene, but to, too, is noticeably limp in the Hi-Li department. Where is Enkidu s (green) phallus? Perhaps it became visible when he moved about the stage > though I can t imagine the singer kept it up for six days and seven nights! [This image is reminiscent of the photo of the elated male student staring at the charms of the Saugeen Stripper a weird postmodern re-enactment of the seduction scene in Gilgamesh? Are the male inhabitants of Saugeen-Maitland all secret wild men at heart?] Anyway, back to the text:

9 Slide 30: Highlighted Text in Seduction Scene: Shamhat s clothing Highlighted text: She spread her clothing and he lay upon her. WHY? WHAT DOES THIS SMALL ACTION SIGNIFY? Her clothing = a sexual metonymy for her body (of course) but it also functions as a sexual synecdoche for CULTURE Slide 31: Nature / Culture Diagram with Shamhat s Clothing Shamhat creates a little space for CULTURE in the wilds of NATURE There she does her ritual work > sexuality under Taboo She doesn t just have sex with Enkidu, she has sexuality with him She initiates him into the erotic regime of the CITY. Slide 32: Highlighted Text in Seduction Scene: Enkidu s erection Highlighted text: For six days and seven nights, Enkidu was erect... QUESTION: What sexual trope is illustrated in these lines? ANSWER: Sexual Hyperbole But you could also argue that Enkidu s erection is a sexual synecdoche for NATURE (all of which is charged up with immense amounts of procreative energy or HI-LI: the erection is a part for the whole) Sex with Shamhat on her cloth = initiation into the civilization of Uruk, which is to say, submission to the regime of sexuality under Taboo. QUESTION: What modern term is given to this process of initiation a momentously political form of sex education? Slide 33: Acculturation ANSWER: Acculturation (technical term in anthropology) DEFINITION: The process of instilling a culture in a human being from infancy onwards. The Wild Man is initially innocent (like an infant), and Shamhat literally brings him into the embrace of the sex goddess who rules over Uruk as its dominant female power. After sexual initiation, the Holy Harlot tells Enkidu that like a man he will find a place for himself i.e. a social position, a place in Uruk society. What s the first place he finds? He first becomes a shepherd just like the goddess Inanna s lover Dumuzi.

10 Slide 34: Sex collides with Sexuality ENKIDU S ERECTION = a natural physiological response to Shamhat s bared vulva it seems all the more natural because Enkidu is first presented to us as a Wild Man living beyond the corders of Uruk s cultural domains SHAMHAT S SEDUCTION = a culturally directed exercise of power over the body of Enkidu explicitly serving the defensive political interests of the King In Tablet One, nature collides with culture in the initial encounter of the Wild Man with the Harlot, and culture (surprise, surprise) wins out Slide 34: Sexual Myth #1 hence, in the epic copulation scene, we seem to be observing natural sex (bestial sexual energy) being turned into sexuality as a cultural effect of Shamhat s powers and that s why the gazelles turn away from Enkidu: their shunning movement functions as a sign that he has lost his purity as a wild creature: his male nature is now mixed with that of a woman, resulting in his becoming embedded (literally) in the culture of the City. One of the cultural outcomes of SEXUALITY is the creation of sexual myths, and with these, the production and promotion of socially recognized sexual roles for men and women within the scripted history of the City. By sexual myth I don t mean a falsehood about sex or sexuality but rather a story we ve been telling ourselves about them for a very long time. Here s the myth arising from Tablet One of Gilgamesh: SEXUAL MYTH #1 Men in their originally natural state, apart from the civilizing power of Women, are wild beasts that must be tamed. In light of the taming of Enkidu, I m going to leave you with two Provocative Propositions to consider. Here s the first one: Slide 35: Provocative Proposition #1 Whatever is perceived as natural about SEX is re-invented by the City as SEXUALITY Slide 36: Provocative Proposition #2 Sex is knowable only through its cultural representations

11 Enkidu s epic erection, as described in the poem, is a sexual synecdoche for > Man in a state of Nature In other words, it s already a CULTURAL representation of natural sex The only way we know about Enkidu s mythically natural sexual condition is through the poem, which is (of course) a cultural creation and promotional extension of the CITY Now, if it s true that Sex is knowable only through its cultural representations, then our original simple binary distinction between SEX (on the natural side) and SEXUALITY (on the cultural side) must collapse.