Above is a new video I made yesterday entitled "Enkidu's Quest: what does it mean to us today?" featuring a short selection from my most-recent book, The Ancient World-Wide System: Star Myths of the World, Volume One (Second Edition).
The passage in the video can be found on pages 484 - 485 of the book, in the chapter entitled "The Gilgamesh Cycle and Atrahasis" (Chapter Fifteen), and involves an exploration of some of the profound messages within the ancient Mesopotamian myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
The texts containing this ancient myth are found on clay tablets, rediscovered during the early 1800s among the ruined ancient cities of the cultures of the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians (including the Babylonians), and constitute some of the oldest extant texts known at this time. The myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and their adventures can thus be known for certain to have been preserved in writing as far back as 2000 BC and perhaps even earlier, although the most well-known versions were written down upon clay tablets about 1000 years after that.
The figures and events described in the Gilgamesh cycle can absolutely be shown to be based on the constellations and heavenly cycles, indeed upon the very same system of celestial metaphor which underlies and forms the foundation for virtually all the other myths, scriptures, and sacred stories preserved by cultures around the globe from time immemorial as their "original instructions" (to borrow a most apt phrase used by Peter Kingsley without implying that Peter Kingsley accepts or endorses anything that I write or argue, although he is certainly acutely aware of the terrible problems which have arisen due to the abandonment or loss of connection to those "original instructions," which historically has often been deliberately inflicted due to the influences of colonialism and imperialism and the ideology of literalist christianity).
The fact that some of the earliest texts we can examine today can be shown to be using this world-wide system of celestial metaphor indicates that this system is extremely ancient, and indeed it appears to have been fully-formed well before the ancient tablets of Mesopotamia were inscribed, and before the inscriptions in the Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt were carved (which themselves go back to around 2400 BC).
Certainly we can also demonstrate that the very same ancient system of celestial metaphor which informs the myths of ancient Mesopotamia, preserved on the ancient clay tablets, also forms the foundation for the characters and episodes described in the scriptures of the Bible. Indeed, when the cuneiform writing system with which the texts are inscribed was deciphered, and the fragments of the tablets were painstakingly reassembled beginning in the nineteenth century (a process which continues to this day), the similarities of passages in the ancient Sumerian and Akkadian texts to episodes found in the Bible -- and to the very wording of the descriptions in the texts -- hit the men and women of the late 1800s like a thunderbolt.
You can read more about the reassembly of the clay tablets and the discovery of these parallels to the scriptures of the Bible in The Ancient World-Wide System, as well as in this previous blog post about the young man who first encountered the Deluge account in the clay tablets, after they had lain forgotten beneath the ruins for more than 2000 years.
And yet, as ancient as are the texts describing the mythical figures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and their many adventures, they continue after all these centuries to speak out to those who care to listen their profound message, a message which we very much need even today in this very present moment, a message which I'm convinced was intended for our benefit and blessing.
That message involves (among other things) the recovery of our own self.
Modern teachers and doctors on the very cutting edge of their profession inform us that our alienation from our own essential self is the single most-untreated cause of human suffering (see for example the work and teaching of Dr. Gabor Mate, as well as that of Dr. Peter Levine and others in their field).
And the world's ancient myths, our "original instructions," can be shown to be telling us the very same thing, and to be showing us the way towards the recovery of the self and the repair of our alienation from who we are.
I hope you will enjoy the above passage from The Ancient World-Wide System regarding Enkidu's quest and what it means for us today. Please feel free to share it with those who might find this information to be helpful in any way.
