4

THE LIMINAL HERO, PART 1

When the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep published his groundbreaking study Rites de passage in 1909, his intent was primarily to define a tripartite structure that van Gennep argued was characteristic of birth rites, puberty rites, marital rites, death rites, and, indeed, “rites which accompany every change of state, place, social position and age” across cultures.¹ According to van Gennep, the three parts of these various rites of passage were 1. separation, in which “a person or group becomes detached from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or from an earlier set of social conditions”; 2. margin or limen (from the Latin meaning “threshold”), “when the state of the ritual subject is ambiguous; he is no longer in the old state and has not yet reached the new one”; and 3. reaggregation or reincorporation, “when the ritual subject enters a new stable state with its own rights and obligations.”² For example, in Hopi childbirth rites as reported by van Gennep, the pregnant woman, while attended by her mother during labor, is isolated (or separated) at the moment of delivery itself, during which no one is allowed to be present. After the child arrives, the new mother is rejoined by her family members, but she remains otherwise detached from her larger community, proscribed from leaving her house before sundown and subject to dietary restrictions. Then, on the twentieth day after the birth, this transitional (or liminal) period ends when the new child is named and a special ritual meal is served to the entire community. “From that day [of reincorporation] on,” van Gennep writes, “everything in the house goes its usual way for the mother, the child, the family, and the pueblo.”³

Yet even while focusing primarily on these sorts of life-cycle rituals, van Gennep proposed that his tripartite model of separation-liminality-reincorporation could be applied to the cross-cultural analysis of rituals other than those having to do with the human life cycle, rituals related to seasonal and calendrical change, for instance (first fruits, harvest, new year, new moon, solstice, etc.).⁴ Subsequent scholars, pushing further, suggested that van Gennep’s rites-of-passage model might apply to elements within religious systems beyond those in which ritual is an overt concern. Thus, in his 1954 book The Myth of the Eternal Return, the Romanian-born historian of religion Mircea Eliade argued that, because it is “a consecration, an initiation,” a movement from “the profane to the sacred,” any journey to the “center” is a rite of passage, whether that journey be a pilgrimage to a sacred place (Mecca, Hardwar, Jerusalem), a heroic expedition in search of some legendary object (the Golden Fleece, the Golden Apples, the Herb of Life), or a quest for “self,” for the center of one’s being.⁵ Eliade’s sense that the rites-of-passage model helps structure stories of heroic adventure is found as well in Joseph Campbell’s 1949 publication The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he writes, “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return.” A hero’s story begins, as Campbell sees it, with the hero venturing forth, or separating himself, “from the world of the common day,” then continues by describing the “region of supernatural wonder” to which he comes.⁶ There, he undertakes “mysterious and threatening adventures that lead to the wrestling of a boon or prize from powerful authorities,” after which he returns and presents this boon or prize to his community.⁷

Both Eliade’s and Campbell’s appropriations of van Gennep’s rites-of-passage pattern, however, have serious flaws, especially Campbell’s, as he imprecisely and uncritically lumps together what the critic H. A. Reinhold describes as “vague and shadowy parallels” from hero stories across the world to yield what Campbell identifies as a universal “monomyth.”⁸ The subject of this monomyth, Campbell goes on to argue, is the hero’s quest for self-discovery with the goal of self-transcendence, or the awakening of the psychic awareness of the heroic soul to the hero’s own identity and, moreover, to the “at-one-ness” or essential unity of all beings and things. In fact, Campbell so emphasizes the centrality of this awakening motif in hero stories as he understands them that, while otherwise grounding his interpretations in van Gennep’s rites-of-passage paradigm, he changes one of the central terms van Gennep used to define the rites-of passage structure, so that, for Campbell, van Gennep’s transitional or liminal phase becomes a phase of initiation, a period in which the hero apprehends theretofore unknown mysteries about himself and the larger mysteries of the cosmos. Mary R. Lefkowitz, however, astutely suggests that this stress on initiation in Campbell’s analysis, derived as it is from the arguably romanticized and even mystically described theories of Carl G. Jung, is more about our Freudian- and Jungian-influenced worldview than it is about the hero stories of the premodern world that Campbell ostensibly seeks to explain: “only a hero in the twentieth century,” Lefkowitz rather scathingly observes, “would set off on a journey with the goal of discovering himself.”⁹ Florence Sandler and Darrell Reeck similarly, although somewhat less pointedly, comment that “what appears to be going on in The Hero with a Thousand Faces is … [the] conversion [of hero myths] from one cultural viewpoint to another,” from these myths’ original context, in which the hero was a “Doer” (for example, a Heracles required to perform twelve superhuman labors), to a twentieth-century context, in which the hero is a “Knower” (for example, a Luke Skywalker, who must learn to feel the “Force” flowing through him).¹⁰ Charles H. Long raises kindred concerns about ahistoric tendencies that compromise Eliade’s work,¹¹ as does Wendy Doniger regarding Eliade’s Jungian attempts to develop a universalistic theory of myth that neglects the particularities of the stories’ geographical and cultural settings.¹²

Thus, for a more successful as well as a more thorough attempt to apply van Gennep’s rites-of-passage model beyond the confines of that which is explicitly ritual, we turn to the work of the Scottish-born anthropologist and theorist of religion Victor Turner and of his followers. We will be particularly interested in the ways in which Turner and his followers came to apply Turner’s understanding of the liminal phase of van Gennep’s rites-of-passage model to an analysis of certain types of religious narratives. In this chapter’s first section I will describe this aspect of Turner’s work. In section 2 I will offer my own understanding of how Turner’s insights might help illuminate the homoeroticized imagery of the Epic of Gilgamesh.¹³

Victor Turner on Rites of Passage

To be sure, Turner, like van Gennep, began his career by seeking to describe not religious narrative but ritual, especially the rituals of the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia, a tribe of about seven thousand people among whom Turner did his primary field work in the first half of the 1950s. Turner argued that within Ndembu society “conflict was rife” and “manifested itself in public episodes of tensional irruption I called ‘social dramas.’” These social dramas, Turner went on to propose, were highly structured events comprised of four parts: 1. an initial “breach of regular, norm-governed social relations,” 2. a “phase of mounting crisis,” 3. an attempt at “redressive action” (which, if unsuccessful, could be followed by a return to the crisis stage and then further attempts at redress), and 4. either “the reintegration of the disturbed social group or … the social recognition and legitimization of irreparable schism between the contesting parties.”¹⁴ Ndembu rituals, according to Turner, stood in a close and even dialectical relationship to these social dramas: first, because the rituals were often performed during the third stage of a social drama as a potential means of bringing about the desired redress; second, and more important, because part of the redressive strategy these rituals employed was to represent, in multivocal and multivalent ways, the stresses that underlay the social drama. As Turner writes, “Both in its plot and in its symbolism, a ritual is an epitome of the wider and spontaneous social processes in which it is embodied and which ideally it controls.”¹⁵

Turner then went on to describe just how, in his view, Ndembu rituals helped control and resolve the social dramas they epitomized: that because of the reference the rituals made to the cosmological and supernatural (or, more precisely for Turner, because of the reference the rituals’ symbols made to the cosmological and supernatural), they could depict the social dramas’ conflicts in a way that reminded the Ndembu community of, and reoriented them toward, their shared transcendental values. By so doing, they evoked a transformative process that “promote[d] reunification”¹⁶ and recreated order in the lives of the rituals’ participants. In developing further this analysis, as Turner himself writes, “It was not long before I began to look for comparable data in other societies, for I was convinced that each society had its own variant of the social drama form.”¹⁷ That is, what was originally for Turner an attempt to describe Ndembu social processes and their relationship to Ndembu ritual developed into an overarching and highly influential theory of social process and ritual across cultures.

As commentators have often pointed out, Turner’s cross-cultural convictions regarding his four-part social drama form and its associated rituals, and especially Turner’s convictions (contrary to the prevailing structural-functionalist anthropological view of his day) regarding the “underlying temporal structure within social processes,” are highly reminiscent of van Gennep’s convictions regarding his tripartite and cross-cultural rites-of-passage model,¹⁸ so much so that after Turner first read van Gennep (in the early 1960s, shortly after Rites de passage was translated into English),¹⁹ he began to suggest that rituals had the same sort of essentially “diachronic profile” or dynamic, processual character as the social dramas he felt they epitomized.²⁰ “Not only,” that is, “is ritual situated within a process of social drama; ritual itself is processual in form.”²¹ Turner, moreover, readily began to use van Gennep’s description of the tripartite structure of rites of passage to discuss the processual structure he now ascribed to rituals (and to all rituals, it is important to note, not just the sort of life-cycle and related rituals on which van Gennep had focused). In particular, the liminal phase of van Gennep’s model, theretofore barely discussed among scholars, became the object of Turner’s intense interest.²² Liminality is thus the topic of the first essay Turner published after reading van Gennep (“Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”), and a chapter on liminality stands at the core of Turner’s monumental The Ritual Process, the 1969 publication of the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures that Turner delivered at the University of Rochester in 1966.²³ In addition, in an autobiographical essay published in 1977, Turner speaks of how critical a theoretical tool van Gennep’s concept of liminality became to him after he first came across it in the 1960s: “The present author [that is, Turner], stimulated during his fieldwork by Henri Junod’s use of van Gennep’s interpretive apparatus for understanding Thonga ritual … came to see that the liminal stage was of crucial importance with regard to this process of regenerative renewal.” “Indeed,” Turner continues, “van Gennep sometimes called the three stages ‘preliminal, liminal, and postliminal,’ indicating that importance.”²⁴

Unlike van Gennep, however, Turner, because he understood ritual in relation to social drama, always saw ritual as a text, as a performance that is not just instrumental, directed toward a purpose such as, say, moving an individual from one stage of life and/or one status to another, but that is also expressive: according to Turner, that is, ritual “does not simply do something but says something.”²⁵ More specifically, as I have already suggested regarding Turner’s analysis of Ndembu ritual, Turner regarded ritual as a process of communication that serves “the highly important functions … of storing and transmitting information,”²⁶ in particular information that concerns “the gods or ancestors or daimones” and that more generally addresses matters of cosmological and supernatural importance.²⁷ As such, it is “information that is regarded as authoritative, even as ultimately valid, axiomatic” within a society. As Turner goes on to say:²⁸

We are not dealing with information about a new agricultural technique or a better judicial procedure. We are concerned here with the crucial values of a believing community, whether it is a religious community, a nation, a tribe, a secret society, or any other type of group whose ultimate unity resides in its orientation towards transcendental and invisible powers.

The information ritual conveys, in short, is information about religion. Robert A. Segal has pointed out, moreover, that, while it may have been commonplace among Turner’s contemporaries in the 1960s to regard myth as a conveyor of religious information, regarding ritual, it was not.²⁹ Yet from such a conviction that ritual does the same sort of communicative work as does myth, it was only a very short step for Turner to reach the conclusion that myths, as well as similar sorts of religious narratives—sagas, legends, and epics—might be analyzed according to some of the same strategies that he had developed regarding rituals.

In a 1971 article, for example, Turner reflects back on what he describes as the passion of his undergraduate days, the period of the Icelandic Commonwealth (ca. 874–1262 CE) and the thirteenth-century sagas that claimed to recount the Commonwealth’s history, in order to argue that these sagas might epitomize social dramas in the same sorts of ways Turner believed social dramas were epitomized in ritual. Indeed, in Turner’s words, the Icelandic sagas are “nothing but connected sequences of social dramas” (emphasis mine).³⁰ For example, regarding one of these stories, “The Story of Burnt Njal” or “Njal’s Saga,” Turner writes:³¹

Njal’s Saga begins with simple breaches of order, minor crises, and informal redress … which cumulate, despite temporary settlement and redress, until finally the “breach” is the killing of a goði [a chieftain-priest] who is also a good man, the “crisis” involves a major cleavage of factions consisting of the major lineages and sibs [kin groups] in southern and south-eastern Iceland, and the parties seek “redress” at the Althing [a general assembly of Icelanders, especially of the Icelandic aristocracy] and Fifth Court [a legal institution created by Njal and convened at the Althing].

A decade later Turner presented this same sort of argument about narratives and social drama, but in a more sweeping fashion, in his essay “Social Dramas and the Stories About Them.” There he explicitly compares the roots he feels both ritual and narrative have in the social drama. As he writes, “The social drama, then, I regard as the experiential matrix from which the many genres of cultural performance, beginning with redressive ritual and juridical procedures and eventually including oral and literary narrative, have been generated.”³²

Moreover, as Turner had come to focus, in his studies on social drama, on the liminal phase of the rituals he felt were embedded within the dramas and were the epitome of them, so too, in his analysis of certain narratives as epitomes of social drama, does he come to focus on representations of liminality he feels are embedded in these texts. Not surprisingly, Turner concluded that in the same way that rituals, and thus ritual expressions of liminality, most typically manifest themselves during the third or redressive phases of social dramas, it was during the redressive phases of narratives structured according to the social drama pattern that liminal characteristics and liminal symbolism most commonly occurred. In the second section of this chapter I will discuss more thoroughly what Turner means when he speaks of liminal characteristics and liminal symbolism, but here suffice it to say that Turner understands the redressive phases of social drama narratives to be liminal because these narrative moments are characterized by the same sort of ambiguity that van Gennep described as intrinsic to the liminal stage of a rite of passage. Especially, according to Turner, these narrative moments are characterized by a certain quality of existing betwixt and between normative social structures. In a second paper Turner wrote on the representations of social dramas in Icelandic sagas, for example, he describes these narratives’ depictions of the annual convocations of the Althing assembly as liminal in character because there “narrow localized ties” were transcended.³³ Most important, otherwise normative clan loyalties and tribal affiliations were temporarily dissolved, so that a space was created in which family feuds, the “crises” Turner sees as dominating in the saga literature (see, for example, his description above of “Njal’s Saga”), could be addressed and, potentially, resolved.³⁴

For our purposes, an even more significant attempt at this sort of analysis is found in Turner’s 1968 article “Myth and Symbol,” in which Turner considers the role of liminal imagery and symbolism in narratives more explicitly religious than the quasi-historical Icelandic sagas. He argues in this essay that liminality is not just a feature of but is essential to his understanding of myths, which Turner defines, following the folklorist Stith Thompson, as “sacred narratives telling ‘of sacred beings and semidivine heroes and of the origins of all things, usually through the agency of these sacred beings.’” Such sacred narratives about divine beings or semidivine heroes are, Turner writes, “liminal phenomena,” by which he means, first, that these sacred narratives are often told at a time or in a site that is part of the liminal phase of some rite of passage. More notable for us, however, is Turner’s proposal that myths, “even where … not bound to rites … have a liminal character … liminal symbolism … abounds.” Myths thus depict times and places that, as above, exist betwixt and between normative social structures, times and places in which otherwise inviolable boundaries can be crossed and otherwise inviolable customs and conventions can be ignored. In Turner’s words, myths are

felt to be high or deep mysteries which put the initiand temporarily into close rapport with the primary or primordial generative powers of the cosmos, the acts of which transcend rather than transgress the norms of human secular society. In myth is a limitless freedom, a symbolic freedom of action which is denied to the norm-bound incumbent of a status in a social structure.

As such, myths, Turner concludes, “represent a return to … a legitimated situation of freedom from cultural constraints and social classifications…. At the root of the rational is the non-rational, which gives it its meaning, and liminality is that root.”³⁵

Victor Turner died in 1983, but still today, a little more than two decades after his death, his work on the rites-of-passage structure and on liminality remains incredibly influential, cited with almost astonishing frequency by scholars of religion.³⁶ In the main these scholars have affirmed many of Turner’s basic conclusions. Of course, some concerns have been raised,³⁷ most notably, perhaps, about the attempts Turner made in the latter part of his career to locate a modified and somewhat debased analog of the category of liminality he had described for traditional societies within the modern industrial and postindustrial worlds in which he and his readers both lived. According to Turner, within this modern analog of liminality, which Turner called the “liminoid,” the “leisure genres of art and entertainment” correspond to “the rituals and myths of archaic, tribal and early agrarian cultures.”³⁸ Yet as many commentators have pointed out, Turner so stretches the parameters of what is liminal here that the concept begins to lose all its meaning, especially its meaning as it pertains to the study of religion. Scholars have also rightly criticized the ways in which Turner’s descriptions of liminality, even as located within traditional societies, became more and more idealized in his later writings, thus obscuring (as discussed further below) how challenging and indeed quite terrifying aspects of the liminal experience can be. Michael Taussig writes, for example, of how liminality in the later Turner, “became increasingly balmy and innocent, with erotic, obscene, sadistic, cruel, and licentious features bleached out.”³⁹

There are aspects of Turner’s earlier descriptions of liminality, too, that are open to criticism. At several points in his writings, for instance, Turner seeks to illustrate what he means by liminal ambiguity by citing examples of specific symbols in which he feels the ambiguous aspects of liminality are especially apparent. Yet while we might agree that some of Turner’s specific examples can represent liminal ambiguity across all cultures (solar and lunar eclipses and theriomorphic creatures such as mermaids and centaurs are two examples of Turner’s that come to mind), other symbols Turner proposed as universally representing liminality may be less applicable cross-culturally. Androgyny, although one of the symbols that Turner claims cultures most often use to express liminality’s ambiguous qualities,⁴⁰ may in fact be a symbol that can be used to express liminal ambiguity only in cultures in which a clear sense of sexual dimorphism is present.⁴¹ Bisexuality is another symbol that Turner suggests is often used across cultures to represent liminality’s ambiguity,⁴² yet as I have intimated in chapter 1, bisexuality, like homosexuality and heterosexuality, is a category that belongs only to our (and Turner’s) nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-American environment. It therefore cannot—contra Turner’s impulse—be applied transhistorically and transculturally as a symbol of liminality.

Within Turner’s attempts to locate a rites-of-passage structure and liminality in religious narratives, too, we can note some dangerous universalizing tendencies. Even though Turner, for example, is a far more sensitive and discerning interpreter of religious literature than are Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, whom I discussed above, it is nevertheless the case that Turner was given, as were Eliade and Campbell, to making statements about narrative patternings across cultures that failed to treat seriously the distinctive features of individual texts and/or particular narrative genres. Caroline Walker Bynum has brilliantly demonstrated with regard to medieval hagiography, for instance, that despite Turner’s desire to claim that the rites-of-passage pattern is used ubiquitously within religious narratives, it is only male biographers who incorporate liminal imagery in their accounts of saints’ lives from the European Middle Ages, whether these accounts be of the lives of male saints or of female. Women saints who tell their own life stories, however, do not typically to do so in terms of liminal imagery nor, more generally, in terms of Turner’s processual model of breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration.⁴³

Still, the fact that Turner can be faulted for attempting to apply too universally certain symbols of liminality and a rites-of-passage narrative pattern does not mean that his overall understandings of liminality and of the liminal aspects of certain religious narratives are without merit. In fact, even Bynum, although raising important questions about using the rites-of-passage structure and concepts of liminality to analyze stories told by women,⁴⁴ admits that she finds both Turner’s “specific and general insights … useful for understanding male stories.”⁴⁵ Other religion scholars agree. Alison Goddard Elliott has argued, for example, that a rites-of-passage pattern structures the hagiographies of many of Christianity’s first-millennium male saints,⁴⁶ and Andre’ Droogers has likewise proposed that the rites-of-passage pattern manifests itself cross-culturally and across the centuries in the biographies of six male religious leaders (1. Jesus, 2. the medieval merchant-cum-mendicant and lay preacher Waldes, 3. the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, 4. a Zaire prophet, Kimbangu, 5. the Buddha, 6. Mohammed).⁴⁷

Both Elliott and Droogers, moreover, draw fruitfully on Turner’s discussion of liminality to explore various aspects of their subjects’ life stories. Indeed, Elliott entitles one of the chapters of her book-length study “The Saint as Liminal Hero” and cites in it, among other arguments, Turner’s observations regarding liminality’s dissolution of “status in a social structure,” along with his argument that when the statusless liminal person “ceases to be a master and becomes the equal or fellow of man, he also … becomes the equal or fellow of nonhuman beings,” in order to illuminate the fact that the saints on whom she focuses, who lived otherwise solitary existences in the desert, were often said to enjoy a peaceful communion with both animals and angels.⁴⁸ Similarly Droogers, who explicitly describes himself as “follow[ing] the path paved by Turner,” catalogs several symbols he defines as marginal or transitional, or what Turner would call liminal, that recur in the religious biographies he examines: existence within the world of nature (versus culture), traveling and provisional lodging (versus sedentary life), nonviolence (versus violence), absence of distinctions in rank (versus hierarchy), anonymity and humility (versus name and fame), isolation and seclusion (versus life in the heart of society), hardship and ordeal (versus comfort), dirt (versus purity), poverty and begging (versus wealth), and fasting (versus eating).⁴⁹

Droogers furthermore suggests that while some of the liminal or marginal symbols he finds in the stories of religious leaders he studies may have their basis in fact, the symbols are often “of an artificial, constructed nature”; that is, the biographers of religious leaders often shape their subjects’ stories in a way that deliberately incorporates and even exploits marginal or liminal imagery.⁵⁰ Elliott makes basically the same point about her saints’ hagiographers.⁵¹ This is not to say, of course, that either Droogers or Elliot wishes to claim that the biographers and hagiographers about whom they write had anticipated by centuries Turner’s theoretical insights and thus were seeking to apply some theory of liminality or, worse, some checklist of liminal motifs mechanically and even unimaginatively to their narratives. Instead, their claim, as Droogers particularly indicates, is that certain religious figures rather naturally seem to have their life stories told using what Turner has taught us to describe as liminal motifs and liminal imagery because these figures are understood by their biographers to have lived, at a minimum, unconventionally and even, in more maximal cases, on the extreme margins of society. Hence the language and imagery of unconventionality and even extreme marginality—which is to say, according to Turner’s framework, the language and imagery of liminality—are well appropriated into the narratives about them.

The biographers of the ancient Israelites (in other words, the biblical writers) likewise perceived their subjects to have lived a life on the margins, and this is especially true of the ancient Israelites as depicted in the stories that purport to present the earliest days of their existence, the stories found, say, in the Bible’s first six books (Genesis-Joshua), which portray the Israelites as, first, itinerant shepherds, then as slaves, and next as peripatetic wanderers in the wilderness, before finally describing them as establishing themselves as a politically and religiously united confederation within the “promised land.” Within these stories of marginal existence, Elliott’s and Droogers’s analysis would lead us to predict, we might well expect to find a superabundance of the motifs of marginality, or, to use Turner’s terminology, a superabundance of the motifs of liminality. It should therefore come as no surprise that many biblical scholars have commented on the presence of liminal features and more generally a rites-of-passage pattern in the Genesis-Deuteronomy narratives.

Edmund Leach, for example, cites Turner in an essay addressing a question raised by the book of Exodus, “Why Did Moses Have a Sister?” that is published in the volume Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth,⁵² and in an article in the same book D. Alan Aycock argues that the story of Abraham’s nephew Lot in Genesis 19 should be read as a “metaphoric rite of passage,” a journey from an old (and urban) society (Sodom) to a new (and rural) one, a cave in the hills above Zoar.⁵³ Ronald Hendel similarly comments on the Exodus 2 birth story of Moses as a rite of passage, in which Moses is a character “born a slave, the son of Hebrews, who gains a new status as a free person as a result of his passage into and deliverance from the Nile.”⁵⁴ More notably, however, Hendel pushes beyond a rites-of-passage analysis that focuses on the story of Moses as an individual in order to see the entire Exodus story of the Israelite people, and especially that story’s description of the people’s transformational journey from Egypt to the land of Canaan, as an exemplar of Turner’s rites-of-passage model,⁵⁵ as has also been suggested by Alfred Haldar, Shemaryahu Talmon, Robert L. Cohn, and William H. C. Propp.⁵⁶ All these scholars have focused in particular on what they describe as the liminal qualities of Israel’s wilderness experiences: for example, the aimlessness (or ambiguity) of the people’s forty years of wandering betwixt and between the land of slavery out of which they have come and the “promised land” to which they are headed.

Gilgamesh, too, is a figure who spends a prolonged period wandering in the wilderness (the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets IX–XI) and a figure who more generally is portrayed within ancient Mesopotamian tradition as having lived, at a minimum, unconventionally, and even, especially during his wilderness wanderings, on the extreme margins of society. Thus it should once more come as no surprise that a number of scholars of the ancient Near East have discussed rites-of-passage imagery in relation to his story. William L. Moran, for example, has described the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh Epic as a “long narrative [that] seems to pivot on three seven-day periods, each of which is associated with a profound transformation.”⁵⁷ The first transformation, according to Moran, is that of Enkidu, who is transformed from nonhuman into human through his six days and seven nights of lovemaking with the prostitute Shamhat. The second is the transformation of Gilgamesh, who, after mourning over Enkidu’s death for six days and seven nights, leaves behind Uruk and the heroic life to become an antihero and, indeed, an antihuman as he dons animal skins and wanders, like a beast, upon the steppe. Only after failing the test set by Utnapishtim to stay awake for six days and seven nights does Gilgamesh reembrace his human nature, leaving behind his animal skins, his animal-like wandering of the steppe, and his fruitless quest for eternal life.⁵⁸

As Moran notes, all these transformations “are associated with corresponding rites of passage, especially cleansing and clothing”: subsequent to Enkidu’s weeklong intercourse with Shamhat, he is anointed and clothed in human garb; when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh refuses to wash, to don fresh clothes, or otherwise to halt the grieving process at the end of the seven days of mourning that is prescribed by Mesopotamian tradition; after Gilgamesh fails Utnapishtim’s weeklong test, he changes out of the animal skins he has been wearing and allows himself to be bathed.⁵⁹ But while Moran is surely correct in finding rites-of-passage imagery and the rites-of-passage pattern in these three moments in the narrative, he does not exploit his own observations in order to suggest, as I will propose below, that the entire Gilgamesh Epic might be read according to a rites-of-passage analysis. Gary A. Anderson comes closer to such an understanding, suggesting that Gilgamesh’s rituals of mourning after Enkidu dies in Tablet VII only begin the liminal phase of a rite of passage that will not be completed until Gilgamesh realizes the truth of the lesson, according to the Old Babylonian version, the alewife Siduri tries to teach him—that “the only life he can attain is a life lived within the human community”—and as a result of this realization leaves his mourning behaviors behind and rejoins (or in van Gennep’s language, is reaggregated or reincorporated into) normal human society.⁶⁰ Tzvi Abusch goes a degree further by proposing that a rites-of-passage model structures Tablets VII–XII of the Epic of Gilgamesh and is also found in the scene of Ishtar’s propositioning of Gilgamesh that occurs in Tablet VI,⁶¹ and Rivkah Harris somewhat similarly reads the story of the wilderness journey in Tablets IX–XI (and also the story of Enkidu’s descent into the netherworld in Tablet XII) as a tale of “symbolic initiation” whereby “Gilgamesh ‘dies’ to one state of his life and is ‘reborn’ to another,” “a metaphorical rite of passage that marks Gilgamesh’s transition from childhood to adulthood.”⁶² Sara Mandell, in her essay “Liminality, Altered States, and the Gilgamesh Epic,” pushes further still, taking on the entire narrative in order to suggest its depictions of Gilgamesh and Enkidu are filled with liminal markers.

As I have intimated already, I agree with Mandell, as opposed to the more circumscribed interpretations of Moran, Anderson, Abusch, and Harris, that we should see rites-of-passage imagery as structuring the entire Gilgamesh narrative. Nevertheless, I find Mandell’s execution of her project seriously flawed, as she is dependent on Joseph Campbell’s understanding of hero narratives and thus replicates, in my opinion, many of the methodological flaws of Campbell’s that I described at the beginning of this chapter. For example, as Campbell is wont to do, Mandell seems to impose a somewhat different story on the text than the one we actually have. Lefkowitz points out about Campbell his statement that, in the Odyssey, Odysseus was sent to the underworld so, through his meeting with the seer Tiresias, he might come into touch with the “basic form of things” and, more specifically, the “unity of male and female.” According to Homer, however, the purpose of Odysseus’s journey to the Land of the Dead was quite different: it was for Odysseus to learn from Tiresias what the impediments were regarding Odysseus’s return to his home on the isle of Ithaca and how he might best deal with these challenges.⁶³ Not dissimilarly, Mandell argues that, while the Epic of Gilgamesh as we have it is structured according to “the archetypal exchange of place paradigm” (a reference to Enkidu dying in Tablet VII, as Mandell sees it, “in place” of Gilgamesh), “somewhere in the development of the Gilgamesh traditions, there was a bard who must have had another agenda,” on which Mandell focuses her attention. Mandell’s description of this other agenda, more-over—“some ritual paradigm related to humanization and civilization, as well as initiation into young manhood”—seems to me to reflect a typically Campbellian (and therefore, in my opinion, problematic) stress on initiation as the central and critical phase of any hero’s life.⁶⁴ Is initiation, as I asked earlier, really the focus of premodern hero stories such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, or does it represent Campbell’s tendency to impose our twentieth-century interest in “finding oneself” on materials whose interests are manifestly different?

Also typically Campbellian in Mandell, and so again, in my opinion, problematic: the sense (as in Jung) that there are universal archetypes (such as the exchange-of-place archetype) that are carried in the collective unconscious of the human community and are therefore reflected in all cultures’ mythologies. Mandell in addition seems to me, in her already problematic discussion of heroic initiation, uncritically to follow Campbell’s stress on the role of shamans in effecting that initiation, through her labeling of the huntsman’s father, because he has “Special Knowledge/Wisdom” regarding Shamhat’s abilities to tame Enkidu, as “incontestably shamanic.”⁶⁵ I find this an extraordinarily bold claim to make about a character who appears in only one scene in the entire Epic and who in that scene utters only one speech, of just a dozen or so lines, all of which are fragmentary (Tablet I, lines 118–128).⁶⁶ It is furthermore a claim that becomes difficult to sustain once we realize that shamanistic ecstasis generally “was of little importance in Mesopotamia as a means of communication between gods and men.”⁶⁷ Plus, it hardly seems to me that it requires “Special Knowledge/Wisdom” to suggest that the recently created Enkidu, as an animal-like creature of the steppe, will be distracted from destroying the huntsman’s snares by means of seduction: one has only to watch male dogs flock to a bitch in heat to see how single-mindedly focused on sex male animals can be. Finally, note this statement by Mandell, which, with its speculation about the Gilgamesh Epic’s hypothetical Ur-narrative, its focus on shamanism, and its thematic concern with a sort of spiritualized rebirth, is pure Campbell and thus I believe has embedded within it all the problems that can be found in Campbell’s work:⁶⁸

There may have existed some tradition, long since forgotten by the time in which the Gilgamesh traditions were incorporated into their literary format, in which Enkidu was the Master of Animals, and Hunter Man’s Father was the Shaman who made everything “work.” That is, Enkidu was what Joseph Campbell has repeatedly called the “Alpha Beast,” whose slaughter would ultimately be followed by regeneration and a renewed life for all beasts of his kind.

Yet despite my significant concerns, I still think Mandell helpfully discusses certain aspects of liminality in Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s characters and more generally in the Epic of Gilgamesh, pointing out, for example, that the description of Gilgamesh early on in the Epic as a being who is two-thirds divine and one-third human (Tablet I, line 46) positions him already at the beginning of the narrative as a character who exists on the limen, or the margin, between deity and mortal. Mandell also astutely points out that the journey to the Cedar Forest, an uncivilized and, indeed, otherworldly place (what she unfortunately describes as a “Never-Never-Land”), takes Gilgamesh and Enkidu into “the realm of an extended liminality,”⁶⁹ and that Gilgamesh’s journey in liminality continues (rather than begins, as Anderson, Abusch, and Harris would have it) after Enkidu’s death, during Gilgamesh’s wilderness wanderings. As I have already suggested, I find the presence of these liminal indicators in the Epic crucial, and it is my contention that focusing on these and other aspects of liminality that I believe are found throughout the Gilgamesh narrative can illuminate the text’s use of erotic and sexual imagery that, as we have seen, otherwise remains an impediment in interpretation.

Liminality in the Epic of Gilgamesh

According to Turner, the most defining characteristic of the liminal state or the liminal persona is ambiguity; in Turner’s classic formulation, to be liminal is to be betwixt and between, separated (to use van Gennep’s terminology) from an earlier social structure or set of social conditions but not yet reaggregated or reincorporated (to use again van Gennep’s terms) into a new structure or set of conditions. “Liminal entities,” Turner writes in The Ritual Process, “are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”⁷⁰ As such, they are often described using symbols and images that themselves stand outside normative experiences and customary configurations and that emphasize “paradox, disorder, anomaly, opposition, and the like.”⁷¹ Turner even describes how some symbols of liminality depict paradox particularly vividly by representing both “birth and death, womb and tomb” (for example, caves) or by representing both “nature and culture” (for example, “theriomorphic figures, at once animals and men or women … mermaids, centaurs, human-headed lions and so forth.”⁷²

A second important quality of liminal persons, Turner goes on to state, is that they are often represented “as possessing nothing.” The reason for this is “to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system.”⁷³ Indeed, so absent are marks of rank or distinction that Turner labels liminal persons, and more particularly groups comprised of liminal persons, as egalitarian. Because of their homogeneity and egalitarianism, Turner moreover argues, liminal groups experience what he calls communitas, a time of “intense social togetherness”⁷⁴ and of “union with one’s fellow human beings”⁷⁵ during which the distinctions and boundaries that usually keep people apart (for example, economic distinctions, status distinctions, kinship boundaries) dissolve. Still, as Turner makes clear (at least in his earlier writings), this liminal experience of communitas is not as wholly idealized as it might at first sound, for although an intense sense of fellowship and solidarity is experienced within liminal groups, the liminars (to use Turner’s word for liminal persons) find themselves subject to the absolute authority of those who stand outside their group yet somehow assume responsibility for it. Participants in an initiation ritual, for example, often find themselves required to submit passively and humbly to the demands of their community’s ritual leaders, even though these leaders often punish initiates arbitrarily and typically impose upon them onerous tests and trials, including many of the hardships included in Droogers’s list of liminal experiences that I cited above: fasting, seclusion, sexual continence, poverty, homelessness, silence.

At the same time, however, that these ritual leaders impose hardships upon liminal entities, they also typically reveal to initiates special gnosis or knowledge, and this experience of revelation is the third crucial component of the liminal state that Turner identifies in his discussions.⁷⁶ Especially important in this process is the revelation of the sacra or knowledge relating to things divine. “Sometimes secret names of deities or ancestors are revealed; sometimes the mythical history of the society is recounted in full; sometimes special incantations or creeds are taught.”⁷⁷ Obviously, these are things that members of a believing community need to know, yet the point of the revelation is not just the transmittal of critical information. The more important goal is to bring liminal entities “into close connection with deity or with superhuman power” in order to instill or inculcate in them the crucial values and convictions of their community, to ground within them that which is cosmologically authoritative and thus unquestionably “true” and “real.”⁷⁸ This is the “change” of which Turner is speaking when he writes, “The archaic knowledge or ‘gnosis’ obtained in the liminal period is felt to change the innermost nature of the neophyte, impressing him, as a seal impresses wax, with the characteristics of his new state. It is not a mere acquisition of knowledge, but a change in his being.”⁷⁹

“Liminality,” Turner summarizes, “is pure potency.”⁸⁰ In liminality “social categories are played with, inverted, suspended, social borders are liquidated, crossed, blurred; identity symbols are stripped away and affixed anew.”⁸¹ There result is an arena “where anything can happen, where immoderacy is normal, even normative, and where the elements of culture and society are released from their customary configurations and recombined in bizarre and terrifying imagery.”⁸² In liminality what Turner calls the “subjunctive mood” of a culture prevails,⁸³ and imagination and paradox are encouraged, “all as part of a self-conscious quest for the basic truths of the human condition.”⁸⁴

The degree to which these many markers of liminality can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh is striking. Indeed, in the pages that follow I propose to explore several different examples of the use of liminal language and imagery within the Epic, in scenes that span from the tale’s opening tablets to the text’s climactic descriptions of Gilgamesh’s encounter with Utnapishtim in Tablet XI.

The Gilgamesh Epic’s Opening Scenes: Introducing Gilgamesh and Enkidu as Liminal Characters

Gilgamesh. I suggested above, following Mandell, that the depiction of Gilgamesh as two-thirds divine and one-third human that is found in Tablet I, line 46, positions Gilgamesh already at the beginning of his tale as a being who stands betwixt and between identities. Yet this is hardly the only way in which the Epic’s introductory scenes demarcate Gilgamesh as a liminal character. Rather, the Epic’s descriptions of Gilgamesh’s boorish behaviors that oppress Uruk (whatever one interprets the particulars of these behaviors to be) may indicate that, as the narrative begins, Gilgamesh also stands on a limen, or margin, between civilization and barbarism.⁸⁵ Thus, while he, as king, is preeminently charged with maintaining civic order, he is nevertheless portrayed as the one who most threatens to rend the social fabric of his community.⁸⁶

In addition, the Epic, in describing Gilgamesh’s rampages through his community, several times characterizes Gilgamesh as a “wild bull” (Tablet I, lines 28, 66, 195, 202), which could suggest he stands not only on the limen between civilization and barbarism, but on the limen between the human and animal worlds.⁸⁷ Gilgamesh’s liminal nature in the Epic’s opening scenes seems further illustrated by the Epic’s somewhat peculiar representation of his royal stature, whereby Gilgamesh, supposedly Uruk’s supreme authority, is portrayed as an almost helpless dependent when he beseeches his mother to interpret his two dreams that presage the coming of Enkidu (in the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. i, lines 1–3, 24–26; in the Standard version, Tablet I, lines 227–229, 255–257).⁸⁸ In the Epic’s opening scenes Gilgamesh is described as well as ḫadī-ū’a LÚ (Tablet I, line 217), typically translated as something like “a man of quickly changing moods” or “a man of extreme feelings,” but meaning, more literally, something like “the happy-woeful man.”⁸⁹ He is a man, that is, whose basic emotional state is described as betwixt and between. Finally, we can note Gilgamesh’s very name, which has been interpreted by some to mean, “The Old One Is Youthful.”⁹⁰ If this meaning is correct, it may again suggest Gilgamesh as a liminal character who stands betwixt and between the polarities of youth and old age.

Enkidu. Even more so is Enkidu marked as liminal from the moment he is first introduced in the Epic. He stands, for example, on the limen, or the margin, between animal and human, a being who runs with the beasts as if they are his peers and who, according at least to the Old Babylonian version, suckles these animals’ milk (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. iii, lines 1–2).⁹¹ Yet he has been created as a counterpart for the god-man Gilgamesh and is created, moreover, by a birth goddess specifically lauded in the text for her skill in making humanity (Tablet I, line 78). In fact, despite his predominantly animal nature, Enkidu seems from the moment of his creation to have at least some human attributes, for, as Wilfried G. Lambert points out, he has the human brain capacity necessary to know how to disable the huntsman’s traps, ingenuity his animal companions lack.⁹² Nevertheless, he allies with the animals against the trapper. In a perceptive study of Enkidu Gregory Mobley quotes G. S. Kirk, “Enkidu, although a man, is also the very antithesis of man.”⁹³

Enkidu stands as well somewhat on the margin between male and female, and while, as I have noted above, this sort of androgyny may not be as universally characteristic of liminality as Turner has suggested, it does seem to serve as an important symbol of liminality in the Mesopotamian context, where “sex distinctions [were] important components of structural status.” Consequently, “in a structureless [or liminal] realm they do not apply.”⁹⁴ Thus, although Enkidu is otherwise male, his hair when he is first created is said to be like that of a woman’s (Tablet I, lines 88–90):

All his body was shaggy with hair;

He was made with tresses like those of a woman;

The locks of his tresses grew luxuriantly, like grain.

In addition, according to at least the Old Babylonian version of the Epic (which is the better-preserved text at this point), Enkidu, when he begins his transition into the world of civilization after his week of lovemaking, is garbed in fabric torn from the woman Shamhat’s garment (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. ii, lines 27–30):

She tore off (her) garment.

(With) one (piece), she clothed him;

(With) the other (piece of) the garment,

She clothed herself.

In this passage Enkidu can further be said to assume a betwixt-and-between position with regard to humanity and divinity that is somewhat similar to the “two-thirds god, one-third human” status that Gilgamesh holds. Thus, while the lovemaking with Shamhat serves, according to the Epic, as the catalyst that makes Enkidu human, she, immediately after their coitus ends, says to him (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. ii, line 11; cf. Tablet I, line 190, in the Standard version; the emphasis in the quote is mine):

“I look at you, O Enkidu,

Like a god you appear.”

We further see indications in this scene that Enkidu stands in a betwixt-and-between position in terms of age. His six-day and seven-night stint of lovemaking with Shamhat clearly signals that he has achieved at least the physical maturity associated with adulthood, but Shamhat’s act of clothing him after their intercourse is most reminiscent of what a mother would do for a child.⁹⁵ Enkidu in addition appears more childlike than adult, and Shamhat more like his mother than his lover,⁹⁶ in the episode that follows, when they reach the shepherds’ camp and she teaches him how to eat and drink (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. iii, lines 10–14):

The prostitute opened her mouth,

She says to Enkidu:

“Eat food, O Enkidu,

What is appropriate to life.

Drink beer, which is the custom of the land.”

Still, some twenty-five or so lines later, according, again, to the better-preserved Old Babylonian version, Enkidu is represented as more adultlike than child, as he and Shamhat once more make love (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. iv, line 2). As is typical of liminal entities, that is, Enkidu is “neither here nor there,” portrayed as both child and adult yet failing to conform completely to the attributes of either status.⁹⁷

It is in this same passage that Enkidu resolves to confront Gilgamesh after the young stranger who passes through the shepherds’ camp tells him about the marriage that is soon to take place in Uruk and about Gilgamesh’s intent to bed the bride before her husband can do so (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. iv, lines 3–32). Arguably, Enkidu is represented at this point as being in a betwixt-and-between position with regard to the institution of marriage—motivated to go to Uruk to challenge Gilgamesh because of what he perceives to be the latter’s violation of marriage custom, yet himself in a marriagelike relationship with the prostitute Shamhat that is hardly normative.⁹⁸ Finally, and perhaps most significantly with regard to Enkidu’s liminal nature in these opening scenes of the Epic, we should note that until he leaves for Uruk he dwells in the wilderness or the steppe. This is particularly noteworthy, because, for ancient Near Eastern traditions, the wilderness is the paradigmatic liminal space and its inhabitants are therefore the paradigmatic liminal beings. Leach, for example, writes of the biblical wilderness as “a ‘betwixt and between’ locality … which is neither fully in This World nor in The Other.”⁹⁹

Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s Liminal Adventures: The Expedition to the Cedar Forest and the Fight Against Huwawa/Humbaba

Separation. Still, despite the presence of multiple liminal markers in the Epic’s opening scenes, it is only in the aftermath of the actual meeting of Enkidu and Gilgamesh, about a third of the way through the Standard version’s Tablet II, that a liminal phase within the Epic’s narrative truly begins, as it is only in the aftermath of their wrestling match that these two heroic characters are actually separated, to use the language of van Gennep’s rites-of-passage structure, from the sets of social conditions that have previously defined each’s existence: Gilgamesh from his harassing of Uruk’s citizenry generally and its newlyweds in particular and Enkidu from his rural homeland and from Shamhat. Alternatively, if we were to look to the language of Turner’s social drama model, we could say that it is only at this point in the Epic that the crisis that has been mounting in Uruk as a response to Gilgamesh’s oppressive behaviors—or what we might call, with Turner, his “breach of regular, norm-governed social relations”—begins to find redress.¹⁰⁰

But regardless of whether we use van Gennep’s or Turner’s language to describe what happens as a consequence of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s combat, we can agree with both van Gennep and Turner that it is this separation or attempt at redress that initiates fully the Epic’s liminal phase. For example, as is typical of liminality, it is at this point that Gilgamesh and Enkidu, as liminal persons, become subject to onerous tests and trials, so that Gilgamesh, especially, who has previously imposed hardship upon others, is now faced with his own significant challenges, in particular the challenge he undertakes together with Enkidu in mounting an expedition against Huwawa/Humbaba. What makes this expedition especially worthy of our consideration is the multiple ways in which it manifests features of the ordeals typically experienced by liminal entities.

The Role of the Ritual Leader. As I have described previously, for example, the ordeals typically experienced by liminal entities are usually imposed upon them by ritual leaders, individuals who stand outside the liminal community yet somehow assume authority over it. To be sure, in Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s case, it is not immediately evident who such ritual leaders might be. It is hard to see them as being residents of Uruk, since Gilgamesh, however irresponsible his exercise of authority, is still the supreme power within that body. Moreover, because Gilgamesh is “the greatest” among all of Mesopotamia’s kings (Tablet I, line 27), it is hard to envision that there is a ritual authority within some other Mesopotamian city-state who could impose the undertaking of the Huwawa/Humbaba expedition upon Gilgamesh.

Nevertheless, the Epic, at least in the Standard version, does twice suggest that there is a superior being who instigates the Huwawa/Humbaba ordeal, the sun god Shamash. Thus, in Tablet III, line 46, Gilgamesh’s mother, while importuning the sun god to keep her son safe on his journey, admits that it is Shamash who has incited her son to undertake the expedition, “You have touched him (talpussuma), and he will go.” Likewise, in Tablet V, line 130, Huwawa/Humbaba identifies Shamash as the instigator of the assault on him, saying to Gilgamesh, “You attacked at the command of Shamash, the Lord of the Mountain.”¹⁰¹ And though it might appear somewhat forced to ascribe to a deity the role of ritual leader, we should note that Turner accounts for exactly this sort of possibility: that among communities where there are no instructors or gurus, liminal ordeals are, as in Gilgamesh, often imposed through some otherworldly agency. Turner describes, for example, how dream visions can impose tests and trials upon Omaha boys during their solitary coming-of-age rituals in the wilderness. The authority of these dream visions, he insists, must be considered analogous to the authority of ritual leaders within other societies because both the otherworldly visions and the ritual leaders represent “the absolute, the axiomatic values of society in which are expressed the ‘common good’ and the common interest.”¹⁰² This is surely an adequate description of Shamash’s role in the Standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Liminal Tests and Trials. We should further note that, as is again typical of the ordeals experienced during the liminal phase of a rite of passage, the tests and trials that Gilgamesh and Enkidu undergo as part of their expedition against Huwawa/Humbaba are enormous. Huwawa/Humbaba, for example, is described in the most terrifying of terms. He is said to be “fearsome” (puluḫtu) and “ferocious” (dāpinu) because, according to some of the most vividly evocative lines in all of Akkadian poetry (in the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, lines 109–111, 196–197; in the Standard version, Tablet II, lines 191–192, 240–241, 253–254):¹⁰³

His roar is a flood,

His mouth is fire,

His breath is death.

According to the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, moreover, “strange is his face” (line 192), and the several clay masks from ancient Mesopotamia that have been convincingly identified as images of Huwawa/Humbaba show how apt a description this is.¹⁰⁴ Huwawa/Humbaba can even be represented in Mesopotamian tradition as demonic, that is, as an otherworldly and so an especially liminal being.¹⁰⁵ Huwawa’s/Humbaba’s dwelling place in the Cedar Forest is described as well, at least by the Old Babylonian version, in terms that are close to otherworldly, as a battleground that is “unequaled,” a place where a victory cannot be won (Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, lines 114–115, 199). In addition, both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions of the Epic depict the Cedar Forest in terms that identify it as the paradigmatically liminal space of the wilderness. The Old Babylonian version in particular stresses this wilderness’s isolated qualities, describing its borders as extending, for example, some “sixty double-hours” (Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, lines 107 and 194), or some four hundred or so miles (a double hour being the equivalent of six to seven miles, about the distance a traveler can walk in two hours).¹⁰⁶

The Revelation of the Sacra. Leach points out that the liminal qualities of wilderness space typically give rise to the characteristically liminal experience of divine inspiration and revelation, given that wilderness locations “stand at the boundary between This World and The Other and are therefore appropriate places for a meeting between the natural and the supernatural.”¹⁰⁷ For Gilgamesh and Enkidu, this divine inspiration and revelation takes the form of interactions with the sun god, Shamash. Thus, at the end of the Standard version’s Tablet IV, Shamash advises Gilgamesh and Enkidu about when to enter the Cedar Forest; then, in Tablet V, during the actual encounter with Huwawa/Humbaba, he raises thirteen gale winds that encircle the ferocious creature and hold him pinned so that Gilgamesh is able to slay him. Now, admittedly, Shamash’s role in providing this guidance and support may at first seem paradoxical, since it was Shamash, as we have seen, who initially set the confrontation with Huwawa/Humbaba as a challenge that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were to overcome, and presumably were to overcome unaided. But we should recall that, according to Turner’s description, the ritual leaders in a rite of passage typically play this sort of dual role, imposing upon their charges numerous tests and trials yet also providing to liminal entities the crucial sacra or divine knowledge they need to pass successfully through their ordeals. It is worth noting in this regard that although Shamash had previously been identified at several points in the Epic as Gilgamesh’s patron deity, the one who “loves” Gilgamesh according to Tablet I, line 224, he first actually appears in the text during the ordeal in the Cedar Forest. Just as Turner’s analysis would predict, that is, “close connection with deity or superhuman power” occurs in the narrative only within the context of a liminal moment of test and trial.¹⁰⁸

Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s Liminal Adventures: The Fight Against the Bull of Heaven

Separation. Turner’s analysis would further predict that, after liminal entities overcome the challenges that have been set before them, they should be reaggregated or reincorporated into their communities. Yet, for Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the reaggregation or reincorporation that should follow their successful negotiation of the Huwawa/Humbaba challenge is, at best, only fleetingly realized;¹⁰⁹ to use the language of Turner’s social drama model, the redress of the societal crisis that provoked the movement of the Epic’s narrative into liminality is not yet accomplished. Gilgamesh and Enkidu do return victorious to Uruk, and Gilgamesh does reassume his position as king. Gilgamesh’s resumption of his royal status is marked, moreover, by his bathing and changing into his royal robes (Tablet VI, lines 1–5), which are exactly the sorts of rituals of cleansing and clothing that Moran has described as central to transition moments within rites of passage elsewhere in the Epic. But despite this brief return to normalcy, Gilgamesh again, to use Turner’s language, acts in a way that provokes a “breach of regular, norm-governed social relations,”¹¹⁰ defying the goddess Ishtar by rejecting her proposition of marriage—and thereby perhaps refusing, depending on how we interpret, to participate in the socially sanctioned and even socially mandated sacred marriage. Gilgamesh’s catalog of Ishtar’s former lovers insults the goddess to boot. Redressive action is surely called for, and so the Epic’s liminal phase arguably resumes. Consequently, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are forced again to face tests and trials, this time in the form of the attack of the monstrous Bull of Heaven.

The Role of the Ritual Leader. As was the case in the Huwawa/Humbaba episode, it is important to note the typically liminal features of “Bull of Heaven” test and trial. For example, in the same way that the Huwawa/Humbaba challenge was imposed on Gilgamesh and Enkidu by a divine being, Shamash, who in this respect performed the role of a rites-of-passage ritual leader, so too is it through divine agency that the Bull of Heaven is unleashed, sent forth by the head of the pantheon Anu in response to Ishtar’s threats. Anu, furthermore, assumes a seemingly paradoxical position with regard to the Bull that is similar to the role Shamash assumed with regard to Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s confrontation with Huwawa/Humbaba and to the roles ritual leaders generally assume, according to Turner, in the rites-of-passage liminal phase. Thus, while Anu releases the Bull to Ishtar so that it can wreak havoc in Uruk, he at the same time works to protect those who must face this ordeal by requiring of Ishtar that seven years worth of foodstuffs be stored up in the city to compensate for the harvests that will fail on account of the Bull’s complete devastation of the land.

Liminal Tests and Trials. The Bull is indeed utterly fearsome in terms of the devastation of which it is capable. For example, when the Bull reaches Uruk it is able, just by snorting, to open up two pits into which one hundred, and then two hundred, of the men of Uruk fall (Tablet VI, lines 121–124):

When the bull snorted, a pit opened up,

One hundred of the young men of Uruk fell into its midst.

When it snorted a second time, a pit opened up,

Two hundred young men of Uruk fell into its midst.

This is surely the sort of “bizarre and terrifying” image that Turner in his “Myth and Symbol” article cites as characteristic of liminality.¹¹¹

The Revelation of the Sacra. Gilgamesh and Enkidu, of course, survive their liminal ordeal with the Bull of the Heaven. But, as we have seen, their victory over this creature, and also their victory over Huwawa/Humbaba, is not realized without cost, as it is decreed at the beginning of Tablet VII that, as punishment for the two heroes’ transgressions against these otherworldly monsters, Enkidu must die. Significant with regard to our current analysis is the fact that this punishment is revealed to Enkidu in a dream vision of the gods’ divine council; that is, as is typical within liminal space and time, Enkidu experiences a revelation regarding the sacred. In fact, he receives two, for as Enkidu’s death approaches he has a second dream in which he has a vision of the netherworld and the grim nature of the dead’s existence there. Even more significantly, between these two dreams, as Enkidu rails against his fate, he is addressed directly by a deity, the sun god Shamash, who persuades Enkidu to rescind his cursing of the prostitute Shamhat, whom Enkidu had been deriding for bringing him into the world of humanity that has led to his death. Shamash further makes known to Enkidu a special revelation concerning the honor that Gilgamesh and the people of Uruk will accord to him after his death.

Enkidu’s Death and Gilgamesh’s Journey Into the Wilderness: Liminal Tests and Trials and the Revelation of the Sacra

Separation. Gilgamesh does, in fact, accord Enkidu great honor after he dies, delivering a long and emotional lament, commissioning an elaborate memorial statue decorated with gold and lapis lazuli, and lavishing upon the dead Enkidu grave goods made of gold and other precious substances selected from his treasury. Gilgamesh engages as well in ritual mourning behaviors typical in ancient Mediterranean cultures, tearing out his hair and stripping off his royal raiment (Tablet VIII, lines 62–63):¹¹²

He was tearing out and shedding his curly hair,

He was ripping off and casting aside his finery, like it was something taboo.

As I noted above, both Moran and Anderson correctly identify these mourning behaviors as typical of a rite of passage, separating the mourner from his normal position within his community’s social structure by separating him from the normal markers of his status and position (dressed hair, regular clothing). This point is in addition made by Harris.¹¹³ Typically, however, as I have also noted above, this ritual separation in ancient Mesopotamian tradition lasted for only seven days, at which point the “mourner returns to the community by means of aggregation rites.”¹¹⁴ Yet, although Gilgamesh acknowledges that seven days is the proper duration of the mourning ritual (in his speeches to the alewife Siduri, the ferryman Sursunabu/Urshanabi, and Utnapishtim; Tablet X, lines 63, 137, and 236), he fails to end his mourning according to this schedule and reassume his normal place within Uruk’s social structure.¹¹⁵ Instead Gilgamesh dons the skins of lions and lets his hair grow matted and disheveled (Tablet VII, lines 144–145, Tablet VIII, lines 88–89). He then leaves Uruk to wander the steppe.

Liminal Tests and Trials. As Anderson in particular interprets, Gilgamesh at this point enters into an extended liminal period that will continue until he finally comes to terms with his own mortality at the end of Tablet XI. My own analysis would differ in its understanding that, from the beginning of the Epic, Gilgamesh is defined as a liminal character who seems to live primarily a marginal existence, especially from the time of his initial encounter with Enkidu. Still, one must admit with Anderson (and, somewhat similarly, with Abusch and Harris) that the part of the Epic that describes Gilgamesh’s wanderings is especially filled with liminal features. For example, the very act of wandering (rapādu), which is stressed over and over in the descriptions of Gilgamesh’s movements (Tablet VII, line 145, Tablet VIII, line 89, Tablet IX, lines 2, 5, Tablet X, lines 46, 53, 66, 68, 70, 81, 120, 127, 139, 141, 142, 152, 219, 226, 239, 241, 243), implies a quality of aimlessness reminiscent of the ambiguity that characterizes liminality. We can again note, moreover, following Leach, how the very wilderness in which Gilgamesh roams is a paradigmatically liminal space.

In fact, this wilderness is even more otherworldly and thus more liminal in character than was the otherworldly wilderness of the Cedar Forest in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu encountered Huwawa/Humbaba, as Gilgamesh travels in his despairing wanderings well beyond the confines of human habitation, to the very ends of the earth. There he comes to Mount Mashu, the peak on the world’s eastern edge from which the sun rises, whose upper reaches are said to support the sky and whose base lies in the netherworld (Tablet IX, lines 38–41):

He reached Mount Mashu,

Which daily guards the rising of [the sun],

Whose summits [rise] to the vault of the heavens,

Whose flanks (literally “breasts”) reach the netherworld below.

This is truly, to quote Leach yet again, a place “at the boundaries between This World and The Other.”¹¹⁶ Yet even though the Epic’s descriptions of Mount Mashu might seem maximally to represent the characteristics of liminal space, Gilgamesh finds a way to journey beyond the mountain and into an even more liminal setting, traveling twelve double hours through Mashu’s interior to leave this world entirely behind. He then reaches a garden paradise with a sea beyond. It is this sea Gilgamesh must cross in order to come to his ultimate destination, the dwelling place of Utnapishtim.¹¹⁷

All this journeying through the typically liminal space of the wilderness is filled, as one would predict, with the typically liminal experience of tests and trials (Gilgamesh’s “toils and travail” [anaḫu and šâṭu], in the words of Utnapishtim and his wife [Tablet XI, line 268 and 273]). Gilgamesh initially encounters lions, which he is said to fear (palāḫu; Tablet IX, line 9), and then the dreadful scorpion-men who guard Mount Mashu’s gate.¹¹⁸ They, like the lions, are also said to be fearsome (puluḫtu) and in addition terrifying (rašābu), able to kill with their very look (Tablet IX, lines 42–43; see too lines 46–47):

There were scorpion-men guarding the gate,

Terrifying in their fearsomeness, their gaze (causing) death.

The ordeal of transversing Mashu’s interior is equally fearsome, as, like the nighttime journey of the sun through the netherworld, it is utterly dark.¹¹⁹ Furthermore, although Gilgamesh emerges from his transverse of Mashu’s interior into a seemingly paradisiacal garden, he almost immediately must confront a new trial, crossing the foreboding waters of death that lie in the midst of the sea that separates the garden paradise from the dwelling place of Utnapishtim. This trial he makes all the harder on himself through his reckless destruction of some mysterious stone objects whose precise nature remains unclear to scholars but somehow previously enabled Utnapishtim’s ferryman, Sursunabu/Urshanabi, to cross the waters of death safely. As a result of their loss, Gilgamesh must undertake the manufacture of immense punting poles that can be used as an alternative means to propel Urshanabi’s boat; when, in the course of the journey across the sea, all these punting poles are used up and the waters of death still have not been crossed, Gilgamesh must position himself as if he were a mast in Urshanabi’s boat and hold aloft his clothes to serve as a sail. And, during his sojourn with Utnapishtim, Utnapishtim imposes upon Gilgamesh yet another trial, the test of staying awake six days and seven nights.

The Revelation of the Sacra. As is typical in this time of liminal testing, Gilgamesh experiences divine inspiration and revelation, from, first, the sun god Shamash. Or at least he does so in the Old Babylonian version, which describes how Shamash comes to Gilgamesh during his wanderings and urges him to abandon his futile quest for eternal life (Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, col. i, lines 5–8):

Shamash was distressed;

He spoke to Gilgamesh:

“Gilgamesh, where do you rove?

The life you seek, you will not find.”

The most extended revelation Gilgamesh receives regarding things divine, however, is the story of the flood, told to Gilgamesh by Utnapishtim once Gilgamesh finally reaches the flood hero’s domain. It is especially crucial to note here that although scholars today understand the story of the flood as found in the Epic’s Tablet XI to be an only slightly modified version of the flood tale well known from elsewhere in Mesopotamian tradition, the Epic—or at least the Standard version—takes great care to stress that the story Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh is in fact a revelation.¹²⁰ Thus, the Standard version’s prologue explicitly identifies Utnapishtim’s story of the flood and the events that preceded it as something that was “secret” (niṣirtu) and “hidden” (katāmu) before Gilgamesh brought the tale back to Uruk and introduced it into Mesopotamian cultural history (Tablet I, line 5).¹²¹ Even more significantly, Utnapishtim, as he begins to relate the story to Gilgamesh (Tablet XI, lines 9–10), identifies it as not only “secret” (niṣirtu) but also as a divine secret, “the secret lore of the gods” (pirišta ša ilī). In discussing Turner’s understanding of liminality above, I noted that in the process of the revelation of the sacra “sometimes the mythical history of the society is recounted.”¹²² Utnapishtim’s recounting of the flood story to Gilgamesh is a premier example of this phenomenon.

As Gilgamesh’s liminal experience of revelation continues, moreover (at least in the Standard version; the Old Babylonian version, as I noted in chapter 2, seems to have ended shortly after Gilgamesh wakes up from his weeklong sleep),¹²³ Utnapishtim discloses to Gilgamesh yet another “secret” (niṣirtu) and more “secret lore of the gods” (pirišta ša ilī), the secret of the magical “Plant of Rejuvenation” (Tablet XI, lines 275–276).¹²⁴ It is further of significance that Utnapishtim uses the phrase “secret lore of the gods” (pirišta ša ilī) at one other point in his discussions with Gilgamesh: in the midst of his recital of the flood story, when he describes that he knew of the gods’ intent to send the flood and knew how to survive it because the god Ea revealed his fellow deities’ “secret” plan to him (Tablet XI, lines 195–196).¹²⁵ In terms of our analysis what this passage intimates is that, although Utnapishtim plays the role of a ritual leader who reveals sacred knowledge to Gilgamesh during the latter’s rites-of-passage experience, Utnapishtim previously, during the time of the great flood, received the sort of divine revelation that liminal persons typically are granted. Furthermore, the flood itself can surely be described as the sort of great ordeal undergone by liminal entities, and, in fact, Turner has suggested that the sea, and so by extension the flood’s waters on which Utnapishtim floated in the boat that Ea revealed he should build, often serves as a liminal symbol, a wild place on which one wanders, leaving one’s normal community behind.¹²⁶ All of which is to say: Utnapishtim, at least in terms of his past adventures, must himself be understood, like Gilgamesh, as a liminal figure.¹²⁷

Indeed, I would argue that Utnapishtim and his wife, as the only mortals granted immortality by the gods, are still in some sense liminal at the point at which Gilgamesh encounters them. Note especially in this regard the liminal nature of their dwelling place, not on the earth, the place of humanity, yet not in heaven, the place of the gods.¹²⁸ As inhabitants of such a betwixt-and-between space, they serve as perfect representatives of all the betwixt-and-between lands in which Gilgamesh has wandered and all the betwixt-and-between experiences he has had. So too do many of the other beings Gilgamesh encounters in his roaming serve as these sorts of betwixt-and-between representatives:¹²⁹ for example, the betwixt-and-between scorpion-men who guard Mount Mashu’s gate (recall, in this regard, Turner’s discussion of theriomorphic figures as liminal symbols);¹³⁰ also, as I shall discuss fully in chapter 5, the alewife who lives on the shore of Tablet X’s otherworldly sea.

Enkidu’s Death and Gilgamesh’s Journey Into the Wilderness: Gilgamesh as a Liminal Character

God/Man/Corpse. I have just noted how almost all the individuals whom Gilgamesh meets in the course of his wilderness wanderings can be described as liminal: Utnapishtim and his wife, the scorpion-men who guard Mount Mashu’s gate, and the alewife Siduri who lives on the shore of Tablet X’s otherworldly sea. But what is most significant for my discussion here are the many ways in which Gilgamesh too manifests a betwixt-and-between identity during the liminal journey he makes to Utnapishtim’s dwelling place.¹³¹ When Gilgamesh comes to Mount Mashu, for example, he is described—notably, for the first time since the Epic’s opening lines—according to his liminal status as two-thirds divine and one-third human (Tablet IX, line 52).¹³² However, in many respects this description of Gilgamesh as god-man seems to be used ironically, for, as Anderson points out, Gilgamesh at this point in the Epic is much better analyzed as one caught between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Thus, while he is, of course, still physically alive, he appears as if he were one if the denizens of the netherworld, who are described for us in Tablet XII as going about, like Gilgamesh, unanointed and wearing tatters.¹³³ The wilderness in which Gilgamesh wanders can in fact be understood as the gateway into the netherworld according to Mesopotamian tradition and so represents to some degree the realm of the dead itself.¹³⁴ The implication, as Anderson writes, is that “Gilgamesh, the passionate seeker of life, embarks on a journey that leads him into the land of death.”¹³⁵

Man/Beast. As I have already briefly mentioned (above, p. 114), Gilgamesh at this point in the Epic is also well described as existing on the boundary between human and beast, as he wears the skins of animals, is covered as they are with matted hair, and roams as they do through the steppe. Like them too, he consumes flesh (šīrum) for food (Tablet X, line 261, Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, col. i, line 2).¹³⁶ Many scholars have noted that the animal-like characteristics described for Gilgamesh here recall the descriptions of Enkidu when he was first created and when he stood on the limen, or the margin, between animal and human.¹³⁷ Jeffrey H. Tigay in particular points to some striking linguistic correspondences: Enkidu, before his coming to Uruk, is said to wander (rapādu) the steppe (Tablet I, line 191, Tablet II, lines 7, 21), just as is Gilgamesh after Enkidu’s death, and “the reaction of the hunter when he first saw Enkidu and the appearance of Gilgamesh while he wandered the steppe are described in practically identical terms: ‘Woe in his belly; / his face like that of a wayfarer from afar.’”¹³⁸ Anderson adds that both Gilgamesh and Enkidu strike fear in those who see them (Tablet I, lines 96–104, Tablet X, lines 1–14),¹³⁹ and Jack M. Sasson suggests that the “facts of mortal life” Gilgamesh utters early on when encouraging the reluctant Enkidu to go forth on the expedition to confront Huwawa/Humbaba—“As for humankind, his days are numbered” (Tablet II, line 203; see too the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, line 142)—are precisely those Gilgamesh in his wilderness wanderings struggles to apprehend.¹⁴⁰

We should note as well the degree to which Gilgamesh’s journey to the otherworldly locale of Mount Mashu, which lies in the far east, the place of the rising of the sun, stands in structural relationship to the journey Gilgamesh and Enkidu make together (and which Enkidu is previously said to have made alone: in the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, lines 105–108, 251–254; in the Standard version, Tablet III, lines 6–7) to the otherworldly Cedar Forest, which is located in the far west, in or near Lebanon.¹⁴¹ It is further of note that the same term, “fearsome” (puluḫtu), is used to describe Huwawa/Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Forest, and the scorpion-men who guard Mount Mashu’s gate. A. Leo Oppenheim suggests, moreover, that the Epic’s depiction of the paradisiacal “Garden of the Gods” that Gilgamesh reaches after his transverse of Mashu’s interior “patently duplicates” the text’s portrayal of the landscape of Huwawa’s/Humbaba’s Cedar Forest (Tablet V, lines 7–8), “which our poet describes with that warmth of feeling and intensity of expression which are characteristic for all passages in the epic in which the beauty of nature is described”:¹⁴²

On the mountain’s slope, the cedars put forth abundant yield,

Their shade was good, full of delight.

Gilgamesh’s dark journey of twelve double hours through the interior of Mount Mashu, which represents the nighttime journey of the sun through the netherworld, can further be understood as standing in structural relationship to the last “journey” Enkidu made in his lifetime, his twelve-day descent from life into death (Tablet VII, lines 259–272).

Man/Woman. Like Enkidu too, the liminal Gilgamesh stands posed between the gender polarities of male and female. Enkidu, recall, when originally created, was explicitly identified as having hair like a woman’s although he was male, and even after he proves beyond doubt his ability to perform as a man (during his week of uninterrupted intercourse with Shamhat), she garbs him in some of her womanly clothing. Then, as the Epic continues, Enkidu is identified according to other typically female markers. For example, in Tablet IV, as he and Gilgamesh journey toward Huwawa’s/Humbaba’s Cedar Forest, Gilgamesh ritually provokes three dreams in an attempt to determine whether the gods will look favorably on the two heroes’ enterprise. The imagery that Gilgamesh sees in these dreams—of a mountain that collapses on top of Gilgamesh and of an all-consuming fire—is difficult to understand, in part because the text as it has come down to us is very fragmentary and in part because Gilgamesh’s visions are so highly symbolic.¹⁴³ But what is important for our purposes is the fact that the task of interpreting these prescient dreams is assumed by Enkidu. Previously in the narrative, however, dream interpretation is a task that had been assumed by a woman, Gilgamesh’s mother. Furthermore, as both Julia M. Asher-Greve and Rivkah Harris have pointed out, it is usually women who are identified as expert in interpreting dreams in Mesopotamian sources.¹⁴⁴ In Sumerian tradition, for instance, it is a goddess, Nanše, who is the dream interpreter of the gods,¹⁴⁵ and in Old Assyrian tradition, only female dream interpreters are attested.¹⁴⁶ In fact, Oppenheim has noted that the scene in which Enkidu interprets Gilgamesh’s dreams is the sole point in all the epic literature of Mesopotamia (and similarly of Asia Minor) where a male functions as a dream interpreter.¹⁴⁷ According, that is, both to the specific context of the Gilgamesh Epic and to Mesopotamian tradition more generally, Enkidu, in taking on the role of dream interpreter, performs what is otherwise a typically female function. Also, of course, within the Tablet I dreams of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is portrayed as womanlike, in both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions’ accounts of the axe dream and in the Standard version’s account of the meteor dream, when it is said he will be to Gilgamesh “like a wife.” As we have seen, this imagery of Enkidu as Gilgamesh’s wife is repeated in Tablet VIII, when Gilgamesh veils the dead Enkidu “like a bride.”¹⁴⁸

Yet, interestingly enough, Gilgamesh, although presumably at some level the groom who is partnered with Enkidu’s metaphorical bride, is in addition portrayed as womanlike in Tablet VIII’s deathbed scene. For example, immediately after covering Enkidu’s face “like a bride,” Gilgamesh is said to pace ceaselessly around the body, like a lioness over her cubs (Tablet VIII, lines 58–61):¹⁴⁹

He covered the face of his friend like a bride,¹⁵⁰

Like an eagle, he circled above him.

Like a lioness whose cubs are in a pit,

He paced to and fro, forwards and backwards.

Likewise in the same scene, Gilgamesh is said to compare the lamentation he plans to raise over the dead Enkidu to that which would be performed by a lallaritu, or wailing woman (Tablet VIII, lines 41–44):

“Hear me, O young warriors, hear me!

Hear me, O elders of Uruk, hear me!

I will weep for Enkidu, my friend,

Like a wailing woman (lallaritu), I will wail bitterly.”

Moreover, even if Gilgamesh had not offered this explicit comparison of himself to a wailing woman, we would have to identify his mourning behaviors as womanlike in many respects, for, as Harris again notes, the sorts of lamentation and keening that Gilgamesh plans to undertake after Enkidu’s death were usually in Mesopotamia associated with women.¹⁵¹ We should further note that it is possible to suggest that, like Enkidu in this deathbed scene, Gilgamesh is represented using imagery that is not only womanlike but wifelike, at least if, following Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, we interpret his mourning over Enkidu as being like a widow’s.¹⁵²

Still, as much as Gilgamesh and Enkidu are said to take on womanlike roles and even wifelike roles with respect to one another, the fact is, as I have described in chapter 3, that they are not wifelike in their interactions with one another in a very crucial way, for relationships between husbands and wives were, in Mesopotamia, strictly hierarchical, whereas Gilgamesh and Enkidu are unremittingly portrayed as equals. Likewise, as we have seen also in chapter 3, same-sex erotic interactions in Mesopotamian tradition were strictly hierarchical in structure rather than being patterned according to the model of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s egalitarian relationship. Armed, however, with our analysis regarding the Epic’s liminal qualities, and regarding Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s liminal characteristics, we are now prepared to revisit this seeming conflict between, on the one hand, the Epic’s unrelieved insistence on the two heroes’ egalitarianism, and, on the other, the Epic’s frequent use of the hierarchically dependent language of erotic and sexual relationships in its descriptions of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s interactions. And what we are now prepared to make clear is that this conflict, which otherwise has created such an impasse in scholars’ attempts to define the nature of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship, is precisely the point. Because the Epic tradition has sought to characterize Gilgamesh and Enkidu using liminal markers, it employs language that both suggests the two heroes conform to Mesopotamia’s superior-inferior/active-passive sexual paradigm in their interactions with one another and suggests simultaneously they do not, for, indeed, they both do and do not, just as the liminal is “that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both.”¹⁵³ As what is perhaps Turner’s most often-cited formulation of liminality would claim, Gilgamesh and Enkidu as liminal entities are “neither here nor there, betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”¹⁵⁴ They are, as the “essence of liminality” as defined by Turner requires, “release[d] from normal constraints,” so that the “ordinary constructions of common sense” within the Mesopotamian worldview are “reconstructed in novel ways,” ways that more typically in the Mesopotamian perspective would seem “bizarre,” even “to the point of monstrosity.” Within liminality’s domain of “uncommon sense,” however, these bizarre and even monstrous reconstructions are precisely what we should expect.¹⁵⁵

To put the matter another way: using the lens of Turner’s theory of liminality, what we can now see is that the eroticized and sexualized imagery the Epic of Gilgamesh uses in its descriptions of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship does not conform to the Mesopotamian norms that mandate a hierarchalized structure within sexual interactions (whether they be same-sex or opposite-sex) because it is inherent in the very nature of the Epic’s structure that its representations of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship do not conform. Gilgamesh and Enkidu, throughout most of the Epic, are liminal characters whose relationship takes place within the boundaries of liminal time and liminal space. Their relationship, therefore, is characterized in a manner that defies Mesopotamian cultural convention. Just as Turner’s description of liminality would predict, that is, “the classifications on which order normally depends are annulled or obscured,”¹⁵⁶ so that Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship is consistently characterized in ways that deviate from—and in fact stand in opposition to—the normal social structures of Mesopotamian society. There is, in short, “a confusion of all the customary categories” of Mesopotamian culture,¹⁵⁷ and thus the eroticized language and imagery that are normally used only to describe sexual relationships that are hierarchical, whether opposite-sex or same-sex, can be used to describe a relationship of equals.

Previous commentators who have looked at the Gilgamesh Epic’s homoeroticized imagery have let themselves get distracted by the question (to use modern parlance) “are they or are they not gay?” But this is not the Epic’s question. The Epic’s question is “are they or are they not liminal?” Because, moreover, its answer is “they are,” the Epic intentionally portrays Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship through the use of eroticized and sexualized imagery that is anomalous and ambiguous—that is, liminal—within the Mesopotamian context. In the previous chapter I quoted Charles R. Beye as arguing that there could be “no sexual relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu” because “ancient narrators … were explicit about sexuality and would have made clear any sexual relationship.”¹⁵⁸ What Beye has failed to recognize, however, is that in the case of the Epic of Gilgamesh the ancient narrators’ thematic needs were best served by ambiguity. “Paradox … lies at the heart of rites of passage.”¹⁵⁹ Rather than standing as an impediment to our interpretation, the ambiguous and paradoxical imagery that the Epic of Gilgamesh uses to describe the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu should be seen as integral to the Epic’s lifeblood.