I suggested in the previous chapter that understanding the Epic of Gilgamesh generally according to the rites-of-passage template originally proposed by Arnold van Gennep, and more specifically understanding the characters Gilgamesh and Enkidu and the depictions of their relationship according to the descriptions of the rites-of-passage’s liminal phase that have been advanced by Victor Turner, provides us with an explanation of the Epic’s use of homoeroticized imagery that has previously stymied scholars in their attempts at interpretation. What I hope to show in this chapter is how the use of the rites-of-passage model and a focus on liminality can illuminate other aspects of the Epic’s descriptions of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and their interactions. In particular, in the second section I will discuss the reaggregation or reintegration stage in the rites-of-passage model as understood by van Gennep and Turner and how their analyses might help illuminate some of the concluding scenes in both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions of the Epic. One of these scenes will be the speech in the Old Babylonian version in which the alewife Siduri urges Gilgamesh to abandon his futile quest for immortality in favor of the pleasures of human society and human sociability, by which I anticipate my more general discussion in the third section of this chapter of the role that Siduri, as well as three other female characters—Shamhat, Ishtar, and Utnapishtim’s wife—play in the Epic’s portrayals of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s lives. Before I turn to these matters, however, let me begin with some less substantive but nevertheless intriguing illustrations of the insights a rites-of-passage interpretation of the Epic of Gilgamesh might allow.
Liminal Puns, Liminal Communitas
Liminal Puns
As I described in chapter 3, Anne Draffkorn Kilmer has argued that two puns—wordplays on the terms kiṣru/kezru and ḫaṣṣinnu(m)/assinnu(m)—are found in the Standard version’s account of Gilgamesh’s meteor dream that presages the coming of Enkidu and in the Old Babylonian and Standard versions’ accounts of the corresponding axe dream.1 I also described in chapter 3 Stephanie M. Dalley’s proposal that a pun using the terms zikru and sekru is present in Tablet I’s account of the creation of Enkidu as a “counterpart” for Gilgamesh.2 As I discussed, the wordplay in each of these cases compares Enkidu as kiṣru, “meteor,” Enkidu as ḫaṣṣinnu(m), “axe,” and Enkidu as zikru, “counterpart,” to a male functionary—the kezru, assinnu(m), and sekru—who is part of the cultic entourage of Ishtar, the goddess of sex and love. My point in those previous discussions was to show how eroticized these comparisons are and how they thus might suggest Enkidu is to be interpreted as an object of Gilgamesh’s erotic and sexual desire.
What is worthy of our attention at this point, however, is the degree to which the kezru, assinnu(m), and sekru as cultic servitors of Ishtar are liminal in nature. The kezru, for example, is associated with prostitution, which, as I will discuss more thoroughly in the third section of this chapter, is a very liminal profession, as it brings women into relationship with men in ways that stand totally antithetical to the normal and normative structure of male-female relationships in Mesopotamian society.3 The assinnu(m) likewise seems a liminal character, eroticized and sexualized through his associations with Ishtar, yet nevertheless, as I have earlier quoted Martti Nissinen as suggesting, asexual in certain ways: a eunuchlike individual who, in the words of one text, typically “fails to achieve a sexual climax during intercourse.”4 Moreover, in logographic writing (writing in which cuneiform signs stand for full words), the assinnu(m) is designated as ur. SAL, which means literally “man-woman,” and a passage in the eighth-century BCE myth of Erra and Ishum somewhat similarly describes Ishtar as having turned the assinnus from men into women.5 It is hard to imagine more paradigmatically liminal descriptions than these sex-ambiguous characterizations, at least within the Mesopotamian cultural context, in which sex distinctions were structurally important.6 As for the sekru, I have earlier noted that Dalley describes him as having “uncertain sexual affinities,”7 a statement that in its ambiguity is again paradigmatically liminal. Understanding this liminal imagery, I suggest, gives the puns to which Kilmer and Dalley have pointed us a heightened significance: Enkidu is compared to the kezru, assinnu(m), and sekru not only to suggest he is an object of Gilgamesh’s erotic and sexual desire, as Kilmer and Dalley have proposed, but further to indicate that he, like these Ishtar devotees, is a liminal character whose eroticized and sexualized interactions with Gilgamesh must be interpreted against a backdrop of liminal ambiguity.
Liminal Communitas (Especially as Illustrated by Comparing the Akkadian Versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh with Its Sumerian Antecedents)
Understanding the centrality of liminal imagery in the Gilgamesh Epic also allows us to see a heightened significance in the observations of Thorkild Jacobsen and Jeffrey H. Tigay that I cited in chapter 2 and elaborated upon in chapter 3 regarding the Epic’s consistent portrayal of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as equals.8 For Jacobsen and Tigay, recall, the Akkadian tradition insists on this reconceptualization of the older Sumerian accounts, which represented Gilgamesh and Enkidu as master and servant, in order to advance its larger thematic agenda regarding Gilgamesh’s despair at the loss of his beloved friend and his desperate quest for eternal life that is the result. In this analysis Jacobsen and Tigay, among others, are certainly correct, but understanding the Epic’s liminal qualities allows us to see that something else is going on here. In insisting on Gilgamesh and Enkidu as equals, the Epic portrays Gilgamesh and Enkidu as representatives of the typically liminal experience of egalitarianism. In fact, Turner specifically describes liminality as an arena in which “distinctions of rank or status disappear or are homogenized,” a statement that could hardly capture more precisely the changes that Jacobsen, Tigay, and others have noted with regard to the epic tradition’s movement out of its original Sumerian context and into the Akkadian world.9 Thus Sumerian “distinctions of rank or status”—the language describing Enkidu as ARAD or ardu, “slave” or “servant,” and Gilgamesh as bēlu, “master”—almost entirely disappear (see only the somewhat anomalous and tenuously affiliated Tablet XII, lines 7 and 54), and the two heroes’ homogeneity becomes the norm.10
Indeed, it is quite notable that, in the tradition’s move out of its original Sumerian context and into the Akkadian world, the two heroes’ homogeneity becomes the norm despite the fact that, in the Akkadian Epic, Gilgamesh is still technically Enkidu’s superior in terms of status (Gilgamesh is, after all, Uruk’s king). In keeping, however, with the Akkadian Epic’s liminally egalitarian thrust, language that calls attention to Gilgamesh’s status-superior position (for example, šarru, “king”; šarrūtu, “kingship”) is rarely employed: just fourteen times, by my count, in all of the Epic’s three thousand lines. Strikingly, moreover, only half of these occurrences are found in what I have described in chapter 4 as the Epic’s fully liminal phase, even though this fully liminal phase—which begins in the aftermath of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s wrestling match, about a third of the way through the Standard version’s Tablet II, and ends (as I will discuss further below) subsequent to Gilgamesh’s visit to Utnapishtim’s dwelling place in Tablet XI—comprises approximately eighty-five percent of the Epic’s text.11
Turner furthermore argues that the liminal qualities of egalitarianism and homogeneity facilitate what he calls communitas, the experience of utter and intense fellowship that liminal persons, according to Turner, typically enjoy. As Turner writes, once “jurally sanctioned relationships” and “institutionalized roles” dissolve, “deep friendships” that are “expressive of the common weal” can develop.12 Again, these observations of Turner’s might be said to capture perfectly the particular situation in the Gilgamesh Epic: once the “jurally sanctioned relationship” and the “institutionalized roles” of Enkidu as subject and Gilgamesh as king dissolve, in the aftermath of the wrestling match, then the liminal Gilgamesh and Enkidu are in a position to experience the deepest of friendships, one of absolute fellowship and solidarity. Particularly significant in this regard is the term ibru, “friend,” that the Epic uses almost incessantly (up to 150 times, according to one recent catalog) to describe who Gilgamesh and Enkidu are in relation to one another.13 With respect to their absolute solidarity, we should think also of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s inseparability once they meet; of their single-minded focus on one another, to the exclusion of almost all others, throughout the course of their interactions; and, of course, of the inconsolable grief Gilgamesh manifests upon Enkidu’s death.
As above, moreover, comparing the Sumerian tradition to the Akkadian is revealing, especially comparing the Sumerian and Akkadian traditions regarding Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s expedition to confront Huwawa/Humbaba.14 In the Sumerian, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are accompanied on their journey to Huwawa’s domain by fifty other young men from Uruk, but in the Akkadian these fifty Urukites disappear. Instead, in accord with its stress on Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s liminal characteristics and the liminal bond of utter, even exclusionary solidarity that exists between them, the Akkadian Epic depicts the two heroes as going forth to confront Huwawa/Humbaba alone, dependent solely upon each other for their mission’s success.
Another difference between the Sumerian and Akkadian accounts of the Huwawa/Humbaba story is the role of Uruk’s elders (šibūtu). These men are not mentioned at all in the Sumerian tale, but in the Akkadian, in both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions, Gilgamesh, before he leaves, speaks to the elders of Uruk about his proposed expedition. His intent, it seems, at least according to the somewhat better-preserved Old Babylonian version, is to secure at a minimum their support and even possibly their permission. He says to them (Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, lines 181–188):15
As for me, Gilgamesh, let me see the one of whom they speak (that is, Huwawa/Humbaba),
The one whose name the lands keep repeating;
Let me conquer him in the Cedar Forest.
“How strong is the sprout of Uruk” (that is, Gilgamesh),
Let me cause the land to hear.
Let me set my hand; let me cut down cedars;
Let me set for myself a name forever!”
In the Standard version Gilgamesh also asks Uruk’s young men (the eṭlu) and his mother, it seems (the context is fragmentary), to bless his expedition (Tablet II, line 225, Tablet III, line 27). These details are again absent from the Sumerian text, in which Gilgamesh does not seek counsel even from the fifty of Uruk’s young men who accompany him to the Cedar Forest. Once more, Turner’s descriptions of communitas help us understand these changes by explaining that the statuslessness of liminal entities, although it breaks down social distinctions in order to allow them to experience intense solidarity and friendship among themselves, simultaneously renders these liminars devoid of the power and authority that status can otherwise provide. As a consequence, they become ever more answerable to the power and authority of individuals who stand outside their liminal community. Turner writes, indeed, that participants in many rites of passage “have to submit to an authority that is nothing less than that of the total community” (emphasis mine),16 a point the Standard version illustrates especially well by having Gilgamesh solicit support from so many different constituencies within Uruk.
Moreover, I have argued in chapter 4 that, in the course of the Huwawa/Humbaba episode, the sun god Shamash exercises the particular type of power and authority that a community’s ritual leaders typically assert over liminal entities, by imposing upon Gilgamesh and Enkidu the ordeal of their expedition against the Cedar Forest’s guardian and by coming to the two heroes’ aid in their time of greatest trial. What I did not note in my discussion in chapter 4, however, is that this sense of Shamash as instigator of the Huwawa/Humbaba expedition is yet again a detail that is added in the Akkadian version of the Epic; in the Sumerian account of the Huwawa adventure, the journey to Huwawa’s domain is undertaken at Gilgamesh’s own initiative.17 In keeping, though, with my analysis in this chapter, I now propose that this recasting of Shamash’s role in the Akkadian is consistent with and, in fact, is generated by the Akkadian Epic’s interest in portraying Gilgamesh and Enkidu as liminal figures on whom has been imposed a typically liminal ordeal of test and trial.18
Liminality’s End
I further noted in chapter 4 that Turner’s convictions regarding his four-part social drama, and his related notions regarding van Gennep’s tripartite rites-of-passage model, assume an underlying temporal structure and consequently change; liminality, to put the matter somewhat more bluntly, does not last forever. It is succeeded, in van Gennep’s terms, by reaggregation or reincorporation or, in Turner’s language, by reintegration. I would maintain that a consideration of that moment of reaggregation or reintegration helps us understand better some of the concluding scenes of the Gilgamesh Epic in both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions.
Reaggregation in the Old Babylonian Version of the Epic
In the Old Babylonian version of the Epic, Gilgamesh, toward the end of his wilderness wanderings, encounters the alewife Siduri on the shore of the sea that Gilgamesh must cross in order to reach the dwelling place of Utnapishtim and his wife. Before he crosses the sea, Gilgamesh and Siduri speak, he telling her of his great grief on account of the loss of Enkidu and of his fears regarding his own death that Enkidu’s demise has engendered. Siduri in response urges Gilgamesh to abandon his futile quest for eternal life and to replace it with the pleasures that can be found in good food, good company, clean clothes, a well-bathed body, children, and a wife.
For our purposes the most satisfactory analysis of this passage currently available is provided by Gary A. Anderson, who notes how carefully Siduri’s speech is structured in order to urge Gilgamesh to abandon at long last the mourning behaviors he embraced after Enkidu’s death.19 The alewife says (Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, col. iii, lines 1–14):
Gilgamesh, where do you rove?
The life you seek, you shall not find.
When the gods created humanity,
They established death for humans,
Life they took into their own hands.
You, Gilgamesh, may your belly be full,
Day and night, rejoice continually.
Daily make a joyous feast,
Day and night, dance and play.
May your garments be made clean,
May your head be washed, may you be bathed in water.
Look to the little one who holds your hand,
May your spouse rejoice continuously in your lap.
This is the fa[te of humankind].
As Anderson points out, the alewife’s advice here, while often interpreted in terms of the philosophy of carpe diem, to seize the moment and live life to the fullest, is better understood in terms of Gilgamesh’s mourning rituals: Gilgamesh, who has been lamenting, is now urged to rejoice; instead of wearing the rags in which mourners are typically attired (cf. biblical sackcloth), he is urged to don clean clothes; instead of keeping himself in the mourner’s typically unkempt state, he is urged to bathe and wash his hair. He is also urged to eat festal meals and to engage in sexual relations with a wife (which is the implied meaning of the passage’s penultimate line), whereas mourners in ancient Near Eastern tradition typically fasted and abstained from sexual intercourse. In Anderson’s understanding, that is, Gilgamesh is urged to reaggregate or reintegrate himself into society by reversing the liminal rituals of mourning and returning to the normal and normative behaviors of Mesopotamian society.
Anderson, in my opinion, has brilliantly identified some of the key principles that should guide our interpretation of Siduri’s speech.20 In addition, I believe he has correctly summarized the key message Siduri tries to teach Gilgamesh, that “the only life he can attain is a life lived within the human community.”21 Still, I suggest we can push somewhat further in our analysis, for in the typical rite of passage, especially as originally defined by van Gennep, the reaggregated subject does not return to his society in the same position in which he left but reenters with a new status and with a new set of responsibilities and obligations. The alewife’s advice to Gilgamesh about a spouse and a child are crucial to note in this regard, for, while we have previously seen a Gilgamesh who rejoices, wears clean clothes, bathes, and washes his hair (at the beginning of Tablet VI, for example, after Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s return from their battle against Huwawa/Humbaba), marriage and family are not aspects of human existence that seem previously to have been a part of the life of Gilgamesh.22 Rather, Gilgamesh, according to the Epic, has previously enjoyed sexual relations only outside of marriage, with brides to be in Uruk before they were bedded by their husbands and possibly, to return to Jacobsen’s late 1920s analysis, through his harassing of Uruk’s young men and young women. Gilgamesh, moreover, shuns the offer of marriage Ishtar extends to him in Tablet VI. What the alewife tells Gilgamesh, therefore, in urging him to leave the liminal phase of his rite-of-passage experience behind, is that he should reengage with his society in a way that does more than just reverse the mourning behaviors that have separated him from his fellows. He should reengage in a way that marks the changes his rite of passage has engendered and thus reengage as one who now embraces rather than rejects the institutions of marriage and family as two of the primary social structures of his community.23
Reaggregation in the Standard Version of the Epic
Focusing on the end of Gilgamesh’s liminal period, and on the reaggregation or reintegration that should follow, in addition helps explain some aspects of the concluding tablet of the Epic’s Standard version (by which I mean Tablet XI; as discussed in chapter 2, I agree with those commentators who see Tablet XII as a secondary and inorganic appendage to the Standard version’s original text). In chapter 4 I have discussed some aspects of Tablet XI in relationship to the Epic’s liminal imagery: how, for example, Gilgamesh, in the course of his visit to Utnapishtim, receives from Utnapishtim the sort of revelation regarding matters divine that is typical of the liminal experience, both Utnapishtim’s revelation regarding the theretofore secret and hidden story of the flood and Utnapishtim’s revelation regarding the secret Plant of Rejuvenation, which would allow Gilgamesh to enjoy eternal youth. In revealing this secret lore, Utnapishtim, as I have previously suggested, plays the role typically assumed by ritual leaders in the liminal stage of rites of passage, and he also plays the role ritual leaders typically play in this liminal stage by imposing on Gilgamesh yet another in the series of onerous ordeals he has had to face: the test of staying awake six days and seven nights.
In undertaking this ordeal of staying awake for a week, however, Gilgamesh, for the first time in his cycle of tests and trials, fails. I would suggest that this is quite significant in terms of the analysis I have been developing and that it indicates, to use Turner’s words, that Gilgamesh has been so “ground down” by his liminal experiences—that is, by his ordeals, his fears, his statuslessness, and his wandering—that he is now almost ready to be “fashioned anew” and “endowed with additional powers to cope with [his] new station in life.”24 He is now almost ready, that is, to be endowed with the new rights and responsibilities that come with the end of liminality and then to be reaggregated or reintegrated into his society. But when will this moment actually happen? It might at first seem, according at least to the Standard version (the Old Babylonian version, recall, seems to have ended shortly after Gilgamesh wakes up from his weeklong sleep),25 that the acquisition of the additional powers the rites-of-passage model leads us to expect is to come from the magical Plant of Rejuvenation that Gilgamesh, after failing the weeklong ordeal of sleeplessness, is exhorted to seek out. But it turns out, of course, that the Plant is not the instrument that will bestow a new status on Gilgamesh, for while Gilgamesh does manage with great difficulty (another typically liminal ordeal) to secure this plant from its habitat at the bottom of the sea, a serpent comes upon it and carries it off before the hero has a chance to eat it. The chance the Plant offered Gilgamesh of some sort of everlasting youth is lost.
Yet even though the rebirth promised by the Plant of Rejuvenation is lost to him, it is still at this point in the Standard version of the Epic—when this last failure has arguably ground Gilgamesh down one final notch—that our hero comes to realize the additional powers he needs in order to be reaggregated into his community and to assume whatever new station in life is appropriate to this reaggregated state. Thus Gilgamesh finally realizes what he has failed to apprehend ever since Enkidu’s death, that he cannot achieve immortality. Still, he comes to appreciate that there are other means through which he can claim some form of eternal life: according to the Standard version, by creating great monuments of civilization (walls, temples, great works of literature). Armed with this realization (dare I say revelation?), he is ready to reassume his place in his community as king, and now a king of a quite different sort than the reckless and irresponsible leader he was before.
Note, moreover, how integrally linked, according to Turner’s theory, these two aspects of Gilgamesh’s experiences at the end of Tablet XI are, his being utterly ground down by all the challenges of the liminal experience that he has faced and his finally realizing the knowledge he needs to succeed in his reaggregated or reintegrated state. In writing about this aspect of Turner’s work, his widow Edith Turner, along with two other colleagues, observes, “Because rites of passage occur at great moments of anxiety (life crises) and because they even provoke anxiety by vividly calling attention to irresolvable human paradoxes, they provide an atmosphere in which the neophyte is rendered most susceptible to learning.”26 We can easily see how these comments apply to Gilgamesh by the end of Tablet XI. He has been experiencing anxiety over his inevitable death ever since he was confronted with the loss of Enkidu. He now experiences a particularly heightened anxiety in having lost his last chances at some sort of eternal youth and immortal life. In addition, his time with Utnapishtim and the subsequent loss of the Plant of Rejuvenation have vividly called his attention to what is for him an irresolvable paradox: that, even though he is two-thirds god to one-third human, it is his human third that controls his destiny, so that, like a human, he will die. It is at this crucial moment, when he is in his greatest state of vulnerability, that, according to a rites-of-passage analysis, Gilgamesh is rendered most susceptible to learning and so can finally apprehend what so many in the course of his journey have tried without success to tell him: that the eternal life he seeks he will not find.
To quote again Edith Turner and her colleagues regarding liminal entities, “Previous acts of acting, thinking, and feeling are stripped away. Thus cut off from their usual ways of apprehending the world—their routines and their customary ways of communicating—they are placed in a highly suggestible state for learning.”27 So can Gilgamesh, once all is stripped away, finally learn what has eluded him since Enkidu’s demise and find a means of being “at peace” (Tablet I, line 7) with “the basic truths of the human condition.”28 He is then ready to be reintegrated into his society.
Reaggregation in the Old Babylonian and the Standard Versions of the Epic Compared: The Reaggregation of Gilgamesh
It is important to observe here, however, that while the Old Babylonian version of the Epic, at least as it is represented in Siduri’s speech, and Tablet XI of the Standard version agree regarding “the basic truths of the human condition” that Gilgamesh must apprehend—the futility of his quest for eternal life and the fact of his own mortality—they seem to disagree regarding the means by which he is to find peace in this apprehension. Admittedly, we cannot make such a claim with absolute certainty on account of the fragmentary nature of the Old Babylonian version as it has come down to us. The Old Babylonian text as we have it breaks off in the midst of Gilgamesh’s encounter with the ferryman Sursunabu (later Urshanabi), before Gilgamesh even meets Utnapishtim and certainly before he is confronted with the disappointing news that Utnapishtim has to tell him and before his failure to pass the test requiring weeklong wakefulness. As I have previously indicated, however, commentators generally agree that the Old Babylonian contained at least some elements from the Sumero-Akkadian story of the flood and also contained the story of Gilgamesh’s abortive attempt to stay awake for six days and seven nights and the hero’s realization regarding his own mortality that stemmed from that failure.29
“But how did he react to this discovery?” William L. Moran asks. “Did he return to Uruk, frustrated and embittered, a broken and tragic figure? Or did he, as in the later Standard Version … recover some sense of purpose, of human goals, and of the satisfaction of human achievement?” Moran concludes: “At present, these are questions for which there are no sure answers.”30 Still, in the Old Babylonian version, at least as it is represented in Siduri’s speech, Gilgamesh is urged to find a measure of comfort in human sociability as manifest in marriage and family. The Old Babylonian version might further be interpreted to imply (although it does not specifically say this) that there is a sort of immortality to be had via one’s descendants.31 Yet even if this reads too much into the Old Babylonian, it nevertheless seems clear that Siduri’s speech in the Old Babylonian presents a different strategy regarding Gilgamesh’s potential reintegration into the human community than does Tablet XI in the Standard version, which mentions family not at all. Rather, it advocates that Gilgamesh find a measure of comfort by realizing there is an immortality to be had in creating great monuments of human civilization.32
Such a conclusion can help explain why Siduri’s speech to Gilgamesh, although arguably one of the most magnificent pieces of poetry in Mesopotamian literature, is dropped in the Epic’s Standard version.33 To be sure, part of the reason the Standard version drops the speech is probably somewhat pedestrian, as it is generally the Standard version’s tendency to homogenize texts that are more distinguished in the Old Babylonian. Recall, for example, that the Standard version homogenizes the two distinctive meteor-dream and axe-dream accounts that were found in the Old Babylonian, so that the language of Gilgamesh “loving” the metaphorical Enkidu “like a wife” and “caressing” him that was found in the Old Babylonian only in the axe-dream account is incorporated in the Standard version into both the meteor-dream and axe-dream passages.34 Likewise, as Tigay has meticulously demonstrated, the Standard version thoroughly reformulates the conversations Gilgamesh has with the characters he meets, according to the Old Babylonian version, at the end of the world—Shamash, Siduri, Sursunabu (later Urshanabi), and presumably Utnapishtim—so that a substantial “degree of conformity” is imposed on “the varying dialogues of the Old Babylonian version.”35
Yet although Tigay further shows that “at least some elements” of the uniform dialogues of the Standard version are derived from “the separate dialogues of the Old Babylonian version,” he does not attempt to explain why, in its reworking of the Old Babylonian, the Standard version chooses to adopt the elements it does and to reject others, including the object of my interest here, Siduri’s speech urging Gilgamesh to leave his mourning behaviors behind.36 If, though, we understand that Siduri’s speech suggests a reintegrative strategy for the liminal Gilgamesh that is different from the reintegrative strategy that the Standard version advocates, then we can easily understand why neither this speech nor elements from it were employed in the Standard version’s revision. The Standard version, that is, while accepting the larger thematic point of Siduri’s speech in the Old Babylonian—that the quest for immortal life is futile—puts forward a different model than the Old Babylonian regarding the aspects of mortal existence in which Gilgamesh should find fulfillment: the great works of civilization versus marriage and family. The Standard version thus deletes Siduri’s speech, however magnificent it may be, as contrary to the picture of Gilgamesh’s reintegrated life that it seeks to describe.37
Reaggregation in the Old Babylonian and the Standard Versions of the Epic Compared: Reaggregation for the Rest of Us
One final caveat is necessary before we conclude this discussion of reaggregation, which is that the stress I have placed in my just concluded comments on the different reintegrative strategies the Old Babylonian and Standard versions advocate for Gilgamesh as he nears the end of his liminal experiences is important. This is because the Standard version, while it seems to reject the Old Babylonian notion that Gilgamesh should embrace institutions of human society and sociability as a means of reintegrating with his community, does not appear to reject the value of Siduri’s advice altogether. Rather, in Tablet VII, in Enkidu’s deathbed scene, the Standard version seems to quote the sun god Shamash with approval when he chides Enkidu for cursing the harlot Shamhat because it was she who brought him into the world of human existence and consequently into the world of human mortality. As both Anderson and Tigay astutely note, Shamash, who counters Enkidu’s curses by citing for Enkidu all that Shamhat’s civilizing acts have allowed him to enjoy, specifically lists the same sorts of things in which Siduri in the Old Babylonian version urges Gilgamesh to find comfort (Tablet VII, lines 133–136).38 These include good food (“bread worthy of the gods”), good drink (“ale worthy of kings”), fine clothes (“a splendid garment”), and, most important, good company (“the handsome Gilgamesh for a companion”).
Shamash in this Standard version passage, that is, argues to Enkidu that the same sort of pleasure Siduri urges upon Gilgamesh in the Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment is “what constitutes life” and that “enjoyment of these luxuries, even for the short span of a person’s existence, makes the mortal life worth living.”39 By extension, we can understand the Standard version as presenting that argument to us, the Epic’s audience, in Tablet VII,40 even as it seems to offer a different sense in Tablet XI of how Gilgamesh is to find peace within the confines of human existence. Perhaps we can explain this difference by appeal yet again to rites-of-passage imagery, in particular, to the nature of status and markers of rank that are found outside liminal time and space? For us, the Epic’s audience, these status and markers of rank are, like Enkidu’s, fairly minimal: we are not animals, but human, and maybe even, by virtue of our intelligence and civilized nature, a little like the gods.41 As such, we should be satisfied by those fruits of civilization our intelligence has created for us to enjoy, such as cooked food, fermented drink, finely made clothing, and the institutions of friendship, marriage, and family, for it is through these things we partake of divinity as much as is possible within the realm of mere mortals. Crucial to recall in this regard is that Enkidu is described as “like a god” immediately after he sleeps with Shamhat and begins his journey toward the civilized life in Tablet I, the implication being that it is through embracing the pleasures of civilization that Enkidu in particular and thus humans in general can approach the lives enjoyed by the divine (Tablet I, line 190; cf. the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. ii, line 11).42
Gilgamesh, however, is not like humans in general, and, outside of liminal time and space, he is not like Enkidu in particular. He is rather king, and, for one of such exalted rank, the Standard version may imply that the life in human community in which ordinary individuals are to find contentment just will not do. Kings, as Tigay points out, are said in Mesopotamian tradition to be in “the image of god” not only because they share, like all of us, in the gods’ intelligence and civilized nature, but because they partake of the same majesty as do the immortals.43 They therefore may require for their contentment, as the Standard version sees it, far more majestic exemplars of the intelligent and civilized life than do the rest of us; they may require, as the Standard version’s prologue would have it, the satisfaction of knowing they have built great walls, erected great temples, and produced great works of literature. This must be especially true for a king like Gilgamesh. He is, recall, “the greatest among kings” (Tablet I, line 27); indeed, he is two-thirds divine and one-third human. He thus represents, as opposed even to other kings and certainly as opposed to the rest of us, “an extraordinary level of potential and aspiration.”44 As such, this larger-than-life Gilgamesh may need larger-than-life ways of finding contentment as he seeks peace within the limitations that mortal existence imposes upon human beings. Consequently the Standard version advocates for him, in both its prologue and in Tablet XI, that he look beyond the relatively simple pleasures of human society and sociability that will suffice for Enkidu and for the rest of us in order to create much grander and more monumental artifacts of human ingenuity.
As Tigay writes about Siduri’s speech in the Old Babylonian version, “What the barmaid offers Gilgamesh is a conventional philosophy of life.” But while the Old Babylonian seems to believe, again in the words of Tigay, that this is something “of which Gilgamesh sorely needs to be reminded,”45 the Standard version suggests that this conventional philosophy does not suffice for Gilgamesh but only for more humble mortals such as Enkidu and the Epic’s audience. To put the matter in terms once more of our rites-of-passage analysis: in the Epic of Gilgamesh, once the basic truths of human existence are realized and reintegration begins, status—so absent during the liminal period of a rite of passage—matters. According, moreover, to the Standard version, it seems to matter in terms of describing how successful reintegration is to be realized, so those of us with the average status of an Enkidu will be able to make our peace with the human condition in fairly modest ways, whereas those of Gilgamesh’s superior rank will find they must achieve peace through more extraordinary efforts.46
Liminal Women: Shamhat, Siduri, Ishtar, and Utnapishtim’s Wife
At several points in his writings, Turner suggests that women, by reason of their positions of status inferiority and marginality within society, are quintessentially liminal; also that women, as quintessentially liminal beings, can help generate for others the liminal experience of communitas.47 In her important study of Turner’s theories of social drama and liminality, and their applicability to women’s stories and women’s symbols from the Western European Middle Ages, Caroline Walker Bynum agrees, or at least agrees that in the medieval hagiographies she examines women in general are depicted by their male biographers as standing outside the medieval world’s primary social structures and that women saints in particular are understood to represent for men what it was to “retreat from the world into inner, often mystical repose.” As such, these women helped engender men’s movement into and, ultimately, out of a similarly constituted space, thus providing, in Bynum’s words, “a means of escape from and reintegration into” men’s normal experience of status and power.48 In making this argument, Bynum tempers Turner’s tendency to universalize his theories of liminality in two important ways, first, by insisting that Turner’s impulse to describe all women as liminal and able to facilitate liminal communitas must be evaluated against an individual culture’s understanding of women’s position and status in relation to the normative social order. Second, and more important, Bynum demonstrates that, even in cultures where a description of women as liminal does seem to apply, it is a description that applies only insofar as one “stands with the dominant group (males) and sees women … as liminal to men.”49 “Women’s lives,” however, “are not liminal to women,” because, Bynum theorizes, Turner’s description of liminality as a structureless status that stands as a temporary antithesis to “the weight of social structure and responsibility” does not well conform to the actual experiences of women, in medieval society and in many other cultures, for whom structurelessness is not a “phase” but more typically a lifetime norm.50
The distance is vast, of course, between the Middle Ages of Western Europe and Mesopotamia of the second and first millennia BCE, and we must take very seriously Bynum’s cautions about applying either Turner’s insights or, by implication, hers across all cultures and transhistorically. Still, Bynum’s sense that the women saints she studies are typically portrayed by their male biographers as liminal and are therefore perceived as especially able to propel men’s movements into and out of a liminal experience will prove to be highly suggestive in our examination of women characters in the Gilgamesh Epic. As we will see, women characters in the Gilgamesh tradition repeatedly are described by the Epic’s assuredly male authors and redactors as critical players in the movement of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in and out of liminal time and space. But not all women: Gilgamesh’s mother, Ninsun, is an important exception. Bynum’s analysis may again provide an explanation, given her suggestion that the experience of antistructure that is liminality really only makes sense to those individuals who “in a special sense are the structures,” that is, for the medieval period she describes and, for most societies (including ancient Mesopotamia), the male elite.51 The women who represent liminality to this segment of a population do so by representing everything they, as elite males, are not: powerless and without status. Neither of these adjectives, however, describes Gilgamesh’s mother, who is royal and also a goddess. Hence, according to the understanding Bynum has developed, Ninsun would not be particularly well positioned to effect Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s transformations with respect to liminal time and space. Other women, though—women who represent the relative powerlessness and lack of status more typical of women’s experience—should be positioned, according to Bynum, to enable Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s movements in and out of liminal existence.
Still, when I look at the women of Gilgamesh, it seems to me there is a little more going on than that for which Bynum’s insights allow, for I will argue below that there is at least one woman character in the Epic who, although powerful and of high status, is nevertheless associated with Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s “escape from and reintegration into” status and power. This is the goddess Ishtar. Yet as we will see, Ishtar, despite her powerful and high-status position within the Mesopotamian cosmos, is marked by the tradition as liminal in some other crucial ways. What I hope therefore to demonstrate is that the women in the Epic of Gilgamesh who are particularly able to do the work of moving Gilgamesh and Enkidu in and out of the Epic’s liminal phases are able to do so not only because they, like almost all Mesopotamian women, are liminal from the point of view of the Epic’s male authors but also because they are especially liminal women, women who live, for example, not just a woman’s typically marginal existence, but a life on the extreme margins of society (the prostitute Shamhat), or women who manifest a extremely exaggerated form of a liminal being’s betwixt-and-between identity (the human yet immortal wife of Utnapishtim). In all, I will examine the liminal nature of four of the Epic’s women characters: the prostitute Shamhat as she is described in the Standard version’s Tablets I and II and in the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, the alewife Siduri as presented in the Standard version’s Tablet X and the Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, the goddess Ishtar as depicted in the Standard version’s Tablet VI, and the portrayal found in the Standard version’s Tablet XI of Utnapishtim’s wife.
The Prostitute Shamhat
Almost all commentators have suggested that the role Shamhat plays in the acculturation of Enkidu in the opening tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh is pivotal, since it is immediately after Shamhat’s and Enkidu’s six days and seven night of uninterrupted lovemaking that Enkidu’s animal nature leaves him (“Enkidu was diminished, he could not run as before”; Tablet I, line 184) and the transformation that makes him human begins (“he had grown in broad understanding”; Tablet I, line 185). As I have earlier intimated, this is an interpretation with which I by no means disagree, and I also by no means disagree with the analysis of Moran, which I cited in chapter 4, who associates the profound transformation effected by Shamhat with rites-of-passage imagery that especially includes rituals of cleansing and clothing (Enkidu being anointed and donning his first human attire).52 What I would like to suggest here, however, is that combining these two sets of observations allows us to assign a heightened significance to Shamhat’s role as a pivotal character. In my estimation she is particularly able to propel the admittedly already liminal Enkidu into what I have described as the fully liminal world of tests and trials, of divine revelation, and of egalitarian communitas that he experiences together with Gilgamesh because she, as a prostitute, is herself a highly liminal being and so especially able to bring about Enkidu’s entry into the liminal phase of the Epic in which his interactions with Gilgamesh take place.53
That prostitutes are liminal characters has been noted by several scholars of the ancient Near Eastern world. Susan Niditch, for example, has written that as liminal entities generally are those who fall “betwixt and between neatly defined categories,” so does a prostitute according to ancient Near Eastern tradition fall “between the two allowable categories for women. She is neither an unmarried virgin, nor a non-virgin wife.” Yet, while for most women the prostitute’s participation in sexual intercourse outside the bounds of marriage would mean condemnation, Niditch argues that because the prostitute is in a certain sense officially recognized as liminal within her society, and thus acknowledged as an individual not constrained by the customs and conventions of the social order, she is tolerated. As Niditch writes, “In effect, one could fall between the proper categories and survive, once that outside betwixt-and-between status was itself institutionalized and categorized.”54 Phyllis A. Bird similarly describes prostitution in Mesopotamia as a “tolerated liminal activity”55 and has elsewhere tried to capture the ambiguous qualities that characterize the prostitute’s liminal nature by describing her using the paradoxical phrase “legal outlaw.”56 As Bird suggests, the activity of the prostitute is something the society (at least as represented by its male members) feels is needed and even desired, and therefore the role of the prostitute is accommodated. But because the prostitute threatens the conventions of her society by “standing outside the normal social order and its approved roles for women,” she is nevertheless “ostracized and marginalized” with “a stigma … always attached to her role and her person.”57
Bird further suggests that there is a stigma attached to the fact that the prostitute controls the financial transactions in which she engages with her clients, something that again stands outside the normal social order in the ancient Near Eastern world, where financial transactions are typically controlled by men.58 According to Bird, moreover, the prostitute even lives on the outskirts of a city, her very place within urban geography demarcating, to use Bird’s terminology, her “marginal” character.59 This aspect of a prostitute’s existence may be indicated in the Gilgamesh Epic in Tablet VII, in which Enkidu, among the curses he heaps upon Shamhat, says, “May the shadow of the city walls be where you stand!” (line 117).
The curses of Shamhat that Enkidu utters are interesting to us for another reason, which is that they are similar to the curses that the goddess Ereshkigal, the queen of the netherworld, utters against an assinnu who has been sent to petition her in the myth of Ishtar’s Descent to the Netherworld.60 Ereshkigal, for example, begins her tirade against the assinnu by claiming she will curse him with a great curse, just as Enkidu opens his invective against Shamhat by saying, “Let me curse you with a great curse” (Tablet VII, line 102). Also, both Ereshkigal and Enkidu denounce the objects of their disdain by saying, “May the drunkard and the thirsty strike your cheek” (Tablet VII, line 119). Finally, as Enkidu says of Shamhat, Ereshkigal expresses hope that the assinnu will find a place to stand only on the outskirts of the city, under the shadow of its walls. These parallels are significant for our purposes because of the similarities they posit between Shamhat and the assinnu, a cult functionary of Ishtar who, as I described above, is well characterized as liminal. This confirms what I have already suggested, that Shamhat as a prostitute is well understood as liminal too.
Shamhat is further, as I have in addition already suggested, understood to be a liminal figure who propels Enkidu into a world of liminal engagement with Gilgamesh. Indeed, her very first words to Enkidu, which are spoken after their weeklong bout of lovemaking is completed, urge Enkidu to go to Uruk to meet Gilgamesh (Tablet I, lines 192–195; see too the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. ii, lines 14–23). Crucial to notice here is that the idea Enkidu might go to Uruk and engage with Gilgamesh after being “tamed” by Shamhat is never part of the original plan that brought the prostitute into the wilderness. Rather, the huntsman’s father, who is the one who originally proposed that the huntsman ask Gilgamesh for a prostitute to seduce Enkidu, suggests she entice Enkidu only because he knows the seduction will break Enkidu’s bond with the wild beasts and so end Enkidu’s abetting of his animal companions through his disabling of the huntsman’s snares. Gilgamesh, too, when he responds to the huntsman’s appeal by sending Shamhat into the countryside, does so only with the intent of distracting Enkidu from his attacks against the huntsman’s livelihood; there is never any mention that the huntsman might send the subdued Enkidu back to Uruk for Gilgamesh to encounter. This idea instead is unique to Shamhat, and the fact that she expresses it in the first words she speaks to Enkidu suggests it has a special significance. Once again, I propose its significance is that Shamhat as an exceptionally liminal character is particularly well positioned, from the narrative’s perspective, to effect Enkidu’s movement into the world of liminal time and space in which his interactions with Gilgamesh will take place. In fact, we might say that only a liminal character like Shamhat can effect Enkidu’s movement into liminal time and space, as opposed to, say, the huntsman’s father, who seems oblivious to this possibility.
The Alewife Siduri
Several scholars have commented on how similar Shamhat is structurally to the alewife Siduri. Rivkah Harris points out, for example, that both Shamhat and Siduri are working women who support themselves, that both function within the extradomestic domain of Mesopotamian society, and that both are engaged in professions that were important in the leisure activities of Mesopotamian men. Taverns such as Siduri is depicted as managing, moreover, were places where men went to meet prostitutes like Shamhat, and thus taverns were accommodated yet stigmatized in some of the same ways in Mesopotamian society that prostitution was accommodated yet stigmatized.61 Tzvi Abusch adds that as Shamhat sought to humanize the animalistic Enkidu in the early scenes of the Epic, so too toward the Epic’s end, at least in the Old Babylonian version, does Siduri seek to rehumanize the animal-like and corpselike Gilgamesh, by urging him to put his overwrought mourning behaviors aside. Indeed, Abusch notes that many of the specific features of human existence to which Shamhat originally introduced Enkidu are those later urged upon Gilgamesh by Siduri in the Old Babylonian account: a clean body, human clothing, and sex. Abusch follows up as well on an interpretation first put forward by Moran, who argues that the episode describing Enkidu’s acculturation in the Gilgamesh Epic derives from an older story “of the humanization of a primitive by a prostitute that would have been told in the aštammu, ‘tavern/inn,’” to which Abusch appends his own suggestion: that “Siduri’s advice would also seem to derive from and have its setting in the aštammu or bīt sābî/sābīti [which means, like aštammu, ‘tavern, inn’].” “Through these and other connections,” Abusch concludes, “the author links the Siduri-Gilgamesh encounter with the earlier Shamhat-Enkidu encounter and suggests that they parallel each other.”62 This observation allows us in turn to conclude that, as the prostitute Shamhat is represented in the Epic as an exceptionally liminal figure, so too should the alewife Siduri be identified as highly liminal in nature.
Other evidence supports this interpretation. Dalley notes, for example, that alewives in Mesopotamia “lived outside the normal protection of male members of a family,” which is the sort of position we now readily recognize as liminal.63 Abusch in addition points out that Mesopotamian taverns served ritually “as a transition-point back to normal life for the patient who has undergone magical rites,”64 which implies that those who kept taverns were themselves transitional figures. Abusch, moreover, follows Lambert in identifying Siduri as a goddess, “perhaps of the Ishtar type.”65 If this is so, however, then we must quickly note that, unlike Ishtar and the other gods, Siduri does not live in the heavens. Yet the otherworldly location in which Gilgamesh encounters her, on the shores of a cosmic sea, is surely not the earthly domain of humans. Siduri, that is, lives in a locale betwixt and between the realms of gods and mortals, which suggests that, if she is a goddess, she is one who, like her more famous neighbors Utnapishtim and his wife, represents a betwixt-and-between or liminal sort of divinity.66
Abusch further suggests that some version of the Gilgamesh Epic that predates the Old Babylonian text ended shortly after Gilgamesh’s encounter with Siduri and did not include any of the Utnapishtim episode. As Abusch sees it, Gilgamesh, in this account, while wandering aimlessly, would have come across Siduri, who, after delivering her famous speech about the need for Gilgamesh to abandon his futile quest, would have concluded by advising “his immediate return home to Uruk and the resumption there of a normal life.” The text then “may well have ended with Siduri sending Gilgamesh back to Uruk in the care of a boatman, perhaps Urshanabi.”67 Were this hypothesis to hold, it would suggest still more of the structural parallels between Shamhat and Siduri that were so significant for our analysis above, for as Shamhat effected Enkidu’s movement out of the wilderness where he was born and toward the city of Uruk, so too would Siduri have effected the end of Gilgamesh’s wilderness wanderings and his journey back toward Uruk. As Shamhat, moreover, in effecting Enkidu’s movement toward Uruk, propelled him into the liminal time and space that are represented in the stories of his interactions with Gilgamesh, so analogously would Siduri, in effecting Gilgamesh’s return to Uruk, be propelling him out of the liminal time and space that have defined his existence since shortly after he and Enkidu met. We could then further propose that the reason Siduri, like Shamhat, is particularly able to effect a hero’s transformation with respect to liminal time and space is that Siduri, like Shamhat, is a highly liminal figure.68
Yet even if Abusch’s reconstruction cannot be sustained (and he himself notes it is speculative),69 the basic fact of Siduri’s liminal nature remains, and I believe that this is a significant feature of the Epic, even in the Standard version, in which Siduri’s role is greatly downplayed. As I intimated already in chapter 4, even in the Standard version Siduri as a liminal figure serves, as do the theriomorphic scorpion-men and Utnapishtim and his wife, as an ideal representative of all the aspects of liminality Gilgamesh has experienced and is experiencing at the point in the Epic at which she appears: the liminal lands in which Gilgamesh has wandered; the liminal tests and trials Gilgamesh has endured; and the liminal identity Gilgamesh manifests. As Gilgamesh lives betwixt and between worlds, that is, he appropriately interacts with other betwixt-and-between characters, and even in her downplayed role in the Standard version Siduri functions as one of those beings. In the Old Babylonian, of course, she is more, a liminal being who, I would argue, uses her liminal position to try and move Gilgamesh out of his liminal existence and into a reaggregated life. If Abusch is correct, she may even have succeeded in this essay in some still older version of the Epic, her liminal nature, as I would interpret, the instrument that makes her particularly able to effect this sort of transition.
The Goddess Ishtar
In an essay entitled “Images of Women in the Gilgamesh Epic,” Rivkah Harris quotes a hymnic passage in which the goddess Ishtar sings of herself, “When I sit at the entrance of the tavern, I am a loving prostitute,”70 and then correctly notes that this passage suggests some association between the prostitute Shamhat, the tavern keeper Siduri, and the goddess Ishtar, who plays such a large role in Tablet VI of the Gilgamesh Epic. This is indicated by other evidence as well. Ishtar, for example, is the patron of prostitutes within Mesopotamian tradition, including the subcategory of prostitutes known as the šamḫātu, or “shamhat-prostitutes,” who in the Epic of Gilgamesh give Shamhat her name (Tablet VI, line 162). Also, in several god lists, the name Siduri occurs as a name of Ishtar.71 These data linking Shamhat, Siduri, and Ishtar intimate, in terms of our analysis, that Ishtar, like Shamhat and Siduri, is to be understood in certain respects as liminal. Indeed, in a second article, “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites,” Harris makes precisely this point. In Harris’s words, Ishtar, “represented both order and disorder, structure and anti-structure. In her psychological traits and behavior she confounded and confused normative categories and boundaries.” Later, in the same essay, Harris, quoting Turner, specifically identifies the goddess as “liminal,” one who, as a goddess of love and sexuality but of war as well, is represented in ways both benign and horrific. To illustrate more fully, Harris cites two texts in particular. The first lists several aspects of existence that are said to fall in the domain of Ishtar: to destroy and to tear up, yet to build up and to settle; business savvy and great winnings, yet financial loss and deficit; slander and hostile words, yet joking and smiling. The second text speaks of Ishtar as the one who has “thrown into confusion threads which have been ordered,” yet simultaneously as the one who has “organize[d] those threads which bring confusion.” As Harris says, these are “vivid expressions of the goddess’s innate contradictions.”72
Of the examples of Ishtar’s contradictory nature that Harris cites from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first is less than convincing: that the goddess is depicted as compassionate and maternal in Tablet XI, when Utnapishtim recounts how she cried out “like a woman in travail” because of her distress over the destruction of humanity in the flood, yet appears lusty and aggressive in Tablet VI, when she propositions Gilgamesh, and, once spurned, is represented as vindictive and vengeful.73 Because, however, Tablet XI’s flood story seems so wooden and mechanical an addition to the Epic,74 it is difficult to see in its juxtaposition with Tablet VI significant evidence of the narrative’s appreciation of Ishtar’s liminal nature. Others of Harris’s observations, though, are more germane. She points out, for example, that Ishtar, in proposing marriage to Gilgamesh in Tablet VI, assumes a masculine rather than feminine role; that Gilgamesh, in rejecting her, and in the most scathing and insulting of terms, treats her as if she were a low-status mortal rather than a deity; and that the specific episodes of her past he details in his rejection, describing her affairs with both animals (the allallu bird, the lion, and the horse) and mortals (the shepherd and Ishullanu, the gardener), indicate her tendency to blur the boundaries of the divine, human, and natural worlds.75 Harris finally notes that, although Ishtar “has a special relationship with kings that extends from early times, down to Ashurbanipal, the last Assyrian king,” she is at the same time “the patroness of prostitutes, those who belong to the fringes of society … its marginal members.”76 In the Gilgamesh Epic this is indicated by the fact that Ishtar in Tablet VI first seeks an association with Gilgamesh, the king, yet subsequently, after Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven that is the instrument of her revenge, calls upon her entourage of “courtesans, prostitutes, and harlots” to mourn the Bull’s death (Tablet VI, line 161–162).
As I have suggested above regarding Shamhat and Siduri, I would propose that because of Ishtar’s generally liminal nature, the Epic associates her with its heroes’ movement in and out of liminal time and space. Crucial to recall here is that, as I have interpreted at least the Standard version (the Tablet VI materials are not represented in the Old Babylonian and may not even have been a part of that corpus),77 there seems to be a brief movement toward Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s reaggregation or reintegration into Uruk’s community at the beginning of Tablet VI, when the two heroes return successful from their expedition against Huwawa/Humbaba and Gilgamesh bathes and reclothes himself in his royal robes and so apparently resumes his position as king.78 But almost immediately, there is, to use Turner’s language, another “breach of regular, norm-governed social relations”—Gilgamesh’s rejecting of Ishtar’s proposal of marriage, and in the most insulting of terms—which provokes the sending of the Bull of Heaven and throws the narrative back into a liminal phase.79 The scene of Ishtar’s proposition is thus pivotal in terms of the narrative’s movement in and out of liminal time and space,80 as was the scene of Enkidu’s humanization by the prostitute Shamhat and, perhaps, the scene in the Old Babylonian version and its potential precursors in which the alewife Siduri counsels Gilgamesh to abandon his futile wanderings. The liminally characterized Ishtar, in short, helps propel movement with respect to liminal time and space in much the same way that the liminally characterized Shamhat and, possibly, Siduri are able to do. The imagery that surrounds this Ishtar-related transition, moreover, is identical to the imagery that surrounds the transition effected by Shamhat and, at a minimum, proposed by Siduri: cleansing, clothing, and sex.
And there is yet more, for Abusch has provided a stimulating reading of Ishtar’s propositioning of Gilgamesh that can help us understand why her offer so provokes a crisis in “norm-governed social relations.” As he suggests, the marriage Ishtar proposes seems ostensibly to be a form of the sacred marriage that I described in chapter 3, in which the king of a Sumerian city-state engages in ritual intercourse with a priestess representing the goddess Ishtar. But, as Abusch sees it, the union Ishtar proposes to Gilgamesh is not actually “a normal or even sacred marriage” at all.81 It is rather a proposal to Gilgamesh to become a functionary in the netherworld: “Gilgamesh the king will wed Ishtar and go to his new home, the tomb, the netherworld; there he will be accorded the rites of the dead and exercise his infernal powers.”82 I will not try to reproduce here the extensive evidence Abusch musters in support of this thesis; what is crucial for our purposes is his sense that the marriage Ishtar offers is not “normal” and also his sense that in ostensibly offering the sacred marriage, which Abusch associates with fertility and life,83 while actually offering a marriage that represents sterility and death, there is a “purposeful ambiguity” to Ishtar’s proposal.84 The proffered marriage, that is, is “neither here nor there”; it stands antithetical to that which is “arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”85 These last quotes are, of course, from Turner, defining what is liminal, my point here being that the very ambiguous, non-normative, or liminal marriage that Ishtar offers Gilgamesh is part and parcel of, and needs to be understood in the context of, the movement back into liminal time and space that Gilgamesh’s encounter with the goddess brings about.86 In this respect Ishtar is very like the prostitute Shamhat (of whom, she is, after all, the patron goddess), as her proposal to engage, as did Shamhat with Enkidu, in a non-normative yet marriagelike relationship with Gilgamesh propels him into a liminal existence.87
Utnapishtim’s Wife
The pivotal roles played by the women Shamhat, Siduri, and Ishtar in the Epic of Gilgamesh leads me to suspect that we need to pay more attention, in the Standard version, to another woman, Utnapishtim’s wife, and especially to the role she may play in bringing about Gilgamesh’s ultimate return to Uruk. As I have already indicated, this woman, like all the other women I have described, is surely liminal, defined in terms of a betwixt-and-between identity (a mortal who became immortal) and living in the betwixt-and-between space (neither the heavenly abode of the gods nor the earthly domain of humans). She also, it might be argued, provides some of the crucial impetus of getting Gilgamesh back to Uruk.88 Particularly significant here is the scene in the Standard version’s Tablet XI, in which Gilgamesh tries to stay awake for six days and seven nights yet immediately falls into a “sleep like a fog” (Tablet XI, lines 209 and 212). Upon witnessing this, Utnapishtim speaks scornfully to his wife about Gilgamesh’s failure. But he says nothing about what he plans to do with the somnolent Gilgamesh, so that, for all the Epic tells us, Utnapishtim could be planning to let Gilgamesh lie comatose forever. It is only Utnapishtim’s wife who urges that he be awoken, and that he be awoken, significantly, so that he might “go back on the way that he came in well-being” (Tablet XI, line 215).
In addition, Utnapishtim’s wife urges Utnapishtim to tell Gilgamesh, after he is awakened, about the Plant of Rejuvenation; otherwise, Utnapishtim might again, for all the Epic tells us, have done nothing. To be sure, the knowledge of the Plant of Rejuvenation becomes a bittersweet gift, as Gilgamesh claims the Plant only to lose it to the serpent, but it is nevertheless, in the Standard version account, a gift that finally forces Gilgamesh to acknowledge the basic truths of human existence that have theretofore eluded him. Utnapishtim’s wife, that is, does much more in the Standard version than commentators usually acknowledge to bring about the resolution of Gilgamesh’s angst-ridden existence. Or, to speak in the terms of our analysis here, it is she, by making sure that Gilgamesh does not sleep forever and by prodding her husband to tell Gilgamesh of the Plant that inspires his ultimate realization of life’s truths, who puts Gilgamesh in a position to move out of the liminal phase of his life story and be reaggregated or reincorporated into his community.
Moreover, although there is no sex involved (unless one finds an allusion to it deeply veiled, in the phallic image of the serpent), there are, in conjunction with this transition Utnapishtim’s wife helps bring about, the same rites of cleaning and clothing that accompanied the transition of Enkidu effected by Shamhat and the transition in Tablet VI associated with Ishtar. Thus, immediately after Gilgamesh awakens from his week-long sleep, and just before he is told the secret of the Plant of Rejuvenation, he bathes and redons his royal robes. Bathing and the donning of clean clothing are rites also urged upon Gilgamesh by the alewife Siduri within the Old Babylonian account as she seeks to effect his reintegration into Mesopotamian society. Indeed, it may be that as Siduri becomes downplayed in the Standard version, Utnapishtim’s wife in some sense replaces her in her role as a liminal woman whose function in the narrative is to help move an epic hero out of his liminal existence. It may further be that the sexual motifs that are present in the Old Babylonian Siduri episode and present in conjunction with liminal women’s roles elsewhere in the epic tradition are absent in relation to Utnapishtim’s wife because of the observations I advanced earlier regarding the Standard version’s concluding proposition, that marriage and family are insufficient paths to fulfillment in life for the reaggregated or reintegrated Gilgamesh.
Yet whatever the merits of these last points of speculation, it seems clear that we must view many of the Epic’s women characters—Shamhat, Siduri, Ishtar, and Utnapishtim’s wife—generally through the lens of liminality and see more specifically that these women’s exceptionally liminal nature places them in an especially good position to move the Epic’s two heroes in and out of liminal time and space. As such, these women function simultaneously as mirrors of the liminal imagery that predominates in the Epic’s text and as crucial linchpins that facilitate the narrative’s movement through the phases of the rites-of-passage model.