GILGAMESH, THE LOVE GODDESS, AND THE BULL OF HEAVEN

In this installment, Gilgamesh insults Ishtar, the goddess of love (represented here by Venus the goat). Big mistake!

Welcome to Goat Rope's Fun With the Epic of Gilgamesh Week, which is devoted to a lighthearted look at what may be the earliest written epic in human history (along with snarky comments on current events). If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

After slaying the monster Humbaba, Gilgamesh is on a roll. He returns in glory to Uruk, he catches the eye of the love goddess Ishtar, who proposes marriage in extravagant terms:

Come to me Gilgamesh, and be my bridegroom; grant me seed of your body, let me be your bride and you shall be my husband. I will harness for you a chariot of lapis lazuli and of gold, with wheels of gold and horns of copper; and you shall have might demons of the storm for draftmules...

The thing is, Ishtar doesn't have such a good track record. Her consorts tend to wind up dead. Gilgamesh refuses and insults the goddess (another bad move).

This is a major mythological problem: when gods or goddesses ask something from people, or vice versa, it doesn't usually turn out well for the humans involved no matter what they do.

Ishtar goes into a rage to Anu, father of the gods, and asks permission to unleash the Bull of Heaven on Uruk for vengeance. He doesn't want to go there but relents when she threatens to "bring up the dead to eat the food like the living and the dead shall outnumber the living."

Sounds like a zombie movie...

Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven and Enkidu throws its thigh at the goddess as an insult (another bad move). For this offense, he falls sick and ultimately dies, a fate of which he was warned in one of the many dreams in this epic. Enkidu describes the abode of the dead thus:

There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness...

Gilgamesh goes nuts. He wails over Enkidu, hoping to revive him with his lamentations. He only relents after a week, when "a worm fastens on him." He stops eating and bathing (although the extent to which he normally engaged in the latter is unclear) and caring form himself.


He finally orders a glorious funeral, then decides to set off on a quest for immortality. This is the most dangerous journey of all. He seeks the Sumerian Noah--Utanapishtim, who along with his wife, survived a cataclysmic flood in an ark and were the only humans to be granted immortality...

...which, unlike poor Enkidu, will keep until tomorrow.

HEALTH CARE. Economist Dean Baker love to point out the myth that economic conservatives rely on the market while progressives rely on government is just that. Instead, what we really have in many arenas is what he calls "a conservative nanny state." This is from a recent op-ed of his on health care:

if we are ever going to think seriously about how best to restructure health care, we will have to clearly understand how the system works now. The current system is not a free market; it is a set of government rigged rules that ensure that the insurance and pharmaceutical industries prosper, and that tens of millions of people go without access to care.

POLL SHOWS GROWING OPPOSITION TO IRAQ WAR. According to a Reuters report,

WASHINGTON - Opposition to the Iraq war has climbed to a record high and President George W. Bush’s approval rating dropped to a new low amid growing dissent from members of his own Republican party over his war strategy, according to a new USAToday/Gallup poll.

Bush’s approval dropped to 29 percent in the poll taken Friday through Sunday, down from 33 percent in early June, USA Today reported on Tuesday....

More than seven in 10 Americans favor withdrawing nearly all U.S troops from Iraq by April, the newspaper said.

Meanwhile, Bush wants the proverbial course to be "stayed."

QUESTIONING THE MARKET GOD. Here's an item from today's Times about growing dissent with the ruling consensus in the economics field.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL. From today's Gazette, here's a story on WV native musician Kathy Mattea's investigation of mountaintop removal mining for an upcoming album. Mattea is pretty popular here, but just wait and watch while the right wing noise machine tries to make her hated...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GOOD CROWD, BAD CROWD

Caption: This is a bad crowd.

Large groups of people have a pretty bad reputation in many circles.

The Christian existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said "The crowd is untruth."

In 1841, Charles Mackay wrote the popular Extradordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, wherein he said,

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Our old pal Nietzsche said that "Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, saw in any crowd a potential mob, noting that

when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification.

Gustave Le Bon, an earlier writer who influenced Freud, said "In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated."

Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom described the ways people sometimes seek to evade anxiety by seeking submersion in a larger group.

The dangers of the egotism and imperialism of groups was the theme of the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's classic Moral Man and Immoral Society (although Niebuhr had some doubts about the morality of individuals as well).

Earlier series and posts in this blog looked at the problems caused by obedience to authority and conformity.

Some interesting things have been written recently, however, that talk about the good side of groups. But that will keep until tomorrow. As Scarlett said, "Tomorrow is another day."

THIS COULD GET INTERESTING. West Virginia native and country music star Kathy Mattea is starting to speak out about mountaintop removal mining and climate change, as Ken Ward reports in today's Charleston Gazette. She is currently working on a project of coal-related music.

ATTACK OF THE GIANT PENGUINS. This is not a burning issue of our time, but scientists have discovered a 5 foot tall penguin that lived 36 million years ago in Peru. This baby had bigger jaw muscles than the current crop and a foot long beak.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED