For 4000 years, The Epic of Gilgamesh has influenced mythology, theology, and literature, and its rediscovery in the 1850s is itself an epic tale of war, theft, and Hobby Lobby. A meditation on love and death, rage and grief, civilization and nature, starring two problematic queer frat boys, it is the foundation of so many of our stories. In this episode, we talk to poet, artist, and essayist Julian Gunn about the story that started it all.

Show Notes:

• Gilgamesh, A King, At Uruk (Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Darmok")
• What makes the world’s first bar joke funny? No one knows.
• @radiantfracture on instagram
• Julian's blog
• Julian's games
• Victoria Festival of Authors
• The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Maureen Kovacs
• The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George
• The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Sophus Helle

If you haven't had enough problematic gays raging against the gods by the end of this episode, you might enjoy Rachel's new novel, Blight! Buy it from your favourite online bookstore or directly from the publisher.

Also, voting for the Aurora Awards opens June 7th! You can vote for us. Or other people. But please vote for us.

Hey, David.

Yes, Rachel?

A dog entered a tavern and said, “I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one.”

I, I don’t get it.

Neither do I, but apparently, the ancient Sumerians found it hilarious. [Opening Music]

Welcome to Wizards & Spaceships, where we discuss the world’s earliest example of someone going “hold my beer.” For four thousand years, The Epic of Gilgamesh has influenced mythology, theology, and literature, and its rediscovery in the 1850s is itself an epic tale of war theft and Hobby Lobby. A meditation on love and death, rage and grief, civilization and nature, starring two problematic fear frat boys. It is the foundation of so many of our stories.

Today, I am so excited to welcome to the show Julian Gunn, one of my favorite people in the whole wide world. Julian Gunn is a Victoria poet, artist and essayist living and working on), l?k?????n and WSÁNE? territory. He teaches academic writing, creative writing, and literature at Camosun College. Welcome to the show, Julian.

I’m so excited to be here, and I’m so happy that you opened with my favorite joke in all of human history.

I’m so excited. I finally got to use that joke. I love it so much. I, I feel like we need to explain the joke.

If you can, because I still don’t under…, and I haven’t gone to the Wikipedia entry, that Rachel, I understand that you already knew the joke, but you also went to Wikipedia. So, can you explain it just at least for me and some readers that don’t get it?

Right. So, this is the earliest known joke that has been written down. Because we… we can translate the words from ancient Sumerian, but we don’t know the idioms or the slang or double meanings or anything like that, we kind of don’t know why it was funny or whether they considered it funny at all.

So, the explanation of the joke is nobody understands the joke.

Oh, I love it.

Yeah. And it’s it just says so much about how the past is another country. We have the same brains as ancient peoples, and we take so much from their history and we can learn so much about them. But in the end, this is such a very different culture and… and so remote from our contemporary understandings. And that’s one of the greatest reasons that I can think of for studying old literature.

It’s almost like the love child of ‘The Dad Joke’, and ‘You Had To Be There’ merged and came up with this monstrosity. But… time travel! Like, there’s so many reasons to go back in time to be there in the room or to figure out what was actually said and what was done. This joke is the perfect reason to do time travel, I think.

I mean, some things are universal. In that same text, there are fart jokes.

Of course there are.

And I don’t wanna get into the fact I have another podcast that’s called Two Old Farts Talk Sci Fi. Didn’t realize how just ancient farts are. Julian, what was… what first drew you to The Epic of Gilgamesh?

Yeah. Thank you. So, I think I would have first heard about it in Alberto Manguel’s 2007 [CBC] Massey Lectures, “The City of Words.” And I don’t know if your listeners can remember this far back in history, but in those days, those far off days when the Internet was in its infancy, if you wanted queer content, you had to be a really good close reader. And so, anytime you heard anything that sounded even vaguely queer, you were like, oh, I’m gonna find that, and I’m gonna read it.

And so, he’s like, you know, Enkidu and Gilgamesh, it’s 4,000 years old. I’m like, I’m gonna find this 4,000-year-old gay thing, and I’m gonna read it. And so, I found it and I read it, and I was like, well, that was really good, but it was not quite as gay as I thought. So, then I was driven to read the notes. And in the notes, Andrew George, who’s kind of the preeminent Gilgamesh scholar in English says, well, the really gay part is in tablet 12.

There are 12 tablets. It’s in tablet 12. I’m like, great. So, I flip over to where tablet 12 should be, you know, right after tablet 11. And there’s another note.

Well, I put tablet 12 in a different part of the book. And so from that moment that I kind of took on the quest for the queer heart of Gilgamesh.

Amazing. Yeah. It’s funny because my… my first experience with Gilgamesh was in high school English class. So, we read Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, which is, of course, a line in Gilgamesh. And when you read it in context, it’s incredibly heartbreaking.

You know, my… my relationship with CanLit is super complicated, and that is something that started in high school because we had all of this assigned reading. And most of it was terrible. Most of it was, “I live on the Prairies, and I was abused as a child, and my husband is terrible. Woe is me.” And I assumed that this was gonna be one of those books.

And instead, it [In the Skin of a Lion] starts with this beautiful passage from The Epic of Gilgamesh and involves anarchist nuns and blowing stuff up and trying to kill industrialists and it’s great. So, as we studied this novel in-depth, we also ended up reading Epic of Gilgamesh because that’s the story. It’s sort of a de-gayed version, I guess. I remember they… they made Enkidu a woman. But yeah. So, then I… I read this original text, and at the time, we didn’t have a tablet 12.

I didn’t know about it until you told me about it. I’m like, wait. There’s another tablet? Yes. It was a huge, big deal for me in high school, though, because I was absolutely fascinated by it.

And, you know, I did pick up on the queer vibes even without tablet twelve there because they are really quite hard to miss. And it was lovely as an adult to find out that there’s way more of it than I had originally known. How about you, David?

Well, yeah, I can’t even recall if I took it in high school. Let’s just say it’s been a few years. But, one thing that drew me in and I did send a link, and I was so happy that Julian liked this because I would’ve… I would’ve been devastated if he didn’t, was a link from an episode called “Darmok,” in [Star Trek:] The Next Generation where basically everyone’s talking in metaphor, and they’re at a campfire. And Patrick Stewart, as Jean-Luc Picard, tells the story of Gilgamesh, and it’s just such a powerful, beautiful moment.

This is a story, a very ancient one from Earth. I’ll um… I’ll try and remember it. Gilgamesh, a king. Gilgamesh, a king at Uruk. He tormented his subjects. He made them angry. They cried out aloud, “Send us a companion for our king. Spare us from his madness.” Enkidu, a wild man from the forest.

Once we realized we’re gonna do this show, I, of course, read the piece, and it is just as powerful and just as emotional. And like for myself, you know, everyone takes something from a piece of… of… of work. And for me, because I had already lost my parents, my wife died almost two years ago. The feeling of grief, the feeling of loss, the feelings that go through Gilgamesh are ones that I identify with, and it’s just so well written. And the other thing I wanted to jump into before I forget… because I’m getting at that age where… where things tend to… aren’t retained, which in this culture and after a recent election is probably a good thing.

But the idea of repetition, I’m a huge proponent, and I love repetition. In fact, I have to say it again. I love repetition. And the way it does that with the dream sequence and with everything, I know we’re getting into more detail through the podcast, but what it’s able to do because I think as you do that, if you do it right, it’s even more powerful when you’ve repeated the words, but they mean something slightly different because of the repetition and what’s happened. So, that’s sort of what drew me into The Epic of Gilgamesh.

I wish I had read more of the different translations and the different things that they brought, but I’m sure that you guys will talk about that.

No. I mean, one of the incredible things about this poem, and maybe we’ll talk about this at the end too, is that it’s so old and yet it asks like these deep existential questions that are exactly the same for us. What do you do with your life in the face of death? You know, how do you cope with grief and with the loss of the central person in your life? I’m… I’m like, that’s so beautiful that it could have so much meaning for you.

Mhmm. Alright. So, we all three of us have read it, and I think Julian’s probably read the most number of translations. I think I’ve read two, and, David, it sounds like you’ve read one. I never know whether people have heard of it or read it.

So, can you explain for listeners who might not have read it or might not have read it in a long time, What is the story about?

Well, you had a great introduction in talking about, like, what it tries to raise for us or, like, what questions it asks us in the way that these very old stories do. But I can tell you the story in Gilgamesh if you like. So, Gilgamesh is an epic poem, which I like to say is a big, weird, old story that holds time together. And the oldest versions are about 4,000 years old, but the best known version, what we call the standard Babylonian versions, about 3,200. And it’s written in cuneiform, which is the oldest writing system in the world.

So, it’s this super cool thing that we have this story that still bears the traces of that transition between oral and written culture. And the standard Babylonian version has 12 clay tablets, which are broken. So, we only have about two thirds of the epic, but it remains amazingly coherent despite that. So, what’s it about? It’s about Gilgamesh, the young, incredibly hot, eighteen-foot-tall king of Uruk.

And they really make a big effort to make sure that we know how hot he is. They mentioned this so many times in the epic.

It’s so important that we know. It’s very important that we know that he’s very hot, and it’s very important that we know that this is an incredibly impressive city. And those two things, if you take nothing else away from Gilgamesh, you’re supposed to take that. So, Uruk is the first city state, like the first really big city in human history. And I’d like to read just a little bit of the description of it because that will come in towards the end, if that’s okay.

Absolutely.

So, this is the Sophus Helle translation, which is a very recent one and my favorite.

That’s the one that I just finished reading.

Yeah. It’s the…it’s the best one. For a couple of reasons which we can get to. So, see that wall white as wool, behold that bulwark that cannot be rivalled, and then climb the wall of Uruk, walk its length, survey the foundation, study the brickwork. So, we’re supposed to marvel at this incredible king and this incredible city and the technology that they’ve used to build the city, these kiln fired bricks, which was a big deal at the time. So, Gilgamesh is two thirds God and one third human. Don’t try to do the math.

He’s a magnificent warrior, but he’s a terrible king. He has too much energy, too much appetite. He’s too selfish and greedy, and he’s tyrannizing his people. He’s making them miserable. So, they pray to the gods.

And here’s another cool thing. One of my favorite things about the epic, if you’re familiar with kind of biblical or Greek or Norse stories, you’re like, a-ha, I know what happens now. Bad king, you pray to the gods. They’re gonna smite him. They’re gonna hit him with a lightning bolt.

No. The gods are like, yes. We can definitely help you. We’ll give him a guy. And so, they make Enkidu, for Gilgamesh.

So, he’s this being that’s created especially to be a companion and a match for Gilgamesh.

The match for his storm, I think, is the way that Helle translates it.

Oh, that’s beautiful. Yeah. And Enkidu is kind of a wild man. He’s covered in hair. He lives in the wilderness.

There’s this kind of nature/culture thing going on in the poem very much. And another cool thing is if you hear wild man and you’re familiar with our traditions, you might think, ah, well, he must hang out with apex predators. He’s a… he’s a bear. He’s a lion. No.

He hangs out with the gazelles and he eats grass, which I love. I love that he’s wild, but he’s not a predator. So, Enkidu is initiated into human culture by the priestess sacred sex worker Shamhat. And he and Gilgamesh have this fist fight meet cute where they beat each other up, and then they love each other desperately. And they go on adventures like you do.

So, they cut down the cedar forest. They kill the forest guardian Humbaba. Gilgamesh insults the goddess Ishtar. She sends the bull of heaven after them. They kill that too.

And if you’re thinking this whole ‘send Enkidu to make Gilgamesh less violent’ thing doesn’t seem to be working out, you are right. Enkidu is turning Gilgamesh’s energy outwards, but he’s still just as destructive. So, then the gods do punish him. They kill Enkidu, and this breaks Gilgamesh like a clay tablet. So, then we move into the sort of second part of the poem.

This happens almost at the midpoint. Gilgamesh is overcome with grief. He’s obsessed with his own mortality. He travels to the edge of the world seeking the only immortal human beings, Utnapishtim and his wife, who survived the great flood. And the flood is a really important reason why we even have this story.

But Gilgamesh demands the secret of immortality, so they test him. And this is kind of the last amazing thing about the poem. Gilgamesh does not triumph. He fails. He does not achieve immortality.

And so, they give him this kind of consolation prize. They show him where he can dive into the deep for this plant that will restore his life force. But he puts it down when he goes to have a bath and a snake eats it. So, Gilgamesh goes home with nothing. He’s not really superhuman anymore, he’s kind of shrunk to human size because no matter what he does, he can’t escape mortality. And as he approaches, he looks up and sees his city. And he repeats the same lines from the beginning of the poem, climb the wall of Uruk, walk its length, survey the foundation, study the brickwork. And we understand that he has accepted that his only immortality is in the city he built, the community he belongs to, and in this poem.

Yeah. And so much of that just seems reflected in the stories that we still tell. But it’s almost as if the most important part or at least the… the most important part to me, which is this failure and this almost embrace of mortality and immortality only through storied community is kind of the thing that we miss in a lot of our fiction now.

There’s a really beautiful moment, not in this version, but in the old Babylonian where he at one point, he runs into Šiduri, the innkeeper. She’s kind of the innkeeper at the edge of the world. And she tells… he says he’s looking for immortality, and she’s like, “Gilgamesh, go home. Drink some beer. Kiss your wife.”

You know? Live a human life.

Mhmm. There’s um, something about… because we refer to it in the beginning as love and death, but also rage and grief and how rage and grief are so intertwined. You know, you… you go through your grief process, and part of that is raging against what, you know, all of the future that’s been lost. It’s quite… sort of a wake up call that he needed to understand that because he had grown beyond his bounds and wasn’t at that point caring about anyone until he had to go through what your ordinary folk go through. But sorry, I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent.

My… my question is about Gilgamesh. And would you consider it a work of genre fiction or not?

I love the tangent. And I… I love this question. I’d actually really love to know, what you two think about that because I have some thoughts, but I’d love to know how you think it relates to genre.

I mean, for me, I think it… it does. I mean, can it be genre fiction before genre or even marketing had been invented yet? I don’t know. Maybe it’s in its own category. But I think it’s definitely relevant in the discussion of genre fiction because this is… this is our first superhero story, at least the first superhero story that gets written down and a far better one than the ones that we get now, at least in my opinion.

Obviously, you have the intervention of the gods. You have beings that are not quite human. You have the question of immortality in the first place. So, you have all of these genre elements. You know, do I think it’s genre fiction in a marketing sense?

Not really. But in the influence sense, I would say yes.

Yeah. And I would agree. It’s a long time between Gilgamesh and Frankenstein. But with Frankenstein, you’ve got a very similar kind of idea of us being able to somehow conquer death or to be able to create something. They created, and I don’t know if it’s [pronounced] Enkie-doo or En-key-doo.

Nobody knows.

No one knows. We have to ask the person that came up with that joke. But with Frankenstein, you’ve got a creature that is so contemplative and is so thinking about what life is and concepts of good and evil and everything else compared to the movies that followed it where Frankenstein, the monster, I should say, is… is not portrayed that way. And here you’ve got Gilgamesh and the other characters in it really in a contemplative kind of thing trying to understand what their life is about. And for the question really was about whether it’s genre or not, but there’s so many genre elements with depending on whether or not you count the idea of a fairy tale or a myth or a legend as genre.

I have a very large umbrella for genre, and, I’m actually using hand gestures right now, which is very handy in a podcast. Within that, I would count it as genre because it’s something like, for me, genre is something that can’t really happen in real life and… and someone who’s eighteen feet tall who can actually grab the bull, and they’re sounding like the bull of heaven, and you’ve got all of the stuff. You almost feel like Enkidu or the creature that was in the forest almost says like… like Enkidu is almost like the original green man myth. So, yeah, for me, I think it… it feels genre to me.

I mean, I love that connection to Frankenstein because if I recall rightly, one of the things the creature desperately wants is a friend. Like he talks about specifically wanting a companion. Yeah. I totally agree. Gilgamesh is one of our first examples of an epic, although cool thing, they wouldn’t have called it an epic.

They didn’t have the genre epic. They would have called it a series. And they probably would have interacted with it a lot like we interact with a TV series or a streaming series. Like, rather than sit down and binge all 12 tablets, maybe you just, like, read out your favorite one. You’d be like, why don’t we read out the bull of heaven? Like, that’s my favorite.

So, there’s something, again, like really connected to our kind of modern episodic storytelling in this epic. I think, and I’m gonna steal this from, Sophus Helle. I think it’s a mockumentary because.

Okay. I love this.

It is in a genre, actually. It’s in a genre called the king’s narrative, which you can imagine is a story that a king causes to be written all about how great he is and how he got that way. And that kind of is what Gilgamesh is. But nobody reading it would think it was actually written by Gilgamesh. So, it’s kind of a meta narrative.

It’s kind of a meta king’s narrative. It’s like a self… it’s a very self aware piece of writing. Like all those elements of meta-ness or postmodern-ness that we think are twentieth century are all in this poem, which talks about itself as a poem and as the wall of the city.

And then at the end, you have him kind of sitting down to write the epic, though.

Yeah. At the end, Gilgamesh kind of reveals himself as the speaker of the epic and as the person who’s making the record.

Which I kind of love too as a portrayal of somebody that is… it’s really not a flattering portrayal in the most part. Like, here’s this out-of-control guy doing terrible things on purpose or by accident, and he’s just a disaster. And in the end, he has to pull it together to be a king. It feels self deprecating in a way that somebody who was now older and wiser and reconciled to his own mortality would describe himself.

Oh, I love that reading. I think you’re so right. And so much of the epic is about being retrospective. You know, they’re always linking us to the distant past. And then like in this personal level, linking us to like youth and all of the mistakes we make in youth.

I think that’s a terrific reading.

Yeah. I would add another thing, which I just thought of a second ago when Rachel was talking about this, is that it’s not just about him realizing at the end that it’s the city walls. It’s the things he’s done to help people and the stuff that that has been built that will outlast him. And that’s sort of part of the idea of being able to live forever, but it’s also the writing itself that has passed on to the next generation.

That’s right. The poem makes this link between the wall and the stones of the wall and the poem itself. And there is this idea that maybe this poem will, will be as a, like a lasting legacy. I mean, they would have imagined it as a legacy within the Assyrian empire, not within the world that we know, but it did stick around.

Which brings me to my next point, which is one of the most exciting things about reading Gilgamesh now, it is 2025 when we’re recording this. When I read it in high school, there was less of it that had been discovered. And they are still finding new fragments of tablet. So, one of the discoveries is that the sex scene between Enkidu and Shamhat is twice as long as the scholars thought when I was 17, which is just great. I’m glad that we found that bit.

Great. Good job, archaeology. More importantly, I wanna talk about tablet 12 because I didn’t know about that when I was a kid. It was definitely not included in the version that I first read because that would have seared its way into my brain and stayed there forever the way the rest of the story did, but more so. So why is tablet 12 controversial, and is it canon?

I know the answer to this, but I want to hear Julian say it.

Okay. This is so important. Tablet 12 is canon. There are 12 clay tablets. They are all marked.

Tablet 11 says, there’s another tablet coming. Tablet 12 says, hi, I’m tablet 12. The problem is that there’s the one big story. Right? This big arc of Gilgamesh’s, transformation.

And it takes 11 tablets to tell, and then there’s tablet 12. And tablet 12, it’s clearly linked. It tells a different story, but it’s about death. It’s about the underworld, but the tone is different and the characters are kind of reset. It’s like another playthrough through the same idea.

Enkidu is alive and it tells a different story of losing him to the underworld. And it does contain the only intact part of the epic where Enkidu makes direct reference to having sex with Gilgamesh. And for some reason, tablet 12 makes translators lose their minds. And I’m not talking about, like, Victorian… I’m talking about twentieth century, twenty-first century translators. They do bizarre things when they get to tablet 12.

They leave it out. [Maureen Gallery] Kovacs takes it out and then writes a long defensive note about how it just wasn’t very good, so she didn’t translate it. Andrew George, the definitive scholar in English of Gilgamesh, as I’d said, takes tablet 12 out of the sync sequence and moves it in with the older stories. He’s like, well, this one’s just a translation of an older story. Sophus Helle is the only major translator who just leaves it where it goes.

And as a scholar, I find this bizarre behavior to leave out one twelfth of an ancient text because you feel weird about it. And as a queer, I find it very suspect.

Yeah. And it… it is very weird, and it’s very campy. Like, the story is Gilgamesh is playing ball and he loses his ball in the underworld and he’s well, actually, he doesn’t tell Enkidu to go get it. Enkidu volunteers and Gilgamesh is like, what are you doing? Why?

And then Enkidu goes to the underworld and gets stuck there, and they summon him back as a ghost. And then he describes what the underworld is like. And I can see this. It’s… it’s really funny. It’s… I read it, and it made me smile.

It made me laugh. It… it definitely has a more comedic tone than the rest of it, but I can also imagine that it’s theologically actually really significant.

Yeah. I think that’s right. And I am not an expert. I should say I’m not an expert in ancient texts. So, what you’ll get from me is what I’ve gathered from reading and listening to people who know more about it.

But my understanding is that this tablet probably is some kind of ceremonial recitation, which is great that it’s also funny. And then it is Gilgamesh, you know, his… it’s not… doesn’t happen in this version, but Gilgamesh is eventually going to become a god of the underworld. He’s going to become the judge of the underworld. And so, he is deeply linked with, like, all knowledge about the underworld. And this tablet gives you the fate of everyone in the underworld linked to how they are cared for by the people they leave behind in the world.

So, it’s about the relationship between the living and the dead and what you need to do in the living world to ensure that your death is not completely miserable because the underworld sucks. It’s like you eat dust and for some reason you have to dress up as a bird. And unless you have people to make sacrifices for you, you have these the series of, like, really miserable fates. And so, it’s goofy and it’s also a repository of what would be like deep theological knowledge.

And if you do consider it part of the same continuity of tablets 1 to 11, it actually sort of explains some of the bizarre decisions that the characters make in those earlier tablets.

Yeah. Like, if we think about maybe, you know, when Enkidu first meets Enkidu or En-kigh-doo or En-key-doo, depending on how you wanna say it, first meets Gilgamesh’s mother, he… she says something, which is broken. We’re not entirely sure what she says, and it makes him miserable. And it’s possible that one of the things she says is, well, you have no family. There’ll be no one to mourn for you after you die.

Because the next thing that happens is Gilgamesh is like, hey, don’t worry about it. We’re gonna go out. We’re gonna cut down the cedar forest and kill Humbaba. That’s going to make an immortal name for us. So that will give us a kind of immortality.

So, you won’t have to worry about that. And then when they kill Humbaba, he curses Enkidu, and he says, “May there be no one but Gilgamesh to mourn you.” So, may you have no family to mourn you. And then when he dies, Gilgamesh performs these incredibly elaborate mourning rituals. He… he has all of this treasure gathered, he makes all of these sacrifices to everyone he can think of in the underworld, and he raises like a huge statue to Enkidu.

And then at the end, we have this kind of litany of what happens to you in the underworld. So, I agree, Rachel. I think it’s all really powerfully linked and it’s only our ideas, our aesthetic ideas about what literature should look like that even make it seem weird to us at all.

Mhmm. I agree. But you knew that.

Yeah. I thought that, you know, if… if these people are just making this shit up, Like, if you start going in 12 and just all the odd things that happen, you think, well, that’s what fiction is. That’s what writing is. And back then, it’s possible that a lot of people just simply read these… storytellers read these stories from memory, from just recited it without having to, you know, look at a teleprompter, so to speak. Let’s, and that would mean that the story itself might change with each rendition of… of someone telling it.

Yeah. The written tablet at this point is really just a backup. You know, it’s like having a save. The story would have lived in recitation, and it would have lived in ceremony and performance. Yeah.

I wanna come back to something you started with Rachel, which is that this was a… a really different culture. Like, they share so much with us. They share these deep existential questions. But there are any number of reasons why it would have made perfect sense to organize the story this way to describe in that time. He could have been anthologizing related stories.

It could have been a kind of coda to the original story. We just don’t know because we don’t have access to his aesthetics. But… and because we’re trying to impose, if I may, we’re trying to impose a kind of a… a colonial, like a retroactive colonization onto Gilgamesh, you know, the story from Iraq that we inherit from nineteenth century Assyriology that wants it to be a literary ancestor to European literature, and a… and a biblical precursor through the flood story. So, we wanna fit it into our narrative.

Yeah. So, you mentioned the flood, and we haven’t really talked about the significance of the flood and how it sort of reflects Gilgamesh’s own personal narrative. Do you wanna say a little bit about that?

Yeah. So, the story of the flood is like this lost knowledge, this lost history that Gilgamesh goes and brings back to his culture. So, he’s also a scholar. He’s also someone who maintains the link to history. You know, Gilgamesh is in our deep past.

It’s set in the deep past of the person who wrote it. And then he goes to the even deeper past to find the story of the flood.

And… and the whole… some of the context that I learned about it in high school was this is… this is the same flood as in the Bible, or this is the same hero’s journey arc that Joseph Campbell rattles on about. And to me, that’s a form of violence to the original narrative. That’s… it is its own thing. It may… and it definitely influenced those later stories, but it doesn’t deserve to have the pattern of those early stories kind of hammered onto it.

No. They were influenced by it. Like Yeah. The… and this is very well documented. The biblical story of the flood is nicked from Gilgamesh with the names changed.

You had the serial numbers file filed off. Right? So, it is the same story, but it’s not two separate accounts. They’re one account. And then someone else taking that same story and doing what you do with stories, which is repurposing it, repurposing it to make the point that that writer wanted to make, to tell that culture what they wanted to say using the idea of the flood.

One of the reasons we have Gilgamesh at all is because, you know, British scholars were desperate for evidence, you know, of the Bible, right, as a definitive text, and looked for these… these flood accounts as ways to support it. But what’s interesting about this is not that there might be… I mean, it’s lovely to fantasize that we all made a record at the same time of a universal flood. What a beautiful idea. But what is more demonstrable is that we are compelled by the idea of a great flood, and we love to tell that story, over and over again, for in each culture.

Mhmm. And then the sort of Victorian story of the discovery and the search gets echoed in the twenty-first century’s Hobby Lobby story, which is one of my favorite things to have happened because, you know, we’re… we’re Canadian. We don’t have hobby lobby, but it’s a huge chain in the US and it’s run by very, very homophobic Christian fundamentalists who were very keen to not only torture their own workers in terms of things like health care and… and benefits, but, also carve a place for themselves in history and culture. And so, they ended up in Iraq, trading with ISIS for antiquities and actually got part of a tablet.

Yeah. The dream tablet, which is, nothing to do with the flood, which is like Gilgamesh having all of these frightening dreams as they go off to cut down the cedar forest. Yeah. Which feels appropriate somehow.

It does. It does. It’s so weird.

Well, you still can’t make this up. But anyways, one thing of Julian is… I think that there’s only so many stories that have… have carried down from the… all the generations, and it’s… it’s rare for something written so long ago to be relevant and moving to a modern audience. And I was just wondering, what is it about Gilgamesh that makes it so enduring?

Yeah. I love this question, and I would really love to hear your answers to this as well. For me, I think it’s because it is so old. And yet, again, you know, the question at its heart is existential. It feels like a completely modern question.

How shall we, again… how shall we live in the face of death? That question has not changed in four thousand years. And its answer is so humane. Right? Its answer is not make war and be a triumphal king.

Its answer is love your community, you know, build for it, take care of it, love other people, and enjoy your human life.

I would agree completely. I think that was what touched me when I was 17. But it’s something that is just so much more important now when we live in really terrible times. We’re kind of called upon to make sense of the world and our place in it and… and how do we ensure the continuity of the things that are… are most important to us. And it does give us an answer. And what I think is even more important is that it gives us a difficult answer.

And it doesn’t say, well, this… this, you know, dear reader / listener, this is what you are supposed to do. This is how to make a meaningful life. It says, this is one guy’s really messy journey to figure out the answer for himself, and it went horribly wrong in a number of ways. And maybe you can take something from it, but in the end, we’re not gonna give you a definitive playbook for life.

But it also went right in a number of ways as well because he did meet a warrior that was his equal. He became a best friend, went on a journey, and sort of like trying to live a life that's something that matters. You know, the things that we say and do matter. How we treat the living and the dead matter. Who we are as… as people, how we relate to each other, the paying it forward, the trying to be a better person, trying to learn from our mistakes, trying to build a community, and trying to not be a dick.

That’s one of the things that’s on our Discord page. One of the very first things we did for Wizards & Spaceships Discord page was, “Don’t be a dick.” It’s important, and maybe that’s what the message… partly of the message. Obviously, I’m glossing over it a bit.

No. No. No. But don’t be a dick, and don’t throw a bull’s dick at a goddess. Just don’t do it.

That should be the oldest joke, but, anyways… [laughter]

So, speaking of being a dick, let’s talk about the main characters as problematic queer icons. So, even in my very neutered translation that I read in high school, it was clear that there was some kind of relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu that was not what we would call in our era heterosexual. So, what’s the role of sexuality in Gilgamesh?

Oh, man. It has it’s such a powerful force all through the poem. It’s this kind of you know, it’s, it powerfully connects people and it powerfully drives them into wrong action. So, most famously, I guess, sexuality is the way Enkidu enters into the human, right? Shamhat, the priestess, makes him into a thinking self aware being through sexuality.

Like, she… she fucks him into rationality. But sexuality is also the way that Gilgamesh terrorizes his city. Right? He’s terrorizing the women of his city sexually. And it’s Enkidu who steps in, puts his foot… literally puts his foot in the door, and says, you’re not going to do that anymore.

And the sort of famous sexual section of tablet 12, maybe one of the reasons people don’t like it is because it is… inescapably linked sex and death. Right? So, may I… may I read you…

Yes.

The… the relevant passage? So, Enkidu is essentially telling Gilgamesh why the underworld sucks so much.

And one of the reasons is that the body decays and just like in the poem, it’s the larger poem where Gilgamesh is horrified to see maggots dropping out of the nose of his dead friend. There’s an indelible image. Enkidu gives an indelible image of the body and death. So, he says, “My friend, my penis, which you touched to please your heart, is being eaten by a moth like a threadbare cloth. My friend, my crotch, which you touch to please your heart, is filled with dust like a crack in the ground.”

So, we get the sense there of sexuality as this really joyful kind of playful experience, but again, something that is lost and needs to be grieved when you’re… when the person dies. I don’t know, Rachel, what did you make of sex in Gilgamesh?

Yeah. I mean, I thought the whole idea of sex being both your entry and your exit from life. Not that Enkidu isn’t alive before the very, very long sex marathon with the… the temple priestess. But he’s not alive in a way that we would recognize as human, you know. And as… as soon… it’s almost like if we wanna go back to the kind of biblical comparison. It’s a really interesting contrast and parallel with the idea of… of the apple in the Garden of Eden. So, you have this state of innocence and the fall from that.

And so, when he, you know, when he has sex with Shamhat and, he becomes human and he becomes self aware, all of the animal friends suddenly flee from him. He’s lost that innocence and that purity, but he’s gained self awareness. And it’s not presented as a negative thing the way the later bible story would have it. It’s not a sin. It’s not anything that he’s judged for, but it is a change of state into something that is nature, into something that we recognize as human.

Yeah. And it’s something you can’t go back from. Right?

Yeah.

So, even though it’s something to be grieved. And when Enkidu is dying, when the gods kill him and he is slowly wasting away, he curses her for making him a part of human culture.

He, you know, he says I would have been better off staying in the wilds and then the gods have to reprove him and say, you know, no, she did a really nice thing for you. And he’s like, yeah, okay. She did a really nice thing for me. But first he’s mad.

You know. Full support to Shamhat. She… she did what, what she was asked to do, and, you know, very enthusiastically from the account. So…

Yeah. There is one of the things that… Jimmy Carter passed away recently, and he was… there were memes and various things on Pinterest and stuff that quoted him as saying, “Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world well before Christ was born, and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things, he never said that gay people should be condemned.” So, this is something that we should be aware of and that a translation shouldn’t shy away from what’s actually happened. We have to… we’re much more aware nowadays of being more accepting, but the tide is a bit turning as well.

So, I think even possibly in Alberta, I think there were some laws or things that they’re trying to do this. I think this story shouldn’t be changed or should… we shouldn’t rewrite history. This is the story of two men in a relationship that you’ve lost something. One of them has died and the other person is grieving, but it’s important that there was love there and that they cared about each other, and you shouldn’t white wash or change what the story is about.

I think it’s also a really interesting illustration. Like, especially in North America, we have this vision of history is one of… of constant progress. So, in the past, people were bigoted and homophobic, and now we’re more enlightened. And even when we talk about Alberta or the US or, you know, some of the backlash, that scene is going backwards. And yet in this, we have such a beautiful story of queer acceptance from the entire community.

So, when… when the gods create Enkidu and Gilgamesh is dreaming about a meteor falling to earth and he holds it and loves it as if it’s his wife, and then he dreams of an axe and he holds it and holds it and loves it as if it’s his wife. And his mom is like, this means that you’re gonna be the person who’s most important to you. Go! Go on, son. Go out and meet him. It… it’s just… it’s really cool.

And, for a 17-year-old reading that, it was a very different narrative than anything that I was used to, and it’s quite eye opening. And I think it’s a model to say, well, no. Like, there is nothing inherent in humanity or human history that would make us need to be homophobic. It’s… it’s an unnatural state of affairs that is kind of imposed by institutions. It’s not something that is inherent to how we think as people.

Yeah. And I mean, that’s one of the beautiful things about reading the epic. It’s not just that there’s a relationship that we would call queer in it. It’s that there’s clearly just a different kind of understanding of what sexuality is and what it’s for. I mean, Shamhat is a sacred sex worker.

She does sex work for the temple. That’s a totally ordinary part of the culture, and it is a celebrated… she’s a celebrated character and a really powerful character. So, there’s a kind of a sexual and a kind of emotional expansiveness, I think, in this world that… that we could use. Like, we could use a world in which people would say, you know, expect Gilgamesh to get married. And also, he would have this passionate relationship with Enkidu, and all of those things would be… and perhaps visit the temple.

And, all of those things would be part of, like, his experience of sexuality. And there are also… transphobia is also ahistorical, right? Like, not in this story, but in, for example, the descent of Ishtar, there are people, priestesses, who we would now call transgendered people or something, you know, in that category of person who are, who saved the world, like they’re absolutely essential, sacred beings and full human beings. So, when I encounter arguments that talk about transgenderness or other modes of engaging with gender as something new and some kind of fashion, I just wanna say, well, you know, you, you haven’t done your reading, like thousands of years ago, these people… And it… and I’m not making it up.

It’s attested to right in the text. It’s imprinted on the tablet. It’s right there.

Trans rights. Yeah. That’s right.

There’s also one other thing which we haven’t really touched on, but we can just talk just very shortly about is the idea. Because I had never heard of this concept until there was a movie some years ago called, “First Knight.” [Note: the term ‘first night’ is not what that film was about, but, according to Wikipedia, The Greek historian Herodotus mentions a similar custom in ancient Libya]. The idea that a king has the first opportunity… because at that time, women had to… not have had any sexual relations before marriage, but the king would have sex with that woman before she actually lays down with her husband. And that whole con[cept]… and that shows up in this… in the text. And that’s also one of the reasons maybe why Enkidu fights it.

But you… among all the many other re… there were thousand reasons for him to fight Gilgamesh. But this idea of ‘First Night’ is such a crazy concept. It’s… it’s almost like bringing a religion like, somehow, because of some religious value, the king must do this first, and I don’t understand the basis for it.

Yeah. Let’s talk about that. So, what I understand from my teachers, so Bruce King is someone I studied this text with, is that… so the epic knows this is bad. In fact, this is not… this would not have been a custom of either the culture that the person is writing about or his own culture. So, it’s not an Assyrian thing.

It’s not a Sumerian thing. It is an idea of what the worst possible king could be. And the worst possible king would be someone who would. Now for us, we would say, you know, who would sexually abuse the people who are part of his city, but also for them, it would be someone who would disrupt every marriage. So, who would disrupt every social institution, break apart every social bond and destroy the very thing he’s supposed to sustain, which is the life of the community. So, this act is like the most fundamental disruptive, tyrannical thing he could possibly do.

And that’s what it’s doing there, is to say, like, this is the worst king because we wanna take him and make him into the best king.

Mhmm. And it’s interesting too, in that, that it… it feels like it’s a portrait of a society in change. And we think about ancient societies as kind of static, and that’s, of course, not true or we wouldn’t be here. But you see that change happen within the epic itself, which is another thing about it that’s really, really cool.

Yeah. I… I would love to know which things you’re thinking about in particular, but one of the things we definitely see is a transformation in how gender is being understood. Right? We’re at a… it’s being written at a moment when women are being, beginning to be kind of pushed out of spiritual and religious power, and like male gods are becoming more central. Sophus Helle talks about this.

And we don’t have great attestation for exactly what’s happening. But I think you can see that in the text. You can see that in the role of Ishtar, who is the patron god of the city, but somehow also is someone that Gilgamesh needs to insult and repudiate and elevate other gods ahead of. But tell me what you were thinking of.

I was thinking about the building of the city itself and to look at all of these new technologies that we have. Look at how beautiful our city is. Look at how huge our city is. And we don’t think about ancient civilizations getting excited about technology, but this is… this is completely what’s happening at the beginning and the end of the story. And it is not… again, it’s one of those universal themes of the narrative that feels instantly familiar when you read it.

Yeah. In… in a sense, it is science fiction. It’s just science fiction for making really good bricks.

So, any final thoughts, Julian or Rachel because I think we’re gonna wrap up and talk about what we’re all sort of working on, but any final thoughts about, The Epic of Gilgamesh?

Tablet 12 is canon. That’s if you take it, one thing away from this podcast.

Yeah. I’m gonna go with that too.

Yeah. Sounds good to me. So, what are people working on? Do you wanna start with, Julian first?

I mean, I probably have the least to plug. I’m writing a novel, but God knows when you can read that.

But it’s really good.

Aw. You’re the best.

I read a lot of it.

It’s true. You’re one of like three people who’ve read… read a lot of it. I just started volunteering for the Victoria Festival of Authors, which is a great local writer’s festival here in the fall. And a lot of the events are online.

And one of the principles is to invite a lot of indigenous writers. So, it’s a wonderful opportunity, especially the online events, to encounter the work of indigenous writers in what we now call Canada. And I did, the only other thing I could possibly plug is that I did make a patch that says “Tablet 12 is Canon.” So, on the off chance that somebody wants one of those, they can get in touch with me.

And, Rachel, what do you got going on?

Well, probably the day that this airs is also the day that my second book comes out, which Julian’s read.

So excited.

Yeah. So, this is Blight. This is the second story in The Sleep of Reason series following Cascade, which came out in 2022. It has been a while. You finally get to catch up with these characters.

And if you like problematic queer icons, you will really enjoy this book. And let’s see. I am working on the third book. I am also working on two sequels to my other project, which is The Sad Bastard Cookbook, Food You Can Make So You Don’t Die. And yeah.

So, one of them is gonna be written by me and Zilla, who wrote the original Sad Bastard Cookbook, and it’s just a straight up sequel. Second one is gonna be written by our friend Rohan O’Duill, who actually knows how to cook and is good at it and does it for a living as a professional chef. And he’s going to be writing one for exhausted parents. So, look for those coming out soon as well. And David?

I’ve got a couple poems coming out, I think, in, Aurora Borealis, which is a magazine that should be, it’ll be, out well before this, episode is, dropped, and we should be, making headway. Hopefully, I will have a poem shortlisted for the Aurora Award. I’ve just got my fingers crossed. Plans are for Rachel and I to be at the Seattle WorldCon in August. And hopefully, we’ll be able to connect with some people there and maybe get a couple episodes and possibly try, knock on wood, fingers crossed, to somehow get on the programming, but you never know about those kinds of things.

But certainly a lot of writing, a lot of reading, a lot of arithmetic. I don’t know at this point.

Alright. Well, thanks again so much, Julian, for joining us. I appreciate it.

This is brilliant. Thank you.

I’ve been looking forward to this episode for a really long time. I’m glad we got to do it.

Wizards & Spaceships is a Night Beats production. It’s written and produced by David L. Clink and Rachel A. Rosen. Our theme music is by Rick Innis. You can find more of his music at anythingthatgrooves on SoundCloud. Our logo is by Marten Norr. See more of his work at flowerprincedraws on Instagram.

Our soundbites are from Pixabay.

At least half of our dad jokes are by Rohan O’Duill.

You can find show notes, other episodes, and links to our other projects at wizardsandspaceships.ca.