S2E3 - Gilgamesh and Enkidu: Medicine for the Lessons Life Has to Repeat

In this episode of Story Medicine, we explore the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is one of the oldest stories ever written, pressed into clay tablets over four thousand years ago, and it still carries medicine that feels just as relevant today.

Gilgamesh is the mightiest king in the world... and the most alone. When the gods send him an equal - the wild man Enkidu, made of earth and water - his life transforms. But the friendship that follows doesn't complete its work, and when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh sets out on a desperate quest to conquer death itself. He travels to the ends of the earth. He fails. And in that grief and in that failure, the medicine he needed all along finally lands.

This story speaks to anyone who has ever pursued achievement, legacy or busyness to avoid sitting with grief. Anyone who has contacted a part of themselves that needed integrating, and found it took over rather than found its proper place. And to anyone waiting to be fully present until things are different than they are.

The episode includes the complete story told in full, an exploration of the medicine it may be offering, and three practical integration exercises to help you embody that medicine.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Welcome to Story Medicine. I'm Joe Summerfield. For over 20 years, I've been working to better understand and support people in navigating this human experience. I've come to believe that stories are encoded with the collective wisdom of all who have come before us, that they bring us into connection with the collective unconscious, and contain treasure waiting to be decoded. This podcast explores traditional tales through that lens. Each episode offers a story told in full, an exploration of the medicine it may be offering, and three practices to help you to integrate that medicine. Today's story comes from ancient Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers in what is now Iraq. It is the great epic of Gilgamesh, and it's amongst the oldest written stories in human history. The standard Babylonian version was compiled around twelve hundred BCE by the scribe Sinlekiunini, drawing on Sumerian sources that reach back as far as two thousand one hundred BCE. It was preserved on clay tablets. Drawing on Sumerian sources that reach back as far as two thousand one hundred BCE. The epic was preserved on clay tablets, buried for thousands of years and excavated in the nineteenth century from the library of Ashur Banipal in Nineveh. It carries medicine about grief, mortality, and the hard won return to what is ordinary and real. Let's begin. His name was Gilgamesh, two thirds god and one third man, so the tablets tell us, blessed by the gods with extraordinary strength, a face like the sun at midday, and a restless driving energy that could not be stilled. He had seen the countries of the world and brought back wisdom from before the flood. He had built the great walls of Uruk and the sacred precinct of Ayana, and he had carved his deeds into stone so that they would outlast him. He was magnificent. Magnificent and alone. There was no one in all of Uruk who could meet him as an equal, no one who could stand beside him without flinching. He took what he wanted when he wanted it. He drove the young men to exhaustion with ceaseless contests. The people cried out to the gods for relief, and the gods listened. The goddess Aruru pressed her hands into the earth to reach clay and water, and she shaped a man unlike any other, wild, enormous, covered in hair, and as strong as the rocky hills. This was Enkidu. He ran with the gazelles in the grasslands, he drank at the watering holes beside the lions. He knew nothing of cities, nothing of walls or thrones or ambition. He was made of the same earth that had made everything, and he lived in it the way that the animals did. Word of this wild man reached Uruk eventually. A trapper came before the king and described what he had seen, a man who moved through wilderness like a force of nature, who filled in his traps and set the animals free. Gilgamesh listened, and something stirred within him. Gilgamesh listened, and something stirred within him. He had dreamt of something falling from the sky, a great meteor landing in the streets of Uruk. In his dream crowds had gathered, but the meteor was too heavy for him to lift alone. He found himself drawn to it, unable to look away. His mother Ninsun interpreted his dream. A companion is coming, one who will never forsake you. Gilgamesh wondered whether perhaps this wild man might be his companion. Through a chain of encounters, Enkidu was drawn toward the city, and when he finally walked through the gates of Uruk, he came face to face with Gilgamesh, and the streets shook with their meeting. And they fought, of course they fought. Two forces of nature could not meet in any other way. They grappled in the streets, in the doorways, their contests shaking the walls like cedar trees in a storm. And then at the height of it, something shifted. Gilgamesh stepped back. The rage left him, and he looked at the man before him, this wild, extraordinary creature, and he recognized something that he had never encountered before, his equal. From that meeting something entirely new began. Enkidu became the companion that Gilgamesh had never had, the one who would not flinch, who stood beside him without flattery or fear, who saw him clearly and chose him. And in Enkidu's presence something in Gilgamesh opened that had never opened before. Together it seemed they were unstoppable. Gilgamesh proposed that they journey to the great Cedar Forest, sacred realm of the gods guarded by the terrifying Humbaba, to cut its trees and to win immortal glory. Enkidu resisted. The forest was sacred, he said. Humbaba was its guardian for a reason. Mortals had no business there. Enkidu knew the order of the wild and understood that some boundaries exist because they should. But Gilgamesh pressed, and Enkidu, through love and loyalty, went along with him anyway. By the time they stood before Humbaba, Gilgamesh's nerve began to fail him, and now it was Enkidu who urged him forward. They slew Humbaba and cut the sacred trees. Then they turned for home, floating the timber back to a rook on a raft. When Gilgamesh arrived in the city, he washed the dust of the journey from himself and put on his royal robes, and it was then, seeing him restored, golden and triumphant, that the goddess Ishtar was struck with desire. She came to him and offered herself as his bride. Gilgamesh refused her, bluntly, cruelly even, listing the lovers that she had destroyed before him one by one. So Ishtar sent the bull of heaven down to destroy him in revenge. Enkidu wrestled the bull by the horns, and then held it by the tail while Gilgamesh thrust his sword between its shoulders and killed it. Then Enkidu wrenched off one of the bull's haunches and hurled it at Ishtar on the city wall, shouting that he would do the same to her if he could. So the gods assembled. Two mortals had slain Humbaba, sacred guardian of the forest. Two mortals had killed the bull of heaven. One of them must die, and the gods chose Enkidu. Enkidu fell ill. He lay on his bed in Uruk and grew weaker day by day while Gilgamesh sat beside him. In the night Enkidu dreamed of the underworld, a grey, lightless place he called the house of dust, where the dead wore feathers like birds and ate clay for food, where great kings worked as servants, and where everything that had been built above ground dissolved into shadow. He woke from the dream cursing. He cursed the trapper who had first spotted him in the wild. He cursed Shamhat, the woman who had drawn him toward the city and towards this friendship that had brought him to his deathbed. And then slowly he withdrew those curses. The god Shamash had spoken to him in the dark, and reminded him of what he'd been given bread and wine, fine garments, a great companion and honour. And then Hidu remembered. He remembered the feasts, the adventures, and the man sitting even now beside his bed. And he blessed Shamat instead. For twelve days his condition worsened, and then he was gone. Gilgamesh refused to believe it. He sat beside the body and would not leave. He called on the mountains to mourn, on the rivers, the wild animals, and on the people of Uruk. He tore his hair, he ripped his clothes, he wept without ceasing. He stayed for six days and seven nights, watching the face of his friend for any signs of return, until his dear friend's body made denial impossible. And then Gilgamesh rose. He dressed himself, not in the robes of a king, but in animal skins, and he walked out into the wilderness. He was now a man who had looked at death, not in battle where there's noise in the press of your own aliveness, but up close in a room, in the face of someone he had loved, and he was afraid. He set out to find Utnapishtim, the one man to whom the gods had granted immortality. If such a thing existed he would find it, he would demand the secret. He, Gilgamesh, would not meet the same fate as his friend. The journey took him to the ends of the earth. He passed through the twin peaks of Mount Mashu, through a tunnel of complete darkness beneath the mountain, walking twelve leagues without a thread of light, until he emerged into a garden of jewelled trees beside an unknown sea. There he met Siduri, a woman who kept a tavern at the edge of the world. She looked at the great king, dressed in skins, hollow eyed and grief worn, and she spoke plainly to him. She said When the gods created humankind, they allotted death to mankind, but life they kept in their own hands. As for you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full, make merry day and night. Let your clothes be clean, let your head be washed, cherish the little ones who hold your hand, let a wife delight in your embrace. This alone is the concern of humankind. Gilgamesh listened, and then he walked right past her deeper into the world's edge, still searching. He found Urshanabi, the ferryman, and crossed the waters of death, and then he found Utna Pishtim, at last the immortal at the far shore of the world. And Utnapishtim told him what Siduri had already told him, the gods fixed death for mankind. There is no door, there is no secret, this is the order of things. But then Utnapishtim offered him a test. Could Gilgamesh, the great, relentless king, simply stay awake for seven days? Gilgamesh sat down to prove himself, and he fell immediately asleep. Utnapishtim's wife baked a loaf of bread each day that Gilgamesh slept, and when Gilgamesh finally woke there were seven loaves before him, the first hard and dry, the last still fresh. The seven days of his sleeping counted out in bread, he couldn't deny it. Before Gilgamesh left empty handed, Utnapishtham's wife urged her husband to give him something for his journey. Utnapishtim relented and told Gilgamesh of a plant that grew at the bottom of the sea. It would not give him immortality, but it would restore youth. So Gilgamesh dove down to the ocean floor and wrenched the plant free. He carried it all the way home. On the last night before arriving back to Uruk, Gilgamesh set the plant on the bank of a pool and went down into the water to wash. A serpent smelled the plant's sweetness and rose from the water. It swallowed the plant whole and slid back down beneath the surface, shedding its skin as it went. Gilgamesh sat down on the bank and wept. He was exhausted, and then he rose and he walked home. He came to the walls of Uruk, the walls that he had built, the walls that had stood all this while, and he looked at them. He began to speak to Ur Shinabi, the ferryman, who had made this last part of the journey with him. He spoke of the walls, their dimensions, the precision of their laying. He spoke of the orchards, of the temple, of the foundations of fired brick. He didn't speak of glory, he spoke of what remained. And so the oldest story ends with the medicine Siduri had offered at the edge of the world finally having landed, in a man standing at his own walls, seeing them perhaps for the first time. Part two The Medicine Let's explore the medicine that this story may be offering us. Before we begin, if you know somebody who might appreciate this story's medicine right now, please share this episode with them. And if you're enjoying the podcast and would like to help others to find it too, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. Thank you. This story opens with a problem, a king who has never truly met anyone. Gilgamesh is immensely capable, but that capability, in the complete absence of anyone who can meet him, turns destructive. He is restless and raging from a kind of relational emptiness. No one holds their ground, no one pushes back. As he moves through Uruk, everything yields, and in that endless yielding there is no encounter, there's no friction, there's no real contact with another person. I think this speaks to something that we might recognise in our own lives, perhaps not in quite such dramatic form, but the pattern is familiar. The person whose competence means that they're rarely challenged, the party in a relationship who wins out every time, the leader whose authority means that people tell them what they want to hear. The individual who is somehow always in charge, always the strongest person in the room, and who is, underneath that, profoundly alone. Gilgamesh is a man starved of genuine encounter. The tablets tell us that he is two thirds divine and one third human, and again, I think in a sense this is a story about all of us, about a process that we all face. We all begin life as infants as the centre of our own universe, unindividuated, in some sense boundless, not yet aware of the limits that will eventually define us. As we grow, we come to encounter the true order of things, our limits, other people's limits, the true scale of time, and eventually mortality itself. The fall from the feeling of divinity. This is a reckoning that we all face in some form. Gilgamesh is simply experiencing it in the most extreme version possible, because his divine portion appears to give him genuine cause to push back against what he feels is his birthright to omnipotence and immortality. And so this is his journey, and throughout the story he seems to display a level of strong headedness that necessitates the escalation of the medicine again and again. Gilgamesh resists every dose, and the gods have to keep escalating. A wild man of extraordinary power isn't enough. He recruits him into more conquest. And so the wild man has to die. The wisest counsel imaginable from a woman at the edge of the world isn't enough. He walks straight past her. He has to fail a simple test. He has to lose the plant to a snake while washing himself. He has to exhaust every last strategy before the medicine lands. The gods essentially having to turn up the volume again and again because Gilgamesh keeps finding a way not to hear. But I don't think that we're so different. Most of us will recognise lessons that return in different forms because we didn't fully receive them the first time. The relationship that breaks in the same way as the last one, the burnout that arrives again because we didn't change what caused the first one. The grief that we thought we had processed that surfaces untouched years later. Life will keep escalating the medicine until we can no longer avoid it. And there is another dimension to this. Gilgamesh's resistance is part of the same quality that makes him magnificent, his drive, his refusal to accept limits, his relentless forward motion. These are the same forces that built the walls of Uruk, that carved his deeds into stone. His gift and his wound are the same thing. And perhaps again there is medicine here for us, in that what we most need to integrate is rarely separate from our greatest strength. It's often woven into it. So back to the story. In the first instance, what the gods create in response to his condition is a meeting with a complementary equal. Enkidu is shaped from clay and water, earth and the primordial. He isn't simply a rough man without education, he is humanity before the split, before civilization drew its line between the human world and the natural one. He belongs to the earth in the same way that the animals do, and the way that some part of each of us does, a part that perhaps we have inadvertently worked hard to overcome. He has no hunger for legacy, no need for his name to outlast him. He is present in a way that Gilgamesh has never been. It is through fighting and meeting limits that they recognize each other. We might understand this as an encounter with the shadow, with the parts of ourselves that we've rejected or never developed. And that's true, but I think what's happening here is even more specific than that. Because Enkidu isn't simply what Gilgamesh has pushed away. He carries something that Gilgamesh has never had access to at all, a capacity for genuine encounter, for real contact with another person, with the creaturely world, and with his own nature. And I think what the meeting with Enkidu does is restore in Gilgamesh something that his relentless, crowding out energy has displaced. You cannot truly meet another person if the only mode available to you is dominance. Welcome to Story Medicine. I'm Joe Summerfield. For over twenty years I've been working to better understand and support people in navigating this human experience. I've come to believe that stories are encoded with the collective wisdom of all who have come before us, that they bring us into connection with the collective unconscious, and contain treasure waiting to be decoded. This podcast explores traditional tales through that lens. Each episode offers a story told in full, an exploration of the medicine it may be offering, and three practices to help you to integrate that medicine. Today's story comes from ancient Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers in what is now Iraq. It is the great epic of Gilgamesh, and it's amongst the oldest written stories in human history. The standard Babylonian version was compiled around twelve hundred BCE by the scribe Sinlekiunini, drawing on Sumerian sources that reach back as far as two thousand one hundred BCE. It was preserved on clay tablets. Drawing on Sumerian sources that reach back as far as two thousand one hundred BCE. The epic was preserved on clay tablets, buried for thousands of years and excavated in the nineteenth century from the library of Ashur Banipal in Nineveh. It carries medicine about grief, mortality, and the hard won return to what is ordered.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Ordinary and real. Let's begin. Part one. The story.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

Long ago in the city of Uruk, between the two rivers, there was a king. His name was Gilgamesh, two thirds god and one third man, so the tablets tell us, blessed by the gods with extraordinary strength, a face like the sun at midday, and a restless driving energy that could not be stilled. He had seen the countries of the world and brought back wisdom from before the flood. He had built the great walls of Uruk and the sacred precinct of Ayana, and he had carved his deeds into stone so that they would outlast him. He was magnificent. Magnificent and alone. There was no one in all of Uruk who could meet him as an equal, no one who could stand beside him without flinching. He took what he wanted when he wanted it. He drove the young men to exhaustion with ceaseless contests. The people cried out to the gods for relief, and the gods listened. The goddess Aruru pressed her hands into the earth to reach clay and water, and she shaped a man unlike any other, wild, enormous, covered in hair, and as strong as the rocky hills. This was Enkidu. He ran with the gazelles in the grasslands, he drank at the watering holes beside the lions. He knew nothing of cities, nothing of walls or thrones or ambition. He was made of the same earth that had made everything, and he lived in it the way that the animals did. Word of this wild man reached Uruk eventually. A trapper came before the king and described what he had seen, a man who moved through wilderness like a force of nature, who filled in his traps and set the animals free. Gilgamesh listened, and something stirred within him. Gilgamesh listened, and something stirred within him. He had dreamt of something falling from the sky, a great meteor landing in the streets of Uruk. In his dream crowds had gathered, but the meteor was too heavy for him to lift alone. He found himself drawn to it, unable to look away. His mother Ninsun interpreted his dream. A companion is coming, one who will never forsake you. Gilgamesh wondered whether perhaps this wild man might be his companion. Through a chain of encounters, Enkidu was drawn toward the city, and when he finally walked through the gates of Uruk, he came face to face with Gilgamesh, and the streets shook with their meeting. And they fought, of course they fought. Two forces of nature could not meet in any other way. They grappled in the streets, in the doorways, their contests shaking the walls like cedar trees in a storm. And then at the height of it, something shifted. Gilgamesh stepped back. The rage left him, and he looked at the man before him, this wild, extraordinary creature, and he recognized something that he had never encountered before, his equal. From that meeting something entirely new began. Enkidu became the companion that Gilgamesh had never had, the one who would not flinch, who stood beside him without flattery or fear, who saw him clearly and chose him. And in Enkidu's presence something in Gilgamesh opened that had never opened before. Together it seemed they were unstoppable. Gilgamesh proposed that they journey to the great cedar forest, sacred realm of the gods guarded by the terrifying Humbaba, to cut its trees and to win immortal glory. Enkidu resisted. The forest was sacred, he said. Humbaba was its guardian for a reason. Mortals had no business there. Enkidu knew the order of the wild and understood that some boundaries exist because they should. But Gilgamesh pressed, and Enkidu, through love and loyalty, went along with him anyway. By the time they stood before Humbaba, Gilgamesh's nerve began to fail him, and now it was Enkidu who urged him forward. They slew Humbaba and cut the sacred trees. Then they turned for home, floating the timber back to a rook on a raft. When Gilgamesh arrived in the city, he washed the dust of the journey from himself and put on his royal robes. And it was then, seeing him restored, golden and triumphant, that the goddess Ishtar was struck with desire. She came to him and offered herself as his bride. Gilgamesh refused her, bluntly, cruelly even, listing the lovers that she had destroyed before him one by one. So Ishtar sent the bull of heaven down to destroy him in revenge. Enkidu wrestled the bull by the horns and then held it by the tail while Gilgamesh thrust his sword between its shoulders and killed it. Then Enkidu wrenched off one of the bull's haunches and hurled it at Ishtar on the city wall, shouting that he would do the same to her if he could. So the gods assembled. Two mortals had slain Humbaba, sacred guardian of the forest. Two mortals had killed the bull of heaven. One of them must die, and the gods chose Enkidu. Enkidu fell ill. He lay on his bed in Uruk and grew weaker day by day while Gilgamesh sat beside him. In the night Enkidu dreamed of the underworld, a grey, lightless place he called the house of dust, where the dead wore feathers like birds and ate clay for food, where great kings worked as servants, and where everything that had been built above ground dissolved into shadow. He woke from the dream cursing. He cursed the trapper who had first spotted him in the wild. He cursed Shamhat, the woman who had drawn him toward the city and towards this friendship that had brought him to his deathbed. And then slowly he withdrew those curses. The god Shamash had spoken to him in the dark, and reminded him of what he'd been given bread and wine, fine garments, a great companion and honour. And then Hidu remembered. He remembered the feasts, the adventures, and the man sitting even now beside his bed. And he blessed Shamhat instead. For twelve days his condition worsened, and then he was gone. Gilgamesh refused to believe it. He sat beside the body and would not leave. He called on the mountains to mourn, on the rivers, the wild animals, and on the people of Uruk. He tore his hair, he ripped his clothes, he wept without ceasing. He stayed for six days and seven nights, watching the face of his friend for any signs of return, until his dear friend's body made denial impossible. And then Gilgamesh rose. He dressed himself, not in the robes of a king, but in animal skins, and he walked out into the wilderness. He was now a man who had looked at death, not in battle where there's noise and the press of your own aliveness, but up close, in a room, in the face of someone he had loved, and he was afraid. He set out to find Utnapishtim, the one man to whom the gods had granted immortality. If such a thing existed he would find it. He would demand the secret. He, Gilgamesh, would not meet the same fate as his friend. The journey took him to the ends of the earth. He passed through the twin peaks of Mount Mashu, through a tunnel of complete darkness beneath the mountain, walking twelve leagues without a thread of light, until he emerged into a garden of jewelled trees beside an unknown sea. There he met Siduri, a woman who kept a tavern at the edge of the world. She looked at the great king, dressed in skins, hollow eyed and grief worn, and she spoke plainly to him. She said When the gods created humankind, they allotted death to mankind, but life they kept in their own hands. As for you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full, make merry day and night. Let your clothes be clean, let your head be washed, cherish the little ones who hold your hand, let a wife delight in your embrace. This alone is the concern of humankind. Gilgamesh listened, and then he walked right past her, deeper into the world's edge, still searching. He found Urshanabi, the ferryman, and crossed the waters of death, and then he found Utnapishtim, at last the immortal at the far shore of the world. And Utnapishtim told him what Siduri had already told him, the gods fixed death for mankind. There is no door, there is no secret, this is the order of things. But then Utnapishtim offered him a test. Could Gilgamesh, the great, relentless king, simply stay awake for seven days? Gilgamesh sat down to prove himself, and he fell immediately asleep. Utnapishtim's wife baked a loaf of bread each day that Gilgamesh slept, and when Gilgamesh finally woke there were seven loaves before him, the first hard and dry, the last still fresh. The seven days of his sleeping counted out in bread, he couldn't deny it. Before Gilgamesh left empty handed, Utnapishtim's wife urged her husband to give him something for his journey. Utnapishtim relented and told Gilgamesh of a plant that grew at the bottom of the sea. It would not give him immortality, but it would restore youth. So Gilgamesh dove down to the ocean floor and wrenched the plant free. He carried it all the way home. On the last night before arriving back to Uruk, Gilgamesh set the plant on the bank of a pool and went down into the water to wash. A serpent smelled the plant's sweetness and rose from the water. It swallowed the plant whole and slid back down beneath the surface, shedding its skin as it went. Gilgamesh sat down on the bank and wept. He was exhausted, and then he rose and he walked home. He came to the walls of Uruk, the walls that he had built, the walls that had stood all this while, and he looked at them. He began to speak to Urshanabi, the ferryman, who had made this last part of the journey with him. He spoke of the walls, their dimensions, the precision of their laying. He spoke of the orchards, of the temple, of the foundations of fired brick. He didn't speak of glory, he spoke of what remained. And so the oldest story ends with the medicine Siduri had offered at the edge of the world finally having landed, in a man standing at his own walls, seeing them perhaps for the first time.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

Part two The Medicine.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

Let's explore the medicine that this story may be offering us. Before we begin, if you know somebody who might appreciate this story's medicine right now, please share this episode with them. And if you're enjoying the podcast and would like to help others to find it too, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. Thank you. This story opens with a problem, a king who has never truly met anyone. Gilgamesh is immensely capable, but that capability, in the complete absence of anyone who can meet him, turns destructive. He is restless and raging from a kind of relational emptiness. No one holds their ground, no one pushes back. As he moves through Uruk everything yields, and in that endless yielding there is no encounter, there's no friction, there's no real contact with another person. I think this speaks to something that we might recognise in our own lives, perhaps not in quite such dramatic form, but the pattern is familiar. The person whose competence means that they're rarely challenged, the party in a relationship who wins out every time, the leader whose authority means that people tell them what they want to hear. The individual who is somehow always in charge, always the strongest person in the room, and who is, underneath that, profoundly alone. Gilgamesh is a man starved of genuine encounter. The tablets tell us that he is two thirds divine and one third human. And again, I think in a sense this is a story about all of us, about a process that we all face. We all begin life as infants as the centre of our own universe, unindividuated, in some sense boundless, not yet aware of the limits that will eventually define us. As we grow, we come to encounter the true order of things, our limits, other people's limits, the true scale of time, and eventually mortality itself. The fall from the feeling of divinity. This is a reckoning that we all face in some form. Gilgamesh is simply experiencing it in the most extreme version possible, because his divine portion appears to give him genuine cause to push back against what he feels is his birthright to omnipotence and immortality. And so this is his journey. And throughout the story he seems to display a level of strong headedness that necessitates the escalation of the medicine again and again. Gilgamesh resists every dose, and the gods have to keep escalating. A wild man of extraordinary power isn't enough. He recruits him into more conquest. The wild man has to die. The wisest counsel imaginable from a woman at the edge of the world.