For twelve double-hours Gilgamesh advanced in the tunnel in darkness, feeling a fresh air breeze only at the ninth hour; a faint light appeared in the eleventh double-hour. Then he walked out into brightness and an incredible sight: an "enclosure of the gods" in which there grew a 'garden' made entirely of precious stones—
As its fruit it carries carnelians,
its vines too beautiful to behold.
The foliage is of lapis lazuli;
the grapes, too luscious to look at,
of [ . . . ] stones are made.
Its [ . . . ] of white stones [...],
In its waters, pure reeds [ . . . ] of Sasu-stones
Like a Tree of Life and a Tree of [ . .. ]
that of An.gug stones are made.
As the description goes on, it becomes clear that Gilgamesh found himself in an artificial Garden of Eden, made entirely of precious stones. Gilgamesh was marveling at the sight when he suddenly saw the man he went searching for, the "One of the Faraway." Coming face to face with an ancestor from millennia past, this is what Gilgamesh had to say:
As I look upon thee, Utnapishtim,
Thou art not different at all,
even as (though) I am thou . . .
Then, telling Utnapishtim of his search for Life and the death of Enkidu, he said to him, to Utnapishtim:
Tell me,
How did you join the congregation of the gods
in thy quest for Life?
Well, Utnapishtim said, it was not that simple. A secret of the gods let me tell you, he said:
Once, the Anunnaki, the great gods, convened;
Mammetum, maker of Fate,
with them the fates determined . . .
Shuruppak, a city which thou knowest,
a city which on the Euphrates is situated,
that city was ancient, as were the gods within it.
When their heart led the great gods to the Deluge,
the Lord of Pure Foresight, Ea, was with them.
Their words he repeated (to me) through the reed wall:
"Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu,
Tear down house, build a ship!
Give up possessions, seek thou Life!
Aboard the ship take the seed of all that lives."
Describing the ship and its measurements, Utnapishtim went on to tell Gilgamesh that the townspeople of Shuruppak helped build the ship for they were told that they would thereby get rid of Utnapishtim, whose god was quarreling with Enlil. Telling the whole story of the
Deluge, Utnapishtim related how Enlil discovered Ea/Enki's duplicity, and how Enlil, changing his mind, blessed Utnapishtim and his wife to live henceforth "the life of the gods":
Standing between us,
he touched our foreheads to bless us:
"Hitherto, Utnapishtim has been human;
henceforth, Utnapishtim and his wife
like gods shall be unto us.
Faraway shall the man Utnapishtim reside,
at the mouth of the water-streams."
"But now," Utnapishtim went on to say to Gilgamesh, "who will for thy sake call the gods to Assembly, that the Life that thou seekest thou mayest find?"
Hearing that, and realizing that his search has been in vain, for only the gods, in assembly, can grant Eternal Life—Gilgamesh fainted, lost consciousness, and collapsed.
* * *
For six days and seven nights Utnapishtim and his wife kept vigil as Gilgamesh slept uninterrupted. When he finally awoke, with the help of Urshanabi they bathed Gilgamesh and dressed him with clean garments as befits a king returning to his city. It was at the very last moment that Utnapishtim, pitying Gilgamesh as he was leaving empty handed, suddenly said to him: "What shall I give thee, as you return to thy land?" He had a going-away gift for him, a "secret of the gods":
To you, O Gilgamesh,
a hidden thing I will disclose—
A secret of the gods I will tell thee:
A plant there is, like the buckthorn's is its root.
Its thorns are like a brier-vine's,
thy hands they will prick.
(But) if thy hands obtain the plant,
New Life thou shall find!
The rejuvenating plant, Utnapishtim said, grows at the bottom of a water hole (or well)—and showed Gilgamesh where. "No sooner did Gilgamesh hear this, than he opened the water pipe. He tied heavy stones to his feet; they pulled him down into the deep, and he saw the plant. He grabbed the plant, though it pricked his hands. He cut the heavy stones from his feet; the well cast him up by its shore."
Holding on to the rejuvenating plant—a scene possibly depicted on an Assyrian monument, Fig. 93—the overjoyed Gilgamesh spilled out to Urshanabi, the boatman, his future plans:
Urshanabi, this plant is a plant unlike any,
Whereby a man may regain his life's breath!
Figure 93
I will take it to ramparted Uruk,
I will cause [ . . . ] to eat the plant [...],
'Man Becomes Young In Old Age'
its name shall be.
I myself shall eat (of it),
and to my youthful state I shall return!
Certain that he had finally attained his life's dream, Gilgamesh started on the way back to Uruk, accompanied by Urshanabi. After twenty leagues Gilgamesh and Urshanabi "stopped for a morsel." After another thirty leagues, "they saw a well and stopped for the night." Filled with visions of rejuvenation, Gilgamesh put down the bag with the unique plant to take a refreshing swim; and while he was not watching,
A serpent sniffed the fragrance of the plant;
It came up from the water and carried off the plant.
And Gilgamesh sat down, and wept,
His tears running down his face.
Gilgamesh the demigod cried, for once again Fate had snatched for him defeat out of success. Mankind, one believes, has cried ever since— for this was the greatest irony of all: It was the Serpent who encouraged Mankind to eat of the Forbidden Fruit without fear of dying—and it was the Serpent who robbed Man of the Fruit of Not Dying. ..
Was it again a metaphor for Enki?
* * *
Gilgamesh, the Sumerian King List says, reigned for 126 years and was followed on the throne by his son TJr.lugal. His death, as his whole tragic tale, leaves unanswered the question that is its central theme: Can Man—even if he be partly god—avoid mortality? And if his life was an unanswered puzzle, his death was even more so when it comes to his burial.
From Gilgamesh in the 3rd millennium B.C. to Alexander in the 4th century B.C. to Ponce de Leon (searching for the Fountain of
Youth) in the 16th century A.D., Man has searched for a way to avoid, or at least postpone, dying. But is that universal and ongoing search the opposite of what Man's creators had planned? Do the cuneiform texts and the Bible imply that the gods deliberately held back immortality from Man?
In the Epic of Gilgamesh the answer is a statement that is given as fact, amounting to a Yes:
When the gods created Mankind,
Death for Man they allotted—
'Everlasting life'
they retained in their own keeping.
Gilgamesh heard it from his godfather Utu/Shamash, when his interest in Life and Death matters began, and once more from Utnapishtim (after Gilgamesh told him his journies' purpose). The answer is: It's a useless effort—Man cannot escape his mortality, and the whole long tale of Gilgamesh seems to confirm that.
But let us re-read the tale, and the irony in that apparent answer emerges: The way to attain the longevity of the gods, his mother told Gilgamesh, was to join them on their planet. That explains why the same Utu/Shamash who at first said 'Forget it', then provided help to Gilgamesh on his two attempts to go where the rocketships ascend and descend. Failing that, a "secret of the gods" was revealed to Gilgamesh: The existence of a rejuvenating Plant of Life right here on Earth. And that raises the question about the gods themselves: Did their "everlasting life" also depend
on such a nutrient—were they not the wonted 'Immortals'?
Interesting light is cast on the subject from ancient Egypt, where the Pharaohs held the belief that everlasting life awaits them in an Afterlife if they could join the gods on the "Planet of Millions of Years." To achieve that, elaborate preparations were made ahead of time to facilitate the Pharaoh's journey after his death. Starting with the exiting by the Pharaoh's Ka (a kind of an Afterlife Alter Ego) from his tomb via a simulated door, the king journeyed to the Duat in the Sinai peninsula, there to be taken aloft for a space trip. (The existence of such a facility in the Sinai was attested by a tomb depiction showing a multistage rocketship [akin to the Sumerian Din.gir symbol!] in an underground silo, Fig. 94.) Detailed text and drawings in the Book of the Dead then described the subterranean facilities, the rocketships' pilots, and the breath-taking liftoff.
But the purpose of the space journey was not to merely reside on the gods' planet. "Take ye this king with you, that he may eat of that which you eat, that he may drink of that which ye drink, that he may live on that whereupon you live," an ancient Egyptian incantation appealed to the gods. In the pyramid of King Pepi, an appeal was made to the gods whose abode was on the "Planet of millions of years" to "Give unto Pepi the Plant of Life on which they themselves are sustained." A colorful drawing on Pyramid walls showed the king (here accompanied by his wife) arriving in the Afterlife at the Celestial
Figure 94
Paradise, sipping the Water of Life out of which there grows the Tree of the Fruit of Life (Fig. 95).
The renderings from the Egyptian side regarding the gods' Water of Life and Food/Fruit of Life match the Mesopotamian depictions of Winged Gods ("Eaglemen"), flanking the Tree of Life as they hold in one hand the Fruit of Life and in the other a pail of the Water of Life (see Fig. 72). The notions underlying these depictions are no different from the Hindu tales of the Soma—a plant that the gods had brought to Earth from the heavens—whose leaves' juice conferred inspiration, vitality, and immortality.
While all that appears to be in accord with the biblical take on the subject, which is best known from the tale of the two special trees in the Garden of Eden—the Tree of Knowing and the Tree of Life, whose fruit could make Adam "live for ever"—the biblical tale also relates a divine effort to prevent Man from partaking in that fruit. Man was expelled from Eden "lest he try," and God was so determined to prevent the Earthlings from regaining access to the Tree of Life, that He "placed at the east of the Garden of Eden the Cherubim and the flaming sword which revolveth, to guard the way to the Tree of Life."
The tale's essential element—of Man's creator trying to prevent him from having divine nourishments—is found in the Sumerian tale
Figure 95
of Adapa. There we find the Creator of Man himself, Enki, treating the "perfect model of Man," his own Earthling son Adapa, thus:
Wide understanding he perfected for him;
Wisdom he had given him;
To him he had given Knowledge—
Lasting life he had not given him.
Then Enki's own handiwork is put to the test: Adapa, his son by an Earthling woman—a marvel invited by Anu to Nibiru—is offered there the "Food of Life" and the "Water of Life," but is told by Enki to avoid both, for they will cause Adapa's death. That, it turns out, is not true—just as God's warning to Adam and Eve that eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowing would cause death was not true. What worries God (in the Garden of Eden tale) is not the couple's risk of death but the opposite—"What if the Adam put forth his hand and took also of the Tree of Life, and ate of it, and lived forever?'
(The Hebrew words in the Bible are Ve'akhal ve Chai Le'Olam— "and he ate and lived to OLAM? The term Olam, usually translated "forever, everlasting," etc., can also refer to a physical place, in which case Olam is translated 'World'. It can also stem, I have suggested, from the verb that means 'to vanish, to be unseen', so that Olam could be the Hebrew name for Nibiru, and in this context, the longevity place. See the sidebar "Words and Their Meaning," page 197.)
God, thus, was worried that were The Adam to eat of the Tree of Life, he would gain the life span "ofOlam', the life cycle of Nibiru. In the Sumerian text Enki tricks Adapa not to have the divine nourishments simply because when Man was created, Everlasting Life was deliberately held back from him. While the existence of a Food of Life is affirmed, it is not Immortality—it is "Lasting Life," Longevity—that has been deliberately held back from Man. The two may have the same short term result, but they are not the same thing.
Now, what was that "Life of Olam," life on Nibiru—an endless immortality or simply a great longevity that on Nibiru is counted in Shar units—3,600 times longer than Earth's life cycles? The notion of gods (or even demigods) as Immortals has come to us from Greece; the discovery in late 1920s of Canaanite 'myths' at their capital Ugarit (on Syria's Mediterranean coast) showed how the Greeks got the idea: From the Canaanites, via the island of Crete.
But in Mesopotamia, the Anunnaki gods never claimed absolute Not Dying—Immortality—for themselves. The very listing of earlier generations on Nibiru amounts to saying: Those were the forebears who have died. The tale of Dumuzi was a public telling of his death, a death recorded and mourned (even in Jerusalem at the time of the Prophet Ezekiel) on the anniversary month of Tammuz. Alalu was sentenced to die in exile; An.Zu was executed for his crime; Osiris was killed and dismembered by Seth; the god Horus died from a scorpion's sting (but was revived by Thoth). Inanna herself was seized and put to death when she entered the Lower World without permission (but was revived through Enki's efforts).
There was no immortality, nor even a claim of immortality by the Anunnaki. There was an illusion of immortality, caused by extreme Longevity.
That longevity was apparently associated with living on Nibiru and not just being sustained by some of Nibiru's unique nourishments, for otherwise what purpose was there for Ninsun to encourage Gilgamesh to go there, to attain the "Life of a god."
An interesting question for modern science to ponder is this: Was the life cycle longevity (on Nibiru, or anywhere else in the universe) an aqcuired trait, or an evolutionary genetic adjustment? The statement associated with Adapa suggests a genetic decision by Enki—that a 'Longevity Gene (or genes), known to Enki, was deliberately excluded from the human genome when the 'mixing' of genes took place. Could we ever find it?
That a key with which those genetic secrets could be unlocked might be available, is where our trail of gods and demigods is leading.
SPELLING OUT 'LIFE'
The King James translators of the Hebrew Bible, and virtually all who followed them, have done their best to instill a sense of Divine Spirit, a majestic awe of a Creator of All, in the creation stages described in Genesis. The "winds"—satellites—of Nibiru/Marduk, Ru'ah in Hebrew, become the Spirit (of God) hovering over dark chaos; the Elohim, fashioning The Adam "in our image and after our likeness," breathe the "breath of life" (Neshamah) into his nostrils and give him a "soul."
On our way we have stopped here and there in this book to (a) point out misconceptions stemming from mistranslations, and (b) to highlight instances where the Hebrew is a literal rendering of a Sumerian term, identifying source word by word and making understanding the verse clearer.
It was the noted Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer who had pointed out that in the tale of fashioning Eve out of Adam's rib—7se/a in Hebrew—the Hebrew redactor must have taken the Sumerian word Ti to mean "rib"—correctly, except that a similarly pronounced word Ti in Sumerian meant "Life," as in Nin.ti (= 'Lady Life'): What was done was to take that which is "Life"—DNA—from the Adam and manipulate it to obtain a female genetic chromosome.
These instances come to mind as one reads the actual Sumerian wording used by Ziusudra to tell Gilgamesh how Enlil granted him the "Life of a god":
Ti Dingir.dim Mu.un.na Ab.e.de
Zi Da.ri Dingir.dim Mu.un.na Ab.e.de
Two Sumerian terms, Ti and Zi, both usua
lly translated 'Life', were used here; so what was the difference? As best as one can determine, Ti was used to indicated the physical godlike aspects; Zi expressed Life's functioning, how the living is carried out. To make his meaning extra clear, the Sumerian author added the term Da.ri (= 'Duration') to Zi; what Ziusudra was granted was both the physical aspects of godly life, as well as the durability aspects of it.
The two lines are usually translated "Life like that of a god he gives to him, an eternal soul like that of a god he creates for him."
A masterful translation, to be sure, but not the exact meaning of the Sumerian writer's masterful play of words, using Ti once and Zi (as in Ziusudra) in the next line. Not a 'soul', but durability, was added to Ziusudra's Life.
XIII
Dawn of the Goddess
Come Gilgamesh, be thou my lover!"
There are hardly any other few words, here spoken by Inanna, that epitomize the unintended consequences of the post-Diluvial relationship between gods and Earthlings.
In truth, after it was realized that the Anunnaki could have all the gold they needed just by picking it up in the Andes, there was no reason for them to stay on in the Old Lands. Enlil, according to Ziusudra, changed his mind about the imperative of wiping Mankind off the face of the Earth after he smelled the aroma of roasting meat—the thanksgiving sacrifice of a lamb offered by Ziusudra; but in fact the change of heart among the Anunnaki leadership began as soon as the scope of the calamity became clear.
There Were Giants Upon the Earth Page 21
