When Gilgamesh and Enkidu met in the marketplace at Uruk there was a wrestling match of champions. The whole population crowded round to watch. Gilgamesh finally won, flinging Enkidu on to his back while still keeping his own foot on the ground.
So a famous friendship started a series of adventures. They hunted panthers and tracked down the monstrous Hawawa who guarded the way though the cedar forest. When they later slew the bull of heaven, Gilgamesh had the horns mounted on the walls of his bed chamber.
But then Enkidu fell dangerously sick. Gilgamesh sat by his bed six days and seven nights. Finally a worm fell out of Enkidu’s nose. At the end Gilgamesh drew a veil across his old friend’s face and roared like a lioness that has lost her cubs. Later he roamed the steppe, weeping, fear of his own death beginning to gnaw at his entrails.
Gilgamesh ended up at the tavern at the end of the world. He wanted to get out of his head. He asked the beautiful barmaid the way to Ziusudra, whom, we have seen, is another name for Noah or Dionysus. Ziusudra was a demi-god who had never really died.
Gilgamesh made a boat with punting poles topped with bitumen, such as are still used by marsh Arabs to this day, and went to meet the seer. Ziusudra said, ‘I will reveal to you a secret thing, a secret of the gods. There is at the bottom of the sea a plant that pricks like the rose. If you can bring it back up to the surface, you can become young again. It is the plant of eternal youth.’
Ziusudra was telling him how to dive beneath the seas that covered Atlantis, how to find the esoteric lore that had been lost at the time of the Flood. Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet like the local pearl-divers, descended, plucked the plant, cut himself free of the stones and rose to the surface in triumph.
But while he was resting on the shore from his exertions, a snake smelled the plant and stole it.
Gilgamesh was as good as dead.
WHEN WE READ THE STORY OF GILGAMESH we may be intrigued to see how he fails the test that humanity’s great leader has set him. There is a note of anxiety here that can then be heard spreading ever more widely in the Babylonian and Mesopotamian civilizations that grew up to dominate this region.
With the death of Gilgamesh we are in the time of the greatest ziggurats. The story of the Tower of Babel, the attempt to build a tower up to heaven and the resulting loss of a single language uniting all humanity, represents the fact that as nations and tribes began to become attached to their own tutelary spirits and guiding angels, they lost sight of the higher gods and the great cosmic mind beyond that gives all the different parts of the universe one destiny. The ziggurats represent a misguided attempt to scale the heavens by material means.
The Tower of Babel was built by Nimrod the Hunter. Genesis calls Nimrod ‘the first potentate on earth’. The archaeologist David Rohl has convincingly identified Nimrod with the historical Enmer-kar (‘Enmer the Hunter’), the first king of Uruk who wrote to the neighbouring king of Aratta, demanding tribute money in what is believed to be the earliest surviving letter.
Nimrod was the first man to seek power for its own sake. From this will to power came cruelty and decadence. In Hebrew tradition a prophecy of the imminent birth of Abraham prompted Nimrod to mass infanticide. We should understand by this that he practised infant sacrifice, burying the bodies in the foundations of his great buildings.
We join the secret story of Abraham in about 2000 BC wandering in between the sky scrapers of his native Ur (Uruk). He decided to go on a quest, to become a desert nomad to rediscover the sense of the divine that was in the process of being lost.
When he visited Egypt the pharaoh gave one of his daughters, Hagar, as a servant to Abraham’s wife Sarai. Hagar bore Abraham his first son, Ishmael, who was to become the father of the Arab nations. We should understand by this that Abraham learned great initiatic knowledge from the Egyptian priests. Marriages of this time were usually within a tribe or extended family. Supernatural powers were connected with blood, and marriage between people of the same blood strengthened powers, something which used to be a part of the tradition of the gypsies, for example. Marriage of individuals from different tribes could involve an exchange of powers and knowledge.
WHAT FORM OF INITIATION MIGHT ABRAHAM have received in Egypt?
We should picture the candidate for initiation laid out in a granite tomb. He is surrounded by initiates who have sent him into a very deep sleep-like trance. When he is in this trance state they are able to raise his vegetable body — and with it his spirit or animal body — up out of his physical body, so that it hovers like a phantom over the mouth of the tomb. A witness of an initiation ceremony practised on the Irish poet W.B. Yeats described how during the course of the ceremony a series of bells were rung to mark the stages. Yeats’s spirit could be seen shining with different degrees of brightness during the different stages, each marked by different patterns of colour.
Initiates who perform these sorts of ceremonies know how to mould the candidate’s vegetable body so that when it sinks back into the material body the candidate is able to work to use its organs of perception consciously. At the end of three days the candidate will be ‘born again’, or initiated, which is marked by the hierophant grasping him by the right hand and pulling him out of the coffin.
In esoteric philosophy the vegetable body is of utmost importance. Not only does it control vital bodily functions, but the chakras are, of course, the organs of the vegetable body. So this body in effect forms the portal between the physical world and the spirit world, and if the chakras are enlivened this may lead to powers of supernatural perception and influence, the ability to communicate with disembodied spirits and also healing powers.
In the temple sleep — which would still be practised by initiates of the Mystery schools two and half thousand years later, and is still practised in some secret societies today — someone who was ill would be allowed to sleep in the temple. This sleep would last for three days, during which time the initiates would work on their vegetative bodies in a way which was not dissimilar to the process of initiation.
Someone undergoing this healing process might have very realistic visions, directed by the initiates. First, he would be plunged in utter blackness. He would seem to himself to be losing all consciousness, to be dying. He would seem to himself to come round again, then be led by an animal-headed being travelling down long passages and through a series of chambers. At different stages he would be challenged and menaced by other animal-headed gods and demons, including monstrous crocodiles who would tear at him.
In the Egyptian
He approaches the inner sanctum. He sees an extraordinary, bright light shining through the cracks round the edge of the gates. He cries out, ‘Let me come! Let me spiritualize myself, let me become pure spirit! I have prepared myself by the writings of Thoth!’
Finally, out of the swirling waves of light a vision emerges of the Mother Goddess suckling her child. This is a healing vision because it takes us back to the paradisaical time we looked at in Chapter 3, before the earth and the sun became separated, when the earth was illumined from within by the Sun god, a time before there was any dissatisfaction, disease or death. And it looks forward, too, to another time when earth and sun will be reunited, when the earth will again be transfigured by the sun.
In all ages and in all places there have been people who have believed that meditating on this image of the Mother Goddess and child brings about miracles of healing.
AFTER HIS STAY IN EGYPT ABRAHAM moved westwards, towards the region we know today as Palestine. He had to arm and train his servants to rescue his brother who had been captured by local bandits. Following a fierce and bloody fight, he was walking through a valley (which today’s biblical scholars identify with the Kidron Valley), when he met a strange individual called Melchizedek.
As with Enoch, there is just a brief mention of Melchizedek in the Bible but an accompanying sense of the numinous and of something important left unsaid. Genesis 14: 18-20: ‘And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth
