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Gilgamesh descending (5)
by Steve Tanham
And now we must move swiftly, as the king’s heartbeat quickens with purpose.
Again, he watches the Fate Dancers… and begins to see the depths of what they do. These movements describe a ‘whole’. They are parts of how that unity evolves itself, while carrying its essential nature, unchanged… except for the result of its own process, working on the material of that which is not yet awakened to that change. It is something for which the mind has no language – except to watch the dancing…
Gilgamesh knows he is the agent of change… That all good change in the face of the chaos that came before comes from him. Enkidu – his brother and twin – is learning well. But there is a test of his new life coming up. Gilgamesh has determined that the kingdom of Uruk is still not safe; that there is another threat to his consolidated power. The demon named Humbaba lurks in the wild cedar forest. It is time to plan the death of this wild force so that all may be brought under the rule of Uruk.
His energy is all-consuming…. I am consumed.
They do not understand. Before, they did not need to understand. What has changed? Is it the presence of my brother, Enkidu, next to me, as we take turns to sleep in this vast cedar forest, where the trees really do touch the sky – this place of the greatest wildness in the whole of Sumer? The sky-father will bless me for this, as his night-time rest will no longer be disturbed by the hissing of Humbaba’s deadly whispers, echoed though the tall trees… Soon, there will be no great trees here, as they fall to the bloody blade of that which will kill the tree-demon… King Gilgamesh.
The final battle approaches, I can feel it. For seven days and nights we have gone deeper into the great cedars – to get to the heart of where cowardly Humbaba hides. My brother, Enkidu, is failing me. When confronting the Council, he even said he thought I was wrong! I, his brother, who shared with him my life and my throne, He said that Humbaba, the source of all our ills, was really Huwawa, the great and provident spirit of the cedar forest!
I had to compel him, showing him the nature of true strength in the face of the weak. Only when kneeling, again, before my mother, Ninsun, did I waver for a second, when she took Enkidu as her own child, leaving my blessing until the end of our audience. I bit my tongue, knowing that to prove my strength would vindicate me. Knowing that, on our return, she would hold me up in triumph…
Each night in the darkening forest, we take turns to sleep while the other watches. He says I cry out in the blackest of hours, but I know I have no need of dreams. When he sleeps he cries and rolls on ground, as though clutching his heart… With each night of dreaming he seems to lose a little colour, and awaken a paler man. When me met in battle in the square of Uruk, he was resplendent with the bright colours of adventure… Now, they fail him, but I know that at the bottom of that black pit lies courage; and that his dreams of suns falling from the sky into valleys are his loss of his bravery.
He will prevail, He will find that courage….
I know, too, that when the colours of cowardice have washed away in that valley of his mind, there will come a blackness – a blackness within which he will find, as all good warriors do, his inner nature… and then, in victory, he will shine once more.
When I stand guard over his fevered sleep, I take my sword from his leather bindings and hold it over him, sweeping the air to rid him of these ghosts. But his writhing continues and I am sickened. Tonight, there is a yellow sickliness about him, but, as I stand over him, I see that it is leaving his body and draining into the earth.
I sit back and watch this wonderful return of bravery, as shining black takes over his skin. While his courage steels itself, I hold my sword and will its strength into him, my brother. They do not understand my sword, whose handle grows too wide in the palm of anyone else who tries to hold it. Its potency is mine, alone… They do not understand the curve of the blade and how it reflects the arc of the sky – home of the Sky-Father who, I know, guides me.
Above all, they do not understand that it has a name, a curving, shining black name, that I shall never speak… For to speak it would be the death of what I do…
There comes the sound of crashing trees, giant cedar trees… and Humbaba is upon us! Wake, my brother, I call, your time of courage is now. And he does, and rises mighty and restored and shining black from the inner victory over his final nightmare. With a skill equal to mine, he weighs up the monster whose magic emerges from all around us, then calls, Come Gilgamesh! and charges at its hidden heart.
The battle is long and has many faces, all of them screaming. The mighty cedars roar with rage that I dare to lead this attack upon the demon they have concealed… but it matters little, for the sword that has no name and that cannot be held by another is singing its black song… and nothing, not even tree-demons, can stand in the way of its will – my will.
Humbaba the tree-demon is dead. The trees are silent. They are silent because I have cut them all down. My black strength surged after I let Enkindu deliver the last blow… it was important that he see his re-found courage at work. He kneels at the side of the monster, Humbaba, sliced open in a thousand places.
I clear the last of the trees from the place of our final sleep and return to look at the kneeling Enkidu. He is slumped forward, as though praying. I clutch his shoulder to give him strength but he falls into the blood and the maw before us both.
Now, there is only the blood-lust and the beatings of both our hearts; and the other is not Enkidu, for I see, with a scream that fills what was a mighty forest, that Enkidu is dead…
The hidden eyes in the forest are downcast, as are mine. Not even the temple guardian can look upon the devastation.
Other parts in this series:
Part One> Part Two> Part Three> Part Four> This is part five
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
Lord of the Deep, the Silent Eye’s 2019 April workshop, was adapted from the Epic of Gilgamesh by Stuart France, and Sue Vincent.
This narrative is a personal journey through that ritual drama in the persona of Gilgamesh.
Header image by Sue Vincent, © Copyright.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
Willow enjoyed her first time with us at the Lord of the Deep workshop. Her retelling continues…
The morning of the first full day of The Silent Eye Workshop had not yet dawned. I had slept well, “If I had dreamt I did not recall” words I would hear more than once that day.
I rose quickly, really looking forward to going into the hills to greet the dawn. We had done this in Cumbria and I had really loved it.
I went downstairs early enough to have a coffee before leaving. After a while the others arrived. Stuart was in the conservatory and announced it was too wet and windy to go up to the hills. I have to admit I was disappointed but Stuart asked us to keep our outdoor clothing on and so recreate being outside. Another lesson in mind over matter.
Listening to Stuart describe what we were about to do helped. Then I closed my eyes as he took us through…
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From Stuart…
*
When the people of Uruk rebel against the tyranny of Gilgamesh,
they petition the Gods…
*
Hearing their plea the Goddess, Aruru, fashions the twin of Gilgamesh
from the clay of her heart
and sets him loose in the wilderness
where he lives and runs with wild animals…
*
Then Aruru sends Gilgamesh a dream.
*
Although vivid the dream is obscure to Gilgamesh
so he seeks an interpretation from his mother, the Goddess Ninsun…
*
In this dream Enkidu, the wild man, is likened to a boulder
which falls to earth from the sky.
*
The people of Uruk adore this fallen sky-stone
and treat it as though it were a divine-child.
*
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Ahead of Sun in Gemini blog, tomorrow, Sue provides the objective truth about the Cedar Forest and poor Enkidu’s fate…
Gilgamesh and Enkidu journey into the wilderness; pursuing the king’s desire for personal glory, the two have left Uruk to seek out the ‘forest demon’, Humbaba. Gilgamesh has vowed to kill the demon and cut down the Great Trees of the forest, seeking to prove his own might and carve his name in the annals of memory.
His mother, the goddess Ninsun, had blessed the two brothers in arms before their departure… but had offered advice; the gods know the value of free-will and the necessity of choice. His people had begged their king to set aside this quest, and he had scoffed, having no value for the opinion of those he should have served. Even Enkidu, who had stood beside him on many a quest, tried to persuade him against the journey, knowing that the apparently fearsome Humbaba is none other than Huwawa, the Great Spirit of the Cedar…
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On a day of scarecrows
The little patch of oil, beneath your sump
Called to me
To put aside Wray’s springtime pride
And ride my early miles, again.
➰
Where teenage fingers
Cold or burned, begged broken thread
To mend and seal
The engine’s heated flow
And let the boy get home
➰
And sliding frozen rump
From frozen saddle, fingers stiff
To feed and heal
In mother’s kitchen
The willing price of independence
➰
Where scarecrows end
The little patch of oil, beneath your sump
Sang to me
To put aside Wray’s springtime pride
And ride my life, again.
➰
©Stephen Tanham
The Wray Scarecrow Festival takes place in the lovely north Lancashire village of Wray each year in the first week of May. The beautifully restored pre-unit Triumph motorcycle was a complete surprise
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Gilgamesh descending (4)
by Steve Tanham
And as I watch Gilgamesh ascend towards the vast cliff-edge from which his life must fall, I wonder about the origin of the ‘play’ in human consciousness. The plot already contains characters – one of whom is dominant. They have their ‘I’s’ when invested with a player, an actor, who gives the ancient words new life. These I’s are as garments, waiting to be stepped into. If they are well-written, as Lord of the Deep was, they will be coherent and real, provoking a response of reality – merging the actor with the ‘I’ of the part she or he plays…
Precisely because of this ‘gift from the gods’, this human ability to ‘become’ someone else, we have both playing (as children, for example) and drama. When that drama is deliberately infused with a seed which will take root in the consciousness of the player, then we have a mystery play. A ritual drama sets the mystery play within a space which, through repeated use for the ‘good’ in the human soul, has a power of its own.
I am calm, now. Watching Gilgamesh and his new twin consolidate their shared kingdom. Each day, Gilgamesh teaches Enkidu something new, or shows him more of the glories he has inherited as the twin of this greatest-ever king.
Gilgamesh has never been happier. Even the agony of Shamhat has retreated into the shadows of his sun-filled life. Uruk is even mightier than it was. But the children are quiet, for four ears listen for their approval… though two of them are listening differently.
A spirit whose happiness relies upon doing – upon conquest – is never still. Its food is more of the same. But only ‘the different’ will make Gilgamesh free… and different is thin food to the ego.
He, Gilgamesh, is somewhere else… revelling with Enkidu, perhaps.
We have entered the temple for the third act of the Lord of the Deep and there is an emotional difference in this space. For a character that is determinedly engineering his own descent into hell, there is a lot of sympathy radiating from the other players…
In a moment of shock, I realise that it is not directed at Gilgamesh, but me. And, with that revelation comes clarity of origin.
These lovely people are supporting me, not the character Gilgamesh.
The minds in the room know that a part must be acted, and that we are all amateurs in this endeavour. The hearts in the room see a friend, and their seeing contains a growing awareness of the inner aloneness of the king’s descent. These beautiful souls are holding me, knowing that there is nothing I or they can do to alter the doom that lies ahead. It must be endured and brought to life, fully, or the purpose of the Lord of the Deep workshop will not be fulfilled: the clever workings of the egoic self will not be laid bare for us all to see and be transformed by.
It is a situation I have never been in before. I have acted other roles since our first such workshop in 2013. I have written several of these productions. But never before have we enacted a story which so totally encapsulated the struggle of the human spirit against the reactive power of what has come to enshroud it…
I do not want these dear souls to go soft on Gilgamesh. In the scale of such teaching stories he is a self-destructive monster. The symbolic dawn – enigmatic though it is- will only come at the end of his descent.
And yet, in the radiance of that love, there is a moment when I would not be here, halfway down that dark slope. The most powerful learning is done alone… or it feels that way, till we look back….
Ironically, Gilgamesh is happy. His relationship with the no-longer wild man, Enkidu, has blossomed into the love of brother for brother. Beyond that, even – for they could be twins. They appear to think and feel the same way, but I know what Gilgamesh does not: that Enkidu is not a gift for the king; he is a token of despair. To realise that, all Gilgamesh has to do is carry on being him-self…
The King calls. I must attend him, or the intensity will diminish. There appear to be three of us, now… which makes me wonder who ‘I’ really am…
Other parts in this series:
©Stephen Tanham
Lord of the Deep, the Silent Eye’s 2019 April workshop, was created by Stuart France, assisted by Sue Vincent.
This narrative is a personal journey through that ritual drama in the persona of Gilgamesh.
Header image by Sue Vincent, copyright the Silent Eye.
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
+ #Silenti, Ancient Landscapes, Ancient Sacred Sites, Consciousness, esoteric psychology, Fear, Journey of the hero, Life and Death, Love, Lust, Mindfulness, Mystery Play, Mystery Schools, Mystical ritual drama, Myth, myths and spirituality, Sex, Sexual Force, Soul, soul in body, Spiritual use of sex force, Spirituality, Stream of Consciousness, Sumerian myths
Gilgamesh descending (3)
by Steve Tanham
Entranced by the living spell that is the movement of the Fate Dancers across their patterned marble floor, I, Gilgamesh – for the other is passive – surrender to the music of destiny and allow my eyes to be transported to a place of wildness; a place so far from the order and safety that I have built here from my children…
There is a constant whirling, and in that spinning wind I watch as six days and seven nights revolve around my throne. As the seventh takes hold, I am dragged into this killing wind which leaves me in the wilderness and watching a scene in which I may not participate, because it is controlled by Shamhat… My eyes scream at the realisation of what she is doing… triumphing over my own command, working with the Fates to unseat the sanity of her king.
The air of the watering hole is quiet, as the dance of the veils is enacted. The wild man – huge and powerful, every muscle straining to hold back his power of movement – watches, as entranced as I am by what neither of us can control.
My loins surge as I see that the woman I have loved – whose divine flesh I have worshipped like no other – has dressed herself in the thinnest of veils… Seven of them. They do not hide per pale skin; they set it on fire.
Beginning with the outer – the white veil, she moves around the beast-who-looks-like Gilgamesh, holding him paralysed by her beauty; but more by the gradual revealing of her body as she strips the thin, shining gauze from her vibrant flesh. My moaning becomes the wind, spinning around the edge of the hollow that holds the watering hole at which the Enkidu beast drinks.
My impotence is complete when the white is added as a cloak to his shoulders, followed by the red, then the grey, orange, green, black and finally yellow. Shamhat stands naked before the savage…
Then, when the screaming wind can get no louder, Shamhat lays him down on the soft earth and makes exquisite love to him… as she once did to a young king named Gilgamesh…
Far away, my throne is silent, now, Tears make my vision swim. The Fate Dancers have come to rest. They are frozen in time, looking at me. They do not act against me; they act from somewhere else, but their actions have ripped my being in two.
Time has ceased to have meaning. Days pass, here, yet the Fate Dancers remain frozen, until there comes a noise from the city walls, and a great cry goes up in the streets outside the palace. The dancers begin to move again and I know I must go out and meet this man, this anointed man, who the spinning winds say is my twin.
The vizier’s soft voice reminds me there is a bride whose marriage ceremony is complete, whose husband has been set aside to allow the king to enter their chamber… and to enter her, as the laws of Uruk – my laws – demand.
Despite the soft promise, I pull a leaden body from the throne and stride, heavy-hearted, through the palace and towards the bride’s chamber which lies across the square. The crowd is excited, but not by my presence. The Divine Council – that bunch of effete Elders – are pulling and pawing at the creature that Shamhat has supposedly civilised – this Enkidu…
They are saying, “How much like Gilgamesh he is!”
But he is not. There is none like the King. Tears form in eyes that have been, until now, all-seeing. How can they be so disloyal? Have they forgotten the glory of their ruler? Have they forgotten my hand-hewn mighty walls and how well they protect the citizens of Uruk?
The pawed one sees me and tears himself away from the Elders, glaring–then charging at me. The aggression is unmistakable. He knows my intention and intends to prevent it. The crowd retreats to a safe distance as we circle each other, four great arms extended.
In his rage, he shouts that he has been raised up by his divine union with Shamhat; and that I will not be allowed to debase the bride who is entitled to the same and should be waiting for her husband – not her king… My response is a blow to his bearded face.
We fight with such ferocity that the crowd scatters. Our battle becomes a mirror of the Fate Dancers’ whirlwind… but this is my city, this is my skill, this is my art. Mighty though he is, I use the whirling motion – learned from the Fate Dancers – to tire him. Then, at the moment when he is most distracted, I draw on my hatred of the power that made me watch the lovemaking of the wild man and my Shamhat and use it to perform my own special magic, driving him to the ground…
… But Enkidu’s hands, which the Trapper said could tame wild beasts, pull me down with him, and we fall to our knees…
Laughing…
And in our laughter, I think of Shamhat… and I steal from her this lover and make of him my brother.
Other parts in this series:
©Stephen Tanham
Lord of the Deep, the Silent Eye’s 2019 April workshop, was created by Stuart France, assisted by Sue Vincent.
This narrative is a personal journey through that ritual drama in the persona of Gilgamesh.
Header image by Sue Vincent, copyright the Silent Eye.
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
Sue narrates some of the glories and challenges of hosting the Gilgamesh – Lord of the Deep workshop…
Shamash, the solar deity also known as Utu to the Sumerians, is enthroned behind the altar bearing the sun symbol, dispensing justice. He holds the Rod and Ring, a precursor of the modern orb of sovreignty.
There is something about greeting the rising sun at the dawn of a new day that changes our perspective, especially on a spiritual workshop, when the attention is already focussed beyond the confines or everyday life.
Every April, we begin the Saturday of our workshop by greeting the dawn. Given the time at which our Companions must rise in order to attend this ritual, it is an entirely optional part of the weekend, especially as many have travelled far the previous day and then stayed up late talking after a visit to the village pub. And yet, every year, almost all of our Companions gather in the pale, cold light of dawn to join…
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Stuart adds some mystical insight to his re-creation of the Gilgamesh story…
*
…You begin to hear distant sounds…
The hub-bub of city streets…
At first faint…
Grows gradually louder…
Market sellers ply their wares…
Children shout and laugh at their games…
And behind the city sound-scape a lyre weaves its reedy resonances…
*
You find yourself amid a thriving thoroughfare of Uruk…
The sun is high in the sky overhead…
The sand beneath your sandaled feet is warm and dusty…
You are moving against the flow of people who are heading for the central precincts of the Great Walled City…
They babble excitedly to each other…
Straining to get ahead…
They are caught in the moment, focused
And drawn to whatever attraction is pulling them centrally…
*
But you are heading towards one of the huge pylon gates that break the massive stone blocks of the city walls…
Soon you find yourself alone…
The clamour of the city-folk fading behind you…
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A Strong Right Arm – written in response to Diana Wallace Peach’s Myths of the Mirror #writingprompt for May 2019.
When Jackson de Ville came to, he was seated and Electra was straddling him. The knife was in his clenched fist and there seemed to be some mental compulsion preventing him from letting it go. She moved forward, so that the blade began to impale her soft flesh…
For a second he had to fight to remember how he got there…
Jackson’s bodyguard work on the inner planet Folis 12 was supposed to be the climax of his distinguished career as a cop. ‘Cop’ was an old word now, but it had stuck. The Enforcement, for which Jackson worked – had been on Electra’s tail for an age… now the undercover detective and his sidekick, Brocco, were closing in for the kill.
The woman giving the talk was the fabled Dr Rosenthal. Specialist in the new meta-science of system balancing, she could draw an audience from across the explored galaxy. Her ‘systems’ were complete solar systems, within which her new family of non-linear equations could adjust an entire set of planetary orbits, bringing about harmonic changes so that each planet could be farmed, using the energies of the others…
It wasn’t rocket science. It was way beyond rocket science. He remembered whistling with admiration as the invited crowd of VIPs surged towards the thick quartz observation window, flanked by the two gothic-looking towers on either side. The whole building looking down on the desert below from the edge of a rocky escarpment.
Dr Rosenthal had turned and motioned he and Brocco into one of the small towers where she said they’d get a better view of internal and external proceedings with a wider angle. They had been assigned to protect the genius lady, who turned out to be far more attractive than Jackson had expected. He could see by the grin that Brocco, found her so, too…
That perfume…. rich and expensive. Where had he….?
Rosenthal’s voice could be heard closing her speech from the adjacent chamber. Jackson stood in the doorway, scanning the audience.
“So, honoured guests, please continue to look down on this desert that is about to be transformed into high yield agricultural land for food.” She moved towards the door to the chamber containing Jackson and Brocco, still speaking. “I will make our final adjustments and rejoin you as you watch our very first act of Solar System Terrafarming…
And then the fragrant lady they were protecting was sliding into their strange little tower and Jackson’s alarm bells were drowning out coherent thought. He was startled when she pushed past them both and hit the middle set of buttons on the chamber’s small console.
There was a roaring noise and the room shook. At first, Jackson thought the tower had tilted to allow for a better view, but then he saw that they were climbing into the sky. A mile below, three large black machines surged into the desert plain and spaced themselves out in a huge triangle. Within seconds each had spawned smaller replicas whose role was to fill in the sides of what was becoming a vast stockade. He gasped as the interior became a sea of self-replicating drilling machines…
By then, his head was hurting and his heavy body was clinging to the edge of the console, trying not to fall to the floor. His last view out of the window was of a desert plain thousands of kilometres wide, filled with frantically-moving black machinery.
Then he hit the floor and someone strong whose perfume was beautiful but deadly was rolling him into an acceleration bag, which inflated just as he began to black out. The tiny chamber was now dark. As he lost consciousness he saw the blackness of space through the perspex panel over his face.
————
He moaned. His muscles were stretched taut. A warm body next to his ran its fingers over his skin in response.
“Welcome back…” it said.
He shivered.
“Don’t worry, she was already dead.” The fingers played and teased with his right nipple.
“Who?” he managed with a hoarse whisper.
“Who – the dead Dr Rosenthal or who – your captor?”
“Shit,” said Jackson.
“Only me,” said the perfume he now knew was Electra Eckberg’s. Her disguise had been perfect!
“Shit,” he cursed, again. “Didn’t you get enough last time!”
“Petulant…” she said, kissing where the fingers had teased.
Her voice changed, becoming hard business. “Sadly, we can’t take another vacation.”
Jackson fought the urge to tell her what he thought of her sick humour, but she put a soft finger over his lips. The conditioned response kicked in and he turned mute. He hated himself for it. It was a form of hypnosis – like the effect of the deadly perfume.
“I’m dying,” she said softly. “Really dying. Folis 12 is now generating more oil than humanity needs for the next twenty years… Don’t hold it against me, I had to fund my retirement and I’m very good with molecular machines…”
He swallowed, wondering, irrationally, if swallowing was allowed. His heart was racing. He sucked in air and fought to be calm. The fingers stroked his skin. No pain so far…
“Brocco?” he asked in a whisper.
“Thanks for the sympathy, bitch!” she barked. Then, softer, “He didn’t make it. Wasn’t expecting two of you and I only had one acceleration pouch.” Her strong fingers squeezed. He winced, swallowing.
“Don’t tell me I was wrong…”
She slid her body off the cold metal table. The perfume – dark hybrid roses spiced with opium at three in the morning: she had made him learn it when he was at his most unhinged – walked around his head.
Then came the whirring noises. He looked up to see a canopy of tiny drills sliding over his body.
“Electra, please.” He was begging. Six foot four of total muscle. All begging.
“I could have killed you a long time ago. Stop being such a bloody baby.”
But it didn’t stop him screaming, even though the million sources of pain were more like tiny electric shocks than agony.
After a while he blacked out. When he came to, he was seated and she was straddling him. The knife was in his clenched fist and there seemed to be some mental compulsion preventing him from letting it go. She moved forward, so that the tip of the blade impaled her soft flesh.
Lights flashed outside the tiny escape craft.
“Where are we?” he shouted at her, seeing tiny drops of blood. Knowing she wasn’t kidding – she was dying…
“Akkatura,” she hissed.
“The orbiting pirate station?”
“Yes,” she managed.
“And you think a cop will be welcome here!?”
Her hand came up to pull his neck. “You’ll see… now kiss me,” The whisper faded to a tiny “one last time…”
He couldn’t help it. He was alive, even if his flesh was screaming. She hadn’t killed him. He bent forward and did as she commanded, sliding the blade home as their lips met.
The taste was bitter sweet. Like her perfume. The loss of consciousness was instantaneous. The lip gloss had begun its work…
He woke in a strange but opulent room. Hours had passed, he could tell from his beard.
“Good morning, Mr de Ville,’ said the robot voice. You are safe and one of our guests. Your account is pre-settled. You can leave when you wish but a rather large amount of money is conditional on you staying here for a short while…”
He looked around, then noticed a light blinking on the room’s console. “The late Ms Eckberg wished to you to have every…” the voice hesitated, seeking the right word. “…comfort while you recovered from your operation.”
Operation! His head was screaming as he ran to the bathroom, remembering the rig of tiny drills. He moaned as he caught sight of his body in the mirror. He had be re-engineered… A complex mass of electronics and energy cells lined his right torso, but the biggest change was his right arm, which appeared to be completely bionic.
“You bitch!,” he hurled at the image. “You tormenting bitch… I hope you went straight to hell and burn there…”
He watched in horror as his right hand began to climb in slow motion up his flesh, in what was obviously a silent parody of cyber-movement. When the digits reached his nipple, they tweaked it. At the same time a familiar and perfumed voice said in his brain, “Now, I hope we’re not going to hurt each other, Jackson…”
© Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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+ #Silenti, Ancient Landscapes, Ancient Sacred Sites, Consciousness, esoteric psychology, Fear, Journey of the hero, Life and Death, Love, Lust, Mindfulness, Mystery Play, Mystery Schools, Mystical ritual drama, Myth, myths and spirituality, Sex, Sexual Force, Soul, soul in body, Spiritual use of sex force, Spirituality, Stream of Consciousness, Sumerian myths
Gilgamesh descending (2)
by Steve Tanham
I enter the temple at the head of the twin columns of the Dancers of Fate. Those of the kingdom enter behind their King in silent reverence as we pass the Guardian and bow our respects.
Alone, but knowing they follow, I cross the centre of the exotic floor and move towards the east of the temple. The gold-draped chair is waiting. I turn and stand, watching the precise formation of Fate Dancers peel away left and right, to literally flow down the circumference of the large circle that is the enneagram; the heart of this temple of the mysteries.
All wait for the King. I take a deep breath before beginning. He is waiting in the space around the golden chair… The familiar feel of an autocratic king from thousands of years ago.
I realise that I am the break in his continuity. Settling into the seated vessel, once more, this ancient king breaks with tradition and gazes across to look at the woman who is half human, half goddess – Ninsun, his mother. The memory is still fresh in his mind: the dream of the rock that fell from the sky to the ground, the way it was adored – the way he hugged and loved it! His strong body curls with the strangeness of it; the embarrassment of how he knelt before her as in a trance, asking her to tell him what it meant…
A friend, Ninsun had said. Even a man capable of being a brother! He was to come into my life… I can feel the King’s astonishment, even though I know he is cuniform words in clay from nearly three thousand years ago. And then the separation leaves us… and there is just Gilgamesh the King on his large throne, whose arms curl up into two wooden hands that hold his beloved sword. He is calm… purposeful. But the most powerful man in the world knows that world is changing.
He was beloved of the Gods, he knew. Why else had the world fallen at his feet? Surely, he had nothing to fear.
Now, there is no more time to indulge the mystery. The women are dancing again and he must watch, captivated. The women known as the Fate Dancers had devised these movements for his pleasure, though he divined the hidden hand of the gods in the way it stroked his heart, like a lyre whose music was not heard, but felt.
Everyone in the royal palace loved the hypnotic flow of the Fates’ dance. Shamhat had even petitioned him to let them make its gliding patterns permanent in the floor of the royal chamber. And he had agreed; at a great cost to the royal purse… for the dancers, but most of all for her. For Shamhat.
But that had been before she refused his advances, saying she had served her time and no longer answered to him but to the Divine Council, alone. His fingers grip the blade of his sword. No other circumstance in the world could have frustrated him like this! The Fate Dancers dance on… unperturbed.
“Shamhat!” He spits out the word. The High Priestess’s name etches a bitter taste on his tongue… Before him, like flickers of half-seen light, the Fate Dancers maintain the perfection of their movements; but Gilgamesh, with his hawk-like vision, sees their eyes flicker, before, smiling, his fingertips bid them continue.
Shamhat! He would make her pay for her public refusal to share her bed with the God King. But it would have to be subtle. Like him, she was partly God, partly human… and clever.
He looks down from his throne at the elegant and beautiful movements across the glistening white floor of his chamber. The Fate Dancers’ feet follow a pattern of lines that intersect the large circle at nine points. Three of them are formed into a triangle bounded by golden stars set into the white crystals. The other six lines intersect like the ghostly pattern of a gemstone and their intersections with the circle are marked with stars of dark blue lapis lazuli.
All this had been created for Shamhat, working – he now saw – to aid in this strange contest of the mind and body with which she saw fit to challenge his authority. But he loved the movements of the dancers. So much so that he could feel his world shifting each time they began to flow across the magical glyph before him.
There would be time to fix this, he thought to himself, settling back into his throne and reaching for his golden cup of mead.
He must have dozed off… Before him, the floor design glitters in the flickering light of the tallow candles. A rough man dressed in furs kneels at the edge of the court and he could sense another behind him. Gilgamesh reaches for his sword, but the vizier’s hand stops him, gently.
“My apologies, King Gilgamesh, I sought not to disturb your rest. There is no threat.”
Gilgamesh lets go the grip on his sword. “That is a dangerous place to stand, even for a royal vizier!”
The vizier bows and points at the kneeling supplicant. “He has news we felt you would wish to know, especially in these… uncertain times.”
Gilgamesh can taste the dawning of the new in the air all around him.
“Speak, man!” he shouts at the trapper. “If what you say is true, let us have no ceremony. What is it you have seen?”
“Why, I have seen a giant, my king!”
The king laughs, refreshed, relaxed and alert. He is amused. Good-naturedly, he tells the trapper that he has been listening to tavern stories. The man protests and the king is about to dismiss him as a fool when he realises that the description of the powerful and fleet wild man is remarkably close to how he, the king, would be described by a stranger, had he lived from the land.
“There is truth in your voice,” Gilgamesh concludes. Reluctantly, he asks the trapper why this has such importance that he risks his life coming to the royal palace to report it.
“My Lord,” says the trembling man, “he could be your very twin.”
Gilgamesh takes a breath and gazes upwards, letting it out slowly. No-one can see his smile.
Time passes. The royal chamber is empty, apart from the king. The tallow candles have burned low. They are making sputtering noises in their flickering death. Gilgamesh follows the spirals of soot high into the dimness of the chamber.
He is pleased with himself. The trapper has been despatched to find the high priestess, who will be told that she is to use her divine arts to seduce and civilise the wild twin. He knows that this action will open up a new sea of possibilities, but he does not care.
All that matters is that he will have vengeance on the woman he used to love…
Other parts in this series:
©Stephen Tanham
Lord of the Deep, the Silent Eye’s 2019 April workshop, was created by Stuart France, assisted by Sue Vincent.
This narrative is a personal journey through that ritual drama in the persona of Gilgamesh.
Header image by Sue Vincent, copyright the Silent Eye.
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
From Sue, the inner, human story of the Lord of the Deep workshop…
“It is,” said Steve, not knowing quite how true his words would prove to be, “a weekend for heroes.” While the ancient story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu was originally penned in the grand, heroic vein, our own retelling and adaptation would have to rely on more modest means in order to succeed. Ingenuity, intent and imagination would transform a bare room into a window on a distant past. Colour would evoke the heat of the rich, desert city of Uruk. Costumes and props would suggest, rather than recreate, an era… but the real magic that transforms an empty space into a working temple is the people with whom you share it. And, before we share the story of our workshop weekend, there are heroes other than Gilgamesh and Enkidu who must be acknowledged.
It is difficult to find the words to express my utter admiration and gratitude to everyone who…
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Sun in Gemini 
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