Gilgamesh or the Hero Along the Way of the Sun
The oldest story that has come down to us from the past is the EPOPEA OF GILGAMESH, which can be dated to the third millennium BCE. We are in the Land Between the Two Rivers, precisely Mesopotamia. In the second half of the last century, while continuing the excavations that had unearthed the stupendous palaces of Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian empire, two archaeologists, Sir Austen Layard and his assistant Hormuzd Rassam, almost by chance noticed two rooms attached to the palace; there they found the library of King Ashurbanipal III (668-627 B.C. C. B.C.), and in it 20,000 texts on clay dealing with mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and along with them 12 massive clay tablets recounting the exploits of a man who lived before and after the great catastrophe of a flood, GILGAMESH, fifth king of the city of Uruk, the largest city in southern Babylonia. The library at Nineveh had restored to humanity not only the first great epic in world history, but even an older version of the Flood than that described in the Bible!
The story is divided into several episodes: Gilgamesh's meeting with Enkidu, who becomes his friend; a journey into the forest to kill a monster; contempt for a goddess; the death of his companion; and the quest for immortality. This story, as tablet IX in column 4 tells us, takes place "along the way of the sun," which to an archaeologist or historian may say nothing, but to an astrologer says that the setting of the whole affair lies in the sky, since "the way of the sun" is none other than the ECLITTICA. In fact, the deeds and places of the tale (of this as of other mythical tales) must be placed, researched, not on a globe but high up in the sky, and precisely on the ecliptic belt, for that is the place where precisely the mythical events take place and where the reason behind said events is based, namely, the obliquity of the ecliptic, that is, that astral situation due to the fact that the Earth is inclined, with respect to the equatorial plane, by 23°30'. This inclination causes the Earth's axis to rotate like a spinning top, so if we extend this axis to the north celestial pole, it describes around the said pole a circle; the time it takes for this extended axis to rotate around the north pole of the ecliptic is about 25,920 years, during which time its orientation changes from one star to another, a star we call Polaris (from the Greek polos, meaning axis, pivot): in 6. 000 or so B.C. the North Star was the iota of the Constellation of the Dragon; in about 3,000 B.C. it was Thuban the alpha of the same constellation; in the time of Classical Greece it was Kochab, the beta of Ursa Minor; today it is the alpha of Ursa Minor (which we call Polaris), while in 4,000 A.D. it will be Vega, the alpha of the Constellation of Lyra.
This phenomenon is called Precession of the Equinoxes: the equinoctial points (and therefore also the solsticial ones) do not remain stationary where they should be, but move along the ecliptic in the opposite direction to that of the order of the Signs. To this phenomenon the ancients attributed the rise and fall of the various Ages (or Ages) of the world. In fact, it was said that the zodiacal constellation rising in the east before the sun (heliacal rising) marked the place where the sun came to rest. This constellation was called the pillar of the sky, and it gave its name to the various Ages of the World (lasting 2,160 years). In 6,647 B.C.E. the spring equinox was in Gemini: this was therefore the pillar constellation; we will then speak of the ERA OF GEMINI; then it slowly moved to TAURUS, then ARIES, and finally to PESCI, "where it still stands and where it will continue to remain for some time to come. Our Age is marked by the advent of Christ the Pisces...The previous Age, that of Aries, had been heralded by Moses descending from Sinai 'with the two horns,' that is, crowned with the horns of Aries, while his disobedient flock stubbornly danced around the 'golden calf,' better understood as a 'golden bull,' Taurus. Thus, it was the heavens in their revolutions that gave the key...That which moved by its own motion in the heavens -- the planets with their weeks and years -- took on an ever more majestic gravity. They were the Persons from the True Becoming: the zodiac was the place of real happenings..." (G. de Santillana and H. von Dechend, The Mill of Hamlet, ed. Adelphi, Milan, 1983). Thus, when we hear of floods, flat or quadrangular earth, dry land or waters below, this refers to events and places that are not of this world but reflect rules, cosmic phenomena, astral events and upheavals: each flood, therefore, can be seen as a destroying event of one Age to make way for the next. The deluges described by the Greeks, who were aware of as many as three successive destructions (and think of the one involving Deucalion and Pyrrha), are presented as astral myths in which a world understood as an Age of the World is seen to die.
Many traditions link this or that catastrophe with stellar elements or figures; let us cite an example taken from the Jewish legendary tradition of the late period, quoted by Frazer: "Now, the flood was caused by the meeting of the male waters of heaven with the female waters that flowed from the earth. The holes in the sky from which the waters above escaped had been made by God when he removed some stars from the constellation of the Pleiades; and to stop that flood of rain he then had to plug the two holes with a pair of stars borrowed from the constellation Ursa. That is why, to this day, Ursa runs after the Pleiades: she wants her young back, but she will never get them until the Last Day." As for the flood experienced by Deucalion and Pyrrha, its waters receded thanks to the sound of Triton's buccina (an ancient musical instrument formed by a tortile shell), an instrument that had been invented by Aigokeros, i.e., Capricorn, the lord of the winter solstice when it was the constellation Aries that 'brought' the sun (from which it should be inferred that this deluge served as a transition from the ERA OF TORUS to that of ARIES, what would date it to 2. 350 B.C.!). To recap, the earth as the place where the mythical events take place is not our globe: earth here means the plane formed by connecting the four points of the year marked by the equinoxes and solstices, i.e., the ecliptic: the four angles, i.e., the constellations that rise together with the sun at the equinoxes and solstices, are the points that determine an earth; thus each Age of the World has its own earth, which is precisely why we speak of the end of the world: when the points of the year are determined by a new group of zodiacal constellations brought by the Precession of the Equinoxes, a new earth arises. Thus the sky as the place where mythical events unfold, the Zodiac as the land in which myths are born, in which Gods and Heroes move, and among them, precisely, GILGAMESH, two-thirds god and one-third man.
The Story of Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh is a despotic, cruel, violent king. The men of Uruk, annihilated by his arrogance and wickedness, turn to the goddess Ninsun, Gilgamesh's mother, begging her to create a double of him, that is, someone equal to him in physical strength and impetuousness of heart. Gilgamesh will cease to be a despotic lord-master the day he finds an equal who is both his rival and friend, so prophesies the goddess who therefore creates Enkidu, with a hairy body and long feminine hair. Enkidu is the opposite of Gilgamesh. Semi-wild, he lives and mates with animals, living in caves or in the forest. Gifted with superhuman strength, he destroys everything he encounters. One day a hunter encounters him in the forest, and is so frightened that he immediately runs to his king to tell him what happened. Hearing the hunter's words, Gilgamesh decides that the only way to tame that half-animal is to remove him from his beastly condition, from his wildness. To do this it is necessary for him to be seduced, to know the love of a woman. So Gilgamesh sends a courtesan to Enkidu with the charge of seducing him. She joins him for seven days and seven nights and finally succeeds in making a man of him. "Enkidu," said the woman, "you have become as beautiful as a god, why do you want to keep wandering in the company of animals? Come on, come with me, that I may lead you to Uruk. It is there, precisely, that Gilgamesh rages like a bull and keeps all men under his feet." "Lead me to the city of Uruk," Enkidu replied, "and as for Gilgamesh and his cruel rule, I will soon change the state of things. I will provoke and challenge him, and I will show him, once and for all, that the young countrymen are not imbeciles." The meeting between the two takes place at the temple gate. Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight like wild bulls, but it is the king who unexpectedly gets the worst of it, and thus understands that he has met his worthy opponent. The prophecy of the goddess comes true, and the end result of the fight was the beginning of a long and tender friendship.
Time passes, and Enkidu in his new civilian life does not fit in well, and day by day he grows weaker and sadder. Then Gilgamesh proposes a venture: to go to the Cedar Forest to challenge and kill the monster Khumbaba. They thus arrive at the dense forest, at the edge of which is an immense door; Enkidu opens it, but the great portal, turning on its hinges, suddenly closes again, crushing his hand. For twelve days Enkidu lies groaning in pain, thinking to desist from the undertaking. But Gilgamesh spurs him on, and the two enter the forest through the great gate. They finally meet, challenge and overcome the monster Khumbaba. Gilgamesh, however, wants to spare his life, moved to compassion by his wailing, but Enkidu insists on killing him, whereupon both of them draw their swords and detach the monstrous head from the gigantic body.
On their return to Uruk, victorious and celebrated by all, the goddess Ishtar comes forward, who, captivated by Gilgamesh's feat and more by his beauty than anything else, asks him to lie with her and become her husband. But Gilgamesh, disdainfully refuses her, whereupon the goddess, furious, sends towards him the Celestial Bull, whose gallop is a harbinger of storms and earthquakes and whose coming brings seven years of drought; but Enkidu rushes to his friend's rescue, grabs a thigh and the member of the Celestial Bull, tears them off with a violent blow and throws them in the face of the goddess., who humiliated and defeated returns to her heaven. But Ishtar now makes her overtures to Enkidu, which he disdainfully rejects, then the goddess punishes him by making him sick. Days and days last Enkidu's agony, until the ninth, watched over by his friend, dies. Desperate Gilgamesh mourns him, and imposes mourning on the whole nation. Great is the grief at the loss of his friend, and great is the fear that 'perhaps' he too will have to die.
So he thinks that the only solution is to become immortal, and he sets out to find Utnapistim, who lives at the mouth of the two rivers, the only one who was saved from the flood and whom the gods have made a god, thinking that he will know how to make him immortal. He sets out, and after a long time arrives at the Gate of the Setting Sun on Mount Masu, which is opened for him by the guardians, the Scorpion-Men. He travels twelve hours in the darkness of a dungeon, then sunlight finally breaks through; exhausted, he stops at the seashore by the nymph Siduri, the one who makes wine and ale, who at first tries to dissuade him from the venture but later helps him by pointing out that the boatman Ursanabi can lead him to Utnapistim. They then set sail, and cross the Waters of Death, and after 120 paddles arrive at Utnapistim called The Far One, who lives in the place of the transit of the sun, east of the mountain. Here The Far One tells him how he was saved from the flood. But Gilgamesh wants immortality, and Utnapistim tells him he must stay awake six days and six nights so he will have immortality. But Gilgamesh is too tired from the journey and immediately falls asleep. When he wakes up he despairs that he did not have the strength to endure sleep, whereupon Utnapistim, moved to compassion, reveals to him the secret of the gods, namely that at the bottom of the sea there is a plant that gives immortality. Immediately Gilgamesh throws himself into the depths of the Ocean, draws the plant to himself, but he does not eat it immediately because he wants to make a gift of it to the other men of Uruk as well. So he sets out and returns by the door through which he had entered.
On the way he sees a well; he is tired and wants to refresh himself; he therefore places the plant on a stone and bathes; but suddenly a snake, attracted by the scent of the plant, comes out of the water and seizes it, and immediately sheds its skin and returns to the well. Gilgamesh sits down and mourns his lost immortality. Distraught, he returns empty-handed to Uruk, and on a stone the whole story is engraved.
An Astrological Journey
That the EPOPEA OF GILGAMESH should be placed on the ways of heaven rather than relegated to the mountains and swamps of earth is deduced both from the places in which the scene is set and from the kind of characters our hero gradually encounters.
Not only that; we can also know the epoch in which this story takes place, and we understand it when the goddess Ishtar sends the Heavenly Bull against Gilgamesh, whose thigh and member Enkidu then tears off; the Heavenly Bull is none other than the constellation of Taurus, a constellation that is not represented by a whole bull but cut in half at the waist, missing precisely the back part. Thus, this scene is meant to tell us about the transition from the ERA OF THE JEWS (represented here by Gilgamesh and Enkidu) to the ERA OF THE BULL (shortly thereafter, in fact, Enkidu dies and the Celestial Bull, thus maimed, is taken up into the sky among the stars!), what took place around 4,499 BCE. It is therefore, this, a 'celestial' story, and this is also inferred from the series of characters who populate it; take for example the Guardian of the Cedar Forest, that monster Khumbaba killed by the two friends: well, the texts call him a god, and he seems to correspond to the Elamite god Hmba, who is even included in a Sumerian list of stars with the determinative mul that precedes precisely the name of the stars: mul Hmba, then, which was then the name by which the Sumerians called the star Raccoon, the alpha of the constellation Cane Minor, a star that this people had counted among those in the constellation Cancer. Not only that: the star mul Hmba, then, was representative, among the planets, of Mercury.
Another interesting element is the fact that to enter the Cedar Forest the two have to go through a door! But what is a door doing in a forest? The door is always a passage between two stages, between two worlds, between the here and the there. We then saw that Khumbaba corresponds to the star Raccoon, a star located near the constellation Cancer. All this would be an arcane catch-all if we did not know that in Cancer we find one of the Gates of the Zodiac (the other is in Capricorn), that is, the Gate from which humankind is incarnated (while from the one in Capricorn the gods are incarnated). It is thus a journey backwards that Gilgamesh and Enkidu undertake: from the Land of Men to the Land of Heaven, passing through the Gate of the Cedar Forest, precisely Cancer. Also interestingly, one of Khumbaba's appellations was "god of the fortress of intestines," what has led some scholars to think that he was the inhabitant and lord of the labyrinth, that is, a predecessor of the more famous Minotaur. In a bas-relief depicting Khumbaba, we see his face that seems to be precisely made of intestines, depicted as it is by a single sinuous line, a face that has strong resemblances to that of the Mexican god Tlaloc, the "god of rain": here, instead of a single sinuous line, we have two snakes that, twisting around each other, 'form' the face of the god, who thus resembles the Caducéo of Hermes-Mercury.
Thus, the Caducéo, the face of Tlaloc and the idea of a "god of the intestines," can only point us to Mercury (consider that this planet, astrologically, has its dominion, in addition to Gemini, also in Virgo, a Sign that in Astrological Medicine corresponds to the intestines!). But what does Mercury have to do with Cancer? In ancient times Mercury was considered a lunar god, and he had strong resemblances to the Egyptian lunar god Thot, the one who had taught writing to men. Not only that: in Egypt, in the tomb of Pharaoh Men-Maat-Ra-Sethi I, son of Ramesses I, we find the planet Mercury mentioned as the "North Star of the Heavens," and in any case as Lord of the Second Dean of the Fourth Sign, precisely Cancer, which in zodiacal depiction represents the North.
Another interesting element is the fact that to enter the Cedar Forest the two have to go through a door! But what is a door doing in a forest? The door is always a passage between two stages, between two worlds, between the here and the there. We then saw that Khumbaba corresponds to the star Raccoon, a star located near the constellation Cancer. All this would be an arcane catch-all if we did not know that in Cancer we find one of the Gates of the Zodiac (the other is in Capricorn), that is, the Gate from which humankind is incarnated (while from the one in Capricorn the gods are incarnated). It is thus a journey backwards that Gilgamesh and Enkidu undertake: from the Land of Men to the Land of Heaven, passing through the Gate of the Cedar Forest, precisely Cancer. Also interestingly, one of Khumbaba's appellations was "god of the fortress of intestines," what has led some scholars to think that he was the inhabitant and lord of the labyrinth, that is, a predecessor of the more famous Minotaur. In a bas-relief depicting Khumbaba, we see his face that seems to be precisely made of intestines, depicted as it is by a single sinuous line, a face that has strong resemblances to that of the Mexican god Tlaloc, the "god of rain": here, instead of a single sinuous line, we have two snakes that, twisting around each other, 'form' the face of the god, who thus resembles the Caducéo of Hermes-Mercury.
Other characters who give us further evidence of the astral location of this myth are Utnapistim the Far, or the Mesopotamian Noah, who has his abode at the "mouth of the rivers," and Siduri, the divine hostess. It is said that Gilgamesh came to the pass of Mount Masu, at the gates of which the Scorpion-Men stood guard. Consider that Masu means twins, and that among the Babylonian 'masu' stars we find the lambda and ipsilon Scorpii, or the twin stars of the Scorpion's sting. Mount Masu thus represents, in Babylonian astronomy, the area between the end of the constellation of Scorpio and the beginning of that of Sagittarius, a celestial zone in which we find no less than the Center of the Galaxy, the place from which souls were said to pass on their initial post-mortem journey, and it is from there that it begins, we read in the text, "a darkness that no one has ever traveled." For that matter, we know that, astrologically speaking, in Scorpio, the eighth Sign analogous to the eighth horoscopic sector, is represented the death of the physical body; interestingly, if life begins in Aries, the first Sign, death is not, as one would expect, in the last Sign, that is, Pisces, but, as seen, in the eighth. From there, in fact, there are four more Signs that basically represent the path and evolutionary process that the soul must go through before its rebirth in a new body in the Sign of Aries. We are then in the world of darkness, and Gilgamesh, as the text says, travels for twelve hours in an underground tunnel before seeing the light of the sun break through.
Finally our hero arrives at a garden of precious stones: here he meets Siduri, the divine hostess. The character Siduri has been juxtaposed by various scholars with those characters who in many epic poems have the task of assisting souls at the time of their departure from the body, such as the nun Gertrude in whose inn the souls spent the first night after death. Siduri gives Gilgamesh some advice on how to get to the place where Utnapistim dwells; first of all he will have to find Ursanabi, the ferryman, because he will be the one to accompany him to the Sea of Death. Now we have to consider that we have been handed down constellation names that sound like Hades or The Ferryman: these names we find between Scorpio and Sagittarius, where we had seen the Galactic Center before. Siduri and the Ferryman Ursanabi can be thought of as finding their 'home' in these places.
Ursanabi tells Gilgamesh to cut 120 poles that he will need to push the boat forward so that his hands do not touch the waters of death. Basically, each pole is needed for one paddle, thus estimating that it takes 120 paddles to reach the destination: consider that from Scorpio, the starting point of this journey of Gilgamesh in search of the plant of rebirth, to Pisces, where Utnapistim is supposed to live, there are four Signs, or 120°! Finally Gilgamesh arrives before Utnapistim, who is then, as mentioned, the Mesopotamian Noah, and who tells him about the Flood, how Enki, god of waters, wisdom and creator of mankind, warned him about the decision of Enlil, god of earth and wind, to destroy mankind, and how to build the Ark. This measured an acre ( an iku) of flat space, and as much for each side, so that the Ark was basically a cube.Obviously the flood was frightening, to such an extent that Enki rebuked Enlil who then apologized to Utnapistim and his wife, granting them to be like gods and to dwell "at the mouth of the rivers." This "mouth of the rivers" was the name given to the city of Eridu, which was in turn associated with, and still the 'earthly' representative of, the star Canopus, the alpha of the constellation Carena, a star that according to the Babylonians held the depths of the Apsu, the freshwater ocean that was cube-shaped, and the Ark was also made in the likeness of the Apsu, since it was a cube and measured "one iku" on each side. To understand the importance of what has now been said, consider that this measurement, "one iku," was the name the Babylonians gave to the Square of Pegasus, a constellation that 'just so happens' to be enclosed in that of Pisces.
Finally our hero arrives at a garden of precious stones: here he meets Siduri, the divine hostess. The character Siduri has been juxtaposed by various scholars with those characters who in many epic poems have the task of assisting souls at the time of their departure from the body, such as the nun Gertrude in whose inn the souls spent the first night after death. Siduri gives Gilgamesh some advice on how to get to the place where Utnapistim dwells; first of all he will have to find Ursanabi, the ferryman, because he will be the one to accompany him to the Sea of Death. Now we have to consider that we have been handed down constellation names that sound like Hades or The Ferryman: these names we find between Scorpio and Sagittarius, where we had seen the Galactic Center before. Siduri and the Ferryman Ursanabi can be thought of as finding their 'home' in these places.
From what we now see, we see how Gilgamesh's journey was a celestial journey, 'along the path of the sun,' the ecliptic. Other things would be to say about the hidden (but then not so much) celestial implications in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Suffice it for now to know that every myth, every 'fall,' every 'measurement,' is a description of those 'corrections' that must be implemented whenever the sky changes, whenever, that is, there is a need to put the cosmic clock back in place.
