The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 105. Raymond de Becker “Enkidu watched over Gilgamesh as if his wife”

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Gilgamesh and Enkidu 02 –

Raymond de Becker’s analysis

In the ten years preceding the Stonewall Riots, a flurry of books appeared from the popular press dealing with same-sex love. These were not the first of their kind, for those date to the 19th century, but after the cruel wave of repression ushered in by the GOP, starting in January 1953, these books tried to reestablish how ordinary the existence of Gay people in the world actually is; an acceptance which had existed in North America prior to the Eisenhower regime. (Therefore, you can see it’s no coincidence the flood gates on books exploring the nature of same-sex love burst almost the minute John Kennedy took office.)

Each publishing firm had different motivations for bringing what they did to the market, with many of these books being pointedly risqué and sex-shaming – fun, gag-gift type material. Other editors skewed towards printing entirely scholarly editions, with tomes asserting the sober-yet-damning voice of the majority’s right to oppress the Gay minority in perpetuity.

The one thing all of these studies have in common is that they were penned by the only permissible authority on ‘H-words’ at the time: the mental-hygiene professional. This being said, some important groundwork was laid down by these psychiatrists and psychologists (whose careers would be ruined if they appeared to be even the slightest bit pro-Gay). For example, one work I randomly picked up from the Community Thrift Store in San Francisco (from 1967, if I remember correctly) invents the term/concept of “homophobia.” No such notion, that hatred towards LGBTI2S+ people could itself be a psychological disorder, had emerged in print before this. This single book did almost as much as Stonewall itself to break down barriers for Queer folks, and did it with a pen-stroke, for the idea was immediately picked up by others and propagated widely. It was blind luck I happened to stumble upon the original work in which the concept was premiered.

Long-winded intro, I know, but I go this length to show that Raymond de Becker’s 1964 L’erotisme d’en face was part of a continuum. Crown Publishers picked up the right to offer an English translation, and The Other Face of Love appeared in the same year.

The texture of the work is notably different, though, from his North American mental health colleagues. He seems less afraid in France of being banished for speaking about same-sex love in positive-leaning language. As praiseworthy as that is, Becker’s study is still highly flawed for attempting to frame historical Gay people in Victorian notions of “ego” and “repression,” and – that old humbug of all Freudians – that Gay folks were “narcissists” in the literal sense. Their medical ‘thoughts’ homophobically projected that every Gay man looked at other men as “sex objects” because they could not have sex with themselves, which is what they really desired. ( . . . God, what bullshit . . . )

So, in Chapter 2 of The Other Face of Love, much of Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s passionate love story is interpreted through the ever-erotizing fog of Freudian misconceptions. Please try to ignore it, by which I mean, look beyond it to our present understanding of love being love regardless of one’s orientation, and know confidently that all ancient people regarded it in exactly the same way.

from Chapter II

Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Palestine

The knowledge we possess of [same-sex love] among animals or primitive [sic!] peoples gives us no clue concerning the nature of the emotion underlying this type of [partnership]. However, in one of the oldest existing epics, which goes back to the second millennium before our era, the Epic of Gilgamesh – a Babylonian poem of which the most recent texts date from the second period of the Assyrian Empire, during the seventh century before Christ – we can hear for the first time the profound music of [same-sex love], a music in which psychoanalysts could find many of their themes, but which also leads us toward some of the most frightening [sic] aspects of man’s metaphysical destiny.

Gilgamesh was neither a medicine man nor a prostitute [of the type explored in Chapter I], but a king; a powerful and much-feared warrior. Religious prostitution did exist in Babylon and Nineveh, among both men and women, and was practiced in the shadow of the temples. But this is something different, and the archives of Boghazkeui have revealed a document which is at the same time a love story and a quest for immortality and the subterranean world. Gilgamesh is the great Babylonian hero, some of whose gigantic portraits can still be admired in our museums, and especially in the Louvre. Neither was there anything effeminate [sic] about Gilgamesh. He was a person so important that no one dared to vie with him. However, his dreams revealed to him what reality did not. He dreamed on several occasions that while he was “preening himself before the valiant” someone resembling a champion of divine stature fell on top of him, and when he tried to lift the other man, he found him too heavy. He tried to free himself from the oppressive weight of this body but did not even succeed in budging it. His comrades – the craftsmen and the people of Erech – then gathered around [Enkidu] the champion, paid homage to him, and kissed his feet. And in the end, Gilgamesh himself embraced him “as one embraces a wife” and deposited the champion at his own mother’s feet.

The mother of Gilgamesh was very wise. She interpreted the dream and told her son that the champion he found too heavy for his strength was the man she had made into his companion, that this companion would watch over Gilgamesh as over a wife, and would always come to his friend’s aid, that his strength would weight the entire country, and that he would never abandon Gilgamesh. And when Gilgamesh dreamed again about a double-bladed ax that fell on him, and over which he watched as he would over a wife, his mother told him again that this ax was a man whom she was going to bring into his presence and [the one] who would be his companion forever. […]

However, the real mother [then] disappears from the epic. Gilgamesh meets in reality the companion of whom he had dreamed. He is called Enkidu, and his strength is greater than that of the hero. They fall in love with one another and set out in search of the herb of immortality, facing monsters and obstacles neither would have dared to challenge on his own. Gilgamesh continues to dream, except that it is no longer his mother, but his friend, who interprets his dreams. He wakes in the middle of the night and asks, “My partner, did you not call me? Why did I wake up? Did you not touch me? Why am I anxious? Has a god not passed by? Why is my body without strength? Oh, Enkidu, my brother, I have seen in a dream . . . “ And Enkidu again interprets his friend’s dream.

The most violent episode in the epic is certainly that in which the two friends confront a woman. The latter has assumed the appearance of Ishtar, who was the Babylonian goddess of [straight sexual] pleasure [and prostitution]. She intends to have her revenge, and asks her father to create a celestial bull which could overcome the hero. The celestial bull disperses a hundred men; then three hundred; but the two partners kill it. Ishtar curses Gilgamesh, but Enkidu throws the animal’s organs in her face. The goddess threatens to castrate [Enkidu] in turn. Then Gilgamesh utters one of the great songs of masculine [independence]:

Thou art no more than a ruin, he said, that gives no shelter to man against bad weather; thou art only a banging door that cannot withstand the storm;

thou art only a trap that conceals acts of treachery;

thou art only blazing pitch that burns the hand of [he] who touches it;

thou art only a water bottle that drowns [he] who carries it;

thou art only a scrap of limestone that lets the ramparts fall into ruins . . .

What lover of yours did you ever love for ever?

What man whom you have possessed ever knew good fortune?

Listen, I will recount the endless list of your lovers.

The good Dumuzi, your lover when you were young.

. . .

And when you have loved me, you will treat me as you treated them!

In Babylonian mythology, the god Dumuzi can be identified with Tammuz or Adonis; that is to say, one of the gods who died young because of a woman. Gilgamesh, in fact, refuses to accept such a fate. And, as Enkidu in his turn curses the courtesan, the assembled gods deem that so many crimes should be punished. It is Enkidu in the end who must bear the violence of their wrath and die. This time it is not Gilgamesh who dreams, but his friend. The latter sees his arms covered with feathers like the wings of the birds which in Mesopotamia are the symbol of death. He begs Gilgamesh to follow him “to the house which one enters with no hope of leaving, along the road which leads only toward it and never back . . . “ But he must enter the subterranean world alone while Gilgamesh, in vain, goes on in search of the herb of immortality. And when, many years later, he returns disappointed to Erech, his royal town, near death, he wants to know the ultimate reality, he asks the gods to allow his partner to come up from the underworld and reveal it to him. After this prayer has been granted, an astonishing dialogue takes place:

Tell me, my brother, implored Gilgamesh, tell me, my friend, tell me the law of the underworld that you know.

No, replied Enkidu, I shall not tell you about it, my partner, I shall not tell you; if I were to tell you the law of the subterranean world that I know, I should see you sit down and weep.

Very well, replied Gilgamesh once more, I am ready to sit down and weep.

That which you cherished, Enkidu then confided, that which you caressed and

which brought happiness to your heart, like an old garment is now devoured by the worms.

That which you cherished, that which you caressed and which made your heart glad, is today covered in dust.

It is all plunged into dust; it is all plunged into dust.

We have given substantial extracts from this four-thousand-year-old poem because they give deep insight into [same-sex love] relationships, whereas animal sexology, or mere comparative ethnology, allow us to see only external and superficial aspects. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the origins of this relationship are found in the loving recognition of [their love’s] superiority. Gilgamesh, the all-powerful sovereign of his kingdom, finds a savage whose strength is so great that he has to bow before him; but Enkidu, the savage, must also bow down before the social strength of his partner. Curiously enough, it is the hero’s mother who presides over this love affair and defines it. However, although the partners are under the maternal wing, at least at the outset, they find in this relationship the strength to oppose Ishtar, the goddess of [opposite-sex] pleasure, who intended to stop them in their quest for immortality. The fact that Enkidu must die while Gilgamesh can pursue his course, that he is perpetually the shadowy interlocutor to whom the hero speaks (in addition to being the one who descends into the underworld and reveals its nature), also foreshadows the theme of the Ka, the Double, which is found among the Egyptians; that of the Dioscuri among the Greeks; the Dadophores in the cult of Mithras; and that of the Shadow in contemporary depth psychology. Everything takes place as though Gilgamesh were discovering in Enkidu a shadowy dimension of himself, the revelation of his hidden and unconscious depths, from which he must all the same turn away, at least temporarily, in order to accomplish his masculine vocation. He only finds them at the moment of his final isolation and his last demand. The homoerotic relationship appears within this perspective as the discovery of a force superior to that imagined by the conscious ego. This force implicates the final fate of the being, helps to overcome the obstacles or temptations of a life that is too easy, and allows, at the end of existence, the final dialogue with the interior Double who is incarnated by the friend in external life.

There is no [same-sex love] writing written before the time of Plato so explicit and profound as this.

—Raymond de Becker,

1964

[Margaret Crosland /

Alan Daventry, translators]