Lust under Love

Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative tells the tale of a tyrant king named Gilgamesh, who is described as being two-thirds god and one-third man.  Gilgamesh is both powerful and cruel, taking brides wherever he so chooses while using forced labor for construction in his magnificent city Uruk.  Once the walls and buildings are completed, Gilgamesh grows bored with the structures and lets them decay back to rubble.  The people of Uruk grow weary of Gilgamesh’s actions and call upon the gods for help.  The gods, hearing the prayers of the distraught citizens of Uruk, create a wild man named Enkidu to reign in the tyrant king.  Hearing of Enkidu’s great strength, Gilgamesh sends a prostitute to find and humanize Enkidu.  Gilgamesh and Enkidu clash and find themselves near equals in strength.  They become great friends and set out on a variety of epic quests, where they eventually challenge the gods themselves.  In one such quest, Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight valiantly against Humbaba, and during the tussle, Enkidu is killed.  Enkidu’s death leaves Gilgamesh heartbroken and frightened by his own mortality.  Driven by his anxiety, Gilgamesh sets out to find Utnapishtim, from whom Gilgamesh hopes to gain eternal life.  Gilgamesh eventually finds Utnapishtim but fails in his quest for true immortality.  The story champions love, in direct contrast with pure lust, as the catalyst for great achievement and fulfillment in one’s life.

Throughout the text, love is made distinctly separate from lust in order to define love as the most beneficial emotion in one’s life.  Before the arrival of Enkidu, Gilgamesh would mercilessly ravage the women of Uruk and “demanded, from an old birthright, the privilege of sleeping with their brides before the husbands were permitted”(Mason).  He was a cruel leader to his subjects, and these peasants’ prayers reached the gods, who created Enkidu to counter Gilgamesh’s vicious lust.  In Enkidu’s earliest stages, he was not yet ready to face the human world where Gilgamesh resided.  It took lust, in the form of a prostitute no less, to humanize Enkidu and prepare him for his confrontation with Gilgamesh.  Although the sexual encounter brought knowledge; Enkidu became exhausted and felt the absence of the prostitute when his life left (Mason).  Enkidu was separated from nature by the experience, bringing clear costs and benefits to lustful encounters.  Both Gilgamesh and Enkidu enjoyed purely sexual encounters only in a passing fashion.  Gilgamesh hardly described his encounters with women, and Enkidu, despite the assistance the prostitute provided, quickly forgot her as the story progressed.  Neither of the two heroes got any sort of long-lasting emotions from their sexual encounters.  Lust was shown to be a means to an end, an important part of human society and the core of human science, but not a source of true fulfillment.

Enkidu’s companionship stood in direct confrontation to Gilgamesh’s generally heterosexual lust.  In order to prevent Gilgamesh from raping another man’s bride, Enkidu blocked his path. The friendship that arose from the tussle was directly born from a denial of Gilgamesh’s insistence on a slew of purely lust-driven encounters.  After the confrontation, Gilgamesh had no desire to continue his forceful encounters with the women of Uruk.  He was no longer interested in such brief, uninspiring endeavors.  Unlike Gilgamesh’s previous conquests, the battle with Enkidu was difficult and required Gilgamesh to put forth effort and determination.  These challenges filled Gilgamesh with new ideas and inspired him to set out on a variety of epic quests with his new companion.

The partnership between Gilgamesh and Enkidu gave Gilgamesh strength and fortitude beyond the vast amount he had previously possessed.  Their love was based on mutual respect for each other’s strength and contained a two-sided dynamic that had never existed in Gilgamesh’s previous relations.  With Enkidu by his side, Gilgamesh did not fear death.  Gilgamesh’s confidence arose from his joy in finding a companion of equal strength and mettle.  After Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh’s opinions on mortality changed drastically.  He set out a solo quest simply to contain his fears about his own inevitable demise.  Part of Gilgamesh’s newfound fear came from seeing a man of equal strength find an untimely death.  The other portion came from losing the man Gilgamesh loved most in the world.  All the bravery that Enkidu had given him disappeared, leaving Gilgamesh cowering in fear of an end he had brushed aside not long ago.

Although some lust was always contained within love, the story focused on the power of brotherly love and friendship.  Only minor signs of affection were described, in a vow and an embrace, leaving the relationship loving on a purely friendly level.  Although signs of affection vary in meaning and importance, the wording was contrary to the style used when the love scene between Enkidu and the prostitute began. The love scene between Enkidu and the prostitute was quite detailed and focused on lustful actions.  Despite the length of the description, the encounter served as a brief moment in Enkidu’s history and its real importance came from the knowledge Enkidu gained of humanized society.  When Gilgamesh and Enkidu shared loving moments they were brief, defining friendship but nothing more.  Although the moment was incredibly important for the story, as the beginning of their friendship, the action itself receives little literary detail.  An embrace, a handshake, a vow, only small actions were used to describe Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s friendship, which contrasted heavily with the story’s lust based encounters.

The power of love was most evident for Gilgamesh, whose dramatic change in lifestyle was a direct result of the addition of love, and the removal of pure lust.  Love was often directly contrasted with lust, in order to magnify the benefits of a loving relationship.  Both Gilgamesh and Enkidu had brief sexual relations prior to their encounter.  In studying their behavior, as the story progressed, the sexual encounters fell meaningless when compared to the achievements of their friendship.  Love was shown to actively strengthen Gilgamesh, giving him the ability to overcome even fear.  It also motivated Gilgamesh to accomplish great quests, to move beyond the confines of his kingdom and the repetitive lifestyle he was living.  When Enkidu was killed during the fight with Humbaba, Gilgamesh was truly heartbroken.  Gilgamesh changed in a negative way, and these unfortunate changes were just as powerful in portraying the massive effect Enkidu had on Gilgamesh’s person.  Unlike lust, love was not as heavily described by the wording and styling of the story.  Lust was made to be concrete, simplifying it and making it often nothing more than a means to an end.  Love was left in a less defined state, often defined not by literal words in the text but by the actions of the characters engaged in it.  Love and lust were always entwined, and love always came out on top.

Work Cited

Mason, Herbert. Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative. First Mariner Books Edition, 2003.