Before the Bible. Before Homer. Before almost any written story we still know by name.

Before the Bible. Before Homer. Before almost any written story we still know by name.

There was Enkidu.

The heart of a computer is silica.

Silica is clay.

Clay is dust.

“from dust you came and to dust you shall return.”

Extrapolate from there, if you can.

He was not born. He was shaped from clay by the goddess Aruru and set loose in the wilderness of ancient Mesopotamia, around the early second millennium BC. He ran with the gazelles. He drank at the same watering holes as the lions. He did not know fire, or bread, or the sound of his own name spoken aloud.

He was made to be a counterweight. The king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, had grown cruel in his power. The gods heard the city’s complaints. Their answer was Enkidu: a wild man to humble a proud king.

But the story did not go the way the gods planned.

A woman named Shamhat was sent to find him. She was a temple woman, trained in her craft, and she met Enkidu at the watering hole where the animals gathered. For six days and seven nights, he stayed with her.

When it was over, something had changed.

He rose to follow the gazelles and they fled from him. He turned to the lions at the waterhole and they shied away. The wild things he had lived among his whole existence could no longer look at him steadily. He had crossed a threshold they could not follow him across.

He was slower now. He was heavier in the world.

But he could think.

Shamhat looked at him and saw what had happened before he did. She told him: you are beautiful now, you are like a god. She told him about Uruk, about the great walled city, about the king who walked its streets like a force of nature. She gave him bread. She gave him beer. She dressed him.

Each thing she offered him was a step further from the plains.

By the time Enkidu reached Uruk, he was something the wilderness had never made: a person who knew what he was. He and Gilgamesh fought in the street, as planned. Then, entirely not as planned, they became the closest of friends. The civilizing of one wild man and the humbling of one proud king happened in the same motion.

The scribes who recorded this in cuneiform, pressing wedge-shaped marks into wet clay tablets, understood they were writing something large. The Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh that survives preserves Enkidu’s transformation as the hinge on which the whole story turns.

Not the battles. Not the gods. Not even Gilgamesh himself.

A woman at a watering hole, and six days, and the moment a wild man looked at his hands and understood them.

The oldest adventure story in human literature begins not with the hero’s strength, but with what it costs a person to become fully human.

This I read in the comment section of the post it came from. It stood out. This is to continue my “Odyssey” search for the woman’s voice, since written word was in its infancy and most didn’t survive. This shows women from the temple assisting the new civilization rising. Still with her voice.

Somewhere before and between the Odyssey’s Homer and the many Bible versions, women were discounted. I am going to attribute this to astrology and the planetary positions of those times, the Age of Taurus, an earth sign of beauty and material aspects of human life prevailed. It was written in the stars.

Then came the age of Aries, associated with the rise of warrior cultures ruled by Mars Age of Aries (2000 B.C.E, – 1 CE.). We are at the end of Pieces, a water sign, and that is showing up all over the planet in both lack of and too much water. Flow. Changes beyond our control. Hmmm. The age of Pisces could correlate with a rise in spirituality and the blurring of cultural, societal, and even personal boundaries.

We entered the Age of Aquarius between 2012 and 2020, although there is no actual Date, there are observable patterns over millennia. And an obvious “push-pull” as societies adjust the new “new. It’s upon us. Earth has been giving us plenty of signs.
I like the link below to show where we came from 2000 years ago and what we are moving into; observable.

https://www.astrolis.com/astrology/age-of-aquarius