I’ve just finished reading The Epic of Gilgamesh.
I know. Weird. An epic poem, four millennia or more old. A dusty cuneiform tale about a testosterone charged king who knows nothing but fighting and fucking. In our our age of patriarchy and misogyny, why engage this relic of the past that reinforces the habits and assumptions of toxic masculinity?
But did you know there’s a #MeToo moment in the tale?
King Gilgamesh has groped and abused and raped a lot of women. One day they rise up, en mass, and tell the gods about it. A massive class-action suit. Yes, against the most powerful man in the world. And unlike our own government, the ancient government actually does something about the predator-king.
I won’t lay out the plot for you. But I will say this, weird as it sounds, this ancient tale is a tract for our times.
Toxic masculinity is, of course, nothing new. But what’s new to me is that folks have been trying, since the dawn of our race, to find a way to heal the masculine soul that’s often so given to fighting and fucking that this kind of masculinity is messing up the world.
What this ancient epic shows us, what the perennial wisdom teaches us, is that masculinity is a journey, and wholeness comes through trial. It’s not merely a birthright. It must be developed, even earned through suffering.
Gilgamesh narrates the classic journey of the soul, the individuation process of depth psychology, the integration that is our goal. Gilgamesh is a young tyrant with absolute power, whose masculine energy serves only his basest instincts. Ego-driven, he’s gradually healed through loss of a friend, deprivation, and intense suffering. He comes to himself through a journey into and through the underworld. When he emerges from the ordeal, he is finally in possession of his true self and is capable of serving his true role in society; he uses his power for the common good.. He become a true king—father, lover, and guide for his people.
When Gilgamesh finally returns home, he returns not in his original hubris, but in humility—no longer a man of fighting and fucking, but of wholeness and wiseness.
His final quest for ultimate domination—to defeat the last monster, Death—teaches him that the goal of life is not eternal life, immortality, but wholeness of being, the finding of one’s beautiful soul. Gilgamesh learns that returning to eternal youthfulness is folly. Forward into manhood (full humanity) is what matters. Loss, grief, fear, courage, and survival are the means to wholeness and integration, the making of a soul that is truly beautiful.
John Keats, the English poet, once called “the world a vale of soul-making.” He understood what the wise so long ago were teaching in the epic poem—the way of wholeness.
Another poet, Ranier Maria Rilke says of the epic: “Gilgamesh is stupendous! I consider it to be among the greatest things that can happen to a person.” “I have immersed myself in it, and in these truly gigantic fragments I have experienced measures and forms that belong with the supreme works that the conjuring word has ever produced.”
My point is, toxic masculinity is nothing new. But neither is the cure.
There is a way to transform toxic, testosterone-driven aggression and violence into greater, creative and benevolent responsibility, to lead men from captivity to their basest instincts, fighting and fucking, to wholeness and wiseness.
Gilgamesh points the way.