Gilgamesh The final chapter: With or against nature

Gilgamesh and Enkidu have both proven to show their different ways acting towards nature. Gilgamesh is a city person who really doesn’t know much of this and build the city walls to keep nature out of his city. Enkidu grew up with nature and he knows how to channel the good things in it towards its benefit. Since the fall of Enkidu’s innocence he stopped being part of nature and began t act more like Gilgamesh. This change in attitude might be seen as his conversion from a leaver in to a taker but there is another way to look at it.

The gods created the world and therefore nature. If this is so then by serving the gods you could be serving nature as well. It may seem contradictory that the gods would order the death of Huwawa the guardian of the forest since he was protecting his forest which most likely was a task given by the gods. Unless the guardian of the forest was the taker in the sense that he believed that the forest and everything in it was his and that because of this nature would have to take control of it again. There is a problem to this theory and it has to do with the fact that if Huwawa were the leaver in this story then why cut the greatest tree in the forest and make a door from it as a symbol of victory? If they were the leaver it would make no sense to put the cedar tree like a trophy and as a way of telling the world that they killed the guardian of the forest and therefore the forest is theirs. Yet this is still one way to interpret their relationship.

Yet there is a third possibility. Maybe the gods weren’t really the creators of Earth. Maybe we were the creators of the gods. There isn’t culture in the world that doesn’t believe in a superior being, an entity which with its great power created us and the whole world. It almost seems that it is part of human nature to believe in this kind of things. As I have said in previous blogs, gods could be but an illusion created by us to make death much easier as well as having someone to blame for the natural disasters that happen and are out of our control.

We can see with all of this that Enkidu’s and Gilgamesh’s relationship with nature was either good or bad. In one they are only trying to protect nature and in the other they are trying to control it. Although there is now way of knowing what caused either their hate or love against nature these are some of the possibilities. The one that seems most likely is that gods were something that they believed in and that they created to feel supported in some of the actions they did that didn’t seem right. Although Enkidu was brought up by nature since he lost his innocence everything changed and the knowledge he had of own to live in nature he used to help Gilgamesh but never to just survive. He used his leaver knowledge in a taker way.