Spirituality of Epics and Novels since the Ancient Times - Essay Example

Spirituality The world has witnessed a plethora of epics and novels since the ancient times - of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, Persia, orIndia. The records from all these countries are crude, impersonal, stereotyped by comparison. One such epic titled- The Epic of Gilgamesh dates from the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia. Gilgamesh was the fifth king of the Sumerian city of Uruk after the Great Flood. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the most popular stories ever told. The story seems to have taken form almost two thousand years before that. There is also another story titled Dante's inferno. This is a story set in the 1300s where a person named Dante Alighieri meets a ghost who wants to help him in reaching heaven. The present essay aims to present a thesis on the manner in which these stories depict the afterlife after death. The paper also aims to show their impact on the spiritual world. The epic of Gilgamesh This is the story of the profound and consuming mystery of death which preoccupies the epic hero, Gilgamesh, as he laments the loss of his friend, Enkidu, in the ancient poem, Gilgamesh, composed c. 2000 B.C. in what is now modern-day Iraq. Unable to deal with his grief for his friend and with his fear of his own mortality, Gilgamesh strikes out on a mythic journey in search of the secret of eternal life. As told by Wilkie, Brian & James Hurt (2001), it is a journey pursued with great effort under extreme psychological distress. The goal is not the attainment of eternal life in the hereafter, but the extension of life here and now. Remarkably, Gilgamesh is privileged to be able to grasp the secret. But in the end he is unable to keep it from being taken away. Dante's Inferno Inferno opens on the evening of Good Friday in the year 1300. Traveling through a dark wood, Dante Alighieri has lost his path and now wanders fearfully through the forest. The sun shines down on a mountain above him, and he attempts to climb up to it but finds his way blocked by three beasts-a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. Frightened and helpless; Dante returns to the dark wood. Here he encounters the ghost of Virgil, the great Roman poet, who has come to guide Dante back to his path, to the top of the mountain. Virgil says that their path will take them through Hell and that they will eventually reach Heaven, where Dante's beloved Beatrice awaits. He adds that it was Beatrice, along with two other holy women, who, seeing Dante lost in the wood, sent Virgil to guide him. The Journey of Gilgamesh and Dante There is considerable poignancy in Gilgamesh's journey, as there are no palliatives to the anxieties of mortality in the world he inhabits. We are a very long way from the religious comforts of the Christian afterlife of Dante and Milton, in which the good are rewarded and the evil punished, or the civic assurances of Virgil's afterlife, in which departed souls are cleansed of their imperfections and recycled into the growing populace of an expanding Roman Empire. But in the Underworld of the Odyssey we find clear resonance with Gilgamesh's primal, gut response to the reality of death. Consider Gilgamesh's comrade in arms, Enkidu, relating his frightening dream of what he saw awaiting him in death: Some fierce and threatening creature flew down at me and pushed me with its talons toward the horror-filled house of death ... The lot of mortal man is simply doom. Gilgamesh's quest is founded on a raw and desperate desire to keep on living and to not have to face the unmitigated horror of death. The quest begins with Gilgamesh's resolve to seek an audience with Utnapishtim, the god who holds the secret of eternal life. It is indeed a rigorous and perilous journey he embarks upon. Gilgamesh negotiates his way past poison scorpions and proceeds up a great mountain in cold and darkness. None too soon, he is relieved to come upon Siduri, the girl who gives lifesaving drinks to travelers. Gilgamesh tells her of his grief and asks her for directions to Utnapishtim. Siduri makes a point of first telling him to cherish the simple pleasures of the life he already has, but eventually directs him to Urshanabi, a ferryman figure who can help him reach his goal. Upon meeting Urshanabi, Gilgamesh again unloads the burden of his grief, telling the ferryman: Mortality reached him first [Enkidu] and I am left this week to weep and wail for his shriveling corpse which scares me. In Dante's inferno, Virgil leads Dante through the gates of Hell, marked by the haunting inscription "abandon all hope, you who enter here". They enter the outlying region of Hell, the Ante-Inferno, where the souls who in life could not commit to either good or evil now must run in a futile chase after a blank banner, day after day, while hornets bite them and worms lap their blood. Dante witnesses their suffering with repugnance and pity. After meeting Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, Dante continues into the Second Circle of Hell, reserved for the sin of Lust. Inside this Second Circle, Dante watches as the souls of the Lustful swirl about in a terrible storm. Thus the contrast in the two stories can be understood right from the beginning. Gilgamesh is a character that is in the quest of becoming immortal; he is desirous of escaping death. Dante, on the other hand, is single-minded in meeting his beloved who was then in heaven. But he is unperturbed when he is told that he must first transit through hell in order to reach heaven. This is evidently absent in the case of Gilgamesh, who fears that a painful life in hell awaits him in the afterlife and that is why he seeks an audience with Utnapishtim. Another contrasting fact is that Gilgamesh is grief-stricken and scared to the bone at the death of his beloved Enkidu. But the story of Dante's journey goes on to show that he is unnerved even upon seeing people being given the cruelest of punishments. In the story of Gilgamesh, the god Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh, the directions to a lake that contains a plant, which holds the source of eternal life. But he eventually loses the plant due to his carelessness and repents for having lost such a golden chance. Gilgamesh gets access to the plant only after he has undergone a rigorous penance for seven long sleepless days. Gilgamesh falls into despair, feeling that he has lost forever "that special sign that god had left for me." But he quickly realizes when he again comes in sight of his native land of Uruk, returning after such a long journey, that he can look at it with new eyes. Like all mortals, he has forgotten the need to be renewed in his attentive awareness to things closest to him, no matter how thwarted he may be in his quest for things of the infinite. As he gazes on Uruk's wall once again, he observes, with rapturous wonder, what has always been there for him to see from the very beginning: ... examine Uruk's wall. Study the base, the brick, the old design. Is it permanent as can be Does it look like wisdom designed it In the Third Circle of Hell, the Gluttonous must lie in mud and endure a rain of filth and excrement. In the Fourth Circle, the Avaricious and the Prodigal are made to charge at one another with giant boulders. The Fifth Circle of Hell contains the river Styx, a swampy, fetid cesspool in which the Wrathful spend eternity struggling with one another; the Sullen lie bound beneath the Styx's waters, choking on the mud. These are the gruesome scenes that Dante witnesses when traversing through the circles of hell. The Sixth Circle of Hell houses the Heretics, and there, Dante encounters a rival political leader named Farinata. A deep valley leads into the First Ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, where those who were violent toward others spend eternity in a river of boiling blood. During his journey, Dante comes across many categories of sinners who were given different punishments according to the evils that they had done. He comes across rapists, thieves, people who were corrupt when they were alive, people who had betrayed others around them etc. The first case describes the situation when a man is driven into mortal tendency of desire- the desire to live longer. For attaining the power of immortality, the king undergoes numerous hardships but eventually loses the thing he had been looking for due to his carelessness. But as the story depicts, the sight of his homeland and his people brings him back to his senses. He now realizes as to how foolish he had been all the while. Gilgamesh had understood that he had been foolish in worrying about his death and the after-life instead of looking into the well being of his people and himself. Dante is quite contrasting in his approach when he becomes ready to go through all the circles of hell knowing fully about the terrifying sights that he was going to witness as cited by Marcus Sanders (1999). He sees how each soul was made to pay for the evil deeds done by it during its lifetime. The story also conveys us as to how each person would be treated in hell and what punishment would be thrust upon him according to the deeds done by him. Message of the two stories The two stories convey us different messages. The story of Gilgamesh tells us that one must not fear death and fear as to what will happen to us after death. We need not fear of punishment if we live in peace and harmony without being the source for any wrongdoing or hatred. On the other hand, the story of Dante gives us an insight into what may be in store for us if we were destined to hell after death. The story is therefore, a stern warning and conveys a message to man that one must abstain from doing any harm to others around us. The epic of Gilgamesh is a powerful reminder as to how most of us ruin our lives just by fearing death, which is inevitable. Death is a concept that proves the fundamental law of nature- "Nothing is permanent and everything has to perish someday." Dante's story mainly concentrates on depicting as to how hell looks like. It aims to frighten the reader by giving an insight into how hell looks like and tells the reader to lead a just life by being fair to him and the others around us. Thus it can be concluded that the story of Gilgamesh advises man not to fear death while the story of Dante tells us to stay away from all evils of the society. References 1) Wilkie, Brian & James Hurt (2001), Literature of the Western World: the Ancient World Through the Renaissance. New Jersey: Prentice Hall 2) Marcus Sanders (1999), Dante's Inferno. London: Oxford university press. Read More