The Gods Are Our Family
© 2007 John Matthews, used with permission

The Search for Immortality

'To him had been given wisdom —
immortality had not been given to him'.
— The Myth of Adapa

From the beginning of human history the idea of immortality — its getting or its loss — has been a central theme in the myths and stories of every culture. In the Tablets of Lore it occurs many times, especially in the story of Gilgamesh, where the hero at first seeks the immortality of fame, flying in the face of the gods to achieve it, and then, when he at last meets death face to face when his friend Enkidu dies, by seeking actual immortality of the body. In this story, as in the one that follows here, the mortal hero is offered the gift, in the shape of the plant of eternal life that grows beneath the sea. But, just as in the story of Adapa, the gift is lost.

It is very clear that to the people of Sumer the gift of life was acknowledged as supremely important, as something to be both honoured and cherished. Living, as they did, in a land where the most precious gift of water had to be persuaded to flow into fields and wells, they were well aware of the fragility of their existence. And, while there is no doubt that they possessed a belief in an afterlife, they approached this in the same pragmatic way that they brought to everything. It is this that brings special poignancy to the story of Adapa, as to the epic of Gilgamesh — for in both the gift of immortality is offered, only to be snatched away again before it can be gained.

Adapa and the Bread of Life

The man was named Adapa, and he alone was permitted to serve at the Gods' table. Ea had given him great wisdom, enough to understand the shape of creation itself. Every day he baked bread, fetched water, and fished in the sea. With his skills he stocked the temples and brought good things to those who lived in the city of Eridu. So he was considered the wisest among men, a pattern of the Gods' creation, subtle and astute.

But, though Adapa was wise and skillful, he was also mortal. Death would find him in the allotted time, and he would vanish into the realm of the Underworld.

Now it happened that one day the stocks of fish in the temple of Ea fell short, and Adapa saw this and was mindful to catch some more. He went to the quayside and boarded the moon-boat that lay at anchor there. A fresh wind blew and Adapa let the craft run before it. Soon he was far out in the ocean, and there he cast his nets.

Then the South wind began to blow. So strong was it that Adapa's boat capsized and he was thrown into the world of the fish. As he struggled in the grip of the waves Adapa called out in anger: "South Wind, may your wings break!"

As he spoke the wings of the wind broke indeed, and the ocean became still. Adapa righted the Moon Boat and sailed safely back to the city.

For seven days thereafter the wind was silent, until at length it came to the attention of the King of Heaven.

"Why has the South wind stopped blowing?" demanded Anu of his servant Ilabrat.

"Lord, the man Adapa, Ea's son, has broken the South Wind's wings with his anger."

When he heard this Anu rose from his throne and went to speak with Ea. "This man, Adapa, has done an evil thing and must be punished," said Anu. "Fetch him hither."

So Ea summoned the man and spoke with him. "Anu is angry," he said. "He will destroy you if you do not do as I say." And he advised Adapa to go in rags, with his face scratched and his hair uncombed as if in mourning. "Follow the path to the gate of heaven. When you arrive there you will see two gods waiting for you. They are Tammuz and Gizzida. Do not be afraid. They will ask you why you look like this. Tell them you are in mourning for them, who have left the earth. They will smile upon you because of this and will speak well of you to Anu. Do you understand this?"

Adapa trembled but nodded.

"Then," said Ea, "when you stand before Anu, he will offer you the bread of death. Do not eat it. Next he will offer you the water of death. Do not drink it. Next he will offer you a garment of light. Accept this, and anoint yourself with the oil that shall be given to you also. Do not forget this!"

The messenger came to bring Adapa before the King of Heaven. He led him up the roadway until they stood before the Eastern gate. There they met the two gods, Tammuz and Gizzida, just as Ea had foretold.

When they saw Adapa in his torn garments, with his hair uncombed and his cheeks scratched they said: "Why do you appear before us looking like this?"

"I am in mourning for two mighty gods who have left our land," said Adapa.

"Which gods are these?" they demanded.

"Why, Tammuz and Gizzida," answered Adapa.

Then the two gods looked at each other and smiled. "Come," they said. "Let us go before great Anu."

When they stood before the throne of heaven Anu looked down at Adapa and frowned. "Why did you break the wings of the South Wind?" he asked.

"Lord," replied Adapa, "I was fishing to bring more stocks to the house of my master, Ea, when the South Wind rose and capsized the boat of the Moon. In my anger I cursed the wind."

Anu frowned on the man, but Tammuz and Gizzida spoke kindly of him, and soothed the anger of the king.

Anu sighed. "What was Ea thinking about to make this creature like us, and to gift him with wisdom equal to ours?' He looked at Adapa, and said: 'Well, now that you are here there is only one thing to do. Bring the bread of life."

So they brought the bread of life, but Adapa, mindful of what Ea had told him, refused it.

Anu said, "Bring the water of life."

So they brought the water, but Adapa again refused.

Then they brought him the garment of light and oil to anoint himself and these Adapa took.

Then Anu laughed. "What a strange creature you are to be sure! Why do you refuse my gifts? Now you will never have eternal life."

"Lord, it was Ea who instructed me," answered Adapa.

Anu laughed again. "The loss is yours Adapa, as it will be of all who come after you." Then he showed the man the whole breadth and height and depths of heaven and gave him command over his own life and of those who came after. Then he sent Adapa back to the world of men.

And so, because of this man, who broke the wings of the South Wind and went into heaven to stand before the throne of Anu, humankind are mortal, and after the span of years decreed to them, they die. And sickness is theirs, that can be cured only by Ninkarrak, the Lady of Healing. And Ea was sad, for he had a liking for the creature he had formed, but even he dare not go against the decree of Anu.

* * *

The anguish of death and dissolution is something most of us encounter at least once in our lives. Some dwell on the thought of their own death, or that of a loved one, increasingly as they grow older. The inevitability of the moment cannot be denied, and is the same whatever one's belief in an afterlife. We face the thought in different ways — by pushing it to the back of our minds and avoiding all mention of it, or by addressing the idea of our own or others' deaths head on.

Right at the beginning of the Adapa story the crux of the matter is stated. Ea had granted Adapa almost god-like status, gifted him with skill and cleverness. But, he has also made him finite. Death will come for him in time. We are not told how Adapa feels about this, or if he has even thought of it. Perhaps, like Gilgamesh, when he is reminded of his own end, he will face it with a mixture of courage or fear. Perhaps he sees it as an inevitable aspect of the life he has been given — for he is, in a sense, the first man, the nearest equivalent to Adam that we find in Mesopotamian culture.

At any rate, when he is offered the bread and water of life he refuses, apparently because he misunderstood the meaning of Ea's advice. Perhaps, as can so easily happen in our own lives, he failed to pay enough attention to the words of the god, hearing only what he thought was an injunction not to eat or drink anything. The outcome is that he is denied immortality, as are all his descendants. There is no second chance. The original text ends on a note of sorrow: "As for him, the man child of man, who broke the wing of the South Wind in his arrogance brought upon us the sufferings of mankind." (Trans. N. K. Sanders).

So it is Adapa's arrogance, his pride and anger, which bring the curse of mortality down upon all of mankind. This is a theme that occurs throughout ancient myth. Again and again humanity is tested by the gods and found wanting, the gift of immortality held out to them, only to be withdrawn as the result of some act of hubris. Yet it might also be said, that while Adapa does indeed act out of the heat of the moment — he has just been upended into the sea! — he is not entirely to blame for this. Everything turns on a fact of which we have a less certain knowledge. Does Adapa know when he calls out in anger against the wind that his words will be so powerful as to actually cause the wind's wings to break? If so, if his intent was to bring harm, then the fault is truly his. He ought, we might say, to have had the patience and understanding— part of the astuteness given him by Ea — not to strike out against a force of nature.

But again we see how the man is loved by his creator — enough for Ea to devise a means by which Adapa will avoid the anger of the lord of heaven. He does this by appealing to the natural arrogance of the gods rather than by speaking up for his own creation — a fact which says something about the relationship of the gods themselves, as does the scene which follows, where Tammuz and Gizzida are flattered by Adapa's appearance as a mourner bewailing their withdrawal from the world (we are not told of the reason for this.) Perhaps it is this failure on the part of Ea to stand up for his creation (and which emphasizes his own humanity) that causes Adapa to forget the more important instruction not to eat or drink the bread and water of death. We are, after all, told that the man was made as a pattern of the God's creation, which implies that he inherited flaws that they too possessed. (Or are we meant to think that Adapa himself bent the divine pattern to his own ends? At this point he seems not to have free will, though this is granted by Anu in the closing lines of the text).

In this story, there is no sense of the man trying to trick the gods into giving him mortality — as in so many traditions around the world. Adapa seems to accept this mortal state as a matter of course (perhaps he knows no better?) and indeed scarcely seems to understand what he is being offered, another point at which his famed wisdom apparently fails him.

What, though, are we to make of the garment of light and the oil for anointing which he is offered and which he does accept? Traditionally such a garment represents a transformation from an ordinary state of being to something more — often the calling of the human spirit to put off its fleshly form and dwell forever at the side of the gods. Oil, too, in many cultures, is both a bonding with deity and a sign that a deeper relationship — that of worshiper and worshipped as in the chrism of Christian baptism — has been reached. Again and again we read of worshippers being anointed as a means of being received into the service of a particular god or goddess. So from this we may assume that Adapa accepts the bond that exists between himself and the company of heaven. And we should note that after Anu has told him that he and his descendants will never have immortality, he shows him the whole of heaven, from the heights to the depths — surely a promise that he will return there rather than a demonstration of what he has lost!

In the end the story is touched with the sorrow of all humankind — the feeling of being somehow outlawed from the state of immortality and the wonders of heaven. It is probably here that we have a first sight of the theme which was to dominate much of Biblical writing: the exile from Eden and the loss of a deeper relationship to deity which permeates Genesis — much of which was to be composed while the memory of Sumerian and Akkadian traditions were still fresh.

But the offer of immortality means more than the gift of eternal life. It also means becoming open to an awareness of our own infinite potential. We can be immortal even within the finite world in which we live, not just by making a name for ourselves or being remembered by our surviving family, but by living beyond the moment, outside the confines of ordinary time, in what we might term "soul time". In most instances we are prevented from doing this by the attitude we take to time itself. For most of us time is something that stretches out before us, waiting to be filled, and with the dark immensity of death at the end. Perhaps because we want to put off that inevitable moment for as long as possible, we constantly try to stretch time so that we can fit more in, achieve more, experience an increasing number of different states of being. This has the effect of driving us ever more deeply into matter — into the experience of the world — and of reducing the amount of time we spend in communication with our own souls.

At a soul level there is no time. We can experience an entire lifetime in a single second of 'soul time'. And yet we consistently run away from this deeper level of experience, preferring the frivolous pleasures of outer time. As the philosopher Jacob Needleman has so eloquently said in his book Time and the Soul: "Our relationship to time is what it is because we lie to ourselves about what we are and what we can do and we hide from ourselves what we are meant to be and what we are meant to serve." The lies we tell ourselves are those that limit us, which bind us forever to the ordinary and the everyday. Because we tell ourselves that we are time-bound and that we begin to die from the moment we are born, we have limited ourselves and our consciousness into a form or mortality that is at least partially an illusion.

Adapa is like a blank sheet of paper when we first encounter him. Given skills and wisdom by the god he acts without real thought or consideration, breaking the wings of the wind in a moment of anger (he seems never to be in real danger) and without a moment's compunction about the possible effect his action may have. In the story we scarcely feel any real sorrow for him; we may even think that he got what he deserved. It is an unfortunate consequence that the rest of humanity is denied immortality as a result. We may well recognize aspects of ourselves in this unthinking action, in the carelessness with which we behave towards our fellow men and women as well as what Needleman calls the lies we tell ourselves. If we were only able to spend more moments in the timeless place of the soul we would become more fully aware and take more thought before we acted.

The rewards of this are immeasurable. If every moment we lived was virtually infinite, is this not itself a form of immortality? Certainly it would make the moment of our own passing less fearful, closer to Peter Pan's "awfully big adventure." Once we are no longer bound by the limits of time we become freed to experience the extraordinary wonder that is life more fully and unreservedly. Without the lies that tell us we are subject to the inevitability of death, the actual fact of our demise ceases to rule over us. "And death shall have no dominion" has more than one interpretation. If we no longer give mortality power over us we are truly free — free to return, like Adapa, to the city with another gift — one just as important as that of endless life — the freedom of ordering our own lives, to choose who and what we are, to lift the burden of time from our shoulders.

Hymn to the Gods of the Night

The Great Ones have lain down,
Shot the bolts and dropped the bars of heaven;
The people sleep and the gates are locked tight.
The gods and goddesses
Shamash and Sin, Adad and Ishtar,
Sun and moon, restlessness and love
Sleep now in high heaven.
Even the judgement-seat is empty,
For no god is working now;
Night's curtain is drawn down,
Temple and sanctuary, dark and still.

In this hour,
The traveller calls to his gods,
Defender and plaintiff, cause laid to rest;
While Shamash — judge and father,
Is chambered in sleep:
'O great ones, lords of night,
Gibil of the furnace,
Irra of the Underworld;
Bow of the Gods,
Orion, Pleiades, Dragon,
Bull, Goat and Bear —
Stars of the Gods —
Stand by me now,
Accept this lamb I offer —
Show me the truth!'

John Matthews, a presenter at Mythic Journeys 2004 and 2006, is the author of numerous books primarily about the Arthurian, Celtic, shamanic and spiritual traditions. His well known works include The Celtic Shaman, Healing the Wounded King, and The Winter Solstice. Watch for The Trick of the Tale: Trickster Stories from Around the World by John Matthews and his wife Caitlín, due out in 2007 from Templar Publishing.

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