Most people regard the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh as traditional hero tale with a tragic ending. Gilgamesh wanted eternal life, he nearly got it but lost it to a serpent in a moment of distraction. So what's the point of the story? Certainly, one point is the need of every person to accept death in order to be able to live to the fullest. But the meaning of the epic goes deeper, much deeper.

What the Babylonians knew, but perhaps is not so well known by modern readers is that Gilgamesh actually attained eternal life, but not in the sense he sought. He wanted to avoid death and have an eternal physical life. That he didn't get. But after his death he was transformed into a god with eternal spiritual life.

The epic of Gilgamesh is a very entertaining story. But there is another side to the epic. It's also a mystical story of initiation and spiritual transformation. Gilgamesh lost the chance of eternal youth, but he got perfect wisdom and knowledge of everything as told in the prologue of the epic. Properly understood, the spiritual journey of Gilgamesh can be a guide for everyone even today who is seeking wisdom and enlightenment.

In order to be able to follow the path of Gilgamesh one has to understand the symbolic nature of the epic. The epic text is filled with hidden meanings and to discover them one has to study the text very carefully. The author of the standard version of the epic, Sin- leqi-unninni, has used many different ways to fill the text with deeper meanings, such as esoteric writing of names, number symbolism and word-play.

Here I will only discuss some basic ways to understand the epic beyond its literal meaning. The study and interpretation of the text is in itself a journey which the reader himself/herself must do individually in order to experience the spiritual dimensions of the story. Mystical interpretation of texts was an important technique used by Babylonian mystics beside magic and rituals. This is shown by the Babylonian mystical and esoteric texts which are known today. (See Alisdair Livingstone, Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).

That the epic of Gilgamesh contains secret meanings is made clear in the prologue to the epic. Here it said that Gilgamesh "saw the secret and revealed the hidden." What kind of secret did Gilgamesh see? Let's look at the prologue. In the prologue there is an invitation to the reader to search for the secret:

"Find the tablet-box of cedar,
release its claps of bronze!
Open the lid of its secret,

The mystic journey of Gilgamesh begins with a dream. It is a call from within. The call from the spiritual world begins often through a vision or a dream. This is the common start of initiation for shamans and mystics all around the world. Gilgamesh dreamt that a rock and an axe fell from heaven to the ground. Gilgamesh did not understand the dream. His mother, the all-knowing goddess Ninsun, interpreted the dream for him. She said that the dream predicted the coming of a companion to Gilgamesh who would become his saviour.

The dream was true. The gods in heaven created a primordial man, Enkidu, who was a twin to Gilgamesh in order to help and save him. What we have here is the first occurrence of the doctrine that every person has a spiritual counterpart, a divine twin who can guide and save the individual. This doctrine surfaced again in the first century in "The Gospel according to Thomas." The apostle Thomas is called the twin of Jesus in the apocryphal gospel. The underlying meaning is that Jesus is the divine twin within the soul of every individual. To know oneself, according to the gospel, is at the same time to know the spiritual twin within, that is the Living Jesus. "The Gospel according to Thomas" was most likely written in Edessa in northern Mesopotamia sometime between 50 AD to 200 AD. But some scholars think that "The Gospel of Thomas" could be oldest Christian gospel and therefore written before Mark.

The doctrine of the heavenly twin formed the basis of Manichaeism, which was founded by the Babylonian priest Mani in the third century AD. The divine twin of every individual soul was at the same time the Primordial Man from which all souls come from. This is very similar to the Epic of Gilgamesh in which Enkidu, the twin of Gilgamesh, also was the Primordial Man.

The second phase of the initiatory journey of Gilgamesh is the battle with Humbaba, a divine monster who represents evil forces according to the epic. To confront the evil forces is extremely dangerous but is necessary at the beginning of the mystical journey. On the way to the ceder forest where Humbaba resided, Gilgamesh and Enkidu performed magical dream rituals. They built a simple hut in which Gilgamesh was to sleep. On the ground they draw a magical circle of flour. The circle protected Gilgamesh from evil forces. Gilgamesh sat inside the circle with his head bent down towards his knees. This body posture helped Gilgamesh to get into a visionary dream state. In the dreams he saw the coming battle against Humbaba in form of symbolic images. This dream ritual was performed five times on the journey to the ceder forest.

After each dream Gilgamesh awoke abruptly and said: "My friend. Did you not call me? Why am I awake? Did you not touch me? Why am I in confusion? Did not a god pass by? Why is my body benumbed?" Gilgamesh was surprised of the sudden awakening

after being in deep sleep. But there is more than surprise involved in these questions. Take for example the question "did not a god pass by?" This is a hidden reference to a name of a person who is a mystic and an ecstatic. One of the Sumerian names for a mystic is lu.an.dib.ba.ra. The name means "one who is passed by a god." The hidden message is that Gilgamesh through the visionary dreams had become a mystic. The special body posture that Gilgamesh used was practiced by mystics in later mystical traditions. It was still used by Jewish Kabbalists to induce visionary trance during the Middle Ages.

The next phase of Gilgamesh mystical journey after confronting the evil was temptation. The goddess Ishtar appeared and promised Gilgamesh all the wealth and power if he married her. Gilgamesh refused to marry her. His refusal has made some modern interpreters of the Gilgamesh epic to draw the conclusion that Gilgamesh was against the Ishtar cult. This is an example of how literal understanding of the Gilgamesh epic can lead to wrong conclusions.

Ishtar's role was mainly as a goddess of love and war, but she could appear in many different forms. She was both loved and feared. Her followers worshiped her in both roles. Gilgamesh had just recently become a mystic and to accept the wealth and power that Ishtar offered was not the right thing to do for a mystic. Gilgamesh rightly refused the temptation. Ishtar not only appeared as a temptress, she also appeared as a goddess of the Underworld. In her proposal to Gilgamesh Ishtar said: "You shall be my husband and I will be your wife!" This is a quotation from another classical Babylonian literary text. In this text it is goddess of Underworld Ereshkigal who says these words when she proposes to the god Nergal. The Babylonian readers familiar with the classical literary texts presumably chilled when they realized that behind Ishtar's words there was a darker message. There are a lot of these intertextual references in the Gilgamesh epic which gives the text additional meanings.

Ishtar became angry by Gilgamesh's refusal to marry her and she sent the Bull of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh and Enkidu. They succeeded, however, to kill the bull after a long battle. The gods decided that one of the two rebels should be killed because of their killing of both Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. They sentenced Enkidu to death and he died after a week. The death of Enkidu signifies that Gilgamesh as every mystic had to walk alone in last part of the mystic journey.

The killing of the Bull of Heaven had an astral significance. The Bull of Heaven was the constellation of Taurus. So what was significance of the killing of Taurus? One explanation could be that the spring equinox was shifted from being in Taurus to Aries around 2000 BC. The spring equinox was a very important in the religious calendar because the Mesopotamians celebrated the New year at that time every year. The killing of the Bull of Heaven (Taurus) probably signified this shift. The so-called precession of the equinoxes was discovered much later, around 125 BC, according to modern scholars. The evidence of the killing of the Taurus in the standard version of the Gilgamesh epic written ca 1200 BC challenges the view of modern scholars.