Gilgamesh and Bubba - the Celtic 'wild man'

The Celts monolithic culture spread from Ireland to Asia Minor, the Galatians of the New Testament. The Celts even sacked Rome in 390 BC and successfully invaded and sacked several Greek cities in 280 BC. Though the Celts were preliterate during most of the classical period, the Greeks and Romans discuss them quite a bit, usually disfavorably.

A Roman historian, Diodorus, tell us of the Celts:

"Their aspect is terrifying. They are very tall in stature, with rippling muscles under clear white skin. Their hair is blond, but not naturally so - they bleach it, to this day, artificially, washing it in lime and combing it back from their foreheads. They look like wood-demons, their hair thick and shaggy like a horse's mane. Some of them are cleanshaven, but others - especially those of high rank, shave their cheeks but leave a moustache that covers the whole mouth and, when they eat and drink, acts like a sieve, trapping particles of food. The way they dress is astonishing - they wear brightly colored and embroidered shirts, with trousers called bracae and cloaks fastened at the shoulder with a brooch, heavy in winter, light in summer. These cloaks are striped or checkered in design, with the separate checks close together and in various colors.

They wear bronze helmets with figures picked out on them, even horns, which made them look even taller than they already are, while others cover themselves with breast-armor made out of chains. But most content themselves with the weapons nature gave them - they go naked into battle. Weird, discordant horns were sounded, they shouted in chorus with their deep and harsh voices, they beat their swords rhythmically against their shields.

In exactly the same way as hunters do with their skulls of the animals they have slain, they preserved the heads of their most high-ranking victims in cedar oil, keeping them carefully in wooden boxes."

The Celtic Wild Man has many names

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," goes an old mystical saying.

One of the strangest and most powerful of mythological phenomena has been the presence in practically every culture known to man of a powerful being known as the Wild Man.

The oldest recorded evidence we have for him comes from the caves of Dordogne in France, dated back to 12,000 B.C. and he is already full blown there - the Horned Magician, Initiator and Lord of Animals, as well as the Hunt.

This worthy became known to Europe as the Green Man, and it is worth noting that ancient cultures did not think the earth, fertility and vegetation were exclusively female as is the trend today. They were both male and female and the Wild Man or Green Man was the Lord of Vegetation, and by that fact also the Lord of Rebirth as vegetation dies and is renewed seasonally, unlike the feminine Earth which endures forever.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

In literature however he makes his first appearance in the oldest book known to mankind, the stunning Sumerian masterpiece known as The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Clearly the Wild Man story appears practically unaltered in cultures that were separated by thousands of miles though historically contemporaneous.

Gilgamesh was king over the great city and state of Uruk, but he was a ghastly sensate self-indulgent brat.

He was also the strongest man who ever loved and his will was impossible to resist.

The royal depredations were causing untold trouble to the ruling classes as well as the ordinary people who were inured normally to kingly whims, but Gilgamesh was unique in his depravity and indulgence. It was more an excess of superabundant energy than evil, he had no idea how to control it and unfortunately there was no commanding enough mentor figure to halt him in his exuberant frenzy.

What Gilgamesh was doing was jeopardizing the entire delicate balance of kingly power - he was running amuck enjoying the fruits of kingship with none of the responsibilities. The priests realized that they could never have any control over the royal hellion, but there was a solution that might bring him back to his senses - Enkidu.

Enkidu was a Wild Man who lived in the forests outside the city and the only person who was stronger than Gilgamesh.

If Gilgamesh could somehow be brought under the stabilizing and healing influence of Enkidu he could still be salvaged and reach his destined greatness.

The only solution is to literally get him back in touch with nature, represented here in archetypal fashion by Enkidu.

Enkidu is prototype Wild Man, nature spirit incarnate. Gilgamesh attempted to capture this Wild Man and got the thrashing of his life for his pride. Then the urban cunning kicked in and he did his first bit of thinking before acting in ages. He called the royal hunter and ordered him to take the most beautiful of the temple prostitutes, named Harlot, into the forest where Enkidu lived. When the Wild Man approached them the girl was to shed her clothes and become stark naked while the hunter was to flee. For the rest nature would take care.

As anticipated the Wild Man was instantly enamored of this beautiful apparition. Being a beast he did not need any instruction in how to proceed in the act of copulation, but being also a supernatural being he kept it up for six days and seven nights without ceasing!

When Enkidu finally got up from this new and enthralling activity he found out that his old friends, the animals, would no longer have anything to do with him. He had become aware of himself as a man, i.e. separate from animal consciousness, and that awareness came only at the price of a split in his instinctive communication with beasts.

The temple beauty flatters him telling him he is as beautiful as a god and his true sphere is the great and noble temple city of Uruk, with Gilgamesh as his friend. Feeling for the first time in his life alone, and needing the companionship of his own kind he goes to the city to befriend Gilgamesh.

This time the king manages to hold his own in the ritual fight, but just about barely. The two become the most famous friends of the ancient world and Gilgamesh gives up his irresponsible and foolish behavior to finally become the great king he was always threatening to destroy within himself.

This was not possible without the catalytic presence of Enkidu.

Enkidu - Natural Man with no notion of sin or perversity - is brought to the city to provide a moral and ethical compass to the perverted king, corrupt with the too easily available and not easily refused pleasures of the city.

Enkidu, like all animals has an instinctive sense of limits, for they all kill and eat only what they can. His behavior automatically makes him the Restrainer and exemplar to the king - who does not even have might as an excuse anymore.

The Green Man

When we peer into the shadows of the Mythic Forest, a startling face stares back at us: the Green Man, masked with leaves or disgorging foliage from his mouth.

The Green Man is a pre-Christian symbol found carved into the wood and stone of pagan temples and graves, of medieval churches and cathedrals, and used as a Victorian architectural motif, across an area stretching from Ireland in the west to Russia in the east. Although commonly perceived as an ancient Celtic symbol, in fact its origins and original meaning are shrouded in mystery.

The name dates back only to 1939, when folklorist Lady Raglan drew a connection between the foliate faces in English churches and the Green Man or Jack of the Green tales of folklore. The evocative name has been widely adopted, but the legitimacy of the connection still remains controversial, with little real evidence to settle the question one way or the other. Earliest known examples of the foliate head, as it was known prior to Lady Raglan, date back to classical Rome - yet it was not until this pagan symbol was adopted by the Christian church that the form fully developed and proliferated across Europe. No known writings exist that explain what the foliate head represented in earlier religions, or why precisely it became incorporated into Christian architecture, but most folklorists conjecture that the foliate head symbolized mythic rebirth and regeneration, and thus became linked to Christian iconography of resurrection. The Tree of Life, a virtually universal symbol of life, death and regeneration, was adapted to Christian symbolism in a similar manner.

The Jack in the Green is a figure associated with the new growth of spring and May Day celebrations. In Hastings, England, for instance, the Jack pageant is still re-enacted each spring. The Jack in the Green is played by a man in a towering eight-foot-tall costume of leaves, topped by a masked face and a crown made out of flowers. He travels through the town accompanied by men whose hair, skin, and clothes are all green, and a young girl bearing flowers, dressed and painted entirely in black. Morris and clog dancers entertain the crowds, while the Jack - a trickster figure - romps and chases pretty girls, playing the fool. At length he reaches a mound in the woods below the local castle. The Morris dancers wield their wooden swords, striking the leaf man dead. A poem is recited over the creature solemnly, then merriment breaks out as each member of the crowd takes a leaf from the Jack for luck.

Cernunnos

The Lord of the Animals, 'Horned One', whose images are found in Romano-Celtic worship sites, and whose role as hunter and animal god is preserved in Celtic legend and folk lore. He ruled the active forces of life and death, giving and taking, in nature; in Romano-Celtic culture he was associated with wealth and prosperity, due to his role as Guardian of the Gateway to the Underworld where all potential forces and events originated. It should be stated emphatically that this deity has far to less to do with 'fertility' and sexuality than is assumed in popular fantasy, for he is a god of hunting, culling and taking.

His purpose is to purify through selection or sacrifice, in order that powers of growth and fertility may progress without stagnation. In this context of purification and de-pollution, he should be an especially interesting figure to us today, for he represents certain truths known to our ancestors which have been neglected by us at our peril. The figure of Cernunnos from the Gundestrup Cauldron is probably the best-known representation of the Celtic Horned God. His very name is really the title, 'Horned One.' Holding a torc and a serpent, wearing an antlered cap, he sits in a yoga pose with his right heel against his genitals. Nearly all seated statues of Hindu deities show the same conventional pose. The torc and serpent are also genital symbols, female and male respectively.

Cernunnos is the spirit of the sacrificed stag-god, a nature deity to whom sacrifices were dedicated in order to maintain the wild creatures and the cycles of nature with his holy blood. There has been considerable speculation about Cernunnos' costume, which appears to be a form-fitting suit of ribbed knitted fabric, with knee-length pants. It is one of the pieces of evidence cited for the antiquity of the art of knitting among Celtic peoples.

Bo, Luke and Daisy Duke

The Dukes of Hazzard television show connects with the symbols of old and takes place in fictional Hazzard County, where Atlanta is referred to as "the big-city," and fits the prescription for a rural community perfectly.

When the Dukes visit Atlanta, Waylon Jennings, who sings the show's theme song, makes it clear that the Dukes roots are not exactly sophisticated: "The Dukes are a little out of their picture when it comes to breakin' in the big city."

Hazzard qualifies as the setting, and Bo and Luke Duke fit the "good ole boys" category perfectly, joining them with former TV good ole boys Andy Taylor, Jed Clampett, and Luke McCoy. The Dukes assigns the label to Bo and Luke immediately and intentionally, when Waylon Jennings belts out the first two lines of his banjo-driven theme song:

"Just two good old boys, never meanin no harm, beats all you never saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born."

With this label cast upon Bo and Luke, it is important to understand just what Good Ole Boy means as an icon in Southern culture. W.J. Cash, in his The Mind of the South (1941) summarized the ideal of the Southern man:

  " . . . stand on his head in a bar, to toss down a pint of raw whisky at a gulp, to fiddle and dance all night, to fight harder and love harder than the next man, to be known eventually far and wide as a hell of a fellow-such would be his focus."

Between 1941 and 1979, Good Ole Boy became the label for what Cash's ideal described. A standard episode of The Dukes shows clearly how Bo and Luke are intended to personify this ideal. In every episode, the Dukes make at least one visit to Hazzard County's local honky-tonk bar, the Boar's Nest, where they kick up their heels and throw back a few. And not only did the Duke boys drink a little whiskey, but they processed it an smuggled it as their major source of income.