Gilgamesh went to the priestesses of the temple of Ishtar and asked the priestesses of the
 temple of Ishtar to send one of their women priestesses, later on falsely called sacred
 prostitutes. They were not prostitutes. They did not sell sex for money. They offered love
 as an act of devotion to the goddess. Gilgamesh sent the priestess with the hunter and another
 companion out into the wilderness to search for this man called Enkidu. Enkidu. And they
 came to the place after three days walking and sat down and waited and waited for five
 days and finally Enkidu appeared with the animals to drink water at the stream. The
 woman from the temple of Ishtar went towards Enkidu and exposed her nakedness to him and
 took his hand to touch her breast whereupon Enkidu was suffused with feelings and sensations
 he had never felt before at this hairless being who spoke and made sounds from her throat
 that he had never heard before. And they made love for nine days and nine nights. It is
 said. After nine days and nine nights the woman said to Gilgamesh, "We must bathe you.
 We must give you a haircut." They gave him a haircut. They bathed him. They anointed
 him in fragrant oils. They gave him human food to eat. Sweet meats, grain, breads, fruit,
 cooked flesh. And when Enkidu attempted to connect with his erstwhile animal friends
 he found he could no longer do so. They shunned him because he smelled differently and he
 could not keep up with them when they ran. His legs were as weakened. He could not run
 as fast as he could before. They escaped. He no longer had any contact with them. He
 was saddened by this. But the people and the woman encouraged him and took him with them
 to the city and told him about King Gilgamesh and his arrogant, tyrannical ways. And Enkidu
 said, "I will fight this man. I will right this wrong." And Enkidu came to the city where
 Gilgamesh was strutting down the main street and they met in the main street and they fought
 and wrestled for two days and two nights. And neither one could throw the other. And
 after many hours of battling and fighting they stopped their fighting and embraced one
 another as brothers and friends and henceforth were inseparable companions. And Enkidu came
 to live in the city and had a house and much wealth and a wife. And he and Gilgamesh went
 out and did many heroic deeds together. And this is the first part of the story which
 is the story of humanity's transition from the wild state to the city-dwelling cultured
 Neolithic farming state. From the existence as wild nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived
 in the fields in a wild state in the wilderness. We were all wild men. Not only do we have
 a wild man, wild woman within us, those are our ancestors. We were that for hundreds of
 thousands of years, much, much longer, ten times as long as we were city-dwelling farming
 pastoralists, technological literate people. So, and this story tells about the price that
 is paid for the separation from nature, for the separation from our own wild nature, our
 own instinctual nature, the loss of the communication and the communion that we had with the animals
 and the knowledge of the land and the plants and the forests. For the advantage of city-dwelling,
 of language, of sexuality. And it's the role of the woman. And it's very instructive to
 compare this story of the transition from wildness to culture, from nature to culture,
 from wildness to civilization, with the story in the book of Genesis, which was the story
 of the Abrahamic pastoralists that went out of Uruk to the land of Palestine. And the
 role of the woman in that story, where the woman is blamed for the decline from an Edenic
 state with really no advantage to the state that they then went into. The state outside
 of the Garden of Eden is a pure fall, a pure disaster. In the Gilgamesh story, which is
 older, Sumero-Babylonian story, the woman plays the crucial role. She plays the civilizing
 role for which she is not blamed, but rather honored, as appears later on in the story.
 And also, there are advantages to the civilized life, while there is also recognition of the
 price that was paid. And later on, when Enkidu dies, he has a flashback hallucination on
 his deathbed of regret and even cursing both the hunter and the woman who seduced him and
 abducted him out of the wilderness. But the gods say to him, "No, you should not curse
 the hunter or the woman, because they brought you into the cities, and they brought you
 the friendship of Gilgamesh, and they brought you life and a house and much wealth and a
 wife and a family." And then he says, "Yes, you're right. I take back my curse. I honor
 the woman," he says later on, on his deathbed. Enkidu says, "I honor the woman. She shall
 be honored by all. Old men will take off their hat to her. The young men will take off their
 pants to her." It says, inscribed in stone, clay tablets.
 After a while of living in the city, Gilgamesh said to Enkidu, "You and I should go out to
 the great cedar forest and cut down some cedar trees, which we need to build more houses
 and walls, and kill the giant that lives in that forest, whose name is Humbaba, a great
 and terrific giant." And first Gilgamesh goes to Shamash, the sun god, and says, "I want
 to do this." And the sun god says, "Why?" Gilgamesh says, "Because," and he says this
 to Enkidu too, "because he is evil. Because he is evil, and we must rid the country of
 this evil." And Enkidu gets tears in his eyes and says, "Oh no. Oh no, Gilgamesh, you don't
 know what you're saying. You don't know what you're getting us into. This giant, Humbaba,
 that you want to kill, is a fierce and terrible and monstrous giant. He will wipe us both
 out. He will destroy us. You don't know that forest. I know it. I've been there. That forest
 is ten thousand leagues in every direction. It is huge. It is monstrous. We are in grave
 danger if we go there." And the gods have appointed that giant to guard that forest.
 That's the guardian of the forest. If we kill him, we will incur the wrath of the gods.
 And Gilgamesh said, "Don't worry. The two of us will do it together. We'll help each
 other. Why are you... Don't be afraid. I'll help you. I'll protect you. You protect me.
 And together, we can do it." That's what the hero always says, regardless of whether he's
 a man or a woman. This is a story told from the man's point of view, but please recall
 that it's equally true of the woman. The hero and the hero are the parallel people, the
 wild man, the wild woman. So they go and they march many days to come to the forest. Before
 he goes, Gilgamesh has the people of the city make magnificent weapons for him, great swords,
 great clubs, great axes, great shields, carved in bronze. And they go out and they march
 many days. And they come to the mountain. They cross seven mountain ranges to come to
 the great cedar forest, where the great cedar trees are. And Gilgamesh goes up on the mountain
 and says prayers to Shamash, the sun god, who was his special protector. He says, "Will
 you protect me and help me in this?" And Shamash asks first questions, "And why do you want
 to do it?" And Gilgamesh says, "Well, you have to rid the country of all this evil."
 Shamash says, "Well, all right. I don't think it's that great an idea." But he bought the
 sacrifice. The god bought the sacrifice and said, "Okay, I'm compassionate. I'll help
 you. I'll give you these allies and you'll have seven fierce winds, the north wind and
 the stone, the icy wind and the frost wind and the hot wind that will be your allies
 in this fight against this terrific giant Humbaba, if you should need them." And Gilgamesh
 had a dream on the mountain before they came to the forest. And in this dream, he dreamed
 that he and Enkidu were in the canyon underneath the mountain and they were like tiny gnats
 under the mountain. And he had another dream, a second dream on another night, in which
 he dreamed that the mountain fell on him and crushed his body, pinned his body under the
 rock. And then a great light came out of the rock and turned into a light being, a light
 man figure, who lifted the rock up and freed him. And Gilgamesh told this dream to Enkidu
 and Enkidu interpreted it. Throughout the story, Gilgamesh has dreams and Enkidu is
 better at interpreting them and saying what they mean. The instinctual man, the wild man,
 is more intuitive, more connected with nature, more connected with the unconscious, altered
 states of consciousness. And he says, "This is a very favorable dream. This means we will
 succeed in our fight against this giant because you have this light of God helping you." And
 Gilgamesh had a third dream, which was a disaster where dust, clouds blackened the sky, volcanic
 eruptions, dust settled over everything. For many days and nights, nothing but darkness.
 They came to the forest. The forest was an enchanted forest. It had a magical, enchanted
 gate around it, outside of it. And when they came to the gate, Enkidu touched it and said
 to Gilgamesh, "Don't touch this gate. What just happened to me is that my whole arm and
 hand went paralyzed and weak when I touched the gate. So you have to smash the gates,"
 said to Enkidu. I'll leave it to you to think about what this means. This whole myth of
 going in and slaying the forest giant is the myth of our ecological catastrophe that we're
 presently in. We are the people in the form of the lumber companies, supported by government
 and industry, who go in and cut down the giant cedar forests and the giant rain forests in
 the Amazon and the cedar forests in the Northwest to build our cities. And in doing so, we violate
 the guardian spirits of nature that are assigned to protect those and maintain those groves
 as sacred groves, as sacred forests, sacred to the gods. So I think it's interesting to
 say that right here in this oldest myth of our culture, dating back to maybe 3,000 years
 B.C., we have this ecological dilemma already indicated very clearly. Because then they
 go into the forest and the giant recedes into the inner recesses of the forest and they
 don't see him, and Gilgamesh proceeds to start cutting down the great cedar trees. This summer
 I was up on Vancouver Island, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where they have
 these cedar forests, and where the connection between what's happening now and this myth
 became clear to me. These cedar trees sometimes grow over 1,000 years old. They are 50 or
 60 feet in diameter. They are the most magnificent trees that you can imagine, and they're being
 cut down. So he proceeded to cut down these cedar trees, and when he had cut down very
 many of them, he fell into a coma, a sleep coma, from which he could not rouse himself
 for several days. Like Enkidu, whose wrist and hand got paralyzed, Gilgamesh cut down
 the cedar trees, he became paralyzed, fell into a coma. Humbaba, the giant, in the meantime,
 the giant forest guardian, heard the cedar trees being cut down and came out of the inner
 recesses of the forest to where Gilgamesh and Enkidu were, having cut down the trees.
 Enkidu managed to rouse Gilgamesh just in time from his sleep, and it is said that Humbaba
 fixed them with his fierce eye, his eye of death. He fixated them with his eye of death,
 as in another Sumerian myth, Ereshkigal, the goddess of death, fixates Inanna, the goddess
 of heaven, with the eye of death. And Gilgamesh calls upon the allies given to him by the
 sun god, the north wind and the frost wind and the icy wind and the hot wind and the
 fierce wind and the hurricane wind. And they come and they blow and they confuse and immobilize
 the giant, so he cannot fight effectively. And so Enkidu and Gilgamesh are able to pounce
 upon the giant and cut off his head and drag him, the body and the cedar logs, back to
 the city. Before they kill him, one other last telling episode, the giant, he's been
 caught by them, by the combination of the winds and Enkidu and Gilgamesh's strength.
 He's trapped, he's caught. He appeals to them, he says, "Don't kill me, I am doing my job
 here as guardian of the forest. You have seen the abode of the gods, which is in the inner
 recesses behind these forests, the beautiful Edenic garden, the garden of Ishtar, the garden
 of the sun god, are all protected by this forest. You have seen it. You should let me
 go. I am the guardian, I am doing my job. I was sent here to protect this forest. Don't
 let me go." And Gilgamesh says, "Well, I'm inclined to agree with you. I think we should
 let you go. This catching animals and wild creatures is not such a good idea. I think
 we should let you go," Gilgamesh says. And Enkidu says, interestingly enough, "I don't
 think that's a good idea because if you let him go, he'll kill you." So Enkidu is suspicious.
 He doesn't trust the other forest dweller, the other forest wild creature, because he
 knows basically what he wants is to escape and he'll do his best to continue his role.
 So he says, "If you want to really get rid of this giant, you better kill him now while
 you got him because if you don't, he'll get you." So Gilgamesh says, "Well, you're right."
 So they kill him. So it's a very interesting story in that it's the arrogant human still
 who wants to go out, who creates an enemy out of nature in order to exploit nature,
 calls nature evil. That's what the Christians did later on. And violates the sacred integrity
 of nature for his own exploitative ends. The wild, instinctual part of him tries to
 warn him, but then when he does agree to go along, because he has no choice because he
 is one with him, he is the same person, he then has a better understanding of what the
 real issue is and what really needs to be done to accomplish the objective. Where Gilgamesh
 still is more likely to be compassionate. So it's not a black and white story. It's
 not like Gilgamesh is all bad and Enkidu is all good. It's not the noble savage either.
 It's the canny wild man. It's a very different thing. And they both together, after all,
 because they are together, they are both in the same fate. They both suffer the same fate
 and the same consequences. So then they go back to the city. That's the end of the second
 main story of that. I'll just tell you the third one and I'll leave out the last one.
 Because I don't want to take too much time. The last one has to do, the third of these
 stories in this epic has to do with the story with the goddess Ishtar. After they come back
 and they get great admiration and the people of the city, "Oh Gilgamesh, what a hero,
 and Enkidu, what a hero, what mighty men, what great heroes and warriors to have killed
 this huge giant and look how huge this giant is and his head is huge and his body is huge."
 And Ishtar, the goddess, says to Gilgamesh, "I want you for my lover. I want you to
 come and be my lover and together we will have great enjoyment and you will be my preferred
 lover, you who are so strong and virile." And Gilgamesh says, in this old, old tale,
 he says, "I don't want to be your lover. Number one, I don't know what to give you.
 I wouldn't know how to feed a goddess, for example, the way I know how to take care of
 a wife. I wouldn't know what you need. And number two, and more importantly, what about
 the history of your previous lover? What about Tammuz? Look what happened to him. He was
 your lover and he got killed for your sake and the people are still bemoaning him and
 crying, "Tammuz, Tammuz, where are you? Where are you?" Every year they cry for him.
 And what about the bird, the man that you turned into a bird? He was your lover and
 now he is a bird with a broken wing who goes around flapping his wings in a paralyzed fashion.
 And what about the lion who became your lover? And look what happened to him. He got caught
 and killed by the lion hunters. And look about the stallion, what happened to him? He got
 caught and he got captured and made domestic and he now experiences the whip and the spur
 and the saddle. And what about that other man? And you turned him into a mole, he is
 under the ground. I don't want to be your lover. Look what happened to the others. And
 Ishtar was furious. This is a story of the male gods, the patriarchal hero warriors with
 their male gods and their reaction of fear and distrust of the goddess and of the feminine.
 And Ishtar went to her father Anu and said, "Ishtar, Gilgamesh has insulted me tremendously
 and I'm just enraged." And her father Anu said, "Well, you know what he said was true.
 That's your story. You did all those things. What can you expect?" She said, "I don't
 care. I've been grievously insulted and I demand that you give me the bull of heaven
 to punish these people. And if you don't allow me to send down the bull of heaven to
 punish these people, I'm going to open the gates of the underworld and allow the dead
 to come up and eat food with the living. See how you like that?" And he said, "Well,
 okay, okay. You can have the bull of heaven." The old gods knew the power of the goddess,
 even though it had been turned around where she's the daughter. Originally, of course,
 she's not the daughter. She's the mother of the gods. That's how the myth got turned
 around. This myth is a very interesting myth of a hybrid of the old goddess culture myths,
 the old creator goddess, created the gods and the humans, and the new male god, sky
 god mythology. It flips back and forth from one point of view to the other. And Anu, her
 father, said, "Well, if you're going to send down the bull of heaven, have you taken
 the precautionary measures? I mean, the people will be out of food for seven years and there
 will be a tremendous famine and so forth." And she said, "I've seen to it. They've
 got grains stored up. They'll be okay. They'll survive." She sent down the bull of heaven,
 which some people say is a drought. Some people say, I prefer the notion that it's
 like a flood, flooding. Tigris and Euphrates Valley probably flooded, had numbers of devastating
 floods that simply wiped out. Because it said the bull of heaven came down, killed 100 men
 with his first snort, and his second snort, another 200 men, and another 300 men, wiped
 out hundreds of people, wiped out the cities, wiped out a major disaster, in other words.
 Girgamesh and Enkidu attacked the bull of heaven, and in a great struggle, during which
 Enkidu leaped up on his bull's back, grasping him by the horns, leaped up on the bull's
 back as they later on did in Crete at the bull games. And while riding on his back,
 seizing his tail in one hand and the horns in the other, and then Gilgamesh cut into
 his throat and heart with a sword, killed the bull of heaven with a great crash, and
 dragged him into the city, adding to their great accomplishments. And Ishtar was even
 more incensed because now they had killed this semi-divine being that had been sent
 down by the gods. And the gods sat in council. And the oldest of the gods, Anu, said, "They
 have killed the forest giant, Humbaba. They have killed the bull of heaven. One of them
 must die. Let it be Gilgamesh, the one who cut down the cedar trees." And Enlil, the
 god of the sky god, said, "No, no. Gilgamesh is my special protege, and it should be Enkidu
 who gets killed." Enkidu saw this whole scene, this god council, in a dream. And Shamash
 said, "I don't think you should kill them at all, because after all, I helped them out.
 They came to me, offered me sacrifice, and I gave them allies." And Enlil got enraged
 at Shamash. See, the gods get enraged at each other. He said, "Yeah, well, you just go down
 there and hang out with those humans all the time. You're a real troublemaker yourself."
 So the decision was Enkidu was going to die. And Enkidu… Actually, there's an extraordinary
 story too, even before he has this dream, where the goddess Ishtar goes up on the city
 walls and complains and invades against them. "They've killed not only the forest giant,
 now they've killed this bull of heaven, this special animal that she sent down. And they're
 both defiant." And they say, basically, "Fuck off, we don't care about you." That wasn't
 inscribed in the tablets, so I added that in. And Enkidu, it says, "took the right
 thigh of the bull," which might actually be a gloss for the penis of the bull, we don't
 know. It says, "took the right thigh," the right thigh of the bull, "and hurled it at
 the goddess and said, 'This is what we'll do to you if we catch you.'" So they were
 naughty boys, to say the least, in relationship to the gods. They defied the gods, they insult
 the gods. This is what we still do, all the naughty boys in the big companies in the government.
 So, after it was decided by the gods and council that Enkidu should die, Enkidu became sick
 and ill and started having these hallucinations and had a vision of the land of the dead,
 where all the great kings and emperors, people of power and the priests and all were wandering
 around in this dusty, gray world with no light and sitting at tables with dust and eating
 food with dust, the land of the dead. And he had other dreams and he had visions and
 he thought about his animal friends that he had left long ago and he cursed, as I told
 you, the hunter and he cursed the woman and the god came and said, "No, no, don't curse
 the hunter, don't curse the woman, they gave you this." And Gilgamesh was weeping and saying,
 "Oh my god, what am I going to do? I'm just going crazy, I can't stand this, you're my
 best friend, you're my closest, think of all the adventures we've had together and all
 the good times we've shared and we're so close and I'm going to miss you so terrible, I just
 can't tolerate this, what am I going to do?" And Enkidu gets sicker and sicker and he has
 this fever and he's hallucinating and he's raving and seven days and eight days and ten
 days and then finally he dies and Gilgamesh goes crazy and tears off his hair, his clothes
 and starts wandering through the wilderness crying his name and Enkidu, my brother, my
 friend, my other self has died, has died, what shall I do? I must go on the great journey
 to find the secret of life and death and what this is all about. And that's another part
 of the story which I'll leave for now, having told you the story of how Enkidu, the wildman,
 came to the city through the woman, how Enkidu and Gilgamesh together as hero-warriors fought
 and slew and cut down the forest and killed the spirit guardian of the forest and how
 Enkidu and Gilgamesh insulted and rebuffed the goddess and how then the price was paid
 and that the animal part of the man dies, eventually the man himself dies also, the
 animal part, the body part dies first. And there's one counterpart I want to mention
 to you of this experience that Gilgamesh has in relationship to the goddess. Why does Gilgamesh
 say to the goddess, "I don't want to be your lover because you're such a faithless goddess,
 you know, look at the other people"? What is that? And it came to me that that experience
 is analogous to an experience that I had in the desert when I first, on a wilderness vision
 quest, when I first realized that Mother Nature, so-called, does not give a shit about me personally,
 does not care for me personally, that I can be wiped out by a falling rock, a sudden drop
 in temperature if I'm unprepared, or losing my way, a landslide, any number of things
 in which my personal existence, my personal accomplishments, my personal happiness, security,
 well-being, recognition, reputation, none of those mean a whit for nature. That's why
 the limitation of the… So if you try to have a personal relationship like a lover
 to nature, you know, "I love nature", sort of romantic ideal, you're likely to
 get clobbered, you're likely to get killed because nature, as Maria Gambutta has called
 out, the old goddess is not really a mother goddess. That's the limitation of that mother
 metaphor for nature. It's an okay metaphor in one sense because it indicates we're a
 family, but it has a limitation because a mother is not like that. It means that you
 don't really take care. We are responsible for our own relationship to nature and for
 impeccability in our relationship with nature. We have to be observant, we have to be attentive,
 we have to study nature so we know our part in it and how we can survive and live in an
 adapted way with nature. Otherwise, we get… So that to me is the insight that's behind
 Gilgamesh's rejection. It's a kind of a petulant, spoiled adolescent kid, you know,
 who's rejected by the girl when he wants his first date kind of thing, but that's
 the experience behind it. It's this… The basic recognition of that nature is personally
 neutral towards us. I mean, she's not against us either. That's a misinterpretation of
 Gilgamesh. She's not out to do us in. Nature is doing her own thing. We are part of it,
 but it's not for us. So neither for us nor against us. She's neutral, but the petulant
 male adolescent who gets his ego bent out of shape says, "Oh, you know, you've rejected
 me. I don't want to be your lover. I can't be your lover because look what happened to
 all these other guys." But we all get killed by nature in the end. Maybe by other people,
 but that's nature too, isn't it? So the story of how Gilgamesh and Kiddu comes to
 the city, how the human makes peace with the animal wild man within, they become companions,
 which is the true relationship for them to have, how they then get overbearing and lose
 it by going and killing the forest guardian spirit, and then by rejecting the goddess
 and nature in a personal way rather than understanding their proper role in relationship to nature.
 And then the final illusion, the last story, is that Gilgamesh thinks, well, he should
 be able to do something that will allow him to be a model like the gods and he has to
 learn that lesson too, that that's not going to happen. So that's the end of this part
 of the story of the hero, the goddess, the hero and the wild man.
 And all myths that are authentic and haven't been rewritten for daytime television maintain
 a kind of dreamlike, surreal quality. And so I'd like to tell you a story that I came
 upon a few months ago and was delighted, and I tell it to you in the hope that you can
 perhaps help me to understand it. Like all good stories, it doesn't really make a whole
 lot of sense, but I felt that there must be something important in it because it was very
 easy to memorize. So that clued me to the fact that there must be something in it. And
 this story comes from that ultimately pivotal moment in Western civilization when the last
 outpost of the goddess culture, which was Crete, Minoan Crete, fell and was in the process
 of falling to the pirate paternalists of Mycenae, who with advances in shipbuilding and an economic
 base built on grain were beginning to conquer the Eastern Mediterranean. And one by one,
 the last bastions of the goddess religion were falling. There were also great earthquakes
 in the Eastern Mediterranean at this time, which also contributed to the disruption of
 this civilization. And the story that I want to tell is a story that occurs from the very
 oldest stratum of Greek mythology. This is not about the pantheon of classical or even
 Doric Greece. This is an older story, Mycenaean, perhaps older than that, going back even to
 the pastoralists coming out of Africa and into the Fertile Crescent. It's a story set
 in a setting which is probably familiar to most of you, although this story is only told
 in Pausanias and alluded to in Herodotus. So it is not a story that even classicists
 are too familiar with. Robert Graves, in his four-volume study of Greek mythology, gives
 it only passing reference. You may recall that King Minos was the king of Crete and
 that he was most famous for having built a labyrinth in which to house the Minotaur.
 And I'm sure you know the story of the traversing of the labyrinth. And perhaps you know that
 King Minos built the labyrinth, had need of it, because his wife, Queen Pasiphae, was
 an extremely sensuous and experimentally-minded young woman. And she became so interested
 in the sexual habits of cattle that she had Icarus, the craftsman who was later to break
 out of this scene on the... Daedalus.
 Daedalus, the guy who was going to break out of this scene later on the first flying machine.
 She had him fashion for her an artificial cow in which she hid in order to have sexual
 union with the bulls in the royal flock. And out of this hanky-panky came the Minotaur.
 And her husband, trying to cover up this series of faux pas, built the labyrinth, installed
 the Minotaur in the labyrinth. And they grew older and did less swinging and began to settle
 down.
 But then comes the story I want to tell, which is a few years later, the king and the queen,
 apparently under quite normal conditions, conceived a child who was in due time born.
 And this child's name was Glaucus. Glaucus means blue-gray and is to this day a term
 preserved in taxonomy to describe the blue-gray color typical of the peyote cactus and of
 the bruising reaction of psilocybin mushrooms.
 And young Glaucus had the run of the royal palace at Knossos. And in his sixth year,
 he was exploring the pantries of the palace and he discovered a huge urn filled with honey.
 And he took the lid off the honey urn and was reaching into it and fell into the honey
 and was drowned and died there. And no one knew what had become of the son of the king
 and the queen. And there was tumult, as you can imagine, in the court. And eventually,
 Queen Pasiphae, in a state of complete hysterical distraction, went to the great seer who advised
 the king's generals and the king's weathermakers. And she said, "You must find our son."
 And the seer looked into the surface of oils poured on water and burned hysop leaves. And
 he said, "My magic is not sufficient to find your son, but I can lead you to one who can
 find your son." He said, "The person," and this is the part of the myth which is so bizarre
 that you suspect that there must be textual corruption or some kind of misunderstanding
 because it's so weird what follows. The seer said, "The person who can lead you to your
 son is that person who can compose the most apt simile on the tricolored cow in your herds."
 What the tricolored cow is, what kind of code language we're dealing with, can only be a
 matter of conjecture. But obviously, the story at this point is couched in a secret language
 which conveyed meaning only to the initiates. So the king and the queen commanded each citizen
 of the principality to appear before them and compose a simile on the tricolored cow.
 And there was a man there, a minor philosopher, whose name was Polyidos. And Polyidos, you
 only have to have spent two weeks in Greek before you transferred out to something a
 little less horrifying to know that Polyidos means "many ideas." So Polyidos, the man of
 many ideas, went before the court and he proposed a simile which, according to the account of
 Pausanias, was brilliant. He doesn't preserve it and hence it's lost forever. But whatever
 this simile was, it carried the day. And Polyidos was actually a very humble man, a minor healer
 and magician. And he was puzzled that out of all the people in the kingdom, he had been
 chosen or he had by fate been singled out as the one who could solve this extremely
 wracking dilemma of the lost son for the king and queen. And he said to the king, "I have
 no idea how to go about this, how to find your son." And the queen flew into a rage
 and said, "He should be sealed into a crypt with the body of our son. And he can come
 out when he comes out with our son alive." And so Polyidos was seized by force. And notice
 now the motifs of incarceration, the dark night of the...
 [silence]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
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Decoding  : 2.08 sec
Transcribe: 2713.83 sec
Total Time: 2716.55 sec