The Myth Of the Wild Man

The Myth Of the Wild Man "In Wildness is the Preservation of the World."- 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. The Wild Man is also known as the lord of the animals and we see him again historically in 2500 B.C. on the Indus valley seals as Pashupatinath, which literally again means 'lord of the animals'.

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. What concerns us here is that this famous story has an exact parallel in Indian mythology too, the story of Rishyashringa, told in the Ramayana and also in the Mahabharatha. Clearly the Wild Man story was dealing with some powerful contexts and psychological issues to appear practically unaltered in cultures that were separated by thousands of miles though historically contemporaneous. However ancient India had trade links with the great civilizations of the Middle East and a process of diffusion was inevitable, it really not mattering much which way the original story flowed.

In both stories, the great city states have been well established and kings rule in the panoply of power with the support of the priestly caste. 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.

The misbehaviorof a king if persisted in has serious consequences in the Middle East; the gods become wroth and withdraw their favor, which usually means no rain. That would have been a catastrophe for royal power rested upon an ability to harvest the rain and dole it out through the year in irrigation channels. This has led to the irrigation theory of despotism. The argument goes that kingly power in irrigation-dependent cultures accumulates out of all proportion until the person controlling the water becomes godlike in status and totally impervious to reason or sense of natural limits. Turning off the water supply was enough to bring any rebellious district to its knees swiftly; they simply could not grow the surplus grain needed to supply rebellion. In countries of the North of Europe where it was too cold for agriculture to be the mainstay of food supply kings were much less despotic. In middle regions like England, France and Germany where it rained all the time and the soil was fertile kings could never become more than Primus Inter Pares, First among Equals. For any baron with extensive lands and a good castle could lay up ample supplies and wait out sieges - which could never be allowed to go on for too long, it gave other lords ideas. Until gunpowder broke this equation, there could never have been a Louis XIV with notions of absolute monarchy.

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. In the Middle East that could only mean he was refusing to act as the Royal Priest, Intermediary between men and gods that preserved the structure of society and ensured rains. 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. This 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 into the stabilizing and healing energy field of Enkidu he could still be salvaged and reach his destined greatness. It is interesting to note that sophisticated urban wisdom has no answers for the perversities caused by the unnatural opportunities for vice and indulgence offered by the urban environment to the man who has no need for restraint in that context. The only solution is to literally get him back in touch with nature, represented here in archetypal fashion by Enkidu.

Enkidu is proto Wild Man, nature spirit incarnate. The whole body was a hirsute explosion and his locks were longer than a woman and, telling detail, " were like the hair of the goddess of grain". Agriculture is the domestication of wild grain, evidently the fate the priests have planned for Enkidu to save their frenzied king. Enkidu had just appeared one day in the forests, a primal force almost manifest by the spontaneous generation of the vegetation. He could speak but preferred to hang out with animals and do nothing with Men, eating grass and drinking water just like a beast at the grazing grounds and watering holes. 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 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 englamored 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! One is reminded of the many similar myths depicting the superhuman passion of the Wild Man Supreme, Shiva himself, though in those tales the Sanskrit tendency to hyperbole makes the time frame into thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. 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 scene now shifts to India where the story is repeated in a parallelism that is really not possible to attribute to coincidence. It is the same tale wearing Indian clothes. As with the Sumerian epic, a crisis has come upon the votaries of high urban culture, the priests of the kingdom of Anga. The king Lomapada was presiding over a land ravaged by drought and there was nothing either he or the magic working expert priests could do. In later versions, feeling this failure of the privileged class keenly, the Brahman interpolators add that the king had displeased priests and it was their wrath that was causing the clouds to withhold rain. This theory wont wash as one of the functions of the priestly class was to perform sacrifices and ensure rain. In both tales, the upholders of the official faith had come to the end of their tether and the king was on an increasingly precarious throne. Fortunately in the forests near Anga there was a Wild Man. He was called Rishyashringa and if only he could be enticed to come into the city there would be rain.

Rishyashringa was the son of the sage Vibhandaka, who was a famous misanthrope. That worthy had withdrawn into the forest to practice his austerities and develop his learning but the envious gods had sent a beautiful Apsara to tempt him. He did not fall into the obvious seductive trap but the sight of the apsara, glimpsed while he was chest deep in water caused him to have an involuntary ejaculation. So potent is the seed of a sage it fertilized the womb of a hapless antelope who happened by chance to be drinking in the same river. Rishyashringa was born of this peculiar union and his father instantly recognized him as a spiritual giant. His grumpy nature would not allow the boy to into the social world, which the sage considered defiling to all spiritual aspirations and the young lad grew up amongst animals and never seeing any other human except his father. Nevertheless his powers were too great to be hidden and his fame grew without his having ever ventured out of the forest.

His physical appearance is instructive in demonstrating that the idea of the wild man changes very little if at all. He was covered with thick black hair down to his fingernails and toes, he had golden brown eyes and most important, he had a horn growing out of the center of his forehead, his antelope inheritance. This might as well be a literal description of the Celtic Wild Man and the most famous of them was Cerrrunos, the Horned One. Shamans cover themselves with the pelts of animals to simulate the hair covering of the Wild Man when they go into their trances to mediate between the spirit worlds of animal and human and it seems to be part of a very deeply abiding human memory indeed. It was this strange being that the priests of Anga needed. Like the priests of Uruk they are agreed that they have failed - are inadequate to shape the king or bring about the rain, as is their designated task. They thus seek the Wild Man energy, the Green Energy to accomplish what their enervated urban abilities could not. He succeeds where the magical civilized priests and their rites fail because he is Wild, is instinctively in touch with the Wet, he is Vegetation. Rishyashringa's conception in the water makes him even more able to be the Male spirit of vegetation, he is connected to the Wet, thus automatically a Rain Bringer.

The king sends a party of hunters accompanied by a bevy of beautiful prostitutes to entice the horned sage away. Strangely enough they are never specifically mentioned as temple prostitutes here though the latter institution was known to India. Perhaps the reader would understand the category of women meant without any need to particularize. This seduction party hangs around the hermitage of Vibhandaka, waiting for him to go away deep into the forest where he would perform secret rituals that would enhance his power. When he finally set out the most beautiful girl wandered into the hermitage and introduced herself as a fellow spiritual aspirant to the amazed Rishyashringa. Refusing to eat his gift of raw fruits she introduced the young man to cooked food and sweets - and wine. She then proceeded to tell him that they had some unique and relaxing methods of greeting their fellows - and began to hug and kiss the confused young man. Cunningly she never initiated him into sex straightaway, a tribute to the Kamasutra culture that believed haste to be a gauche action. She also played with a ball, one of Sanskrit literature's oldest chestnuts to arouse male desire. She then promised to visit him again leaving the poor lad afire with longing.

When his father returned he told him of this unusual spiritual aspirant who had visited them and wanted to know why he was feeling the way he did. With superb naiveté he asks, " Why in him do the globes dangle below the neck instead of below the waist? Why are the hips so much broader than ours?" and sundry other questions which served to agitate and alarm the father. For he thought this was an attack by some evil spirits jealous of his sons spiritual stature and he told him that this was surely some evil golem or devil intent on wickedness. The best way to preserve oneself was to ignore them. The angry sage searched for three days in the forest seeking to root out these disturbers of the peace but they lay well hidden. When Vibhandaka went again to perform his rituals the girl emerged with the captivating proposal that Rishyashringa visit her hermitage now. She carried him away in a raft and then onto a boat and the text leaves us in little doubt that he learnt quite a lot, not only from her but also the other girls who had been brought along to ensure there were no gaps in his education. This is the seven nights of Enkidu and the purpose of keeping the Wild Man enmeshed in constant sex is to ensure he cannot go back into the forest. He develops a new habit, of desire instead of need, and that signifies the break with the animal consciousness.

When he entersthe kingdom it rains immediately and the grateful king marries him off to his daughter Chanda [in some versions the actual seducer who ventures into the forest] as well as declares him heir apparent. This was a politic move, because an angry Vibhandaka had soon trailed his son there and the curse of a sage was potentially catastrophic. The sage realized his son had been civilized overmuch now so he makes the best of the situation and accepts it. His only condition was that after Rishyashringa had an heir to the throne he should forthwith retire again to the forest. By which time we can assume he had his fill of the city's pleasures, and the inevitable powerful drive for dwelling in the forest, so critical a part of the old Hindu consciousness, would have asserted itself again.

It is noteworthy that in neither version is the Wild Man feared or rejected. It is tacitly assumed that he a superior being, able, by his mere physical presence to bring about changes in the mental states of people and the external environment generally. The only worry is in fact of his superabundance of power. He has to be toned down first before the narrow confines of the urban polis can accommodate him and the only method they have is sex. As long as he is in animal consciousness his sexuality is a not a function that will deplete him, for animals mate only when they are in heat. Humans alone have broken the estrus cycle and can mate solely for pleasure's sake. That constant copulation is depleting of the rude animal energy, an energy that imposes its natural superiority, was a given in the ancient world and it is still an influential doctrine in India. This action does not negate or nullify the Wild Man and his Healing power; it only renders him manageable to the sensibilities of the people who have divorced themselves from the wild.