that she kills her lovers, and he fears for his life with her. The enraged goddess, then, causes the king’s bosom friend Enkidu to sleep with her priestess and then kills him, as is his due according to the myth. The poem definitely expresses a man’s revolt against the existing system in which there is so much power given to the Goddess over his life. Here again there is no identification of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as good and evil; the difference between them is that one is a civilized king and the other as wild as an animal – his character plainly stems from earlier human life, which is much more involved with Nature and the Nature goddess than Gilgamesh is.
There is a new situation here, in which the female of the trio is considered treacherous, without any consideration for the old symbolism, and for the necessities of nature and life connected with nature. It seems that the idea of woman’s treacherous nature has been advanced in mythology with the advance of male power over the female, as is told by the Babylonian myth of the young (upstart) god Mardukh killing the Great Goddess Tiamat, Mother of all beings. This upheaval is expressed in a well-known Welsh myth where the struggle for domination between male and female is still going on.
The myth tells the life story of Llew Llaw Gyffes, whose name is translated by Robert Graves “the Lion with the Steady Hand” and by others as “Lugh (the Sun god) with the Long Arm”. Llew’s mother is Arianrhod, whom Graves identifies with the Greek Nature goddess Ariadne; but in the changing scene in Wales, she has limited power over humans and nature, being under the rule of her uncle, Math the Magician. Arianrhod gives birth to Llew with no husband to her