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Mrs Kluger, who died in 1987 in Haifa, Israel, at the age of 80, has given us, in this widely acclaimed book, a useful systematic commentary on the text of the
Gilgamesh legend. It consists of a transcript of a series of seminars, given at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich in 1962, with Jung's endorsement and encouragement. There are posthumous editorial additions by her husband compiled from her note-books.
In many ways the book is exciting, for one is carried along by the power of the poetry of the epic. In the first part of the story she sees the process of weaning of the primus homo from the mother, and in the second half the heroic individuating deed of the recundus homo.
The book is an historical document - a time capsule - and this is not necessarily a disadvantage, for we are given a link to Jung - whose analysand and student Mrs Kluger was - with allusions to his methods and to the kind of seminar that was used in his time at Zurich. The research was begun at his request, and the work occupied the rest of her life, was never finished, and probably was never intended to be published. It remains a didactic seminar, very much a lecture, with occasional question and answer.
With this great lapse of time between the inception of the idea and the publishing, the book has been overtaken by other authors and by developments in related fields. What was innovatory then is now well known and generally accepted. For instance, her interesting material about biblical roots in Babylonian religion and scriptures, never published until now, has become a part of classic biblical commentary. Again, her fascinating - although rather sketchy - accounts of Babylonian prototypes of Old Testament figures found in earlier Middle Eastern historical personages has been made to sound old-fashioned by more recent works that have furnished a commonplace body of knowledge for modern archaeologists and historians. An example is King Sargon of Uruk, said to have been born to a temple prostitu