II. TWO MORPHOLOGICAL PARALLELS TO THE JONAH STORY
2.3.4 Enrichment through Rite de Passage
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H - The helper foretells the destiny of the hero and gives him a gift; 1. The snake foresees the man's return to Egypt and sends him off with precious goods.
↓ - The hero returns to the human sphere of action; 2. The sailor embarks the passing human vessel and goes back to his king with newly-acquired riches.
γ - The hero uses his newly acquired gift to bring about a status change for himself; 2. The sailor presents his riches to the king and by so doing is deemed worthy for promotion.
δ - The hero thrives; The sailor prospers as an attendant to the king.
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throughout this wondertale.167 This period in ―no-man‘s land‖ is consequently a challenge to the liminoid (the sailor); he must prove himself worthy if he is to rejoin human society as a changed and more prestigious person. In this type of wondertale part of this test is the demonstration of proper reverence for the divine, which the sailor undertook with his thanksgiving sacrifice and continues through his interactions with the snake-king.
The sailor's return to humanity is punctuated by communitas, first in his longing to be returned to his home and then by his sighting of a human ship and recognition of
"those that were in it."168 This ―recognition‖ is another concept we see repeatedly in the wondertales with this topos because it initiates the transition of the hero back to familiar space. The sailor‘s excitement at this experience comes with the tacit acknowledgment that he and his host must part ways, as they are of different worlds. Yet now that this sailor has been transformed and is more attuned to his own suffering and the helplessness of humankind, the sailor first pays due reverence to the snake-king who helped to make his transition possible.169 Having duly acknowledged the place of humankind in cosmos as reliant upon divine favor, the hero is now readied to leave this world-turned-upside-
167 ―If the end is positive, the sufferings endured on the way disappear and are even seen as a necessary test to obtain the prize. This is in fact how the Egyptians perceived life itself on earth.‖ Galán, Four Journeys in Ancient Egyptian Literature, 39.
168 It is unclear what is meant by this. Does he "recognize" them only as human, as Egyptians, or are these somehow the sailors he had traveled with before? The text leaves all of these questions unanswered. There also seems to be some jumbling of the events since the sailor loads the goods given to him onto the ship prior to hailing the crew from the shore.
169 The careful reader will note that the other humans do not disembark from the ship and come ashore even though they, too, might gain materially from the island‘s wealth. The reason for this is unclear–Are they afraid? Are they unable to disembark? The inference is that the hero is in a liminal state up until the moment he steps off the island and it vanishes. His fellow sailors do not participate and so cannot testify as to what is there. We may liken this to the Lugalbanda narrative in that episode where Anzud comes very close to the army, close enough to see, but does not approach them closely. The hero is a bridge between worlds.
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down enhanced in at least two respects: he is renewed internally by wisdom and enriched externally by the acquisition of material goods.170
Even despite the great size of the ship on which this sailor had left Egypt and the experience of the large crew with him, this story suggests that there is inherent danger in traveling beyond one‘s own home area because such things did not make a difference in the sailor‘s fate. The sailor was saved from an unforgiving sea only by washing up on the shores of a nurturing island whose lushness is like that of a primordial garden. This is a place of otherworldliness, where the material wealth of ―the king‘s mines‖ is dwarfed and its fantastic ruler is made of jewels instead of merely adorned with them. This liminal island is beyond human knowledge, ―a world in which in which basic conventions of our concrete reality may be broken.‖171 Such a world is subject to drastic turns and
cataclysmic astronomical events without any rationalization of causation.172 All of this creates a setting of chaos and uncertainty that amounts to an existential parallel for the
"hapless traveler, who suffers disaster and does not know how to conduct himself in the situation in which he finds himself."173 Though the snake and those events represent a separate world, the transformative wisdom learned in this situation prepares the hero for
170 Following Stephen Quirke, who in comparing TSS with the ―Tale of Sanehat‖ (Sinuhe) notes that,
―both men return to their previous condition but changed by the interval; their external world is restored but enriched, physically and internally.‖; ―Narrative Literature,‖ 263-276. Another interpretation suggests that the true hero of this story is the snake and not the anti-heroic man, whose ―long-winded‖ and ―self-
absorbed‖ narrative contradicts the ideals of Egyptian wisdom literature; see Betsy M. Bryan, ―The Hero of the ‗Shipwrecked Sailor,‘‖ Serapis 5 (1979): 3-13.
171 Antonio Loprieno, ―Defining Egyptian Literature,‖ 39-58 in Ancient Egyptian Literature (ed. Antonio Loprieno; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 50.
172 John Baines suggests that the cataclysm which destroys the snake‘s family is perhaps an eschaton evoked by Egyptian mythical texts such as Coffin Texts Spell 1130. ―Myth and Literature‖ in Ancient Egyptian Literature (ed. Antonio Loprieno; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 361-377.
173 Baines, "Interpreting the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor," 59.
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situations of uncertainty in the human world and the truism that some things happen for reasons unclear to us.174