Musings on This Week's Blog Conversations

Well, the Week 1 posts made for a promising start for our blog. Good seed posts and pretty vigorous discussion, too. I’m looking forward to Week 2’s conversations…

Naturally, I discerned a few main themes among this week’s various posts and comments, which I would like to address, so here goes…

GODS & HUMANS
It’s an all-too-human tendency to judge the behavior of the gods by our own contemporary sense of morality. We can’t help from doing this (and actually should do this as readers, because it helps us clarify our own principles), but it can also lead us to misdiagnose sometimes.

Gods and goddesses are not mortal, nor are they shaped by the psychological burdens that mortality confers. They may be human-like (we are typically made in their image, after all), but they are not human. And they have responsibilities. Each god and goddess typically has a charge or suite of charges (rivers, the heavens, crops, war, fertility, the Sun and the passage of time, death, knowledge, justice, winds, what-have-you). It’s their job to keep that facet of creation running and in good order. If they neglect those responsibilities, the world gets out of whack. People and animals, even the gods themselves, can suffer.

Inanna

This is relevant to Inanna because she is the goddess of a suite of related domains: fertility, sexuality, crops, and abundance, among others. Perhaps it was hubris (something we are more forgiving of in a man, by the way, than in a woman, where it more often translates to “selfishness”) that she acted on her wild notion to experience the underworld. But when she died there—had she remained there, dead forever—what would have happened to the world? No Spring, no offspring, no crops, no abundance, no sacrifices of meat and drink to the gods. The world dying and out of whack, winter without end.

That’s why so much effort was put into Inanna’s resurrection and retrieval from the Underworld. But even so, her return is achieved only through compromise: she is free to leave, but only if someone takes her place.

Ereshkigal

That non-negotiable “deal” sets the stage for Inanna’s desperate search to find a hostage to trade for her release. It’s a terrible choice, yet she must make it. But who? Ninshubur? Unthinkable. Ninshubur, her protector and enforcer, has been with her since she was a girl, and she relies on her special powers. Her own sons? How could a mother make that choice? She can’t bear the thought. But who else could be close enough that their sacrifice would hurt? It can’t be some luckless passerby who means nothing to her. (For one thing, I doubt that a mortal could survive the horror of hell for one day, much less the decreed term of half a year.) No, it pretty much has to be a god or demigod—and that narrows the choice down pretty drastically: Dumuzi, poor bastard. Didn’t help that he doesn’t seem to have noticed she was gone…

GILGAMESH & ENKIDU
How many movies have we seen where two macho hombres square off in a bar fight, beat the crap out of each other for an hour or so, then suddenly start laughing their heads off, bond over it, and—boom—BFFs forever? (Yeah I know, Department of Redundancy Department, but rhythmically, the “forever” was required…) It’s a Y-chromosome trope, from time immemorial. You can find parallel X-chromosome examples (usually without the brawling) in literature, life, and film as well…

SEXUALITY

Sexuality is a major theme in Mesopotamian literature (let’s face it, all literatures, even if driven underground by taboo). It is certainly plain that sexual matters had no need of being whispered behind drawn curtains or disguised inside elaborate metaphors. (The line between metaphor and reality in the Inanna hymns is vanishingly small...)

Inanna

It is also an important topic for American readers to confront, because of the stark contrast between the treatment of sexuality in Sumerian and Akkadian literature and its treatment in the literature of the three great Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—where matters of sexuality are often severely and substantially repressed. Christianity, especially, has taken this suppression to great lengths. This rejection of the flesh and suspicion of earthly pleasures, which is our troubled Western inheritance from that tradition, can warp our initial responses to the Mesopotamian materials. American readers may experience something almost like shock at the openness of sex and sexuality in these religious and cosmological works—so different in this regard from our own religious texts! Such shock can be an impediment to understanding and appreciation...

INANNA’S LIFE HISTORY
Many people commented Inanna’s character and possible character flaws, contrasting her more loving earlier nature with the more cruel persona of her resurrection and return. There is a change in her nature as she matures from adolescent to young woman, from lover to mother, from queen to goddess.

Inanna

That’s what I find so extraordinary about the Inanna hymn cycle (especially as Diane Wolkstein has chosen and arranged the disparate fragments into a single, chronological narrative): we see Inanna in the round, through time, in a fullness rarely seen for a female character in this mythic genre. (There are few to no comparable longitudinal portrayals of women in ancient Greek or Biblical or Egyptian literature—at least that I am aware of…) No, we must wait for the development of the novel for that kind of character development…

It’s easy to see the Ishtar of Gilgamesh as simply a continuation of Inanna as we last see her in the Hymns. Dumuzi was just the first of her many conquests, none of which ended well for the chosen one. Ishtar is indeed an organic continuation of the goddess Inanna by another name, but remember: Inanna and Ishtar are separated from each other by culture (Sumerian vs. Old Babylonian), language (Sumerian vs. Akkadian), and some 800 years of history (2000 BCE vs. 1200 BCE). Over that time-span, though retaining many of her earlier Sumerian traditions and attributes, Inanna has been passed through the long filter of a new language, changing cultures, and complex histories—somewhere along the line adding War Goddess to her portfolio—to emerge as the wrathful Ishtar whom Enkidu smacks with the Bull of Heaven’s thigh.

In short, it’s not entirely fair to treat Inanna and Ishtar as the “same” character…