Ereshkigal

Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Sumerian Mythology, Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian Mythology, Mesopotamian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She holds absolute and irreversible authority over Kur, the Mesopotamian land of the dead, decreeing the fates of every soul that crosses into it.
Role in Mythos: Ereshkigal is the queen of the underworld, the one power even the great gods will not cross, who judges and detains the dead and from whose realm there is no lawful return.
Relation to Humans: Every mortal who dies passes into her keeping, and her decrees about the dead cannot be appealed by the living. She is not worshipped for favours so much as feared and placated, since her domain is the single destination no human escapes.

The gates open inward, seven of them, and at each one the visitor gives up something more, until whoever comes before the throne arrives stripped to the skin. Beyond the last gate the air does not move. There is no light worth the name, only the grey suggestion of a great hall where the dead eat clay and drink dust, and at its center sits a woman moaning like one in the grip of labour, with no cloth over her body and her hair standing out in coarse bunches. This is Ereshkigal, and the gates exist to make certain that no one reaches her as anything but a supplicant.

Her name means something close to Queen of the Great Earth, the “great earth” being the world below the world, the silent country the Sumerians called Kur and the Akkadians Irkalla. She rules it alone, which makes her unusual. Across the long span of Mesopotamian religion, as goddesses were steadily edged aside by gods, she kept her throne. Death stayed a woman’s office. Even when the warlike Nergal was eventually installed beside her as consort, the underworld remained hers first, and the older texts know it as her house and her law.

Where she came from depends on which tablet is speaking. Some traditions make her a daughter of the sky god An; one strand of the myth has her seized and carried down into the underworld in her youth, so that her rule begins as a kind of captivity that hardens into sovereignty. Her first husband was Gugalanna, the Great Bull of Heaven, the same bull the hero Enkidu helped kill in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is why his funeral becomes the pretext for the most famous visit she ever receives. By Gugalanna or by another she bore Namtar, the fate-cutter and plague-bringer who serves as her vizier and carries out her sentences, and a daughter, Nungal, who keeps the prison of the dead.

That famous visit is the descent of Inanna, her younger sister and her opposite in every way: the goddess of love and war and the open sky, who decides she will add the underworld to her holdings. Inanna comes to the first gate demanding entry, and Ereshkigal, hearing it, orders the gates bolted and the rules of her country applied without exception. At each of the seven gates a piece of Inanna’s regalia is taken, crown and rod and jewels and robe, until she stands naked and bowed in the throne room. The seven Anunnaki judges fasten on her the eye of death. Inanna is struck down to a corpse and hung on a hook on the wall, where she rots for three days and three nights. The plain fact of it is that Ereshkigal kills her sister and feels no need to explain.

What undoes the sentence is not force but grief. The clever god Enki scrapes dirt from under his fingernails and fashions two sexless little beings, and sends them down with the food of life and the water of life. They find Ereshkigal still groaning in her unending pain, and instead of flinching they echo her cries back to her, moaning when she moans, sighing when she sighs. The sympathy moves her where nothing else could. She offers them a gift, a river in flood, a field of grain, and they refuse it all and ask only for the corpse on the hook. Bound by her own promise, she lets them sprinkle the body and lead the revived Inanna up, on the single condition that fixes her law forever: a living soul leaving the underworld must send a substitute down to take her place. The price falls in the end on Inanna’s neglectful husband, Dumuzi.

The other great story bends the opposite way. In the Akkadian poem of Nergal and Ereshkigal, the god Nergal comes down on an errand and gives her offense, and when he returns he storms the palace, knocks her vizier aside, drags her from the throne by the hair, and raises his axe to take off her head. She does not die. She bargains, fast and clear-eyed, offering him marriage and a half-share of her dominion if he will spare her, and he does. A softer version skips the violence and simply has the two of them retire to the bedchamber. Either way the death-dealing god is folded into her court rather than left to roam, and the underworld gains a king without losing its queen.

Her powers are the powers of finality. She fixes the destinies of the dead, commands the galla demons who hunt down anyone who tries to flee her country, and issues decrees that the other gods, for all their strength, will not overturn. Her limits are stitched into the same fabric. She is bound to her own realm and cannot simply walk out of it. She is held to her own word once it is given, which is the lever that frees Inanna. And for all her terror she is reachable through grief and through a blade at her throat, a ruler whose unbending law turns out to have two small doors in it. Her cult was never large. A temple at Kutha, scattered offerings, an occasional appearance in a magical spell, but no one really prayed to be near her. You hoped to keep your distance, and you knew you would fail.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ereshkigal?

Ereshkigal is the Mesopotamian goddess and queen of the underworld, the realm the Sumerians called Kur and the Akkadians Irkalla. Her name means roughly “Queen of the Great Earth,” and she is notable for being the only female deity to rule a land of the dead, a position she held throughout Mesopotamian history even as other goddesses lost ground to gods.

What is Ereshkigal the goddess of?

Ereshkigal governs death and the underworld, decreeing the fates of all who die and detaining them in her realm permanently. Her authority is absolute and irreversible, feared even by the other gods, because her domain is the one destination from which there is no lawful return.

How is Ereshkigal related to Inanna?

Ereshkigal is the older sister of Inanna (Ishtar), the goddess of love and war, and the two are opposites in nature. In the myth of Inanna’s Descent, Ereshkigal has her sister stripped at seven gates, struck dead by the eye of the Anunnaki judges, and hung as a corpse on a hook, before Inanna is later revived on the condition that she provide a substitute for the underworld.

Who was Ereshkigal married to?

Ereshkigal’s first husband was Gugalanna, the Great Bull of Heaven, whose death in the Epic of Gilgamesh ties into the descent myth. In the later Akkadian poem of Nergal and Ereshkigal, the death-god Nergal becomes her husband and co-ruler of the underworld, after a confrontation in which she bargains for her life by offering him marriage and a share of her power.

Who were Ereshkigal’s children?

Ereshkigal’s son is Namtar, the bringer of fate and plague who acts as her vizier and carries out her decrees in the underworld. She also had a daughter, Nungal (also called Manungal), an underworld goddess associated with the prison of the dead and with punishment.