Inanna

Just before dawn, the brightest thing in the sky is not a star. It hangs low over the flat Mesopotamian horizon, steady and white, outshining everything near it, and the people of Uruk knew exactly who it was. The same light came back in the evening on the other side of the sky, and that doubling, morning and evening, was the first thing anyone understood about her: Inanna was never only one thing.

She was the goddess of love and the goddess of war, and the Sumerians felt no contradiction in that. She governed desire, sex, and fertility, and she governed slaughter, calling the clash of battle her own festival and moving through the killing like a woman through a dance. She was beauty and she was rage in the same body. The hymns that praise her as the one who makes lovers ache also name her the storm that flattens the rebel land, and they call war itself the dance of Inanna.

In the carvings she wears the tall horned crown that marks a great god, and a robe that falls in tiered flounces to her feet. Sometimes wings rise from her shoulders. She sets one foot on the back of a lion and holds the beast by a leash, and around her burns the eight-pointed star of Venus. Maces and weapons bristle from behind her shoulders like a quiver of light. There is nothing soft in these images. She is armed.

The stories cannot agree on where she came from. The line repeated most often makes her the daughter of Nanna the moon god and his wife Ningal, and the twin sister of Utu the sun. Other traditions hand her to the sky god An, or to Enki of the deep waters. She may have begun as something small, a spirit of the storehouse and the date harvest, the numen of the reed bundle that stood at the gate of the granary, and grown across the centuries into the Queen of Heaven, the most important goddess Mesopotamia would ever raise.

One of the oldest tales about her is a theft. She travels to Eridu, to the temple of Enki, who keeps the me, the divine decrees that hold civilization together: kingship, the crafts, music, law, truth, even the offices of the temple and the arts of the bedroom. Enki welcomes her and they drink. Cup after cup, and in his cups and his generosity he hands the me across to her, a fistful of gifts at a time, until every one of them is hers. When he wakes sober and understands what he has done, he sends monsters after her boat to take them back. Her vizier Ninshubur beats off every attempt, and Inanna sails into Uruk with the whole working apparatus of civilization stowed in her hold. She keeps it.

But the story that made her immortal is the one where she dies. Inanna decides to go down into the underworld, the realm of her sister Ereshkigal, and she dresses for it in all her power: the crown of the steppe, the lapis beads at her throat, the measuring rod, the royal robe. At each of the seven gates a gatekeeper strips one piece from her, deaf to her protests, and by the seventh gate she stands before her sister with nothing left on her. The judges of the dead turn on her the eye of death. Ereshkigal kills her, and her corpse is hung on a hook on the wall, where it goes green over three days and three nights.

She had planned for this. Ninshubur, told to raise the alarm if she did not return, goes begging to the gods, and only Enki moves. From the dirt under his fingernails he shapes two small sexless creatures and sends them down with the food of life and the water of life, and they wake her. The underworld does not release what it takes for free. Inanna may leave only if she sends someone to take her place, and a pack of demons climbs up with her to collect the debt. She finds her husband Dumuzi, the shepherd, seated on his throne in fine robes, untroubled, not mourning her at all. She turns on him the same eye of death that had turned on her. The demons seize him. He runs, he is caught, and in the end he and his sister Geshtinanna split the year between them, each spending half below, which is why the world has its season of dying and its season of return.

On an ordinary night a young couple in Uruk left a small gift at her temple gate and asked only to be wanted, and above them her star held its place in the west, patient and bright.

Under her Akkadian name, Ishtar, she walks into the Epic of Gilgamesh and is refused. She offers herself to the hero, and he answers by naming what became of the men she loved before him, each one broken, maimed, or transformed once she was finished with him. Insulted, she goes to her father and demands the Bull of Heaven, threatening that if he refuses she will break the doors of the underworld and let the dead swarm up to eat the living. She gets the bull. It kills hundreds before the heroes put it down.

Her power was vast and exact. She could grant desire and withhold it, bless a marriage or wither one, hand a king his victory or his defeat. She held the me, the moving parts of the ordered world. She crossed into death and came back out again, the only one who managed it, and she could raise wings and cross the whole sky with the planet Venus riding as her sign.

What she could not do was master herself, and the myths are honest about it. Her hunger for power and for men left a trail of ruined lovers behind her. Her descent nearly ended her for good, and it cost her the husband who had trusted her. The underworld would return her only for a life in exchange, and she paid with someone else’s. For all her weapons she could be stripped, gate by gate, down to bare skin. She was never safe, because she could never stop reaching.

She wanted everything, and she took most of it.

Four thousand years on, her star still rises before the sun and sets after it, the same white point the people of Uruk watched from their rooftops, and the oldest surviving story of a god who died and came back still belongs to her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Inanna?

Inanna is the ancient Sumerian goddess of love, sex, fertility, and war, worshipped across Mesopotamia as the Queen of Heaven. She was the patron deity of the city of Uruk and one of the most important gods of the Sumerian pantheon. Her Akkadian and Babylonian counterpart is the goddess Ishtar.

What is Inanna the goddess of?

Inanna governs two domains that seem opposed: love and war. She rules desire, sexuality, and fertility on one side, and combat, conflict, and destruction on the other, and she is also identified with the planet Venus. The Sumerians saw her dual nature as a single truth about her rather than a contradiction.

What happens in the Descent of Inanna?

Inanna travels down to the underworld ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, passing through seven gates where she is stripped of a garment or ornament at each one until she arrives naked. Ereshkigal has her killed and her body hung on a hook, but the god Enki creates two beings who revive her with the food and water of life. To leave, Inanna must provide a substitute, and she chooses her husband Dumuzi, who had not mourned her, condemning him to spend half of each year in the underworld.

What is the difference between Inanna and Ishtar?

Inanna is the Sumerian name of the goddess, while Ishtar is the name used for the same deity by the later Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. Over time the two merged into a single figure, so the goddess who sends the Bull of Heaven against Gilgamesh appears as Ishtar in the Akkadian epic but is the same being as the Sumerian Inanna.

Why did Inanna send the Bull of Heaven?

As Ishtar in the Epic of Gilgamesh, she proposes marriage to the hero Gilgamesh, and he rejects her by listing the disastrous fates of her previous lovers. Enraged by the insult, she demands the Bull of Heaven from her father and threatens to raise the dead if he refuses. She unleashes the bull on Gilgamesh’s city, where it kills many people before the hero and his companion Enkidu destroy it.

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Ishtar, Ereshkigal, Enki, Sin, Shamash, Anu, Enlil, Ninhursag, Nergal, Anunnaki, Marduk, Tiamat, Gilgamesh, Aphrodite, Lilith