Ishtar

At the first gate they took her crown. At the second, the rod and line of lapis she used to measure the world. Gate by gate the guardians of the dead stripped the Queen of Heaven of everything that marked her as a queen, the breastplate, the rings, the beads that fell against her chest, until she stood before her sister’s throne with nothing left but her skin and her temper. The air down there was dry as old bone and smelled of dust that had never once been rained on. Ereshkigal looked at her and fastened on her the eye of death, and Ishtar, goddess of love and slaughter, the brightest thing in the evening sky, hung on a hook in the dark and stiffened like a slaughtered animal.

This was the goddess whom half the ancient world called Queen of Heaven. To the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians she was Ishtar, the great Semitic remaking of the older Sumerian Inanna, and she ruled the two forces that upend human lives most completely: desire and war. She was the planet Venus, and the doubleness was the whole point. At dawn she rose as the morning star, armed, a war goddess pushing kings toward the field. At dusk she came back as the evening star, goddess of bedchambers and longing. Same light, two faces, and no promise that the one who came to you would be the gentle one.

Her sign was the eight-pointed star, cut into boundary stones and cylinder seals across a thousand years, and beside it the lion, whose muscle and appetite matched her own. Artists gave her a horned crown, the mark reserved for the highest gods, and set weapons rising from her shoulders like a second pair of wings, a quiver bristling above a body dressed for a feast. In many images she stands on the back of a lion, one foot planted on its shoulders, the leash pulled tight, the animal snarling and entirely hers. The rosette followed her as well, an eight-petalled flower that in the northern Assyrian cities may have crowded out even the star. She is rarely still in any picture. She strides, she treads, she leans her weight forward as if the artist caught her a half-second before she moved.

Where she came from depends on who is telling it. The oldest layer is Sumerian, the fierce young goddess of the city of Uruk, and Ishtar is what the Semitic-speaking peoples of Mesopotamia made of that figure when they folded her into their own tongue and their own gods. Her parentage shifts between the tellings. Most often she is the daughter of Sin, the moon god, which makes the sun god Shamash her brother and Ereshkigal, queen of the dead, her sister. Elsewhere she is named a daughter of Anu, the remote god of the sky, and in that version she is less anyone’s child than a power standing on her own. The stories never settled the matter, and she does not seem to have minded.

The descent that opened this account did not end on the hook. While Ishtar rotted below, the machinery of life above her stopped. No bull mounted a cow, no man reached for a woman, and the whole green urge of the world went cold and quiet. The gods noticed, because a world that stops breeding is a world that stops feeding them. Clever Ea, the god of wisdom, shaped a being to slip down into the dark and coax Ereshkigal into releasing her, and the water of life was sprinkled over the corpse until it stirred. But the dead give up a body for a price. Ishtar could rise only if another took her place. She climbed back through the seven gates, reclaiming her ornaments one at a time, and when she reached the surface she found her young husband Tammuz seated on a throne in fine clothes, comfortable, not mourning her at all. She turned on him the same death-eye her sister had turned on her. He was hauled below in her stead, and ever after the world would wither when he went down and quicken when he was let back up.

Her temper is best remembered from the day she looked down at Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, still wet from washing after battle, and decided she wanted him. She offered him everything, a chariot of gold, a house of cedar, kings and princes kneeling at his feet. He refused, and worse, he told her why. He counted off her lovers and what had become of them: Tammuz, wept for year after year; a bird whose wing she broke; a stallion she drove to exhaustion and then whipped; a herdsman she turned into a wolf for his own dogs to tear apart. No one talks to a goddess that way. She went up to heaven in tears that curdled at once into rage and demanded that Anu hand over the Bull of Heaven, threatening to smash the doors of the underworld and let the dead pour out to eat the living unless she had her way. The Bull came down snorting, and each snort tore a pit in the earth that swallowed a hundred men. Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu killed it between them, and Enkidu ripped off one of its haunches and hurled it in her face. She climbed the walls of Uruk with her priestesses and wailed over the carcass. Then the gods ruled that one of the two heroes had to die for the killing, and it was Enkidu.

Her powers ran the full range of what people want and fear. She could make a barren field bear and a fertile one fail. She kindled lust and love and could pull them back, leaving a whole city cold. In war she was the nerve that carries a line forward and the panic that breaks it, and rulers thanked her for their triumphs and blamed her silence for their routs. She held a portion of the divine decrees that kept the cosmos running, and she could raise the dead when it suited her, a threat few of her siblings could make and mean.

And still she was not untouchable, which is the strange heart of her. The underworld stripped and killed her like anyone else, and she could not free herself; she needed Ea’s cunning and another life to climb back into the light. Gilgamesh turned her down flat and went on living. Her own nature worked against her, because a goddess this volatile is feared without being trusted and wanted without being safe, and every name on Gilgamesh’s list had learned that her love was a kind of weather that could turn without warning. She ruled love and war and never seemed to notice they were the same thing. What she could never do was hold anything still: not a husband, not a season, not the star that carried her name, which rises faithfully and sets just as faithfully and belongs to no one on the ground who watches it climb.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ishtar in Mesopotamian mythology?

Ishtar is the supreme goddess of love and war in Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian religion, known as the Queen of Heaven. She is the Semitic form of the older Sumerian goddess Inanna and was identified with the planet Venus, making her one of the most important deities of ancient Mesopotamia.

What is Ishtar the goddess of?

Ishtar is the goddess of sexual love, fertility, and war, three domains she holds at once rather than in balance. As the planet Venus she was the armed morning star who urged kings into battle and the evening star of desire and the bedchamber, and she could grant fertility to fields and people or withdraw it entirely.

What happened when Ishtar descended to the underworld?

Ishtar descended to the realm of her sister Ereshkigal and was stripped of her garments and ornaments at seven gates before being killed and hung on a hook. While she was dead, all fertility on earth ceased, so the gods sent a being crafted by Ea to secure her release with the water of life. She could only return by providing a substitute, and her husband Tammuz was dragged into the underworld in her place, giving rise to the yearly cycle of the seasons.

Why did Gilgamesh reject Ishtar?

Gilgamesh refused Ishtar’s proposal of marriage because he knew what had happened to her previous lovers, listing how she had ruined or destroyed each one, from Tammuz to a stallion and a herdsman she transformed into a wolf. Enraged, Ishtar demanded the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu and loosed it on Uruk, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed it, and the gods condemned Enkidu to death in return.

What are Ishtar’s symbols?

Ishtar’s principal symbols are the eight-pointed star, which links her to the planet Venus, and the lion, which reflects her ferocity and royal power. The rosette was also closely associated with her and may have become her main emblem in the Neo-Assyrian period, and lions decorate the famous Ishtar Gate of Babylon built under Nebuchadnezzar II.

Related Entries

Inanna, Ereshkigal, Gilgamesh, Anu, Sin, Shamash, Marduk, Enlil, Enki, Nergal, Anunnaki, Tiamat, Humbaba, Aphrodite