Queen of Heaven and of Earth: Descent of Inanna
The Hawthorn Spinner, Brigid 1994, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 3,4,6,8

Queen of Heaven and of Earth:
The Descent of Inanna

By STONE

A complete and authentic life story of the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna was made available to the public in English, translated from original texts. In Sumer the people wrote on small clay tablets, with a pointed stylus in a script of quick little marks and punches, and baked the clay tables to last for eons. In our own age, there are men and women who come to dig out relics from the great high mounds of earth and crumbled brick which once were cities. It is these tablets which have taught us the songs and stories. Samuel Noah Kramer is one of the scholars who devoted years to gathering and arranging the old broken bits of clay. He hoped that by pursuing writings of Inanna he could piece together the first whole modern book of Sumerian literature, and this he did. With the help of a poet named Diana Wolkstetn, he cast it in our language. Harper & Row published it in 1983. The book is called Inanna: Queen of Heaven and of Earth. Our generation has witnessed a divine rebirth.
Let us look back to the ancient land of Sumer. If we wish to know of an ancient goddess let us look back through many generations to Her people and their lives. Through 50 centuries, let us look back.
Down southeastward from the rugged mountains of Anatolia, east across the desert from the valley of the Nile, there lies a land of dry rolling hills and plains, scattered with lakes and thick lush marshes. Here two rivers, broad and mighty, wander to the Lower Sea. Rain here is scarce (the desert lies on either hand) but the rivers do not fail and the silt they carry from the distant mountains is rich. Long ago, when only hunters roamed the mountain woods and Egypt was a string of isolated towns, when metal tools were new in human hands, a people came and made this country bloom. They organized themselves to cut and dike and maintain canals across the land, to channel water through their fields from many miles away. These two rivers are now called Tigris and Euphrates. This land is known to the modern world as Mesopotamia. The nation which those ancient builders built her is now called Sumer.
All up and down the rivers with their many winding branches and their many lakes and marshes and canals, the people built up fields from swamp and cut fields from the scrubby dry land where shepherds long before and long since ranged, and they channeled in the brown water to make crops grow. All up and down the waters they built big towns. Some of their towns, like Babylon and Ur, whose names are still familiar to our ears, would stand in place for ages and grow great while others lapsed into oblivion. They lived together in big towns because in this country, with this stand of massive irrigation, farming had to be the business of a big organization. They believed in law between themselves and natural law which ruled the universe. (If there were no immortal law, how could such an age-long work go on?) And so, among all the goddesses and gods of the sun, moons and stars, storm and fire and war and elemental creation, they worshipped a special patron goddess who was both Justice and fertility and who was said to own all fertile lands.
All things which spring from the womb were Hers, all things which spring from Earth. She was Venus, the star which rules the morning and the dusk, a silver flame. She stood upon the winged lion which drew the rain god's car. She was Inanna, Queen of Heaven and of Earth, who loved the people and was loved by a11, goddesses and gods, women and men.
The ancient Sumerians were marvelously Inventive. They built up fields from swamp by weaving tons of reed ' into mats and laying it down. The land was without timber or stone, so they created fired brick. They built brick palaces and slums, city walls and towering pyramidal ziggurats atop which stood their grandest temples. (Date palms and fruit trees they had aplenty, and a few willow trees and such, but stone and real timber lay far beyond the borders in other lands.) They made money, silver disks and rings of standard size. They fished the waters from boats of bundled reed and built their country huts of reed. Furniture and fences and a thousand things were woven from the ever-present reeds. They made written law, contracts, bills of sale, loans, receipts and written accounting. They had a thriving trade. In fact, modern scholars say they invented writing itself, beginning with accounting tokens (little modeled bits of clay that represented so many sheep or bullocks or bushels of grain) and ending with a literature recording all the height and depth of beauty and ugliness of which we humans can be aware.
Rituals and hymns
In their book of Inanna, Kramer and Wolkstein have gathered four stories of Her 11re and seven hymns. The stories were surely performed as rituals in the streets and in the temples at certain times each year. The hymns were often sung. The words are beautiful, with a kind of unrhymed mythic power equal to our own greatest poems.
The goddess who emerges from these pages is beautiful indeed. Among the many deities of Sumer, Inanna was the people's special patroness for it was She whose marriage to a mortal man brought both law and fertility to their land, and She it was who justice from the gods into the world of men, and it was She who forced the gates of Death itself to bring back ever-renewing life.
The first of these four stories tells of the entry into womanhood. It shows us Inanna as a girl in a house by the river, both desiring and fearing whatever is to come. Her destiny, Her hope, is shown as a willow tree

"In the first days,
In the first nights,
In the first years,
When everything needed was brought into being...

At that time, a tree, a single tree, a hluppu tree
Has planted by the banks of the Euphrates.
The waters of the Euphrates nourished the tree...

A young woman walking by the banks of the river
Plucked the tree from the water and said:

'I will take this tree to my city, Uruk
I will plant this tree in my holy garden.'

The young woman, Inanna, planted the tree.
She cared for the tree with her hand.
She settled the earth around the tree with her foot.
She wondered:

'How long will it be until I have a shining throne

to sit upon?
How long will it be until I have a shining bed
to lie upon?


nurtured by Her hinds for years in which three demons of Her fears have come to dwell. None of the gods will harvest this tree to help Her into womanhood. Instead, Her mortal brother, Gilgamesh, mighty workman, man of men, will chop the willow down and build from it Her thrown and bed.

Giver of Wisdom and Law
The second tale describes Her daring seizure of wisdom and power, how She took a boat from the wharf of the human city to the dwelling of the gods and brought back law. Her mother's father was the god of all waters, keeper of all treasures of understanding, embodiment of thought itself, and She outwitted Him. With a cunning and haughty eye, He sat Her down to feast and drink, as if in honor, and sought to overawe Her with the powers at His command. The god sought to make of Her a fool. He twisted Her around with flattery and promises of gifts. They ate and drank in high frivolity, and though He lost His wits, She kept about Her business all the while. He promised all the treasure chests of wisdom. When He called for them to dazzle Her, She bade Her servants seize them and She made away. Back to the city of men She rode to give them Justice, science and skill, all the powers of the mind, and to rule in glory.
It seems that on Her holidays the people would parade with songs and costumes and dance. Pipes, harps and drums would lead them through the streets with the priestesses and priests. Each city had a king (their word was lugal, meaning "strong man") and at the New Year festival in autumn, when the deadly heat of summer was gone, when Life returned after Death, the kind would come in marriage to their Queen. The story of this marriage is the third tale in the book. It tells of their bodily joy

"He shaped her loins with his soft hands,
The shepherd Dumuzi filled her lap with cream and milk,
He stroked her pubic hair,
He watered her womb.

With his hands he held her full vulva,
He smoothed her black boat with cream.
He quickened her narrow boat with milk,
He caressed Inanna on the bed.

Then she caressed the high priest on the bed,
Inanna caressed the faithful shepherd Dumuzi,
She caressed his loins, the shepherdship of the land,
She decreed a sweet fate for him.

Inanna, The First Daughter of the Moon,
The heroic woman, greater than her mother,
Inanna, who was presented the me by the God of Wisdom."


and all their words of love and it says that She chose him. Without a blessing such as this from their own goddess, a king could be naught but a warlord in the people's eyes, so every year the kind would lead the march to Her secret chamber in the temple to lie with an honored priestess and so seal the nation's union with divinity. In the tale he is Dumuzi, chieftain shepherd, mighty hunter, smart and strong and fast, but he is a man. It is only his union with the Goddess, the gifts of skill and wisdom which She gives, which let him truly rule. For after all, She is fertility and truth; the green land is Hers. And after all, through all the turmoil of a nation built of city-states as was Sumer, through all the civil wars and dynasties of a nation which stood for 18OO years as Sumer did, when everything grew old, it was only the sacred temples with all their craftsmen and scribes and laborers and lands, with all their knowledge of the sacred rites, which stood through time and lent law to the power of kings.

"Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, decreed the fate of Dumuzi:
'In battle, I your leader
In combat, I as your armor-bearer
In the assembly, I am your advocate
On the campaign, I am your Inspiration.
In all ways you are fit:
To sit on your throne
To wear the crown on your head
To race on the road with the holy scepter
in your hand
To wear the holy sandals on your font
To prance on the holy breast like a lapis calf."

Queen of Life and Death
The fourth and final story in the modern book depicts Her death and return. Inanna turns Her ear to the "great below,' knowing this is the only region where She holds no sway, knowing there is naught else that She fears, and knowing that with this fear Her life would be ever Incomplete. Adorned with regal crown and Jewelry and gorgeous gown, She sets out on the mystic path but at each of the seven gates of Hell, deeper and deeper beneath the Earth, She is stripped of Her powers and

'When Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, heard
this, she slapped her thigh and bit her lip.
She took the matter into her heart and dwelt on it.
The she spoke:
'Nett, my chief gatekeeper of the underworld,
Bolt the seven gates of the underworld.
Then, one by one, open each gate a crack.
Let Inanna enter;
As she enters, remove her royal garments.
Let the Holy Priestess of Heaven enter bowed low.'"

adornments one by one. At last She kneels naked before the judges, before the throne of Her long-lost sister who is the Queen of Death. And they pronounce Her guilty and strike Her down. For three days the Queen of Heaven and of Earth hangs lifeless from a hook in the cavern below the Earth and below the Sea, beyond salvation. To know

"Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat.
And was hung from a hook on the wall...

After three days and three nights when Inanna did not
return, Ninshubur set up a lament...:

'O Father Enlil, do not let your bright silver

be covered with the dust of the underworld.
Do not let the Holy Priestess of Heaven be put to death
in the underworld.'"


the meaning of this tale, we now must know that it is She Herself who was the Queen of Death; tt was She Herself who was the tortured and forsaken Queen of Hell. It was all the fear of Her for Herself, cast away when Her glorious womanhood was seized, when the willow tree was cut for Her throne and bed, which now pronounced the guilt of a glorious life and struck it down. For three days the Queen of Life hangs lifeless in the cavern of the Great Below and Her sister, Death, writhes in torment at the sight. But wisdom hears the tale and will not rest. Wisdom, Her mother's father, hears the tale and will not let it be. But Wisdom has no power there in Hell. Yet Wisdom sees He can turn the trick of sending Death a love for life. This is the trick of making the desert sun revive a seed to see it grow. Withered Death Herself must quicken to the hope of growth.

So He sends two servants to comfort Death in her loneliness. Wisdom sends two servants to moan in pain with Death. She is persuaded to let Life go. Her heart is comforted and She lets Inanna go. Alive once more, greater than before, she has regained the half of Herself which was forsaken. Inanna lives with angels of Death on either side. Now in one being, Life and Death, out from the gates of Hell, flies forth the Queen of Earth, the Queen of Love and Fear. It is the law that Life and Death by turns shall rule. So shall it be forever.

"Dumuzi reaches out his hand for food and drink.
The palace is festive. The king is joyous.
Dumuzi halls Inanna with the praises of the gods
and the assembly:
'Holy Priestess! Created with the heavens and the earth,
First Daughter of the Moon, Lady of the Evening! I sing your praises.'
Inanna looks in sweet wonder from heaven.

The people of Sumer parade before the holy Inanna.
The Lady Who Ascends into the Heavens, Inanna,

is radiant.
Mighty, majestic, radiant, and ever youthful--
To you, Inanna, I sing."

REFERENCES
1. Copyright to the main body of this article given free to the public by the author, 1987, Stone can be reached c/o Olwydd, P0B 317, Londonderry, NH 03053.

2, Quotations in boldface type are from "Inanna and Dumuzi: The Sacred Marriage Rite" in The First Love Stories, 1991, Diane Wolkstein, HarperCollins.