Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [73]
Back in the land of the living, with Inanna in the underworld, sex takes a holiday. People stop coupling.
No bull mounted a cow, no donkey impregnated a jenny,*
No young man impregnated a girl on the street,
The young man sleeps in his private room,
The girl slept in the company of her friends.
There are competing versions of how Inanna is released. But once restored to life, she must promise to send someone back in her place—which is another common mythic theme. When Inanna returns to Uruk, her cult city, she finds her husband, Dumuzi, sitting on his throne, looking far from mournful. Enraged that her husband did not weep for her, Inanna gives Dumuzi the same withering gaze of death that she had gotten from her sister, and he is taken to the underworld in her place.
Inanna later realizes that she misses her “honey man,” and begins to grieve for him. Her laments for her husband become popular Mesopotamian songs, and are the very songs that Ezekiel hears the women of Israel later singing, in what he considers an abomination. Inanna pleads with her sister, and Dumuzi is finally released for half the year, his place in the underworld taken by his compassionate sister, so he can spend half the year with Inanna.
To the Mesopotamians, the disappearance and reappearance of Dumuzi were connected to the seasonal cycles of fertility and crops—just like the story of Persephone in Greek myth, or Amaterasu in Japanese myths. (The later Akkadian version of this myth features Ishtar and Tammuz with slight variations, but the ultimate outcome is the same, and the story was a popular one, well known throughout the Near East.)
Was Inanna’s city the first “Sin City”?
“What do women want?” Sigmund Freud famously asked. In one modern pop-anthem, the answer is that girls just want to have fun. And Inanna may have been one of the first “girl power” goddesses to live that creed. Accounts of life in the cult cities of this hard-living, hard-loving goddess also give us a very different picture of ancient city-life. It wasn’t all-work-no-play back then. Mesopotamians, we know, were party people.
Best known as the goddess of sexual love, the Sumerian Inanna (and her Babylonian counterpart, Ishtar) was also a goddess of war, and she enjoyed battle as though it were a dance. Aggressively sexual, she knew few boundaries, and in poems she says, “Who will plow my vulva? Who will plow my high field? Who will plow my wet ground?”
Inanna was also, not surprisingly, the patroness of prostitutes and ale houses. According to historian Gwendolyn Leick, her city, Uruk, one of the oldest in Mesopotamia, was an ancient “Fun City,” and Inanna was a beguiling figure who “stands for the erotic potential of city life, which is set apart from the strict social control of the tribal community or the village.” Inanna prowled the streets and taverns in search of sexual adventure, and, according to Leick, sex in the streets was not an unusual thing in ancient Mesopotamia—in Inanna’s Uruk and perhaps in Babylon. The idea of sex as “immoral” was not widely held in ancient civilizations, including the Egyptian and, to some extent, Greek worlds. In many cultures, sex was viewed as part of the natural order, and was routinely made a part of the fertility rites that were celebrated openly. Many of the restrictive codes about sexual conduct began with the institution of Mosaic Law in Israel, which is one reason why Babylon gained such a reputation as a sinful place