DIANE WOLFSTEIN & SAMUEL NOAH KRAMER – INANNA,
QUEEN OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, HER STORIES AND HYMNS FROM SUMER – 1983
This book is an essential tool if
we want to understand the Sumerian religion and culture, but also if we want to
assess what happened in Neolithic times, what tradition came up to an end in
that period. These tales have been recuperated from original tablets dug out of
the soil of old Sumerian towns. They are all datable between 3500 and 2500 BCE.
The first interest is of course the fact that this is the first assessed and
documented writing system in the world, which does not mean it necessarily was
the first. An older writing system could have been only used on a material medium
that was not durable and as such decayed with time or it was used by a
civilization that had the mishap of being destroyed at some time in history leaving
no traces behind. We must always remember that what we find from those distant
civilizations is a very small portion of what was actually produced by that
civilization.
The second remark on which we
have to insist tremendously is that it took a tremendous amount of time for
that civilization to invent that writing system. The origin is today considered
to be around 8000 BCE (asserted point that was preceded too by a long gestation
and that leads us to right after the Ice Age probably somewhere around 12000
BCE. As for the 8000 BCE origin we can accept the following hypothesis as being
probable:
“
Sumerian cuneiform is the earliest known writing system. Its
origins can be traced back to about 8,000 BC and it developed from the
pictographs and other symbols used to represent trade goods and livestock on
clay tablets. Originally the Sumerians made small tokens out of clay to
represent the items. The tokens were kept together in sealed clay envelopes,
and in order to show what was inside the envelopes, they press the tokens into
the clay in the outside.” (Omniglot, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sumerian.htm,
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Simon Ager |
Hosted by Kualo).
But we would not know about this
probable origin and the subsequent writing system if the Sumerian had not
invented the material medium which is clay and the clay tablets, and further on
we have to say that without the invention of the stylus to write on the clay
tablets and their subsequent hardening we
still would have nothing at all. That is why I suggest to go as far as 12000
BCE to state the mental movement that evolved and constructed that new medium:
writing is a totally new medium to communicate and transport the medium that
language itself is that had been in existence for more than 200,000 years
before cuneiforms starting from nothing more than the code of signals and calls
inherited from previous Hominins and from Hominids beyond and before them.
Having said this we can move to
the next question that has to be asked here. Inanna is a goddess and she
carries with her a gender determination that opposes her to male gods. In
Sumerian religion there are three basic male gods: An, god of heavens; Enlil,
god of earth; and Enki god of wisdom. But we should include one woman with the
first two, Ereshkigal goddess of the underworld. That gives us a spatial
trilogy, trinity if you prefer: heavens – earth – the underworld. And an
abstract god who is not over a territory but over a human capability, a human
ability, wisdom, seen thus as divine in a way. This Enki can definitely be seen
as the “spirit” of God and even beyond as the Sophia of later religions and
philosophies. Enki is in fact a precursor of philosophy. To this double trinity
(heavens-earth-underworld and An-Enlil-Enki) we have to add another goddess,
Inanna, the daughter of Nanna and Ningal, the god and goddess of the Moon. And
note the sun is not that basic since he is the son of the same Nanna and Ningal
and the brother of Inanna. We should probably wonder about the initial vowel or
vowels of these names. They are all connected and go back to /a/ water or sperm
(seen as genetic and fertile water), to /e/ that means a water irrigating canal
on top of levees that separate and limit fields, /é/ that is connected to /a/
water and is also /é/ a house, an estate, and eventually a temple, and /en/
lord, high priest and high priestess. The goddess of the underworld is built on
/eresh/ lady or queen, often compounded to designate the consort of a god (erish-digur).
That at once raises the question
of the status of women but what is more important the spiritual (religious)
role of women in competition with male gods.
If we consider religion as a
mental and spiritual invention of man, we have to consider it comes from the
material evolution of the human kind, hence of Homo Sapiens. The oldest
pictorial representations of the world produced by man and left behind are the
rock paintings of various civilizations. Some studies of the hand prints that
accompany these paintings seem to indicate the painters were women and young
teenagers. How come women could have that position in pre-Ice Age societies?
For a very simple reason which is called division of labor. If the human
species was to develop in order to migrate and occupy the whole world, which it
did, the women who were fertile from 13 to 29, due to all kinds of mishaps
during the pregnancies, at delivery time, during the infancy and childhood of
the children who are dependent on their mothers for food and protection up to
the age of five at least, plus of course adult deaths before the age of 29, a woman had to have at
the very least 8 pregnancies, which could lead two children to adult life and
procreation age, and yet I would think it probably was closer to ten. That
means very clearly that in sixteen years a woman had to be pregnant 8 or 10
times, at the most every two years and more probably every 18 months. This
means from 13 onward a woman had a child in her womb, a child on her hip or
back and a child close at hand to be looked after. Of course women probably
organized themselves so that some of them could be for short periods of time be
relieved. But this is a basic natural division of labor. And since women were
close to the settlement of the group for long days and nights while men were
out hunting, gathering and fishing, they had plenty of time to do these
paintings, to invent and carry the spiritual work of inventing religions and
dealing with supernatural beings and spirits.
So what happened after the Ice
Age that changed this?
The warmer weather and the
thawing of the ice caps meant a lot of water (the flood) and a complete change
of climate which determined all over the world (without any Internet
communication) the development of agriculture and herding with local cereals
and plants and with local animals. If we can say that cattle was imported into
Europe from the Middle East, we cannot say it
was exported to all other areas in the world where they domesticated local
species. It is even strange to see buffaloes being domesticated for
agricultural work in the Indian subcontinent while the cow, the “European”
cattle is sacred and is roaming around unexploited and unused. This development
of agriculture started a long time before the supposed Neolithic revolution. In
fact it probably used after the Ice Age techniques and technologies invented
during and before the Ice Age to survive it. It’s what Stephen Mithen calls
taking care of the natural garden: clear the land around an interesting plant and
it will yield more fruit or stronger roots because it will have more air and
sunshine. Water it; etc. The invention of agriculture must have taken many
millennia under the pressure of extinction if new means of sustenance were not
invented. It happened on a wide scale after the Ice Age because of the full
change of climate and natural circumstances (fauna and flora). This is only a
sketch of the long and complex procedure.
The whole social organization in
Sumer was based on the control and use of irrigation water with the levees
limiting the fields, the irrigation canals at the top of these levees, the
circulation, distribution and sharing of water and this same root of water is
the root of the irrigation canals and the root of the estate-home-household. From
some kind of collective organization based on hunting parties and gathering campaigns
humanity had to move to another collective organization no longer based on the
natural child-rearing division of labor but on the work to be done in the
fields, with the cattle and in the community to produce the tools and other
instruments and appliances. Pottery developed in the same period. A potter
can’t make pots and go plowing. Women no longer had the main role to play in
the rearing of children in a more urban and collective environment and for the
future of the community that started being ruled by some “lugal” in Sumerian,
some “big man” that we generally translate as king, which is probably both true
and false. Men became dominant and the invention of bronze is going to develop
men into the fighting individuals we know. That’s the basis of the change with
Inanna. She does not bring the change. She resists it in all possible ways and
these poems or tales are the very direct incarnation of this struggle of the
woman god to keep her dominant position. Since it is no longer “natural” it has
to be conquered and so Inanna does by luring the God of Wisdom into drunkenness
and then charming him into giving her all his divine powers, what he called his
“me.” In other words the domination of male gods, and here the most abstract
god, the one mostly invented by the intellectual being man was becoming, is
stated as being in full possession of this god at first and losing it all then.
In other words Inanna is inverting the normal movement of things. She is
fighting and she wins for the time being.
Then Inanna will have to get
married and the choice between a farmer and a shepherd is difficult and yet
will be the same as in the myth of Abel and Cain: the shepherd will win like
Cain who survived, even if he is banned and cursed. Why is the shepherd the one
who survives in the Bible and the one who marries the Goddess Inanna. Any
reason could be good, from the idle ease of looking after a herd and the
closeness with human beings in the mammal delivery of young ones. There is also
the blood that leads to sacrifice and many other reasons. Why did Inanna prefer
the farmer at first? Same kind of reasoning. Farming is hard work from sunup to
sundown, in the field and the sunshine, with the problem of irrigation. There
is no animal dimension, no blood, no delivery. It is static in a way and it
could be seen as trite but it is steady and regular and there are no predators.
What is interesting here is how the husbandry of animals is preferred to the
cultivation of plants and that idea is present in many civilizations,
particularly those coming from the Middle East.
Think of the Song of Songs and how The woman was made black because she did not
take care of her vineyard and her brothers punished her by sending her to their
vineyards. The interpretation that the vineyard of the girl is her virginity
makes it difficult to understand the punishment as if the sister was supposed
to look after the virginity of her brothers. It is a punishment because she was
idle and did not do what she had to do for the plants she was supposed to grow.
I would even say that herding in a society that is as for herds itinerant,
seems to be a boy and young teenager’s task, a male task in other words and
shepherdess seems to be a more recent – and romantic? – invention or
development.
Inanna’s descent to the
underworld to challenge the goddess of that underworld is most surprising but
it is not rare. Orpheus and Eurydice is quite similar in a way. The myth of
going down into the underworld for any reason whatsoever is quite common. Even
Jesus went down to limbo to recuperate Adam and a few others. And yet it is a
male who is going down and not a female even if Eurydice was already dead when
Orpheus went down to get her. Inanna’s getting saved is another story but she
will be saved by males, and yet when she is brought back she has new power
though she had been condemned to decay on a butcher’s hook down there by
Erishkigal. So there is no surprise then when she gets even with her husband of
a shepherd who did not come to save her. Dumuzi was no Orpheus.
I will insist on only one more
detail that shows an essential dimension that is not stated properly. In the
poems, Inanna marries Dumuzi and they were happy ever after though they did not
get any children and the end became very sour. But Diane Wolkstein in her
commentary of the poems quotes another source, another version of this episode:
It is a passage of another poem known as “Anmerkar and Ensubkesdanna.” When the
newly wed husband lies on Inanna’s bed two lions are stated, one at the back
and one at the head of the bed. They are called the ug-lion and the pirig-lion,
and the two lions are chasing each other. What is strange is that neither Diane
Wolkstein nor Mason Wilkes who quotes the same passage of this poem in a
similar study “There Will Be Neither Fear nor Trembling: A Hermeneutic of
Neo-Sumerian Epic” explain that “ug4” has to do with death and
“pirig” has to do with light. In other words Inanna is a double character she
is both light and death, life and darkness, etc. and yet she becomes ternary in
that scene since she has just been having intercourse with Dumuzi: Inanni is
herself and the two lions. It would be interesting to further examine “ug4”
in the light of “ugu4” that means to give birth, which makes death
and birth the two sides of one coin and that makes Inanna the association of
three dimension in herself, in one. Inanna is not a simple goddess but even in
her marriage and on her wedding bed she is the strange mixture or association
of light-life, darkness-death and still birth somewhere. She is a triple
goddess, the archetype of the triple goddess. The daughter of the moon god and
goddess, the sister of the sun and the conqueror of the underworld. We are so
close to the Greek triple goddess: Hecate goddess of the underworld, Selene
goddess of the moon and Diana or Artemis goddess of life, birth and animals in
the forest.
I must say that the commentaries
are too often trying to reduce everything to pairs and that is wrong. There is a
deep ternary pattern in this goddess and story which makes it one of the
matrices of our triple goddess if not the only or first one, and thus of our
triple god in the Christian tradition. The binary tradition is in the Jewish binary
pattern of God and his spirit roaming over the dark water immensity under the
dark sky immensity before genesis. A very precise study of this mythological
tradition would show how Judaism moved from the basic ternary pattern of all
“pagan” religions and Christianity will reintegrate the ternary pattern but
with the male omnipotent and omniscient god instead of exploded over three male
gods and conflictingly integrated in one female goddess.
Very good introduction anyway to
this field of spiritual thinking.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
BETTY DE SHONG MEADOR – INANNA, LADY OF LARGEST HEART
– 2000
The poems themselves are from a
later period in Sumer
than the tablets that transcribed the myth of Inanna. The three poems studied
here are by a high priestess of Inanna, Enheduanna, historically attested in a
later period. The reading of these poems is voluntarily anachronistic. The
author definitely analyzes the poems but she looks at the female author
speaking of a female goddess in the light of the present time female position
in the present time western society. Many remarks are interesting but it does
not answer the question of what is happening at that time and what these poems
show us concerning the spiritual evolution of Sumerian society.
I have explained in my review of
Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer’s “Inanna” how this goddess is the
nearly final form after the Ice Age of the spiritual dominance of women in
pre-Ice-Age society and how she is pushed aside by the development after the
Ice Age of agriculture and herding (and pastoralism) that gave the preeminence
to men due to a new division of labor these activities implied. I have also
explained how this Inanna is one of the matrices of the triple goddess that
will triumph in Greek mythology and in most European traditions. On the other
hand the binary pattern of the Old Testament is typically Jewish with God and
his spirit roaming over the dark water immensity and under the dark sky
immensity before Genesis.
In the first poem, “Inanna and
Ebih” the author sees Inanna’s refusal of the mountain Ebih and its destruction
by her because this mountain was a garden that was permanently luxurious and in
which humanity could prosper without any effort at all. The author says this is
the refusal of the concept of Garden of Eden, hence the refusal of a god to
which we should obey and under which we should remain in dependence. In the
perspective of the older tablets about Inanna’s myth we have here a goddess
that represents the older spirituality going back to before the Ice Age,
representing the older division of labor based on children rearing that
naturally was women’s task, and Inanna is both a destructive and violent person
with anyone and anything that does not recognize her as the dominant form.
Obviously Enheduanna expresses here in the first two poems her experience of a
world that is moving away from the power of her goddess and obviously the power
of Inanna’s priestess.
The second poem “Lady of Largest
heart” goes further in that direction. The priestess herself is the victim of
Inanna’s violence and destructiveness. It is rather easy to see that what
Enheduanna nostalgically regrets or celebrates is the negation of what is
emerging in human society. The ritual Enheduanna sets in the heart of that poem
is totally misunderstood by the author. It is the description of how the
woman-centered vision of society imposes its female domination in two
ritualistic and symbolical procedures. The first one is to turn a woman into a
man by dressing her like a man, with weapons and other male man-made hence artificial
attributes. That expresses the desire of Inanna to impose the rule of women
including if women have to play men. That’s the pili-pili endowed with the
phallic la-la, the woman made man.
On the other hand she picks a man
who, crime above all crimes, had “spurned her.” It will be clear what she did
in the third poem. Here she only says she broke the man’s mace, the man’s
weapon, the man’s phallic symbol of his power and his gender. What she does not
say is that to “make him join woman” she uses a sacrificial knife used for
castration. In other words the men who speak against her she castrates them and
locks them in the temple as eunuchs and slaves. There is no advocacy for some
kind of bi-gendered hermaphrodite sexuality. There is only the promotion of a
woman who is from the dregs of society, hence rejected by men, into a dominant
figure in society hence commanding all men, and the castration of a man who does not approve of Inanna and the
rule of women in order to make him a slave of these women priestesses.
The third poem then is clear. Men
rebel against this religion and they destitute the priestess Enheduanna and ban
her from society, giving her the sacrificial castrating knife that fits her so
well, the author who is also the banned priestess in the poem says. The author
here kind of pities that ruthless and tyrannical priestess because a man is
kicking her out of her temple dedicated to the castration of dissatisfied men
and the promotion of women from the gutter. The author misses the point that at
this moment the Neolithic society is entering the bronze age. After imposing
onto society a new division of labor because of the shift to agriculture and
herding or pastoralism, the evolution of humanity is making men the dominant
force in society by becoming warriors and she misinterprets what she calls the “four
spiritual paths.” Inanna cannot be a warrior because her only weapon is the
castration knife: her being a warrior then is a metaphor, but with a grain of
salt. She can sure be a priestess but with no power over society. The spirit
has moved to man and Judaism will be an exclusively male religion as for all
temple personnel. She can be a lover provided she no longer is the triple goddess
with her two lions at the back and at the head of the bed, the brute and the
castrator watching over the beauty and the beast, but I feel the beauty is the
poor Dumuzi and the beast is Inanna. And finally to be an androgyne is nothing
but to be nothing and that androgynous approach is a fake defense of the
priestess’s power over society, power that is rejected due to the evolution of
human society into the bronze age.
The author actually sees at the
end of her commentary of the third poem, “The Exaltation of Inanna,” that the
banishment of the priestess is the necessary step to move from a religion
dominated by women to a religion dominated by one male god, and she does speak
of Judaism and is right on this point. But this is not monotheism since the Jewish
god is a unitary double being, god and his spirit, and later the Christian god
will reestablish the ternary pattern but within the unitary vision of a ternary
god, the father, the son and the holy spirit. Her conclusion that modern women
can, or even should, go back to that old Inanna goddess and her religion to
claim their identity as women is vain because it would also mean to go back to
the domination of men by women and the castration of all men who would resist.
This castration has been symbolized, I mean made symbolical, in a ritual
invented probably by the founding fathers of Judaism, Semitic anyway. It is
known as circumcision which has obviously something to do with the ritualistic
castration, of the reluctant men. But it is only symbolical and that did not
prevent men to be the dominant force in Jewish society. It just gave women one
little piece of skin in exchange for their acceptation to be dominated.
The future is never in going back
to what used to be but in examining whet is today. Today women are vastly
working out of their homes. They have careers and they do not want to drop
them. It is on the basis of this professional independence that women have
today the opportunity to impose their equality to society as such and we must
not forget that if it were only a question of biological gender the question
would already be solved since women are more numerous than men but it is also a
question of educational gender and particularly the uneven possibilities of men
and women in the professional fields based on their educational capabilities.
She quotes Paula Gunn Allen and she should know that no Native American woman
asks for going back to when women were “dominant” and when war parties were
organized to capture some women from the next door tribe and that the men who
were made prisoners in the episode were too often sacrificed in long rituals
during which they were supposed to remain alive and conscious as long as
possible and not utter a peep. But Native American women then were, or so can
we imagine, a force that curbed down the worst aspect of this society of
warriors. Inanna on the other hand is first and for all in Enheduanna’s vision
a tyrannical, violent and castrating goddess.
The book would have been
fascinating if it had been set back in its historical period and not dragged
into the post modern western women’s lib movement.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:36 PM