Inanna is the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Goddess of Love. She is also Goddess of Grain, War, Fertility, Sexual Love, and perhaps best of all, Lady of Myriad Offices. As noted in Archetypes, Inanna was known in Mythology as healer, lifegiver, and composer of songs; the keeper of emotions -- ranging from loving, jealous, grieving, joyful, timid, and exhibitionistic, to thieving, passionate, ambitious, and generous. Inanna was eternally youthful, dynamic, fierce, sensuous, the harlot-virgin, never settled nor domesticated, magnetic, yet independent. She was into fertility, order, war, love, heavens, healing, emotions, and song; always wandering, searching for her home, her power. Ultimately, she was the embodied, playful, passionately erotic, feminine; the powerful, independent, self-willed, feminine; the ambitious, regal, many-sided feminine.
If there is to be a Return of the Goddess, it will likely be Inanna -- accompanied and announced by Lilith. The rest of theAnunnaki troop will likely simply step aside. (Albeit, Ningishzidda might be in an honored place in the retinue.) And with any luck, the Sacred Orgasm will find itself in the midst of many more lovers.
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The so-called myths of Inanna were created sometime between 1900 BC and 3500 BC, although they may have been created even earlier. In their original inception they were pre-patriarchal myths. At the same time, Inanna’s myths also show the incursions of the patriarchy, her gradual dispossession and loss of status. In spite of her power as goddess of most everything, Inanna becomes a wanderer; she takes a powder. Most of the powers once held by her were being slowly eroded. The fact she was pictured as a beautiful woman (i.e. attractive to males, as opposed to the earth fertility goddesses of pre-history), suggests that she was under attack early on.
Inanna, nevertheless, provides a many-faceted symbolic image, a wholeness pattern, of the feminine beyond the merely maternal. She combined earth and sky, matter and spirit, vessel and light, earthly bounty and heavenly guidance. She was Queen of Heaven, goddess of gentle rains and terrible floods, goddess of the morning and evening star, queen of the land and its fertility, bestowing kingship on chosen mortals. She was the goddess of war (more powerful than Athena and Artemis combined), and equally passionately, the goddess of sexual love. More extroverted than Aphrodite, Her receptivity was active. Eventually, she was known by many names (Ishtar, Isis, Neith, Metis, Astarte, Cybele, Brigit, etc.), although those in later times were often described as having much less power or less all-encompassing.
Of the many stories and hymns about Inanna, four are particularly noteworthy. Three of these describe her basic “coming of age”. The first deals with her acquiring her throne and bed, her queenship and womanhood, her sovereignty and sexuality. In the process she lets go of the primitive, grasping, human aspects; her unacknowledged, unexpressed fears and desires; in order to be deserving of the gifts of throne and bed. In the second myth, Inanna acquires from the god, Enki, The Mewhich she in turn gives to her city of Uruk and ultimately to all humankind. The Me are the attributes of civilization, a set of universal and immutable rules and limits which had to be observed by man and god alike. The Me included kingship, priesthood, truth, garments, weapons, art of love making, speech, music and song, power and treachery, deceit, travel, kindness, writing, attention, fear, dismay, judgment, decision-making, allure, and the art of women. In effect Inanna truly earned her queenship and protectorship of her city. In the third myth, Inanna takes a consort and makes him king. She also becomes a mother.
In the fourth myth, the Descent into the Underworld, the Goddess goes far beyond the mundane. In all respects she undergoes the ultimate spiritual initiation, a Descent into Hades. In the process, she lets go of all those possessions and characteristics which feed the ego, and ends up hanging on a nail as a rotting corpse in the bowels of the underworld. But then, after acknowledging her shadow side, she ascends back to Earth and thereafter acts as the complete, fully-formed goddess that was always her. Much of the symbolism of her trip From the Great Above to the Great Below continues to this day in various initiatory rites of societies and organizations dedicated to the mysteries of the beyond.
Inanna was also the favorite of Anu, the Number One Anunnaki, and thus with the approaching end of the Age of Pisces(scheduled for 2012 A.D.), she may making the ultimate comeback, the Return of the Goddess, wherein she will wreck havoc with the patriarchy -- very likely in a manner that can not be imagined. The Great Goddess can be expected to take names and kick... whatever needs to be kicked! But in a very nice way.
