Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary by Marina Warner

Author:Marina Warner [Warner, Marina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Mater Dolorosa

Holy Mary, pierce me through

In my heart each wound renew

Of my saviour crucified.1

—POPULAR PRAYER

Five thousand years ago, in the dust-blown plain of Sumer or southern Mesopotamia, during the month of August, when nature’s anger was most pitiless and the scorched earth and relentless drought held the farmer captive, a chant went up as the priests invoked the life-giving powers of the new season and recited the annual liturgies of Dumuzi, the shepherd, and Inanna, the queen of heaven, his mother and his bride. Dumuzi had been sacrificed to the underworld, tortured and afflicted by demons, just as Christ suffered the tortures of his passion and then descended into hell. Inanna the goddess weeps for him:

Into his face she stares, seeing

what she has lost—his mother

who has lost him to death’s kingdom.

O the agony she bears,

shuddering in the wilderness,

she is the mother suffering so much.2

It could be a poem on a Christian icon of the Pietà: the dead Christ laid out on his grieving mother’s knees (plate 34).

In the religion of Sumer, Inanna was the “Lady of Heaven,” the presiding genius of the earth, and Dumuzi the guardian of flocks, the god of the sap and waters of spring, a shepherd “in love with the song of flutes.” His name means “true son,” and in some Sumerian laments he is called Damu, the child.3 In the liturgical poem Inanna’s Journey the goddess yields him up to the powers of the underworld as her surrogate:

And the seven devils gripped his thighs

like mortal sickness.

The flute-song of the shepherd

is broken, the pipes are shattered

in front of him,

for on him Inanna has fastened

the eyes of death . . .4

Dumuzi, pursued by monsters of drought and death and sterility, is abandoned to the merciless desert sun in the burning wasteland that is the Sumerian hell. He escapes, but they come at him again:

They flew at his face with hooks and bits

and bodkins, they slashed his body with a heavy-axe . . .

He escapes them again, but the devils seek him out, and after this, the Sumerian Way of the Cross, Dumuzi is taken down into death.5

Inanna, his spouse, then weeps for him, and his mother and sister Geshtinanna keen with her. His sister’s name means “Lady of Desolation,” and in the songs the singers are not distinguished, but a triad symbolizing woman in her relation to man under the one aspect of Lady of Sorrows. For Inanna is his wife, but he is also her “Child.” Inanna’s ritual grief is described:

My heart is piping in the wilderness

where the young man once went free.

He is a prisoner now in death’s kingdom,

lies bound where once he lived . . .

My heart is piping in the wilderness

an instrument of grief . . .

she is the mother desolate

in a desolate place; where once

he was alive, now he lies

like a young bull felled to the ground.6

Inanna weeps, though she herself delivered Dumuzi to his fate; in Christian belief the Virgin Mary mourns, though she consented to the Incarnation and the Atonement, and knows that Christ will rise again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.