The Biography of Goddess Inanna; Indomitable Queen of Heaven, Earth and Almost Everything by Sandra Bart Heimann

Author:Sandra Bart Heimann [Heimann, Sandra Bart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504358231
Publisher: Balboa Press
Published: 2016-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

Ishtar, Harasser Of Men

Inanna/Ishtar is goddess of love, pleasure, and love’s cold shoulder. Foster describes the following text as a theatrical entertainment. It is enacted near a reed hut that Foster tells us is for “marital consummation.” I suggest that there is more evidence that the hut is for seclusion during menses. These separate places are prevalent in all early cultures and taboo, sacred — man-stay-away. The seclusion place grew into the women’s quarters and, eventually, men made it their harem.

In the text, goddess beckons the “inexpert man (Foster 2005: 282).” Priestesses initiate young men into the art of mutual pleasurable copulation with a woman, thereby making him fully a man. The audience also enjoys the display of Inanna/Ishtar’s power to change men to women and women to men. In this text, women carry weapons and aggressively sexually harass the men who carry household items and wear women’s clothes; the men burlesque menstruation; they accept women’s verbal and physical abuse. This is a late text burlesquing as a classical composition.

The composition is called both “My Lady Let Me Tell of Your Divine Valor” and “Ishtar, Harasser of Men.” (ibid.: 282-285:)

The poem begins praising Ishtar for her wisdom and invites everyone to come hear of her valor. We imagine a temple singer exclaiming to the crowd gathered. The people will hear of her greatness and strength and the singer especially invites the one who does not yet know her. The singer brings forth the song with great joy! Once a man knows Ishtar, he will follow her forever. The “inexpert” man will come to her door, her temple, for sex. We hear: “Your doings are strange, your ways unfathomable, so many are your deeds, what god would not be like you?”

The singer lists the goddess’s opposing attributes: disturbing emotions and contentment; fickleness, uncertainty, and trust; cooling hot anger, bringing and putting out conflict; cursing and not cursing; truth and lies; dignity, wealth and a bed on the ground are her’s to give. The goddess makes friends of strangers or enemies of friends, a successful home for a wife or causes marital conflict. She is wisdom, misogyny, and the temple harlot. Ishtar owns bondage, “dominance, fear, secrecy, wakefulness, and terror;” she is also responsive and wise. Ishtar owns making the marital bed, great war cries, and the coiffing of hair. She gives gifts, opens a lover’s legs for sex, promotes families to grow; she makes twins, linen, and moths. Ishtar gathers circles of women, gives thick beautiful hair, intimidates, and makes some weak and others strong; she brings good sex, sleep, dreams, child birth, and the infant. The goddess also turns woman to man and man to woman.

The actors are cross-dressed. This also occurs in the description of the new moon monthly parade for Inanna. Speculations are put forward as to the meaning of this gender reversal. In this poem, it is entertaining to see men on the receiving end of their bad behavior; it also describes the contradictory nature of her goddess attributes.

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