Who is Inanna?

"I am the great one ... life of the people!"

Inanna

"Female deities were worshipped and adored all through Sumerian history ... but the goddess who outweighed, overshadowed, and outlasted them all was a deity known to the Sumerians by the name of Inanna, 'Queen of Heaven', and to the Semites who lived in Sumer by the name of Ishtar. Inanna played a greater role in myth, epic, and hymn than any other deity, male or female."

Samuel Noah Kramer, from The Poetry of Sumer

Imagine that Inanna is here now. She regally sits on her lion throne. Her eyes are enhanced with kohl. Her gown is red, wraps over one shoulder and falls to her sandaled feet in layered flounces. Her tiara is gold and shaped like a crescent moon. Inanna's hair is midnight black, loose and curly with tiny gold vulvas affixed. The beads at her neck are lapis lazuli and carnelian. They are her love charms. She is beautiful, young, vigorous, lovable, confident, wise, seductive, protective and compassionate. She runs across the sky or floats about the celestial dome in her boat of heaven; she ties her sandals and sprints over the land. Inanna goes from heaven to visit the underworld and returns. She is rain and storms; when she roars, mountains tremble. Inanna is everywhere! She purrs and men and gods cool their anger. With a goddess-glance, ardor is stirred. She loves her people: the destitute woman at the city walls selling her body for bread is as loved as the shepherd king. For millennia, no god could say her nay! Every new moon we met at her festival and shouted: All hail holy maid Inanna!

The goddess senses our presence after all the long dusty years of silence and waiting. She turns toward us and smiles in welcome. She knows us. She holds her spiral scepter and rises to greet us. She feels our curiosity and awe; our delight in being near her; our desire to know her again.

Inanna speaks, pacing like a lioness about to escape her captivity:

"Who am I?

"Who am I?

"Who am I?

"I AM INANNA, LIFE OF THE PEOPLE!

"I am Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth and almost everything! I am life and renewal. I am love and fertility. I own the powers of culture and civilization. I gave you the art of being women!

"You do not remember me ... I see it in your eyes. But, you do know me. Did you ever gaze into the evening sky searching for the first star? You squeezed your eyes shut and sent a wish into the purpling sky. Do you remember doing that? You whispered: Starlight, Starbright ...; you sent your wishes to me. I am that evening star.

"My story is long and deep. This modern day scribe will tell it to you. I will sit here on my throne while my story is told. My story is also your story; we will remember who we are. Thank you for hailing me again, and I say: All hail the women! Together we will remember. Together we are strong!" (Excerpted from "The Inanna Monolog" by the author.)

THE STORY BEFORE THE STORY

In those days, in those far off days ...

When stars were many and people few, a first great and forever story was birthed. We are human, not because we use tools but because we tell stories. Wherever people live, stories come into being. Storytellers weave location, observation, people, nature, and celestial bodies together. Stories satisfy; they explain mysteries, guide behavior, remember events, and entertain. A story needs two kinds of people: tellers and listeners. The tellers spin and weave a tale into the fabric of knowing that resonates wildly and widely; those who have ears hear; the story is told and retold. It is the same first story, the original root of all myth; it is known everywhere. Its content is universal, strong and reasonable. It is so understandable and practical that it became the warp storytellers would use to bridge the misty distant past, travel through our present and beyond.

People are of two types. First are the ones who consider the land they move over, the thirst-quenching water, the ever-changing sky above; who feel living energy in their offspring, themselves, and in all life around them. The second sort of people are those who need guidance to awaken into that awareness.

The people who find life and living beautiful, nurturing, cyclic, plentiful, surprising, and occasionally unpredictable asked: who? and what? and why? and when? and where? — they are the warp for the great story of life, they are women whose bodies produce and sustain life. They are women whose minds spiral out and grasp big knowing. They are women who include and care for others. They are women who do not kill their or other people's children.

In the beginning of every story is the before. The before of Inanna's story is Life. In the beginning womankind felt life quicken within and noticed all life was thrumming with something mysterious. That numinous mystery was explained by her own body and phases of life. Numinous is equated with brightness, purity (natural or sacred) and also with happiness, wellbeing, and divine favor.

In the beginning, woman called life-energy mother, a Great Mother who brought life into being, collected life when it finished, and birthed it back in renewing cycles of return. Life looks like a woman. She has the humane qualities of the feminine and is big, very big. The same idea arose wherever there were women; the same universal understanding and expanded consciousness, the same story.

Inanna's story is woman's story. Woman's synchronized and baby-building blood-power created culture and a new human consciousness. Woman everywhere recognized life energy — that numinous quality that animates and cycles and blooms and breathes. Women maternally revere life. Long ago women expressed what they knew. A Great Mother birthed everything — Great Mother — monotheaistic and global.

Writing began in Sumer in the 4 millennium B.C.E. (before the common era). Thousands of tablets are now translated. The earliest written record of the divine feminine is Sumerian. Art about the goddess mother has existed since the upper Paleolithic. A Great Mother image is present in art at least since the...