In the version I have Innana (who is described as a more homely and
earthly goddess than the starry Ishtar) descends to the Underworld to
rescue Dumuzi, her husband. But there is a strong suggestion that
Innana intends to take over her sister's kingdom. There are various
mutilated versions in which Dumuzi is in fact rescued by his sister
Geshtinanna and they do a kind of Persephone deal, with each spending
six months in the dark kingdom. But it seems important parts of the
poem are missing.
Well, the best contemporary rendering of this story (to bring it back
vaguely to contemporary poetry) to Alice Notley's Descent of Alette -
best
A
At 4:03 PM -0600 1/8/03, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>Well, Ishtar was Inanna in earlier texts, and in those texts it's
>not entirely clear why she went to the underworld, there is one
>version, which I wish I remembered more clearly at the moment, where
>her descent is required by her sister, and perhaps her dark and
>other half or self, Ereshkigal because Ereshkigal was raped and her
>pleas ignored by the gods in heaven, including Inanna, which is why
>Ereshkigal becomes queen of the underworld while Inanna is queen of
>heaven, and so her descent and her death, for she relinquishes not
>only her autonomy but her immortality and becomes a rotting "corpse
>hung from a stake" for seven days until Ereshkigal whose "pure gaze"
>(along with the gaze of the seven judges) causes her death has pity
>on her, after Inanna's messenger cries out for _her_ to Father Enlil
>who pleas with the underworld on her behalf. What Inanna wears are
>seven divine decrees, her crown of the plain, a rod of lapis lazuli,
>stones of lapis lazuli around her neck, sparkling stones at her
>breast, a gold ring, a breastplate, and all of "the garments of the
>ladyship of her body" (S.N. Kramer, Sumerian Mythology, New York,
>1961) are lastly removed. There are different versions of what
>happens to Tammuz, in Gilgamesh she abandons him "like a bird with a
>broken wing," in some versions he was thought to remain in the
>underworld, hence the ritual of crying for Tammuz, and in this
>descent of Inanna at which I'm looking, he's not mentioned at all,
>and the descent of Inanna seems much more like the story of
>Gilgamesh, the double self, the descent into death and the
>underworld in some restorative address of the death that has been
>visited on the other self.
--
Alison Croggon
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
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