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 human "creative explosion" 30,000 years ago (Pfeiffer 1982). Cave wall paintings and carved figures expressed Great Mother long before writing was invented. We do not know her early names and epithets; we do not know how her people celebrated her, we only know they did. Her images survive. Inanna is the earliest written story of the sacred feminine but seals and figurines already knew her form.

Women are intimately enmeshed in life. They gather, work, and birth together. Women gather into multi-tasking cooperative groups of mothers. They are responsible for life. Woman is the obvious answer to who, what, why, when and where. Before and beyond human woman there must be a big mother, a Great Mother. And so it was that women everywhere created sacred consciousness, awareness, image, and story about a Great Mother.

From our bodies, out of our dark wombs, in a flood of seawater through our vaginal mouths, come tiny squalling helpless new people tethered to a vaginal snake (umbilical cord). Women's bodies labor and push like earthquakes. Muscles tighten and loosen over and over beyond our control until our babe is pushed out and into the world. Our laboring sounds are strong and noisy; our afterbirth blood is copious. Not all babes and mothers survive the ordeal; though fraught with danger, women continue to create and arduously support new life.

Women in solidarity share the work of gathering, storing, preparing, and processing well over half of their clan's food while child-rearing and tending. They talk together and name life around them. They explain first story from their own experience and observations. Together they say "NO!" to male opportunistic sexual and "self-feed" behavior. Saying "NO!" together directs men into hunting parties to participate in cooperative partnership for supporting the young. They also say "YES!" since sex can be pleasurable — and sex helps Great Mother with earth's fertility.

Surviving pregnancy and delivery is only the first paragraph of the story. What follows is less dramatic but wholly necessary. The helpless new people require nourishment so woman's breasts drip generously when baby cries. Mother's milk is watery and resembles rain. Round, milk-filled breasts are like rain-filled clouds. Woman's breasts become the cloud breasts of a great sky mother letting down rain. New life needs years of tending, cleaning, protecting, nourishing, nurturing, and patient teaching to grow from helpless dependent to independent youth.

Trees and lions and clams go about the business of being alive; as far as we know, not one of them considers the why and how of it. Our new species on two legs, after three million years of slow evolution, perceived a numinous life force; the unseeable energy that causes things to come into existence, to sprout, birth, hatch, and grow. The women-people's body bled with dark moon phase. Moon and women's blood took human thinking into the heavens, into metaphor, into big story. Undulating land, mountains, waterways, sheltering caves, rain, storms, phasing moon, and stars must all be a woman, a first prime creatress, a Great Mother who is everywhere.

When girls grow tall and round, blood appears at their vaginal mouth. Their first menses is celebrated, it is powerful. They are girl-women entering into the role of creating life. When women of childbearing age are in close proximity, their blood comes at the same time. Women are moon people. Their bleeding comes together and in harmony with moon; like river and sea tides, women dance with moon. Moon must be a woman. When she is dark and hidden, she secludes with them during their menses. Women first secluded so the scent of their blood would not draw predators to their camps. They said NO! to sex. When moon re-appears, their menses ends; they bathe and emerge from seclusion at the appearance of moon's slender waxing crescent (Knight and Grahn). Inanna is the young aspect of great mother, the potential fertility, the beautiful girl-woman emerging with the new moon. For thousands of years, every new moon was Inanna's festival day.

Women lock-step with moon. They bleed naturally. They survive their bleeding. When blood stops flowing and bellies bulge, a baby is made. The people believed the retained blood built the baby. Only women can produce life. Their blood is powerful. When older women stop bleeding, they hold their blood and create wisdom. Women are powerful. Women are wise people.

What makes each gender who they are is now understood to be directed by chromosomes. The X chromosome is female and holds long-evolved maternal tendencies. Y is the male counterpart and primarily contains the secondary sex characteristics. We now know that in the beginning all baby brains are the same, female. Eight weeks after conception baby boy's Y-ness, testosterone, kicks in. (Brizendine 2006: 14:)

A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone surge doesn't happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl's brain cells sprout more connections to the communication centers and areas that process emotion ... it (hormonal effect) defines our innate biological destiny, coloring the lens through which each of us views and engages the world.

For about two years after birth, a girl child has an increase in estrogen surges. This is to prepare her body and brain for reproduction and "this high quantity of estrogen also stimulates the brain circuits that are rapidly being built. It spurs the growth and development of neurons, further enhancing the female brain circuits and centers for observation, communication, gut feelings, even tending and caring" (ibid.: 19). The girl child is more adept at reading emotions, feeling empathy, and in relating from infancy onward.

Men have one X chromosome, women have two. "Testosterone suppresses maternal behavior" (ibid.: 104). It also reduces: communication skills, desire for emotional connections and relationship, cooperation in egalitarian groups, and the ability to hear — to listen to others. Testosterone-fueled men seek sexual opportunity, not relationship; they use self-opportunity and easily become aggressive. Men are of two kinds: the ones embracing their own humane-ity in their X-ness as a modifier of Y-ness; they are wise. Men embracing only their Y-ness are unwise and unkind. They are the other type of men. They are dangerous to life.

Women have enormous responsibility supporting the helpless babes of our species. Every one of us is here today because of an unbroken web of mothers. If women did not have their XX behaviors and brain, if they had not taken that strenuous job seriously, our species would be extinct in the Long Ago. Our large brain is helpful, clever, and rich with potential. That potential is of two kinds: beneficial and creative or destructive and devolved. Our big brain places a great weight on the shoulders of the women people. Babes are born immature so as to have a good chance of making their way through the birth canal. Women give our species a chance to survive. Women also have the unenviable task of taming the men-people into participation and cooperation (see Chris Knight, Blood Relations).

Woman, moon, emerging light, bodies of water, dripping breasts, rain, dark womb, umbilical cord, new life, powerful moon blood, and creativity are the symbols of first story everywhere. Aspects of woman in all her life phases answer all the questions our clever minds ask. Everywhere, Great Mother cultures grew out of women's blood and her tending, mending, befriending, defending wisdom. Mother goddess-based cultures became egalitarian societies. A monotheaistic story wove itself on the warp of womanhood. As long as there are women, the warp holds. As long as the warp holds, the flawed miss-weavings of the unwise people will cease and the pushed aside woman-known patterns will re-establish our potential and survival.

The woman-based cultures originated in the Paleolithic. We know they have been around at least thirty thousand years, but more likely they are rooted as far back as the emergence of modern humans (estimated between seventy to two hundred thousand years ago). Our cellular memory and our universal unconscious hold the template for a biophilic (life honoring) partnership culture. Excavations of ancient goddess worship sites in the Ancient Near East, Old Europe, Anatolia, Malta, and Crete reveal millennia of peace. Many art forms of Great Mother are discovered at these widely spaced sites, but few male figurines are recovered. Marija Gimbutas reports the same findings in Old Europe. This means that men, both human and godly, were not superior; instead, an honoring bias toward women and sacred woman is observed. War did not exist. Burials and homes indicate social near equality. Long ago women were important and involved. The early societies were "partnership cultures." Women guided the cultures toward sustaining life with inclusion and group consciousness.

Women once created patterns of cooperation and participation; we acknowledged the revolving cycle of birth, death, and renewal. Our story is well woven. When woman is dishonored and ignored, earth wantonly destroyed and life devalued, the continuation of our species is in jeopardy. The usurpation continues into the present, yet in parts of the world the reweaving has begun. The first weavers again take up whorls and spindles and return to work on the warp and woof; women re-member and continue our story. The creatresses of culture can weave our world into wellness. We women need our story and the sacred feminine returned. Women and goddess love life. Women are biophilic, they honor life. They were the first storytellers until they were silenced. Women are telling the stories again, and Inanna's story returns.

Inanna, goddess of the Ancient Near East, once queen of the land between the two old rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, was the sacred divine woman described in first writing that developed in Sumer in the fourth millennium B.C.E.. Writing grew out of temple storehouse accounting symbols and pictographs in urban centers requiring large food storage's contents, inventory and distribution. The storehouse was supervised by women in all cultures. Women were the accountants in urban storehouses. Women likely developed first writing.

Inanna's story, hymns, rites, power, praise, and adoration were in existence before writing. The old stories and songs were recorded onto hand-held clay tablets. More is known about the culture and people of the three and a half millennia preceding our era, than can be known about the papyrus and parchment writing people from last centuries B.C.E. and early C.E. (Common Era). Papyrus and parchment disintegrate. Tens of thousands of clay tablets survive scattered about in museums and collections; many are not yet translated; more still lie waiting under the war torn land of Iraq and Iran.