Inanna and Dumuzi: The eros of the cosmos (part 2 of 4)

“The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.”

― Eduardo Galeano, from Walking Words 

In this episode I tell the second part of Inanna’s story, the courtship and marriage between Inanna and her honey man, the shepherd Dumuzi.

Ripe in every sense, Inanna engages in a passionate and symbolic union that celebrates physical desire, renews the life cycles of nature, and expresses the creativity  and eros of the cosmos.

Her myth illuminates the sacredness of embodied experience and the transformative power of creative union, and challenges traditional dichotomies between spirit and matter.

Inanna invites us to reconsider the sacred through the lens of wholeness, integration, and reverence for life in all its forms.

Transcript of Inanna and Dumuzi: The eros of the cosmos (part 2 of 4)

Hello and welcome to Myth Matters an exploration at the intersection of mythology, creativity and consciousness. I’m your host and personal mythologist, Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful crazy world of ours, I’m glad that you decided to join me here today.

“The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.”

― Eduardo Galeano, from Walking Words 

This feels like a fitting opening to today’s episode. This is the 2nd in a 4-part series on the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna and today I’m going to tell you the part of her myth cycle that involves her courtship and marriage to Dumuzi. 

In episode 1, “The first days,” I shared the opening stories of how Inanna acquired her throne and her bed, two symbols of her spheres of influence, and how she went on to collect a wide range of powers necessary to her role as the Queen of Heaven and Earth from Enki, the god of wisdom and sweet waters. Enki the god of wisdom sat down to drink beer with Inanna and she held her liquor better than he did.

The groundwork has been laid for Inanna to play her role as the divine queen of heaven and earth, the sacred spark in all things. Now what? The goddess meets and marries her love, her honey man, the shepherd Dumuzi. She’s gathered her powers and she has matured. Inanna is ripe in every sense and she is ready. This is the part of her myth that I’ll share with you today.

As I mentioned in the last episode, I’ve stepped into Inanna’s myth a number of times over the years and brought different questions to it. There’s always been a new perspective or insight. This time, in this time, I’m wondering what the myth of Inanna can offer us as we go through the initiation that is currently underway. This is a time of transformation on a major scale. Collective initiation is the lens that I’m using to understand it. We are not all at the same stage of the process or in the same space or place or playing the same role or and yet, we’re going through this transformative time together. 

What is in play and what is being asked of us? What is our responsibility and what are the opportunities? You may bring other questions to the story. That’s fine. This myth can hold them.

Now, let’s turn to the story. I constructed my version of this myth from the English translation Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, by the storyteller Diane Wolkstein and the Sumerian scholar Samuel Noah Kramer. I recommend it if you want to read the myth in English. It’s a wonderful source. And if you’re enjoying these stories, then I think you’d really like to read the myth in its entirety and not settle for my abbreviated version of it.

I invite you to relax, listen, and enter the space the story. Let the words take you where you need to go right now. Note the moments or the details that catch your attention. The old myths and stories are mirrors. Even the themes or the figures that repel you or puzzle you can illuminate your present moment. 

The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi

The Sun god Utu went to his younger sister Inanna. The brother spoke to his younger sister. “Young lady, the flax in its fullness is lovely and the grain is glistening in the furrow. I will hoe it for you. I will bring it to you. A piece of linen, big or small, is always needed. Inanna, I will bring it to you.”

“Brother” Inanna said, “after you’ve brought me the flax, who will comb it for me?” “Sister” said Utu, “I will bring it combed.” “And Utu, after you’ve brought it to me combed, who will spin it for me?” “Inanna, I will bring it to you spun.” “Then who’s going to braid it?”  she asked. Utu said he’ll take care of that too. 

“But then who’s going to warp it?” “I’ll take care of that for you, Inanna.” “Who’s going to weave it for me?” “Sister, I will bring it to you woven.” “Who will bleach it for me?” “Inanna, I will bring it to you bleached.” 

“Brother” Inanna says, “after you’ve brought the bridal sheet to me, — (this is what they were actually discussing all along)– who will go to bed with me?” 

“Sister, your bridegroom will go to bed with you. He was born from a fertile womb and conceived on a sacred marriage throne. Dumuzi the shepherd, he will go to bed with you.” “O no my brother,” Inanna said, “the man of my heart works the hoe. The man of my heart is the farmer. He is the one who grows the grain and brings it regularly to my store houses.”

“Sister,” Utu counseled, “marry the shepherd. Why are you unwilling? His cream is good, his milk is good. Everything that he touches shines brightly. Inanna, marry Dumuzi. You are meant to be the king’s protector. Why are you unwilling?” Inanna was not convinced. “No brother, I won’t marry the shepherd. His clothes are coarse and his wool is rough. I will marry the farmer, because the farmer grows the flax for my clothes and he grows the barley for my table.” 

Now Dumuzi appeared. He spoke to Inanna, “Why do you speak about the farmer? Whatever he can give you, I can give you something equally good. If he gives you white flour, I will give you white wool. If he gives you beer, I will give you cream. If he gives you bread, I will give you honey cheese. I have so much that whatever you don’t want, whatever is left over, I can give to the farmer. Inanna, what does he have more than I do?”

“Shepherd,” said Inanna, “you are only around and doing well because of my mother Ningal and my grandmother Ninikuga, and my father Nanna and my brother Utu. Without them…”  Dumuzi interrupted. “Inanna, do not start a quarrel. My family is as good as your family. My father Enki is as good as your father. My mother Sirtur and my sister Geshtinanna are as good as your mother and brother. This isn’t about family. Queen of the palace, let’s sit together and talk it over.” 

The word they had spoken was a word of desire. From the starting of a quarrel came the lovers’ desire. 

Dumuzi the shepherd brought gifts of cream and milk to the royal house. He knocked on the door and called for Inanna to come and let him in. Inanna ran to her mother Ningal and asked “What shall I do?” “My child” said her mother, “this man will be your husband. He will treat you like a father and care for you like a mother. Get dressed to receive him and open the door.” Inanna listened to her mother. She bathed and anointed herself with scented oil. She put on her fine white robes and arranged her precious lapis bead necklace around her neck. She took her seal in her hand.

Dumuzi waited expectantly. At last Inanna opened the door for him. She shone as bright as the moon. Her light filled the house. Dumuzi looked at her joyously. He pulled her close and kissed her. 

Inanna said “What I tell you Dumuzi, let it be woven into song. Let it pass from old to young and be remembered. My vulva, the Boat of Heaven, is eager as the new moon. My untilled land lies fallow. Who will plow my vulva? Who will plow my high field? Who will plow my wet ground?” 

“Great lady” Dumuzi replied, “I will plow your vulva. I, Dumuzi the king.” “Then do it man of heart,” she replied. At the king’s lap stood the rising cedar. Plants grew high by their side. When this happened, grains grew high by their side. Gardens flourished luxuriantly. 

Inanna sang “He has sprouted, he has burgeoned; He is lettuce planted by the water. He is the one my womb loves best.” Inanna called Dumuzi her honey man, her apple tree, her impetuous caresser of the navel and the soft, soft thighs. “He sweetens me always, ” she sang. “Dumuzi is my honey man for this honey moon.”  And Dumuzi sang too. “Oh Lady, your breast is your field, pouring out plants, grains, water, and bread. Pour it out for me Inanna” he said, “pour out your abundance and I will drink all that you offer.” 

“Make your milk sweet and thick, my bridegroom, “Inanna sang. “My shepherd, I will drink your fresh milk. Fill my holy churn with honey cheese. My husband, I will guard my sheepfold for you. I will watch over your house of life, the storehouse, the shining, quivering place which delights Sumer. The house which decides the fate of the land, the house which gives the breath of life to the people. I the queen of the palace, will watch over your house.”

Dumuzi said, “My sister, Inanna, I would go with you to my garden, to my orchard, to my apple tree. There I would plant the sweet honey-covered seed.” They went to the garden. They made their final pledge and they made love. 

“He brought me into his garden” Inanna said, “I strolled with him among the trees and knelt by the apple tree as is proper. Before my lord Dumuzi I poured out plants from my womb; I poured out grain before him. Last night, as I the Queen of Heaven was shining bright, as I was dancing and singing, he met me. My lord Dumuzi met me. He put his hand into my hand and he pressed his neck close against mine. Oh, the plants and the herbs in his field are ripe. Oh Dumuzi, your fullness is my delight.”

Inanna called for the bed, the bed that rejoices the heart and sweetens the loins.  She called for the bed of kingship and of queenship. “Let the royal bed be prepared,” she said.  Inanna spread the bridal sheet and called the king. “The bed is ready. The bed is waiting.” Dumuzi put his hand in her hand. He put his hand to her heart. Sweet is the sleep of hand-to-hand and sweeter still the sleep of heart-to-heart.

Now the goddess Inanna made Dumuzi the shepherd, the king of Sumer. “I bathed for the wild bull, the shepherd Dumuzi,” she said, “and he shaped my loins with his fair hands and watered my womb. Now I will decree a sweet fate for him.” Inanna the Queen of Heaven gave Dumuzi a crown, throne, and scepter. “I will lead you in battle and protect you” she told him. “On the campaign, I am your inspiration. When you sit on the lapis lazuli throne and cover your head with the holy crown, I will be by your side and I will bind you myself with the garments of kingship. You are the chosen one shepherd, and in all ways you are fit. May your heart enjoy long days because I, Inanna, hold you dear. I will inspire and provide for you as wife and as Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth.” 

Ninshubur, Inanna’s faithful servant and friend, came to the couple and seconded everything that Inanna had pledged. “Here is the choice of your heart, the shepherd, the king,” she said. “Under Dumuzi’s reign” she said, “let there be vegetation, and under his reign let there be rich grain. In the marsh field, may the fish and birds chatter. In the forests, may the deer and wild goats multiply. In the orchard, may there be honey and wine.” Ninshubur blessed the union of Inanna and Dumuzi. 

As King and Queen, Inanna and Dumuzi made love again and again. “He took his pleasure of me, my sweet love, fifty times and now my sweet love is sated,” Inanna said. “Now he says: ‘Set me free sister, set me free. I would go to the palace.”

Inanna spoke, “Oh, my blossom-bearer, your allure was sweet. My bearer of fruit in the apple orchard, your allure was sweet.” Dumuzi left to take his place on the royal throne of Sumer. So ends this portion of Inanna’s story.

The goddess has met and married her honey man, a marriage fueled by attraction, mutual desire, sweetness, and love as well as practical concerns, the obligations of being the goddess Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, protectress of her people. 

As we discovered in the last episode, Inanna contains a very broad range of powers. She encompasses experiences and realities that we commonly hold as contradictory: nature and civilization, life and death, mother and warrior. In this part of her story, the emphasis is on the goddess as abundance. Abundance is her nature. Abundance is what she provides. Abundance is something that she revels in. Overflowing grain, honey, and milk. 

This is the period in which people developed agriculture, irrigation, and domesticated animals. Humans begin to exercise a new control over nature, one that offers the possibility of a surplus of food stored against future scarcity.  This is a huge turn in human history, one that leads to the rise of cities and hierarchal civilization. Inanna is all of it: the earth and the intelligence, the cycles and the new methods, and the outcomes. Through her all of these things are possible.

The goddess Inanna is the central life principle and yet her truth and potential can’t be fulfilled without a dynamic partnership. Inanna and Dumuzi, male and female, model literal physical reproduction. She is the soil and he is the seed. She is the enduring and everlasting earth and he is the transitory manifestation of life forms. Inanna is the storehouse and Dumuzi is the grain stored there. 

Their coupling is also a metaphor for the union of opposites and the creativity inherent in that relationship and interplay, for the fertility that is the creative potential in the world. The sacredness then, of their erotic pleasure is also the sacred dimension of the force of attraction and the expression of creative potential. The alchemy of sensual experience and joy. The mystery of what C.G. Jung named “the transcendental function,” that is, the emergence of new forms and meanings. The eros of the cosmos and the dance between formed and the unformed, manifest and potential.

The language of the myth is the language of the earth. The miraculous resides in the processes and cycles of the material world. Divine and human actors enact the earth drama of life and renew the cycle. The notion of the goddess and her consort as an image of nature’s life cycle- seeding, gestating, sprouting, flowering, fruiting, ripening, and decaying back into the soil, into its ground– could perspective on the myth be reductive but only if we preface this with the word “just.” “Just a nature myth.” 

 Our ability to explain the biology has lessened our respect in this time but this need not be so. Freed from the schooling we receive about the assumed primacy of human inventions, this perspective offers rich possibilities for a more developed and honest humanity. One that embraces our interdependence. One that opens us to wonder and more joy. As a species, we have learned and investigated many things, and we have made many things, but the Earth is still vast and mysterious, and we still emerge from her.

Perhaps you, like me, are intrigued by Inanna’s status as the Queen of both Heaven and Earth. I’ve spoken to the earth dimension a little bit. Where is the heavenly? The dominant religious paradigms insist on the absolute separation of heaven and earth. One is the realm of spirit, goodness, divine perfection, the eternal home of a sexless father god. The other is fallen and female, sinful, degraded because it is animal, instinctual.  Illusory, maya. A trap. A way station on our journey to our real home out there, up there, beyond this earthly vale of tears. 

This division between heaven and earth, spirit and matter, has been impossible for me to reconcile in my quest for a lived spiritual understanding.  I see these concepts unified in the figure of Inanna, an immanent divinity that doesn’t negate the existence of the transcendental. Inanna and Dumuzi are metaphors for a natural process, and you see, because the Goddess is the personification of that process, all of it is divine. This is what I mean by an “immanent” divinity. 

In Inanna, I see a place for the body and bodily experience as a portal to the sacred. A mystery that doesn’t require the devaluing of sensory experience, sexuality, eroticism. I hear a love of the mortal, a love that is a precious tether to the day to day and a path to knowledge of the eternal here on earth.

In her poem “I Talk to My Body,” Anna Swir writes, “Well trained, you may become for me a gate through which I will leave myself and a gate through which I will enter myself.” Transcendental. Immanent. In a recent email newsletter Rob Brezny asks, What if consciousness and flesh are so thoroughly married, so completely interpenetrated, that trying to separate them is like trying to separate wetness from water, or warmth from fire?” 

What if? What if? What if the notion that the divine must be located only here or there, in nature or in the heavens, is false? What if we find our way to the universal presence of the mystery through taking in the sensual particulars of each earthly experience?

The myth of Inanna frequently appears in scholarly investigations of the historical roots of patriarchy. Some say this courtship story shows the degradation of Inanna. Her desire for a bed and throne, for example, means that she plays roles controlled by men in the manner they desire. The fact that she acquired them with help from the male hero Gilgamesh reveals her helplessness. And now to cap it off, she marries the shepherd– under the urging of her brother– and makes the guy king, giving away her power and participating in her own debasement. 

I don’t know. The myth and what we understand about its meaning in neolithic times are ambiguous, largely unknown and likely to remain so. A bed and throne are potent symbols of identity and power in nature and city. These are metaphors for things that many women are pursuing today in a quest for fulfillment. And this seems like a myth of partnership to me, a description of the yin and yang of existence. Inanna and Dumuzi are both symbols of change, change as the inescapable reality of life. 

The primary figure, the central metaphor, is female. The womb is the locus of the mystery of life and this mystery is behind the myth. Life. The mystery of life. This value transcends biological sex or cultural constructs of gender. It belongs to all of us. it is relevant to all of us.

Diane Wolkstein writes, “Inanna is the Goddess of Love. Formed from all of life, the Goddess gives forth desire that generates the energy of the universe.” Adding Inanna to our vocabulary of the divine can expand our understanding of the sacred in self and Other. She can help us soften the hard edges we maintain in our dualities and relax our definitions. She can, as the god Enki said, “arouse wonder.”

I want to leave you with a poem. First, a big welcome to new email subscribers:  Emilia, Bev, Helga, Cindy, M, Julia, Gisela, Ali, Gümrah, Vanessa, Sarah, and Emma. Welcome!

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In closing this poem, “The plum that you’re going to eat next summer” by Gayle Brandeis.

The plum you’re going to eat next summer by Gayle Brandeis

 The plum you’re going to eat next summer
doesn’t exist yet; its potential
lives inside a tree you’ll never see
in an orchard you’ll never see, will be touched
by a certain number of water droplets
before it reaches you, by certain angles
of light, by a finite amount of bugs
and dust motes and hands
you’ll never know. The plum you are
going to eat next summer will gather
sugar, gather mass, will harden
at its center so it can soften toward
your mouth. The plum
you’re going to eat next
summer doesn’t know
you exist. The plum you are
going to eat next summer
is growing just for you.

The plum you are going to eat next summer is growing just for you. What would it mean to embrace this perspective and step into the complex threads of relationship Brandeis describes? Where do you begin with this? I find a clue in these words from Mary Oliver, taken from her poem “The Swan.” Oliver writes: “[…] the path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it […]”

In the mythic space of Inanna as I understand it, this honoring is our central duty. And in honoring this world, this earth, we honor ourselves and each other.

If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world. 

And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Take good care of yourself and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.