Ištar and Tammuz

Author: Traditional Babylonian

Time Period: 2499 BCE–1000 BCE

Country or Culture: Mesopotamia; Iraq

Genre: Myth

Overview

Ištar (Ishtar), the goddess of love and war in Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, has other names in other cultures, including Inana (Sumerian) and Astarte (Greek). In all of her incarnations, she is associated with Venus, the morning and evening star; as the morning star, she is the goddess of war, while as the evening star, she is the goddess of love. Most often said to be the daughter of the sky god Anu and his consort (and possibly earth goddess) Antum, Ištar was regarded as part of a trinity comprising the sun god Šamaš (Shamash), the moon god Sîn (sometimes said to be her father in place of Anu), and herself as the planet Venus. Her chief consort is Tammuz, also known as Dumuzid, who is sometimes portrayed as her son as well; in some versions of the myth, he is a fisherman, while in others he is a farmer. Ištar’s sister is Ereškigal (Ereshkigal), the queen of the dead.

Around 3000 BCE, festivals were held in the ancient Sumerian city-state of Uruk to honor the goddess of fertility, providing evidence that this myth was part of oral culture long before the tale was written down at some later point in the Bronze Age. Portrayals of the goddess Ištar have been found on an alabaster cultic vase known as the Warka vase, which dates to the end of the fourth millennium BCE and portrays a procession of people bringing gifts to her. Each spring during the Babylonian New Year celebrations, a religious reenactment of the myth occurred as a sacred marriage, or hieros gamos; the king and a high priestess took on the roles of Tammuz and Ištar, and their union guaranteed fertility for the coming year. All of the priestesses also served as sacred prostitutes.

Babylon, in present-day Iraq, was the major site of Ištar’s worship. The Ištar Gate, which Nebuchadnezzar II had built about 575 BCE, led into the city and was one of the original Seven Wonders of the World. An early twentieth-century replica was constructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany, with some of the original bricks excavated by archaeologists.

Ishtar on arriving at the gate of the land of no return, / To the gate-keeper thus addressed herself: / “Gate-keeper, ho, open thy gate! / Open thy gate that I may enter! / If thou openest not the gate to let me enter, / I will break the door, I will wrench the lock, / I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors. / I will bring up the dead to eat the living. / (And) the dead will outnumber the living.”

“Story of the Descent of the Goddess Ishtar into the Lower World”

Given the theme of a journey involving descent and return, using Jungian archetypes to analyze the myth will explicate its symbolic significance. Attention will also be given to the classification scheme for folktale motifs that Stith Thompson outlined in the twentieth century.

Summary

Ištar is the Assyro-Babylonian personification of the mother-goddess myth. In Sumer, she was known as Inana. As is typical in the myths of several cultures, the goddess unites with a lover to create the world. This union brings together life, for which the Greeks had two words: zoe, meaning existence, and bios, the temporal life of animals and plants. This sacred marriage, reenacted annually by prominent members of the community, ensures the fertility of all creatures and plants.

Tammuz, the second half of this mythic couple, is a god of agriculture. One of his titles may have been Tammuz of the Abyss because the Babylonians, like the Egyptians, relied on the flooding of the rivers for a successful harvest. He is also the grain spirit, dying each year just as the grain goes into the ground and is reborn as it grows. In addition, Tammuz is a patriarchal god; as a human form of the water god Ea, he teaches humans to cultivate fruit trees and to plant grain.

During part of the year, Tammuz lives on the earth as a shepherd or a farmer, the beloved consort of Ištar. The rest of the year he spends in the underworld. Different versions of the myth offer different accounts of Tammuz’s slaying. In one account, it is Ištar who kills him, enraged at not being mourned when she herself went to the underworld. Alternatively, a demon may have been responsible for his death, as suggested by Ištar’s cries over his body.

After Tammuz is killed, Ištar goes to her sister Ereškigal’s realm in order to retrieve him from the land of the dead. At each of the seven gates to the underworld, she is required to surrender part of her finery: crown, earrings, necklace, breast ornaments, belt, bracelets, and robe. This dressing or undressing is a familiar motif in mythology. When Ištar stands at last before Ereškigal, she is naked. Even though she carries no symbol of her status, however, Ištar is not humbled. She rushes her sister to attack her and as a result is visited with “sixty diseases” (Jastrow 456) via Namtar, a plague demon. An Assyrian hymn, “The Descent of the Goddess Ishtar into the Lower World,” relates her trials and explains the Assyrian concept of hell as a place where souls take on the form of birds.

As a result of Ištar’s abiding beneath the earth, all sexual activity, including that of plants and animals, ceases. When the gods observe this fact, Ea, god of the deep, creates Asušunamir (Asushunamir), a eunuch who has the ability to pass through the seven gates of the underworld unharmed. There, he delivers the message that Ištar is to be freed. Although angry at having to release her sister, Ereškigal has to obey. At each gate as she ascends, Ištar receives again the symbols of royalty that she was required to relinquish in her descent, except for her amulets, which serve as a ransom for Tammuz.

In a Sumerian version of the myth, before Inana goes to Ereškigal, she leaves instructions with her servant as to whose help to seek if she does not return within three days; her sister turns her into a piece of meat and hangs her on a wall, her servant does as instructed, and the goddess is rescued. In some versions, Belit-sheri, another sister of Ištar, goes to the underworld accompanied by several demons to bring Tammuz back; she speaks persuasively, and Tammuz agrees to return to “my mother.” This sister also weeps for the loss of Tammuz, as in Egyptian myth the sisters Isis and Nephthys weep for their brother Osiris.

Ishtar on arriving at the gate of the land of no return, / To the gate-keeper thus addressed herself: / “Gate-keeper, ho, open thy gate! / Open thy gate that I may enter! / If thou openest not the gate to let me enter, / I will break the door, I will wrench the lock, / I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors. / I will bring up the dead to eat the living. / (And) the dead will outnumber the living.”

“Story of the Descent of the Goddess Ishtar into the Lower World”

In still another variation, Tammuz does not leave the underworld despite Ištar’s request that he return to care for the flocks, although it is not clear whether he refuses to return or is not permitted to do so. Thus, the goddess mourns for her lost son-lover. In the cultic observances, mourners wept for Tammuz during the month named after him, which lasted from about June 20 to July 20. Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, such as Ezekiel and Isaiah, condemned the Israelites for what they viewed as idolatry when they took part in this ritualized weeping and baked cakes for the “Queen of Heaven,” one of Ištar’s epithets.

The myth is a typical whole-and-part story, portraying a son or daughter as part of a mother goddess. This motif may have its genesis in the lunar cycle; although the moon always remains the same, its cycles mean that it can be seen to appear, grow, shrink, vanish, and then reappear. Just as the moon “is born” and “dies” predictably, the great mother goddess births a son (new moon), marries him (full moon), loses him (waning moon), searches for him (dark moon), and rescues him (returning crescent moon). If the child is a daughter, she marries a personification of the dark moon, and her mother still rescues her. The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone is the most well known of this variant (Baring and Cashford 147).

The myth of Ištar and Tammuz is clearly syncretistic, pulling from several sources and being shaded by each new culture that adopted it. Because of the many permutations of the core myth, the possibility of a single, coherent narrative is uncertain. What is clear is that Ištar is a powerful mother goddess, Tammuz is her consort, and one or both of them confront death by experiencing a period in the underworld.

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