Ishtar

Representation of a goddess, probably from Ištar/Inanna, at the British Museum. Another possible goddess would be Ereškigal. However, the association is not completely clear.

Reconstruction of the Gate of Ištar, the fourth gate to the inner city of Babylon.

Ištar or Ishtar was the Babylonian goddess of love and beauty, life and fertility. She primarily associated with sexuality. Ištar had many lovers; however, as Guirand points out:

"Woe to him whom Ištar had honored, the capricious goddess treated her lovers of passing, and the unhappy bastards tend to pay a high price for the favors gathered in them. The animals, enslaved by love, lost their native vigor: they fell into the traps laid by men or were domesticated by them. 'You have loved the lion, mighty in strength,' says the hero Gilgameš to Ištar, 'and you have dug wells for him seven and seven! You have loved the corcel, proud in the battle, and you have assigned him the head, the sting and the whip.'

Even for the gods Ištar's love was fatal. In her youth the goddess had loved Tammuz, god of the harvest and, according to the Gilgamesh epic, this love caused Tammuz's death.

It is associated in other regions with goddesses, such as Inanna in Sumer, Anahit in ancient Armenia (Urartu), or Astarte (Asera) in Canaan, Phoenicia and in the Abrahamic religions. Ištar, Inanna and these goddesses represent the archetype of the mother goddess.

In Sumer she was known as Inanna (being two different goddesses that represent the same thing) and later in Babylonia, and in her area of cultural influence throughout the Middle East, she received the honorary titles of Queen of Heaven and Lady of Earth.

For Joseph Campbell, in his book Goddesses, Ištar/Inanna, who nurses the god Tammuz, is the same goddess as Aphrodite and the Egyptian Isis, who feeds Horus.

The legend of this goddess is born from the story of Semiramis who was the wife of Nimrod who was how she achieved all her conquests, through said alliance through her marriage with him. However, after the death of Nimrod or Ninus as he is also known, Semiramis claimed to have become pregnant and stated that the sun's rays had miraculously conceived the son she was expecting, and when he was born he was called Tammuz. Semiramis claimed that her son Tammuz was the reincarnation of her husband Nimrod, who was made a deity of the Sun by such a miracle. Tammuz would have been born exactly on the Winter Solstice, which is between December 21 and 25, according to the Babylonian calendar. Decreeing an annual party where he gave free rein to the passions to ensure the fertility of the town and the harvest. Before her death, Semiramis decreed that she and Tammuz were to be worshiped as gods, he as god of the Sun (Baal) and she, considering herself the wife of one god and the earthly mother of another god (Tammuz), proclaimed herself the Queen of Heaven herself.

With the arrival of Catholicism and, in an attempt to evangelize the different peoples and trying to avoid the pagan and unbridled festivals of humanity, he took said festival and decreed it as the birth of Christ in the year 440; Pope Leo the Great established this date for the commemoration of the Nativity or Christmas, almost a century later, in 529 the emperor Justinian declared it officially holiday of the Empire.

Since that day, Nimrod and Semiramis (now deified as god and goddess) have appeared under different names that reflect the language and culture into which they were adopted. Semiramis, like the mother of all mothers, was the Goddess of Fertility and Beauty Fertility Goddesses.

Position in the Pantheon

Eight-point star, Inanna/Ištar symbol

Eight-point star at the Louvre Museum.

Isthar is the daughter of Sin, god of the Moon, and Nannar, the Moon, younger sister of Ereškigal and twin sister of Šamaš, in Sumerian Utu, god of the Sun, and companion of Tammuz, in Sumerian Dumuzi.

His associated number in the pantheon of Mesopotamian mythology is 15.^{[citation needed]}

Features

As the first psychological archetype of the female dynamic in history, and in contrast to her sister Ereškigal or Ki, the goddess of the earth, Ištar cannot be considered within the group of mother goddesses, since her relationship with the humans is more like an inspiration for vital action than a refuge. With this character, Ištar appears in the epic of Gilgamesh.

It is associated with the planet Venus, the morning and evening star. Its symbol is an eight-pointed star. In her honor, astronomers have named a continent of Venus Ishtar Terra, her associated animal being the lion.

History

Representation of the goddess in the Ishtar Vaso at the Louvre Museum.

Ishtar was the daughter of Sin (moon god) or Anu. By virtue of being his daughter, she was the warlike lady; as a descendant of this, she the exponent of love, license and intemperance, and capricious violence to the extreme.

Under the guise of a warrior, he was worshiped in Agade and in Sippar, under the name of Anunit. He also has an astral character, since he personifies several stars: Venus, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars gathered in constellations.

Ishtar is associated with the planet Venus as the morning star, and on the borders of Babylon she is represented by an eight-pointed star. She too, standing completely naked, with her hands on her stomach, or holding her breasts, or brandishing a bow on a chariot drawn by lions.

In her aspect of loving divinity, Ishtar is the protector of prostitutes and extramarital affairs, according to Catholicism and which certainly had no special connotation in Babylon, since marriage was a solemn contract that the family perpetuated as support of the State and as a generator of wealth, but in which there was no talk of love or loving fidelity.

Ištar is not a marriage goddess, nor is she a mother goddess. The sacred marriage or the sacred hierogamy, which was represented every year in the Babylonian temple, does not have a moral implication nor is it a model of terrestrial marriages, it is a highly stylized fertility rite with liturgical tones.

Her Sumerian version, Inanna, was highly revered beginning in the reign of Sargon.

Also in the Bible, in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, she is named in chapter 44 referring to her as The Queen of Heaven.

Worship

Ishtar was worshiped at the Babylonian temple called E.tur.kalam.ma. In 1778 B.C. C. Hammurabi built a throne to worship Ishtar, and in 1775 BC. C. he made images for her.

Legend

Her first husband was her brother Tammuz. When Tammuz died, Ishtar descended into hell to wrest from her sister, the terrible Ereškigal, the power over life and death.

After instructing her servant Papsukal to come to her rescue if she did not return, Isthar descended into the land of darkness, Irkalla. He started out brave and defiant, yelling at the doorman to open the door before he broke it down. But at each of the seven gates she was stripped of one of her garments, and with them she was stripped of her power, until she came naked and defenseless before Ereškigal, who killed her and hung her body. her on a nail.

With his death, the whole world began to languish. But the faithful Papsukal reached out to the gods and asked them to create a being capable of entering the world of the dead and resurrecting Ishtar with the food and water of life. This is how Ishtar came back to life, but she had to pay the price: for six months out of the year, Tammuz must live in the world of the dead. While he is there, Isthar has to mourn the loss of him; in the spring he comes out again and everyone is overjoyed.

Some consider this legend to be the origin of the so-called "Dance of the Seven Veils".

Etymologies and related names

There are other names related to this goddess: Astarte, Astaroth, Esther, Stára (in Persian), Hecate, Lilith, Isis.