Another voice annotation for my Mythology and Literature grade, on the goddess Inanna's pick of a mate, and the significant of their meeting. Lightly edited, like the concluding 1. If you'd rather listen than read, here you are:

"The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi"

A thought get-go more generally about what myth is, what our relationship to myth is.

It's tempting to retrieve of myth as something other people in other times have washed and made, in order to give gild and structure to their globe. We might call back that, given now to a scientific worldview, to empirical procedures for understanding how man beings work, how human societies piece of work, how the cosmos at large works, on the greatest possible scale of stars and galaxies, the minutest possible scale of subatomic particles, that nosotros're no longer doing mythology – that mythology is something that we can run into from the outside, from a remove, and gaze upon with interest, maybe some amusement, maybe a bit of condescension or adoration or nostalgia, depending on our disposition.

I want to suggest to you a unlike perspective though. That perspective begins from the notion that it'due south just other people's myths that expect like myths. Your own myths don't expect like myths to you, they look like axioms. Permit me note for yous a couple of things that are very much part of our worldview, and that, if nosotros see them from flake of a remove, may wait more myth-like than nosotros have been given to call up.

The past. The time to come. Neither the by nor the futurity has whatever objective being. Nowhere volition you observe the by, not even the instant that merely passed. Nowhere will yous find and be able to present the future; it does non be anywhere. The past and the future are constructs of human heed. Our conventionalities in them is then foundational that most of the residual of our beliefs depend upon them to fifty-fifty make sense at all.

I submit to you, the past and future, along a linear timeline as we excogitate of them, are mythic, in that they are foundational, and they are collaborative constructs – nobody tin brand a myth on their own – collaborative constructs of our cultural imagination. And one marker that it's myth is that we recoil from the suggestion that it's "merely a myth."

And then, if a myth is a globe-arranging story, and the figures in the myths we're looking at are animate, they're characters, how and then practise nosotros remember about this reading for today, "The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi"? It'south more than just a boy and a girl meeting, flirting, fighting, and so getting it on. That'southward but the surface.

We can ask what it is in the earth of the Sumerians that this myth has the ability to adjust, to put in order. Inanna is the goddess of dearest, of war, though I don't think she'due south prominent in that function here, of honey and fecundity and increase. Also she has at her disposal the me, the gifts or powers of civilization. Dumuzi is the god of the vegetation, of the spring, of rebirth. He'south the classical dying-and-rising god; and in some contexts he was also the god of shepherds, a pastoral god, which explains his epithet, "the shepherd." So what does it mean that the goddess of increase, herself, and the god of vegetation, himself, are getting information technology on?

Well, nosotros can look at the terms in which their getting-it-on is expressed. You may have noticed the abundance of nature imagery, of agricultural metaphor. Fortunately this is just sound, so you can't run into me blushing as I read. Inanna is speaking:

My vulva, the horn,
The boat of Heaven,
Is full of eagerness similar the young moon.
My untilled state lies dormant.

Then there'southward the agricultural dimension.

As for me, Inanna,
Who will turn my vulva,
Who will plow my high field?
Who will plow my wet ground?

It's all thoroughly subsumed to this agricultural metaphor, of the sexual human activity as an human activity of well, farming, of planting seed that volition then grow. The word "semen" is from the Latin word for "seed," by the fashion. A little further on, we're hearing from the narrator again:

At the king'due south lap stood the ascension cedar.
Plants grew high by their side.
Grains grew high past their side.
Gardens flourished luxuriantly.

Dumuzi and Inanna - cropped
Lovers embracing. Clay plaque, Mesopotamia, Isin-Larsa-Onetime Babylonian period, ca. 2000-1600 BCE. Baked clay. Basel, Erlenmeyer Collection.

Almost as if their sexual wedlock either causes new abundance and growth in the natural world, or is ane in the aforementioned as the affluence of spring, new growth, in the natural world – the world of nature that surrounds them, and the agricultural earth, the fields that sustain the cities of Mesopotamia, the fields in which the natural world has been domesticated, put to human use. The fruit of their spousal relationship is the whole of the greenish earth.

Putting natural increase in terms of sexual marriage allows homo beings to participate in natural and cosmic processes, and non just to participate in them, but in fact to influence them. The world-arranging story that is a myth has a place in information technology for the human teller of the story. And in fact one thing to sentry for as we encounter the myths of a number of different cultures over this course is, what kind of place does the myth give to the homo participants? Are man beings made focal and central, or are they 1 presence co-equal among many? The Haida term for man being, according to Robert Bringhurst, the translator of Ghandl, whom we'll be reading some weeks from now, is "ordinary surface bird." Puncturing possibly homo pretensions to a special office in the cosmos.

A passage from a volume chosen The Intellectual Hazard of Ancient Man, on ceremonial observances around Inanna and Dumuzi's matrimony, I recall sheds further light on the role this myth played in the cultural life of at least one of the Sumerian city-states. This is about the metropolis of Isin:

[The City] celebrated yearly the marriage of the goddess Inanna to the god Dumuzi or Tammuz…. Since the goddess is an incarnation of the fertility of nature, and her husband, the shepherd-god Dumuzi, incarnates the creative powers of spring, information technology is understandable that this annual union of god and goddess signifies and is the reawakening of nature in spring.

Notice that dual verb – it signifies the reawakening of nature in leap, it also is the reawakening of nature in bound. The author, Thorkild Jacobsen, continues:

In the marriage of these deities the fertility and the creative powers of nature themselves become manifest. Just why, we may ask, should homo servants of the gods, the human ruler and – so it seems – a priestess, transcend their human being status, take on the identity of the deities Dumuzi and Inanna, and go through their spousal relationship? For this is what took place in the rites.

You got that? Every year, early spring, the male monarch of the metropolis takes on the role of Dumuzi, the high priestess of the temple takes on the role of Inanna, and in a ritual I believe most of whose details are lost to us, they, in those roles as god and goddess, consummated the marriage that ensured the return of natural abundance in spring.

Why does it make sense to them to do this? Jacobsen speculates:

The answer to that question lies back … in a remote prehistoric age when the gods were non yet anthropomorphic rulers of states and cities only were still directly the phenomena of nature. In those days man's attitude was not simply one of passive obedience; it called for active intervention, as information technology does among many [quote unquote] primitives today. Information technology is one of the tenets of mythopoetic logic that similarity and identity merge: "to be like" is as good equally "to exist." Therefore, by being similar, by enacting the part of, a force in nature, a god, human being could in the cult enter into and clothe himself with the identity of these powers, with the identity of the gods, and through his own actions … cause the powers involved to act equally he would have them human action. By identifying himself with Dumuzi, the king is Dumuzi; and similarly the priestess is Inanna – our texts clearly state this. Their marriage is the spousal relationship of the creative powers of bound. Thus through a willed act of homo is achieved a divine wedlock wherein is the all-pervading, life-giving re-creative potency upon which depends, as our texts tell us, "the life of all lands." (198–99)

Okay, that'southward a lot. All that is to say, the sexy bits are not just to brand readers or listeners hot and bothered. They have a profound cosmological function: they make human beings participants in the generative powers of nature and the cosmos.

The prototype atop, left to right, similar in a news photo, where protestors are:

Inanna, winged, with arrows for shoulders
Utu, sun god, he comes bladed out of the hill
Enki, god of the fresh waters, his shoulders running with fish
Isimud, Enki'due south vizier, two-faced

Pound read myth as if information technology were the morning paper (Don Revell). Recollect papers? The color in information technology, Inanna's joy, is from a pot I left on the hot stove & it cooked dry.