The Semitic deity Ishtar was a syncretism of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, a cardinal figure in the Mesopotamian pantheon, venerated for 3,500 years before our era. Of complex and even contradictory characteristics, she has been described as the “embodiment of Antiquity”, constantly crossing the boundary between the feminine and the masculine, between the virgin and the prostitute, and between the human and the animal. Some of her titles were “Queen of Heaven” or “Morning and Evening Star”, an epithet that reveals her link to Venus, and therefore to Aphrodite. One of her most distinctive characteristics was an unstable and exalted nature, capable of passing from implacable violence to irresistible, loving seduction. But unlike other female deities, Inanna-Ishtar was never the wife of any god; she remained independent, despite her bonds, according to some sources, with the sky god An or with Dumuzi, the biblical Tammuz. The most famous legend of Inanna/Ishtar is her descent to the Kur, the Mesopotamian land of no return, to conquer the realm of her elder sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. The Akkadian poet and priestess Enheduanna, who lived during the 23rd century BCE and is credited with the first known authorship in history, wrote numerous hymns to Inanna, identifying her with Ishtar in her three aspects: warrior, lover and astral deity. Inanna/Ishtar has become an important figure in contemporary feminist theory, because she illuminates a male-dominated Mesopotamian pantheon. Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Second Sex (1949), argued that Inanna/Ishtar, along with other powerful goddesses of Antiquity, were marginalised by modern culture in favour of male deities. Likewise, for Tikva Frymer-Kensky, she embodied the “socially unacceptable” archetype of the “untamed and unfettered” woman. The diverse profiles of Inanna/Ishtar and the syncretisation and harmonisation of apparently contradictory characteristics make her figure one of the most fascinating, not only in the Sumero-Babylonian pantheon, but in the history of religions in general. Ultimately, an expansive figure who yearns for her own fullness and who, from her first cult around the fourth millennium BCE, would re-emerge in the 20th century, almost six thousand years later.

Powerful, radiant and majestic, you shine brilliantly at dusk, you illuminate the day at dawn.

Fragment from The Holy Priestess of Heaven. Translation by Wolkstein & Kramer (1983)