#innana

[rasby]

Yeah they're gay, keep scrolling

[haggishlyhagging]

Sumerian gender-thinking finds expression through the image of Inanna, but it is hard to know what her image tells us about the nature of women and men. Is Inanna "alone of all her sex" (a phrase originally coined of the Virgin Mary to indicate the lack of similarity between her and mortal women)? Or does Inanna betray a deep suspicion that without the social constraints placed on women, they would indeed be very like men? This question is interesting from the point of view of cultural history. But it is almost irrelevant to the gender role of Inanna within Sumerian culture. Inanna stands at the boundary of differences between man and woman. The image of Inanna as a woman in a man's life-style reinforces social patterns of how men and women were actually expected to behave.

As Mesopotamian culture developed, the distinctive characteristics of Inanna were understood to constitute a difference between Inanna and other women. The Agushaya Hymn, an Old Babylonian mythical hymn about Inanna (by her Semitic name, Ishtar), labels her ferocity and love of warfare her zikrutu, literally, her "manliness." Another literary creation of the Old Babylonian period, the Gilgamesh Epic, also indicates that in this period the sexes were considered intrinsically different from each other.

In the Gilgamesh story, the superiority of Gilgamesh leads him to oppress his people. When their outcry reaches the gods, they realize that Gilgamesh acts this way because he has no peer. They decide upon the special creation of a new being who will be as an equal to Gilgamesh. In a similar situation, the god of the Bible creates a woman. But in the Gilgamesh Epic, the mother-goddess takes clay and creates Enkidu—another male. The true companion for Gilgamesh is not a woman to occupy his attention, but a male to be his close companion. The gods' solution to Gilgamesh's arrogance indicates a cultural sense that the truest bonding possible is between two members of the same gender. The true equality that leads to great bonding is between male and male. The closeness of same-sex bonding holds true also for females. In the Agushaya Hymn, Ishtar is undomesticated, fierce, and wild, quite unlike the other goddesses, and her ferocity had begun to frighten and dismay the other gods. Their solution is to create a companion who will occupy her, and so the god Enki creates a new goddess, another fierce female, Saltu, and sends her to Ishtar. Once again, the motivation behind the creation of same-sex companions for Gilgamesh and Ishtar is that there is a difference and distinctiveness between the genders. To the Babylonians of this period, a man and woman could never be as like each other as a man could be to a man, or a woman to a woman.

-Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth

[winter2468]

please enjoy my incredibly detailed and well-thought-out analysis of the wicdiv characters

[selanpike]

the goddess of everything good in society, and also a lot of the bad things too

[ritualware]

[va-lentine]

[three-of-hearts]

It's nice to know the Gods went through their own adolescence with all their temper tantrums and chaos

[starseededhippie]

[personalblogforaesthetics]

[multidimensionalpineapple32]

This is AI generated on Midjourney.

[josekessler]

Between the Sun and the Moon I raise the Morning Star

[kamikozen]

[darcysolace]

I love the name of the goddess Innana, because there is something so commonly human about the name. Every language has names or words which sound similar to it, because it is built in the most basic ways of communication. It makes me feel like this is truly something divine, something as old as time, something that we gave a name too even before we complicated our language and communication ...

[cimi-d]

SyE: LUGdE

Savers

[chalkstarz]

The demons were trying to take someone to replace Innana in the underworld and Innana’s like I will never let you take my faithful servent! Or this son! Or that son!

And then they came to her husband and she’s like, take him! Take him away! 🤣

[ritualware]