Ishtar/Inanna
For millennia, the name Inanna—known later as Ishtar—has resounded like a whisper carried on desert winds, a goddess so foundational to ancient spirituality that she is widely regarded as one of if not the first recorded deity in human history. That’s not to say she is, obviously, but it’s pretty interesting that some of the oldest known texts revere this multi-facted goddess. She predates Aphrodite, Freyja, and even the feared Lilith, and in many ways, she is the original template for the archetype of the sensual, powerful, and uncompromising divine feminine. Warrior and lover, priestess and queen, life-giver and death-bringer—Inanna is not a goddess of soft dualities but of fierce wholeness.
Inanna first appears in written form around 3000 BCE in ancient Sumer (modern-day southern Iraq), where she was venerated as the Queen of Heaven and Earth. She held dominion over love, fertility, beauty, sex, war, justice, and political power—a rare fusion of domains in a single deity. She was neither compartmentalized nor domesticated; Inanna was a force who defied neat labels. She was worshipped in the city of Uruk, one of the earliest urban centers, where her temple, the Eanna, translated to House of Heaven, served not just as a religious site but a cultural epicenter.
As Mesopotamian civilization evolved, Inanna became Ishtar to the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Her essence remained: a goddess who demanded reverence, and whose blessings came with awe and consequence. Her complexity only grew as her stories spread across empires. Ishtar became synonymous with Venus—the Morning and Evening Star—associated with cycles of brightness and disappearance, love and war, arrival and loss. I find it rather fascinating that as the Abrahamic religions evolved, Lilith and Lucifer picked up attributes once associated with Inanna—sensual power, rebellion, celestial radiance, even the horned crown—reframed in later traditions as dangerous or fallen instead of divine.
One of her most famous and psychologically rich myths is The Descent of Inanna, perhaps the oldest recorded religious narrative of death and rebirth. Inanna descends into the Underworld ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead. She claims her visit is for a funeral rite, but the text suggests her true motives are more complex—possibly to extend her dominion into the realm of the dead or to confront death itself.
As she passes through each of the seven gates of the Underworld, Inanna is stripped of her divine garments and symbols of power—her crown, jewelry, breastplate, and robe—until she stands naked and defenseless. This ritual stripping echoes the process of ego death or the shedding of worldly identity. She stands naked and defenseless before her sister, there, she is judged, struck dead, and hung on a hook like a slaughtered beast. The Queen of Heaven becomes nothing more than a corpse in the land of the dead. This moment is both literal and symbolic. Some interpretations suggest Ereshkigal kills Inanna out of jealousy, anger, or territorial dominance—others see it as a necessary ritual of death. The Underworld doesn’t allow the living to enter without consequence. Inanna must die to truly understand the mysteries of death and transformation. Symbolically, this is the moment of total ego annihilation—the goddess of love, sex, and power is reduced to lifeless matter.
Before descending, Inanna instructs her loyal servant Ninshubur to seek help from the gods if she does not return in three days. Ninshubur follows this plan, and after other gods refuse to help, Enki, the god of wisdom and magic, agrees to intervene. Enki creates two genderless beings—the gala-tura and the kur-jara—from the dirt under his fingernails. These beings slip into the Underworld unnoticed, and when they encounter Ereshkigal, they do not judge or challenge her, but rather empathize with her pain, mirroring her moans and grief. Touched by their compassion, Ereshkigal grants them a wish, and they ask for the body of Inanna.
Ereshkigal gives it to them, and they sprinkle Inanna’s body with the food and water of life, reviving her. However, a condition of the Underworld is that no one leaves unless someone else takes their place. Inanna ascends but must find a substitute. She ultimately chooses her consort, Dumuzi, who she finds enjoying himself in her absence—indifferent to her death and transformation. He is seized and sent to the Underworld in her place, setting off the seasonal myth of his death and return. This myth, deeply encoded with agricultural, psychological, and spiritual symbolism, predates both Persephone’s abduction, Osiris’ death and Christ’s resurrection, also three days later, by over a thousand years. It is a foundational template of transformation: that death—literal or symbolic—is not an end, but a passage. I also love that after her literal ego death, Inanna seemed to outgrow her attachment to Dumuzi—she wasn’t the same goddess who had descended. She returned transformed, with a clearer sense of her own sovereignty.
Carl Jung saw myths like Inanna’s descent as vital to the individuation process, the journey through shadow into wholeness. Joseph Campbell cited her myth as one of the earliest and clearest examples of the hero’s journey—a feminine version in which power is not gained through conquest, but through surrender, death, and return. Inanna is not triumphant because she avoids death, but because she undergoes it fully, and comes back changed. Her story speaks not only to agricultural cycles and cosmic rhythms but to personal evolution. We all have to descend at some point—to shed our identities, confront the underworld of our psyche, and rise transformed. Inanna doesn’t offer the promise of safety; she offers the promise of sovereignty, earned through fire.
Over time, as patriarchal social and religious systems solidified, Inanna’s integrated power became divided and distorted. Her sexual agency and divine ferocity were splintered into sanitized goddesses like Aphrodite, or demonized into fearsome figures like Lilith. In Freyja, we see echoes of her as a goddess of love and battle, riding into war and weeping tears of gold. But none of them quite capture the totality of Inanna—the full-spectrum feminine force who birthed desire and rage in the same breath. She was also central to other myths beyond her descent. In Inanna and Enki, she outwits the god of wisdom and acquires the Me, the sacred powers of civilization—music, craftsmanship, leadership, emotion, sex, chaos—and brings them to humanity. She is not merely a symbol of nature, love, or war; she is the bearer of human culture itself. Her stories are some of the oldest we have, and they resonate not because they are quaint relics of a lost civilization, but because they speak to the deepest truths of existence.
As Inanna became Ishtar across the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires, her character shifted slightly to reflect the values of rising militaristic states. Ishtar became more overtly associated with imperial conquest, stormy vengeance, and battlefield rage. She was still a goddess of love and sexuality, but her warlike nature was emphasized more explicitly—riding into battle with lions, flanked by weapons, her love as consuming as it was generative. While Inanna was often portrayed as an initiator of sacred rites and temple mystery, Ishtar became a more external, politically symbolic deity, invoked by kings and conquerors seeking divine favor.
She also appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the most important works of ancient literature. There, as Ishtar, she proposes marriage to Gilgamesh, who refuses her—mocking her for the fate of her past lovers, including Dumuzi. Enraged by his rejection, she ascends to heaven and demands that her father, Anu, send the Bull of Heaven to punish him. The bull wreaks havoc on Earth but is ultimately slain by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, leading to Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s spiritual reckoning. This myth marks a turning point in the portrayal of the goddess: no longer just sovereign and wise, she becomes a figure of divine wrath, foreshadowing how powerful feminine figures would increasingly be viewed with suspicion or vilified as threats.
Today, Inanna/Ishtar is being rediscovered by those seeking to reclaim the sacred feminine in its wholeness. She reminds us that divinity is not always gentle, that femininity is not synonymous with softness, and that true transformation demands descent. She invites us to confront the masks we wear, the powers we fear, and the darkness we avoid—not to be destroyed by it, but to emerge reassembled.
Inanna is not a goddess of comfort—she is a goddess of becoming. And her voice still echoes across the ages, carried by those willing to walk through the gates of their own shadow and return with fire in their eyes. Inanna is the fire at the heart of the sacred feminine—a flame that cannot be extinguished, only carried forward, generation after generation, by those brave enough to walk her path. As we gaze upon the stars, we are reminded of Ishtar’s enduring presence—a celestial guardian whose influence reaches across the boundaries of time and tradition.
