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“Inanna and the Huluppu Tree”: An Ancient Mesopotamian Narrative of Goddess Demotion
Abstract
Alluring and assertive, Inanna was one of the “great gods” of the male-dominated Sumerian pantheon and the most prominent of all the goddesses (Kramer 1967:153). Her symbols occur on some of the earliest Mesopotamian seals (Adams 1966:12), and she is among the first female deities about whom written material is extant (Hallo & Van Dijk 1968).1 In the second half of the fourth millennium B.C.E., most Sumerian cities had deities, usually goddesses, as “their titulary divine owners,” Inanna being originally the deity who “owned” the developing city—state of Uruk. As such, her primary realm was earthly fecundity, especially that of human beings and other animals (Steinkeller 1999: n3 forthcoming). Because of her power over fertility and her central role in the fertility ritual known as the “sacred—marriage” rite, Inanna retained her importance in the pantheon even as Sumerian culture became increasingly male-dominated (Wakeman 1985:8). However, some of the poems about Inanna suggest that she once ruled over not only the earth’s fertility but also the heavens and the underworld.
... In this overall cosmology, celestial bodies were not necessarily restricted Running head: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AND PSYCHOCOSMOLOGY 10 to any particular domegiven their apparent freedom of movement through the heavensbut were equated with or interpreted as specific deities. Venus, for instance, was conceived as being or representing Inannalater worshipped by Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians under the name Ishtargoddess of numerous phenomena including love, sex, and war, and known as the "Queen of Heaven" (Stuckey, 2001). Similarly detailed conceptions of various heavenly realms are found cross-culturally. ...
Although psychology has tended to focus on the individual, paradigms have emerged looking at people in context, such as social psychology. More recently, these have included fields attending to humans’ ecological context, such as ecopsychology. However, little has been conducted on spatial orientation, on how humankind has understood itself in relation to the Earth (“psychogeography”) or the universe (“psychocosmology”). To address this lacuna, this paper presents a historical narrative of psychogeography and psychocosmology, identifying four main perspectives that emerged over time. First, stretching into pre-history, belief in a flat Earth and a layered cosmos. Second, beginning around the 6th Century BCE, a spherical Earth and a geocentric cosmos. Third, from the 15th Century onwards, an expanded Earth and a heliocentric cosmos. Finally, in the 20th Century, an unstable Earth and an acentric cosmos. The paper illuminates the evolving way humans have understood their world and place in the wider universe, and highlights the psychological impact of these developments.
Snakes suffer from a bad reputation, and few human allies stand to prevent their extirpation. Yet more rhetorically powerful than any ethical injunction halting human violence upon nature, a sensuous moment of intertwining with the serpent can enact onto-epistemological shifts and dispositional transformations. Through a serpentine mêtis and mythopoetics of cunning wisdom and knowledge production, we can imaginatively, transversally, re-member the feeling of raising serpentine energy along the spine, sloughing off old skin, and slithering down among the roots and rhizomes into the depths of uncertainty. Opening up a space for the otherwise, responding to the hum of rhetorical energy coursing through our more-than-human relations, we may still live to tell new stories with the snakes and the rest of our strange kin.
In this study we re-examine the iconography of a male figure dressed in Assyrian clothes and grasping an
undulating item, engraved on a Carthaginian razor now at the Bardo Museum. Starting from the suggestive
analogies with some of the well-known ivories discovered at Nimrud, in the Room SW7 of Fort Shalmaneser,
we suppose a connection of the motif with the ancient myth of Gilgamesh and the ḫuluppu tree, perhaps
reinterpreted in the light of Melqart’s mythology.
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