Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

We have discussed Inanna, one of the most influential divinities of the Sumerians who took it upon herself to raid the underworld realm of her sister, Ereshkigal. The underworld queen, in her turn, exacted a terrible price for Inanna's presumption. Worshiped for at least a millennium in one form or another, Inanna has become a symbol of the goddess energy in all human beings for a new age of pagans.

In her wonderful book of the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna's poems Inanna: Lady of Largest Heart, Jungian psychoanalyst Betty De Shong Meador makes some very insightful - and, as it turns out, surprisingly timely - comments on the vast chasm that has grown between human perception of the origins of evil in the days of Inanna's worship and now. Meador's comments on the out-sourcing of evil under the modern "big three" religions should read as an indictment of our willingness to follow unthinkingly along the path of least resistance. Instead - and to her credit - Meador's writing is thoughtful, and thought provoking, and very much worth sharing.

Enheduanna's poetry can be seen as a reassertion of the religion of "the old, old gods." Her Inanna combats any attempt to call into question the primacy of nature as the body of the goddess. In the poem "Inanna and Ebih" this conflict is explicit. An Edenic paradise on the slopes of the mountain Ebih threatens to defeat Inanna. The god of heaven, An, Inanna's great supporter, bends toward Ebih's unnatural, idealized, conflict-free world. An's seduction by Ebih anticipates Yahweh's persuasion of Adam and Eve that his garden paradise could be theirs for the price of their obedience. This garden is not the nature Inanna rules at all...

At the beginning of a new millennium, humanity still suffers as a result of the separation of spirit from matter that took place in antiquity. Yahweh's split and Greek-influenced Christianity's additions to the separation of good and evil provide divine sanction for the dark/light oppositional mentality that pervades our psychology. Dominant monotheistic religions effectively taught generations that evil is outside ourselves, with Satan over there, in others. We learned to deny our own potential for evil.

In Enheduanna's time, the evil was within us all and each individual was obliged to keep that portion of him or herself in check for the good not only of his own psyche but of the civilization around him. Now the chthonian, the dark, the evil is out there somewhere else and therefor our responsibility is absolved. Or is it?

Do read Enheduanna's poems, and Meador's book, if you have a chance. You won't be disappointed.

Header: Cover of the 2000 publication of Inanna: Lady of Largest Heart from University of Texas, Austin; find the old fashioned book version here

Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

Most people have a passing knowledge of the Hellenistic underworld that was embraced by the Romans when they conquered Greece.  At the very least we know the name of the place and the god who ruled it: Hades.  The actual evolution of Ancient Greek chthonian beliefs bears looking at as it heavily influenced Jewish, Christian and Islamic portraits of what becomes of a soul after death.

Originally, Greek mythology envisioned an underworld similar to the realm of the Mesopotamian goddess Ereshkigal.  Here the dead had diminished to nothing more than shadows.  They could not speak, hardly moved and ate dust.  There was no real outline of what the underworld looked like and there were certainly no specific areas with names and functions.

This changed with the widespread availability of the works of Homer.  In the Odyssey, Homer has his hero travel to Hades which he finds by sailing to the west.  Here, what remains of the dead are called eidolon, which is perhaps clumsily translated as “shade”.  They chirp quietly and flit from place to dark place like injured birds.  Everything good about life is denied them, and they long for even the most difficult existence on Earth.

When Odysseus slaughters two sheep and pours out their blood in a trench to appease the needy shades, they leap forward:

From this multitude of souls, as they fluttered to and fro by the trench came a moaning that was horrible to hear.

Contact with fresh blood would give the sad shades a momentary memory of the life they so desperately longed for.

In Hades, Odysseus also found a grove of poplars sacred to Persephone the underworld queen, a field of the pale lilies known as asphodels (which were, interestingly enough, a staple of the peasant diet in Greece) and the rivers Acheron and Styx.  The three headed dog Cerberus is at the gate, keeping the unfortunate eidolon from trying to escape, and Eurynomus, an indescribable creature that would tear off men’s skins, crouches in the shadows.

Homer also tacked on other features to the classical Greek underworld that were more in keeping with the way the average Greek imagined things might be in Hades.  Odysseus witnesses three men tortured eternally for crimes against the gods.  There is Tantalus, forever hungry and thirsty but unable to reach the food and water just in front of him.  Sisyphus hefts a huge bolder up a hill, only to have it roll back down so that he must return to the bottom and begin again.  Homer also writes of Tityus, whose punishment is the same as that of Prometheus the fire-bearer; vultures appear each day and rip Tityus’ liver from his side only to have the wound heal and the torture repeated over and over again.

As time went on, other writers added to the list of tormented souls in Hades until the pit of Tartarus, where those who had done evil were tortured in all manner of gruesome ways, became a staple of Greek belief.  Along side Tartarus grew the Elysian Fields, where the righteous dead would know the joys of life for all eternity or until they were called to drink the waters of the river Lethe, “forgetfulness”, and be reincarnated on Earth.

The fact that what we would now call Heaven and Hell were within sight of one another in Greek mythology did not escape early Christian theologians.  Certain authors, including Augustine, speak of the damned having to watch the joys of Heaven as part of their torment.  Medieval writers and artists, whose sadistic depictions of Hell border on the psychotic, added to this idea by picturing the souls in Heaven enjoying the suffering of the damned.  That, of course, is a very wide leap in philosophy from the days when all that stood ahead of us was eternity as an eidolon.

Header: Orpheus in the Underworld by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 16^th c

Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

Anyone familiar with the animated DreamWorks film The Road to El Dorado has at least a passing familiarity with the Mesoamerican ballgame.  Though the game has not come down to us with a specific name it was, according to Dr. Tim Laughton of Essex University, a bit like a mash-up of rugby and American football.  What exactly the rules of the game were are unknown, but it is known that players could not use their hands or feet to manipulate a ball made of rubber.

We also know that, at least in some cases, the game was a matter of life and death.  Depending on the size of the court, teams of from one to as many as ten players squared off and the losing team was sometimes sacrificed.  Though not all cultures participated in this ritualized bloodletting, the Maya – who were particularly fond of the ballgame – did.

This Mayan affinity may hark back to their complicated and fascinating mythology, which often focuses on the strangely grotesque particulars of the dark underworld known as Xibalba.

Xibalba (which is pronounced she-balba) was where the gods of death, whose names even incorporated the word, dwelled with the sad shades of those Mayans who had passed away.  Occasional, these chthonian gods amused themselves by interfering in the workings of men and heroes.  One such opportunity arose when two of Xibalba’s lords, One Death and Seven Death, became distracted by an unusual ruckus on earth. 

Upon investigation, the Death brothers stumbled on a ball court where the twin heroes One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu were wearing each other out at their favorite pastime.  One imagines the Death brothers rubbing their hands together as they grinned their skull-faced grins before returning to Xibalba to plot mischief.

One Death and Seven Death wanted the hero twins’ ball court for their own and decided the brothers would have to die.  To this end, they sent out their demon owls, which in the story come across much like the galla of Ereshkigal’s dark realm, to fetch One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu to Xibalba.   

The hero twins, having no real choice in the matter, descended below the Earth on an epic journey to the underworld.  They braved rivers running with fetid blood and pus, deep canyons with crystal spikes on their floors, and giant scorpions.  Being heroes, the twins faced all the challenges and made it to the hall of the Death brothers.

There they found figures that they imagined were the Death brothers.  Bowing respectfully, the hero twins were surprised to hear laughter behind them.  Before they could turn, the Death brothers appeared and shoved hot boulders beneath the twins.  The figures were just manikins, and now One Death and Seven Death had horribly burned the backs of the hero twins’ legs.

In pain but still defiant, they turned and took the “gifts” presented to them by the Death brothers.  Each received a flaming torch and a smoldering cigar.  With this, the Death brothers departed.  They would return in the morning, they told the twins, and if they found that the torches and cigars were not as they had left them, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu would be executed.

The hero twins tried to extinguish their gifts, but they could not.  There was no escape from their fate for the challenge was rigged.  The Death brothers returned as promised, killed the twins, and buried their bodies in the ball court that now belonged to Xibalba.

There is a happy, if grisly, ending to this story.  The Death brothers, for some reason, chose to preserve the head of the older twin, One Hunahpu.  They turned it into a gourd and wedged it in the fork of a tree.  The tree bore fruit, but the Death brothers forbade their minions to touch it. 

Now, One Death and Seven Death had an uncle named Blood Gatherer who had the most intrepid and beautiful child among the denizens of Xibalba.  Her name was Blood Moon and she climbed the tree to retrieve the shiny gourd that had once been One Hunahpu’s head.  In a telling metaphor, the gourd “spat into her lap” and Blood Moon became pregnant. 

It is easy to see, through this complex chthonian mythology, how the Mesoamerican ballgame became a ritualized placation of the powers of the underworld and death via the ultimate sacrifice: human life.  Another time, too, we can look at the equally fascinating story of Blood Moon and her twin sons.

Header: Stone carving from the South Ball court at El Tajin in Veracruz, Mexico showing a ball player being sacrificed after a game

Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

In Western mythos, ghouls are nasty creatures that terrify the living and consume the dead.  What exactly they might be is more often than not left to the imagination.  In some stories they are demonic creature, in others walking corpses and in still others a combination of the two.  Passing a cemetery at night – ill-advised in any situation – the traveler should avert his eyes to avoid seeing the hideous ghouls gnawing on the bones of the newly buried.

Ghouls actually come from Middle Eastern mythology, where they are the same as in western tales and yet different.  The word ghoul derives etymologically from the Arabic ghul.  This word may in turn come from the Sumerian galla, those demons of the underworld that dragged Inanna’s husband off to the realm of her sister Ereshkigal. 

In Arabic folklore, the ghoul is not just a haunt of cemeteries, deserts and wild places.  It may also take on the loveliest of forms and try to live among men.  A story illustrating this, called “The Merchant and the Demon”, may have been first written down in a Persian book which predates The Arabian Nights known as the Hazar Afsan.  Here, the poignancy of the ghoul’s netherworld existence is made clear in its relentless fight to live like a mortal.

An old merchant in the city of Baghdad began to believe that his days on earth were numbered.  He had only one child, a son, to whom the merchant would leave all his vast wealth.  The son was not yet married, however, and wanting to provide more than just material goods for him, the merchant arranged a lucrative marriage.

When the son was introduced to his fiancée, his heart fell.  Though she was from a good and wealthy family, she was not at all clever or pretty.  The son imagined a lifetime with this woman and decided that he could not face it.  He would need to reveal his feelings to his father, but how?  The old merchant was only doing what he thought best.  In despair, the young man roamed the outskirts of the city at dusk day after day.

One evening, when he was at his wits end, the young man heard a woman singing in the most beautiful voice.  He stopped, and peering over the vine-laden gate to his left he saw a maiden on the balcony of a small but tidy house.  She was the most charming thing the young man had ever seen and he stayed by the gate until her song was done. 

Evening after evening he stood outside the gate, falling in love with the young woman.  He began to ask around the neighborhood and found that she was a well bred young lady.  Her father, though wise and well respected, was poor.  The young man was too besotted to let this stop him.  He went to his father and proposed marriage to the young lady whose name he did not know.

At first, the merchant would not be convinced but, seeing his son’s sincerity and desire, he at last relented.  The old merchant contacted the wise man who, overjoyed at the thought of a wealthy match for his daughter, readily agreed to the nuptial arrangement.  The couple was introduced and the young woman returned the young man’s affection.  A sumptuous wedding feast was held, and the couple moved into the old merchant’s palatial home.

All went well for the first few weeks.  The young man did find it odd that his new bride would not join him at meals, but he shrugged this off as the jitters of a newly wed maiden.  One night, startled awake by the call of an owl, the young man was surprised to find himself alone in bed.  He waited for his wife to return, forcing himself to stay awake until she finally crept back into the room and under the sheet only moments before dawn.

The next night, the young man did not allow himself to dose and sure enough just at midnight his bride slipped out of their bed and left the room.  This happened night after night until finally the young man determined to follow her.  He found, to his amazement, that she left the house all together and hurried through the streets do Baghdad until she came to a cemetery not far from her father’s home.  She entered through the creaky gate and then descended into a sepulcher from which the young man could see the flickering light of oil lamps emanating.

Terrified but curious, the young man shored up his courage and approached the sepulcher.  He gazed down the steps and, to his revulsion and horror, saw his lovely bride at table with a company of hideous ghouls.  As they laughed and drank together, a fresh corpse was brought in and laid out on the table.  The young woman tore into it along with the ghouls, ripping it apart and tearing flesh from bone until nothing remained but the skeleton. 

Sated, the ghouls began to break up their feast.  The young man ran for home, jumped in bed, and pretended not to notice when his bride returned.  That night at supper, however, when the woman refused to partake of the meal before her, the young man snapped.  “Doubtless you prefer to take your wine and meat with the ghouls,” he said.

The woman stood up and left the house without a word.  The young man did not follow, assuming that his bride had returned to her own kind.  Instead he drank heavily, and fell into bed to sleep it off.  In the middle of the night he was awakened by a weight on his chest.  When he opened his eyes he was greeted by the sight of his bride, her fang-like teeth bared as she tried to rip open his throat.  The young man managed to fight her off and stab her to death.  She was buried the next day, in the cemetery where she had met her comrades.

Three nights later the young man’s bride returned to him.  Again, she tried to kill him, and again he fought her off.  When she ran away with a hideous shriek, the young man determined to end his nightmare.  With his father’s help, he had his wife’s tomb opened.  There she lay, fresh and pink as if she were only sleeping, with the stain of blood on her lips.

Father and son approached the young woman’s father, and he finally admitted that she had been of the walking dead all along.  She had expired from fever some years past and, after three nights, returned to his house where she resumed her prior life without ever speaking of the tomb.  He knew she was a ghoul, he acknowledged, but he did not have the heart to do away with her.

The young man, however, did.  He had her body burned to ashes and scattered what was left of her on the muddy surface of the Tigris river.  The young man married that less clever, less pretty girl, and he never ventured to the outskirts of Baghdad again.

Header: The Coffee Bearer by John Frederick Lewis c 1857

Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

One of the first published authors in western history was a woman who wrote about a woman.  In fact, she may be the first author in the world.  Enheduanna, High Priestess of the moon god Nanna in Ancient Sumer, documented her love for another deity in hymns of praise and apocryphal stories around 2,300 BCE.  Enheduanna’s chosen subject was the greatest goddess in her people’s pantheon.

Known to the Sumerians as Inanna, who ruled for the most part benevolently from her temple in the city of Erech, she would be called by many more names before Rome conquered her people and eradicated her cult.  In Babylon she was Astarte, then in Assyria and Ancient Persia she became Ishtar.  Her name was also memorialized in the Hebrew Bible; the heroine in the Book of Esther bears a Canaanite form of her name.

The most famous story of Inanna, told by Enheduanna in bits and pieces throughout her hymns, is that of her descent to the underworld realm of her fearsome sister, Ereshkigal.  This chthonian history was a mythological device long before the rise of Sumerian civilization, and it became a lynchpin in the all important New Year’s ritual of Sacred Marriage between the living king and a priestess representing Inanna.

According to the story, Inanna married a mortal shepherd, Dumuzi (Tammuz in the mythos of Ishtar), who she raised to the level of king in Erech.  The couple was happy and the land prospered.  As was typical, though, Inanna grew bored and looked around for more worlds to conquer.  She set her heart of the netherworld empire of her older sister Ereshkigal, where a vast horde of gold, silver and jewels was said to be stored.

Though Dumuzi, Inanna’s attendants – including Dumuzi’s sister Geshtinanna – and the god Enki implored Inanna not to pursue such folly, she brushed their good advice aside.  Dressing in her finest linens and jewels, with the crown of Erech on her brow, she went down the perilous stairway to the Underworld.  Her one concession to the potential danger of her undertaking came in the form of instructions, not to her husband, but to her steward, Ninshubur.  She told this demigod that if she was not back within seven days he must petition Enki for her freedom, for she would surely be among the dead.

Inanna’s journey began at the first of seven gates that led to the royal hall of the Queen of the Underworld.  Here the ghastly demons known as galla demanded tribute from the goddess before they would let her pass.  First her jewels, then her gowns and finally, at the seventh gate, her crown went to the monsters until she stood naked before her dolorous sister.

Ereshkigal, insulted by Inanna’s attempt to usurp her power, turned the soul-stealing eyes of the Judges of the Underworld upon her sister.  Inanna promptly dropped dead on the dusty floor of the hall.  Ereshkigal had her body hung from a hook mounted on a tall stake where it could be seen by all who entered her throne room.

Meanwhile, Ninshubur waited the allotted time and, when his mistress did not return, he hurried to the hall of Enki, the Lord of the Waters.  Enki, who was uncle to Inanna and Ereshkigal, descended into the Underworld.  As he was a stronger deity even than the Queen of the Dead, Ereshkigal made no initial protest when he took Inanna’s body down from the stake and revived her with the “water of life”.  But as the god and goddess went to leave, Ereshkigal reminded them that no one who had become one of the dead could permanently return to Earth or even Heaven without supplying a substitute to join the minions of her realm.

With a pledge to do just that, Inanna was allowed to pass through the seven gates where her finery was returned to her.  But a retinue of the galla followed her in their role as harvesters of souls.  They would kill her chosen substitute in the worst possible way, and drag him or her back to the chthonian world of their Queen.

Inanna wandered the land, visiting the gods and goddesses of city after city.  All of them bowed down before the Queen of Heaven and reminded her of good deeds they had done her and gifts they had given her.  Because of their kindnesses, she let them live and moved on finally arriving at her own beloved Erech.

Here, to her great surprise and disgust, she found her beloved husband Dumuzi not in mourning but sitting on her throne.  He made her people his playthings and “left no man his fortune nor no virgin to her father.”   Outraged, Inanna ordered the galla to take her own spouse to the Underworld as her replacement. 

Dumuzi set out into the countryside that he knew well, and for a time found refuge thanks to his father-in-law Utu, Lord of the Sun, but the galla were relentless.  Eventually Inanna’s shepherd-husband was caught by the galla, tortured, killed and dragged off to the Underworld.

The poignant dénouement of the story comes with the self-sacrifice of Inanna’s lady in waiting.  Geshtinanna travelled to the Underworld and offered herself in her brother’s place.  Ereshkigal, impressed with the girl’s courage, cut her a deal.  Dumuzi would stay half the year in the Underworld.  Geshtinanna would replace him the other half not as a pathetic, dust-eating shade but as Ereshkigal’s personal scribe.

In this way the shepherd-lover Dumuzi embodied the fertile months of the year while Geshtinanna became synonymous with winter.  The resulting rite of Sacred Marriage, then, ensured the kings of Sumer, Babylon and Assyria not only personal power, but the fruitfulness of their kingdoms.  And it is thanks in large part to the first author in history, a lady named Enheduanna, that we know what happened when the Queen of Heaven went boldly into the Underworld.

Header: Ishtar in Hades (Inanna before Ereshkigal) by E. Wallcousins