Undead Mothers VI: Before Horror was The Exaltation of Inana
Or, Ancient Assyrian Feminism Speaks its Piece
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We tend to assume that patriarchy is natural—even if we don’t like it.
It seems, given the prevalence of patriarchal social structures throughout the world, that patriarchy is the inevitable, evolutionary, and necessary nature of social structure and function. But patriarchy is not natural; in fact, it would be much truer to say that it’s agricultural. As many social historians and philosophers have argued, patriarchy emerged thousands of years ago as human society transitioned from being hunter-gatherer based to horticultural, and, thence, to agricultural. Women’s bodies became reified—which is to say turned into an object—in lockstep with the rise of agriculture, when men realized that controlling women’s bodies was a necessary step in promoting the expansion of agriculture and the consolidation of private wealth that it enabled. Engels calls this change the “world historical defeat of the female sex…the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.” As agriculture flourished, women’s status was diminished, since it became necessary to control women’s reproduction in a manner that would support the regulation and distribution of private property.
My own favorite historical book on this topic is Gerda Lerner’s classic The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), which, honestly, should be required middle school reading throughout the United States, and the world. It’d be a big lift to read at the age of 13, but when I imagine what my own life would have looked like if I had believed as a teenager that the subjugation of women to men in patriarchal societies was not the natural order of things, but a co-condition for the establishment of private property, I am wonderstruck and bereft, all at once. Imagine believing that feminism wasn’t a new thing, wasn’t trying to establish a new world order, but actually a really old thing, something we were trying to get back to somehow, and to adapt to the contours of modern life? What if girls grew up thinking that women having rights and powers was the normal state of affairs for untold thousands of years, rather than some world-historical exception?
In the Fertile Crescent, 8000 years ago, women were worshipped for their fertility; huge numbers of statues of fertile, pregnant, and nursing women survive. Up until maybe about 5000 years ago, even after patriarchy had started to take hold with the rise of agriculture, Near Eastern women retained a fairly large share of personal, economic, and political power. Today, I’m going to tell you the story of one particularly powerful such woman, a poet and priestess living in ancient Assyria in the third millennium BCE. A powerful woman who seems—from a certain distance—like she was maybe the progenitrix of horror poetry.
About 4300 years ago, in Assyria, King Sargon came to power. He had a daughter named Enheduanna. She was a badass, and so he made her High Priestess of An and Nanna, the gods of the sky and the moon, respectively. Enheduanna herself had been a lifelong worshipper of Inanna, the goddess of sex, fertility, and justice; she continued her profound devotion to this female deity even after she was installed as the high priestess of two male gods. Enheduanna performed her functions as high priestess with adroitness and political savvy for many years, until her father was overthrown by a warrior named Lugalanne. Lugalanne humiliated and debased Enheduanna. He stripped her of her priestly office, and he exiled her to the wilderness. Enheduanna did what we would all wish to do, if we could, when stripped of our rights, powers, and safety. She used her voice.
And specifically, she used her voice to tell her own story as something like a horror narrative, folded into something like a horror lyric.
But hang on: I thought you said, Eleanor, that horror was invented by the ancient Greeks, and specifically by Euripides?
Great job keeping up with the readings! I did say that, and I stick by it. In Enheduana’s poetry, we’re looking at something like horror, but it is significantly not the same as horror, as I will explain.
Enheduanna addresses Inana, begging her to intercede on Enheduanna’s behalf. The poem, called an “exaltation,” is a prayer. But it’s not a sweet, gentle prayer for succor. It’s a rage-filled, terrifying, oozy, dripping, brutal, withering prayer. And part of its goal is to bring about retribution and revenge on Lugalanne, the man who drove Enheduanna from her temples and from her privileges.
Enheduanna’s prayer begins with her recognizing the tremendous power of her goddess, Inana. She is depicted as somehow above other gods, the queen of all powers, glowing with a frightening light. On the one hand, she is a nurturing queen; on the other, she is a dragon, spitting poison, or a flash flood that rips down the mountains. Enheduanna implores Inana, whom she imagines riding on a lion, as the bringer of storms and the screamer of battle cries. Inana, Enheduanna says, took for herself all the most terrifying powers of all the gods. Even the brave flee before Inana’s coming, “like bats fluttering through ruins,” because they were unable to withstand Inana’s gaze. Her gaze was too much to withstand—forget about her physical power. Inana’s rage cannot be calmed: she fells mountains, she ruins harvests, she burns city gates, she floods rivers with blood. Then Enheduanna turns to her own personal misfortune. She describes how she fled from Lugalanne, who had given her a ritual dagger of suicide and self-mutilation. And she begs Inana for favor and protection; she begs her for mercy.
At this point, the poem breaks into a series of exhortations to Inana, where Enheduana begs her to let mankind know her true strength, to know that she grinds skulls to powder, crushing rebels and eating corpses like a lion or like a dog. Her gaze is terrifying, and always overcomes any challenge.
Inana is a terrifying, powerful, all-punishing, all-judging, all-avenging monstrous goddess. All the other gods—including Inana’s own parents—tremble before her. All humans tremble before her. She is unimaginable, beyond comprehension, and beyond normal affect. She demands to be feared, even by her own high priestess.
Enheduanna does fear her, but she also seeks her aid, as Enheduanna creeps around furtively in forests, banished from her former power by Lugalanne. In one particularly brutal passage of the poem, Enheduanna laments to Inana that Lugalanne smeared his “spit-soaked hand” across her “mouth of honey.” Here, the image of a honeyed mouth clearly conveys something about Enheduanna’s role as a priestess and poet of the gods, someone who speaks sweet truths; the image of the spit-soaked hand invokes Lugalanne’s scorn for her, his will to defile and brutalize her. This image may, indeed, be intended to invoke a rape scene, as some scholars have argued. Enheduanna is being humiliated, brought low, but she lifts her voice to Inana, pleading to her as a “divine ecstatic wild cow” or a bull who can hunt down and destroy Lugalanne.
Inana embodies an ancient, terrifying, all-powerful female divinity, capable not only of beauty and light, but also—and seemingly more often—of destruction, vengeance, punishment, and crushing power. Inana is a goddess, and she is also a monster. She is nurturing, and she is brutal. She is a mother, and a scourge. Because in the worldview of ancient Assyria, those two categories were apparently entirely compatible with each other. This isn’t a religion like Christianity, where femaleness and maternity have to be tempered and reduced by virtues like passivity, suffering, purity, and demureness. No, Inana isn’t part of the virgin/whore dialectic. She is not a virgin, by any stretch; in fact, she’s the goddess of love, sex, fertility, prostitution, war, and justice. She is a wild, brutal, all-daring queen of the skies, and she cannot be traduced.
Put briefly: Enheduanna lives in a culture where imagining the horrifying mother as someone deserving of worship, honor, and prayer is possible. She lives in a culture where something utterly terrifying to the post-agricultural Western mind—a devouring, brutal, bestial woman—is being sought after for help and comfort. The monster mother is the advocate. The monstrous female is the warrior and savior. The demonic woman is the agent for revenge, but also for salvation and redress. She is justice.
Wait, what? The monstrous female isn’t just a monster? How can this be horror, then?
Well, it’s not. This poem represents a kind of supernatural power, violence, and brutality—embodied in Inana—that is not random, not malicious, not sadistic, but is instead connected to a profound sense of universal righteousness. A righteousness, it must be noted, that doesn’t come easy: Enheduanna herself has to convince Inana to take up her battle; Inana is not easily won over, because she chooses where to devote her energies. She is not out of control, even though she can unleash chaos. She is not a torturer, even though she can be brutal. She is not mean, evil, or foul. She is beautiful, fair, and calculated. She is, in a very serious sense, the anti-monster.
Part of her anti-monstrosity is that she works in mutualistic concert with regular humans.
Most conspicuously, she works in a mutualistic relationship with the poet-woman who represents her on earth. After all, Enheduanna gives birth to this poem for her, as an encomium and exaltation. Inana benefits from Enheduanna’s words, just as Enheduanna hopes to benefit from Inana’s power. So “The Exaltation of Inana” is an almost-but-not-quite horror poem in which there is an envisioned radical mutuality between the “monster” (Inana) and the “victim” (Enheduanna). A victim who was abused by someone other than Inana herself. This is so far outside our general frame of reference for horror, and so far outside our general frame of reference for religious belief, it’s hard to know how to respond to this poem.
But here’s my suggestion: we have to think seriously about the early history of patriarchy. In a historical moment before it was absolutely established that women were property and that goddesses had to be subordinated to a single, male deity, the monstrous, the salvific, and the female were not at loggerheads with each other. Right? Jesus, Satan, and Mary have to be kept distinct, in the service of a Christian narrative that privileges male power as the source of both salvation and punishment, but banishes female power to a far lesser realm of passive suffering and radical acceptance. In “The Exaltation of Inana,” the goddess is both savior and punisher, as well as source of nurturance. And all the while, Enheduanna understands herself—as priestess as poet—as a powerful player as well. The alienation of praiseworthy femaleness from monstrosity, power, and salvific ability is part and parcel of the “world historical defeat of the female sex” that happened with the rise and consolidation of agriculture.
By the time of the Hellenic Greeks, with their profoundly patriarchal social structure, the monstrous female was concentrated squarely in the Furies, or their human avatars, the Bacchae. Scary, unpredictable, dangerous, and evil. The Romans had their witches (about whom, more soon), and there was nothing redeemable, beautiful, or salvific about them. The multiplicity, the richness and repletion in the character of Inana reflects a social world that can admit of different modes of female power. It is a culture that is not purely horrified by the power of women, not eager to consign it to the realm of the unnatural, the ugly, the repulsive, and the evil. Quite the contrary, the female goddess Inana can be a deity of warcraft, ecological collapse, fear, punishment, justice-doling, and murder, but she’s also the sword of justice and the wild cow—cows being absolutely central to the food production of ancient Mesopotamia.
Inana, put otherwise, is what we have before patriarchy has come into its fullest form, and before female power has become equivalent to monstrous evil.
In the thousand or so years following Enheduana’s life and writings, the overarching pattern of social change was toward increasingly rigid patriarchal social structures. Inana and the broader pantheon of at least somewhat egalitarian Assyrian deities gives way to the ascendency of Marduk, the god who defeats all the other gods and is set up as the Babylonian god of ultimate power. Concomitant with his ascendency in Babylonian religious culture is the permanent disempowering, devaluing, and commodifying of women.
Much as I love horror art, horror narratives, and horror film, I have to admit that reading Enheduanna’s “Exaltation of Inana” made me wish there were more exultant encomia to women out there for me—and my students and my children—to read. So I’ll end this particular post with a plea of my own, to you, not to Inana: please write stories for our sons and daughters, stories that flout this most central rule by which patriarchal culture disempowers and commodifies women, this rule by which powerful women are ugly, scary, monstrous, and incapable of justice, kindness, mercy, or salvation. Let’s have some exaltations, dear readers! And if you know of any, please post to the comments—I’ll gladly take on some homework of my own!