Inanna Comes to Me in a Dream

Betty Meador

In the late 1970s I had a strange dream. I'm with a group of women, four or five of us. In a ceremonial manner, we are planting two tall stick-like objects on the grave of an older woman, who at the time was a friend. Below the objects, we place two tied bundles of palm fronds. That done, we proceed in the same manner to prepare the grave of her “husband”– planting identical tall sticks whose tops curve around in a circle like a head, and laying two bundles of palm fronds. In reality the woman and man were alive and were not married to each other. In the dream the woman was already buried, while the man sat on the edge of his bed near the door of his house and acknowledged the solemn preparations as we proceeded to arrange the objects on his grave.

The dream came shortly after I had been certified as a Jungian analyst. The older couple in the dream were both analysts, my elders and my teachers. The man was a well-known author and recognized senior presence in the training program. The woman had for many years been a mentor to me. The dream portrays a sequence in which the elders are passing on. I am no longer their student, but have a new identity with a dedicated group of women involved in a common task of ritual burial.

But what was the strange stick-like figure? And why the palm fronds? I searched a few books that I owned and asked other analysts, but no answers turned up. Some months later, while reading Eric Neumann's The Great Mother, I came across an illustration of a stone trough.¹ On the trough were carved “stick” figures almost identical to the ones in the dream. The caption said the figures belonged to the Great Mother and credited the illustration to another book, The Gate of Horn by Gertrude Rachael Levy.²

Levy worked at archeological sites in Iraq before World War II. During the war, when sites were unavailable, she began to research apparent common religious images and structures from different parts of the ancient world. Her book is based on this research. The book was out of print in this country. I ordered it from England. Weeks later, it finally arrived. The stick symbol in the dream appeared in Levy's book as a post made of tied reeds. The reed post often occurs on either side of a doorway or gate in Mesopotamian iconography. Levy connected the symbol to the sacred tree of other ancient cultures. She discovered the reed post to be the symbol of the goddess Inanna, whom she, like Neumann, designated as a mother goddess.

From the mid-fourth millennium B.C.E. almost until the Common Era, a period of 3000 years, Inanna was one of the most significant Mesopotamian deities – some say the most important deity in the ancient Near East. As I read more of Inanna's mythology, I discovered that she was never a mother. Among her many attributes, she is known as the goddess who unites with the king in the annual Sacred Marriage ritual. In Sumerian songs and poems of the Sacred Marriage, she initiates sexual encounters, enticing her chosen lover Dumuzi. As a warrior, she leads kings who are dedicated to her into battle and assures their success. The stately symbol of the reed post was the earliest cuneiform pictograph of her name. Its appearance on clay tablets or in sculptured artifacts designates her presence. Inanna was also goddess of the date palms which grew in abundance in ancient Iraq.

I tell this personal story out of a conviction that women searching for individual identities outside the androcentric collective religions can look into their own depths to find images that give their lives meaning in the present world. Spontaneous symbolic images can be understood as metaphors. When an individual interacts with the symbol as metaphor, she may be surprised at the self-knowledge that unfolds.

My own choices have been informed by such reflection in an imaginative process fueled by dreams and by desire. Symbolic images carry meaning from an apparent source deep in the unconscious mind, a source richer than the ego-conscious self. Inanna came into my dream at a cataclysmic time in my life when I had made a fateful choice to trust desire instead of societal rules “good girls” should follow.

During my analytic training, trust in the inner imaginative dialogue became an essential element of self-exploration. This dialogue reveals that maps of individual identity are latent in the depths of the psyche. There are direction-arrows on the maps, some pointing backward toward configurations formed in the past, others forward toward potential expansion of the self. The back and forth of map exploration activates healing of past injury as well as evolution of personal identity toward a meaningful sense of purpose and a coherent sense of self. This long process of analysis involved a wise elder with whom I worked, able to hold in memory and understanding the emerging directions of exploration and development of the nascent self. Analysis is one way, but many other avenues fuel the constellation of a true self and enable a woman to recognize and deal with the barriers, the road blocks that obstruct her progression toward more adequate realization and expression of her authentic self. This essential self-examination takes many forms. Each person has to find her own way.

Inanna's Pictographic Sign

I say with certainty that at the time of my dream I had never heard of Inanna, much less ever seen her pictographic sign. I do remember in second grade, my teacher, Miss Ida Hardiman, gave the class an assignment to write a letter to a classmate, a letter written entirely in pictographs. I was excited – clearly energized in view of the fact that I still remember the assignment seventy years later. I chose to write my friend Marticia Ratteree. “Dear Marticia,” I began. Dear/deer was easy. I knew how to draw a deer. “Marticia” was more of a challenge. I think I wrote “mar,” then drew a piece of crinkled tissue paper. The rest I have forgotten.

The invention of writing began with a similar urge, although its inventors were adults, merchants in what grew to be an elaborate trading venture. The center of this culture was in Uruk, a city on the Euphrates in southern Iraq. The Uruk culture in the second half of the fourth millennium B.C.E. surpassed in social complexity as well as economic achievement all competing societies in that part of the world. Their social organization included an elaborate pantheon of deities and a tradition of ritual worship. The merchants were Sumerians, who successfully traded their products for the raw materials they lacked, traveling with their goods far into northern Iraq, into present-day Syria, Turkey, and east into Iran, building roads that crisscrossed the entire northern plain. The first clay artifacts of their numerical calculations and their rapidly standardizing pictographs of items for trade date from 3200 B.C.E. This early notation was the beginning of the invention of true writing and of cuneiform script, a script that neighboring cultures later adopted to write their own languages. This script endured almost into the Common Era. The expansion that the Uruk merchants began - transporting their language, their building styles, their pantheon throughout the trading area - has been designated the first instance of momentum toward empire. The largest complex of buildings in the city of Uruk belonged to the Eanna, the temple of Uruk's principle deity, Inanna.

Early in the development of writing, unique pictographic signs depicted each individual deity. For the Sumerians, a drawn image or pictograph was a visible representation of an invisible divine being. Thus, in the area of the sacred, writing belonged intimately to the invisible world of the deities as well as to the visible world of the humans. Just as prayer and ritual placed human beings in the presence of the divine, the “writing” of a divine name brought that invisible being into the presence of the human worshipers. The drawing or sculpture of the reed post of Inanna was Inanna. This symbol, so engrained in the human psyche, seeped into the dream of a 21st century woman, announcing the passing of the dominant old order and the return of the complexity of the divine feminine.

The implications of the dream with its striking image offered many clues, some of which I've already reported. The woman I had revered was dead, ceremonially honored as her voice was silenced. The male voice, that is, a dying component of male influence, seemed to acquiesce in the transition to the authority of the female divinity. Inside my personal psychological domain, a new figure appears, the image of a 6000-year-old female deity. She claims her turf on the grave of patriarchal thinking.

Who is Inanna

Inanna's symbol in the dream is central to the identity of the dream's small group of women. She signified the dynamic force that had brought them together and around which they gathered. A 6000-year-old mythological image carries meaning to the attention of women in the modern era – confronting our cultural boundaries, inviting dialogue. I was determined to learn who she was. Shortly after having the dream, I searched in a local library, only to find general – and frankly, dry – information about her. Then by chance I came across an issue of the journal Parabola that contained translations by a noted Assyriologist, Samuel Noah Kramer, translations of songs from the Sumerian Sacred Marriage ritual. The songs praised Inanna's “wondrous vulva,” as a “new moon crescent beauty” (my translation).³ Eager to read more, I found Kramer's original scholarly translations in a university library. There I learned that the Sacred Marriage hymns comprise a whole genre of Sumerian literature.

What did the words in this strange language actually mean? What was the word for “vulva” in Sumerian? I was compelled to see the original. I found a willing graduate student at a nearby university. We began a long process of working on the poems. I would take the student's word-for-word translations and try to shape the poems into readable verse. Here is a portion of one of the first poems I translated:

peg my vulva
my star-sketched horn of the Dipper
moor my slender boat of heaven
my new moon crescent beauty
I wait an unplowed desert
fallow field for the wild ducks
my high mound longs for the floodlands

my vulva hill is open
this maid asks who will plow it
vulva moist in the floodlands
the queen asks who brings the ox

the king, Lady, will plow it
Dumuzi, king, will plow it

plow then man of my heart
holy water-bather loins

holy Ninegal am I ⁴

These were sacred songs, some of whose content editors of contemporary news media might not print. The poems glorified a woman's sexuality and portrayed her as initiating sexual encounters. Inanna's aggressive sensuality challenges modernity's strict standards for “nice girl” acceptable behavior.

Stepping back from the dream, a person rightfully asks: how does one conceptualize the apparent store of images that appear spontaneously in dreams and in the imagination? The occurrence of the images implies a residue of ancient myth and symbol in the human psyche. Strange images appear in the creative imagination, and likewise turn up unbidden in dreams.

Naturally, I asked what it meant that Inanna was inserting herself into my dream. To ask this question was to imply that a present-day woman could find personal meaning interacting with a mythological image, that ancient myth could engage contemporary culture in a creative dialogue. This intriguing possibility unfolded as I followed my interest in Inanna.

Inanna Goes on the Road

My first encounter with Inanna's mythology revealed an unapologetic female deity delighting in her strong sexual desire. A group of friends and I, one a doctoral student in theater, composed a performance of my translations of Sacred Marriage poems, whose story followed Inanna from naïve maiden, to aggressive lover, to marriage conjoined with Dumuzi in the abundant luxury of love and sexuality fulfilled. We arranged a venue to present our piece to a group of psychologically-minded persons, in the unlikely location of a large Episcopal church. A renegade priest picketed our performance. Three similar groups up and down the coast of California invited us to perform for them. All the performances were enthusiastically received.

During this period, I moved to a city whose large university had a noted department of Near Eastern Studies. Through my contact with the chairperson of the department, I arranged to work privately with a member of the faculty for further translation. An expert in the language, this man helped me re-translate the Sacred Marriage poems. Next we worked on the poignant myth of Inanna's Descent to the Underworld. This myth and the love poems became the core of my book Uncursing the Dark. ⁵

As we completed these translations, my instructor asked whether I had seen the three Inanna poems of the Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna. Eager to continue, I agreed to begin work on the Enheduana poems.

Enheduanna was high priestess to the Sumerian moon god Nanna in Ur, the city in southern Sumer from which Abraham and Sarah departed in the mid-second millennium. Enheduanna had been appointed priestess by her father Sargon, whose conquests built the first empire in history, 2300 B.C.E. Her long tenure at Ur established a precedent in which the daughter of the king occupied the prestigious office of high priestess to the moon god. This precedent was followed for 500 years after Enheduanna's death.

Enheduanna is the first author of record. Inanna was her personal deity. Her three poems to Inanna - a diary-like account of her interactions with her goddess, in pleas of anguish, in scolding, praising, and adoration - contain the first record of a historical individual's voice. Enheduanna's writing is the earliest literature in which a known author speaks in the first person. She says to Inanna, “I am yours/ why do you slay me?” Her poetic imagery is stunning, but most striking is her personal voice speaking passionately from 4000 years in the past. Translations of her three Inanna poems appear in my book Inanna – Lady of Largest Heart.⁶

As high priestess in Ur, Enheduanna held the most important religious office in the land. In addition to the three Inanna poems, she is credited with 42 Temple Hymns in which she sings praises to deities occupying the main temples in each of the principle cities. All 42 of the hymns would originally have been written on the front, back, and sides of a single clay tablet, about the size of your palm. 36 tablet fragments of the Temple Hymns remain, from which scholars are able to piece together the whole composition.

The hymns are arranged primarily in the geographical order of their cities – south to north. Famous for their encyclopedic lists, the Sumerians gave great weight to the first items in any sequence. The honored first place in the Temple Hymn list goes to Enki's temple in Eridu, thereby acknowledging the primacy of the theology of Enki – a trickster god of divination and magic, of sweet waters, and principle actor in an ancient creation myth. Enheduanna placed Enki first - fateful, unbridled Enki, who rescued Inanna from the underworld, whose self-induced ejaculation filled both the Euphrates and the Tigris with life-giving sweet waters. The second hymn is written to the temple of Enlil in the holy city of Nippur. Great Enlil was the deity who crowned kings, whose deliberations decided disputes. By her choice Enheduanna favored Enki's instinct and compassion over Enlil's law-giving and deliberation. Enheduanna wrote three of the hymns to temples of Inanna, each emphasizing a different attribute – her sensuality, her heavenly origin as the morning and evening star, and her role as warrior. Three hymns belong to temples of Ninhursag, the formidable mother goddess and one of the Sumerians' three original deities. Three also belong to the moon god Nanna, honored throughout the Near East as arbiter of time, and Inanna's father. The hymn in honored final position is written to Nisaba, goddess of writing, of science, and of creative mind. Temples of some 30 additional deities each receive one – sometimes two - of Enheduanna's original hymns. The final colophon after hymn 42 to Nisaba says: “the person who bound this tablet together / is Enheduanna / my king something never before created / did not this one give birth to it.” Thus ends this work of the first author of record, a woman, a high priestess, and the world's first known poet. My translations of the Temple Hymns will appear in 2009 in Princess, Priestess, Poet – The Sumerian Temple Hymns of Enheduanna.⁷

For almost thirty years, a compelling interest that began when I discovered Inanna's dazzling sensuality has led me to translate Sumerian literature, to teach students, to speak to interested groups, and to publish the sacred writings of an ancient religion that praises a spectrum of divine images of women as well as men. This trek led me to Enheduanna – a passionate devotee of Inanna, a brilliant poet, a revered high priestess, esteemed dream interpreter, the first human being to leave a record of her struggle with the depths of her inner being. All this began with a personal dream. Dreams are free. The riches they offer are priceless.

Eric Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p 124.
Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1948).
Parabola, Winter, 1980, review of forthcoming book Inanna – Queen of Heaven and Earth by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer (New York: Harper and Row, 1983).
Betty De Shong Meador, Uncursing the Dark (Wilmette, Illinois.: Chiron Publications, 1992), 59-60.
Ibid.
Betty De Shong Meador, Inanna – Lady of Largest Heart (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
Betty De Shong Meador, Princess, Priestess, Poet – The Sumerian Temple Hymns of Enheduanna (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).

About the author

Betty De Shong Meador, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst, member and past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Her translations of Sumerian poetry related to Inanna appear in her book Uncursing the Dark. She has published all the known work of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna, the first author of record and devotee of Inanna, in Inanna - Lady of Largest Heart and the forthcoming Princess, Priestess, Poet - The Sumerian Temple Hymns of Enheduanna. Meador lives on a ranch in San Diego County where she and her husband manage a small vineyard.

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