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FOREWORD
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases:
It will never Pass into nothingness ..."
(Keats, J. Endymion 1:1.)
This is a love story: not just of one person's love for another, although it has been the foundation and inspiration for every such story ever told.
This is the story of all of humanity's love for a Goddess more omnipotent, terrifying and glorious than God himself: yet also more truly human, pragmatic and immanent.
This is a tribute to Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth; Ishtar in Akkadian; Goddess of the Morning, and of the Evening Star. Daughter of the Moon, sister of the Sun, she is Patroness of what makes us essentially human - love and war - like it or lump it.
From the time of the first appearance of burial rites in homo sapiens paintings and carvings indicate that our ancestors worshipped (or were at least fascinated by) a Mother Goddess. But, at a time which Joseph Campbell is able to fix at almost precisely 3,200 BCE, our forebears reached the threshold of a quantum leap in cultural development: differentiation of the feminine archetype.
"All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born ..." (Yeats. Easter 1916) *
Awareness of this new force within us, a Goddess who challenged rather than mothering us, shocked us so we nearly lost our sanity. She has frightened so many for so long that even today people devote their whole existence to the pointless exercise of ignoring or denying her presence. But She inspired us. We now know that Sumer was not the cradle of civilisation so far as writing etc, are concerned. But Sumer was the culture that brought it all together.
Inanna has been worshipped for longer than Judaism and Christianity have existed. She was adored and feared two thousand years before Genesis was written. Then, at the height of Roman imperialism, we lost sight of Her. She was never lost: we were; for two dark millennia in mainstream Europe, and we paid dearly for it. More death, more violence, more suppression of the natural human spirit, for men as much as for women, than in all of human history. Suppressing an archetype does not make it go away; we merely receive the negative manifestations of it.
When the Celtic legends resurfaced as the Grail myth, we nearly rediscovered Her a thousand years ago, but turned away again, incapable or not yet led by people honest enough to comprehend such power, beauty and completeness. The alchemists and Hermetic philosophers came quite close, but were hidebound by the chauvinism of the old ways of the Church and the Greeks.
Now science, technology, and most important, psychology, have advanced to a stage where we can see her again. She is returning to consciousness like a shaft of starlight to enrich our minds and delight our hearts. For She it is who represents the ultimate act of civilised humanity, because She personifies the highest form of consciousness, the final phase of what Jung called the process of Individuation - the act of discovering who we really are - not perfect, just authentic, just human.
"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me." (Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason, conclusion.)
Inanna represents both. This is Her story.
Please Note: As some readers have found the full text version rather hard going – let’s face it; it is a PhD thesis! – an ‘easier’ version appears on my personal website at
http://www.zyworld.com/DrBernardSButler
