Ereshkigal

Ereshkigal is the Mesopotamian queen of the underworld, the land called Irkalla or the Kur, the land of no return, a place of dust and clay where the dead eat clay and are clothed like birds in feathers. She is a grim and jealously guarded sovereign, and the central myth about her is the Descent of Inanna (Akkadian Ishtar): when her sister Inanna comes down, passing through the seven gates and stripped of a garment or emblem at each until she stands naked and powerless, Ereshkigal fixes the eye of death on her and hangs her corpse on a hook, and only a ransom and a substitute win Inanna's release, at the price of her husband Dumuzi taking her place below for part of each year.

The myth survives in two related but distinct versions, an older Sumerian text usually called Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld and a later Akkadian retelling known as Ishtar's Descent, recovered among the tablets of King Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh in the nineteenth century; the two differ in detail, the Sumerian version, for instance, more fully develops the fate of Dumuzi's devoted sister Geshtinanna, who volunteers to share his sentence in the underworld for half of each year so that he need not remain there constantly, a resolution the shorter Akkadian version treats more briefly. Modern Assyriologists read the differences as evidence of a long, evolving oral and scribal tradition behind the story rather than a single fixed original.

A second major myth tells how Ereshkigal came to share her rule. In the story of Nergal and Ereshkigal, the war-god Nergal offends the queen of the dead and is summoned to her realm to answer for it; the encounter turns, in the fuller version, into desire, and Nergal remains below as her consort and co-ruler, so that the underworld gains a king. The tale is one of the ancient Near East's more psychologically vivid narratives, and it fixes the pairing of the death-queen with a violent male god. Ereshkigal has no temple cult of the ordinary kind, the dead were not a source of blessing to petition, but she is invoked in incantations and feared as the power that no one who enters her land escapes. This atlas sets her as the Mesopotamian face of Pluto.

The myth of Ereshkigal and her sister's descent has had a distinct modern afterlife in depth psychology and literature: the Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera's 1981 study Descent to the Goddess drew directly on the Inanna-Ereshkigal narrative as a psychological model for confronting grief, depression and the neglected, shadow side of the self, helping introduce the ancient Mesopotamian myth to a modern therapeutic and feminist readership largely unfamiliar with cuneiform literature otherwise. The reading is a modern interpretive layer rather than any part of ancient Mesopotamian belief, but it is one of the clearest examples of a Sumerian myth being actively taken up and reinterpreted well outside the field of ancient history.