When stars were many and people few, a great story was told everywhere. The first storytellers were women. Their story was so large it filled the universe it told of a Great Mother encompassing life, death and return of everything. When Neolithic farming people settled, and depended on plentiful crops and herds, a goddess of fertility stepped into stardom. Inanna is the Sumerian goddess of love, crescent moon, evening star, fertility and renewal. She is the longest lasting supreme goddess of the Ancient Near East. Inannas biography includes her rise to supreme holder of almost all the powers of culture and civilization. 5000 year old poems bring Inanna to life. She sings to her miraculous vulva and to her consort-lover; she struggles to keep her powers and complains of her losses and demotions. Inanna represents lifes powerful contradictions. She changes peace to war and back again; she causes strife and brings love; she turns women into men and men into women. Inanna loves all her people, every one. A biography must have adversity and Inanna has plenty; she must always conquer of the ever-rising tide of patriarchal domination in all its forms. Buried and forgotten for two millennia, she now steps from the dust, ties up her sandals, applies her kohl, adjusts her tiara, summons her lions, and returns. Her story is also womans story. Let me introduce you to Inanna, Queen of Heaven, Earth, and almost everything

This reference offers reliable knowledge about women's diverse faith practices throughout history and prehistory, and across cultures. Across the span of human history, women have participated in world-building and life-sustaining cultural creativity, making enormous contributions to religion and spirituality. In the contemporary period, women have achieved greater equality, with more educational opportunities, female role models in public life, and opportunities for religious expression than ever before. Contemporaneously with this increased visibility, women are actively and energetically engaging with religion for themselves and for their communities. Drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars, this reference chronicles the religious experiences of women across time and cultures. The book includes sections on major religions as well as on spirituality, African religions, prehistoric religions, and other broad topics. Each section begins with an introduction, followed by reference entries on specialized subjects along with excerpts from primary source documents. The entries provide numerous suggestions for further reading, and the book closes with a detailed bibliography.

A fresh retelling of the ancient texts about Ishtar, the world's first goddess. Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. "A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A fresh retelling of the ancient texts about Ishtar, the world's first goddess. Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. "A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade

Inanna was the great goddess of the Sumerians, a people who lived 5000 year ago in the place we know today as Iraq where was created the first urban civilization in human history. Inanna, the goddess of sexual love and connected with the planet Venus was responsible for the fertility of the land and the later goddesses, the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus adopted many aspects of Inanna. The kings worshipped Inanna and celebrated with her the Sacred Marriage rite, but they also needed her help during the many wars they were waging, which gave Inanna the aspects of a warrior goddess. As love goddess Inanna had a passionate love life and her great love was the shepherd Dumuzi, not a god, but a mortal human who wandered about the steppe with his cattle. The peasants sang love songs about Inanna and Dumuzi during the many feasts of the successive agricultural seasons, believing that their love affair stimulated the fertility of the crops and the fecundity of the livestock. But their idyll was not to last for long as Dumuzi was gruesomely murdered. The answer to the question of who killed Dumuzi and why, is hidden deep in the history of the ancient agrarian communities. The Sumerians wrote their texts on clay tablets that once dried could be preserved until our own day and thanks to this miraculous piece of luck we can cognizance of a number of magnificent hymns and myths written about Inanna. These archaic texts call up human emotions that find an answering response in the hearts of people today and are still capable of moving us deeply. In this book the myths are told against the back ground of Sumerian civilization and various aspects of society from this time are also discussed, such as convent life, divine kingship and funeral rites. One aspect of the funeral rites was The Great Wailing, a rite in which Inanna had an important role and which appears to have been performed in many countries around the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age and has left traces even in the Old and New Testament. Henriette Broekema's book makes the complex character and history of goddess Inanna accessible to the ordinary reader and based on the texts from that time, in twenty six richly illustrated chapters, she succeeds in bringing the astonishing world of the goddess Inanna to life. Bron: Flaptekst, uitgeversinformatie.