Free Seductress by Betsy Prioleau

Accompanied by tigi music, the congregation wound up the spiraling ziggurat to the chapel at the top. Women, as usual, dressed with holy flamboyance—flounced, form-fitting one-shouldered kaunakes with gold hoop earrings, diadems, and stacks of bracelets.
    The priestess who played Inanna, the nugig (woman of highest rank), wore the most spectacular attire and dramatic makeup and smelled like a living censer, having bathed and perfumed herself for days beforehand. Her hair, a huge turn-on for Sumerians, was coiled in a wreath of thick braids, surrounded by “small locks” and gold ribbons. Once within the high altar, the nugig accepted the king’s gift offerings, then serenaded him with lascivious verses, praising her “honey-man’s” erection, and itemizing how she would “holy churn” and pleasure him.
    At the climax of the service they repaired to a bed on the dais and copulated, to the ecstatic cries of the assembly. Inanna had revealed herself, charged the king with semidivinity, and reinvigorated the world. A blowout carnival of license followed. Possessed by their goddess, the “one-who-is-joy,” the community joined in a rhapsodic orgy of games, feasts, dances, music, intoxicants, and wholesale coupling.
    After the Babylonians adopted Inanna and renamed her Ishtar, she began to lose her luster among Sumerian divinities. As the archfascinator Ishtar in The Epic of Gilgamesh, she failed to conquer the hero, even though she deployed all of Inanna’s wiles and added extra enticements. Despite her bribes of endless wealth, political power, and jeweled chariots, the mighty Gilgamesh stood his ground. He scorned her lures and sex appeal and read her a long lecture on her loose morals. At this point in mythology the seductress began her metamorphosis into the femme fatale. With all the fury of a woman scorned, Ishtar declared war on Gilgamesh and destroyed him. Ishtar became an icon of predatory female sexuality, the mantis lady red in tooth and claw.
    But unofficially Ishtar’s cult persisted and prospered for centuries. Inanna/Ishtar was too compelling, too magnetic an archetype to be swallowed up by patriarchy without a trace. Excavations in one city, Alalakh, contained temples to her at fifteen different levels, and throughout the ancient world she resurfaced with new names: Astarte, Asherah, and finally, in a slightly altered form, Aphrodite.

Aphrodite
    Unlike her sister Athena, Aphrodite did not spring full blown from Zeus’s head but developed incrementally from a mélange of earlier goddesses. She came late to the Greek pantheon, a Near Eastern import who smuggled a powder keg into Attic culture—she-power and the raging tumult of sexual passion.
    The patriarchal Athenians did what they could to curb her. They limited her job description to romantic love, restaged her myths, frowned on her festivals, and prettied her up, but she burst through their definitions and became “the most potent goddess.” A PC Grecian makeover couldn’t efface centuries of worship. An amalgam of the archaic Serpent Goddess and Inanna, she threw Olympus into confusion and attracted one of the most enthusiastic cults of classical times.
    Although the Greeks demoted her from her central place in the cosmos, Aphrodite preserved much of her earlier all-inclusive preeminence. In the original story of her birth she united the powers of heaven and hearth and inherited jurisdiction over both. After the sky god’s semen fell on mother ocean, Aphrodite arose miraculously from the foam. She supervised mankind as queen of the world and sailed through the empyrean as empress of the great above in a chariot drawn by swans.
    The sea birth also signaled her regenerative powers. As statues of her with snakes coiled on her arms indicate, she was a resurrection goddess of life renewal. Wherever she stepped, roses, crocuses, hyacinths, and lilies sprang up in her path like a magical May Day processional. She was a walking “cosmic generative