Ishtar: Love and War

The thing I like about Ishtar is that she breaks life down well for me. To me life is love and war, or maybe it is the mood I’m in. But if you think about it…without love you wouldn’t have hate and without hate you wouldn’t have war. You have to feel passionately about something in order to feel strongly enough to want to kill lots of people (in war) for it, right?

So it’s appropriate (in my world anyway) for the Assyrian goddess of love, fertility, and sex to also be the goddess of war. Yes, I know that she (or rather her followers) were really about sex, but my focus here is love and war. There are lots of interesting stories about love, betrayal, and who was doing what with who. Kind of like modern day drama reality shows, except on a divine level.

Unlike her contemporary gods and goddesses of love, she was just a bit more hard core. For anyone interested in finding out more about Ishtar there are really only two myths that relate to her directly. The story of Gilgamesh tells of Ishtar throwing herself at him and how karma (different culture but you get what I mean, right?) bites her. Another myth describes Ishtar’s decent into hell and then her return trip. All pretty interesting stuff, if you like love and war anyway.

What do you think of Ishtar? Who is your favorite love goddess?

Photo Credit: CarbonNYC

July 31st, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Gods | (0)