The Tomb and the Womb (Continued)

by Hal Duncan

The Stripping of the Flesh

In "The Descent of Inanna," one of the oldest myths we have of death and rebirth — one with such staying power that modern fantasists such as myself or Catherynne M. Vallente are still drawn to retell it — the Sumerian goddess Inanna, Queen of Heaven, hears the call of the "Great Below" from her throne–room in the "Great Above." A feisty, ambitious girl with a string of abandoned lovers behind her and her gaze set on the destiny in front of her, she gathers her objects of power and, on "the road of no return," descends into the Kur, where Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead, rules a city of dust and ash.

Like the Greek netherworld, Hades, the Kur has its gates — seven of them — and a keeper to warn away the unwary. Inanna gains entrance to this Hell under false pretences, and as she enters through each gate she is stripped, item by item, of all her symbols of power and royalty until she stands in Ereshkigal's throne–room, "naked and bowed low," whereupon she is seized by the Anunnaki, chthonic spirits of the ancestral dead, and scourged, hung on a hook like a wineskin.

The ancestors act similarly on shamans of the Siberian Tungus. Joseph Campbell quotes one such shaman, describing the transformation he underwent after lying sick for an entire year: "My ancestors appeared to me and began to shamanize. They stood me up like a block of wood and shot at me with their bows until I lost consciousness. They cut up my flesh, they separated my bones and counted them, and they ate my flesh raw."

The Greek god Dionysus, suffers a similar fate: seized by Titans, torn limb from limb, and boiled in a cauldron to be feasted upon; rescued and restored by his grandmother, Rhea. His epithet Dithyrambus — "Twice-born" — might just as easily relate to this as to the variant tale where his second birth is from Zeus's thigh. The female followers of Dionysus wreak this same savagery upon any beast or man who crosses their path. King Pentheus, in Euripides's The Bacchae, spies on their rituals and is ripped apart by his own mother. Orpheus meets the same grim end. While the stories have the latter murdered for preaching against the cult, Robert Graves considered his death a sign that Orpheus represented, originally, the initiate of the Dionysiac mysteries, his ordeal a record of ancient rites that sound not unlike the shamanism described by Campbell.

If we want a modern version of this dismemberment and reconstitution, it's tempting to look to the Marvel comics character, Wolverine, who, in a hidden base in the wilderness, has his bones removed and replaced with an adamantium skeleton by the unfeeling elders of modern magic — scientists. Surly, cynical and cigar–smoking, his past life tokened with the dogtags of the dead soldier, there's something of the shaman, perhaps, to that suspect and suspicious outsider. It's a fanciful idea but isn't the superhero the flip–side of the vampire, an archetype of rebirth just as the latter is an archetype of death? With the obvious exception of Superman and a few like souls, the superhero usually has their origin story of being transformed, often by some near–death experience. Batman is driven to remake himself by his encounter with death — the death of his parents — at an early age, but better examples can be found in Spiderman or the Hulk. Again and again we see radiation or some similarly lethal force as the cause of the empowering transformation. Where the vampire's rebirth is incomplete, with the superhero it is the death that is incomplete, their old self not destroyed but living on in tension with the new identity, an emblem of the normalcy they've lost.

Buffy seems to carry all these elements of the death–and–rebirth tale. Those elements are out of sequence and revised as the story–arcs progress, but it's interesting to see how the retro–continuity reconstructs the story towards the underlying myth. Buffy's superhero status is established with an origin that's less transformation than awakening; we're given to understand, at first, that she is born with her powers, the chosen one of her generation, simply unaware of them. Later in the series, however, we learn that these powers are transferred to the new slayer when the old slayer dies (and we learn this, mind, after Buffy herself dies and is brought back to life). Later still we learn that the slayer is herself demonic, when Buffy, in a vision, confronts the ancient elders, the ancestral spirits, who made a deal with the powers of death, binding a demon into the original slayer in a magical ritual. After another death and resurrection we're even shown a Buffy who identifies with the very creatures she hunts, her world a living Hell because she is as dead to it as they are, no longer quite human, no longer capable of emotional engagement.

It is as if the simple set–up of a little girl going face–to–face with the forces of darkness is striving to expand into the old pattern, as if the melodramatics of Buffy's mundane adolescent miseries — of her heartbreaks and hardships — are reaching to become the mythics of Inanna's flesh being stripped from her body — of her harrowing of Hell.

Lamentations

In "The Descent of Inanna," it is only the pleas of her loyal maidservant to the god Enki that lead to her release, Enki sending emissaries to bargain with Ereshkigal for her freedom; they win Ereshkigal's favor with sympathetic laments for the sheer misery of being Queen of the Dead; when she offers them a boon they ask for the corpse of Inanna.

Freedom from Death, though, comes at a cost. Inanna walks out of Hell with demons at her back, following her from town to town as she visits each of her dutifully mourning sons in turn. Finally she arrives in Uruk where her lover, young Dumuzi, lazes under a tree of golden apples, luxuriating in his shining robes. With a hellion wrath, Inanna curses the shepherd–boy turned king and the demons pounce; they seize Dumuzi, to drag him down to take her place in Hell.

Inanna's tale is possibly less familiar to the reader than the comparable Greek story of Persephone, abducted by Hades, god of the underworld, to be his wife. Persephone, often referred to as Kore (the Greek term for "maiden") was so beautiful that Death claimed her for his own, a mythic echo, perhaps, of the sentiment voiced by many attempting to console those who have lost a loved one "before their time."

A less dynamic character than impetuous Inanna, Persephone is the passive victim in this version of the tale, but the differences in the tales only highlight the similarities. Demeter, her mother is the Earth goddess, whose grief for Persephone is so consuming that the world itself is made desolate, as she refuses to let the grain grow. The loss of Persephone thus brings drought, famine, unending winter; similarly, the absence of Inanna, goddess of the grain store and the date palm, results in an infertile world where "no bull mounted a cow, [no donkey impregnated a jenny]," and much of the Inanna story is taken up with the lamentations of her maid before various gods, bemoaning the desolation.

To the scholars of the Victorian period it seemed obvious that these tales were echoes of ritual sacrifices required for the replenishment of the world — divine blood shed to fertilize the earth — or more abstract articulations of the cycles of nature. We need only look at the Aztec god, Xipe Totec, who died each year and was flayed, found to be gold beneath his skin, like the maize shelled after harvesting. His death was re–enacted in rituals with priests wearing flayed skins of sacrificial victims, touching individuals with defleshed bones to magically impart fertility. To the Victorians it seemed obvious that gods or goddesses die and are reborn because they represent the sun which dies each dusk and is reborn each dawn, or the moon which dies each month and is reborn three days later, or the greenery of the earth which dies each winter and is reborn each summer.

Even before texts were discovered to confirm this then, it was assumed that Inanna's lover Dumuzi returned from the netherworld himself on an annual cycle, spending half the year in the netherworld and half the year free, just as his Greek counterpart Adonis spent his summers on earth with Aphrodite before returning to his other lover, Persephone, below. The comparable symbols made the comparable structures obvious; and eventually it was confirmed with the discovery of texts showing that, yes, Dumuzi was indeed reborn.

However it would be reductionist to take these tales as animistic agricultural allegories and nothing else. One might equally well argue the reverse, that the cosmic action is a metaphor for the human action, that the desolation and regeneration of the earth can just as easily be read as an example of the Pathetic Fallacy, the Romantic device of projecting a mental state onto the external world. It may be a modern error, true, reading these tales of death and rebirth outside of their ancient context, to see the story as more psychological than seasonal, but a major component of these tales is the lament of the living for the dead and, whether voiced by Inanna's maid or Persephone's mother, this could point us towards a more sophisticated reading of these tales as explorations of grief.

We have already mentioned Dumuzi and his flight from the demons of the netherworld. His tale is told in the poem "Dumuzi's Dream," picking up where "The Descent of Inanna" left off, with the demons seizing the gentle shepherd–boy to drag him down to the netherworld. It is in the link between the two tales — the demons who shadow Inanna and who become the hellhounds on Dumuzi's trail — that we can see something deeper than a mere allegory of nature and fertility. Those demons, the ugallu, are pitiless creatures; fatherless, motherless, they recognize no bonds of family; neither eating nor drinking, they have no appreciation of the joys of life. They are like chronic schizophrenics devoid of affect. They are dead men walking, the Starkweathers of Sumer.

This is where these tales of death and rebirth become personal, psychological, because those demons are, one might say, Inanna's own rage unbound. They are the hatred and resentment of that which still lives. They are grief for the death of one's own soul. They have no emotions because they are the emotions.

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