All Alexander's Women

by Robbert Bosschart

Her hymns, and the earlier mythology of the goddess Inanna, have been discovered –copied by many generations of scribes and librarians– on clay tablets of c. 1750 BC, excavated in Nippur at the end of the 19th century. In other archives, similar versions have been found. Put together, they made possible a near complete reconstruction of Enheduanna’s hymns; and of even older texts, like The Descent of Inanna, 412 lines of Sumerian cuneiform text on clay tablets. The opening verse of the Descent says:

  “From the Great Above, the goddess set her mind on the Great Below. Inanna abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the Underworld.”

  It then goes on to tell the following myth. Before leaving, Inanna told her handmaid Ninshubur that if she should fail to return, the maid was to ask for help from various gods. Dressed in all her finery, jewels and insignia of power, Inanna presented herself at the first gate of the Underworld, saying that she had come for the funerary rites of Gugalanna, husband of her sister Queen Ereshkigal.

  The gatekeeper reported this and received the order that Inanna was permitted to proceed upon surrendering her crown.

  “Neti, chief gatekeeper of the Underworld, obeyed his queen:

  He opened the seven gates of the Underworld…

  He said to the pure Inanna: “Come Inanna, enter!”

  But as she entered the first gate, from her head the sugurra, the crown of the steppe, was removed. “What is this?”

  She was told: “Silence, Inanna!

  A divine rule of the Underworld has been fulfilled.

  Inanna, you may not question the rites of the Underworld!”

  A similar procedure followed at each of the gates. One after another, Inanna lost all her insignia and clothing, until finally she entered the Underworld naked. Thus she appeared before Ereshkigal and the Seven Judges of the Underworld, who cast the glance of death upon her. Inanna became a corpse, and her body was hung on a hook like a joint of meat.

  When Ninshubur applied for help, only the god Enki gave assistance. He sent two creatures of his making into the Underworld and had them implore to Ereshkigal that she gave Inanna’s corpse to them. They then sprinkled it with the food of life and the water of life that Enki had provided them, and revived Inanna.

  But Ereshkigal had made them promise that if Inanna returned to the upper world, another person must be sent down as her ransom. So when she came back to earth, a crowd of demons accompanied her seeking a substitute victim.

  Those who had mourned for her were safe. But when this ghastly entourage made its way to Inanna’s own city, Erech, they found her husband, showing no signs of mourning but sitting contentedly on the throne in kingly attire. Inanna, enraged at his callous behaviour, handed Dumuzi over to the demons. Later, however, his sister Geshtinanna was allowed to substitute for him each half year in the Underworld.

  Among various scholarly interpretations of the text, one points at a possible astronomical background to this myth. In Sumer, Inanna is identified in the sky as the planet Venus. At the gate of the Underworld, she said she had come for the funerary rites of Ereshkigal’s husband Gud-gal-anna “The Great Bull of Heaven”. That name also designs a constellation that disappears from the night sky shortly before Venus.

  Astronomically, Venus has a periodic motion of about 584 days. After the first 365 nights (or one year), the brightness of the planet gradually declines, until it disappears entirely from visibility for a period of 78 nights. So Venus/Inanna’s visit to the Underworld, and the gradual stripping away of her finery/brightness, could have been a mythical explanation to this sequence of astronomical events.

  Another well known interpretation is based on psychological views. Especially the Neo-Jungian school offers insights into ancient ‘descent’-myths (Inanna, Persefone, Psyche) as descriptions of an interior journey: we must enter our own underworld to find our true self. That always is a painful voyage.

  Various layers of consciousness have to be explored “going in through the gates and leaving behind our insignia” (our preconceived image of ourselves). Old fears and pains have to be overcome, before we can reach the final inner dimension. There, we become one again with the cosmic essence of Being. Once our old body (former personality/convictions) dies off, the soul may be revived with the ancient magic truths (“sprinkled with the food of life, the water of life”), to return to the earth as a more wholesome being.

  In this interpretation, Inanna’s ‘descent’ is the description of an initiation and healing process. Myth as a road map, showing how to reconnect our Above (conscious thought) with our Below (unconscious feeling); and how to bring back to the surface of our life our “spark of the divine”, through a return to long forgotten or suppressed values.

  The goddesses whose stories the ancients told, are powerful and loved. They watch over the seasons of fertility; over love and passion, war and justice; over the Land of the Dead and the Heaven of Stars. But earlier, in a matriarchal era, there had been only one Great Goddess/Great Mother who embodied all the divine. Under the influence –and finally, dominance– of conquerors with a patriarchal culture, the Great Goddess gradually lost terrain. Masculine gods appeared at her side, and were later set above her. The Dumuzi sequel in Inanna’s Descent (a husband, punished for having occupied her throne, but finally returning to share power, if only for half of each year) may represent the transitional stage in this conflict.

  Possibly, in Sumer the Great Goddess already had carried the name/title of Inanna –which means ‘Lady of Heavens’– even before patriarchal culture took over. For sometimes she is described as a once all-powerful, but now dispossessed, wandering goddess. But she never lost her title of ‘giver of kingship’.

  In the end, the Great Goddess is worshipped in the form of a new generation of divinities with different names or titles: Inanna in Sumer, Ishtar/Astarté in Babylon, Isis in Egypt, Kubaba/Cybele in Asia Minor, and Anahita in Central Asia. They still are mighty, but have to share their rule with male gods. In some aspects they are ‘driven underground’ or literally sent to reign in the underworld, like the goddess Ereshkigal, Inanna’s sister.

  Further to the West, we will find the powers of the Great Goddess diluted among no less than seven goddesses: Hera, Hestia, Demeter, Persefone, Artemis, Afrodite, and Athene. Even the underworld has been taken away from her, now to be ruled by the masculine god Hades.

  “GREAT LADY ANAHITA, LIFE-GIVER

  OF OUR NATION”

  An Eastern descendant of the Great Goddess is Anahita, the Water Goddess. Her worship begins on the banks of the Oxus (Amu Darya) river in Baktria, spreads later to Babylon, and from there on to western Asia. It also reaches Armenia, ancient Egypt –where she is depicted as an armed and mounted goddess– and central Persia. There she becomes one of the ruling deities.

  Anahita is a maiden Goddess of the Moon, Fertility and War. Her full name, Ardvi Sura Anahita, means “the humid, strong, pure one.” As the Ruler of Water, she embodies both physical and metaphorical qualities of water, especially the fertilizing flow of water from the fountain in the stars. In time, Anahita is identified with the Babylonian goddess Anaitis, and in the Hellenistic period, with Afrodite, Artemis/Diana, and Athena. She becomes immensely popular all over the empire.

  Zoroastrian texts name Zranka (modern-day Seistan) as a stronghold of her worship. She is revered in the imperial capitals Susa, Persepolis and Ekbatana (modern-day Hamadan). Her worship is dominant in the old kingdoms of Elam and Media, and in Asia Minor.

  An Armenian tradition calls out to her “Great Lady Anahita, glory and life-giver of our nation, mother of sobriety, and benefactress of humanity”. (This might explain the special reverence of the Armenian-born queen Stateira, wife of Artaxerxes II, for Anahita.) The last ancient-built Anahita temples are reported in Armenia. In times of the Roman Empire, destructions of temples of Anahita are mentioned in Artaxata, the Armenian capital, and in places now known as Erzinjan and Mush.

  Even in present-day Armenia, despite its Christian faith, Anah
ita still receives official honours. The central bank decided in 1997 to issue a commemorative gold coin with her image, stating that “Anahit has been considered the Mother Goddess of the Armenians”. The same image reappears on an Armenian postage stamp of 2007.

  In the Persian empire that Alexander conquered, the official religion – though others were often tolerated– was the cult of Ahura Mazda. This worship of the ‘Lord of Wisdom’ had been reshaped, from the 13th century BC onwards, by the Baktrian reformer Zoroaster/Zarathustra and his followers.

  Their sacred book, the Avesta, canonised in its oral version c. 650 BC, had reorganized the pantheon. In older Persian traditions, the Water Goddess Anahita was the mother of the god of Victory, Mithra. Zoroaster turned Mithra into a prophesied Saviour. Anahita was then venerated as an immaculate virgin, and known as the “Mother of God.”

  This worship was mainly experiential, lacking any real body of doctrine. There were many rituals and traditions, but little else until the Babylonian priests took over. They assimilated the Persian Anahita to their principal goddess Ishtar, who had acquired all the ancient powers of the Sumerian goddess Inanna.

  However, only a generation before the arrival of Alexander the Great on this scene, king Artaxerxes II, Sisygambis’ father, had introduced a new calendar for holy days. He was very active with religious innovation, and substituted old Persian month-names with names derived from these Zoroastrian deities. Berosus, the Chaldean priest who wrote his Babyloniaka chronicle in the early third century BC, affirms that Artaxerxes II set up statues of Anahita in Susa and such far-flung places as Sardès, Damascus and Baktra.

  That was a defiance of Zoroaster’s command that Godhead should be represented only by the flames of a sacred fire. This ‘transgression’ allowed his wayward son, the next king Artaxerxes III Ochus, to reject Anahita, and limit official worship to Ahura Mazda and Mithra only.

  Ochus’ regime in time became the most sanguinary and hated in Ancient Persia’s history. It can be conjectured that, after the bloody demise of Ochus’ branch of the dynasty, the new queen-mother Sisygambis would have liked to see the cult of Anahita reinstated. A definite possibility, in view of Alexander’s determination to return to the policy of religious freedom that had existed under Cyrus the Great.

  One thing we know for sure: Anahita temples continued to function in the realm, and faith in Anahita remained strong among the population. Her worship was officially reinstated in Persia by the Zoroastrian dynasty of the Sassanids. The founder of that empire, Ardashir I (224-240 AD) has been identified as a son and grandson of chief priests at the principal Anahita temple of Istakhr, a site halfway between Persepolis and Pasargadai.

  Many generations later, this temple was still the place where the last king of the dynasty celebrated his coronation ceremony, in 632 AD. Coins of the Sassanid era prove that the goddess Anahita was invoked at their kings’ investiture. But after 651 AD, the muslim Arab conquerors of Persia presumably drove the cult underground.

  Even so, the faithful would continue to appeal to the goddess Anahita for centuries to come. Recently, this author became acquainted on the Greek island of Crete with a Ionian family. The mother still remembered how, in her youth, her grandmother used to pray to the goddess Anahita. They had been brought up in a very traditional village near Efesos.

  Zoroaster writes his “Hymn to the Waters” (Aban Yasht) to explain how and why his male god Ahura Mazda has ordered him to honour the goddess Anahita. He describes her thus:

  “A maid, fair of body, most strong, tall-formed, pure, nobly born of a glorious race. She wears square golden earrings on her ears bored, and a golden necklace around her beautiful neck. She girds her waist, so that her breasts may be well-shaped and tightly pressed. Upon her head Ardvi Sura Anahita carries a golden crown, with a hundred stars, with eight rays, and with fillets streaming down. She is clothed with the skins of thirty beavers; for the skin of the beaver that lives in water is the finest-coloured of all skins, and when worked at the right time it shines to the eye with full sheen of silver and gold.

  She is possessed of as much Glory as the whole of the waters that run along the earth, and she runs powerfully. Ahura Mazda has made for her a chariot with four horses —the wind, the rain, the cloud, and the sleet— and thus ever upon the earth it is raining, snowing, hailing, and sleeting. And her armies are so many that they are numbered by ninehundreds and thousands.”

  The Aban Yasht enumerates Anahita’s powers as follows:

  “Offer up a sacrifice, O Spitama Zarathustra! unto this spring of mine, Ardvi Sura Anahita, the health-giving, life-increasing and holy, who makes the seed of all males pure, who makes the womb of all females pure for bringing forth, who makes all females bring forth in safety, who puts milk into the breasts of all females in the right measure and the right quality! <...> And Ahura Mazda the merciful ordered thus, saying: “Come, O Ardvi Sura Anahita, come from those stars down to the earth made by Ahura, that the great lords may worship thee, the masters of the countries, and their sons. They will beg of thee: O good, most beneficent Ardvi Sura Anahita! I beg of thee the supremacy of Glory, and this favor: that I, fully blessed, may conquer large kingdoms, rich in horses, with high tributes, with snorting horses, sounding chariots, flashing swords, rich in aliments, with stores of food, with well-scented beds; that I may have at my wish the fullness of the good things of life and whatever makes a kingdom thrive!

  And the maids of barren womb, longing for a lord, will beg of thee a strong husband. Women, on the point of bringing forth, will beg of thee a good delivery. All this wilt thou grant unto them, as it lies in thy power, O Ardvi Sura Anahita!”

  All these are, no doubt, the old powers of the Great Goddess. The Aban Yasht gives a long list of legendary Persian kings who have asked these favors of Anahita, and thrived – and of their enemies, who were refused Anahita’s favor, and crumbled. In his study of the Darab-Nama, professor William Hanaway notes: “Anahita was closely connected with royalty and the legitimacy of kingship.”

  As the Darab-nama tells the story, Alexander has birthright to Persia’s throne because his mother is a woman called Anahid (!) descended from Feridun, and his father (king Darab/Darius) is a son of Ardashir/Artaxerxes. This attribution of double royal Persian descent is unique to the Darab-Nama.

  Alexander conquers Persia from his half-brother Darab, who asks him to marry his daughter Buran-docht. In addition to being a great warrior on the battlefield, Buran-docht also acts as Alexander’s advisor and organiser. Her mother is called Aban-Docht, “Daughter of the Waters”, and resides in Istakhr: clearly a reference to the Water Goddess Anahita, who had her main temple there.

  Hanaway adds: “The logical ancestor of Buran-docht is Ardvi Sura Anahita. In Istakhr, Buran-docht takes Alexander’s hand, seats him on the throne, and proclaims him king of Persia after his symbolic visit to her temple.”

  Possibly, queens of the Achaemenid dynasty derived part of their power from their connections with the Great Goddess/Anahita cult and its capacity to legitimize a new king. Atossa, with her surprising marriage to Darius after his illegal coup, and her vast power from then on, might be an example.

  In the realm of Artaxerxes II, his queen Stateira –another descendant of the ancient Achaemenid line– also may have been such an initiate. (This could explain why the ‘outsider’ Parysatis, born from a Babylonian concubine, was so bent on killing her.) Artaxerxes II is the first historic example of a Persian High King owing his coronation at Pasargadai to a ceremony in an Anahita temple.

  As Anahita is the goddess of all waters, for Persians water is an element not to be polluted - the message being that mortals should not defile a goddess. She retains her virginity by bathing in pure water. The image, though not its real meaning, lives on long afterwards: Pausanias mentions an early Greek myth in which Hera, the later wife of Zeus, renewed her virginity by bathing in a magical fountain. Aelianus tells of a goddess who restored her virginity after each coitus by bathing in a
fountain located between the upper Tigris and Eufrates, where some of the holy places of the Zoroastrians were. She must have been Anahita.

  The prolific Greek writer Strabo states that “ritual prostitution” occurred in her temples in order to “purify the seed of males and the womb and milk of females.” This truncated interpretation has been cut off from the original meaning: that the enlightened experience of sexual unity between man and woman involves them in the universal love of the Great Goddess. The act of sexuality is meant to transport humans into a divine dimension.

  Thus, the “ritual prostitutes” in Strabo’s description of priestesses in Anahita’s temples, in reality are virgins in the original sense of the word: intact in their inner being. They can welcome strangers with total self-assuredness, in a radiant way, for their task is to bring them in the presence of the love of the Great Goddess. In their act of sexuality, all dissonances of the human personality (like the opposition between feminine and masculine, or between the bodily and the spiritual) are eliminated, in order to open their consciousness to the divine.

  ISIS, “QUEEN OF HEAVEN”

  The Egyptian Isis will be the most enduring embodiment of the Great Mother. In fact, there still are Isis worshippers today. Already in the earliest Pyramid Texts (dating back to 3000 BC), that invoke her no less than 80 times, the distinctive icon above her head is the ‘throne’ hieroglyph. In other words, from the beginning she has reigned both in heaven and on earth. In all the land: unlike most other Egyptian gods, she did not begin as a local deity, but was revered everywhere.

  Isis is closely related with kingship, as wife of Osiris; and with motherhood, as mother of Horus. The pharaohs proclaimed themselves the son of the goddess, and had this depicted on their tomb-carvings. There they are often seen drinking milk from the breast of their mother Isis. Inscriptions at Philae invoke her thus: