Whore of Babylon, Queen of Heaven

Inanna continued her way toward the underworld. She journeyed from ancient Sumer up the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, through the whole of Babylon and into Hittite Haran. She traveled into Canaan with the Habiru who called her Ishtar. She went with them into Egypt and they called her Ashtarot` when she returned, leaving behind only a memory; the myth of Isis.

She saw god-kings and city-states rise and fall; patriarchs murdered by sons who took their places and their names; armies and wars of territory and dominion. She traveled with the armies, with the whores and the musicians and the eunuch priests, offering solace in their tents, in tabernacles of sex and salvation.

She had bastard sons by kings. She washed the feet of gods amongst men.

She saw villages burned and statues toppled. She saw kingdoms become federations, federations become empires. She saw whole dynasties of deities overthrown, their names and faces obliterated from the monuments they’d built. So, unlike them, she took new names; new faces. Times changed and she changed with them.

She never accepted the new order that was tearing down the old around her, but she knew better than to fight it, watching the others stripped of honor; stripped of reverence, stripped of godhood, still calling themselves Sovereigns even as the Covenant shattered every idol in their temples.

So she traveled as supplicant, as refugee; with mystery as her protector rather than force; cults rather than armies.

She saw the seeds she dropped behind her take root in the earth, and grow only to be crushed by military boots.

She traveled with slaves and criminals.

She went from Israel, to Byzantium and Rome, this Queen of Heaven — [a] Blessed Mother, full of Grace, her new name and old titles echoing amongst the vaults of stone cathedrals; spaces as vast and hollow as the temples left long empty in Uruk and Badtibira, Zabalam and Nippur, Kish and Akkad.

She traveled in statues and pietas, painted in indigo and gold in old Renaissance frescoes, Russian icons; traveled to the New World with conquistadors and missionaries; to plantations where the slaves danced round the fires at night, possessed by gods, by saints, by loas and orishas; journeyed across time to a New Age of carnival mythology, and stars worshiped in glossy parchments sold at newsstands; of rosaries and Tarot cards and television earth mothers fussing over the broken hearts and wounded prides of soft, spoiled inner children.

She journeyed on the Road of No Return, to the dark mansion of the god of Death; the house where those who enter never leave, where those who enter lose all light, and feed on dust and clay for bread.

They see no sun; they dwell in Night, clothed in black feathers of the carrion crow.

Over the door and the bolt of the dark house, dust settles, [and] moss and mildew grow.

She stopped, this Whore of Babylon; this Queen of Heaven. Inanna stopped before the entrance to the Underworld, and turned to look back at her servant, who had followed her down through the centuries; [through[ the millenia.

“Go now, Lady Shubur,” she said. “Do not forget my words.”

“My Queen,” said Lady Shubur.

“Go”

— Hal Duncan, Vellum