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The Goddess speaks.
"In the radiant heavens, to give omens in abundance, I appear, I appear in perfection. With exaltation in my supremacy, with exaltation do I, a Goddess, walk supreme; Ishtar, the Goddess of evening am I; Ishtar, the Goddess of morning, am I; Ishtar, who opens the portals of heaven, in my supremacy."
Humanity replies:
"Praise Ishtar, the most awesome of the Goddesses, revere the queen of women, the greatest of the deities. She is clothed with pleasure and love. She is laden with vitality, charm, and voluptuousness. In lips she is sweet; life is in her mouth. At her appearance rejoicing becomes full. She is glorious The fate of everything she holds in her hand Ishtar - to her greatness who can be equal Strong, exalted, splendid are her decrees Ishtar among the gods, extraordinary is her station. Respected is her word; it is supreme over them. She is their queen all of them bow down before her." [Barbara Walker: Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.]
She is not only a Goddess of beauty and love, sacred and profane, but also a very bloodthirsty Goddess of war.
"When I stand in the front (line) of battle
I am the leader of all the lands,
When I stand at the opening of the battle,
I am the quiver ready to hand,
When I stand in the midst of the battle,
The arm of the warriors,
When I begin moving at the end of the battle,
I am an evilly rising flood, ?" [Jacobsen: Treasures of Darkness.]
This conjunction of opposites is characteristic of Inanna, as one would expect from a manifestation of the Self. However, it has led to many writers becoming not only confused, but also tripping over themselves to explain the seeming enigma. Some, such as Bottèro (p 296) have tried to explain it by coalescing a sweet and mild Sumerian Inanna with a warlike Akkadian Ishtar. Well, to them let us quote Jacobsen again:
"Inanna, the dread storm, the oldest child of Suen,
what did she do?
She was making heaven tremble, the earth shake,
Inanna was destroying the cow pens, burning the sheepfolds,
(crying) "Let me berate An, the king of the gods!" 
This two-fold nature of Inanna is easily explained in terms of modern biochemistry. Love and war, sexuality and aggression are two manifestations of one very important hormone, adrenaline. (Medical students for decades have been taught that adrenaline is the four Fs hormone - fighting, fleeing, feeding, and, er ... mating?) There is a more serious interpretation. The Sumerians like the pre-Socratic Greeks two millennia later, conceived of the universe as comprising four components, fire, air, earth and water, presided over by the twin powers of love and strife. Inanna personifies that twin presiding power, of ana- meaning building up, the affinitive power of love; and -lysis, splitting, the power of war. These two words constitute analysis, of which she is the ultimate presiding goal and thus impetus. We now recognise the Sumerian view of the four "elements" in its psychological context as representing the four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition) presided over by what Jung called the transcendent function, uniting opposites in such a way as to lead to further development.
Inanna's personification of two major aspects of libido, spirituality and sensuality, illustrates this very elegantly. She even transcended gender. Despite being depicted invariably as a beautiful feminine deity, she was worshipped in some rituals by people who wore clothing, which was half feminine and half masculine, denoting her equal importance for everyone, regardless of sex.
It should come as no surprise then that Inanna was seen as a judge, not only of people but of gods too.
"Monthly, at new moon,
that the offices be carried out properly,
the country's gods gather unto her.
The great Anunnaki, having bowed to her,
are stepping up for prayer, petition, and plaint,
able to voice unto her
the pleas of all the lands,
and Milady decides the country's cases, settling them." [Jacobsen: Harps p 114]
She is Goddess of the Morning and the Evening star, Venus. Some writers have tried to fit her to a later pair of Semitic deities representing morning and evening stars as distinct, but the Sumerians recognised the identity, and even coined a specific title, "Ninsianna" (Heaven's radiant queen) to describe her as the Goddess of both, a goddess linking the daylight realm of her brother, the sun-god Utu (Shamash) with the night realm of her parents, the moon-god and goddess, Nanna (Sin) and Ningal.
Those interested in Wicca and Astrology may be surprised to find that it is the course of Inanna's star, Venus which first led to the pentagram symbol
If one knows the ecliptic and can pinpoint the present position of the planets in relation to the constellations of fixed stars in the zodiac, it is possible to mark the exact place in the 360 degrees of the zodiac where the Morning star first appears shortly before sunrise after a period of invisibility. If we do this, wait for the Morning star to appear again 584 days later (the synodic orbital time of Venus) mark its position in the zodiac, and then repeat this process until we note back on point one again (six notations on five different positions in the zodiac) as the Morning star, we will find that exactly eight years have passed. If we then draw a line from the first point marked to the second point marked, then to the third, and so on, we end up with a regular pentacle or pentagram. It was only the planet Venus that possessed the fivepointed star sign. Not one of the innumerable stars above us can by its orbit form this sign. Moreover, the points of the pentagram pointed to five different groups of stars or constellations which were easy to remember; each had a given name Thus Inanna/Ishtar was the first Goddess to have the Witches' Pentacle as Her sign. She is also associated with the eight-point star, recalling her Queen of Heaven role as ruler of what the Jews called Achamoth, the realm ouside the planetary orbits (in the Ptolemeic system.) Nowadays we would refer to that realm as the unconscious.
Like most of the major Sumerian deities, Inanna was originally considered a fertility goddess, specifically of date palms, but later of most grain products. One of her earliest symbols was a stylised rolled up door of the storehouse, of which she was patroness. Several male gods were considered storm-gods, most particularly her brother Ishkur and grandfather Enlil, but she was the only storm-goddess. Again in contrast, she is also goddess of gentle fertilising rain. But she came to represent fertility in general far more than any other deity. When she descended into the underworld, crops stopped growing, but everything, from humans to donkeys, lost their fertility. We may ask whether the Sumerians saw her as representing something beyond simple fertility in an agricultural sense.
To understand this, we need to remember that when Inanna first appeared in human awareness a little over five thousand years ago, humanity underwent one of its most radical and astonishing sudden developments.
"It was at this moment in human destiny that the art of writing first appeared in the world and that scriptorially documented history therefore began. Also, the wheel appeared. And we have evidence of the development of the two numerical systems still normally employed throughout the civilized world, the decimal and the sexigesimal; the former was used mostly for business accounting in the offices of the temple compounds, where the grain was stored that had been collected as taxes, and the latter for the ritualistic measuring of space and time as well. Three hundred and sixty degrees, then as now, represented the circumference of a circle - the cycle of the horizon - while three hundred and sixty days, plus five, marked the measurement of the circle of the year, the cycle of time. The five intercalated days that bring the total to three hundred and sixty five were taken to represent a sacred opening through which spiritual energy flowed into the round of the temporal universe from the pleroma of eternity, and they were designated, consequently, days of holy feast and festival." [Joseph Campbell: Primitive Mythology.]
The Sumerians were rightly proud of their new and unique civilisation, and spent considerable time discussing how it came about, frequently using astronomical and astrological explanations. One of the more amusing and informative myths concerns Inanna's acquisition of the me (pronounced may,) the symbols of civilisation, from her maternal grandfather Enki, the God of Wisdom. During a banquet to welcome her, he became drunk and expansive, offering her all the powers necessary for civilised life, from arts and crafts to temple officers and personal characteristics. She was only too happy to accept these, and made a rapid strategic withdrawal with them before Enki sobered up. When he did, he sent various monsters to retrieve the me, but Ninshubur, Inanna's vizier saw them off, Inanna returned safely to her city, Uruk, and Enki with his usual good nature allowed her to keep her new gifts.
The significance of this story lies in the fact that Enki, like Hermes and Mercurius of mediaeval alchemy, commanded the subterranean sweet waters, a metaphor for the collective unconscious. That civilisation, (which is an advancement of consciousness in a whole culture, not just an individual,) should originate from the unconscious, then be refined and brought to consciousness by the goddess who "opens the portals of heaven" makes perfectly good sense.
Inanna's role of mediating the production of useful material from the unconscious is further illustrated by her depiction as a lion-goddess, with seven lions drawing her chariot. These lions represent the seven archons, the imaginary spheres circumscribed around the earth by the seven visible planets in the early conception of the solar system. The realm outside these archons was called Achamoth in Hebrew, and was where Wisdom dwelt. Anything coming from heaven to earth, (i.e., from unconscious to conscious) had to pass through each of these planetary spheres, and took on characteristics of each.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Inanna for civilisation is easily missed. Because of our Greek philosophical tradition, we tend to over-estimate the power of reason; rational, solar Apollonian consciousness. The problem is that in doing so, we value conscious thought at the expense of intuition, thus filtering out most of the information the brain has acquired without our ever noticing. Worse, we tend to give solar consciousness a masculine tinge, with lunar consciousness being considered feminine and inferior.
The Sumerians took a different view. In their cosmology, the moon god and goddess, Nanna and Ningal, (here shown together,) had a sort of yin-yang relationship, out of which arose solar consciousness, personified by their son, Utu (Shamash) but another form personified by their daughter Inanna. This is completely in keeping with our Self-mandala where the maternal and paternal ways of seeing the world give way to dynamic masculine, then dynamic feminine worldviews as we grow to maturity. Inanna, as goddess of the morning and evening star, represents a form of consciousness in which we can join solar with lunar thinking, thus allowing attention to detail and seeing the 'big picture.'
This was not idle speculation. It had a major practical impact. For thousands of years people had been drawing circles as symbols of completeness. It took this new sort of consciousness to say, "Well, these circles are very pretty, but why don't we stick a couple of them on the sides of our carts, so we don't have to drag sleds everywhere?" The wheel is invented.
And it wasn't just wheels. They invented a seed-drill, which automatically placed seeds into the ground as it was ploughed, rather than throwing them everywhere and hoping they germinated. [Hawkes p 122] They invented the composite bow, like the ones used in archery competitions today, although theirs were made of cattle horn and wood. This gave them an immense tactical advantage over their enemies, because they could start shooting well before the other side was close enough to use their own weapons. The bow was of course an attribute of Inanna - who else?
In short, this ability to think rationally, combined with the capacity to put isolated detail into a larger context, resulted in an abundant flowering of arts, crafts, trade and architecture In this sense Inanna's fertility status was unique.
Despite her attributes of fertility, harvest and abundance, Inanna is not to be confused with maternal goddesses.
"She is never depicted as a wife and helpmate, or as a mother." [Jacobsen: Treasures p 141]
Ninhursag (Nintur) the Lady of the Foothills, was the Sumerian mother-goddess, also called 'form-giver.' Part of the confusion arises because the rather unattractive fat goddess statue holding her diminutive breasts is referred to as "the Ishtar pose" in archeological slang.
This does not mean that these statues are of the goddess herself. She, in contrast is always shown as a tall athletic slim deity, often accompanied by a lion, and usually armed.
Although Inanna's relationship with her own mother Ningal, was harmonious, she was implacably opposed to Great Mother symbols, particularly Kur, which is variously represented as the underworld, a great serpent, or a mountain guarding it. Kur represents regression, against which Enki, Ninurta and Inanna all battled. It bears many of the attributes of the 'Terrible Mother,' the unconscious perceived as something dangerous, stultifying, and capable of gobbling up our precarious little ego-consciousness.
Baring and Cashford [The myth of the Goddess] are guilty of not only trying to perpetuate the mother-goddess misapprehension, but even accuse Inanna of being lunar, in the face of all the evidence showing that she was daughter of the moon deities, and was always shown as a star-goddess. They compound their inaccuracy by confusing Inanna's consort Dumuzi (Tammuz) with the separate son-lover myth of the Cybele cult. This, despite the fact that we know Dumuzi's mother to be Duttur, a sheep-goddess.
Her lustful rather than maternal nature was reflected by her role in the sacred marriage; a priestess played a New Year ceremony in which the king enacted the part of Dumuzi, Inanna's divine consort, and the part of the Goddess herself. Frymer-Kensky points out that it is significant that the prime divine figure in this ritual intercourse is not a mother-goddess. "Instead, the ritual involves sexual union with the goddess who represents the lust which allows for sexual union." This was thought to signify union between gods and humanity. The gods brought fertility by their control of climate and soil: humans contributed by their labour. It had the additional advantage for the king, that he and only he could have sexual union with the Goddess, no little advantage to his prestige and authority.
How essential was Inanna's support for the king's power and success is illustrated by Sargon, the world's first emperor, who attributed his rise to power totally to Inanna being at his side from early in life when he was still a servant of King Urzababa. In later historical works his dynasty was called "ina palê Ishtar," the "reign of Ishtar."
 
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