Embracing Inana: Legitimation and Mediation in the Ancient Mesopotamian Sacred Marriage Hymn Iddin-Dagan A

Abstract

The sacred marriage ceremony from ancient Mesopotamia is one of the most dramatic ways of conceptualizing the relationship between king and gods known from the ancient world. According to a number of literary texts, kings from the late third and early second millennia--and perhaps even earlier-consummated a ritual union with Inana, the goddess of love and war. Given the literary nature of our evidence, this ceremony may have been only an intellectual construct, rather than an event in real life.2 Irrespective of this, however, it remains a major source, not only for early Mesopotamian religious thought in general, but for ideas of kingship in particular. The specific implications of the ceremony for the king, however, have not been central to scholarly debate on the meaning of the sacred marriage. Traditionally, Assyriologists disagreed over whether the ceremony involved the bestowing of fertility on the homeland,3 or of power on the king.4 In more recent years, while attention continues to be paid to these issues, they are more often subsumed under considerations of liminality, sexuality, and gender. 5 Within the context of these studies, kingship has tended to be treated in two ways. In functional terms, the ceremony is seen as legitimizing the king. Either he himself is the recipient of divine favor,6 or he is the means whereby his subjects enjoy such benefits.7 In cosmological terms, the marriage is seen as marking the king as the figure who mediates between the human and divine worlds.8