Goddess of 10,000 Names, Arise! 🕊

In my research on Mary Magdalene, I have found many unusual links to feminine divinities of the past.

It is almost as if Mary Magdalene, throughout the ages, has become a focal point for lost goddesses and their presence in our lives. Despite the tragic and untrue confusion about her status as a prostitute, there is a link in this to ancient, sexual ceremonies of sacred marriage.

The stories of the resurrection of the young king in the presence of a Goddess (which seemed so uniquely Magdalene) have been previously recounted ages ago in Ancient Sumer, Babylon and Egypt, with a Goddess as a resurrectrix. And they all seem to lead to the Sumerian Goddess Inanna, also known as Ishtar (in Assyria) and Isis (in Egypt).

These stories were perpetuated for centuries, and eventually reused in the Bible. By reused, I mean that much older versions of the same storylines were included in the Bible, but without the female component which had featured in a prominent way in original versions.

The story of Inanna the Sumerian goddess is at least 4300 years old, and is mostly known not only through archaeological discoveries but also in a far more sophisticated way: through the poetic hymns of Inanna’s High Priestess, Enheduanna, the daughter of King Sargon of Sumer.

But who was the Goddess Inanna?

According to Sumerian stories, Inanna was the daughter of the gods An and Enki. She was a goddess connected to the Tree of life and the resurrection stories, several hundreds of years before the Biblical Genesis was written. For comparison, Enheduanna’s hymns to Inanna were written at least 500 years before Abraham was born, and the worship of this goddess can be dated back to at least 3500 BCE.

Betty De Shong Meador, the author of Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart : Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess, found that both the imaginative Van Dijk and mainstream scholars such as Simo Parpola connect the origins of the Tree of life to Inanna.