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Dumuzi (Tammuz)
We celebrate the strange career
of Dumuzi at Midsummer. The origins of
Dumuzi are lost, of course. It is entirely possible that Dumuzi was an
actual person, a shepherd chosen by a powerful Queen, Inanna, to be
her consort and co-ruler. They became the archetype of the Sacred
Marriage. The stories of an older generation of Dingir would have been
grafted onto them, until there was nothing left of the actual people,
other than tiny traces, little places where the stories bent to
accommodate them. As the primal couple of the oldest written saga of
the hieros gamos, their influence on religion and magick is absolutely
incalculable.
Now, within the saga, Dumuzi
first travels from obscurity to royalty. He
has achieved the ultimate quest of the hero by glorifying and marrying
Inanna. People sang hymns to this courtship and marriage for a
millennium or more. In the glory of union with Inanna, Dumuzi became
God. The people identified him with the dying and reviving vegetation
and the ebb and flow of the vivifying light. He continued on,
his name, as Tammuz, enshrined in the calendars of the Middle East to
this day, and in the custom of women to mourn his death at the
entry into the dark of the year, a custom which may have survived for
more than four thousand years.
For Dumuzi did die, and the
manner of his death in the oldest version of
the story is instructive. Just as the zenith of the Sun's career implies
its nadir, Dumuzi's deification contained the seeds of his destruction.
Dumuzi, wonderful as he was,
splendid in his youth and vigor, was swept
up in his own glamour. He forgot everything except how wonderful it
was to command such adulation. He forgot half of himself, his Queen,
the very ground of his being. Right at his peak, Inanna, who had her
own destiny and her own majesty, returned from the land of the Shadow,
returned from the halls of Ereshkigal. She found everyone in mourning
for her except the one who should have been leading the mourners, the
one who should have been storming the Abyss for her. He was lolling
around the throne room eating dates and playing with the serving
wenches.
When Inanna returned from the
deepest ordeal ever experienced by human
or Dingir, she saw the boy Dumuzi clearly, saw him through the eyes
of her sister the Queen of Death. As the hymns say, she turned the
Eye of Death on him. She turned the galla of Attalu loose on him.
He ran, he hid, he
shapeshifted, but in the end he was carried away, borne
off to Attalu as ransom for his Queen.
When it was all done, all the
women wept for Dumuzi, and the world was
still out of balance.
Dumuzi's sister Geshtinanna
stepped forward next. Geshtinanna mourned inconsolably
for Dumuzi, and agreed to take his place in Attalu for half the year.
So, every spring the return of Dumuzi is celebrated with the planting
of the grain, and every autumn the return of Geshtinanna is celebrated
with the harvest of the vines.
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