Why Are You The Way You Are, Ishtar?

Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, a great and powerful and frightening being. On the surface, she is cocky and confident, sexual and full of lust. Her wrath is something to avoid, if at all possible. But I see her as someone afraid. In her descent to the underworld, all her worldly posessions were stripped from her, every claim she had to her status was torn from her body and mind. Similar to a rape victim, she was left scared, naked, and alone. She died on that trip to the underworld, and she was left to rot. Nothing could make her feel more human than that.

In showing that vulnerability, being completely exposed, she changed as a person. She suddenly had something to fear in her life, and it was exactly that: vulnerability. I think something clicked in her brain, something that she had never had to face before. The fact was, she was not as infallible as she thought she was. She was imperfect, and completely destructible. She now had something to fear, something to work to avoid for the rest of her life. I feel that this sense of constant fear for what had happened to her made her hostile. She altered her personality to compensate for her moment of weakness, and this caused her to be the great and terrible goddess that everyone feared.

When Gilgamesh rejected her, she felt vulnerability (similar to what she felt in the underworld), and this experience with him became the "taboo" in her mind. All memory of this embarrassing encounter had to be erased, and the way for her to do that was to elevate herself by taking what Gilgamesh holds dear: Enkidu. Why did he have the right to be happy when he had caused Ishtar such internal pain?

I'm starting to see Ishtar in a new light; even as I write this, my perspective on her is changing. I see now that her horrid personality was not entirely a result of maliciousness. It was an innate character flaw that caused her to crave control over everything, and all because of that one time when she lost control over herself. During that one painful trip to the underworld, Ishtar became someone new, someone different. She became the terrible goddess that we know her as.