Fiction: A Prophecy

[qos]

A couple of years ago, I started playing with a story about a young princess in a mythic civilization where part of the religious beliefs include a variation on the Inanna myth. But in this myth, instead of going to the Underworld, she went to the moon, where Hekate cut her down for her arrogance. Like the original Inanna, she hangs from a peg for three days, but then is rescued by her consort, Akkad, who makes love with Hekate to win back his love.

In the ritual life of the city, women of the royal family become avatars for the goddesses, and the one who is Inanna in her youth, partaking in both the pleasures and the ordeals of that goddess, eventually becomes Hekate, living in an ascetic shrine on a hilltop outside the city, presiding over the ordeals of Inanna's to come.

I should mention that I started writing this long before my current connection with Ereshkigal was established -- but it is proving strangely prophetic.


* * * * * * * *

I was eight when I saw my cousin Callia scourged and lifted on the cross of Hekate. My beautiful, laughing cousin was naked, bruised, and wild-eyed – but even in my tender years I could see that it was not simply pain that wracked her.

I should not have been there. It was strictly forbidden to children, but when Hekate – my great-aunt Minerva – turned and saw me, she did not betray me. She only gave an enigmatic, knowing smile, and continued with her part in the ritual.

The next afternoon I snuck away again, up the hillside to where Callia hung on the cross, pale and silent, blindfolded so she knew neither day nor night, nor could receive any comfort or shame from those who gathered silently to witness her ordeal. The galla, servants of Hekate, carried slender, flexible rods to beat anyone who violated the sacred silence or tried to approach the suffering avatar.

This time Hekate sent a galla to bring me from the rocks, forward through the people, to the very foot of the cross so I could gaze up at my cousin’s chilled and bruised body. When I had stared for several minutes, Hekate beckoned me to her. I shivered as I obeyed, and knelt, bowing my head so I could not have to look at her seamed face and bright eyes.

“You disobey your mother,” she whispered – for she too would not speak so that Inanna could hear.

There was no lying to the avatar – even if my guilt were not obvious. “Yes, madam,” I breathed.

“What do you seek, little princess?”

“I. . . I don’t know.”

She gripped my chin, tilting my head up. “Does it frighten you, seeing our Lady like that?”

I shook my head. I had no words for what I felt: a strange mixture of awe and yearning.

Another knowing smile touched her thin lips. “Little princesses who disobey their mothers end up hanging on hillsides, my pet – and eventually living on them.”

I was not yet an initiate, but her meaning was clear – and shocking. “Did you – ?” I clapped my hand over my mouth, but my mind raced on, trying in vain to imagine the crone – ancient for as long as I could remember – ever revered as the embodiment of Inanna.

“Go home,” she commanded – and we both knew I would obey her even if I had flouted my mother. “Do not return until the proper time.”

Her words crackled and hissed in my mind as I ran back down the hill to the palace. “The proper time” could be simply when I took my place with the other maidens weeping for the loss of Inanna. . . but I knew, deep in my soul, that she was prophesying my own eventual elevation as avatar, my own inevitable ordeal on the hill.

After that whispered conference, I hugged my destiny to my deepest heart, and while I loved and honored my parents and wanted mostly to please them, I lost any fear of disobedience. I understood that Inanna was ruled only by her own desire, and reaped the consequences of pleasure or pain with a bold heart.