Dreams as Sunshine in the Night

 

The word dMamud, which signifies “Dream (deity)”, is listed in the divine genealogies as the daughter of the Sun God. Since dreams usually occur at night, the close genealogical connection between the god of dreams and the Sun God may seem puzzling. The riddle may be solved, however, by considering that dreamers see a world which is just as bright as the day. [1]

I am a wild cross-reader, forever with my nose in a dozen books in as many genres at the same time. One of the pleasures is to notice things that resemble each other over great distances. A recent example. I have long been strongly drawn to ancient Mesopotamia, so when a Sumerian goddess (Mamu) associated with dreams popped up in a scholarly essay by a German Assyriologist online I paid attention. Mamu [2] is depicted as the daughter of the sun god Utu. The author noted that the family connection between a dream goddess and a sun god may seem puzzling and suggested a plausible and rather charming explanation, that dreamers enter a world as bright as day.

I am often reading and dreaming into the world of the Victorian ghost hunters and psychic researchers. The question from Sumer jogged my memory of a passage I read in a wonderful little book by the Victorian radical reformer and Theosophist Anna Bonus Kingsford:

"The priceless insights and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone far to elucidate for me many difficulties and enigmas of life which might have otherwise remained dark to me, and to throw upon the events and vicissitudes of a career filled with bewildering situations, a light which, like sunshine, has penetrated to the very causes and springs of circumstance." [3]

A solution from Victorian England to a Sumerian mystery: Dreams are sunshine in the night.

[1] Annette Zgoll, “Dreams as Gods and Gods in Dreams. Dream-Realities in Ancient Mesopotamia from the 3rd to the 1st Millennium B.C.” Leonhard Sassmannshausen (ed) He Has Opened Nisaba’s House of Learning Studies in Honor of Åke Waldemar Sjöberg (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014) p.305

[2] Mamu for short. Ancient Mesopotamia has many dream gods and goddesses. The Sumerian lady mentioned here is called dMamud by the scholarly translators. This means, “Dream (deity)”. Sumerian has two words for “dream”: ma-mu.d and maš-ĝi6.k. Only the first term, transcribed as ma-mu.d can be written with the divine determinative diĝir (d). A word tagged with this sign is the name of a deity. The word ma-mu.d also denotes a meaningful dream which has the power to influence the future. By contrast,  maš-ĝi6.k, refers to all types of dreams, including confused and deceptive ones. Thanks to all the spadework of cuneiformists in decoding the ancient texts, we see that a connection between dreams and the gods is built into what may be the earliest of all written languages. See S.A.L. Butler, Mesopotamian Conceptions of Dreams and Dream Rituals (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1998)  pp.73-77

[3] Anna Bonus Kingsford, Preface to Dreams and Dream-Stories (New York: Scribner & Welford ,1889).  Interesting that a reprint has been published by Nabu Press. Nabu was an ancient Mesopotamian god of writing and flow. I have a figurine of Nabu, a copy of a statue in the Oriental Institute (as it used to be called) in Chicago on my desk.

"Sargon lay down not to sleep but he lay down to dream"

I have been saying for decades that dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep; it is about waking up to a deeper reality. I found confirmation for this understanding in a Sumerian text that is a mere four millennia old. It is the story of "Sargon and Ur-Zababa". The famous Sargon of Akkad began his career as a cupbearer to Ur-Zababa, the Sumerian king of Kish around 2350 bce.. Ill and anxious, the ruler of Kish asked Sargon to dream on his behalf. We then read "Sargon lay down not to sleep but he lay down to dream" Sargon's dream brought no comfort to the king.He saw the goddess Inanna as a beautiful young woman "high as the heavens and vast as the earth" who drowned Ur-Zababa in a river of blood. Ur-Zababa tried to have the dreamer killed but he was the one who died and Sargon took his throne. The people believed, because of his dream, that Sargon was under the aegis of the great goddess. Source: Gil H. Renberg, Where Dreams May Come: Incubation Sanctuaries in the Greco-Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 2017) 45

The call of Inanna and the first named author in history

Inanna

daughter of the Moon

silken bud unfolding

riding out on your wild blue bull

through the Gate of Wonder.

I am riffing on a version of "Inanna and Ebih",  written by the high priestess of the Moon God at Ur around 2300 bce. The literal translation is in Betty De Shong Meador's brilliant Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart.

    I was excited to learn that Meador was called to the great Sumerian goddess Inanna by a dream . She dreamed she saw two fellow Jungian analysts – conservative, by-the-book types - being buried. Strange sticks with loops at the top were planted in the earth around their graves.
      At the time, Inanna was unknown to her and she made no association between the dream and the goddess.  Long after, in one of Erich Neumann’s books, she found a picture of the looped poles like the ones in her dream. She read that they are symbols of Inanna and the earliest way of writing her name in pictographs. They are reed posts. They may represent door posts, or the props for a curtain. In pictographs (see photo), reed pieces hanging down from the rings, sometimes look like women's hair, or ribbons.
     Why would doorposts made from reeds be a symbol for the Queen of Earth and Heaven? Doorposts of this kind could denote the passage to the storehouse,the place of fertility and abundance that are the gifts of the goddess in her beneficent mode. Doorposts could also denote the passage between the worlds. Inanna herself passed through a series of doorways in her famous Descent to the Underworld. So the reed doorposts - in a country with little timber or stone - could be the Mesopotamian version of the pylon gate in Egypt or the dolmen arch in Celtic lands.
     There is further significance in the reeds. In ancient Mesopotamia, dream incubation took place in reed huts.You would step between reed doorposts to dream with intention, maybe to dream yourself into a close encounter with the goddess herself. The marshes of southern Mesopotamia, full of reeds, offered a liminal dreamy landscape. Legend has it that Sargon of Akkad, the father of the priestess who wrote poems and hymns of Inanna was abandoned in a reed basket, sealed with pitch, on a river,  to be found by the gardener who raised him.  A baby from the reeds, long before Moses.

      Meador waxes poetic about the reed posts of Inanna as “insurgent flags”. In her words, “Inanna’s symbol standing tall on the graves was an image of strength and courage from a culture outside of and alien to patriarchal thinking... Inanna’s tall reed standards stand like insurgent flags amid the bastion of traditional beliefs that restrict women.” The meet-up between the old dream and new research into the mythic cycle of Inanna led the Jungian analyst to make a huge new leap in her work and understanding, into Goddess realms. "This new perspective propelled me onto my future path.” 

       As Meador studied the texts, she found Inanna's wild call for her chosen lover to plow her field. The goddess calls for Dumuzi, who is both the "wild bull" and the plowman:

My field needs hoeing

Dumuzi, I call you
It is you I want for prince. 

     Inanna is many, a great goddess who refuses all boundaries and limitations. For Meador, she is the Sumerian “personification of the whole of reality”. 

You wear the robes
of the old, old gods. 

     Meador discovered a soul friend in ancient Mesopotamia. She happens to be the first named author in all of human history. Her name is Enheduanna. The "en" in her name means "high priestess". She was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god Nanna. She was also a poet of the first rank, and the most passionate of her poems were devoted to presenting Inanna in all her faces. She composed 42 temple hymns that have survived  and the "Exaltation of Inanna"(Nin-Me-Sar-Ra) infused with her passion for the goddess.

     It is really absurd that Enheduanna is relatively unknown. She is the first named author in world literature. She is a great poet. She is advancing a whole theology and philosophy that promotes the great Goddess as the one beyond the many. She writes with searing passion and eloquence about the many aspects of the self. The goddess she praises – in all her dark and light – is within her, and within the whole of nature and the whole cosmic order. Both contain multitudes.

     Meador writes that “in Enheduanna’s writing, we witness that moment when an individual is selected out of the mass of humanity into a new consciousness of self-definition and self-worth...Enheduanna begins to understand emotion as the graze of the goddess’ hand across a person’s soul. Image and emotion become the language of the goddess to the particular individual.”
    Called to the goddess and the ancient poet through the doorway of a dream. Goddesses and dead poets can make that happen. I know about this.

Quotes here are from Betty De Shong Meador, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna. Published by University of Texas Press.

Inanna at the breakfast table

The plot thickens, the veil of mystery flutters and closes and opens. The night before I posted my blog piece titled "A Dream Doorway to Inanna", a male friend dreamed that he saw me having to deal with a skeptic in a group. Dream Robert revealed he was wearing a jeweled necklace with something resembling a "letter opener", studded with lapis lazuli, hanging down from it. Using this power tool, Dream Robert invoked a goddess. She appeared, raging at the ignorance and stupidity of humans. Her rage brought skyscrapers tumbling down. When my friend sent his report, I remarked, "That sounds like Inanna in her take-no-prisoners mode." He did not know about Inanna, which makes it all the more interesting that - as I study the original sources again - it seems that the placement of the jewels in Dream Robert's outfit strongly resembles the placement of jewels on Inanna's outfit as she dresses to visit her dark sister. I'm now guessing that the "letter opener" studded with lapis lazuli may be Inanna's lapis measuring stick, which is in her hand as she begins her descent to the Underworld, or one her other rods and wands of power. Lapis lazuli has great significance in the Inanna story; it was believed to supports powers of seership and to light the way to the afterlife.  

We dream of Inanna, and maybe she dreams of us, whether we call her goddess or archetype. Once, when I was leading a retreat in the foothills of the Cascades, Inanna took possession of the breakfast table where our group was gathered for coffee, waffles and dreams.    "How is your dream recall?" I asked the first person to join me at the table.    She proceeded to recount a dream in which she is traveling through a dusty landscape to the home of a tarot reader. Instead of spreading the cards, the tarot reader shows her two fish tanks, each containing elaborate dioramas. At the center of each is a statuette of a goddess. The dreamer recognizes the goddess forms: Isis and Inanna. The tarot reader tells her she must choose one. She chooses Inanna. Immediately a great tornado whips up,swirling everything around her. She wakes excited and curious to know mor eabout the power and the attributes of the goddess she chose.     We started talking about Inanna and the great cycle of poems composed in her name in ancient Sumer. I spoke of the terrifying praise-poems in which Inanna goes forth into battle, with a flashing carnelian at her throat and the mace of a warrior raised in her hand, with the force of a tornado. I mentioned that in my carry-on bag for this trip there just happened to be a copy of the beautiful versions of the Inanna poems composed by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer.     We were joined by a psychologist who had made a close study of the myths of Inanna and spoke about the story of the Descent of the Goddess as the model for a woman's journey to the depths to meet and integrate her Shadow side. She reminded us that one of the mysteries in this mythic cycle is that we are not given a clear reason why Inanna chose to make her descent to the darkest level of the Underworld, the realm of her dark sister, Ereshkigal, tobe hung in a meathook. We do know that she did this of her own volition. It was a choice she made freely.     We had now been joined by many other dreamers, all eager to take part in the weave of mythic associations that was taking place over the waffles and coffee. One woman shared that she was in the midst of a ritual journey through the Descent of Inanna organized by a women's group and unfolding over many days. She had made the descent, through visualization and ritual, through the seven gates of Inanna's descent, at each of which she was required to give up an aspect of her power and protection. As she made this mythic journey, she realized that it evoked many of her personal life dramas and passages - for example, losing a job and leaving a home - which now assumed even deeper resonance.    I confessed that Inanna, in full warrior mode, makes me, as a mere man, a little nervous. At that moment, a woman named Moon took the place at the table that someone had just left free. I smiled. Inanna is the daughter of Nanna, the Sumerian Moon god, and I am a very lunar man. We were at a mythic edge - with all the juice that brings - that was also a family situation.

We see again how dreams are only personal myths; they are swing doors between our world and the world of gods, archetypes and others. I am thinking again about my friend's dream of me invoking a goddess with a power tool that looked like a letter opener. In front of me now, as I write, is the letter opener I use every day. It has the form of the caduceus, twin serpents wrapped around a staff and here surmounted by wings. The earliest form of the caduceus was in Mesopotamia. It seems to have been one of the many forms of the staff or wand of power of Inanna. It turns up all over the world map later on, including as the want of Hermes and Mercury and Hermanubis. But it seems to begin with Inanna. Perhaps, without knowing it, I have been reaching to her every time I open mail.

That turns my mind to a famous statement from Jewish tradition, that a dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is left unopened. We do better than interpret dreams, in our Active Dreaming practice. We engage with the dream world, we enter it at will, and we bring gifts from it into waking life. We are ready to act in the understanding that our dreams may be a nightly field of interaction with greater powers, and that those powers - even of often camouflaged - are at play in our ordinary world. I look at the letter opener again. Inanna's people in ancients times did not have paper or parchment or papyrus. They recorded dreams on clay tablets that were then baked, making them strong and durable enough for us to read of Inanna's Descent to the Underworld and the Dream of Dumuzi more than 5,000 years later. They had an interesting expression in Sumerian for dreams that defy understanding. Such dreams are inside "a closed archive basket of the gods" - that is to say, a basket of dream reports written in cuneiform with a read stylus on those tablets of baked clay." Sometimes the gods open the archive basket and give us a myth to live by, even in our modern lives.

A dream doorway to Inanna

Inanna

daughter of the Moon

silken bud unfolding

riding out on your wild blue bull

through the Gate of Wonder.

I am riffing on a version of "Inanna and Ebih",  written by the high priestess of the Moon God at Ur around 2300 bce. The literal translation is in Betty De Shong Meador's brilliant Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart.

    I was excited to learn that Meador was called to the great Sumerian goddess Inanna by a dream . She dreamed she saw two fellow Jungian analysts – conservative, by-the-book types - being buried. Strange sticks with loops at the top were planted in the earth around their graves.
      At the time, Inanna was unknown to her and she made no association between the dream and the goddess.  Long after, in one of Erich Neumann’s books, she found a picture of the looped poles like the ones in her dream. She read that they are symbols of Inanna and the earliest way of writing her name in pictographs. They are reed posts. They may represent door posts, or the props for a curtain. In pictographs (see photo), reed pieces hanging down from the rings, sometimes look like women's hair, or ribbons.
     Why would doorposts made from reeds be a symbol for the Queen of Earth and Heaven? Doorposts of this kind could denote the passage to the storehouse,the place of fertility and abundance that are the gifts of the goddess in her beneficent mode. Doorposts could also denote the passage between the worlds. Inanna herself passed through a series of doorways in her famous Descent to the Underworld. So the reed doorposts - in a country with little timber or stone - could be the Mesopotamian version of the pylon gate in Egypt or the dolmen arch in Celtic lands.
     There is further significance in the reeds. In ancient Mesopotamia, dream incubation took place in reed huts.You would step between reed doorposts to dream with intention, maybe to dream yourself into a close encounter with the goddess herself. The marshes of southern Mesopotamia, full of reeds, offered a liminal dreamy landscape. Legend has it that Sargon of Akkad, the father of the priestess who wrote poems and hymns of Inanna was abandoned in a reed basket, sealed with pitch, on a river,  to be found by the gardener who raised him.  A baby from the reeds, long before Moses.

      Meador waxes poetic about the reed posts of Inanna as “insurgent flags”. In her words, “Inanna’s symbol standing tall on the graves was an image of strength and courage from a culture outside of and alien to patriarchal thinking... Inanna’s tall reed standards stand like insurgent flags amid the bastion of traditional beliefs that restrict women.” The meet-up between the old dream and new research into the mythic cycle of Inanna led the Jungian analyst to make a huge new leap in her work and understanding, into Goddess realms. "This new perspective propelled me onto my future path.” 

       As Meador studied the texts, she found Inanna's wild call for her chosen lover to plow her field. The goddess calls for Dumuzi, who is both the "wild bull" and the plowman:

My field needs hoeing

Dumuzi, I call you
It is you I want for prince. 

     Inanna is many, a great goddess who refuses all boundaries and limitations. For Meador, she is the Sumerian “personification of the whole of reality”. 

You wear the robes
of the old, old gods. 

     Meador discovered a soul friend in ancient Mesopotamia. She happens to be the first named author in all of human history. Her name is Enheduanna. The "en" in her name means "high priestess". She was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god Nanna. She was also a poet of the first rank, and the most passionate of her poems were devoted to presenting Inanna in all her faces. She composed 42 temple hymns that have survived  and the "Exaltation of Inanna"(Nin-Me-Sar-Ra) infused with her passion for the goddess.

     It is really absurd that Enheduanna is relatively unknown. She is the first named author in world literature. She is a great poet. She is advancing a whole theology and philosophy that promotes the great Goddess as the one beyond the many. She writes with searing passion and eloquence about the many aspects of the self. The goddess she praises – in all her dark and light – is within her, and within the whole of nature and the whole cosmic order. Both contain multitudes.

     Meador writes that “in Enheduanna’s writing, we witness that moment when an individual is selected out of the mass of humanity into a new consciousness of self-definition and self-worth...Enheduanna begins to understand emotion as the graze of the goddess’ hand across a person’s soul. Image and emotion become the language of the goddess to the particular individual.”
    Called to the goddess and the ancient poet through the doorway of a dream. Goddesses and dead poets can make that happen. I know about this.

Quotes here are from Betty De Shong Meador, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna. Published by University of Texas Press.

Literature begins in dreams of the Goddess

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth

The raw sexuality of her call to her lover is wild and shocking.  He plunges into her like a wild bull. When they couple, he is the green life of all growing things and she is the Queen of Heaven. He is Dumuzi and she is Inanna.

     But she is called to go down into the dark places and travel a terrifying path of ordeal and initiation. When she returns, transformed, to the surface world, she finds that her man has forgotten her and is playing king of all he surveys. Her angry curse sucks the light out of his day. 

     Now Dumuzi dreams that everything turns against him. Trees are uprooted, his hearth fire is doused, his drinking cup is thrown down, his shepherd’s crook is taken away. A fierce raptor seizes a lamb from his sheepfold, and he knows that something fearsome and unforgiving is coming for him.

The churn lies silent; no milk is poured.
The cup lies shattered; Dumuzi is no more.
The sheepfold is given to the winds.

Death is coming for him, and his only hope lies in the love and feminine wisdom of his younger sister, Geshtinanna. She is a reader, “a tablet-knowing scribe” who knows the meaning of words and of dreams.

     She tells him, “Your demons are coming for you.” She helps him hide, but in the end he cannot escape his demons. 

Dumuzi fettered by demons

He is overpowered by them and carried in the talons of a raptor down to the realm of Inanna’s dark double, the Queen of the Underworld, and into his own cycle of death and rebirth. Grieving, both Inanna and his constant sister, drumming like shamans, will seek him in the lower world. And they will make a deal by which Geshtinanna will take her brother’s place in the Underworld for half the year, giving him time up top with the goddess in her sunnier disposition. But that is a later story in the cycle of Inanna.

     The Dream of Dumuzi is the oldest recorded dream. It was written in Sumer nearly five thousand years ago, scored with marks on baked clay that look like the tracks of a very thoughtful sandpiper. It was almost certainly written by a woman, who authored a magnificent cycle of hymns to Inanna. We know her name: Enheduanna. The first recorded author is a high priestess and poet devoted to Inanna. The first dream analyst is a female shaman who becomes a goddess.

     Geshtinanna becomes the goddess of dream divination (and of wine). Her consort, who is depicted with serpents shooting up from his shoulders, has an awkward-looking name, Ningishzida, which is worth inspecting closely. Chastely translated by previous generations of scholars as “Lord of the Upright Tree,” it actually means “Lord of the Erect Phallus”. Those Mesopotamians knew a thing or two about sexual arousal in dreams and how real magic rides on sexual energy.

     The Dream of Dumuzi, unclothed in its beauty and terror in a modern translation by Diane Wolkstein, is great writing, and it takes us where great writers do not fear to go: into the inner chambers of the heart, into the demon-haunted mind, into the mysteries of death and rebirth. Thanks to its survival, we can say without hesitation that one of the first uses of writing was to record dreams,  and that one of the great things that emerged from dreaming with the Goddess, at least five thousand years ago, was literature.

     That statement may be strengthened by current scholarly investigation, inspired by Marija Gimbutas, into a possible "language of the Goddess" expressed through a visual code in inscriptions in south-eastern Europe, which may prove to be a form of writing even older than that of Sumer, developed by matrifocal societies.

Adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.