Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart Quotes

“Throughout our lives we are confronted with what seems like a never-ending task: trying to grasp the full scope of reality. As children, we adapt to circumstances by using the psychological defenses available to us. As we mature, we have to confront the defensive illusions we have constructed. If our psyches can tolerate the loss, we continue to let in more and more of human nature's reality: its dark and shadowy aspects, its limitations, and finally, recognition of the fragility of our brief sojourn on this planet. Psychological maturity involves the ongoing process of integrating into our conscious, everyday selves the full range of elements that make up the psyche inside us as well as those elements that make up the world that surrounds us. Inevitably what we must face is a mixture of our motives and deeds, and the similar paradox in others.”
― Betty De Shong Meador, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

“Inanna was the only Mesopotamian deity whose character so prominently included contradictions... In her actions, Inanna exhibits both benevolent light and threatening dark. Her violence and destructiveness go beyond the boundaries of tolerable human behavior. She carries light and dark to their extremes. Inanna's immense popularity in antiquity must be related in part to the fact that she could reflect not only the best in human nature, but she could also exhibit what is abhorrent, unpleasant, dirty, sinful, terrifying, abnormal, perverse, obsessive, murderous, mad and violent.

Inanna is a mirror of what Jung called ¨the abysmal contracictions of human nature.¨ She shows us our oppositions in sharp relief. She is a divine manifestation of the ultimate conjunction of opposites, displaying for humankind its contradictory nature.”
― Betty De Shong Meador, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

“Whether the so-called ¨sacred prostitution¨ was actually practiced is doubtful....Henshaw asserts, 'those of us who have studied Mesopotamian civilization for many years have never come across anything remotely near this practice.”
― Betty De Shong Meador, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

“Emotion is the trace of an activated archetypal pattern. Emotion is the repository of the archaic landscape within each individual. Emotion is the labile, volatile, energetic force linking chaos and order in the psyche. Riding on emotion, a person can go back in time and visit a primordial landscape, untouched by cultural influences. Transported by emotion we make all the stops along the full continuum of our psychological vista. At one end of the continuum we are best by overwhelming primitive rage or terror or longing. At the other end, we experience a calm peace or the satisfaction of everyday accomplishment. The palpable difference in each of these locations is the quality of the emotion.”
― Betty De Shong Meador, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

“In the process of monotheism's development, women suffered a great loss. The essential role women had played in ancient religions as guardians who contained opposites diminished. Women's roles became marginalized and secondary to the roles of men not only in the religious sphere, but also in the realms of politics, economics, social, and cultural life.

We who come of age within the basic assumptions of monotheism rarely think about how this paradigm infiltrates every corner of our psychological lives. It does not occur to us that our most entrenched values of good and evil, perfection and impurity, worthiness and corruption are strongly influenced by the splitting which male monotheism imposes on our socialization from birth. It takes a concentrated awareness to realize that this paradigm excludes all other possibilities, and to conceive that our most fundamental presumptions could be different.”
― Betty De Shong Meador, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna