The Burney Relief (neopagan discussion)

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Also if you guys are interested this website worldhistory.org has three great articles about Inanna, Ereshkigal, and The Burney Relief itself

I wish i could send you guys all three direct links but i can't figure out what's up with my phone.

Just search for those three things in the search bar. Very fascinating stuff.

Ereshkigal the Underworld Goddess reminds me a lot of the Greek Underworld God Hades. Like Hades she wasn't necessarily an evil deity (not in the way Lilith would be), but she wasnt exactly a popular figure of worship either due to her connection to death.

She guarded all knowledge of the Underworld in order to prevent people from knowing the truth about what happens after death.

She sounds like a darker version of Hestia, another one of my favorites being the Greek Goddess who guarded the home and family and was Goddess of the Hearth. She had no connections to darkness or the Underworld though as far as I know.

I admire her high priestesses the Vestal Virgins who served her Roman Equivalent Vesta in the temples where they tended a sacred flame that thdy could never allow to extinguish. As women they enjoyed more special privileges than any other woman in Rome's patriarchal society and they were highly respected from what I understand.

The only downside to being a high priestess of Vesta was that you had to spend 30 years as a virgin in her service and if you were caught having sex rather it was consensual or by rape you were punished severely by being buried alive.

It was because Hestia/Vesta was a Virgin Goddess much like Athena/Pallas and Artemis/Diana and it would have been considered a great offense to them.


But the executions of Vestal Virgins rarely happened. It was a highly respectable position for a Roman lady

I think both she and Hecate are seen as goddesses of outsiders and the abandoned. Also, if you're doing something like the Qliphotic path (especially with traditions like Temple of Ascending Flame and the like) you're looking as Lilith and Lucifer almost in a Nuit / Hadit (diffuse feminine vs. white-hit single point masculine) role if I were to compare it to Crowley's Thelema.

I get the sense that with most of these deities you have to work with them for a while (by work I mean imbibe their metrics and play around with how you think they might relate with you constructively) and in that yeah, you'd probably avoid working with deities that you either felt you had no connection to or were actively harmful.

For me something started happening between fall of 2016 and spring/summer of 2017 where all of society's promises were coming overdue, I felt like there was an emotional sepsis within me that I was afraid could really push me in bad directions, I tried to think of which deity I'd work with, who had the experience with these sorts of things, and Lilith was the quickest that came to mind and hence I started building a relationship with her.

What I think can be dangerous with all of these, and almost any god or goddess, is that their image becomes a tool in the arsenal of your unconscious to persuade you in all kinds of directions and that includes various complexes that have their own agendas or it could even be something that your own genome tries to hypnotize you with toward its own ends. On one hand if it's work you feel inclined toward it's something you want to do not only despite the dangers but possibly even, to some degree, because of the dangers - ie. we live in a dangerous world, anything harrowing that your not doing is at risk of blind-siding you later, and the wider the variety of challenges you have under your belt and worked through the better.

I'd have to imagine that would also mean that lethal self-defense in preventing rape would also be justified considering.

When I was in AMORC for a while they had a vestal virgin role in temple initiations and ritual, I think the term was 'Colombe'. Per something on their site:

https://www.rosicrucian.org/events/colo ... dale,%20MN

I think you're right. But i still say most of her fans need to do more thorough research into who she was and what she does.

I tried working with Lilith for a while but in the end I felt she did me more harm than good.

I really think Inanna might be a very interesting deity though.

And in truth i feel drawn to several other deities like Hestia, The Shichifukujin, even Columbia the 'American Goddess'.

I hate to say it but - popular anything isn't about learning, really needing to learn anything is often regarded as a secondary signal of lacking status and needing to compensate for lack of status. If normies, conformies, and any proper 'Game A' players do anything it'll be either Rhonda Byrnes 'The Secret', its Christian cargo-cult cousin prosperity doctrine Christianity, and you'll mostly just find loners, occasional deep introverts (usually loners), and LGBTQ+ studying actual esoterica - ie. they're people society burned its social contract with and who had to, accordingly, go and find their own answers.

My take on all of this is that it shows just how Darwinian we are on every level - ie. knowing anything that you don't absolutely need to know - in the gene race - is like having a bunch of heavy statues in your car weighing you down at the drag strip when you try to compete on quarter mile speed. In most cases this is why pretending you're something that's vogue for five minutes, dressing like a caricature of that thing, and being a total fake is seen as vastly superior to actually 'being' that thing or having that knowledge (ie. from that way of thinking if it isn't helping you make copies of yourself or gain status so your copies have advantages over other people's copies its worse than worthless, it's a sign of a person genuinely not understanding that the gene war is the only thing in reality that matters - even if its victors guarantee our extinction as a species). Even before I was into mysticism or anything of that sort I was really into music and I had to learn the hard way that if it's not only not top 20 but this months top 20 its anathema because it's invalid tender for social climbing.

That sounds awesome if you are able to center her in your pantheon. My own experience was that the Greco-Egyptian Isis/Mary/Sophia, or what really looks like Mary as a goddess, was the first that I had a strong resonance with, but I've met one other guy who had beatific encounters with said being and lets just say he was covered on Solomonic tattoos, was overcoming addictions, had a daughter who was starting to get involved with gangs (they had to move on that account) and if I learned anything from reading a lot of historical accounts was that many men who had Mary encounters were going to be headed off the deep end into esotericism (Albertus Magnus is another name that comes to mind here).

I don't know if you've ever gotten into the Victorian versions of Hermetic Qabalah but I find those tend to be at least useful guides in terms of self-balancing and building a pantheon. I still remember filling out my own ToL with which deity would be present in which sephira and overall it seems like the principles hold pretty well. You might not necessarily need that if you have a simpler structure but it might help you figure out whether you'd put Innana in Binah or somewhere else, and if in Binah who'd go in Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth, etc..

I'll have to look more into all that. Thank you for the suggestions.

What do you think of my idea of Inanna, Ereshkigal, and Lilith forming a kind of triangular structure to represent the higher Heavens where Inanna rules and the lower Underworld where Ereshkigal and Lilith rule together?

Also if Lilith is actually the heir of Lamashtu, that would mean she too is the sister of Inanna and Ereshkigal as Inanna, Ereshkigal, and Lamashtu were all three children of the Sky God Anu.

I have to admit that I don't have deep enough reading on Ereshkigal or Lamashtu to really understand their operational differences well enough to think of what their distinct places would be in a triune system. Do you have any thoughts on what makes the distinctly unlike one another?

Honestly I only recently started learning about Inanna and Ereshkigal, but I've known who Lilith was for quite a long time as she seems to have become one of the most popular dark goddesses in wicca lately. Much like Hecate in my opinion. Though I only recently learned about her connections to Lamashtu as well as Lamia.

But from what I have read so far about Ereshkigal I think compared to Lilith and Inanna she's a lot quieter, much like the Greek God Hades when compared to his brothers Zues and Poseidon.

Lilith is pretty evil imo, or if you don't believe in the concept of good and evil one can at least admit that she is pretty cruel especially towards children.

Ereshkigal on the other hand doesnt seem especially cruel or malicious, she's more neutral just like Hades was. But nevertheless was not a popular goddess of worship due to her connection to death and realm of the dead (I don't believe Hades was particularly popular among worshippers for this same reason).

I believe that both Lilith and Ereshkigal dwell in the lower realms of The Underworld. One could think of them in a way as Good Cop and Bad Cop, if that makes sense?

Also this is one of the reasons some archeologists have argued that the Burney Relief is most likely Inanna and not Ereshkigal nor Lilith/Lamashtu. Neither of the later two were popular goddesses of worship due to the fear surrounding them so it is highly unlikely that the Ancient Sumerians would build sculptures modled after Ereshkigal or Lamashtu (and Lilith was a Jewish creation not Sumerian).

Inanna is the strongest contender for the identity of the mysterious winged goddess on the Burney Relief simply because she actually was a very popular goddess among the ancient people of Mesopotamia.

All of the above does make some sense but I'm less sure I can make sense of the triune model you're drawing.

If it's any clue that Lamashtu has no temples because she respects no places or boundaries and similar things perhaps could be said by extension of Lilith then that's effectively saying that both are symbolic of nature red in tooth and nail. That's neither higher or lower realms, it's right here.

The other thing, after watching several hundred NDE videos by now, I'm not sure what the above and below would be - particularly when heaven and hell realms seem so fungible and the individuality of the symbols in the experiences seem to suggest that it's almost a dissociation of inner and outer where during the early stages one sees outer events but then gets sucked in through inner archetypes and goes to places I can't comment on because I don't think we have any maps that accurately describe them. Other than that above we have trillion miles of empty space and below we have dirt, rock, and magma with trillions of miles of space on the other side of it.

The only thing I can say is that we have a mystery of mind, perhaps realms that are much more mental, and then a mystery of matter where matter itself forces priorities such as power and Darwinian fitness (or subjugation and death) onto those who visit it. Also it's possible that there could be many different realms of the dead, possibly less Abrahamic and possibly combinatorially explosive, as one of the famous 60's psychonauts said that they smoked DMT, saw themselves in a black space with a rubbery membrane, they touched the rubbery membrane, a creature that was all tentacles and eyes turned toward them, zapped them back out, and that same guy mentioned that an Asian child told him that he knew of this being - that it was a guardian of the dead and that this child would go and assist that being at night when they went to sleep.

We're really wrapped in a mystery, I really like the British philosopher John Gray's outlook that it's existentialism while we're here and past that who knows (he's an atheist but not necessarily a reductive materialist). I don't feel like western Abrahamic views of the world have given us any more guideposts other than what internal value structures help one tribe in the Middle East defeat another. Past that all of the deities, at best, have symbolic value and to explore and integrate their symbolic value takes understanding why personifying them into deities is a useful endeavor. Even if they were autonomously real in some sense I'm not certain that we're likely to meet them as such. Even my super-strong vision of the divine virgin, it was powerful enough to stand out way above and beyond anything else I've ever experienced, but aside from love and support no concrete message was given over and above symbolism so I can't even be clear that this was a direct contact with deity.

Perhaps you're right, my idea for a triangular sigil (of sorts) is probably a bit of a stretch coming from a guy who learned about these ancient goddeses from browsing Google out of boredom lol

But i can still work on researching them more and more and getting to know all three ancient goddesses in a spiritual and an academic way. I learn more and more the further i dig around, just like I did with Lilith and realized that there's much more to her than the popular Adam & Eve creation myth.

Also even though I no longer consider myself a Christian I think maybe I am guilty of still viewing these things through the Abrahamic looking glass even though i try my best to stay open minded.

I guess in a way it's a typical cultural thing among most of us Westerners...

That's fair.

I realize in these regards everyone's a bit different in terms of what kind of circle they're trying to square with their upbringing, environment, and other parts of their history. I too was raised in the church, Catholic but had nondenominational neighbors who were much more actively religious, and somewhere around 7th grade I really wanted to become a priest because I had the mentality that caught me again in my early 30's, ie. that if this stuff's real hardly anything matters more than figuring it out and getting the best understanding I can. I can say as well that the more time went on and the more mixed signals the evidence threw me the less I felt that way and the more it's felt like this whole place is a conspiracy of sorts to get us as lost in matter and extroversion without introspection as possible (over and above all of the money advertisers rake in by hijacking our attention as well).

I had about a three or four year reading binge where I was trying to catch up on all of this stuff as well as weed out the things that didn't seem to fit. During that time I had a very slow job and was able to read the bible cover to cover in about five weeks as well and did five or six more laps through it trying to really make sense of how to grapple with the contents and after a while I did feel like I could see the components, what came from where, etc. and over time I had less concern for whether or not I was doing things that would have gotten me burned at the stake a few centuries ago and at the same time though I don't have any dislike or disgust for the symbols in Christianity - I just see Christ as emblematic of Tiphareth, of archetypal man (Adam Kadmon if one wants to take that direction), I see Mary deified as the archetypal feminine and I'd also agree with what the Catholic symbolists do in terms of giving her most of the trappings of the Greco-Roman variant of Isis.

If you ever do want to talk books let me know. I did start out with Manly P Hall, bridged off to Rudolph Steiner and Anthroposophy, then went the Golden Dawn route, checked Thelema, had some curiosity about Martinism and read a few related books that were good but I only felt like I was finding surface-scrapings of what that's all about. One thing I can say is that Hermetic Qabalah is a great cheat-sheet for figuring out arrangements of concepts and ideas, just that sometimes I do wonder if it's too much of a cheat sheet - it clearly works up to a degree but I'm also aware that the Victorians were out to syncretize everything and quite a few magicians and mystics have been trying to step back from that in recent years (as Gordon White has put it on a few occasions - 'decolonizing' magic).

I definetly would like to check those books out whenever I have the money to order more books.

Also since I found the connection between Lilith and Lamashtu so fascinating, I think I should read more about the connection between Inanna and Aphrodite.

I did learn that just as Inanna was both a Goddess of Love and War, there was a time in Ancient Greece when Aphrodite was also connected to the concept of both Love and War. This was evident by her relationship to Aries the God of War and her involvement in the Trojan War.

But this aspect of Aphrodite was whitewashed overtime most likely because the Ancient Greeks and the Romans who worshipped her as Venus did not like the idea of connecting women to the concept of war (iow it was because of sexism basically).

This reminds me of how Japan's Goddess Benzaiten was given the same exact treatment over the centuries. Benzaiten was based off a Hindu deity whose name alludes me and she was the goddess of "all that flows" which was why her shrines were always built near a source of water. She was a goddess of many things like art, music, beauty, wisdom, and logic, but she was also a goddess of war who in earlier statues and paintings was depicted with multiple arms holding a different weapon in each hand. She was believed to be a protector of Japanese cities during times of war and was even worshipped by samurai.

But over time the image of her as a war goddess was softened into a goddess of beauty who was shown holding a musical instrument in two hands instead of the many different weapons of war.

I think it's obvious that the Japanese did this to her because of their generally low opinion towards female warriors. But there is actual evidence of Benzaiten's connections to war and warriors just like the male God of War known as Bishamoten (both deities are in the Shichifukujin btw).

https://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/benzaiten.shtml

Something I'd really recommend is considering the Dao in these matters.

The more I think of 'the dragon', whether in eastern mythology or what the western left-hand path Draconian currents are looking at, it's the Dao. It's a river that gives rocket fuel to paths of least resistance because those paths are the most economic for it to take. Tell me that doesn't sound familiar when you look at social media. When we've been sufficiently sectioned off from reason and aligned with some archetypal character it can understand it empowers that character. This is where the idea of 'mass formation' getting coopted by the fringes is a problem because it's the best description of that collective behavior.

I might have mentioned John Gray earlier but if not, his 'Straw Dogs' is a very good book about human instinctual tendencies (really making the case for their indifference to technology - really coopting it), recurring evils, he also hits on these in other books like 'Soul of the Marionette'.

This is maybe where the west has a bad relationship with Tiamat or where John's vision is about wars against certain dynamics and certain victory of good over evil where he'd see the enemy as a dragon (this is maybe why whoever wrote the Bornless Rite implored that the spells and scourges of God the vast one also be obedient unto him - because they're guided by their on dynamics, not by Logos).

But yeah, this is the kind of place where cosmic concepts of evil come from (it fits also quite well with the kinds of memetic storms that Rene Girard would predict) and it dovetails with a recent conversation that Jonathan Pageau and John Vervaeke had on Rebel Wisdom regarding egregores and network effects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBErw604LXg

It's a bit like you really do need to see these kinds of things as corporate entities which are staked down to very little aside from human participants as well as their number and qualities.

The answer to that debacle seems to be own your own piece of it and don't be alienated from that energy, otherwise someone else with less pure intentions might manipulate it toward their own ends and even worse when it gets pulled up in dynamics that have taken on a life of their own.