The strange career of Dumuzi is a cautionary tale. The origins of Dumuzi are lost, of course. It is entirely possible that Dumuzi was an actual person, a shepherd chosen by a powerful Queen, Inanna, to be her consort and co-ruler. They became the archetype of the Sacred Marriage. The stories of an older generation of Dingir would have been grafted onto them, until there was nothing left of the actual people, other than tiny traces, little places where the stories bent to accommodate them. As the primal couple of the oldest written saga of the hieros gamos, their influence on religion and magick is absolutely incalculable.

 

Now, within the saga, Dumuzi first travels from obscurity to royalty.  He has achieved the ultimate quest of the hero by glorifying and marrying Inanna. People sang hymns to this courtship and marriage for a millennium or more. In the glory of union with Inanna, Dumuzi became God. The people identified him with the dying and reviving vegetation and the ebb and flow of the vivifying light. He continued on, his name, as Tammuz, enshrined in the calendars of the Middle East to this day, and in the custom of women to mourn his death at the entry into the dark of the year, a custom which may have survived for more than four thousand years.

 

For Dumuzi did die, and the manner of his death in the oldest version of the story is instructive. Just as the zenith of the Sun's career implies its nadir, Dumuzi's deification contained the seeds of his destruction.

 

Dumuzi, wonderful as he was, splendid in his youth and vigor, was swept up in his own glamour. He forgot everything except how wonderful it was to command such adulation. He forgot half of himself, his Queen, the very ground of his being. Right at his peak, Inanna, who had her own destiny and her own majesty, returned from the land of the Shadow, returned from the halls of Ereshkigal. She found everyone in mourning for her except the one who should have been leading the mourners, the one who should have been storming the Abyss for her. He was lolling around the throne room eating dates and playing with the serving wenches.

 

When Inanna returned from the deepest ordeal ever experienced by human or Dingir, she saw the boy Dumuzi clearly, saw him through the eyes of her sister the Queen of Death. As the hymns say, she turned the Eye of Death on him. She turned the galla of Attalu loose on him.  He ran, he hid, he shapeshifted, but in the end he was carried away, borne off to Attalu as ransom for his Queen.

 

When it was all done, all the women wept for Dumuzi, and the world was still out of balance.

 

Dumuzi's sister Geshtinanna stepped forward next. Geshtinanna mourned inconsolably for Dumuzi, and agreed to take his place in Attalu for half the year. So, every spring the return of Dumuzi is celebrated with the planting of the grain, and every autumn the return of Geshtinanna is celebrated with the harvest of the vines.

 

References:
Wolkstein_and_Kramer. Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

"Dumuzi." Encyclopedia Mythica. 2004. Encyclopedia Mythica Online.  21 Feb. 2004  http://www.pantheon.org/articles/d/dumuzi.html.