These Are The Children Of Ereshkigal, The Dark-eyed: Ninazu, By Gugulanna Heaven's-Bull Namtar, By Father

These are the children of Ereshkigal, the dark-eyed: Ninazu, by Gugulanna Heaven's-Bull Namtar, by Father Enlil who sits enthroned in state Nungal, by the queen of the dead and the dust of time that keeps her secrets. These are their titles. Ninazu, city-god, Enega and Ešunna, death-and-life through vegetation and the shadow of the never-never in his blood. Pitiless mace of war, dying and rising serpent-friend. He will suck the poison from your wounds. Namtar, inexorable. Right hand of the sinister, mouth of hell's crown, messenger of An and Ereshkigal and Nergal. Commander of demons whose very name breathes a plague, unfaltering fate, dutiful minister of his mother's court, Death who is the issue of the Dead's All-Mother. Nungal, the neck-stock, the dusty threshold bolt, the screaming lock, the fanged river of ordeals. Rebirther, reformer, who dwells in the mountain where Utu rises. Hers is that corner of the underworld man can return from reforged, the house of dust and shadows where a broken man sheds his old skin or wears it as burial shroud. Goddess Prison-Warden, her mother's daughter in the realm of men, radiant hope and beautiful despair, cool water of compassion on fevered brows. Hear their names in the bellow of a bull, in the snarl of a dragon, in the tolling-bell tones of their mother and as soft as crematory ash. They sit on the borderline like ravens on a fence, silent dark eyes and subtle croaked secrets, twilight-and-dawn owls, young-and-old serpents. Poison and healing, life found in death. Fear. Learn. Become braver for it. Ereshkigal, for deserved awe of you and your children, may your names be marked by the black-headed ones.

I think tonight I want to tell you a story.

It's not exactly an unusual story, it's just one that has stuck with me. I'm sure this site is full of closet stories, underdog stories, social justice and bully victim stories. I'm not even sure where to start, with this, since it hits all four of those and more.

I come from a small town in the southwestern United States, where the most interesting thing to do is either drink or comment on the weekly flood of stench from the beef packing plant. Nobody moves in, and slightly more than "nobody" moves away. The schools are small, and I later figured out that they're on the national shitlist of places to get an education. It doesn't surprise me too much. The teachers were good and tried their best, but. It still doesn't surprise me.

I was bookish, white in a Hispanic town, timid, and had all the mass of a particularly useless paperweight. I didn't hit puberty until we moved away, either, so I had several years of locker room talk and kiss-and-tell bragging to sit through, utterly confused by the pictures of half naked boyfriends and dick pics shoved in my face like I was supposed to give them a Yelp rating. I didn't have friends, really, but I did have books. The only thing I had over my bullies was better grades, so I clung to that and tried to turn the insults into badges of honor.

This was when AR testing was big. You had to fill out tests to prove you read books, and reading books earned you points. Most people read the bare minimum necessary, some people didn't. I devoured the library like it was a homemade brownie and didn't come up for air until I had to. I got actual complaints about the number of points I was earning. The teachers said I'd filled my quota, I could stop anytime, but honestly? I forgot to take the tests 30% of the time.

There was a leaderboard that listed the people with the most reading points. I knew my name was on there, and yeah I was a little proud, but mostly I was more concerned about surviving PE. After a certain amount of school assemblies though, even oblivious people pick up on patterns. I was neck-and-neck with another girl. For the sake of the narrative, let's call her Emma. I didn't pay her much mind, beyond maybe a little competitive streak.

I still recognized her when she came up to me at lunch and invited me to sit with her group.

Keep in mind, I was the stereotype. I was that one sheep booted from the herd and heckled by wolves on a daily basis. I honestly was shocked, and then for the rest of lunch I was shaking, but I sat with them and alternated between stilted mumbling or shivering silence. Thus began a beautiful friendship.

And, over the years of inside jokes and emotional support, thus began an utterly doomed crush.

Her religious and cultural background aside, I never actually planned to act on it. It never actually struck me that it was a crush until my last year in that town. Any gay stuff I'd ever been exposed to was either as a rare comedy stereotype, or in my dad's philosophy tapes. Romance wasn't really in the picture for me. Sex was some sort of strange cryptid sorcery that drove humanity mad, my parents seemed to have made a match based on attractiveness and professional standing. It's just part of being an adult, getting married, right? That's what you do, sort of a natural progression towards being a successful person. Girls date boys and make out in cornfields, get pregnant before they can get higher education, and they all live drunkenly ever after in ugly little houses. Nowhere in that picture did it account for blushing, emotional bonding, and finding someone beautifully entrancing without heavy cleavage or wide hips and a need to see their underwear.

I did get hit with the evils of hormones after we moved away, and that was enlightening. I did, eventually, email her. After I figured myself out, why I'd never seen boys as potential dates and that my type is apparently "pretty eyes and a waist dip". To make things more mortifying, I came out to her TWICE. The first time, I was confessing my doomed crush and she politely told me I would find a lovely girlfriend someday. The second time was years later, by which time I think she'd forgotten and it came up in conversation. It was terrible both times, except for the part where she accepted me no matter what.

I've been watching TED talks and various videos on coming out, because this is what I do when bored. I know my stance on the subject. I've run into several of the common fears, the strange language, rejections, the "tell your stepbrothers she's just a friend". I'm never telling my mom unless I get engaged. My dad knows, and doesn't really believe me because I don't ogle boobs on a regular basis. My stepmom knows, and seems fine with letting sleeping dragons lie so long as I don't mention the Gay Lifestyle near her kids. I'm not out to the rest of my family because I want their respect, I want my cousins to come to me if they need me, and I feel like they won't if they know.

So I sit in my car and read about gay people getting lynched in the next county over, and draw comparisons between the locks on my gay closet and my pagan "broom closet". I don't wear religious symbols. I don't wear rainbows. I job hunt and read the fine print on every application to be sure they legally can't fire me for being me, and I keep my mouth shut with a smile. I go to church with my mom in the morning, and I go to pagan meetings the same afternoon, and when I get home I light incense for the Dingir in an apartment that I share with my girlfriend, where I see confederate flag bumper stickers parked outside.

I live dangerously. Pepper spray can't really protect you from someone deciding not to allow the renewal of your apartment lease, unfortunately, but it's still nice to feel the weight of it in my purse.

Blank, unmolded, full of potential Churning energy beneath a placid face Riptide beneath glass Mirror beneath breath And the wind on the water Where Great Above kisses Great Below Swirls in empassioned churning, Sprays forth glittering droplets from the dark To dance in the sunlight. But the world is not a blank Word document, is it? Fill in the blanks. Color by numbers And throw your watercolors in the sea To watch them melt away Like morning mist Like the sinking sun Like distant shores. I digress. Clear your throat. Breathe in. Now breathe OUT Like startled birds Surging waves Scales rippling over sinew as they lunge forward, Forward, Forward. Nets cast free, flying, Snaring wings, A snarl of fins, Jewels in the deep And the magic of flight. The pelican rips her heart out To feed her crying young, The ocean is the mother Of the open-mouthed shore. Give her your tired, Your hungry, Your poor, Give a man a fish and he'll eat once more. Teach a man to fish and he'll thrive on the sea. So does a goddess The onrushing flood Temper her maelstrom and Tender with care The blessings of nets That catch kinsmen and kind In binds of compassion, Doing as ought be done. The pelican tears out her heart The nets reach skyward The goddess lends an ear The nets reach seabound Open palms catch ceaseless tears The nets reach over the earth Between fishermen And the Fisher of Men An open palm Lies outstretched In waiting. Lady Nanshe with the pelican at her feet, clad in glittering scales, May your name resound on the lips of the black-headed forever and ever.

Silim! I'm so happy to have found your blog, and even moreso to see I'm not the only Meso polytheist here in America. Reading over everything has made me feel a lot more connected with my own beliefs as well as this little community, so thanks for existing!

You’re definitely not the only one! I’m doing my best to let other people know we’re here, I was convinced I was on my own too. Stay awesome out there, anon. I’m glad I could help.

Love is always a very awkward conversation. I've had a lot of talks about it with various people, not just concerning my own relationships. I knew a girl with nine siblings in middle school, even more worryingly thin than I was, who picked up the slack where her mom couldn't. It's been an ongoing project over the course of several years between my dad and I to try to define love in a clear, logical way. I have a friend who dated a suicidal boy because she didn't want him to kill himself, and it was one of the unhealthiest relationships I've ever seen, second only to perhaps the story of a man who loved his son and tried to beat the sociopathy out of him. I've had happy accidents, like living for a lonely four months in Spain and getting a housemate who was absolutely torn up about his sexuality, and telling him about my own experiences. I can't say I've gone through the same sort of stress as other LGBT people, but. Comparing pain is sort of pointless to begin with. It was enough that I understood, cared, and did my best to help when I had the chance. My relationship with my mother is complicated, in that she loves me with a fiery passion but expresses it through control. She feels responsible for my actions in a way that... doesn't function well. There is no line between personal and professional action, and a lot of times I feel more like her psychiatric patient without the benefit of a professional distance. She resents me, is confused by my actions, and frustrated. She loves me and only wants me to be my best, so by her logic I should just do everything she says, but it really isn't that simple. I'm 21 years old with my own life, and I'm afraid of her calling the police on me or banging unexpectedly on my door. I am comfortable with who I am. LGBT in a three year strong relationship, pagan and more certain of it than I ever was just shadowing my mother at church, fairly decent looking aside from the scars and split ends, capable of quite a few basic things and able to learn anything I need to. My anxiety stems from how other people respond to me, and my history. That's hardly unique, more a simple fact. I started this post off my saying that love is complicated, and I meant it. I've been listening to a lot of documentaries today, reading about gay history. I ran into a particularly misogynistic story that made me physically ill in a way that stories usually never do, and it made me think. It made me think about my mother, who's fierce and professional and feminist, but who admitted to me once that if I ever turned out lesbian she would outright sob over having failed in her duty to save my soul. It made me think about my dad, who's definitely not sure what to make of my sexuality (I came out to him) but doesn't care about making it his business either so long as I'm careful and safe. Acceptance from someone who's just starting to untangle his culturally trained misogyny, and isn't that funny? People are complicated. Just take a brief glance in a neurology textbook, or a psychology textbook. The ways we learn by building associations in particular fascinates me. It explains a lot, to me. Love is complicated. The Greeks had multiple words for it, Eros and Agape and Philia and Storge. We have multiple ways of referring to it in English, too. Roughly 220,000 words are in the Oxford dictionary, but I still haven't found a good way to describe how I feel when I see other people trying their hardest out of good intentions and having it go terribly, awfully wrong, without any possibility of understanding. I don't understand everything. I definitely don't claim to. But it's a gift that I understand what little I do, and I'll keep trying to understand what I do not. I hope other people will do the same. And I hope that little by little, some of the solipsism will be filed away from the world. Not everyone will accept everything. Not everyone is willing to be conscious of the ways their actions affect others. Maybe I'm a naïve idiot venting my rare moment of optimism. I didn't really have a plan when I started writing this, you know? I just have this aching fire in my chest. For myself, for the people I've met, for every time I've seen one person blank faced and going through what amounts to a "Windows.exe has stopped working" every time their locked-in worldview is faced with strange and alien data. It's definitely not going to change anytime soon. But hey. At least the government will let me get gay married. That's more than I expected, I'm kind of curious to see what will come next. Which will be put a stop to first, gay people and non-whites getting lynched in the next county over, or pagan merchants being run out of town? Does anybody actually listen to questions like that, or just nod and smile as they recycle their plastics and move on?

One of the most powerful moments I experienced as an ancient history student was when I was teaching cuneiform to visitors at a fair. A father and his two little children came up to the table where I was working. I recognised them from an interfaith ceremony I’d attended several months before: the father had said a prayer for his homeland, Syria, and for his hometown, Aleppo.

All three of them were soft-spoken, kind and curious. I taught the little girl how to press wedges into the clay, and I taught the little boy that his name meant “sun” and that there was an ancient Mesopotamian God with the same name. I told them they were about the same age as scribes were when they started their training. As they worked, their father said to them gently: “See, this is how your ancestors used to write.”

And I thought of how the Ancient City of Aleppo is almost entirely destroyed now, and how the Citadel was shelled and used as a military base, and how Palmyran temples were blown up and such a wealth of culture and history has been lost forever. And there I was with these children, two small pieces of the future of a broken country, and I was teaching them cuneiform. They were smiling and chatting to each other about Mesopotamia and “can you imagine, our great-great-great-grandparents used to write like this four thousand years ago!” For them and their father, it was more than a fun weekend activity. It was a way of connecting, despite everything and thousands of kilometres away from home, with their own history.

This moment showed me, in a concrete way, why ancient studies matter. They may not seem important now, not to many people at least. But history represents so much of our cultural identity: it teaches us where we come from, explains who we are, and guides us as we go forward. Lose it, and we lose a part of ourselves. As historians, our role is to preserve this knowledge as best we can and pass it on to future generations who will need it. I helped pass it on to two little Syrian children that day. They learnt that their country isn’t just blood and bombs, it’s also scribes and powerful kings and Sun-Gods and stories about immortality and tablets that make your hands sticky. And that matters.