When stars were many and people few, a great story was told everywhere. The first storytellers were women. Their story was so large it filled the universe it told of a Great Mother encompassing life, death and return of everything. When Neolithic farming people settled, and depended on plentiful crops and herds, a goddess of fertility stepped into stardom. Inanna is the Sumerian goddess of love, crescent moon, evening star, fertility and renewal. She is the longest lasting supreme goddess of the Ancient Near East. Inannas biography includes her rise to supreme holder of almost all the powers of culture and civilization. 5000 year old poems bring Inanna to life. She sings to her miraculous vulva and to her consort-lover; she struggles to keep her powers and complains of her losses and demotions. Inanna represents lifes powerful contradictions. She changes peace to war and back again; she causes strife and brings love; she turns women into men and men into women. Inanna loves all her people, every one. A biography must have adversity and Inanna has plenty; she must always conquer of the ever-rising tide of patriarchal domination in all its forms. Buried and forgotten for two millennia, she now steps from the dust, ties up her sandals, applies her kohl, adjusts her tiara, summons her lions, and returns. Her story is also womans story. Let me introduce you to Inanna, Queen of Heaven, Earth, and almost everything

This reference offers reliable knowledge about women's diverse faith practices throughout history and prehistory, and across cultures. Across the span of human history, women have participated in world-building and life-sustaining cultural creativity, making enormous contributions to religion and spirituality. In the contemporary period, women have achieved greater equality, with more educational opportunities, female role models in public life, and opportunities for religious expression than ever before. Contemporaneously with this increased visibility, women are actively and energetically engaging with religion for themselves and for their communities. Drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars, this reference chronicles the religious experiences of women across time and cultures. The book includes sections on major religions as well as on spirituality, African religions, prehistoric religions, and other broad topics. Each section begins with an introduction, followed by reference entries on specialized subjects along with excerpts from primary source documents. The entries provide numerous suggestions for further reading, and the book closes with a detailed bibliography.

A fresh retelling of the ancient texts about Ishtar, the world's first goddess. Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. "A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A fresh retelling of the ancient texts about Ishtar, the world's first goddess. Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. "A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade

This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.

Six-thousand-year-old clay tablets left behind by the Sumerians tell us in cuneiform script that the planets Uranus and Neptune are "greenish-blue." How did they know? Our science could not confirm that until the Voyager II fly-by in the 1980s. The ignored question of the last century has to be: “Who told the Sumerians that Uranus and Neptune exist, and about their colors?” Again: “Who told them?” Take a breath to grasp the significance of that question? The same clay tablets also tell that Inanna, a fierce and beautiful goddess from antiquity, is not a fictional character. As Aphrodite to the Greeks, Venus to the Romans, through many adventures and love affairs erroneously categorized as myth, she gained for herself a place in the Nefilim Pantheon of Twelve. Inanna/Ishtar is a chronicle of fact-based incidents interspersed with highly probable fictional stepping stones. Acknowledged the “Goddess of Love and War,” her ferocity in battle and passion in bed are depicted in the detail anticipated of one bearing that epithet. For the deities of antiquity, the few prohibitions regarding sex were related to royal rights of succession allowing Inanna, a Divine Child, daughter of two of the ruling pantheon, a free romp among the gods and mortals of her time. This tale swims upstream against the flow of current teachings and knowledge. It contains theory and context some may find objectionable. Eventually, continually emerging discoveries will require a rewrite of the Bible (another one), giving our precursors the place in our ancient history they deserve. It is through our Creator, by way of the Nefilim and Anunnaki, that we exist in our present form, far ahead of our time. They provided the “missing link” that has baffled anthropologists for centuries. Nibiru, their home planet, ("Planet X" to current astronomers), orbits our sun from deep space. The Sumerians tell it is a monarchy ruled by a pantheon of twelve including a King, his two sons, a daughter, and eight others of royal blood. To accept their reality, consider how they came to be; a subject that is not being taught in our culture. I hope the following will help make it clear. The title, “Goddess of Love and War,” is bestowed on Inanna by history, not the author. It would not be fitting to write, "They kissed and went to bed to make love.” Therefore, the several descriptions of sexual activity herein are not gratuitous, but they are graphic.

From the earliest times, the medicinal properties of certain herbs were connected with deities, particularly goddesses. Only now with modern scientific research can we begin to understand the basisand rationality that these divine connections had and, being preserved in myths and religious stories, they continued to have a significant impact through the present day. Riddle argues that the pomegranate, mandrake, artemisia, and chaste tree plants substantially altered thedevelopment of medicine and fertility treatments.The herbs, once sacred to Inanna, Aphrodite, Demeter, Artemis, and Hermes, eventually came to be associated with darker forces, representing theinstruments of demons and witches. Riddle's ground-breaking work highlights the important medicinalhistory thatwas lost and argues for itsrightful place as one of the predecessors