The Marriage of Nergal, and the Balance of the Dead

A second major myth tells how Ereshkigal came to share her rule. In the story of Nergal and Ereshkigal, the war-god Nergal offends the queen of the dead and is summoned to her realm to answer for it; the encounter turns, in the fuller version, into desire, and Nergal remains below as her consort and co-ruler, so that the underworld gains a king. The tale is one of the ancient Near East's more psychologically vivid narratives, and it fixes the pairing of the death-queen with a violent male god. Ereshkigal has no temple cult of the ordinary kind, the dead were not a source of blessing to petition, but she is invoked in incantations and feared as the power that no one who enters her land escapes. This atlas sets her as the Mesopotamian face of Pluto.

The myth of Ereshkigal and her sister's descent has had a distinct modern afterlife in depth psychology and literature: the Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera's 1981 study Descent to the Goddess drew directly on the Inanna-Ereshkigal narrative as a psychological model for confronting grief, depression and the neglected, shadow side of the self, helping introduce the ancient Mesopotamian myth to a modern therapeutic and feminist readership largely unfamiliar with cuneiform literature otherwise. The reading is a modern interpretive layer rather than any part of ancient Mesopotamian belief, but it is one of the clearest examples of a Sumerian myth being actively taken up and reinterpreted well outside the field of ancient history.