Imaginário e devoção no culto à deusa mesopotâmica Inanna/Ishtar (2112-1600)

Abstract

Inanna, the tutelary deity of the city of Uruk in Ancient Mesopotamia, was the most referenced and complex goddess within the cultural system of that region. Goddess of love and war, storm and thunder, patron of the army, Lady of the Battle and Justice, charged with giving destiny to the king, bearer of the MEs, Queen of Heaven, goddess of life and its infinite manifestations were some of the epithets and functions with which it was titled. The number of documents mentioning it and of temples identified as her place of worship have qualified her as the most popular deity of Mesopotamia. And this popularity attracted the attention of powerful monarchs, whether by devotion to it or by power plays that involved Templar, palatial, and population control relations. And it is these relations and their confluences that I approach in this thesis, whose temporal clipping is the period from Ur III to Paleobabilônico, my hypothesis is that the cult, whose most important feast was the sacred marriage, was not restricted to a game of interests between political and religious powers as a form of real legitimation and maintainer of the Templar influence, its roots and support are based on the popular classes and groups of devotees of the most diverse social strata. The cult congregated disparate sectors of society, influenced in the social imaginary dictating behavioral rules, beyond all stylistic apparatus of the ritual of the hierogaments there was a popular devotion to Inanna, whose contact as the sacred had paths as multiple as the facets of the goddess. At the end of the analysis of the textual and iconographic sources we conclude that the Inanna cult contributed to the real legitimation, but given the tradition of this present in the city of Uruk from the first known tablets, the kings eventually kept a local rite alive that their acceptance by the popular classes favored them in relation to the idea of social cohesion, the belief also favored a specific group of society: women, who, by appropriating the goddess's discourse, achieved certain "freedoms." Inanna's worship had thus become a multihanded way, for it served the purposes of the king, clergy, and devotees. It was Inanna's multifaceted characteristic that allowed the power play between the sovereign, the Templar complex and the faithful and unified the Mesopotamian religious imaginary around a female deity who unlike the rest of the pantheon, had no place demarcated, passed by spaces, justified conducts, promoted the breaking of rules and behavioral models considered acceptable