Despite often being labeled a love goddess, Inanna-Ishtar—the most popular female deity in ancient Mesopotamia and one of the world’s oldest documented divine figures—is better described as a goddess of sex. She’s an overtly erotic figure who harnesses her beauty and feminine charm even in nonsexual relationships and whose “love” poetry is more about pleasure than companionship. Meanwhile, her favor is considered crucial to success in war, and we often find her “exulting in battle like a destructive weapon” and “being strong with the mace like a joyful lord” (Black and colleagues, Inana and Ebih).

What logic could allow these seemingly opposing parts of life to feel like key domains of the same deity? Intuitively, it makes a kind of sense, we might say. But try to articulate why. If that’s easy enough, add in some of her other, less well-known domains: kingship, fate, gender-bending, the arts of civilization.

Her personal traits are equally varied: she’s vindictive, clever, tender, restless, beautiful and beautifying, power-hungry, knowledge-seeking, a darling and a terror, an upholder of order and a force of chaotic destruction, and much more besides.

Summing her up proves trickier than we’d think—a puzzle that scholars and devotees alike have been mulling over for decades.

What, they ask, is holding this deity together? What is Inanna really the goddess of?

And what does it mean for how we in modern times might choose to view her and our cosmos, an essential part of which one cradle of civilization believed her to reflect for over three thousand years?

One possible answer

Inanna is a goddess of heightened experience.

What “heightened experience” means here is a state where stimulation exceeds its ordinary limits and overflows into increased appetite and output. We can recognize heightened experience by how it feels inside and what it does outside. Inside us, time and other aspects of reality feel suspended, and the inner faculties are absorbed, all brought to bear on the experience before us. Our appetite for more of the stimulation intensifies, and our energy surges, often until it spills outward into constructive or destructive action.

Common examples of heightened experience include

• erotic excitement

• bloodlust

• power highs

• adrenaline rushes

• thrills of transgression

• the sublimity of beauty

• the euphoria of liberation

• extremes of emotion

• the flow of learning and mastery

Sound familiar? As we’ll explore below, all are key domains and experiences of Inanna and her cosmic impact. (“Heightened experience” is, of course, a modern term we’re using to name a pattern that emerges across Inanna’s myths, not a concept we know the Mesopotamians themselves articulated as such.)

Even in humans, these states are powerful. They’re unusually memorable in their intensity, and they can drive us to do things we didn’t know we were capable of. But Inanna doesn’t just cause these states in people; she embodies and gravitates toward them herself. And when she lives them, the divine results are inevitably even more extreme and world-shaking.

This may be the very reason Inanna’s mythic character is so varied. Taken all together, her myths suggest an appetite not just for sex or violence in particular, but for the heightened experience these and other facets of life unleash. And since another feature of heightened experience is that its highs can degrade into new normals, she must continually seek out new ways to achieve it. In other words, she’s insatiable.

All this explains why Inanna touches on so many aspects of life, why her emotions scale to cosmic consequences, and why her domains look so disconnected (but actually aren’t).

Sex and war are two paths of heightened experience. But there are plenty more, and Inanna can teach us just how many. In this, she’s a goddess uniquely suited to remind humans, ancient and modern, of the richness of life. Next, we’ll let her show us some of her favorite paths—and, in the process, perhaps we’ll gain a new understanding of what it means to feel alive.

Inanna’s favorite paths to heightened experience

1. Erotic ecstasy

In poetry about Inanna’s marriage to the shepherd god-king Dumuzi, her first and most mythically important lover, it’s clear that the important thing is not the search for a soulmate or domestic happiness. Rather, it’s how the goddess’s intense sexual excitement and pleasure must be assured so that they spill over as fertility for earthly crops and creatures. As Dumuzi says to her, “Your breast is your field. Your field pours out plants,” in addition to water and bread. “I poured out grain from my womb,” she agrees (Wolkstein and Kramer, The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi). Such are the outcomes of her orgasm.

Sexual enjoyment is a quintessential heightened experience, and portrayals of Inanna’s sexual activity never fail to remind readers of this. The texts are full of her fantasy, longing, foreplay, fulfilment, and afterglow, often in graphic detail. Inwardly, her erotic intensity and joy are states of sensual absorption and time-stopping pleasure. Outwardly, they not only render her eager to receive and give ever more pleasure—“sixty then sixty satisfy themselves in turn upon her nakedness. Young men have tired, Ishtar will not tire” (Foster, Before the Muses)—but also quicken sexual desire and similarly generative qualities in plants, animals, and humans. This output in turn secures the renewal of kingship and creates celebrations of the abundance her pleasure brings, both of which are crucial for holding society together.

Note that the emphasis is never on Inanna’s capacity for childbearing or motherhood or on the stability created by the long-term success of a marriage. There’s no mention of the goddess becoming pregnant from her sexual adventures, and while a few texts seem to refer to her “sons,” it’s never implied that Dumuzi is the father. It would be a mistake to regard her as a mother goddess. As for the long-term, family-forming potential of Inanna and Dumuzi’s union, it should be remembered that their life together ends tragically when Inanna condemns him to take her place in the underworld for failing to mourn her while she’s dead there. Hardly a model of a stable wedded bond!

No, the point of Inanna’s erotic poetry seems to be the sexual experience itself—both her satisfaction and her insatiability. She takes many lovers and never tires of admirers’ attentions. Her primary role as a sex goddess may well be the root of her insatiability for heightened experience in general: like the sexual impulse, she’s capable of exquisite satisfaction… just not for long before the hunger flares up again. This cycle may provide the template for all her other seeking.

2. Power-Intoxication

When we talk about getting “drunk” on power, Inanna would know exactly what we mean. The feelings of strength, exaltation, pride, and even invincibility that come with displays of agency, superiority, or competence create an exalted state of realized potential and life lived fully, perhaps limitlessly. Power begets power hunger, as well as its two main outputs: generosity and terror.

At first glance, it’s hardly surprising to find Inanna’s texts full of praise and imagery of her power—she’s a god, after all. Two key differences between Inanna and other gods, however, are how insatiably she seeks more power and how much she delights in it, revealing the sense of heightened experience she derives from her achievements. She’s no remote matriarch, stoic in her self-assured restraint.

Many, if not most, of her main myths are incited by some scheme of hers to gain more power: her growing of the huluppu tree so she can make a throne and marriage bed out of it, her cunning acquisition of the me (divine powers and arts of civilization) from wisdom god Enki by outdrinking him, her daring takeover of An’s temple, her destructive conquest of the mountain Ebih when it refuses to bow to her, her descent to the underworld to usurp her sister’s throne.

Her ambition pays off. Hymns praise her successful status-climbing: “You now surpass even your mother,” one says. “You were born to be a second-rate ruler, but now? How far you surpass all the greatest gods” (Helle, The Exaltation of Inana). Rather than starting her mythic life at full power, she’s shown to have acquired it over time, from growing the huluppu tree as a girl who still lives “in fear of the word” of older, more powerful pantheon leaders to ruling over heaven and earth as a queen “eminent in the assembly, enthroned in power, noblemen to her right and left!” (Helle, The Hymn to Inana).

And when she secures the power she craves, there’s a perhaps unexpected emphasis on her blatant enjoyment of it, capturing her right when she’s caught up in heightened experience. She’s described as “rejoicing in her fearsome terror” (Black, Ebih) as she boasts at length to the defeated Ebih. When she brings the me from Enki’s city of Eridu to her own city of Uruk, she commands her people to celebrate with a festival of sparring, singing, ceremony, and feasting. “Let all the lands proclaim my noble name,” she adds, in case we were left in any doubt that her desire for their happiness is also (if not ultimately) about her feeling her own power. “Let my people sing my praises.”

The people under her patronage had every reason to celebrate. Whether she wins them new arts of civilization or conquered territories, Inanna’s bids for power often benefit them as much as her, advancing their standing and prosperity. That “often” must be qualified because Inanna acts from her insatiability for heightened experience more than from any precedent or desire for stability. This makes her unpredictable: “She overturns what she has done; nobody can know her course.” And “the man she once called on, she now has no care for” (Helle, Hymn). Rather than a source of chaos to be rejected, however, she was seen as a volatile force to be courted, wooed to your side.

No one knew this better than the king. In addition to being a sovereign in her own right, Inanna also plays an essential role in human kingship. The king of a Mesopotamian city was said to be her lover, their sacred marriage an important festive occasion. As with her prototypical lover, Dumuzi, she rewards the king who pleases her with life (not just longevity, but potency), abundance (through her fertility-quickening pleasure), and success in war (through her hearty participation in it). And if he didn’t please her? Well, as we’ll see later, her anger is just as fate-fixing as her favor.

3. Peril

Humans often feel most alive when life is in jeopardy. In times of peril, we have no attention to spare for anything beyond the present moment—indeed, there may be nothing beyond the present moment! All of our senses and mental acuity are homed in on the high-stakes task at hand, hungry for any input that might help us prevail. In our rage and fear, we might also be hungry for blood, violence, and destruction. And, animated by adrenaline, we exude strength and stamina we didn’t know we had. Inanna seems to relish all of this.

One of her main roles is as a war deity. While kings counted on her to inspire their battle strategy and foment terror and weakness in the enemy, her general approach to war is anything but cool and calculating. She’s a warrior goddess who both revels in violence herself and inspires it in mortals:

On the vast, silent plain, bright daylight is darkened. She turns the midday heaven into a starry sky. People look at each other in anger, they look for a fight. Their noise disturbs the plain, their shouts weigh on wasteland and meadow. Her cry is a storm: skins crawl throughout the lands. No one can withstand her frenzied attack. … She hurries havoc! (Helle, Hymn)

When I [Inanna] stand in the thick of the battle, I am indeed also the very guts of battle, the heroic strength. (Black and colleagues, A Šir-Namšub to Inana)

Seen from Inanna’s perspective, war isn’t primarily about justice or the restoration of order. It’s the lusty, perilous experience of combat itself that’s foregrounded again and again in her poems: “In her happy heart, she sings the song of death in battle. Singing the song in her heart, she washes her weapons with blood and guts” (Helle, Hymn).

Her lust for violence echoes her sexual lust, but it’s not simply a destructive opposing pole to her generative erotic pleasure. This is one place where seeing her as a goddess of heightened experience can be especially useful. Heightened experience, such as battle, increases energy so that it spills outward: a neutral force that might be favorable or catastrophic, depending on how Inanna feels and acts in that moment of suspended reality. In short, the bloodlust she feels and inspires might decide a person’s victory or undoing—or their enemy’s.

Sometimes, Inanna herself is a source of danger. To call her capable of devastation is an understatement. “When she speaks, cities turn to ruins—homes for ghosts—and temples become deserts.” Unlike some other divine figures, her destruction is rarely, if ever, portrayed as the prelude to new creation; rather, “she humbles great mountains, leaving them as rubble,” (Helle, Hymn), as she does with Ebih. The point seems to be the act of destruction itself. Destroying has always been an inherent source of heightened experience. Even a child who builds a city of blocks just for the fun of knocking it down knows this. 

4. Extreme emotion

Intense emotions are heightened experiences. Their grip feels all-consuming. They’re also highly generative: rage wounds with destructive actions or words, joy is generous and often infectious, longing catalyzes deep bonds and world-shaping creations, grief digs bottomless abysses and endless wells of tears. And even when we don’t want to be feeling the emotion, while it lasts, we crave only input that will add fuel to the fire. Just try explaining to a person who’s lost control of their anger all the good reasons they should calm down, or cheering up someone in the throes of profound loss.

Inanna is well-acquainted with this form of heightened experience. If she’s feeling an emotion in a myth or hymn, you can bet it’s an extreme version. In one poem dedicated to comparing Inanna’s passions to the various elements of a storm and other natural forces, “the riverbanks overflow with the flood-waves of [her] heart” (Wolkstein and Kramer, Loud Thundering Storm). In another, she “[wears herself] out with wind after wind.” Likewise, she causes her cult personnel to “exhaust themselves with tears and tears” and “makes them weep and wail for her” (Helle, Hymn). When monsters invade her beloved huluppu tree or when she demands a cosmic role from Enki, she doesn’t just sulk—she sobs. When Gilgamesh rejects her or when Ebih refuses to bow to her, she doesn’t seethe—she flies into a fury sated solely by destruction. As the “radiant” Evening Star, she “looks in sweet wonder from heaven” as the people of Sumer parade before her, and she stirs “great joy” and lovemaking in them. The heightened experience of intense emotion can also manifest as fixation, such as Inanna’s hoarding of as many me as she can get her hands on: “Ishtar’s preoccupation with the me’s may almost be said to approach the character of an obsession” (Hallo). As we can see, Inanna doesn’t keep her intense emotions to herself. They bubble over into her actions, often with great consequences for the world around her.

Indeed, sometimes, they cross the line into sheer excess, as judged by her fellow gods. When Inanna asks An, the king of the deities, for permission to retaliate against Ebih, his lack of support for her plan shows that even he, who has an affectionate relationship with her, finds her anger disproportionate: “My little one demands the destruction of this mountain—what is she taking on?” (Black, Ebih). (And once she attacks anyway, it’s not enough to bring the disrespectful mountain to heel; she needs to annihilate it with every kind of weapon, including her bare hands, and subject it to multiple rounds of gloating.) Similarly, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Inanna famously reacts to Gilgamesh’s rejection of her amorous advances by setting the Bull of Heaven on him, another act that An apparently finds excessive—though, this time, he reluctantly grants permission. When Inanna appeals to Enki for a role in the world order, he chides her for being so upset when he’s already given her many functions—she wants too much. Another time, Enki fashions a grotesque doppelganger of Inanna for her to spar with because her bellicose attitude becomes too overwhelming for the other deities.

Other times, her intense emotions make order instead of breaking it. Inanna and Shukaletuda tells about a time she’s sexually assaulted in her sleep by a gardener’s son named Shukaletuda, whom she relentlessly tracks down for vengeance. Along the way, she spreads disaster across the land. When she finally captures him, she curses him roundly and condemns him to death. She sentences him to live on only in “sweet” songs that name him as her violator (Black and colleagues, Inana and Shu-kale-tuda). Here, Inanna’s fury serves lawful justice. Indeed, aspects of this myth are believed to reflect how rape was punished in the human justice system of its time.

Inanna can also swing from one intense emotion to the next in the span of moments. In the story of her descent to the underworld, she wrathfully condemns Dumuzi to die in her place upon catching him failing to mourn her—only to weep “bitterly” for him like any new widow in the very next lines (Wolkstein and Kramer, The Descent of Inanna). Her grief at his loss is in no way blunted by her anger at him; she’s capable of holding both emotions at full voltage at the same time. And both overflow into cosmic consequences: the cycle of seasons wouldn’t exist without the combination of her angry condemnation of the Dumuzi and her tender grief that leads her to allow his sister to take his place in the underworld for half the year.

5. Transgressive thrill

There are two interrelated elements of what scholars often call Inanna’s “boundary-crossing.” The first is her association with paradox and opposites. She’s the Morning and Evening Star and has the power to turn day into night and night into day. She wants the heavens and the underworld. She’s equally famous as a lover and a warrior. She upholds lawful order while also causing chaos. She’s associated with storms and sunlight alike. “To destroy and to create,” writes one poet, “are yours, Inana” (Helle, Hymn). She “combines male aggressiveness with the force of a superabundance of female sexuality” (Harris). She brings prosperity and ruin to cities. She’s compassionate in lamentations and pitiless in often being the cause of them.

The sum of all these clashes and resolutions of opposites is a goddess who lives and bestows a vast range of life experiences. Remember, Inanna always wants more. Not content to be hemmed in by categories, her mercurial character—and perhaps her restless collection of the me—means freedom to access life in all its many colors. Such an extreme sense of freedom is a heightened experience. It’s the sense of boundless possibility that makes us giddy.

Her extensive collection of opposing domains can also be read as a sign of her power, another heightened experience we’ve already explored. The dizzying list (incompletely translated due to fragmentary sources) of the me that “are yours, Inana” in the Hymn to Inana, for instance, impresses upon readers the inescapability of her reach. She is the empress who has conquered in all regions of life, reaching into the dominions of other gods.

The second sense of Inanna’s boundary-crossing is transgression. As “the Brave One who appears first in the heavens” (Wolkstein and Kramer, The Lady Who Ascends into the Heavens), intrepid Inanna doesn’t hesitate to break with precedent when it gets in the way of her purposes, including her naked need for heightened experience itself. For all that she carries out the orders of pantheon leaders An and Enlil and even seeks permission before acting, it seems as likely that she’ll defy a given mandate or norm as obey it. As Enki comments in one myth, “Inana, you destroy what should not be destroyed; you create what should not be created” (Black and colleagues, Enki and the World Order). 

If we see her as a goddess of heightened experience, this fits. The “thrill of transgression” is a stock phrase for a reason. With its potent cocktail of danger, agency, and frequent combination with other heightened experiences like sex and violence, the act of rebelling against the established order can be rewarding in its own right. Much of Inanna’s festival activity seems to have been rooted in that fact. Ever “defiant” (Helle, Exaltation), she revels in rites where men and women swap clothes, slaves and masters play at each other’s roles, adults lose themselves in children’s games, and all manner of taboos are violated.

One common example of Inanna’s transgression of norms is gender-bending. Her status as a female warrior would already be seen as a transgression in Mesopotamian society, to say nothing of the macho assertiveness and aggressiveness she exhibits in the rest of her life. Many of her cult personnel were involved in gender-bending ritual activity, which the texts intriguingly describe as the goddess setting “a great burden” on certain bodies, “bless[ing] them,” and giving them cultic tools likely viewed as belonging to the opposite sex: “She snapped a spear and gave it to them, as if they were men” (Helle, Hymn). We still know very little about how this gender-bending worked or its religious significance, but the evidence is strong that it occurred and that Inanna was said to be responsible for it, instigating the transgressive behavior of her own desire.

Other transgressions abound. Inanna doesn’t listen when An warns her against attacking Ebih: “‘Maiden Inana, you cannot oppose it.’ Thus he spoke. The mistress, in her rage and anger, opened the arsenal” (Black, Ebih). In one poem about her early courtship with Dumuzi, she sneaks out of her family home to go dancing with him, a youthful transgression as relatable now as in ancient times.

Perhaps Inanna’s greatest transgression—and maybe the only one she’s truly punished for—is her descent to the underworld. Ambition apparently drives her to seek power in the one realm she can’t rule. We know that this is considered transgressive because of other gods’ reactions: “Inana craved the great heaven and she craved the great below as well. The divine powers of the underworld are divine powers which should not be craved” (Wolkstein and Kramer, Descent).  

One of this complex story’s takeaways seems to be the discovery of the limits of Inanna’s power: only death itself can contain her. She never conquers the underworld, and though she has the foresight to leave instructions for her rescue if needed, it ends up relying on contingencies (her vizier Ninshubur carrying out her instructions, Enki’s willingness to provide the plants and water of life, Ereshkigal’s favor of Inanna’s rescuers). The transgression proves costly even after her resurrection: she loses Dumuzi, whom she damns to be her substitute in the great below. The underworld, it seems, is the one realm where she can’t hope to do more than survive. And this makes sense—the Mesopotamian underworld is largely portrayed as a dreary place; a goddess of heightened experience may well not belong there.

Paradox-spanning freedom and transgression generate more than the thrill of pushing limits or joy in inversion and reversal. They create new horizons of possibility, new options for life experience. Since what was once transgressive often becomes a new norm once the line is crossed, the appetite for this heightened experience is, like the others, self-perpetuating. Once one frontier is reached and settled, a new one must be sought. Inanna is ready to meet that challenge: “ever restless, she straps on her sandals” (Helle, Hymn).

6. Beauty

Beauty is a quieter but no less powerful path to heightened experience. Delight in it can be transcendent, sublime, and obsessive. It amplifies emotions, stirs desire, inspires us to creativity and intimacy. It can also be wielded as a form of power, another source of heightened experience.

Inanna taps into all of these features. As we’d expect of a sexually charged goddess, she’s beautiful in both her womanhood and in her aura of divinity. But she doesn’t stop at natural good looks. Many of her stories detail how she beautifies herself with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, and even weapons and emblems of power.

This isn’t solely a prelude to sex, either. One scholar reflects that Inanna may be “the world’s first power dresser” (Pryke, Ishtar). She carefully adorns herself even in preparation for non-sexual situations, such as before asking for An’s blessing for her attack on Ebih and before journeying to the underworld. Her ensembles show off her status and wealth as much as her sex appeal. She wears a mascara with the suggestive name “let him come, let him come” along with her “garment of ladyship” (Wolkstein and Kramer, Descent).

And she aims to inspire fear as much as admiration with her beauty, signaling that we should read her allure as more of the heightened-experience-inducing sublime variety than the merely pleasant, placid kind: “Inanna … put on the garment of royalty and girded herself in joy. She bedecked her forehead with terror and fearsome radiance. … She brandished the seven-headed cita weapon vigorously to her right and placed straps of lapis lazuli on her feet” (Black, Ebih).

Her connection to beauty isn’t limited to her own person. She delights in her lovers’ attractiveness, and, in her capacity as a fertility deity, she also creates beauty in the natural world. Manmade beauty, such as the arts, also pleases her: she often sings and dances, and her festivals are full of music and other aesthetic displays. Some of the me she collects for her city are related to beauty and aesthetics: “adorning speech,” “the art of song,” and the “colorful” and “black” garments, for instance (Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna and the God of Wisdom). Her concern with beauty, then, has a generative effect on culture and civilization—just as our own does when beauty inspires us to create and consume art, beautify ourselves, and even create new humans through sex.

And just as it can overflow into conflict among humans (think the Trojan War), beauty also moves Inanna into destructiveness when her vanity is apparently insulted by Ebih’s lush loveliness (among other things): “Mountain range, because of your elevation, … because of your attractiveness, because of your beauty, because of your wearing a holy garment … I have killed you and brought you low” (Black, Ebih).

7. Mastery

We’ve seen how Inanna is a dedicated collector of the me, those rather mysterious Mesopotamian units that “represent the institutions, cultural achievements and divine forces which fuel and maintain the comic, cultic, political, and social order” (Pongratz-Leisten, “Reflections on the Translatability of the Notion of Holiness”). In myth, these building blocks of civilization are portrayed as physical objects: Inanna can “grasp them in her hand” and “clasp them to her breast” (Helle, Exaltation)—or load them into a boat, as she does after tricking Enki into gifting dozens of them to her at once. But most of the me signify not (just) literal items, but actions, skills, and concepts, such as the “art of lovemaking,” “deceit,” “travel,” the “making of decisions,” and all manner of crafts, ritual roles, and government functions (Wolkstein and Kramer, Wisdom). The idea seems to be that once Inanna’s city, Uruk, possesses these me, the people will have access to these various skills and arts, strengthening and enriching society.

Here, we see not only another form of Inanna’s power and boundary-crossing freedom, but her embodiment of mastery leading to creativity. A sense of mastery is the driver behind two heightened experiences that can be every bit as input-hungry and output-giving as sex and war: learning and flow. In psychology, “flow” is a mental state in which a person is completely engrossed in an activity for its own sake, where action and awareness merge, and the challenge of the task is perfectly balanced with their skills (Csikszentmihalyi, Flow). Like other heightened experiences, we can’t get enough of it, and it’s usually generative. It’s the force behind the energy we pour into passion projects—and many passion projects go on to shape the world.

We can view Inanna’s, and her people’s, acquisition of the me as analogous to learning; she’s hungry for new knowledge and skills. No wonder she has such a close relationship with wisdom god Enki (her trickery of him notwithstanding!). Similarly, possessing and wielding the me can be seen as possessing and exercising skills and arts and enjoying experiences. Lines in Inanna’s poetry such as “She has brought the mighty powers [the me] to perfection” (Helle, Hymn) suggest that the me are not just things to do, but to gain competence in, to the point where flow is possible and society flourishes under the skills of Inanna and her city’s people.

The cosmic significance of heightened experience

Enheduanna, a high priestess whose poetry to Inanna remained famous for centuries, called Inanna “queen of vast heart.” “Her vast heart bids her do as she does,” the poet writes. “Only she, the queen, does these things” (Helle, Hymn). 

To modern ears, this sounds like praise of the goddess’s particular generosity or compassion; that’s what we tend to mean when we call a person “big-hearted.” In context, it likely means something very close to a capacity for the heightened experiences described in this article: Inanna’s heart is vast in the sense that it can’t be constrained by ordinary limits, her passions are huge, and her hunger is all-encompassing. In other words, her vastness is not about love, but life.

Inanna can easily be called a goddess of life—less the gestation and nurturance of life than of the heightened experience of it.  She is aliveness itself, life that wants more life, seeking an outlet for her endless energy. It’s as if she wants to make the most of every moment. This isn’t productivity or playfulness, but an urgency to taste as many moments of full awakeness as possible. The one thing she can never have, give, or experience is “enough.” Yet it seems it’s the ecstatic fulfilment of her seeking that spills over to generate the natural phenomena, military victories, and me of civilization that mortals depend on.

Indeed, supposing the Mesopotamians viewed her, or we now choose to view her, as a goddess of heightened experience, we confront the question: Why revere this state to the point of giving it the essential place in spiritual life and the world order that Inanna enjoyed for thousands of years?

One answer to this very subjective question is that heightened experience has a major, if undervalued, role both in our destinies as they unfold and in how we make meaning of our lives in hindsight. As our tour of Inanna’s paths to heightened experience has shown, many moments in these states are fate-deciding (or at least fate-tempting) ones. In these states, life is stretched so far to its vertical and horizontal limits that it seems it could move in a thousand different directions; routine and time and reality itself are in question. Heightened experiences are often the crossroads of life.

These moments also have a way of burning themselves into our memories. If you’ve recalled some of your own heightened experiences in the course of reading this article, you’ll likely confirm that many of them were also moments that, at the time or in hindsight, most made life feel truly lived. String them together, and you get a story of realized potential. Even the most negative ones probably shaped your life’s narrative in big ways. The most volatile and extreme states of being are also often its most meaningful; peak experience is transformative. Worshippers of Inanna seem to have recognized that these experiences shape destinies, cosmic cycles, and civilizations. Inanna can be seen as the divine face of that overwhelming, unavoidable force.

Why is Inanna a goddess of sex and war? Because she sweeps the whole spectrum of experience, of which sexual union and bloody violence can be viewed as extremes among extremes. Because erotic pleasure and bloodlust are two of the most universal heightened states. Because both are arenas of power, peril, beauty, and mastery, if very different kinds. Because they readily unleash intensity, excess, and transgression. And because they—like Inanna herself—are life at its most dynamic, full, and unforgettable.