Inanna in Narnia, Jadis in Ebih
What if I told you that a lost chapter of the Chronicles of Narnia was written thousands of years ago—and it’s not from the Bible?
In Narnia scholarship and fandom, Inanna (also known as Ishtar), the Mesopotamian goddess of sex and war, is only rarely associated with Jadis, the primary antagonist of The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But these two beautiful and terrible women of power have a surprising amount in common. Nowhere are their mutual features more obvious than in the epic poem Inanna and Ebih and its parallels with Jadis’s conquest of Narnia leading to the Long Winter.
In this article, we’ll take a close look at these unexpected parallels.
On Inanna’s side, her similarity to Jadis is worth noting as evidence of the persistence of her very ancient archetype. Inanna is one of the oldest historically documented deities in the world, worshipped as early as 3300 BCE in Sumer. To acknowledge her parallels with one of modern fantasy literature’s most widely known characters is to honor the essentiality of their shared archetype to humanity’s cultural consciousness.
Associating her with Jadis also reminds us that many popular modern readings of Inanna downplay her violence and power hunger. Anyone tempted to see her role as a goddess of sex as softening her should remember that in the case of Inanna, “we should not read sex as equating to pregnancy and motherhood but to an irresistible power and agency” (source).
For Jadis—who, it should be noted, came from Charn, a civilization resembling ancient Mesopotamia—the comparison provides a look into how her conquest of Narnia likely felt from her perspective. Raised royal in an archaic monarchy and with magical powers unavailable to commoners, her grand view of herself and her expectation of submission from others can be seen as making as much sense as Inanna’s, which we’ll see on display in the poem.
Inanna’s conquest of Ebih, briefly explained
Inanna and Ebih dates to the mid to late third millennium BCE. A highly influential text, it was included in the Sumerian literary canon used to train scribes hundreds of years later. The gist of the poem is this:
One day, Inanna is walking in the mountains, radiant in her power, and in their center, she encounters Ebih. Ebih is portrayed as both a place—a mountain or mountain range—and an individual, probably a god who is the mountain’s essence. Ebih fails to pay Inanna proper respect, refusing to “put its nose to the ground” and “rub its lips in the dust” in deference. Outraged, Inanna vows to terrorize the mountain into submission.
Before launching her raid, she seeks the blessing of An, king of the gods, with whom she has a mutually beneficial and even affectionate relationship. She dresses in splendor, gives him offerings and prayers, and indirectly reminds him that since her “terrifying” power came from him, Ebih’s disrespect is also a slight against him. But An denies her. He is struck by Ebih’s beauty, bounty, and fearsomeness and warns Inanna not to oppose it.
The furious Inanna attacks anyway, unleashing “magnificent battle” alongside storm, fire, flood, drought, and other natural disasters. After defeating and killing Ebih, she boasts of her conquest, and the poem ends with words of praise for her deed.
Jadis’s conquest of Narnia, briefly explained
Jadis’s conquest of Narnia occurs in the thousand-year gap between The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, meaning it’s not shown in the text. Still, these two books, along with Lewis’s official Narnia timeline, give us some idea of what happened. Here’s a quick summary:
In The Magician’s Nephew, we meet Jadis in her home world. There, to win the throne of Charn in a war against her sister, she destroyed all life by speaking the Deplorable Word, a powerfully destructive magic incantation. After a stymied attempt to conquer our world in London, she ends up in the world of Narnia just as it’s being created by Aslan. She’s exiled from Narnia shortly thereafter, when Aslan, hoping to protect his new world’s heartland from her, orders the planting of a tree she can’t come near because she unlawfully ate its fruit to gain immortality. She “lives on” in the north of the world, “growing stronger in dark magic.”
At some point in the next centuries, she becomes the executioner of Aslan’s divine father, the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea (who’s essentially God the Father, in Christian terms; a typical distant Sky-Father deity). The position gives her the authority to judge traitors and ritually sacrifice them on the Stone Table. This seems to give her some legitimacy in this new world that she wouldn’t have otherwise.
In Narnian Year 898, the protective tree presumably dies, and Jadis re-enters Narnia at last. We can assume that two years of war against its human rulers follow. She claims victory, seals Narnia in eternal winter, and rules for one hundred years until her defeat in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Are the parallels intentional?
Inanna wasn’t totally unfamiliar to Lewis. If nothing else, he would have read indirect references to her worship in the Bible and possibly known her as the inspiration for the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation.
Then there’s Ungit, the fictional goddess worshipped in the ancient-Near-Eastern-flavored story world of another of his novels, Till We Have Faces. Ungit is presented as one of the same kind as Aphrodite, a mythological descendant of Inanna. This suggests he was aware of the broad Near Eastern family of violent goddesses of eros to which Inanna belonged.
But it’s very doubtful Lewis knew of Inanna and Ebih. The first English translation was published after his death. My intention isn’t to claim this ancient poem as a direct source for Jadis. It’s more likely Lewis had Inanna’s type of goddess in mind to some degree for Jadis’s character, but not this specific text. Nonetheless, Lewis was well-read in mythology and ever attuned to archetypes, and this one seems to have worked her way into his story more deeply than he knew.
Now that we’re primed with the basics, it’s time for our close read of Inanna and Ebih and its parallels with Jadis’s conquest of Narnia. Since a line-by-line breakdown of the poem would be long and repetitive, I’ve omitted the less relevant lines. You can read the full translation here.
1. Characterization of Inanna and Jadis
Goddess of the fearsome divine powers, clad in terror, riding on the great divine powers, Inana, made complete by the strength of the holy ankar weapon, drenched in blood… great lady Inana, knowing well how to plan conflicts, you destroy mighty lands with arrow and strength ...
Appropriately enough for the content of the poem, its opening lines highlight Inanna’s reputation as a destroyer of lands through military might. This mirrors our introduction to Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew as the warlike destroyer of her world. Her power, too, is “made complete” by a specific “weapon”: the Deplorable Word. And she is “drenched in blood” for having used it.
My lady, … on your wearing daylight and brilliance on earth, on your walking in the mountain ranges and bringing forth beaming rays, on your bathing the girin plants of the mountains (in light), … on your being strong with the mace like a joyful lord, … on your exulting in such battle like a destructive weapon …
The poem goes on to illustrate Inanna’s characteristic combination of beauty and terror. On one hand, she’s the “beaming rays” of “daylight” illuminating the mountains. On the other, she triumphs and rejoices in battle. The text juxtaposes the contrasts of her character, weaving them into one.
The same is done with Jadis in her earliest scenes, her beauty and brutality emphasized in equal measure, sometimes in the same sentence. She has a “look of such fierceness and pride that it took your breath away—yet she was beautiful too.” And we’re told that “even her height was nothing compared with her beauty, her fierceness, and her wildness. She looked ten times more alive than most of the people one meets in London.” For all that Lewis ultimately judges her negatively in a way the Mesopotamians never seem to do with Inanna, he allows the ambiguity of Jadis’s character room to breathe.
2. Rejection by an abundant land
(Inana announced:) “When I, the goddess, was walking around … in the Lulubi mountains, when I turned towards the centre of the mountains, as I approached the mountain range of Ebih it showed me no respect.”
Both Inanna and Jadis encounter a thriving place that refuses to bow to them. For Inanna, that place is Ebih. For Jadis, it is Narnia.
The freshly created world of Narnia, full of newborn (yet fully grown) animals and so fertile that an iron bar from a lamp-post grows into a new lamp-post in its soil, is every bit as abundant as An (later in the poem) describes Ebih:
Fruit hangs in its flourishing gardens and luxuriance spreads forth. Its magnificent trees are themselves a source of wonder to the roots of heaven. In Ebih ...... lions are abundant under the canopy of trees and bright branches. It makes wild rams and stags freely abundant. It stands wild bulls in flourishing grass. Deer couple among the cypress trees of the mountain range.
And just as Ebih is in the “centre of the mountains,” the land of Narnia is nearly the literal geographical center and certainly the spiritual center of its world, the very heart of creation. It is this land that Jadis will covet even when all the rest of the world is open to her. Like Inanna, she has a chance of making the rest bow down to her, but this one place—and its god, Ebih/Aslan—refuses.
3. Jadis and Inanna’s response
“Since they showed me no respect, since they did not put their noses to the ground for me, since they did not rub their lips in the dust for me, I shall personally fill the soaring mountain range with my terror. … Like a city which An has cursed, may it never be restored. … May Ebih give me honour and praise me.”
Aside from the Mesopotamian nomenclature, these lines could have just as likely been spoken by Jadis as by Inanna. We can picture Jadis scheming in similar terms as she plots to conquer Narnia for 898 years.
Jadis is in the market for a new place to conquer for more practical reasons than Inanna—after destroying her home world, she needs a new one to inhabit and rule. But there’s also, no doubt, an element of feeling affronted at the Narnians not treating her like the royalty she is. We see this in her reaction to the various people who don’t bow to her in London, which she also aimed to conquer earlier in The Magician’s Nephew:
“Stand up, dog, and don’t sprawl there as if you were speaking to your equals.”
“Down on your knees, minion, before I blast you.”
“Scum! You shall pay dearly for this when I have conquered your world. Not one stone of your city will be left.”
Both women react with outrage, but also with a goal of making war on the land that won’t submit to them. Jadis must begin the process of gaining followers to fight for her in a world where all either don’t know her or are suspicious of her as the “Witch” Aslan warned them about. Inanna begins making battle plans and gathering arms:
“I shall storm it … In the mountain range I shall start battles and prepare conflicts. I shall prepare arrows in the quiver. I shall ...... slingstones with the rope. I shall begin the polishing of my lance. I shall prepare the throwstick and the shield.”
4. Assertion of legitimacy
Inanna’s next step is to seek An’s approval for her war on Ebih—though she apparently doesn’t need it, seeing that she later attacks without it anyway. All the things she says she “shall” do earlier in the poem, she now asks An to “let” her:
“Against its magnificent sides let me place magnificent battering rams, against its small sides let me place small battering rams. Let me storm it … In the mountain range let me set up battle and prepare conflicts…”
While the reason for her permission-seeking is never stated, we can only assume it involves winning a sense of legitimacy, and perhaps aid, for her endeavor.
Here’s where things get a bit speculative on Jadis’s side. We don’t know that she ever met with the Emperor like Inanna meets with An. But given that the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea gave her an important role in the Narnian cosmos (as an executor of the Deep Magic), it’s not far-fetched to speculate about her seeking his aid or blessing to rule over Narnia or, at the least, using the authority he gave her as an argument for her right to conquer. Indeed, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver implies she did something very like this:
“Oh … so that’s how you came to imagine yourself a queen—because you were the Emperor’s hangman. I see.”
This “hangman” role wasn’t one Jadis could have claimed on her own—the Emperor’s Deep Magic enforces it, threatening cosmic collapse if she’s denied her right. This aspect of her violence is divinely sanctioned. As Jadis herself puts it: “unless I have blood as the Law says all Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water.”
In turn, we can see An as the Mesopotamian equivalent of the Emperor and Inanna as something very like An’s hangman. She does violence in his name and wins power for herself in the process. In this poem, she reminds An:
To set the socle in position and make the throne and foundation firm, … to pursue murderous raids and widespread military campaigns, … to shoot the arrow from the arm and fall on fields, orchards and forests like the tooth of the locust, to take the harrow to rebel lands, to remove the locks from their city gates so the doors stand open—King An, you have indeed given me all this… You have placed me at the right hand of the king in order to destroy rebel lands: may he, with my aid, smash heads like a falcon in the foothills of the mountain, King An, and may I ...... your name throughout the land like a thread.
Another, equally famous poem, The Exaltation of Inanna, states this role even more clearly:
It was An who gave you [= Inanna] power. … You give orders by the holy order of An. … Enlil [= An’s second in command, who embodies the force that supports An’s authority] loves you for teaching the land how to fear. An has ordered you to stand by for battle.
In short, part of Inanna’s cosmic role is to carry out An’s justice by bloody means. Sound familiar? And it’s very possible Jadis spent some of her long years before ruling Narnia carrying out the Emperor’s justice in the way Inanna describes herself doing here.
Both Inanna and Jadis also use personal image to announce their legitimacy. Before meeting with An, Inanna dresses for power:
Inana … put on the garment of royalty and girded herself in joy. She bedecked her forehead with terror and fearsome radiance. She arranged carnelian* rosettes around her holy throat. She brandished the seven-headed cita weapon vigorously to her right and placed straps of lapis lazuli on her feet.
(* While the translation used in this article actually reads ‘cornelian rosettes’, a pinkish variety of rose, the original Sumerian reveals that this word should be ‘carnelian’, a red stone commonly used in Mesopotamian jewelry. ‘Cornelian’ is probably a typo.)
Meanwhile, Jadis adopts a new aesthetic to complement her new far-northern environment and her skin newly bleached white by the apple of immortality—fashioning herself a queen fit for this new place. As we first meet her in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
The reindeer were about the size of Shetland ponies and … their branching horns were gilded … Their harness was of scarlet leather and covered with bells. On the sledge, driving the reindeer, sat a fat dwarf … on his head he wore a red hood with a long gold tassel hanging down from its point ... But behind him, on a much higher seat in the middle of the sledge sat … a great lady, taller than any woman that Edmund had ever seen. She also was covered in white fur up to her throat and held a long straight golden wand in her right hand and wore a golden crown on her head. Her face was white—not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing sugar, except for her very red mouth. It was a beautiful face in other respects, but proud and cold and stern.
Note how, in addition to dressing to convey royal authority and wealth, both women are described as carrying a weapon in their right hand and including red in their palette (Inanna’s rosettes of red stone, Jadis’s red lips and the red accessories of her sledge and servant). Both also, again, give a strong impression of beauty and intimidation.
Unfortunately for Inanna, her meeting with An doesn’t go well. Despite welcoming her warmly, he isn’t keen on her plan. He emphasizes not only Ebih’s great beauty and bounty, but also that these qualities make it powerful enough to frighten even the gods:
An, the king of the deities, answered her: “… Inana demands the destruction of this mountain—what is she taking on? … It has poured fearsome terror on the abodes of the gods. … Its arrogance extends grandly to the centre of heaven. … The mountain range’s radiance is fearsome. Maiden Inana, you cannot oppose it.” Thus he spoke.
There are speculative implications for Jadis’s story here. By the time of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Emperor seems as ambivalent toward Jadis’s rule of Narnia as An is toward Inanna’s destruction of Ebih. He doesn’t seem to actively oppose it—we don’t hear of him doing anything to stop Jadis. But he also doesn’t seem to support her conquest—if he did, Aslan, who’s horrified at the mere idea of working against his father’s magic, would have to let her keep the throne.
Likewise, An neither outright forbids Inanna from attacking nor backs up her efforts. He only confesses to being impressed by Ebih and tells Inanna he believes she can’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—win that fight.
From the perspective of Narnian lore, it’s fascinating to think that the world’s supreme divinity might have had such a dynamic with the woman whom Aslan names its source of evil. It may well be that the Emperor warned Jadis against her conquest, asserting she could not win against his son, Aslan. And he would have been right; while she does win Narnia for one hundred years, Aslan and his fertile, abundant spring are eventually her undoing.
5. Conquest through both military might and ecological disaster
Inanna takes the refusal of her request about as well as we can imagine Jadis taking it. But it’s here that we come to one of the most noteworthy parallels of all: both Inanna and Jadis assault their targets with a combination of martial and natural means. Jadis has her followers and her winter magic, and Inanna…
in her rage and anger, opened the arsenal and pushed on the lapis lazuli gate. She brought out magnificent battle and called up a great storm. Holy Inana reached for the quiver. She raised a towering flood with evil silt. She stirred up an evil raging wind with potsherds.
While it’s possible that Jadis conquered Narnia using her wintry magic alone, it’s unlikely. Something had to be done about the Narnian royal family already in place, and a war is the easiest explanation for the two-year gap between her return to Narnia and the start of the Long Winter. Plus, it’s not as if fighting isn’t her style. She commanded armies in Charn and has one on call in Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the very least, the introduction of the aggressive, wolf-led police force that we know enforces her rule would constitute an element of military might in her conquest. The most probable scenario is that she wielded a mixture of arms and natural disaster as Inanna does in Ebih.
We then see Inanna put both sets of weapons to work. First, arms, in a moment comparable to Jadis’s likely slaying of the human ruler of Narnia:
My lady confronted the mountain range. She advanced step by step. She sharpened both edges of her dagger. She grabbed Ebih’s neck as if ripping up esparto grass. She pressed the dagger’s teeth into its interior.
Then, natural disaster, comparable to Jadis’s initiation of eternal winter:
The rocks forming the body of Ebih clattered down its flanks. From its sides and crevices great serpents spat venom. She damned its forests and cursed its trees. She killed its oak trees with drought. She poured fire on its flanks and made its smoke dense. The goddess established authority over the mountain. Holy Inana did as she wished.
Inanna gloats in her triumph. Note how, despite An’s refusal to support her conquest, she cites her authoritative link with Enlil, An’s right-hand man. An’s rejection doesn’t change her overall authority in the cosmos, which she fully uses to her advantage in this raid.
“Mountain range, … because of your height, … because of your beauty, … because you did not put your nose to the ground, because you did not rub your lips in the dust, I have killed you and brought you low. … I have made tears the norm in your eyes. I have placed laments in your heart. Birds of sorrow are building nests on these flanks.” For a second time, rejoicing in her fearsome terror, she spoke out righteously: “My father Enlil has poured my great terror over the centre of the mountains. On my right side he has placed a weapon. On my left side a ...... is placed. My anger, a harrow with great teeth, has torn the mountain apart.”
While we don’t know what gloating words Jadis might have said after her victory in Year 900, we do see her making very similar boasts to Aslan the moment before she sacrifices him on the Stone Table in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, effectively reconquering Narnia. Jadis too points back to the divine authority she holds as an executor of the Deep Magic. It’s well within the scope of possibility that she utilized this source of power in her first conquest, also, as we saw Mr. Beaver accuse her of doing.
“And now, who has won? Fool, did you think that by all this you would save the human traitor? Now I will kill you instead of him as our pact was and so the Deep Magic will be appeased. But when you are dead what will prevent me from killing him as well? And who will take him out of my hand then? Understand that you have given me Narnia forever, you have lost your own life and you have not saved his. In that knowledge, despair and die.”
Thus, in their great conquests, Jadis and Inanna both employ a combination of military might, ecological devastation, and divinely given authority from a Sky-Father superior. Both end up using the power given to them toward their own ends independently.
6. Aftermath
Having expanded her dominion through this conquest, Inanna reminds us of a few things she’s achieved and presumably will do in Ebih as well—achievements echoed in Jadis’s rule of Narnia:
“I have built a palace and done much more. I have put a throne in place and made its foundation firm. I have given the kurjara cult performers a dagger and prod. I have given the gala cult performers ub and lilis drums. I have changed the headgear of the pilipili cult performers.”
It’s helpful to know who the kurjara, gala, and pilipili are. The exact functions of these personnel in Inanna’s temples are still enigmatic to scholars. What they have in common is that they’re believed to have blurred gender norms, possibly sometimes embodying a third-gender status.
Such performers were likely seen as appropriate to act out the myths of this goddess of liminality and transgression. This is a controversial topic with unclear evidence, but at the least, we can confidently say that Inanna “‘breaks the boundaries between the sexes by embodying both femaleness and maleness,’ and her cultic participants appear to have done the same” (source). Her in-betweenness, and the transformation she divinely enacts in the world around her, is symbolically mirrored in their hard-to-pin-down identities. More generally, she, her personnel, and her festivals are thought to have modeled the crossing of boundaries, combining of opposites, and changing of destinies. Thus, we can imagine that now that Inanna has taken over Ebih, she will enact a similar status-bending on its inhabitants.
This is precisely what happens when Jadis—who is also often associated with crossing boundaries, including gender norms, in the scholarly literature—conquers Narnia. Like Inanna, she builds a palace, puts a throne in place, and reverses the social order of Narnia by raising the status of her once-outcast allies. Giving orders to summon them for her war against Aslan’s followers in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she names a few of these associates:
“Call out the giants and the werewolves and the spirits of those trees who are on our side. Call the Ghouls, and the Boggles, the Ogres and the Minotaurs. Call the Cruels, the Hags, the Spectres, and the people of the Toadstools.”
More are pointed out at the Stone Table, once her army is gathered:
Ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants; and other creatures whom I won’t describe because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book—Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins.
Jadis’s followers are untamed, liminal creatures who live in the margins and fringes of civilization, if not entirely in the wild outside of it. By giving them new pride of place in Narnia, setting them above the more domesticated creatures Aslan favored, she resembles Inanna giving formal tools and titles to the kurjara, gala, and pilipili. Both women’s conquests are followed by an overturning of the conventional social order.
The point of divergence
For destroying Ebih, great child of Suen, maiden Inana, be praised.
This is the poem’s final word on Inanna’s deeds in Ebih. Here, the striking parallels end. While both Jadis and Inanna are enthroned at the end of their respective myths, only one is “praised.” The Chronicles of Narnia condemns Jadis for doing the same thing Inanna was revered for in literature four thousand years earlier. According to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Jadis is not only the villain, she “isn’t a real queen at all … she’s a horrible witch.” And she is, of course, defeated in the end. Same archetype, opposite judgments.
Where Lewis might frame Jadis’s appeal to higher authority as a way of cloaking selfish violence in divine justice, Mesopotamian myth seems to treat Inanna’s challenge to An as part of her paradoxical character. It might be a way they made sense of the role of disruptive, chaotic forces of violence and passion within the divine order itself.
Meanwhile, Jadis manipulates the fabric of the land, commands winter, and serves as an agent of cosmic justice. In Inanna’s world, that would have been enough to make her a god. But Lewis, working within a monotheistic framework, denies Jadis that status. In Narnia, she is seen not as a deity but as a witch. The difference says less about her than about the theological lens through which each culture interprets them.
Of course, Inanna is the protagonist of her story, while Jadis is the antagonist of hers. And readers will have their own thoughts on why one is worshipped and the other disparaged. But it is curious to reflect on not only the persistence of this archetype and her myth from the very dawn of history, but also the very different attitudes toward two very similar stories, each a celebrated classic in its day, written four millennia apart.
Kahina Sharratim is devoted to the Red-Blooded Goddess, Whom she honors in many Faces mythological, literary, and historical. This blog explores those Faces, the connections among Them, and sometimes Pagan devotional reflections. Her book-length biography of Narnia’s Queen Jadis, titled A High and Lonely Destiny, will begin release in serial form in 2026, ahead of the Netflix film adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew.
