Ishtar, known to the Sumerians as Inanna, was the formidable Babylonian goddess of love, sex, and war. She was never a figure of domestic peace or maternal comfort; rather, she was a “volatile force” who embodied the paradox of creation and destruction. Her most famous myth, the Descent into the Underworld, chronicles her journey to the realm of death, where she is stripped and struck dead, only to be “resurrected” through the intervention of other gods.+2
While modern secularism tries to dismiss her as a relic of cuneiform tablets, her influence is woven into the very fabric of American springtime traditions. The “Queen of Heaven” mentioned in Jeremiah 7:18—for whom the Israelites baked cakes and poured out drink offerings—is the same spirit that has rebranded itself through the centuries. Whether she is called Ishtar, Astarte, or Ostara, her essence remains: a celebration of carnal fertility that inevitably demands a sacrifice.
The Scriptural Exhibit
The holy writ does not mince words regarding this deity. In Ezekiel 8:14, the prophet is shown a vision of an abomination at the very door of the Lord’s house: “Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD’S house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.”
Tammuz was the consort of Ishtar, and this ritual of “weeping” was a precursor to her “resurrection” festivals. God calls this an abomination because it replaces the worship of the Living Creator with a cycle of nature-worship. Furthermore, Jeremiah 44:19 records the stubborn defiance of those who insisted on serving her: “And when we burned incense to the queen of heaven, and poured out drink offerings unto her, did we make her cakes to worship her… without our men?” This ancient “cake-making” persists today in the traditional “hot cross buns” and springtime sweets, often consumed without a thought to their idolatrous origins.
The Forensic Analysis
When we analyze the American “springtime” culture, we see the fingerprints of Ishtar in the obsession with “fertility symbols”—the egg and the rabbit. While the world calls these “harmless,” the forensic reality is that Ishtar’s cult was centered on sacred prostitution and sexual license as a means to ensure agricultural abundance.+1
In America, this “culture of fertility” has been inverted into a culture of death. The same spirit that once demanded sexual rites to bring “life” to the fields now presides over a society that worships sexual freedom while viewing the resulting life as a burden to be discarded. The “springtime of life” is celebrated with bunnies and eggs in one room, while in another, the fruit of that same “love” is sacrificed in the abortion clinic.
The “descent” of Ishtar is mirrored in the descent of our culture:
- The Ritual of Lust: Modern springtime “breaks” and festivities often mirror the revelry of the Babylonian Akitu festival.
- The Cycle of Despair: Just as Ishtar’s descent brought a halt to all earthly fertility, the modern rejection of biblical marriage and morality has led to a “demographic winter” and a psychological plague of despair among the youth.
- The Altar of Convenience: The “resurrection” the world seeks is not the spiritual victory of Christ, but the restoration of their own comfort and license, often at the cost of the unborn.
The Verdict
Ishtar’s “spring” is a facade. It is a seasonal mask for a goddess of war who delights in the destruction of the family unit. To participate in these “Queen of Heaven” traditions is to touch the “unclean thing” that God warned Jeremiah and Ezekiel about. We cannot claim to celebrate the Resurrection of the Lamb while simultaneously decorating our homes with the fertility idols of a Babylonian war-goddess.
As the world drifts into its annual springtime trance, we must remember the warning of II Corinthians 11:14: “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” The pastel colors of spring are the “light” used to hide the darkness of a culture that has chosen the path of Ishtar—a path that begins in the bedroom and ends in the “underworld” of the abortion ward.