Fun things to do in hell

I’ve been re-reading Descent to the Goddess, about the Sumerian goddess, Innana,(aka Ishtar)“queen of heaven and earth,” paying a visit to her sister, Ereshkigal, “queen of the Great Below” who lives in “the land of no return.” Inanna's visit is to attend the funeral of Ereshkigal’s husband, but the grieving widow greets her sister by demanding that she follow the customs of hell and be stripped, judged, killed, and her rotting corpse hung on a peg. I detect serious sibling rivalry here. Most hostesses just take your coat.

It’s too late to have second thoughts while being stripped, judged and killed, but Inanna might have been wondering whether she should have just sent regrets, flowers, and a nice card. Furthermore, this casts some doubts on the circumstances of Ereshkigal’s husband’s death. She seems to have been studying up on black widows, praying mantis mating behavior, and all those Alien movies.

Seriously, it's a very absorbing book. Jungian, feminist analysis—see below.


May 22 to May 28, 1977, I read:

The Season, a Candid Look at Broadway, 1967, William Goldman
Charlotte Bronte, the Self-Conceived, Helen Moglen
Note: read most of it.
Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? Jack Catran
Women, Women, Women, Dody Goodman, Chris Alexander
Evidently Ms. Goodman was alive and well in 2004, interesting about her difficulties with Jack Paar, etc…amazing how blatant, and unconscious, the sexism was then.
http://www.dodygoodman.com/index.html
Slan, A. E. Van Vogt
The Joy of Money, Paula Nelson
Note: Couldn’t relate to it, only looked through it (Note to self, 30 years later, this explains a lot, no?)
The New Apocrypha, John Sladek,
Note: sampled its encyclopedia offerings
Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist, James A. Brussel, M.D.
Controversy, William Manchester
Note: Read some essays, not all. The pace of his prose is irritating. (I think I meant slow & measured!)


May 22 to May 28, 2007, I read:
Tea with the Black Dragon, R. A. MacAvoy
web page
I’m glad to see this reissued in an Ereads paperback and ebook. Considering that the author was in her 30s when she wrote it (as I was when I read it), I now notice and find intriguing that the heroine is a free-spirited 50-year-old with gray hair who finds romance with a mysterious Chinese man, who may in fact be an ancient dragon. Not your usual paranormal romantic suspense novel—beautifully written!

Descent to the Goddess, A Way of Initiation for Women, Sylvia Brinton Perera
Another book I read in the 80s. I still remember discovering it at the SF Public Library, and the usual feeling of having mysteries revealed when I read it. I still have pertinent photocopied pages in my files. Then a friend was pruning her library and offered me anything I liked from the discards, and this small paperback was among them!

On reading again, these sentences stood up for me in red letters of fire:

We also feel unseen because there are no images alive to reflect our wholeness and variety. But where shall we look for symbols to suggest the full mystery and potency of the feminine and to provide images as models for personal life?
Descent to the Goddess, p. 12.