• GeneralVincent@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Inanna is awesome, there’s some other lgbtqia aspects to her worship

    From The wiki;

    Individuals who went against the gender binary were heavily involved in the cult of Inanna. During Sumerian times, a set of priests known as gala worked in Inanna’s temples, where they performed elegies and lamentations. Men who became gala sometimes adopted female names, and their songs were composed in the Sumerian eme-sal dialect, which, in literary texts, is normally reserved for the speech of female characters. Some Sumerian proverbs seem to suggest that gala had a reputation for engaging in anal sex with men. During the Akkadian Period, kurgarrū and assinnu were servants of Ishtar who dressed in female clothing and performed war dances in Ishtar’s temples. Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also had homosexual proclivities. Gwendolyn Leick, an anthropologist known for her writings on Mesopotamia, has compared these individuals to the contemporary Indian hijra. In one Akkadian hymn, Ishtar is described as transforming men into women.