The references to their connexion with each other in myth
and ritual are both fragmentary and obscure, but we gather from them
that every year Tammuz was believed to die, passing away from the
cheerful earth to the gloomy subterranean world, and that every year
his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him "to the land from
which there is no returning, to the house of darkness, where dust
lies on door and bolt." During her absence the passion of love
ceased to operate: men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce their
kinds: all life was threatened with extinction. So intimately bound
up with the goddess were the sexual functions of the whole animal
kingdom that without her presence they could not be discharged. A
messenger of the great god Ea was accordingly despatched to rescue
the goddess on whom so much depended. The stern queen of the
infernal regions, Allatu or Eresh-Kigal by name, reluctantly allowed
Ishtar to be sprinkled with the Water of Life and to depart, in
company probably with her lover Tammuz, that the two might return
together to the upper world, and that with their return all nature
might revive.
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