"The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one; he is in the father's place."
     - Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

"For it was the Sumerian religious credo that the ritual marriage between the king of Sumer and its fertility Goddess [Inanna] full of sexual allure, was essential for the fertility of the soul and the fecundity of the womb and that it brought about the prosperity of the land and the well being of its people. The first Sumerian ruler who celebrated this rite was the shepherd-king Dumuzi (the Biblical Tammuz) who reigned in Erech...early in the third millennium BC."
     - Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer

"Annually she [Innana] mated with the shepherd god Dumuzi (or Tammuz) who incarnated the creative powers of spring. His autumnal death symbolized the seasonal decline, and their reunion in the spring resurrection the renewal of the earth."
     - Jennifer and Roger Woolger, The Goddess Within

"Excavations of ancient Erech, where Inanna had her most revered temple, dug up a necklace of semiprecious stones, one of which was inscribed with the words: 'Kubatum, the lukur-priestess of Shu-Sin,' - lukur being a Sumerian word designating an Inanna devotee who may have played the role of the Goddess in the Sacred Marriage Rite."
     - Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer

"Ninshubur, the good handmaiden of Eanna,
stays awake at her goodly duties,
She leads him bewigged in
to the loins of Inanna:

'May the lord, the choice of your heart,
may the king, your beloved bridegroom,
pass long days in your sweet thing, the pure loins!
Grant him a pleasant reign to come!'"
     - "The Blessing of the Bridegroom"

There are "hints that Ishtar was in some way responsible for the selection and sanctioning of the kings of the Sumerian city-states, who acted as stewards of the divine sovereigns. It was this way...which gave rise to the concept of sacred marriage, the 'temple prostitution' that the later Bible writers would find so abominable. The sacred marriage was a formal, highly stylized cultic institution, at one and the same time religious and political, enacted between the high priestess representing Ishtar, and the king in the role of high priest representing the city as the vicar of god; and though this act of sacred sexuality, the power of the divinity flowed down from heaven through the king to the people and the land."
     - Magnus Magnusson, BC - The Archaeology of the Bible Lands

"...A text does exist describing the coronation of a Sumerian king during the Uruk period (late fourth millennium). According to this text, the king-to-be approached the throne dais of the goddess Inanna-Ishtar. There he received from her the 'bright scepter' and the 'golden crown'. He probably also received from her a new, royal name."
     - An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism

"At Babylon the imposing sanctuary of Bel rose like a pyramid above the city in a series of eight towers or stories, planted one on the top of the other. On the highest tower, reached by an ascent which wound about all the rest, there stood a spacious temple, and in the temple a great bed, magnificently draped and cushioned, with a golden table beside it. In the temple no image was to be seen, and no human being passed the night there, save a single woman, whom, according to the Chaldean priests, the god chose from among all the women of Babylon. They said that the deity himself came into the temple at night and slept in the great bed; and the woman, as a consort of the god, might have no intercourse with mortal man."

"At Thebes in Egypt a woman slept in the temple of Ammon as the consort of the god, and, like the human wife of Bel at Babylon, she was said to have no commerce with a man. In Egyptian texts she is often mentioned as 'the divine consort', and usually she was no less a personage than the Queen of Egypt herself. For according to the Egyptians, their monarchs were actually begotten by the god Ammon, who assumed for the time being the form of the reigning king, and in that disguise had intercourse with the queen "
     - Sir James George Frazer, The Illustrated Golden Bough

Hyperlinks

·Ishtar, Lady of Heaven
·Song of Songs