Sacred Marriage

Summary

The sacred marriage is the union of a goddess with a god, or with a king who stands in his place, on which the land's harvest, the security of the throne, or the birth of one who keeps order depends. Its oldest complete telling is a Sumerian hymn of King Iddin-Dagan of Isin describing Inanna's wedding at the New Year.

The people gather in the palace, "the house that advises the Land", and a dais is set up there for Inanna, where the king stays with her. At the New Year, on the day of the rites, so that she may decide the fate of all the lands, and on the day the moon disappears, so that the rites may be completed, a bed is set up for her: rushes are purified with cedar perfume and laid on it, and a coverlet is spread over them. Inanna bathes for the king, rubs herself with soap, and sprinkles oil and cedar essence on the ground. The king goes to her with head held high and lies down beside her under the name Ama-ushumgal-ana, and when she has made him rejoice on the bed she says: "Iddin-Dagan, you are indeed my beloved!" Then he enters her temple with offerings and incense; she embraces her spouse, shines like daylight on the throne dais, and sets the king beside her like the sun. Food and drink are prepared, the people line up before her, musicians play, the people spend the day in plenty, and they pray for the king: may his days be long on the splendid throne.

The name under which the king lies down is the bridegroom's name in Inanna's songs. In one song her brother Utu promises to bring her flax already retted, spun, woven and bleached, and she asks: who will lie down on it with me? He answers: your bridegroom, Ama-ushumgal-ana will lie down with you. She says: he is the man of my heart; he does no hoeing yet heaps up piles of grain, a shepherd whose sheep are heavy with wool. In another song Inanna says she looked over all the people and chose Dumuzi as god of the Land and decreed his destiny; then she sings of her vulva as a high, well-watered field and moist ground and asks: who will plough it? The answer comes: the king shall plough it for you, Dumuzi the king shall plough it for you.

The picture recurs across many mythologies. Ouranos, the Sky, covers Gaia, the Earth; Zeus embraces Hera on the peak of Ida and the earth sends up grass and flowers beneath them; Isis conceives by the dead Osiris the heir Horus; Shiva marries Parvati so that the son may be born who leads the gods to victory; Izanagi and Izanami circle a pillar before the islands are born; and Freyr longs for Gerðr, a giant's daughter, from whose line come the kings of Sweden. The versions agree that the union is prepared: the bride bathes and adorns herself, and the bed is set in a high or separate place, a mountain peak, a grove, a palace. They agree that something depends on it: the land's crops, the king's endurance, or the birth of one who keeps order. Most put an obstacle before it that has to be overcome: a bride who prefers another to the one chosen for her, a girl who refuses gifts, a bride who practises austerities until the ascetic accepts her, a couple who get the order of speaking wrong and must circle again. The idea the sacred marriage turns on is that fertility and kingship come from two coming together on terms and by consent: when the union is complete, the land brings out what is in it, the one on the throne stands firm, and the heir is born.

The name reads in the Arabic tongue as follows. The Greeks called it ἱερὸς γάμος, which LSJ explains as "ritual marriage"; γάμος by itself is a wedding, a marriage. Remove the case ending -ος and γαμ- remains: a hard g and an m. We read it as Arabic jimāʿ, a reading proposed on the method: Arabic j surfaces as a hard g in the Juthoor sound laws, m is m, and the ʿayn drops because Greek has none. Lane gives jāmaʿa imraʾatahu, he lay with his wife, jimāʿ the union of husband and wife, and from the same root jamʿ and ijtimāʿ, gathering and coming together. We read ἱερός, "holy", from Arabic ḥurr on the same method: the breath with which the Greek word begins answers Arabic ḥ, as in the project's reading of Hera as al-ḥurrah, and r is r. Lane gives ḥarrara al-walad, he set the child apart for the worship of God and the service of the place of prayer, and muḥarrar, a child devoted by his parent to the service of the temple. The Greek phrase is then jimāʿ muḥarrar, a union set apart for the god. Arabic has two more words for marriage that explain these stories. The first is ʿurs, which Lane gives as the wedding and its feast, while ʿirs is each of the spouses; the project's Greek essay reads the name of Eros from it, the force that comes at the start of creation so that everything afterwards is joined to its mate. The second is baʿl: a husband, whose primary meaning Lane reports as marriage itself; tabaʿʿalat is said of a woman who adorned herself for her husband; and baʿl is also palm trees and crops that drink with their roots or from rain and are not watered. It is the name of Baal, lord of the rain, and the Canaanite essay says that rain yubaʿʿil the earth, makes it fruitful, so that Baal marries sky to earth with every downpour.

Linguistic Root

The Greek g of γάμος answers Arabic j under the Juthoor merger law, which brings q, k and j together in one sound that surfaces as k or g in European languages; the ʿayn drops as throat sounds drop in Greek, leaving from jimāʿ the j and the m, the two consonants of the Greek word. The senses meet: γάμος is the wedding and the marriage, jimāʿ the union of husband and wife, jamʿ the joining of one thing to another. Greek nonetheless has a family of words around it, among them γαμβρός, a relative by marriage, and the reading must account for the whole family through j and m, which it does if the shared sense is the joining of one household to another. For ἱερός LSJ gives the Ionic form ἱρός, with the breath and the r and no vowel between them: the two consonants of Arabic ḥurr in order, the doubling not being written in Greek. Its senses include what belongs to a god, what is consecrated to one, such as altars and a temple, and the temple itself; it is the epithet of Zeus's bed in the Theogony. Lane gives ḥarrara al-walad, he set the child apart for the worship of God and the service of the place of prayer for as long as he lived, and muḥarrar, a child given by his parent to the service of the temple; the Qur'an has the wife of ʿImrān say, "I have vowed to You what is in my womb, muḥarraran". The senses meet in what is set apart for the god and not returned to common use. What remains is that the Attic form ἱερός has a vowel between the breath and the r with no counterpart in ḥurr.

Attestations by Culture

Inanna and Dumuzi in Sumer

Before the wedding there is a quarrel over the husband. Utu tells his sister: let the shepherd marry you, his butter is good and his milk is good. She refuses: the shepherd shall not marry me, let the farmer marry me, who grows flax and grain. Dumuzi matches the farmer's goods with his own: a black garment for a black ewe, beer for milk, bread for cheese. Then shepherd and farmer meet on the riverbank; the farmer offers the shepherd grazing in his fields, and the shepherd says: when I am married, you will be counted my friend. The courtship weighs one livelihood against another and ends with grain and milk on one table.

The songs and Iddin-Dagan's hymn are told in the summary. In Inanna's Descent Inanna hands this same husband to the demons of the underworld as her substitute, which is why Descent to the Underworld joins the wedding to the absence.

A bed at the top of the tower, and Nergal on the throne of the dead

Herodotus describes in Babylon a tower of eight stages, at whose top stands a great shrine with a large, well-covered couch and a golden table beside it. There is no image in it, and no one spends the night there except one native woman chosen by the god, as the Chaldaeans say. They also say that the god himself comes to the shrine and rests on the couch, and Herodotus says he does not believe them.

In the story of Nergal and Ereshkigal marriage becomes the road to kingship: the queen says to the god who has seized her by the hair, be my husband and I will be your wife; I will give you kingship over the wide netherworld and put the tablet of wisdom in your hand; and he kisses her and wipes away her tears.

Isis and Osiris

The Great Hymn to Osiris says that his sister Isis sought him without wearying and roamed the land lamenting until she found him; she made shade with her plumage and created breath with her wings, joined her brother, raised the weary one's inertness, received the seed and bore the heir, and raised the child alone in a place unknown. When his arm was strong she brought him into the hall of Geb, the council of the gods gave him the kingship, and the hymn says: abundance is established by his laws, roads are open, the land has peace under its lord. Osiris's death and return belong to death and return; what belongs here is that the throne of the living passed to a child born of a union between the living goddess and the dead king.

Baal and Anat on the tablets of Ugarit

The main Baal Cycle does not say that Baal married Anat. Before Baal goes down to Mot he lies with a heifer in the open steppe, and the text does not name her Anat.

On a separate tablet outside the cycle, KTU 1.10, Anat asks for Baal and is told that he has gone out with bow and arrows to hunt in the reeds of Shamak, full of wild bulls, and she flies to him. Baal sees "the maiden Anat, loveliest of Baal's sisters", rises, falls at her feet and says: long life to you, my sister; your strong horns Baal will anoint. Then Anat sees a cow and chases it in anger. In the third column cows give birth to a bull calf and a heifer calf, then a cow bears a wild bull to Baal, and Anat goes up to Mount Saphon to bring him the news: a bull is born to Baal. The tablet is broken at the top, and the start of its third column is partly restored from another tablet, KTU 1.11. That second tablet opens with two damaged lines containing a verb whose meaning scholars dispute, after which one of the pair grasps the other's belly and the other grasps his testicles. Wikander reads the two lines as the union of Anat and Baal; Barbosa sees the same in them and reads what follows as the birth of a calf that displeases Baal, but he left the tablet untranslated because of its state.

So what the tablets hold is this: Anat is called Baal's sister and "the maiden"; Baal is told of a bull born to him from a cow; and a damaged tablet describes two bodies meeting, which two scholars read as Anat and Baal. What they do not state in words is that Anat is the cow who gives birth, or that she is Baal's wife. Izak Cornelius writes that Anat is Baal's comrade in battle and his partner but never his wife, that the texts once taken to describe their union are now read differently by Peggy Day and Neal Walls, and that on these two tablets she is a "mistress of animals"; others disagree, among them Wikander and Barbosa in their reading of the two lines. The marriage the Ugaritic tablets state outright is on another tablet, KTU 1.24, where the moon god Yarikh embraces Nikkal so that she will bear him a son.

Ouranos and Gaia, Zeus and Hera

Gaia bears Ouranos alone, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, then lies with him and bears the Titans. Ouranos comes at night, longing for love, and spreads himself over her entirely, and will not let his children out into the light, until Kronos cuts him with the sickle. The first union in the Theogony is one that will not separate, and the world opens only when it is cut apart. At the poem's end Zeus takes Hera as his wife, and she bears him Hebe, Ares and Eileithyia.

In the fourteenth book of the Iliad Hera bathes in ambrosia, anoints herself, puts on a robe Athena made, borrows the girdle of desire from Aphrodite, and goes up to Gargarus, the peak of Ida. Zeus sees her and desires her as he did the first time, when they lay together in secret from their parents. He takes her in his arms, and the earth sends up fresh grass, dewy lotus, crocus and hyacinth, thick and soft, lifting them from the ground, and a golden cloud covers them from which glistening dew falls.

The people of Plataea tell that Hera was angry with Zeus and withdrew to Euboea, so Cithaeron advised him to make a wooden image, carry it veiled on an ox wagon and say that he was marrying Plataea, daughter of Asopus. Hera came at once and tore the dress from the bride, and finding a block of wood she was pleased and made peace with her husband; from this comes the festival of the Daedala, held every few years.

Shiva and Parvati, Soma and Sūryā

In Kālidāsa's Birth of the War-God the gods complain to Brahmā of the demon Tāraka, and he tells them that a son born to Shiva and Parvati will lead them to victory. Indra sends Kāma, god of love, with Spring: the snow melts, the trees blossom, birds and deer wake, and Shiva does not stir from his meditation. When Kāma is about to shoot him, Shiva sees him and burns him with fire from his eye. Parvati then practises austerities until he accepts her; he sends the seven sages to ask for her from her father, the Himalaya; the wedding is held, and Shiva restores Kāma's body. Then Kumāra is born, leads the gods and kills Tāraka. Kālidāsa, The Birth of the War-God, cantos 2–3, 6–8 and 10–17, in Ryder's analysis. In the Śiva Purāṇa Shiva kindles the fire and makes the offering with Parvati on his lap, her brother Maināka gives the handful of parched grain, and the two walk round the fire as custom requires.

The Rigveda has another wedding hymn: Soma woos Sūryā, the Sun in feminine form, the two Aśvins are groomsmen, Savitar gives her to her husband, and "her treasury was earth and heaven". The hymn then becomes a human wedding: the husband says, I take your hand for good fortune, that you may reach old age with me; and, Soma obtained you first, then the Gandharva, then Agni, and your fourth husband is a man; Agni has given me wealth and sons and this my wife. The divine wedding is the first of all weddings, and every bride passes through its husbands before her own.

Izanagi and Izanami

Izanagi and Izanami go down to the island of Onogoro and see a heavenly pillar and a broad hall. He asks his sister-spouse: how is your body formed? She says: it is formed, but one place is not completely formed. He says: in my body one place is formed in excess; I will put what is in excess in me into what is incomplete in you, and we shall give birth to the land. They agree to go round the pillar, she from the right and he from the left, and when they meet she speaks first, "What a handsome man!", and he after her, "What a beautiful woman!" Their child is a leech-child, which they set adrift in a reed boat, and then the island Awashima, which is not counted among their children. They go up to the heavenly deities, a divination shows that the fault lay in the woman speaking first, and they go down and circle again; this time he speaks first, and she bears the islands one after another.

The Kokugakuin commentary on this chapter gathers related customs: villagers in China who set up a tree in a field in spring and dance round it to choose spouses; Tsuda's comparison of the pillar with the European maypole; and Yasuda's New Year rite, still found in the 1970s in parts of Gunma, in which a naked man and woman circle the hearth to bless the millet crop.

Nüwa and her brother

In a late account from the Duyizhi 獨異志, when the universe first opened there were only Nüwa and her brother on Mount Kunlun, and no people under heaven. They discussed becoming husband and wife and were ashamed. The brother went up the mountain with his sister and prayed: if Heaven wills us to be husband and wife, let the smoke gather; if not, let it scatter. The smoke gathered, the sister came to her brother, and she made a fan of grass to hide her face, which is the origin of the bride's fan. The quoted text does not name the brother.

Freyr and Gerðr

Freyr sits on Odin's high seat, sees Gerðr, daughter of Gymir, in the land of the giants, and falls sick with longing. He gives his servant Skírnir his horse and the sword that fights by itself, and Skírnir goes to her. Gerðr refuses eleven golden apples and the ring that was burned with Baldr, and is not frightened by the sword, until Skírnir curses her with a wand and runes to loneliness, hunger and shame. Then she yields and says: Barri is the grove we both know, a still and windless grove; after nine nights there Gerðr will grant Njörðr's son love's pleasure. Freyr answers: long is one night, long are two, how shall I endure three? The Northern Tales commentary notes that the grove's name may come from barr, barley, and asks whether her yielding is consent or coercion. Snorri says Freyr gave his sword as her price, so he fought Beli with a hart's horn and will meet Surtr at Ragnarök without a sword.

In the Ynglinga saga Freyr rules the Swedes and builds the temple at Uppsala; in his days peace and good seasons spread over all lands, and the Swedes credited them to him. His wife was Gerðr, Gymir's daughter, their son Fjölnir, and from his other name, Yngvi, the kings of Uppsala were called Ynglings. When he died they hid him in a mound for three years and said he was alive, and the good seasons and peace went on.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The first likeness is ploughing and rain. Inanna describes herself as a watered field to be ploughed; the bridegroom in the song heaps up grain without hoeing; the earth blooms under Zeus and Hera; Gerðr's grove may be "barley". The project reads the name of Ouranos from ʿ-r-n, and in Lane the ʿarānīn of the clouds are the first of their rain; it reads Gaia as al-ḥayyah, the living one, and ḥayā is the rain by which land comes to life. So the union of sky and earth in the Theogony is the first rain meeting the earth that gives birth, but in the poem it is a smothering union that keeps the children from coming out, and it has to be cut. In Arabic baʿl holds together the husband and the crop that drinks the rain.

Then kingship. Iddin-Dagan sits on the throne because Inanna has called him her beloved; Nergal becomes king of the dead by marriage; Horus inherits his father's throne through a birth from the union of Isis and Osiris; the kings of Uppsala trace their line to Freyr and Gerðr; Hera becomes queen beside Zeus. The project reads the name of Hera as al-ḥurrah, the free, lawful wife, which is exactly what the sacred marriage makes her: the wife on whom the ruling house rests.

Then circling and order. Izanagi and Izanami go round the pillar from opposite sides, Shiva and Parvati walk round the fire, Nüwa's brother asks for a sign from the smoke. In the Japanese story the child is not right until the order of speaking is right. The project's Japanese Semitic essay reads the pair as the two pans of a balance, and the project reads their shared name from wizān, so circling from two sides until they meet is a weighing of one pan against the other.

The versions part over consent. Inanna chooses her bridegroom and decrees his destiny, and Parvati practises austerities until she is accepted, while Gerðr yields only after the curse, Ereshkigal in the Amarna text speaks under the sword, and Hera deceives Zeus to keep him from the war. They part over time as well: some of these weddings are repeated, like Inanna's at every New Year, the Daedala, and the hymn of Soma and Sūryā at every human wedding; others happen once at the beginning of creation, like Ouranos and Gaia, Izanagi and Izanami, Nüwa and her brother. In many the couple are siblings: Izanagi and his sister-spouse, Nüwa and her brother, Zeus and Hera, both children of Kronos, Isis and Osiris; Baal calls Anat his sister, but the text does not state their marriage.

Symbolic Reading

The project's essays read these stories from nature. The Canaanite essay says that Baal is the husband who owns his land, and that rain yubaʿʿil the land, makes it fruitful, so the rain god is the baʿl who marries sky to earth with every downpour. The Greek essay reads Ouranos covering Gaia as a thick atmosphere pressing down on the earth, and the sickle of Kronos as time separating sky from earth. The Greek Semitic essay reads Eros from ʿirs, the cosmic force of pairing that makes the elements draw together and mate, and compares him with the Indian Kāma and with Dumuzi as a power of union. The Chinese essay reads the union of yin and yang as the oldest symbolic description of living things reproducing. The Japanese essay reads Izanagi and Izanami as two plates of the earth's crust whose collision raises volcanoes, from which the islands are born. The Sumerian Semitic essay reads the word gigunu from Arabic junna, to be hidden, and makes it the screened chamber at the top of the temple where the sacred marriage took place. In Inanna's Descent the Giguna is Inanna's temple at Zabalam, which she abandons when she goes down; Iddin-Dagan's hymn sets the bed in the palace, and Herodotus puts the god's couch at the top of the tower of Babylon.

The texts support most of these readings with their own images. Inanna is a field to be ploughed and the bridegroom its ploughman; the earth flowers under Zeus and Hera; parched grain is thrown into the fire of Shiva's wedding; the grove where Gerðr makes her promise may be barley; the Japanese millet rite has a man and a woman circling the hearth. In all these images the crop needs two: an earth that receives, and water or a plough that comes to it. Iddin-Dagan's hymn places the wedding at the New Year and on the day the moon disappears, so here the wedding opens the farming year and decides the fate of the lands within it.

The stories also keep a precise picture of human weddings. The bride bathes, perfumes and adorns herself, as Inanna, Hera and Parvati do, and Arabic says tabaʿʿalat of a woman who adorns herself for her husband. The couple walk round the fire and grain is thrown into it as custom requires in the Śiva Purāṇa; the verses of Soma and Sūryā are recited at weddings; the bride hides her face behind a fan as Nüwa did; and the people of Plataea celebrate a wooden wedding that recalls the reconciliation of Zeus and Hera. The family's consent is sought: the sages ask Parvati's father for her, Utu tells his sister whom to marry, and Izanagi and his sister wait on the judgment of the heavenly gods. The sacred marriage is the human wedding raised to the sky, and then the model on which every later wedding is performed.