Post by eternallybound on Feb 14, 2017 4:22:56 GMT -6
To begin, let it be known that I never asked to be the ruler of this realm. I was satisfied with my existence as a sky deity, a status I held from the moment my father's tears brought the seed of my conception into the womb of mother ocean. Innocence lives in the sky, and innocent I was. In an eternal whim I could dissolve into breath, come back as a cloud. I was the rhythm circulating from above to below. What a period that was.
They say all good things must come to an end, and deities know this more than most. Our majesty is held in a spider’s web of belief. When worship stops coming, we dissolve into dusty cobweb. Some of us are swept out into oblivion, left with not even our own self-awareness. Look at how Abraham reduced us to broken idols with his “monotheism.” Our powers drained with each shattered believer, funneled into one violent megalomaniac of a deity that no one in the heavenly realm paid much attention to, until with bitter luck he stumbled upon some zealous couple in an open desert tent. He whispered in their ears, sparking the demise, disintegration, and destruction of our temples.
But demise, disintegration, and destruction have come to compose my current personality. Not when I was a sky deity of course. In those days I was the incarnation of the human ideals that the vast majority of you put onto a pretty little pedestal, crown with flowers and trinkets of gold, twirl to and fro in white communion dresses. Threatening is what I have become. Envious and brutal. Cold stone, sharp eyes, a body shutters from a vision in a nightmare. A goddess to be feared, and if not, worshiped by those who are deemed twisted, who you would rather believe never existed.
The legend goes that it was the dragon Kun that ushered me to the underworld, the first betrayal by one who was supposed to love me. He was my brother, though it is hard to track down proper familial relations when the mere mingling of tears and water can bring about birth. I was in a moment of reconfiguration, transmuting from pure blue sky to a waterier form, when a net fine enough to catch the air itself pulled me. I felt myself sweeping downward, and down too swept my innocence and the kindness that had motivated me to form a shady cumulous for a parched desert traveler. With each meter of decent I felt myself solidifying into a cold and frigid ruler, hard and erect, the keeper of the dead. As we slid through a crack in the crust of the earth, the sky became a memory, and steady decay became my effect. By the time Kun deserted me on my tombstone throne, I was fully anthropomorphic, and still am today, though perhaps, a bit more grey.
Being the ruler of the underworld had its pleasures. I learned to feel the hardness of my heart in the petrified countenance of every new corpse in my domain. Practicing severity became my devotion. Much like heaven, there is plenty of dancing to be done in the underworld. I love to watch the dead dance, their swaying forms decomposing with their strange and morbid movements, a twist to the left as the right arms unhinges itself to the right. The dead are always dancing, it speeds up the process s of decay, and no one wants to stay in my palace for long. There are more ethereal realms to be explored, where body is but a hazy memory cloaked in poetry, color, and warmth.
The mighty dance among the meek. Idols of humanity, rulers of empires, they all come here, until their bodies are striped away, layer by layer, returning their substance to pure earth. From my kingdom comes new and fertile soil, few realize this. Few realize much in your world. Just look at how many forgot about me. I had a temple once. It was a place for those who understood that their existence was tied to my capacities. Rulers feared to enter its halls, but rulers are rarely the wise. It was not a place of celebration, but nor was it a place of mourning. Let it be known that I have mourned. I mourned for the lifeless forms of children that entered my halls, I mourned for the memories I saw played out in the eyes of the dead. For their longing was my own, their death my imprisonment.
I was never jealous in the sky. For what was there to be jealous of? I was the meaning that lies at the base of a prayer. I was the thread that connected a hope, to a prayer, to a force of creation.
For all that I lost, my sister maintained -Ishtar, goddess of love, goddess of abundance, goddess of fertility, the list can go on with all that a pure heart prays for. When I lived in the sky I used to delight in her blooming temples, filled with the radiance of dancing priestess I would blow their hair as they spun into bliss. Her bliss was my own, a sisterhood. As a zephyr I would caress her orange blossoms, bringing their scent to the places where lovers meet. Together we would wrap them, and dwell within the beauty of their emissions, soft and warm, the delicacy of lovers meeting. To us, this was sustenance, and we were the most noble hunters, looking not for blood or life to kill, only for creates to entwine within our ecstasy. I don’t for her though, for in her betrayal I have cursed her. Though my curse does little, with the pitiful power I now possess, I continue on, holding her within the gaze of my destructive powers. For her betrayal was the most painful of all. I should say betrayals, for she has forsaken both in the skies and in the tomb I now call my home. It was the decision of all the gods that I should rule the dead, and I as I fell. No. As I was dragged from my purity, hers was the face I saw. “It had to be,” was all she could muster as she watched me descend. Then she turned away. Politics corrupted her soul, as it tends to even in the most essential of natures. In the council of the gods she abandoned our love, and sisterhood became a word tinged with poison, bitter to my thoughts even as I share them now. A second betrayal too, this time for her gratification. I don’t know the whole story, nor do I care to. I am sure she had her reasons, but as I have come to understand, reason is as flawed in the divine as it is in the humane. Only reason poisons a well to bring about victory, all the while forgetting about the rain. Reasonable actions breed famished outcomes. Let me tell you, I saw my fair share of reason’s victims come through here. Kings who poisoned their brothers, they followed their reason down paranoid paths through haunted woods. It was for reason that they feared their beloveds, and it was all for reason that they spent the rest of their “glorious days” haunted by their own deeds. These are the ones I love to see enter, they come into the kingdom of the dead trembling, awaiting the sight of the concept that haunted them until their dying day. They wasted their lives, and they fear their afterlife. Such is the consequence of reason.
Please excuse my minor meander, and let me bring you back to the matter at hand- Ishtar’s second betrayal.
Farmers and lovers of the land used to cry out with great delight to my sister, Ishtar, “oh great bringer of life and abundance, how we sing your praise!” Strangely enough, more and more of you seem to call to her everyday. We deities have our cycles, and I see her rising again. I know that she wants me to hear. Too many disputes remain open between us. It is her revenge, and it always has been. Her praise is my despair, and why should anyone praise me? Her name turns the air around me more putrid.
I should be the goddess of life and abundance; without my kingdom how would your gardens grow? I hear Shiva had a similar existential crisis once. The great God of destruction was distraught, and confided in his dear Parvati, “What am I? Only destruction? where is my goodness?” “Lord” she answered, “Without your destruction where would creation be, you are destruction, but from you creation is birthed!” What a wise wise goddess, no one in my pantheon gives me such credit. I admire her beautiful combination of love and wisdom, though I never got the chance to meet her in person (I am not allowed to leave my subterranean realm). However, my great servant Neti came back with raving reviews of the goddess after some New Age witches conducted a ceremony involving me, Parvati, and Persephone, who he described as a more balanced version of myself.
Perhaps it was Parvati's love for Shiva that inspired me to seduce the great usurper Nergal. Locusts swarmed from his skin, and tumors raged in his loins. He visited me on a heavenly mission, his vile terror parted my gates, and none of my slaves could bear to deny his entry. The people called him the God of pestilence and disease, of famine and cruelty. These were all fine by my standards, after all my life is spent watching flesh turn to muscles, muscle turn to bone, and bone turn to dust. Most of the stories say that I intended him to see me get out of the bath, and they are correct, for as you will remember my innocence stayed in the skies. He woke me up to a pleasure I did not believe could exist in these dismal halls. I loved him for this, or at least felt a yearning that tore at my heart like hungry claws into fresh meat.
I now understand this type of pleasure is well known amongst the anthropomorphs of the upper realms. It was all the contact I had ever known. Upon his leaving I went into a storm of fury. I pounded on the crusts of the earth, sending tremors that disturbed sacrifices and claimed the lives of entire villages. I demanded his presence in my realm in shrieks that shook the lightening bolts out of the storm God’s hands, causing fires to spread and many to die. Nergal was sent back to me, his tongue spewing malaria, his belly emaciated from his own famine. The story goes he entered my throne room, grasped me by my long black tendrils, threw me to the floor, forced himself upon my form, then sat upon my throne. The story is more or less accurate, though it leaves out a few details that would have delighted those horror loving medieval artists if they had not been so preoccupied by the “one true God.” As he sat on my throne the dead all bowed, a gesture of honor they had never bestowed upon me. In his horror they saw the makings of their own fates.
Slowly my cult dwindled, even the archaeological record can tell you that. The living came to worship Nergal in my place, my throne became his. A passion turned to submission. A submission ever closing in on oblivion. I am now little more than a handmaiden and fuck toy to the once known Mesopotamian Lord of the dead. This is fine by me though. For it brings you to the moral of this story, and listen closely, because a moral from a Goddess is as eternal as belief. When stolen, raped, and dethroned, always tell your story. Pity is power too. Just light a candle for me tonight, we will see who rises to a great throne in the sky.
They say all good things must come to an end, and deities know this more than most. Our majesty is held in a spider’s web of belief. When worship stops coming, we dissolve into dusty cobweb. Some of us are swept out into oblivion, left with not even our own self-awareness. Look at how Abraham reduced us to broken idols with his “monotheism.” Our powers drained with each shattered believer, funneled into one violent megalomaniac of a deity that no one in the heavenly realm paid much attention to, until with bitter luck he stumbled upon some zealous couple in an open desert tent. He whispered in their ears, sparking the demise, disintegration, and destruction of our temples.
But demise, disintegration, and destruction have come to compose my current personality. Not when I was a sky deity of course. In those days I was the incarnation of the human ideals that the vast majority of you put onto a pretty little pedestal, crown with flowers and trinkets of gold, twirl to and fro in white communion dresses. Threatening is what I have become. Envious and brutal. Cold stone, sharp eyes, a body shutters from a vision in a nightmare. A goddess to be feared, and if not, worshiped by those who are deemed twisted, who you would rather believe never existed.
The legend goes that it was the dragon Kun that ushered me to the underworld, the first betrayal by one who was supposed to love me. He was my brother, though it is hard to track down proper familial relations when the mere mingling of tears and water can bring about birth. I was in a moment of reconfiguration, transmuting from pure blue sky to a waterier form, when a net fine enough to catch the air itself pulled me. I felt myself sweeping downward, and down too swept my innocence and the kindness that had motivated me to form a shady cumulous for a parched desert traveler. With each meter of decent I felt myself solidifying into a cold and frigid ruler, hard and erect, the keeper of the dead. As we slid through a crack in the crust of the earth, the sky became a memory, and steady decay became my effect. By the time Kun deserted me on my tombstone throne, I was fully anthropomorphic, and still am today, though perhaps, a bit more grey.
Being the ruler of the underworld had its pleasures. I learned to feel the hardness of my heart in the petrified countenance of every new corpse in my domain. Practicing severity became my devotion. Much like heaven, there is plenty of dancing to be done in the underworld. I love to watch the dead dance, their swaying forms decomposing with their strange and morbid movements, a twist to the left as the right arms unhinges itself to the right. The dead are always dancing, it speeds up the process s of decay, and no one wants to stay in my palace for long. There are more ethereal realms to be explored, where body is but a hazy memory cloaked in poetry, color, and warmth.
The mighty dance among the meek. Idols of humanity, rulers of empires, they all come here, until their bodies are striped away, layer by layer, returning their substance to pure earth. From my kingdom comes new and fertile soil, few realize this. Few realize much in your world. Just look at how many forgot about me. I had a temple once. It was a place for those who understood that their existence was tied to my capacities. Rulers feared to enter its halls, but rulers are rarely the wise. It was not a place of celebration, but nor was it a place of mourning. Let it be known that I have mourned. I mourned for the lifeless forms of children that entered my halls, I mourned for the memories I saw played out in the eyes of the dead. For their longing was my own, their death my imprisonment.
I was never jealous in the sky. For what was there to be jealous of? I was the meaning that lies at the base of a prayer. I was the thread that connected a hope, to a prayer, to a force of creation.
For all that I lost, my sister maintained -Ishtar, goddess of love, goddess of abundance, goddess of fertility, the list can go on with all that a pure heart prays for. When I lived in the sky I used to delight in her blooming temples, filled with the radiance of dancing priestess I would blow their hair as they spun into bliss. Her bliss was my own, a sisterhood. As a zephyr I would caress her orange blossoms, bringing their scent to the places where lovers meet. Together we would wrap them, and dwell within the beauty of their emissions, soft and warm, the delicacy of lovers meeting. To us, this was sustenance, and we were the most noble hunters, looking not for blood or life to kill, only for creates to entwine within our ecstasy. I don’t for her though, for in her betrayal I have cursed her. Though my curse does little, with the pitiful power I now possess, I continue on, holding her within the gaze of my destructive powers. For her betrayal was the most painful of all. I should say betrayals, for she has forsaken both in the skies and in the tomb I now call my home. It was the decision of all the gods that I should rule the dead, and I as I fell. No. As I was dragged from my purity, hers was the face I saw. “It had to be,” was all she could muster as she watched me descend. Then she turned away. Politics corrupted her soul, as it tends to even in the most essential of natures. In the council of the gods she abandoned our love, and sisterhood became a word tinged with poison, bitter to my thoughts even as I share them now. A second betrayal too, this time for her gratification. I don’t know the whole story, nor do I care to. I am sure she had her reasons, but as I have come to understand, reason is as flawed in the divine as it is in the humane. Only reason poisons a well to bring about victory, all the while forgetting about the rain. Reasonable actions breed famished outcomes. Let me tell you, I saw my fair share of reason’s victims come through here. Kings who poisoned their brothers, they followed their reason down paranoid paths through haunted woods. It was for reason that they feared their beloveds, and it was all for reason that they spent the rest of their “glorious days” haunted by their own deeds. These are the ones I love to see enter, they come into the kingdom of the dead trembling, awaiting the sight of the concept that haunted them until their dying day. They wasted their lives, and they fear their afterlife. Such is the consequence of reason.
Please excuse my minor meander, and let me bring you back to the matter at hand- Ishtar’s second betrayal.
Farmers and lovers of the land used to cry out with great delight to my sister, Ishtar, “oh great bringer of life and abundance, how we sing your praise!” Strangely enough, more and more of you seem to call to her everyday. We deities have our cycles, and I see her rising again. I know that she wants me to hear. Too many disputes remain open between us. It is her revenge, and it always has been. Her praise is my despair, and why should anyone praise me? Her name turns the air around me more putrid.
I should be the goddess of life and abundance; without my kingdom how would your gardens grow? I hear Shiva had a similar existential crisis once. The great God of destruction was distraught, and confided in his dear Parvati, “What am I? Only destruction? where is my goodness?” “Lord” she answered, “Without your destruction where would creation be, you are destruction, but from you creation is birthed!” What a wise wise goddess, no one in my pantheon gives me such credit. I admire her beautiful combination of love and wisdom, though I never got the chance to meet her in person (I am not allowed to leave my subterranean realm). However, my great servant Neti came back with raving reviews of the goddess after some New Age witches conducted a ceremony involving me, Parvati, and Persephone, who he described as a more balanced version of myself.
Perhaps it was Parvati's love for Shiva that inspired me to seduce the great usurper Nergal. Locusts swarmed from his skin, and tumors raged in his loins. He visited me on a heavenly mission, his vile terror parted my gates, and none of my slaves could bear to deny his entry. The people called him the God of pestilence and disease, of famine and cruelty. These were all fine by my standards, after all my life is spent watching flesh turn to muscles, muscle turn to bone, and bone turn to dust. Most of the stories say that I intended him to see me get out of the bath, and they are correct, for as you will remember my innocence stayed in the skies. He woke me up to a pleasure I did not believe could exist in these dismal halls. I loved him for this, or at least felt a yearning that tore at my heart like hungry claws into fresh meat.
I now understand this type of pleasure is well known amongst the anthropomorphs of the upper realms. It was all the contact I had ever known. Upon his leaving I went into a storm of fury. I pounded on the crusts of the earth, sending tremors that disturbed sacrifices and claimed the lives of entire villages. I demanded his presence in my realm in shrieks that shook the lightening bolts out of the storm God’s hands, causing fires to spread and many to die. Nergal was sent back to me, his tongue spewing malaria, his belly emaciated from his own famine. The story goes he entered my throne room, grasped me by my long black tendrils, threw me to the floor, forced himself upon my form, then sat upon my throne. The story is more or less accurate, though it leaves out a few details that would have delighted those horror loving medieval artists if they had not been so preoccupied by the “one true God.” As he sat on my throne the dead all bowed, a gesture of honor they had never bestowed upon me. In his horror they saw the makings of their own fates.
Slowly my cult dwindled, even the archaeological record can tell you that. The living came to worship Nergal in my place, my throne became his. A passion turned to submission. A submission ever closing in on oblivion. I am now little more than a handmaiden and fuck toy to the once known Mesopotamian Lord of the dead. This is fine by me though. For it brings you to the moral of this story, and listen closely, because a moral from a Goddess is as eternal as belief. When stolen, raped, and dethroned, always tell your story. Pity is power too. Just light a candle for me tonight, we will see who rises to a great throne in the sky.