Ishtar

I need to research this further but am drawn to the story of Ishtar as a trigger for Tongues.

Ishtar is a multifacted goddess.  She is the goddess of love and sexuality, and thus, fertility; she is responsible for all life, but she is never a Mother goddess.  As the goddess of war, she is often shown winged and bearing arms. Her third aspect is celestial; she is the planet Venus, the morning and evening star.  In Babylonian mythology she is the 'divine personification of the planet Venus'.  It is claimed, her cult involved sacred prostitution, or at least the requirement that women once in their lifetimes made love to a stranger in the temple of Ishtar.  One of the most famous myths about Ishtar describes her descent to the underworld.  In this myth, Ishtar approaches the gates of the underworld and demands that the gatekeeper open them. The gatekeeper lets Ishtar into the underworld, opening one gate at a time.  At each gate, Ishtar has to shed one article of clothing.  When she finally passes the seventh gate, she is naked.  In rage she throws herself at Ereshkigal (queen of the underworld).  Ereshkigal orders her servant Namtar to imprison Ishtar and unleash sixty diseases against her.  After Ishtar descends to the underworld, all sexual activity ceases on earth.  The god Papsukal reports the situation to Ea, the king of the gods. Ea creates an intersex creature called Asu-shu-namir and sends him-her to Ereshkigal, telling him-her to invoke 'the name of the great gods' against her and to ask for the bag containing the waters of life.  Ereshkigal is enraged when she hears Asu-shu-namir's demand, but she has to give him-her the water of life.  Asu-shu-namir sprinkles Ishtar with this water, reviving her.  Then Ishtar passes back through the seven gates, getting one article of clothing back at each gate, and is fully clothes as she exits the last gate. (Source: Wikipedia)

Because of her multiple aspects and powers, Ishtar remains a complex and confusing goddess figure in modern study. Scholars suggest she incorporates contradictory forces to the point of embodying paradox:  sex and violence, fecundity and death, beauty and terror, centrality and marginality, order and chaos.  Rivka Harris views her as a "liminal" figure (Harris, "inanna-Ishtar as Paradox," 265).  In 'Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopatamia', Zainab Bahrani calls her the embodiment of "alterity" (Bahrani, 'Women of Babylon, 158) (Source: www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/ishtar/php)