Easter/Ishtar Falls on 4/20 Once More

Once again, as in 2014, Easter Sunday falls on 4/20. This time, cannabis retailers seem to be co-celebrating the dual holiday, with Easter-themed decorations and events. 

Easter, the celebration of Jesus's resurrection, is the most sacred day of the Christian year. In ancient Babylon, around the spring equinox, people celebrated the resurrection of their god Tammuz, who was brought back from the underworld by his mother the fertility goddess Innana, known in Akkadia as Ishtar, pronounced “Easter” in most Semitic dialects. Flowers, eggs, goats and rabbits, among other agricultural products and animals, were the symbols of the holiday then, as now.

Ostara (1884) by Johannes Gehrts

Ishtar/Ostara and Her Connection to Easter

"In ancient Sumeria, Ishtar was held in high esteem as a heavenly monarch," writes Jeanne Achterberg in Woman as Healer. "Her temples have been found at virtually every level of excavation." The Ishtar Gate to the inner city of Babylon was considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

Also called the Queen of Heaven, Ishtar was a compassionate, healing deity. Her medicine kit likely included plant allies, and one of them, known as the "aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar," was likely cannabis. 

As the land of Sumer became a perpetual battlefield, Ishtar
became the goddess of war and destiny, and became more
sexualized, even as women were restricted from education
and the healing arts.

In mankind’s first written story The Epic of Gilgamesh
(circa 2000 BC), the cruel king Gilgamesh calls Ishtar
a predatory and promiscuous woman, and rebukes her
advances, just before taking off with his buddy Enki-
du to chop down the great cedar forest. Gilgamesh’s
repudiation of Ishtar, some scholars say, signifies a rejection
of goddess worship in favor of patriarchy in ancient times.

One of the interpreters of the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in tablets at the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh in the 1850s, was Leonidas Hamilton, who published a translation in 1884 that gives Ishtar top billing over Izdubar (Gigamesh), subtitled "The Babylonian Goddess of Love and the Hero and Warrior King." Hamilton writes, "Ishtar... may be identified with Eostre of the Germans, or Easter. To this goddess our Saxon or German ancestors sacrificed in April...from thence arose our word Easter, which the Saxons retained after their conversion to Christianity, so that our Easter-day is nothing more nor less than Ishtar's day." Hamilton cites the Hebrew and English lexicon from John Parkhurst. 

Some have tried to debunk the Ishtar/Easter connection, saying the holiday is named only after the German goddess Ostara (pictured), "the divinity of the radiant dawn" (Grimm), doubtlessly a reincarnation of Ishtar, who the Babylonians called "the morning star" and "the perfect light." 

 

Scottish author Steff V. Scott, in From Ishtar to Eostre: Reframing the Near Eastern Origins of an Anglo Saxon Goddess, finds such debunking racist and ill-informed. He writes, "A rigid academic investigation into the subject shows that Ishtar-Astarte’s worship was prevalent not just in Mesopotamia but down the Levantine Corridor, into Egypt, across Northern Africa, into ancient Greece and Rome, across Europe, and even into the British Isles." Scott presents as evidence writings of Virgil, the Venerable Bede, and Germanic academic sources linking Ishtar/Astarte with Ostara, as well as archeological evidence found on Hadrian’s Wall and "seven altars and inscriptions to Ishtar-Astarte found in Britain under various forms, titles and epithets, all dating to the Roman Period."

Ishtar's Connection to Cannabis

Babylonian period Queen of Night relief,
often considered to represent Ishtar

In the bible, Ishtar or her (sometimes) mother Asherah are called Ashtoreth, the supreme goddess of Caanan and the female counterpart of the gods called Baal or Bel.

Among those pagan, idolatrous practices was the burning of incense. Polish anthropologist Sula Benet, whose 1936 doctoral thesis ''Hashish in Folk Customs and Beliefs'' won her a Warsaw Society of Sciences scholarship for graduate study at Columbia University, theorized that the biblical incense kaneh bosm, meaning "sweet or good cane" was cannabis, mistranslated as "calamus" in the modern bibles.

Throughout the Old Testament, prophet after prophet warns the children of Israel that God will bring misery upon them unless they cease to worship Baal/Bel and Ashtoreth, to whom “burnt offerings” were made. In Jeremiah 44, the women tell him they will continue to secretly burn incense to the Queen of Heaven. One who did so was King Ahab's wife Jezebel (whose name meant "worshipper of Bel" but still means "harlot" to many today).

Author Chris Bennett and others connect Ishtar with Ishara, the prototypical Semitic goddess of love and medicine dating back to the third millennium BC. “Ishara” is the Hittite word for “treaty, binding promise” and so could connect with hempen rope, as other ancient goddesses do. “Ishtar was often depicted as a bundle of reeds, known as the ‘knot of Ishtar,’” writes Bennett in Cannabis and the Soma Solution.

Assyriologist Erica Reiner writes in Astral Magic in Babylonia, "the herb called Sim.Ishara 'aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar,' which is equated with the Akkadian qunnabu, 'cannabis,' may indeed conjure up an aphrodisiac through the association with Ishara, goddess of love."

This Easter, it's time to resurrect Ishtar, and all that our healing goddess stood for, including cannabis. 

ADDENDUM: I was remiss in not pointing out that 4/20/25 is also the final day of Passover. According to NBC News, in New York City, the cannabis brand Tokin’ Jew is advertising a kosher-style THC gummy line, “Tokin’ Chews,” designed to meet dietary restrictions for Passover.

I don't know a goddess connection to Passover, but the biblical heroine Esther, whose holiday is Purim, takes her name from Ishtar.