Ishtar Rising: Why the Goddess Went to Hell and What to Expect Now That She’s Returning

By Robert Anton Wilson

“And herein lies both Wilson’s typically mischievous nature and serious intent — in its original, weaponized form, the book that became ‘Ishtar Rising’ is nothing less than a mytho-feminist screed masquerading as an antique stroke book; a brilliant, compact summary of ‘matrist’ attitudes, their cruel demotion and degradation, their struggle for survival, and their hoped-for triumphant restoration. ‘Ishtar’ is a book of revealing — the undressing of the Goddess as she descends into the Underworld, where, shorn of the accoutrements of Divinity, she must confront her True Naked Being to survive the ordeal. It speaks also of the return of the repressed. The journey of the now-enlightened Goddess back from the murk and mysteries of the Nether World to Get Some Shit Tidied Up. It speaks from its rear-view mirror times of a still-overdue resurgence of connectivity, kindness, sex-positivity, respect for Nature and for Life. It wonders what a world ruled by the Goddess would look like, in contrast to those Dark Satanic Mills and centuries of slaughter presided over by an unforgiving God.”
– Grant Morrison, from his Foreword to Ishtar Rising ⁕ This is the Robert Anton Wilson Trust authorized Hilaritas Press Edition

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilaritas Press
• Release date: Jan 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734473513

Robert Anton Wilson

Author of some 35 books including Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising, Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, and co-author of the Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson (RAW or Bob) was a futurist, author, lecturer, stand-up comic, guerrilla ontologist, psychedelic magician, outer head of the Illuminati, quantum psychologist, Taoist sage, Discordian Pope, Struthian politician . . . maybe. Bob described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with different perspectives recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". His goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything." His "Maybe Logic" inspired the creation of the Maybe Logic Academy. Google "Robert Anton Wilson" for mosbunall info.~~~The Berkeley mob once called Leary and me "the counter-culture of the counter-culture." I'm some kind of antibody in the New Age movement. My function is to raise the possibility, "Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit."

Book preview

ISHTAR RISING

Why the Goddess Went to Hell

and What to Expect

Now That She's Returning

Robert Anton Wilson

Foreword by

Grant Morrison



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Copyright © 1989 Robert Anton Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

International Standard Book Number (eBook): 978-1-7344735-1-3

First Edition 1989

Second Printing 1994

Third Printing 1997

Second Print Edition 2020, Hilaritas Press

eBook Edition 2020, Hilaritas Press

Cover Design by amoeba

eBook design by Pelorian Digital

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com



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A Note From Hilaritas Press:

Decisions about how to put together the new Hilaritas Press edition of  Ishtar Rising  presented us with an array of issues that arise from the Book’s historical iterations. The 1974 Playboy Press edition,  The Book of the Breast,  a commissioned work from the magazine, had photographs interspersed throughout the text with captions written by Bob that followed the written narrative.

When Bob regained the rights to the book from Playboy Press in the mid 1980’s, he decided to republish it with the text largely as originally written, but with a new title and a new foreword. This new edition was published through a small publishing house, New Falcon Publications. The book that emerged in 1989 (sadly filled with typos), was quite different from the original. The New Falcon edition had inserted new photos and only SOME of the original photos, and all the photographs were clumped together in the center of the book, with no photo captions. We can only surmise that the effort of obtaining legal rights to all of the original photographs was deemed either too expensive or too daunting, as the New Falcon photo choices were quite different from the original. We also are guessing that if you couldn’t get all the original photos, then entering Bob’s original photo captions on just some of the images probably did not make sense.

In the new Hilaritas Press edition of  Ishtar Rising , we have attempted to honor Bob’s original guidelines, and recreate the Playboy layout as much as possible. We took the time, effort and considerable expense of tracking down and gaining rights to as many of the original photos as possible. For those photos for which we could not locate permissions, we found suitable substitutions that worked with Bob’s photo captions. In many cases, when finding images that Playboy used, we were able to obtain the same image but at a much higher quality. Because of improvements in digital processing and printing, we can not only offer superior graphics, but also an  Ishtar Rising  in full color. We hope you enjoy the result!

Amor et Pasta Volans

Hilaritas Press Partners, Rasa and Christina



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Contents

Foreword by Grant Morrison for the 2020 Edition

Introduction by the author to the 1989 Edition

Introduction by the author to the 1973 Edition

Chapter 1 - It Began with Erection

Chapter 2 - Tales of the Vienna Woods

Chapter 3 - The Breast Repressed

Chapter 4 - Mammary Metaphysics

Chapter 5 - The Return of the Repressed

Chapter 6 - The Breast Expressed and the Breast Possessed

Chapter 7 - Making a Clean Breast of It

Photo Credits

Dedication

To the women of planet Earth

this study of unity in duality

"To the little boy in me, I am a God, you are a Goddess

To the little girl in you, you are a Goddess, I am a God

To the God in me, I am a little boy, to the Goddess in you.

To the Goddess in you, you are a little girl, to the God in me."

John Lilly, M.D.

The Center of the Cyclone

It was the sad time after the death of the fair young god of spring, Tammuz. The beautiful goddess, Ishtar, who loved Tammuz dearly, followed him to the halls of Eternity, defying the demons who guard the Gates of Time.

But at the first Gate, the guardian demon forced Ishtar to surrender her sandals, which the wise men say symbolizes giving up Will. And at the second Gate, Ishtar had to surrender her jeweled anklets, which the wise say means giving up Ego. And at the third Gate, she surrendered her robe, which is hardest of all because it is giving up Mind itself. And at the forth Gate, she surrendered her golden breast-cups, which is giving up Sex Role. And at the fifth Gate, she surrendered her necklace, which is giving up the rapture of illumination. And at the sixth Gate, she surrendered her earrings, which is giving up magick. And finally, at the seventh Gate, Ishtar surrendered her thousand-petaled crown, which is giving up Godhood.

It was only thus, naked, that Ishtar could enter Eternity.

R.A.W.

Cosmic Trigger



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Introduction to the 2020 Edition

by Grant Morrison

Back in 1973, when our enlightened boy wonder Robert Anton Wilson wrote the first version of Ishtar Rising , then entitled The Book of the Breast , the world was a very different place, and this book is, in many ways, a product of its times, as modern readers will swiftly realize to varying levels of dismay or delight; products as they are of their own particular times.

The Book of the Breast is a title clearly deployed to entice the attentions of Playboy magazine’s erudite readership of pipe-smoking, pyjama-wearing, jet-setting bachelor millionaires. The original book is enlivened for this purpose with photographs of Sophia Loren in a wet and clingy dress, juxtaposed with stark images of the Venus of Willendorf. The New Falcon edition later added Tina Turner shaking it all out with a Mick Jagger who contrived to look somehow vigorously elderly even then.

The low quality of the crepuscular black-and-white pix is such that Welch and Turner may as well have been photographed within a week of the famous Neolithic representation of fertile womanhood, by the same snapper, using the same Flintstones-style box Brownie camera made of bamboo and seashells.

The publicity mugshot busts of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor only add to the tawdry, carnivalesque impression of an ancient What-The-Butler-Saw crank-operated peepshow that promises more than it can deliver.

The Book of the Breast as Wilson admits, was a work-for-hire freelance writer gig. Strapped for cash and offered the task of filling a hundred-or-so pages with ruminations on the subject of tits (for a publication, let’s remind ourselves, whose raison d’etre was the objectification — advocates might offer glorification — of women, and specifically the breasts of women), the great pop philosopher seized the opportunity to transcend the brief and deliver something of long-lasting value and still-subversive impact.

But buyer beware: the opening chapters offer Bob the stand-up, disciple of Lenny Bruce, stuck with an unpromising gig entertaining the rubes and rowdies at some downtown Bunny Club in early 1970-somewhere. He starts out by adopting a locker-room vernacular aimed squarely at what he assumes must be an all-male audience, out there under the stacked-tray layers of nicotine smoke past the footlights.

The blue patter seems calculated to put the voyeuristic clientele at ease, lowering their emotional and intellectual defences just long enough to slip the needle home and administer a little medicine to these presumed men, some of whom may never have imagined human concerns and fears behind the cottontail, floppy ears, well-rehearsed smile, and generously-stuffed décolletage of the average Playboy Club waitress.

And herein lies both Wilson’s typically mischievous nature and serious intent — in its original, weaponized form, the book that became Ishtar Rising is nothing less than a mytho-feminist screed masquerading as an antique stroke book; a brilliant, compact summary of matrist attitudes, their cruel demotion and degradation, their struggle for survival, and their hoped-for triumphant restoration.

To further bedazzle and misdirect its masculine readers, the routine comes camouflaged, then, with saucy pics; initially reminiscent of those jazz rags Sgt. Gran’dad resorted to before they had color photography let alone HD VR internet porn, Ishtar is in fact a cackling cuckoo in the nest of the unsuspecting masturbator, retiring to the barn or the bathroom for a fly fumble, only to be ensnared in Ishtar’s seductive web of thrilling, radical, anti-establishment ideas; Its world-shaking notions of female emancipation, sexual imprinting, mythic reality, the social cost of Freudian oral and anal impulses, and the potential consequence of the return of the repressed; Its thrilling evisceration of the anti-rational, death-inflected misogyny of Catholic Church dogma.

The tits are sleight of hand. The blue jokes are smoke trails drifting through dazzling mirrors. The show, the glitter and glamor, is a feint — and while the audience is distracted by the peeling chiffons , the real trick is slipping through their perceptual firewalls in the manner of another of Wilson’s great heroes, Orson Welles — whose inscrutably ludic F is For Fake Wilson has often lauded and here slyly recapitulates.

Like so many magicians and conjurers, like Welles, like Joyce, Lenny Bruce, or Aleister Crowley, and others he admired, Wilson is doing one thing, while making it look like he’s doing another.

Ishtar Rising speaks of the Great Goddess of Many Names, first identified as Innana by the Sumerians, in some of the earliest recording human mythmaking, later called Ishtar by the Babylonians, Persephone by the Greeks. The Goddess who goes to Hell. Hers, is a journey marked by the peeling of layers, a Self-stripping, a Dance of the Seven Veils of Illusion, where they never undress, they never undress, but it’s non-stop striptease , as Momus sang.

Wilson strips away the illusions of the male reader, disrobing the innocent alchemical bride that is the unwary man who picked this book up, dreaming of some transcendent glimpse of nipple to cure his 21 st century soul-sickness.

Ishtar is a book of revealing — the undressing of the Goddess as she descends into the Underworld, where, shorn of the accoutrements of Divinity, she must confront her True Naked Being to survive the ordeal.

It speaks also of the return of the repressed. The journey of the now-enlightened Goddess back from the murk and mysteries of the Nether World to Get Some Shit Tidied Up. It speaks from its rear-view mirror times of a still-overdue resurgence of connectivity, kindness, sex-positivity, respect for Nature and for Life. It wonders what a world ruled by the Goddess would look like, in contrast to those Dark Satanic Mills and centuries of slaughter presided over by an unforgiving God.

Ishtar sets out to interrogate a culture whose denial and repression of the breast, and by extension motherhood, the Milk of Human Kindness, womanhood and femininity in all its expressions, is a breeding ground for essentially Fascistic repression, judgmental censoriousness and a profound lack of empathy — what Wilson describes as fundamentally patrist attitudes.

In place of the armored hard body of Corporate Man, that modern exemplar of successful sociopathic toxic masculinity, Wilson offers a matrist vision of oceanic orgasms, Free Love, Tantric sex, common sense, and boundless creativity.

As I write, there are almost 8 billion human inhabitants of Planet Earth; when Wilson handed in his manuscript, there were 4 billion, which made for a roomier world, with greater diversity of animal species and oceans far less toxic than those suffered by our struggling marine life today.

There were supersonic passenger aircraft, a recently-concluded series of manned missions to the moon, a Cold War whose brutal sulks and silences were expressed through a seemingly endless series of small destructive hot wars; there was Studio 54, and a David Bowie still 42 years downstream from his death.

Meanwhile, the women’s movement of so-called Second Wave feminism, at that time popularly known as Women’s Lib , was in the process of making some perfectly sensible and reasonable observations and demands that resulted in cultural seismic shifts whose reverberations we are still experiencing today.

Wilson’s book drew on this seething cultural ferment and while he ridiculed some of the movers and shakers of the second Wave vanguard, distrusting what he saw as a puritanical zealotry and the unconscious assumption of anal/ partrist anti-values of intolerance and prejudice by women who preached the opposite, he is far from critical of Feminism and its ideas.

Our Humble Narrator takes more care in his introduction to the 1989 edition — when the book was gloriously unshackled from its clanking Playboy chains to rejoice in the blockbuster title Ishtar Rising: Why the Goddess Went To Hell and What to Expect Now That She’s Returning — where he acknowledges and apologizes for his earlier flippancy speaking with greater caution, consideration and a typically informed, even-handed understanding of advancing social tides.

In pursuit of this book’s goals, Wilson, model-agnostic to a fault, acknowledges a reliance on data from numerous reality tunnels , (AKA worldviews), popular in the mid-20 th Century but perhaps less so now.

Indeed, there are multiple citations of Freudian theory, and the ideas of Wilhelm Reich herein, which modern readers may be compelled to contradict or accept in accordance with personal bias.

References are made to Pavlov, and Skinner, and certain of sexual behavioural conditioning theories, which have in the intervening years been strenuously challenged are here advanced. Many of Wilson’s sources have been subjected to criticism and revision in the years since this book was written and it’s a task best left to scholars to weigh up the evidence for pre-Christian matriarchal cultures, orgone energy, or Richard Milhous Nixon.

Fortunately, where Wilson is concerned, we need not accept as gospel truths any of the ideas he co-opts; they are tools to be used and discarded as soon as better tools come along.

Wilson is not selling New Age Snake Oil; he is no high priest or guru offering certainties and commandments. His, as ever, is the wry voice of the ultimate open-minded skeptic, who delights in challenges to his own and his readers’ preconceptions.

His thinking is often magical, (or perhaps surrealistic , in the sense that it deploys high-level pattern recognition to combine unlikely notions in unlikely ways that make statements about reality and how we perceive it) but he has little time for the supernatural, and the difference between practical magic and the Will O’ the Wisps of the supernatural soon becomes clear in Wilson’s work.

Where some of his ideas may have aged poorly, or been superseded by better data, where other insights now read as self-evident social truths, what seems most astonishing is how so many of Wilson’s arguments remain as radical and as pertinent as when they were first published.

It is therefore interesting and instructive to revisit the book, as we approach the third decade of the 21 st Century, during another forward surge of female empowerment — bringing with it a swell from the queer margins where sexual identities are blurred and prismatic rather than binary, and in which so-called minority and outsider voices have grown louder and more organized; the result being a relentless cultural audit that is underway even as I type.

With this in mind, it must be said that Wilson, the great optimist, perhaps failed to foresee the ways in which restriction of censorship, as it applies to the depiction of nakedness and sex, could become just another tool of repressive ideologies.

The ubiquitous internet pornography that has rendered magazines like Playboy all-but obsolete has surely demystified the body and the physicality of sexual behavior in ways Wilson might initially applaud, but there appears to be a cost in human connectivity — where an upswing in the general acceptance and availability of strong porn goes hand-in-hand job with a decline in not only intimacy, but sperm counts, and testosterone levels.

Porn’s gonzo tendency towards the sadistic, and scatological where the impulse is to rejoice in degradation, ruination, and cruelty, speaks more to our demonic, power-craving anal component than to the angelic oceanic aspect of our nature as humans.

Nevertheless, Wilson’s call for a more tolerant, more creative and diverse society based on matrist principles seems today more urgent than ever. The remedies he suggests for the sickness of those anally-driven patrist strategies that brought some of us prosperity in exchange for species extinctions, climate catastrophes, and massive inequalities are sorely needed and this book is one which has, once again, I believe, found its moment.

I write at a time when magic, and magical thinking is on the rise once more, with covens of witches flying through our entertainment media, sigils in advertising, proliferating Pepe memes, and Fake News undermining the foundations of the Real . . .

A time when the appalling influence of capitalism, (whose grotesque, late middle-aged, indeed elderly, strong man leaders project cathected images of uncompromising male power and virility, even as they resort to testosterone injections and daily doses of Viagra), appears ever more monstrous, suicidal, inescapable; a drooling rapacious Leviathan with one hand around Mother Nature’s neck and the other up her skirt . . .

Perhaps the matrist values Wilson outlines — spontaneity, connectivity, generosity, to name a few of the virtues — may be the only sane alternative to our current Futures Most Likely To (God-State absolute surveillance and control on one hand; bones, dust and acid rains on the other) . . .

The Goddess has gone to Hell, and may still be negotiating her return as we speak — but we know how this myth ends; mocked, denied, Her rights, denied a voice, indoctrinated, exploited, monetarized, mutilated, humiliated, She rises, unstoppable, indomitable, with a wink and grin, wiser, more powerful and deadly, yet more compassionate, more dangerous than ever.

As the Mythic Feminine continues to find startling and provocative new ways to express Herself in contemporary culture, Ishtar Rising helps to articulate a new myth that replaces the destructive Hero’s Journey of the Conquering Boy-King with a more introspective, more inclusive story of unveiling, self-discovery, honesty, surrender, and new creation.

That it was written by a 40-year old man in the middle of the now-historical 20 th century is of little consequence — the Goddess (if only in the eternal form of the mitochondrial Mother DNA, that still divides in every living cell) speaks through all of us and here, if you listen, she speaks loudly and clearly and with no bullshit through Bob Wilson.

Ishtar Rising offers humour, wisdom, and the considerable insights of a brilliant fellow traveller from an antique land, reminding us that if, unlike the Goddess, we cannot find our way back from Hell, we will be condemned to live and to die in the Inferno . . .

Fnord!

Grant Morrison

Scotland, June 2019



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Introduction to the 1989 Edition

1 – The Underworld Journey

Midway through my life,

I found myself in a dark woodland . . .

— Dante, The Divine Comedy

(beginning the Descent to Hell)

In Ternberg, Austria, in 1987 I met Diane Wolkstein — we were both speaking at a Folklore convention — and she gave me a copy of her new translation of the ancient Sumerian epic of Inanna, a work dated at around 2000 B.C.E. ( Inanna , Queen of Heaven and Earth, Rider and Company, London 1984). I was entranced by the beauty of the legend and by Diane's skillful translation, but I was also amused to find that the Inanna story was earlier than the sage of Ishtar yet basically identical to it. You see, I had known the Ishtar epic since my high school days, and, indeed, my first long poem was based on it, but I am so ignorant of Near Eastern archaeology that I had never learned that Ishtar is a late re-telling of the tale of Inanna.

The story of the moon-goddess who descends to Hell and rises again, whether she be called Inanna or Ishtar (or Persephone, or Brigit), has later, Patriarchal echoes in the myths of Osiris, Attis, Dionysus, Christ, and many other sun-gods (including Joyce's Tim Finnegan). It is also, of course, the structure of Dante's Divina Comedia. This archetypal death/resurrection, in either its female or male forms, is called the Underground Journey by Jungians, and I recently observed, with the same sort of shock you get when you first see yourself on TV, that every single one of my novels is based on some variation on this primordial legend.

All of my heroines and heroes go through a withdrawal from tribal consensus reality — a journey through the realm of fantasy, horror and the Unconscious — leading to a rebirth or

Reviews for Ishtar Rising

[larry · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Every book I've read by Robert Anton Wilson has left me illuminated a sense of enlightenment clarity and expanded consciousness this one led me there as well but in a totally unexpected way I can't suggesr it highly enough