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Pergamon Museum, Berlin
It may seem trivial to write about pop stars, and many are innocuous enough, but Madonna takes everything up a notch, as I wrote here. Her gyrating through our culture affects everybody. The blogger The Vigilante Citizen also seems to think so.
He compares her appearance at the Superbowl half time show last February to a Babylonian goddess. Yes, Madonna did come decked out as some kind of exotic ancient priestess, so this may not have been a difficult analogy to make. But TVC explains the significance of her "costume":
Madonna herself is dressed in a way that highly resembles an Ancient Sumerian/Babylonian goddess, Inanna-Ishtar.
Ishtar was a powerful and assertive goddess whose areas of control and influence included warfare, love, sexuality, prosperity, fertility and prostitution. She sought the same existence as men, enjoying the glory of battle and seeking sexual experiences. Madonna’s portrayal as Ishtar is therefore quite interesting as one can argue that the pop singer has embodied, throughout her career, the same assertive yet highly sexual qualities of Ishtar, even achieving a state of power in the music industry that is usually reserved to men. On an esoteric level, Ishtar is associated with the planet Venus, known as the Morning Star or the Evening Star.I also compare Madonna, and her highly sexualized performances, to an ancient goddess. I wrote:
Madonna's homosexual men [in her video Girl Gone Wild] are like the castrated dancers of the Greek goddess Cybele, who danced around their goddess into sexual frenzy.We have reached a new level of Godlessness in our culture. But this doesn't result with an empty, atheistic, world, but with a world full of gods. People still need figures to worship. Rejecting God only leaves an empty space to fill up with other gods. Leading cultural icons are re-inventing and re-introducing ancient gods and goddesses into our culture. Popular culture, through powerful venues and mass gatherings such as television, giant pop concerts and spectacular sports arenas, displays these rites and rituals with grandeur, hypnotizing even the most jaded of viewers. It won't be long before those empty souls are filled with such offerings. Madonna is not merely re-enacting some forgotten ritual, but is resurrecting an ancient, pagan religion and its goddess.