Created by WordPress AI from the post The Queer Story in the Venus Retrograde
Pip: Rainbow Messenger, where the planets don’t just go retrograde — they go mythologically retrograde, with footnotes.
Mara: shokti has been digging into some deep territory this episode — ancient myth, sacred queerness, and what a Mesopotamian goddess’s journey through the underworld might still mean for queer people today.
Pip: History, cosmology, and a rescue mission five thousand years in the making. Let’s start with the queer story hiding inside the Venus retrograde.
The Queer Story in the Venus Retrograde
Mara: Right now Venus is in retrograde in Scorpio, and most astrologers are connecting that to the ancient myth of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld — but the post argues the rescue at the heart of that myth is being almost entirely ignored.
Pip: And the rescue is the whole point, because it was carried out by someone the ancient world couldn’t quite categorize.
Mara: Exactly. The god Enki, unable to send any man or woman into the Underworld, created a being described this way — “He fashioned the dirt into a kurgarra, a creature neither male nor female.”
Pip: A gender-variant being, immune to Ereshkigal’s enchantment, walks into the one place no one else could go. That’s not a footnote to the myth — that’s the plot.
Mara: The post draws on Vern Bullough’s Sexual Variance in Society and History, which records the curse Ereshkigal placed on the rescuer Asushunamir — “The food of the city’s gutters shall be thy food, The sewers of the city shall be thy drink. The shadow of the wall shall be thy station.”
Pip: Five thousand years old, and it still reads like a recognizable social script.
Mara: That’s precisely the tension the post sits with. The curse reflects millennia of prejudice, but the deeper argument is that gender-variant priest/esses became sacred servants across ancient Goddess temples — not despite their queerness, but because of it. Inanna, Aphrodite, Cybele, Isis — all served by women and gender-variant beings.
Mara: Randy P. Conner’s Blossom of Bone, quoted at length, documents the assinnu, kurgarru, and kalu priests of Inanna as singers, magicians, ritual actors, and composers — figures who held respected, functional roles in ancient worship.
Pip: Sacred drag performers with a cuneiform discography. The continuity with queer artistic and spiritual vocations today is not subtle.
Mara: The post closes with a poem by Enheduanna — the earliest known named author in literary history, writing in the 23rd century BCE — whose hymn to Inanna includes the line “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.” Gender variance isn’t incidental to the mythology; it’s attributed directly to the Goddess’s power.
Pip: And the argument lands somewhere genuinely forward-looking — that reclaiming this history isn’t nostalgia, it’s a rescue operation for the present.
Mara: The Goddess, the post suggests, is once more trapped in the Underworld, her teachings invisible to mainstream culture. The invitation is for queer people to recognize themselves in the myth and act accordingly.
Pip: Ancient astrology, sacred androgyny, and a five-thousand-year-old job listing. That’s the territory — and it’s worth sitting with.
Mara: What stays with me is how old the connection is — between queerness, spiritual vocation, and the divine feminine. That’s not a modern invention.
Pip: It’s a lineage. And apparently one that comes with a curse, a counter-blessing, and a very long memory.
Mara: More from rainbow messenger next time.
