Ishtar

Ishtar is one of the powerful goddesses whose magic and wild virtues, Simone de Beauvoir argues, were appropriated by patriarchal religion. Though she is not developed as a character in a continuous narrative, her place in the book’s comparisons reveals a shift in how feminine power is imagined: from an independent force associated with life and death to a legacy recast within a male-dominated religious order.

A goddess of wild power

Ishtar appears alongside Astarte as a source of magic and wild virtues. In the account of ancient cults, the male god Dionysus takes over this inherited power, while women—the maenads, thyades, and bacchantes—become the devotees who enact its religious ecstasy. The passage thus distinguishes the goddess’s symbolic force from the later form through which men and women encounter it: her powers persist, but under a male god’s image.

From divine power to patriarchal order

Beauvoir places Ishtar within a broader account of the changing status of female divinity. In her comparison of ancient goddesses with the Christian order, Ishtar belongs with Astarte and Cybele: powerful figures who embody both life and death and whose maternal power makes men, in the mythic logic described, dependent on them. Christianity reverses that relation by assigning life and death to God alone and relocating the soul’s destiny beyond the mother’s earthly domain. The change does not simply erase earlier feminine power; it changes the terms by which that power can be represented.

Myth and the recasting of femininity

Ishtar’s significance lies in the contrast between a goddess who is powerful in her own right and later ideals that honor women through a subordinate role. The book describes the Christian elevation of the Virgin Mary as a victory achieved by the defeat of the earlier, autonomous feminine force: woman may be glorified as mother, but only after her power has been subordinated. Against that transformation, Ishtar marks a remembered form of divinity in which maternal authority remains connected to sovereignty over life and death.