Pagan Festival Shout Out: Festival Of Dumuzi

Old Sumerian festival celebrating the return of Dumuzi (God of Life and Death) from the Underworld to be with Inanna (Goddess of Life) for the verdant part of the year.

Dumuzi, in Mesopotamian religion, god of fertility embodying the powers for new life in nature in the spring. The name Tammuz seems to have been derived from the Akkadian form Tammuzi, based on early Sumerian Damu-zid, The Flawless Young. 

Known as Dumuzid, Dumuzid was believed to be the provider of milk, which was a rare, seasonal commodity in ancient Sumer due to the fact that it could not easily be stored without spoiling. was also an agricultural deity associated with the growth of plants. Ancient Near Eastern peoples associated Dumuzid with the springtime, when the land was fertile and abundant, but, during the summer months, when the land was dry and barren, it was thought that Dumuzid had "died".

Considered the New Year´s Festival appears as the confluence of every current of religious thought to express every shade of religious feeling. Basically, it served:

1. to establish harmony with nature which was indispensable to a fruitful social life;
2. to reaffirm the bond between the community and the gods, the community here being represented by the king in temple ritual, for the king was the one responsible for the continual tending of earthly harmony and accountable to the gods. The community participation is visibly marked in the mourning for the disappeared king in the first days, in the joys of the procession and probably at the private level in the Sacred Rite enacted in the holies of holies of everyone´s homes, at the same time that the king joined with the high priestess in the Inner Sanctum of the ziggurat, and
3. to enact ritually the periodical changes of fortune humanity was subjected to and seek active participation in changing the fates by listening to the gods´ designs and yet searching for mystical ways to attune and even interfere with destiny by acting upon omens and auguries.

The New Year´s Festival could be held in the autumn as well as in the spring. We translate Sumerian zagmuk, which means "beginning of the year", and the Akkadian akitu, which has uncertain meaning, but basically means New Year´s Festival because these feasts are essentially what the modern term indicates - festive celebrations of a new beginning in the annual cycle.