>>19835671Aphrodite comes from the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, who comes from the Sumerian Inanna. She descended to the underworld through seven gates where she was stripped naked, becoming trapped in the underworld, but was saved by her lover Dumuzi (also known as Tammuz/Adonis) who took her place in the underworld. This gave rise to the Gnostic story where Sophia falls from the Pleroma, being raped/prostituted with the seven archons, until she is rescued by the Aeon Christ who incarnates in Jesus and absorbs the fallen divine sparks of Sophia in the form of a dove at his baptism, being abandoned by her before his death.
>The Babylonians also held an annual festival called Sacaea, which went for five days and ended with a resurrection ritual where a human sacrifice taking on the role of the king, who had come to represent a dying god, was whipped and then crucified>“According to the historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest spoke with ample knowledge, there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival called the Sacaea. During these five days masters and servants changed places, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them. A prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king’s concubines. But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and crucified." —The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer, vol I, p226>Another annual Babylonian festival, which went for twelves days in December, was called Zagmuk. It involved sacred prostitution rites using priestesses from the Temple of Venus in Babylon representing Ishtar, who would have ritualistic sex with the king, representing the dying god Tammuz, who would then be killed afterwards. Though they would come to use a substitution sacrifice in the place of the king to circumvent having to ordain a new leader annually 