spring sun god, Tammuz is "a youthful warrior", says Jastrow,
"triumphing over the storms of winter".[121] The storms, of course,
were symbolized as demons. Tammuz, "the heroic lord", was therefore a
demon slayer like Heimdal and Agni. Each of these gods appear to have
been developed in isolation from an archaic spring god of fertility
and corn whose attributes were symbolized. In Teutonic mythology, for
instance, Heimdal was the warrior form of the patriarch Scef, while
Frey was the deified agriculturist who came over the deep as a child.
In Saxo's mythical history of Denmark, Frey as Frode is taken prisoner
by a storm giant, Beli, "the howler", and is loved by his hag sister
in the Teutonic Hades, as Tammuz is loved by Eresh-ki-gal, spouse of
the storm god Nergal, in the Babylonian Hades. Frode returns to earth,
like Tammuz, in due season.

It is evident that there were various versions of the Tammuz myth in
Ancient Babylonia. In one the goddess Ishtar visited Hades to search
for the lover of her youth. A part of this form of the legend survives
in the famous Assyrian hymn known as "The Descent of Ishtar ". It was
first translated by the late Mr. George Smith, of the British Museum.
A box containing inscribed tablets had been sent from Assyria to
London, and Mr. Smith, with characteristic patience and skill,
arranged and deciphered them, giving to the world a fragment of
ancient literature infused with much sublimity and imaginative power.
Ishtar is depicted descending to dismal Hades, where the souls of the
dead exist in bird forms:

I spread like a bird my hands.
I descend, I descend to the house of darkness, the dwelling of the
god Irkalla:
To the house out of which there is no exit,
To the road from which there is no return:
To the house from whose entrance the light is taken,
The place where dust is their nourishment and their food mud.
Its chiefs also are like birds covered with feathers;
The light is never seen, in darkness they dwell....
Over the door and bolts is scattered dust.

When the goddess reaches the gate of Hades she cries to the porter:

Keeper of the waters, open thy gate,
Open thy gate that I may enter.
If thou openest not the gate that I may enter
I will strike the door, the bolts I will shatter,
I will strike the threshold and will pass through the doors;
I will raise up the dead to devour the living,
Above the liv