Semiramis

Semiramis (/səˈmɪrəmɪs/) was a legendary queen of Assyria who somehow acquired the reputation of being exceptionally beautiful and exceptionally lustful, as well as a kick-ass warrior. [note 1]. As a result, she got into a shedload of operas and plays, including operas bearing the title Semiramide by Cimarosa, Meyerbeer, and Rossini. In cinema, she frequently appears in sword-and-sandal[1] films, and has been played by Rhonda Fleming and Yvonne Furneaux. By all reports, she was fun to be with.

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Folklore
Folklore
Urban legends
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The legend

Legends state that she was daughter of the Assyrian mermaid-like goddess Derceto,File:Wikipedia's W.svg a.k.a. Atargatis, and a mortal. She was fed by doves as an infant. Later, she was married to Ones, a general of the Assyrian king Ninus. The king wanted her as his queen, being impressed by her bravery in combat. But the general refused to give her to the king, so the king made an offer the former could not refuse. Ones went batshit crazy and ended hanging himself, leaving Semiramis free to marry the king. After Ninus was killed by an arrow, Semiramis became queen and ruled alone for 42 years. She expanded her empire from Egypt to India, where she was repelled after having been wounded.[2]

Other legends consider her the inventor of the chastity belt and the first woman to castrate men. They generally regarded her as basically a spoiled whore brat who, scorned after the Armenian king Ara refused to marry her, marched to battle against Armenia just to kill him in battle. She then tried to raise Ara from the dead [note 2] by praying to the gods, and of course she failed. So she disguises one of her lovers as said king telling she was successful, so the war would end.

She appears in the Divine Comedy in the second circle of Hell, reserved for the lustful. Dante writes:

“”To sensual vices she was so abandoned,
That lustful she made licit in her law,
To remove the blame to which she had been led.

She is Semiramis, of whom we read
That she succeeded Ninus, and was his spouse;
She held the land which now the Sultan rules.
—Dante, Divine Comedy, canto V

On the other hand, Swinburne seemed to have liked her:

“”SEMIRAMIS.
I am the queen Semiramis.
The whole world and the sea that is
  In fashion like a chrysopras,
The noise of all men labouring,
The priest’s mouth tired through thanksgiving,
   The sound of love in the blood’s pause,
The strength of love in the blood’s beat,
All these were cast beneath my feet
   And all found lesser than I was.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Masque of Queen Bersabe

The real history

In all likelihood, the origin of Semiramis' legend is the Asyrian queen Shammuramat,File:Wikipedia's W.svg[3] who governed the Assyrian empire as regent from 811 to 806 BCE. The myths came later as it was a novelty to have a large empire ruled by a woman who waged successful wars against those who started them (Greeks and Indo-Iranians)[4] — she, of course, was not the daughter of a goddess, nor did she carry her conquests as far as her mythical equivalent.

The woo

Alexander Hislop,File:Wikipedia's W.svg a 19th century Protestant Scottish minister, claimed in his book The Two Babylons[5] that Semiramis was a real ancient Mesopotamian person who invented both polytheism and goddess veneration[note 3] and was the queen consort of Nimrod, the one who supposedly built the biblical Tower of Babel. Long history short, according to him she ordered that her own fine person should be venerated as the Queen of Heaven, and that her child was the nature male deity Tammuz.File:Wikipedia's W.svg All mother-child deity or divine pairings of history down to the Mary-child Jesus are just the Semiramis-Tammuz duo refurbished, so by this logic Catholicism is just paganism in disguise.

Even if scholars have rejected his ideas as just manure — to begin with, no reference at all to Semiramis or any other consort of Nimrod exists in the Bible, nor Semiramis is called "mother of harlots" in those texts where she is mentioned[6] — obtained by mixing by myths from many cultures,[7] the woo lives on in places as Jack Chick tracts — who puts Nimrod as her son, no less batshit insane people as David Icke, who conflates her with the Reptilians,[8], and among Fundies who often throw in the mix the Whore of Babylon and the Biblical queen Jezebel to justify why women cannot rule alone and/or without fearing Yahweh, be as queens, majors, or whatever[note 4].

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gollark: When they get "summoned", some xenowyrms come in and run some fancy special effects, then put in a fancy purple-painted egg, and when it grows up they wear a trenchcoat and do GoN stuff.

See also

Notes
  1. And all this was years before Xena.
  2. Not as a zombie
  3. Yeah, there are no polytheistic religions and/or other goddesses, mother or not, in other parts of the world far away from Babylon.
  4. Then again that is a preacher who's obsessed with Illuminati/NWO nonsense, the End Times, claims that far-left parties practice Occultism and Satanism, and the coming of the Antichrist. Bullshit is a gateway for more bullshit, it seems

References
  1. See the Wikipedia article on Sword and sandal.
  2. Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, book 2
  3. "Sammu-ramat (queen of Assyria)". Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2017-12-06.
  4. Georges Roux — Ancient Iraq
  5. Hislop, Alexander. "The Two Babylons". Philologos.org. Retrieved 2017-12-06.
  6. Grabbe, Lester L. Can a 'History of Israel' Be Written? p. 28, 1997, Continuum International Publishing Group
  7. Ralph Woodrow "THE TWO BABYLONS: A Case Study in Poor Methodology", in Christian Research Journal volume 22, number 2 (2000) of the (Article DC187)
  8. David Icke, The Biggest Secret, 52-54
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