The stories I live by choose me. The Descent of Inanna has repeatedly helped me make sense of my life, creeping into my mediations and my dreams. It is guiding me now. Inanna’s story came to me via another. In the late 1970’s I worked as a museum educator at Hammond Castle Museum, a gothic revival home on the rocky coast of Gloucester. We had a show of medieval carved ivories that pictured the knight Parzival searching for the Grail. The Curator, Naomi Kline, said that pictures of Parzival were as popular in the early Middle Ages as pictures of Micky Mouse were now. In preparation we read Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170-1230). One of the other tour guides introduced us to The Masks of God: Creative Mythology by Joseph Campbell that included more than 175 pages analyzing that book. I became fascinated with Campbell, eagerly read all four volumes of The Masks of God, and went to hear him give a lecture in Cambridge. Before his tedious talk about James Joyce, a storyteller acted out the ‘Descent of Inanna’ from a 3rd Millennium BCE Mesopotamian epic poem to which Campbell referred in this volume of Occidental Mythology. I felt the performance as if it unveiled my life to me – I guess you could call it a conversion experience. I started to read anything I could find about her. Before translations of the poems were easily accessible, I found Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women by Jungian therapist Sylvia Brinton Perera, which related to story to contemporary women’s lives. By the time I went to study for the ministry in the mid 1980’s, the story lived in me in the same way the story of Jesus lived in my Christian friends and the story of exodus lived in my Jewish friends. I was able to use the story in a slide show during my introductory theology class, make it into a ritual for my Feminist Theology class and study it with a cuneiform scholar from a museum in Jerusalem.
In the story, Inanna is the Queen of Heaven who rises and sets as the planet Venus in the city state of Sumner. Much of the poetry about Inanna is very erotic. Her consort needed to please her sexually for the land to be fertile for enough grain to grow to feed the city. These poems and ancient sculptures inspired by them became part of my sexual fantasies. There are also poems about her power as a ruler who gives the gifts of civilization to her people that became part of my vision as a leader. The story of the descent has helped me integrate various shadows and lights in my personality at different times of my life. It begins when Inanna decides to visit her elder sister (or grandmother) Ereshkigal Queen of the Underworld, to bring condolences upon the death of her husband. This place is much like the later Greek Hades - not for the living. To get there, Inanna must go through seven narrow gates. At each gate she must remove another royal garment. By the time she bows low before Ereshkigal she is naked. c, furious that anyone would think they could survive a visit, strikes Inanna turning her into a corpse, and hangs the rotting meat from a hook on the wall. After Inanna has been gone for three days, her sons and her second-in- command are worried. They ask different gods to help. Inanna’s consort Dumuzi is very happy ruling Sumner by himself and offers no help at all, but Enki, the God of Water responds. From the dirt beneath his fingernails, he makes two little fly--like creatures who are not noticed as they sneak through the 7 gates. They find Erishkigal moaning in pain. When she cries, “oh my heart!” they respond, “oh your heart.” Ereshkigal proceeds to cry about each part of her body in pain, and the small creatures respond like little Rogerian therapists to each cry. When she is done, she asks what she can do for them and they ask for the rotting corpse hanging on the wall, which she gives them. They sprinkle her with the water and food of life. Revived, Inanna rises swiftly to Heaven with demons following at her heals. There she finds all of her family and subjects grateful for her return, except for Dumuzi. In her anger, she sends him to the underworld.
Many have noted that this is essentially an agricultural fertility story about seeds breaking down in the underworld and rising in the spring after the spring floods. Others have noted its similarities to the Easter story when Jesus spends 3 days in hell and then rose from the dead. At the beginning of my career, I attended the World Council of Churches Women and Religion Conference. Walking from the parking lot to the conference center a group of nuns stopped when one of them pointed at me and shouted, “That’s Inanna.” Curious, I stopped to discover that the nun had been in my feminist theology class and was inspired by the ritual we did enacting Inanna’s decent. Every spring her convent repeated their own ritual of the story. During those years, the story entered my dreams and mediation to help me acknowledge my shadows as I took on the role of leader, shining in the light of public life.
It’s been a while since Inanna has visited my dreams. A few years ago as I got older and more of my friends died, I realized that I had more to learn from Grandmother Erishkigal. With retirement, I have been grieving my career and the many people I worked with over the years. It has felt like a kind of death. Inanna and Erishkigal returned to my mediation. Just as I choose to retire, the Queen of Heaven willingly went to the underworld but she was not prepared to feel like she had died. I have felt like both the rotting side of meat hanging from a hook on the wall and like the grieving Queen of the Underworld moaning in pain, “Oh my heart! Oh my back!” I have had to discipline myself to stay in that dark small cold place until the little flies have made their way down and responded, “Oh your heart! Oh your back!” Just this week, I can feel the little flies sprinkling the food of life, the water of life, on my rotting corpse. It is no coincidence that I feel this deep in my soul, even as we daily notice signs of spring’s arrival.
Are there stories that you live by or live in you? What are they? How did you learn them? What are some of the ways they appear in your life? What have they shown or taught you? Does the story tie you to something larger than yourself such as a community, the seasons of the year or to human history?