In my quest to find heroines I can identify with I have been delving further back into matriarchal history. And I had to go a long way back. The myth of Inanna is at least 5000 years old because it appeared on clay tablets in 3000 BC, but may actually be older than that because the Sumerian civilisation began around 6000 BC.
In depth (also transpersonal) psychology Inanna's story is a journey into the underworld (in archetypal psychology, my world, the unconscious psyche) and an initiation that leads to re-empowerment. From all accounts it is a tale of courage and from my own psychic experience, one of the most significant initiation rites that anyone could enter into, willingly or not.
The original tale of Inanna’s descent begins with a visit to her maternal grandfather Enki, who also doubles as the God of wisdom. It sounds as though they have a few wines together and she is reported as ‘applauding herself’ and her own ‘wondrous vulva’, the female equivalent to ‘dick waving’ and pissing competitions perhaps. You have to hand it to this girl, she was a real ‘queen’. When her pop is drunk enough he bestows upon her the fourteen ‘ordering principles, potencies, talents and rites of the civilised, upper world’. Which means that she effectively ‘brings civilisation to her people’. But she doesn’t get it for free.
Inanna’s reasons for entering the Underworld are not clear, but she herself demands to enter, therefore her decision is a conscious one. Some scholars think she may have been intending to 'conquer the underworld' (well of course she was, or at least her own 'dark' nature). Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld and Inanna's sister, may have suspected this, which could explain her subsequent quite harsh treatment of Inanna.
It is significant that Inanna doesn’t arrive in the Underworld by accident or because she fucked up somewhere as is mostly the case in Greek myths, where things just frustratingly happen and people find themselves at the mercy of fate - the bastard mercurial gods. Whatever her motivation, she ‘opens her ear to the Great Below’ and abandons her seven kingdoms to descend, but carries them with her symbolically as pieces of jewellery and clothing.
She has to pass through seven gates where she has to leave behind an article of clothing or jewellery, interpreted as her being ‘stripped of her power’ (only worldy power though, I think 'ego' is closer to the truth here) She finally meets Ereshkigal who promptly turns her into a corpse. 'And the corpse was hung on a hook’. This is really interesting because I think that Ereshkigal is really just her own dark side.
Three days and three nights pass and Ninshubur (Inanna’s servant in the Upper World), following instructions, goes to Enlil and Nanna, but the sky-god and the moon-god refuse to help her because she got herself into this mess after all. Ninshubur goes to Enki's temples and demands he save the Goddess of Love, as a consequence of which he creates two genderless creatures from his dirty fingernail scrapings to do the job (interesting symbolisms here too). However when they come before Ereshkigal to retrieve the corpse, ‘she is in agony like a woman giving birth’ and tries to get them to relieve her of her pain. Instead, they just take the corpse. Being a long-time sufferer of endometriosis myself, this bit really has me wondering if this is what Ereshkigal is experiencing. If so it is no wonder she is being such a bitch. It could also be that Ereshkigal’s pain is the result of a schism in the ‘whole’ goddess (more on this later perhaps)
So things go as Enki predicts and they retrieve and revive Inanna in the Upper World. When she regains consciousness though, she finds everyone in mourning, except her husband, who is merrily eating and drinking. So she does what any wrathful goddess would do, she ‘fixes upon him the eye of death and decrees that he shall be her replacement in the Underworld’. He is, of course, terrified, tries to flee and begs for help. Inanna, not being a complete bitch like her sister, agrees that they ‘shall each spend half the year there’ a bit like the Persephone myth, except this time it’s a bloke who swaps places. I think this actually makes more sense, after all, it ensures that the male and female psyche never inhabit the same realm - which is kind of the way it is, right?
Well no, because when Inanna eventually regrets sending her husband to the Underworld, they work out some substitutes. That way she only loses her fertile powers during the six months that either one of them is in the Underworld (autumn and winter) and they can get together every spring and summer.
Inanna is not viewed primarly as a ‘mother-goddess’ which is rare and refreshing, because she is not confined to an identity based solely on her ability to replicate her genetic material. She does retain obvious links with reproduction though, through fertility. There is nothing wrong with replication, it’s just that this alternative provides a heroine for women who either aren’t born mothers in the traditional sense, or who want to explore a different aspect of their feminine natures. It even offers a version of the feminine psyche prepared to plunge courageously into a scary Underworld while hubbie stays at home.
As one very chaotic personality though, I love this description of Inanna - I really identify with it, and I wonder how many of my female friends do too. Meador says that the depiction of Inanna is:
an attempt to bring together the seemingly chaotic forces of the universe into one unifying.... personification…. [She] is the extreme expression of the unity in the plurality of the universe .…Inanna is a unique outbreak of a particular consciousness attempting to embody and define itself. She is an expression of the Mesopotamian psyche that manifested itself in this paradoxical, divine woman. (Scott-Stanley)
Go girl!
Image: My own Gateway Goddess, with much reference to menstruation and endometriosis in the 'red sea'
Sue Gebhardt, Inanna and Ereshkigal, An Ancient Myth for Modern Times
D. Scott-Stanley, A Depth Psychological Perspectiveof Inanna
