Inanna’s Descent
By: Kat Magik
Tags: Life Lessons, Healing, Inspiration, Iraq, Mythology

I love a good myth.

I love ancient stories and fairytales from around the world that offer hard worn maps through emotional turbulence and pivotal life points.

Inanna’s Descent, the ancient Sumerian myth of facing your own demons, is a powerful metaphor for navigating suppressed anger and the grief that often accompanies it.

Lesson 1: Don’t Think You’re Above Rage

Many people have suppressed anger and grief — at their lives, at the injustices of the world, at the unhealed past.

This year I have witnessed so much anger locked in my clients bodies and the therapeutic release when it’s fully accepted.

There’s been a lot of ancestral torment rising up about the first world war and its immense avoidable suffering — the fear, compliance, betrayal and anger.

And others have just been really fucking angry at who they live with under lockdown and it came out on the table!

The Great Sugar Coat doesn’t work in the mythical underworld.

There is such a thing as Sacred Rage and it needs to be respected as a powerful energy of transmutation and boundary setting.

Inanna’s sister is furious that she comes traipsing down wearing the same set of sunny day clothes, pretending the old rules apply, and soon nails her.

Lesson 2: Allow Without Judgement

Inanna dies a morbid symbolic death in the underworld — corpse strung up.

She is forced to shed her civilized self and seven layers of pretence so she can finally move through denial and access her own repressed anger and grief.

In all great myths and fairytales the initiation process is often shown as violent and unequivocal as a way of forcing the reader to appreciate the enormous amount of repressed power that lies within any trapped emotion and the impact it may have on your own energy and life force.

It’s tempting to take the path of smooth-ish denial but a big part of any emotional recovery is accessing the full wrath of boundary transgressions, the selfish destruction and ignorance of others, and transmuting it back to health.

“Suppress anything and it goes to the roots…anger in itself is not bad. To carry it, to accumulate it, is dangerous.” Osho

One thing I found really powerful on my own healing journey was being with the rage and punching it out on a pillow or dynamic meditations with others where you can really scream/dance it out.

I had to be in a safe place to do that.

I had to venture into the underworld to feel it.

Lesson 3: Only True Empathy Heals

Inanna’s faithful servant Ninshubur goes to Enlil, the highest god of Sky and Earth, and to Nanna the Moon god to ask for help on her behalf. Both forces are deterred by the ferocity of the underworld and refuse to meddle.

It’s finally Enki, the god of Water and Wisdom, who decides to rescue Inanna.

What does this teach us?

You can’t approach your wounds with a sword.

Water as an element represents healthy emotional release and fluid strength.

To meet the wounded parts of ourselves, often the inner child, with loving acceptance we need the tender stream-ear of a wise witnessing parent.

Enki — being the Water God — is able to slip unnoticed into the Underworld, securing Inanna’s release by empathising with her sister Ereshkigal, who is now groaning with her own death/birth pains.

Lesson 4: Paradoxical Gratitude For The Journey.

Inanna’s husband Dumuzid is offered up in exchange (with his sis Geshtinanna) for her release, serving as the masculine aspect of psyche that once disregarded the necessary ‘un-time’ of the underworld but now stands rooted and integrated, appreciating all shades of experience without shame.

The journey beneath births a bright new beginning.

A compelling ‘Sink then Ascend’ tale, Inanna’s descent mirrors her archetypal and literal associations with Venus, the brightest morning and evening star and the planet closest to earth, most visible at dusk and dawn.

Her symbolic power comes through the return to personal truth and ‘breaking bread’ with the disregarded, shadowy aspects of a wounded soul.

Her primary symbols forever more are the Lion and Eight Pointed Star.

And her archetype (later known in Mesopotamia and Iraq as Ishtar) represents the courage needed to face the depths of the human heart.

Old-Babylonian period, 19th to 17th century BC. From Southern Mesopotamia, Iraq. Wikipedia Commons

Thanks for reading dear ones.