Inanna's Journey into the Underworld--and Why We Need to Tell Stories

            Since I wrote last the weather has warmed up. We are having a glorious Portland spring.  My garden is leafing out and all the perennials are putting on quite a show--making it look like I have done more work this year than I have. The rhubarb is coming back as strong as ever--huge leaves and inch-thick stalks; the fig tree is bejeweled with tiny studs of shiny, green figs; the raspberries are fuzzy and sharp, cutting tiny thorny teeth on the new season; the blueberries are covered in the white promise of fruit. I even have potatoes volunteering in my potato patch and the strawberries have decided to exponentially proliferate. The tomatoes and leeks, sweet onions, spinach and lettuce are planted and now the weeding begins.  I am like the seasons--ecstatic at the return of sunshine and leaves, the summer birdsong, the flies buzzing.
            Winter is a good season too, but I am always relieved to be through it. This winter, while the bare leaves raked the sky and the few stars pierced the soft filminess of the cloudlayer, I slept long and dreamed about swimming with whales. I kept choosing the whales over people, kept wanting nothing but to be in the depths of that dark world with those enormous creatures and hear their ethereal lowing.

The light has beckoned me back.

           Ironically, I have been teaching in my high school Evening Scholars class, the ancient Sumerian story of Inanna, Goddess of Heaven and Earth, and of Inanna's descent into the Underworld. It is a story of lightness and darkness, of death and rebirth. To me every winter feels like a descent into quiet reflection. Similarly, loss requires a descent of some sort into the depth of self and so this has been an important story for me this year.
           The story of Inanna's Descent into the Underworld is a tale that negotiates the upper world with the lower world, the inner world with the outer world. It is a story translated from inscribed tablets and exists as one of the oldest known works of literature, originating in the Middle East. It predates the similar, and widely known, Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. Part myth, imbued with strong metaphor, it is a tale in which Inanna is called to meet with her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below, who, in this tale, suffers from having not been "seen" or heard. My students and I believe that, like Hades, she suffers from a sense of isolation. Residing in the Underworld she is haunted by a feeling of diminished sovereignty over her own deep realm--a belief that the the "Great Below" is inferior to the Upperworld.  For this reason she devises to put an end to Inanna.
            I tell my students to imagine twin sisters. One is the golden cheer-leader, for whom everything seems easy, she is the celebrated one. Her sister on the other hand can be imagined as a "Goth," artistic, introspective, and inclined to more isolating behavior.
          Out of spite, Ereshkigal fixes her keen, envious eye on Inanna, Goddess of the Great Above, and devises to reduce her to a corpse as a way to end her own agony. She calls her heavenly sister to the underworld determined that Inanna will feel her pain.
          Inanna, unafraid, certain of her own power, heeds the call. At each of the seven gateways into the Underworld Inanna relinquishes a garment as instructed by the gatekeepers. As she sheds each piece of clothing she also sheds power.
          Arriving in her sister's chamber, Inanna stands naked and powerless. She is killed when Ereshkigal fastens the eye of death upon her (I tell my students to think of giving someone the stink-eye). Ereshkigal orders Innana's corpse to be hung from a hook in her chamber. Ereshkigal's goal is accomplished, but she feels no real satisfaction from it. In fact, she still feels miserable.
           Inanna would have remained there, her corpse wasting away on the hook, had it not been for a faithful servant Ninshubur, and two "genderless" flies sent by the god of wisdom and waters, Enki, to see to Ereshkigal and retrieve Inanna.  The flies are small and unthreatening and thus are able to pass through the seven gateways unheeded.
          Once in the chamber, the flies do as they have been instructed, they repeat everything that Ereshkigal says. When she says, "I have pain," the flies say simply "You have pain." When she says "I have lost so much," they reply, "you have lost so much," and so on until Ereshkigal is spent but suddenly relieved of her need to say more.  (We imagine that she has finally been "heard.")
           At this moment her eyes turn outward and she looks at the tiny creatures as if seeing them for the first time. "What can I do for you?" she asks, realizing that as Queen of the Underworld, she is endowed with the power to give gifts. They request only the rotting corpse of Inanna and she, no longer needing her prize, no longer fixated on Inanna as she has come again into herself, grants the flies their request. Notice, I tell my students, it is significant that she doesn't need Inanna anymore.
           Inanna is restored to the Great Above, revived, but changed. She has literally "been to hell and back."My class interprets this as the possibility that she was altered in her appearance from the experience of near-death, either literally, or that she was changed internally, simply by the encounter with her own powerlessness.  From that moment forth, both sisters rule their realms differently, Inanna with humility and a new knowledge of the darker shadow-side of life. She now knows something of loss and despair (we imagine that she understands pain--what we call human frailty). Ereshkigal, by being listened to changes with a knowledge of her own importance--her voice has been affirmed--the power of her own realm realized.  The powers that each wield are now more complex and superior to those wielded before.

             My students, seniors in high school, have been looking at this story through many lenses including the Carl Jung's Hero's Journey; Elizabeth Kubler-Rosses Seven Stages of Grief and Loss; Feminism; Symptoms of Depression; and Sibling Rivalry. But of course, this story has been my lesson (and I hope theirs too). In teaching this story, in repeating and examining it in so many different ways, I have considered my own journey of loss, my own sense of powerlessness and of restoration.
             I remember how once I knew only the hope and possibility of the "Upperworld" believing that I would bear a child easily. My loss initiated a descent that changed that feeling.  Like Ereshkigal, I had things I needed to voice, pain I needed to feel. Ereshkigal is a perfect metaphor for the shadowside of our personalities--the subterranean depths of the intuition and psyche. With the help of others and with time, my sadness released enough so that I could "ascend," and be restored, like Inanna, changed but stronger.
             I thought of therapists or friends when I considered the flies, about how therapy or just the right kind of listening can offer a reflection of who we are and what we are feeling.  Stories too, ancient and new, give us a structure to hang our own stories on, or a lens through which to understand ourselves better.
            So often when someone close to us has lost something or is grieving, depressed or despairing, we don't know what to say. We try to understand, but we don't. Loss can scare us--maybe other people's loss scares us even more than our own. We don't know what our role is or what it looks like to be supportive. In talking to women about their lost babies. miscarriages, and infertility, even I, having suffered something of my own loss, walk away feeling like I have said too much.
            The genderless flies in this story remind me that simply repeating what a person has said, adding nothing new, is balm enough.  Ask any of us. Tell us that you just want to listen to what we are feeling and thinking. Perhaps you will hear the the grating agony of depression. It might not be pretty. Maybe you will hear the lowing of whales. Either way, you will likely see relief as one of us is given the space of quiet listening to tell our story, and thus, we may find our way back to the light of possibility.