A Myth for These Times: Inanna – by Nan Brooks

Inanna victorious with Venus and other allies

“The world is made not of atoms, but of stories,” is a quote I once heard attributed to the writer and activist Muriel Rukeyser.  Whoever said it was right, I am sure. We connect with one another with our stories, we get through difficult times on stories. 

I often marvel at the universality of ancient myths and their power, just as I do about the relevance of Shakespeare’s writing and understanding of human nature.  The great myths, with the ways they reveal great cosmological and theo/thealogical understanding, give us solid ground to stand on when the world is shifting all around us. So, here is a myth for these ever-shifting times.

Inanna is a goddess who has survived from ancient Sumer and Her myth is a comfort to me. I hope it is for you, too. Over time, scholars and wise ones have come to see correspondences – the likenesses that connect deities, planets, parts of nature (as in Mother Nature and in our personality-natures). Inanna in her astral expect is Venus, the evening and morning star.  She is associated with both the heavens and sexuality. She is understood to be both victim and triumphant warrior queen. She is the elder wise woman and a rash young one. She is calculating and innocent. In short, She is complex and the various myths that celebrate Her or condemn Her are an expression of who we are as humans. These myths also reflect the time in which they originated – and there have been many opportunities for changing times in the 5500 years humans have recounted the Inanna Myth.

The task of simplifying the myths in which She figures is way beyond my capabilities, but I can devote some energy to understanding one part of the myth. I like to remember the part called Inanna’s Descent. It has helped me get through the worst of times in my life, and I am certainly drawing on Her and this myth these days.

Inanna is sent to the underworld – or She goes willingly. In any case, she seeks her sister, Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld. In some versions, Inanna wishes to take over her sister’s realm. Whatever her intention, Ereshkigal seals off her kingdom. So there is Inanna plunged willingly or unwillingly into the mystery of a world where nothing is the same as her familiar upper world. This place is everything unknown. She is immersed in mystery or Mystery (as in mystical).

Whatever Inanna’s intent about being there, her ultimate mission is to get back to the world she knows, and to do that, she must make her way through seven gates. At each gate, she must give up a part of herself. She gives up her crown – her own queenship. She loses her girdle of power. She becomes naked. She gives up her life and becomes a corpse hung on a hook. She is nothing, she has no body! But she is still there and she is trapped. She finds her disembodied self at the feet of her enraged sister.

Because Inanna had the good sense to instruct her servant in the upper world, Ninshubur, to come to her aid if she failed to return, Inanna has hope of rescue. Sure enough, her father, the god Enki sends his servants to help. Whatever the means, Inanna is restored to her earthly kingdom and she enacts justice for herself.

What I focus on in the story is that Inanna loses it all and yet she remains. Even without a body. My friend, the scholar and artist Sid Reger, often refers to the life cycle of the butterfly when discussing the Inanna myth. The caterpillar emerges from an egg, eats and eats and eats and then forms herself into a pupa, or chrysalis. Within that chrysalis, the caterpillar dissolves into a kind of goo. (Scientific term.)  The metamorphosis to butterfly requires that the organs, limbs, all the tissues of the caterpillar dissolve and recombine so that what emerges is the butterfly. The butterfly eventually lays her eggs and the cycle continues.

It is the complete dissolution that strikes me. As does the fact that the planet Venus is currently retrograde – invisible in the night sky until she reappears as the morning star. As does the fact that her at our home the earth has shifted beneath us, literally and figuratively. As does the fact that we have to discern who is truthful and who will betray us from the national government to whichever personal allies we turn to. Metaphor upon metaphor.

Our condo community electricity failed for seven buildings recently – that’s 28 households, including ours. An underground line has broken because the earth has shifted. When I heard this one fact, I could only say, “No kidding.” Our household has undergone a few shocks – our condo requires major structural repairs to be safe for habitation (six months and counting), my chronic health problems make me vulnerable to the corona virus and my wife is a healthcare professional. She has had an unjust shock in her professional life that requires careful and fierce action. Friends and family are confronting illnesses and dramatic changes in their living situations. Everyone’s financial resources are dwindling. The world we live in has become unfamiliar and is awash in grief. It is in the air we breathe, as is a deadly virus.

Like Inanna, we are in an unfamiliar world, each of us in our own way. We must make some sacrifices, give up what matters to us to one degree or another. Haircuts, vacations, the lives of loved ones, our own health. We don’t know yet what will be required of us, what further losses we will endure. We wait for rescue, be it accurate medical tests, the fading of that mysterious virus, or the return to work and routine. We know that whatever we return to will not be the world we left, and we know we will find our way through until we get there. We will not be the same.

We endure, we surrender to this moment in time, one moment after another. We move through the gates, as Inanna does, taking one step at a time. One next right thing leads to the next right thing.

I’m fascinated, too, by the notion that Inanna has a choice about this perilous journey at the same time that she doesn’t have a choice. She chooses to marry Dumuzi at the same time she is sent into an arranged marriage by her god father. She chooses to descend to the underworld at the same time she is forced to go.

Like Inanna, we choose our actions and most of all, we choose our reactions to the losses, the mystery. We choose who to believe and we choose which facts matter to us and which do not. We choose how to treat one another from whether or not we wear a mask in public to how we talk with one another on a bad day.

What happens exactly inside this chrysalis time is Mystery. Hope is a choice. Kindness is a choice.

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