Creating Reality
http://www.halexandria.org/dward388.htm
Dance of the Seven Veils
http://www.halexandria.org/dward385.htm
Descent into the Underworld
Abstract
The ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna and her descent into the Underworld reveals a series of profound psychological and contemporary messages. This paper discusses the fundamental psychological interpretations of the diverse ingredients of the myth, including the concept of a higher self, the abandoning of old values and artifacts, and the ultimate empowerment of voluntarily making the descent. Also considered are the implications of modern day individuals making their own descent into Hades as a form of spiritual initiation: a seeking of wisdom and growth and the shedding of illusions (a twentieth century Dance of the Seven Veils). Finally, the paper presents the results of research into the idea that our world and society may be in the process of making its own descent, releasing traditional paradigms in preparation for a period of “accelerated growth”.
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth
The myths of Inanna could have been created anytime between 1900 BC and 3500 BC, although they may have been created even earlier [1]. In their original inception they were pre-patriarchal myths. But by the time they were written down, the myths showed the incursions of the patriarchy, Inanna’s gradual dispossession, and eventual loss of status.
Inanna, nevertheless, provides a many-faceted symbolic image, a wholeness pattern, of the feminine beyond the merely maternal. She was the goddess of grains, fertility, order, war, love, heaven and earth, healing, emotions, the “Lady of Myriad Offices”. As goddess of war, she was more powerful than Athena and Artemis combined, and as goddess of sexual love, more extroverted than Aphrodite. She was ultimately known by many names (Ishtar, Isis, Neith, Metis, Astarte, et al), but each of the goddesses in later times were invariably described as having much less power or were less all-encompassing in their many attributes. Most of the powers once held by her: “the embodied, playful, passionately erotic feminine; the powerful, independent, self-willed feminine; the ambitious, regal, many-sided feminine” [2] were being eroded by the patriarchy even in Sumerian times.
Of the many stories and hymns about Inanna, four are particularly noteworthy. The first, for example, deals with her acquiring her throne and bed, symbolic of her queenship and womanhood, her sovereignty and sexuality. In the process she lets go of the primitive, grasping, human aspects; her unacknowledged, unexpressed fears and desires, in order to be deserving of the throne and bed. In a second myth, Inanna acquires from the god, Enki, the attributes of civilization, which she, in turn, bestows upon her city of Uruk and ultimately, humankind. In this way, she demonstrates her power and abilities and becomes Protectoress in deed as well as name. In the third myth, Inanna takes Dumuzi the shepherd as her consort and makes him king. Ultimately, she becomes mother as well, giving birth to his two sons.
These three myths collectively represent three of the four stages of human development: the establishment of individuality, interaction with others on an intimate, one-on-one basis, and one's involvement in the outer, mundane world. (These three stages also correspond to the first three quadrants of a Taurus-rising astrological chart -- as in the Astrology According to the Goddess). The fourth stage or quadrant, however, takes each of us into the mystical and metaphysical realm, where we encounter our ultimate understanding of self and identity and its universal connections.
It is in the fourth myth, the Descent into the Underworld, that the goddess goes beyond the mundane and voluntarily undertakes the ultimate journey.
The Descent of Inanna
Really feeling into this site. Relished the story of the descent as it describes intitiation.
When I Came across this paragraph I just felt so understood. Lol.
Enki has understood that complaining is one voice of the dark goddess, a way of expressing life -- valid and deep in the feminine soul. Such complaining does not seek alleviation as much as it is to simply state the existence of things as they are felt to a sensitive and vulnerable being. There is no need for a stoic-heroic superego perspective of judging it as foolish and passive whining, but rather it should be viewed as autonomous fact -- “that's the way it is.” Suffering is seen as part of reverencing.
And then how Inanna is recovered and let go of by the distraught Ereshkigal..
Ereshkigal is so touched by the attention they offer her in her pain that she extends herself and offers gifts of fertility and growth. Following Enki’s instructions, however, the kurgarra and galatur refuse these gifts and ask for what Ereshkigal most wants to give and that which is most difficult for her to give: They ask her to release part of her personal anguish, her despair and anger which is embodied in the glorious goddess of love. They ask for the rotting body of Inanna. When Ereshkigal is able to release her nemesis, and thus part of her pain, the kurgarra and galatur sprinkle the food and water of life on Inanna’s corpse, and she is reborn.
In ascending from the underworld, a dilemma is encountered. The Anunna (aka the Anunnaki) must maintain the rules of the underworld, but they must also deal with the fact that Inanna has been reborn in the underworld, an original event. Their tactic is to tell Inanna that she must provide someone in her place. In essence, Inanna cannot be allowed to again forget her neglected, abandoned “sister”, that part of herself that is Ereshkigal. Wolkstein [1] views this aspect as a passageway which has been created from the Great Above, the conscious, to the Great Below, the unconscious -- which must be kept open. Thus, the galla, the demons of the underworld, those “who cannot be bribed”, are assigned to accompany Inanna as she leaves the underworld.
Inanna is restored to active life, but returns demonic, surrounded by the galla. She arises loathsome and claiming her survival -- the same fearsome characteristic of any woman or man coming out of hiding and ready to stand their ground. Each knows that changes and life demand sacrifice, a bit of knowledge from which most flee in terror.
But even in her demonic state, Inanna recognizes that Ninshubur and Inanna’s two sons, Shara and Lulal, had abandoned the routine of their daily lives and gone into mourning for Inanna. And while the galla are ready and willing to take any of them in Inanna’s place in the underworld, Inanna knows that each of them cared for her, and therefore, she does not choose them.
Her consort and the shepherd she had installed as King of the land, however, had gone on with life as if nothing had happened. While Inanna had ventured into the unknown and undertaken the ultimate quest, Dumuzi had turned his attentions to earthly achievement, growing attached and identifying with his high position, neither weeping for his “lost” wife nor running to greet her on her return. In addition, Dumuzi had dared intimacy with the goddess and that entails a price. His attempts at scapegoating and taking flight betray his need “to descend into the underworld himself, his need to find a relationship to an inner feminine whom he can accept nondefensively and revere as equal.” [2]
In attempting to escape his fate, Dumuzi is first turned into a snake -- a symbol of serpent wisdom: that nothing in the Great Round dies, that life’s forms are both lost and renewed. He also turns to his sister, Geshtianna. Dumuzi had been king, but he lacked the qualities of understanding and compassion, devotion and the sense of belonging to others. He had thus turned to the feminine wisdom of his sister. It was then Geshtianna who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Geshtianna’s willingness to suffer torture protecting her brother, and then to share his fate in the underworld, is not the grand gesture of a Christ dying for all of our sins, but a much more personal and deeply feminine act. She acts out of love and grief, doing what she can to redeem her brother lost to the underworld. She neither flees from her fate nor denigrates what is to be (as would Dumuzi and the patriarchy). Geshtinanna thus ends the pattern of Scapegoatology, and allows herself to be acted upon by the light and dark aspects of the goddess. Dumuzi’s sister becomes “the result of, and an embodiment of, the whole initiation process.” [2]
In Sumerian, the word for ear and wisdom are the same. Thus, when Inanna “turned her ear to the Great Below”, the implication is that she was seeking wisdom and understanding. When approaching the outer gates of the underworld, she said she was on her way to the East -- a sign of her entering the ordeal of initiation. According to Perera [2], Inanna's descent “is a story of an initiation process into the mysteries.” “Inanna shows us the way, and she is first to sacrifice herself for a deep feminine wisdom and for atonement. She descends, submits and dies. This openness to being acted upon is the essence of the experience of the human soul faced with the transpersonal. It is not based upon passivity, but upon an active willingness to receive.” It is the allowing of another to exert influence upon her.
Inanna is also descending into the underworld “because... of my older sister, Ereshkigal.” This symbolism suggests that Inanna had perhaps heard the pain and anguish of her denied and dark side, and was willing to acknowledge the feelings of abandonment and guilt. This takes on the significance of Inanna facing her dark side. It is also a form of approaching the dark forces of earthly reality and the unconscious; a slow process of peeling away ego-identifications and defenses -- particularly after “the conscious ideal of the personality has been wounded by being cut off from its roots by the devaluation of matter and the feminine.” [2]
In an earlier myth, The Huluppu Tree, Inanna, as an adolescent, had been frightened by Lilith, the neglected, wounded, and raging sexuality side of Inanna. The powerful Lilith had to be sent away so Inanna’s life-exploring talents could be developed. But now these characteristics must be reborn, and it is perhaps Ereshkigal’s labor pains or “call” that Inanna heard in the Great Above and to which she responded.
Another of Inanna’s stated reasons for descending was in order to observe the funeral rites of Gugalanna, the Bull of Heaven. There is power in the knowledge gained from observing such rites, and this may have been part of her motivation to undertake the journey. This is particularly true for Inanna because Gugalanna was as impetuous and emotionally aggressive as she was. But there is also the sense of the death of the old ways prior to their rebirth. Just as Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, astrologically symbolizes Death and Rebirth, so Inanna must accept death before she can be reborn.
Finally, in reviewing Inanna's reason for making the descent, we might consider the view of Perera [2]: “Inanna's suffering, disrobing, humiliation, flagellation and death, the stations of her descent, her ‘crucifixion’ on the underworld peg, and her resurrection, all prefigure Christ’s passion and represent perhaps the first known archetypal image of the dying divinity whose sacrifice redeems the wasteland earth. [However] Not for humankind’s sins did Inanna sacrifice herself, but for earth’s need for life and renewal. She is concerned more with life than with good and evil.” [emphasis added]
The Descent into Hades as a Psychological Tool
According to Perera [2], “All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.”
A fundamental aspect of such descents is the letting go of illusions and old outworn patterns of mundane life. Ereshkigal’s realm is like the undiscriminating fires of Kali, which combined with time and suffering grinds away all distinctions and ego before yielding new life. It is an adherence to some pre-ethical natural law, an acknowledgment that life is inconstant and cyclical. Inanna can still wrap her consort in an active loving and caring embrace, and then back down, suddenly disinterested, alone and even cold.
It is important to recognize that Hades, or the underworld, cannot be equated with the Hell of Christianity. The Greek god, Hades, as ruler of the underworld, was known as the “Bringer of all Good Things”, the god of riches, and often pictured with a cornucopia or horn of plenty. In an inscription found at Eleusis, the site of Demeter’s Eleusian Mysteries (wherein latter day Greeks made their own ritualized descent), the end result of a descent into Hades is lauded: “Beautiful indeed is the Mystery given us by the blessed gods: death is for mortals no longer an evil, but a blessing.” [3]
Being able to not care about relating to an external other, nor to the collective society or its Paradigms, can initially be very frightening because it cannot be validated by the collective from which one is releasing themselves. But the act of letting go, being able to not care, can provide the possibility of a totally fresh perception, a creative perspective in the form of Enki reacting to the needs of the moment, a new pattern and a never ending exploration. What mass consciousness may fear as chaos, monstrous or ugly, is hard to endure. It implies the elimination of our defenses, a sacrifice of easy collective understanding, the dashing of hopes to look good and safely belong, and the giving up of being agreeable to a patriarchal paradigm. It involves hitting bottom, but a bottom where all the “assets” that have been given up, lost, or taken, become irrelevant.
Ultimately, the purpose of descending into Hades, of undertaking the journey of spiritual initiation, is for self-empowerment. Preparing oneself, relying on divine assistance, and beginning “The Fool’s Journey” by stepping off the precipice, psychologically removes the deadwood, the irrelevant artifacts of modern life whose value is illusionary at best. Whether we eliminate from our lives our most fundamental identities at each of seven gates, or whether we process the same death and rebirth on a daily, less dramatic basis, we still make our descent into our psyche, and at the bottom find pure gold and enlightenment. For when one has nothing to lose, when there’s nothing they can take from you, when even death is no longer feared; that is when the possibilities become unlimited and one can be truly empowered.
There is a sense today, that our modern world is now making its own descent, one in which we must all participate. The world seems enmeshed in a host of cycles within cycles, all of which are ending with the turn of the millennium and the run toward 2012 A.D.. Financial cycles beginning in the early 1980s, the time of the Great Depression, and further back to the late 1700s, all appear to be ending and beginning to turn down. Governments, religions, systems of law, traditional healing modalities, all seem stricken with a fatal strain of Armageddon Virus. Even the most basic philosophies, our work ethics, our fundamental rules of relating to one another, are breaking down. The patriarchal paradigm itself seems doomed. Massive, earthshaking chaos seems imminent.
If one considers the Time Wave theory to be valid, then the Cycles which are ending are on the scale of the invention of writing, the discovery of the wheel, sliced bread or equivalent landmarks in the human evolution (or transformation). The descent of mankind into Hades is fully evidenced by the madness of governments, the loss of humanity, and the rise of individualistic, innovative, and unique spirituality. The human experience may very well be thought of as the ultimate Descent into the Underworld, where Free Will is equated with resistance, predestination with divine destiny, and the only wild card in the deck being that knowing effects reality. The choices before us are Data Collection, unique transmutation, transformation, and Synthesis, and Communicating what we learn.
As the Chinese I Ching notes, the symbols for chaos and opportunity are the same. If the world, our society, our must cherished collective beliefs, are indeed being threatened with chaos -- then perhaps it is only our world making its own descent into Hades prior to its being reborn. If so, then we’re looking at a time of opportunity, not merely chaos. We’re looking at our world shedding a host of illusions, in preparation for being empowered.
The ancient “Dance of the Seven Veils” is a symbolic shedding of illusions. Robbins [4] has taken this understanding and unveiled seven illusions within which he believes our world is currently suffering. The illusion-destroying reality, in his view, becomes:
1. The reality that the earth is a sexual globe, the drama of which is largely, historically, directed by the female. Venereal Disease is caused not by sexual license, but the fear of sexual license and the guilt associated with the suppression of the great mother.
2. Human beings do not have dominion over plants and animals. Humanity as a function of nature, cannot live separately from nature except in a self-deceiving masquerade.
3. Attempts at political solutions are futile -- the primary problems are philosophical. Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility of improvement without each person going through the personal ordeal (or initiation) of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. Humanity’s great mission in life has nothing to do with struggles between classes, races, nations, or ideologies, but rather is a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit and lighten up.
4. Religion is an improper response to the Divine, an attempt to pin down what is eternally in flux, forever moving, and shifting shape. Religion is reductive, while the Divine is expansive. Religion is thus blasphemy.
5. Security is a form of paralysis, just as satisfaction is a form of death.
6. Economic depression and “insufficient funds” are illusions. There is plenty of everything for everyone. There is only lousy distribution.
7. Everybody has got to figure it out for themselves. No one can do it for you, think for you, or hang on your cross. The priest, rabbi, shaman, guru, can, at best, direct you through a busy intersection, but they won’t follow you home and park your car. [5]
The world’s descent into the underworld is involved in the releasing of those illusions that cover such realities as described above. It is the death of an old paradigm of protection values and the rebirth of an emerging paradigm of growth values. These differing values have been highlighted in Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Values”.
Making the Descent into Hades
The timing of the world’s descent into Hades is, of course, important. And while there was a sense of “impending doom” associated with the end of the millennium, it seems more likely that the world has already begun the descent, and we just haven’t been fully cognizant of that fact yet.
In the late sixties, for example, the inflation-adjusted national stock exchange index reached a peak which has never since been exceeded. (Sorry about that!) This peak occurred at a time nearly coincident with a mass conjunction of seven planets in the astrological sign of Virgo. Virgo is the sign of discipleship and the discrimination between alternatives. The conjunction in August 1968 (the time of the rioting at the Democratic national convention) may well mark a significant turning point.
Other economic cycles (as represented by the national stock market) involved the end of a larger economic cycle extending from the bottom of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and also the end of a still larger cycle extending back to the late 1700s. George [3] has suggested that we may be in the “Dark of the Moon” phase of a 25,920 year cycle (the time for a complete revolution of the polar axis). George has also noted that in “1998-99, for the only time in a 26,000 year cycle, the winter solstice point will precess to exactly align with the intersection of the Milky Way galaxy (our galaxy) and the Zodiac (our solar system). According to many calendric and medicine traditions, the winter solstice point marks the ends and beginnings of Calendars!”
On a more individual note, a relatively small object was discovered in a planetary orbit between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus in 1977, and thereafter called Chiron. Mythologically, Chiron is the King of the Centaurs, the maverick, mentor, astrologer, wholistic healer, and man/beast archetype. Astrologically, Chiron is also the planet of initiation. Meanwhile, Pluto, discovered in 1930, is the planet of Death and Rebirth -- inevitable, fundamental transformation. It would thus appear that transiting Chiron conjuncting an individual’s natal Pluto would imply a sort of Initiation Imperative, in other words, a strong tendency toward initiation, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
In esoteric astrology, the effects of a planet are not fully realized until their discovery. One might therefore suggest that the transiting Chiron conjuncting natal Pluto aspect would not be effective until after the discovery of Chiron on November 1, 1977. However. From November 1, 1977 through December 31, 1999 (when transiting Chiron conjuncts transiting Pluto), transiting Chiron conjuncted the natal Pluto of everyone on the planet! In other words, everyone got an opportunity to feel the Initiation Imperative! The fact that Chiron and Pluto conjunct exactly once on the very last day of 1999 is, in itself, something that exceeds the bounds of “coincidence”.
The big question is, “Were you paying attention when your number was called?”
Forward to:
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References:
[1] Wolkstein, D. and Kramer, S.N., Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth; Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, Harper and Row, New York, 1983.
[2] Perera, S.B., Descent to the Goddess; A Way of Initiation for Women, Inner City Books, Toronto, Canada, 1981.
[3] George, D., Mysteries of the Dark Moon; The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess, Harper San Francisco, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 1992.
[4] Robbins, T., Skinny Legs and All, Bantam Books, New York, 1990.
[5] A more detailed review of Robbin’s “dance card” is contained in Dance of the Seven Veils, and of course, in his delightful and brilliantly innovative book [4].
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