Invoking Inanna: Everything My Grief Demanded
My Grief did not beg for understanding,it demanded everything. I sacrificed my mother for my salvation
I am Inanna, the Queen of Heaven. I am the Goddess of War, Divine Justice, Pleasure and Power. I am Inanna and you're bearing witness to my journey into the underworld and how I rose anew…
The most liberating events happened to me over the past five years:
Friendships I'd nourished for over ten years came to abrupt, painful endings
Friends whose resentment, disrespect and disregard became undeniable
Lovers turned spiteful and cruel
Betrayals from friends and family were abound
I was cracked open like a pomegranate and my seeds scattered everywhere. I needed antidepressants for a while, while my body responded with anemia, fatigue, migraines, high cortisol, insomnia and erratic, irregular menses.
I was scattered, but I was also sent into the vast expanse of Self. Ordinary language couldn't capture my dilemma, so I reached for myth.
I repeatedly asked myself what I did wrong, what I overlooked, what I misunderstood or why my ancestors would punish me that way. I needed to know what exactly was wrong with me, broken within me.
I journeyed into my inner unknowns, the Underworld, with all of these questions, threads of inquiries that seemed to get more tangled with every inadequate answer I found. I needed to understand what about me was so broken to have attracted such a humiliating, dishonorable experiences. I meditated, performed cord cutting ceremonies, committed to sobriety, filled my honey jar with dreams, left offerings alongside my wishes and prayed to all the Goddesses who would listen.
All the answers took me to me a graveyard…
As the days passed, I heard a voice call out to me. The voice asked me to follow it to see what I had not yet seen, to experience what I hadn't experienced, and to learn all that which I did not know. The whisper grew louder until it was a shout that couldn't be ignored.
The voice called my name and I heeded its call.
I was not ready to see what I hadn't seen, to experience what I hadn't experienced and I certainly didn't want to learn what I didn't know. Yet I arose from my throne, walked away from my life of comfort and followed the voice…
I reached the Underworld, and unmarked, uncovered graves stood before me. It took silencing my fear to actually sit and comprehend where I was: at the site of my shame. Before me were unnamed losses, forgotten selves, abandoned hopes, unspoken and unmet needs.
A lifetime of grief gone unacknowledged. A lifetime of dissociation and numbness I had mistaken for living.
It made sense now why my fear had always held me back from going there, to that intimidating darkness. Fear is so much louder that Shame, which whispers. Fear demands protection, a plan and a strategy. Shame asks to be hidden, to not be seen in its nakedness.
Yet Fear sits next to Grief which will not beg for anything, but need everything…
I had arrived at the Underworld, the domain of Ereshkigal, Queen of Death. I knew that if I were to continue, I would be irreparably transformed, for no one journeyed into the underworld and returned unchanged. So I stood in front of the first of seven gates of the Underworld and demanded entry. As I passed through the seven gates of the Underworld, I gave up an offering. At every gate, I gave a piece of my power: my crown, my robe, my pectoral breastplate, my lapis lazuli necklace, my golden ring, my mascara and my measuring rod…
I visited each uncovered grave and grieved. Tears couldn't spring from my eyes but my spirit held the phantoms of all the pieces of me that had died and not been mourned:
The girl who grew up too fast,
The teen who felt too much and too intensely,
The woman who thought her goodness was enough,
The lover who thought her devotion proved her worth,
The friend who believed loyalty would earn her community
So many shattered pieces of me that I believed I had moved on from, but whose voices had come together to birth my Shame. That shame asked for so much without demand. Shame asked me to undress and be as naked as she was, and to sit in that darkness with her. I was terrified, and in my terror realized that's how my shame had always felt: terrified and alone.
I mourned to set my ghosts free. I mourned to welcome back more life into my spirit. I mourned so my shame did not have to fear me abandoning myself again, as I had done so often over the course of my life.
As I mourned, my tears finally emerged like a cleansing balm to wash over me and sanctify my grief. I looked at the tapestry of my pain and was surprised I found beauty in it. I saw a picture of my younger self, my first incarnation to die, standing next to my mother. As my finger traced the image, I remembered how I first died at the hands of my mother…
I eventually reached the throne of Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, as naked as the day. Even in my shame, I stood with pride and gazed upon Ereshkigal's Eye of Death. I died and was hung on a hook for three days and three nights. My people mourned me and pleaded with other Gods to save me. Enki, the God of wisdom and creation, heard their pleas and from the dirt of his fingernails created two emissaries who were tasked to appease Ereshkigal. They successfully appeased the Queen of the Underworld and she allowed them emissaries to feed me with the food and water of life. I arose from the dead.
Ereshkigal reminded me that my revival was a debt of death I had to repay. Accompanied by the galla, the guards of the underworld, I set out to find a suitable replacement. I came upon my husband, Dumuzi, sprawled upon my throne and languishing in luxury and pleasure with unrestrained indulgence. Affronted by his shameless debauchery and flagrant disrespect, I decidedly pointed my finger at Dumuzi in judgement. The galla followed the direction of my finger towards Dumuzi. Startled and afraid, I watched as my now ex husband scrambled to get away from the galla demons. He did not once notice me. All he did was run away like a coward who had been caught…
"I am the God of your life," my mother said to me once. I was greening out in my college dorm room in attempt to medicate one of the many stresses of young adulthood. yet her words pierced through the haze so sharply I felt lucid. Her words echoed in my head for a long time afterward until they finally imprinted on the wall of my memory. She had always been adept at inducing fear, anxiety and trepidation in me but until she named herself as the God of my life did I truly fathom that deities could be cruel too. Indeed, she had always been a cruel God.
My mother was the Goddess of Lamentations who had seen so much strife and death, she was in perpetual grief of people and events that passed before she could fully mourn them. She was a goddess whose face was eternally buried in her hands; her tears spilled through her fingers like an bursting river flooding its banks. And like all mothers, she was a being of concentrated complexities and multiplicities.
I was conceived through violence and birthed in shame, and so when she held me in her arms, she had but one proclamation: she finally had someone to love her.
I was born to witness her eternal grief. I studied it so well I had became proficient in the language of melancholy. I was intensely aware of all the folds of her face, the glare in her eyes, the quiet yearning in her heart, the fire in her throat that she doused with silence and occasional red wine; a conspiracy of cluster headaches tormented her occasionally and restrained her to the dining table, where she would proceed to battle her demons with a wine glass and a stubborn, solemn silence that threatened to transform into anger if disturbed. I often wondered whether my mother recognized me in those moments as her child or one of the demons of her past that haunted her so ardently.
I came home one day, jubilant and ecstatic with childish glee, to find my mother seated in the living room. It was a beautiful sunny day, but a storm had cast over her face and she'd transformed into the Goddess of Lamentations. I saw the groves left by her eternal river of tears. My joy evaporated and I knew I was not her child in that moment. She saw something else, one of the demons that haunted her. Before I could move, she had forced me down onto the carpet, stripped me and began to beat me with a belt. She screamed a lot of things, but I was screaming too and so her words drowned in my tears. I was in pain and my body called for my protector.
"Mom! Mom!" I cried, snot bubbling on my nostrils and running into my mouth with a sweet-salty tang. My mother did not hear me, could not hear me. I was being punished by a Goddess who kept screaming that I was a whore. The Goddess pointed her finger at my naked, five year old body and screamed that I was a whore.
I grew up in fear of the Goddess of Lamentations such that melancholy became a lifelong companion. A deep profound sadness that permeated every facet of my life. So when she sent me to boarding school for eight years, it was both respite from her anger and a rupture from everything I had ever known.
The Goddess of Lamentations approached me after many years of not showing herself to me and demanded deference and affection. I was 27 years old and I found myself bereft. I showed her my grief and the scars I had received over the years. She looked at the wounds, sneered and demanded her offering, as she always had. Affronted and incredulous, she let her fury be known - that I wasn't her child but a being corrupted by malicious forces intent on starving her off her right to my eternally compliant devotion. For who was I without a mother, the being who had brought me into the world (and had also threatened to take me out of it multiple times)?
I found my salvation by severing the tapestry of pain that connected us, this umbilical cord that tethered us. I stood before my ghosts, the various incarnations of me that had died, and offered the umbilical cord as penance.
Together with my Shame, we buried the umbilical piece in the graveyard and sobbed together. We sat there, on the mound, as the sun began to rise in the horizon and I thought to myself, this is where my life begins anew. Feeling unafraid, unencumbered and untethered. Liberated…
I, The Queen of Heaven, Inanna, now descended and arisen, sat upon my throne once more. Worshippers bowed their heads before me and sang me praises, for true joy, pleasure and freedom had returned to the world .