Underworld of Shadow and Depth: Ereshkigal's Realm
As Inanna can symbolize our upper, outer, or in-the-world personality, the part of us who is somebody in the world, so can Ereshkigal represent our unseen aspects and memories that we have kept hidden in the shadow or innerworld. Ereshkigal can be a symbol of the cause of our suffering that we have ignored or depreciated and can only approach, humbled and made vulnerable by adversity. Ereshkigal is unattended when we deny whatever is personally meaningful and authentically true for us and are walled off from this gnosis or felt knowledge. Going through the gates to our feelings and fears occurs when we incrementally go through layers of resistance to accepting the reality of illness.
People also make a descent with Inanna when they have gradually disabling illnesses that chronically worsen mental or physical health, illnesses that fall into a diagnostic limbo between the body and the psyche—environmental allergies, chronic fatigue syndrome, and psychosomatic illnesses—or they have infectious or hereditary diseases that involve multiple systems and are progressive. The descent may take years, with the onset of a new set of symptoms, subsequent tests, and prescriptions and procedures, like other gates to pass through.
Chemotherapy and radiation patients make an Inanna descent. Each treatment is another gate. After the second or third chemotherapy treatment, hair often falls out in clumps. On this descent at this gate, you surrender your head of hair, and even if you were expecting it, this is a shock. For women especially, it is a loss that strikes at identity and femininity. It is often a low point, a depressing time. The face in the mirror is unfamiliar. “Who is this?”
Inanna was naked and bowed low when she entered the underworld. She had been humbled and stripped as she descended, but the ordeal was not yet over. When Inanna came into Ereshkigal's presence, the goddess of the underworld was not happy to see her. Filled with wrath and judgment, Ereshkigal gazed at Inanna with the baleful eyes of death and struck her dead. Then Inanna's body was hung on a hook, where after three days, it began to decompose or turn into a slab of green meat.
Inanna and Jesus: Transformation of Suffering
Inanna's fate at this point reminds me of Jesus and the series of betrayals, humiliations, and punishments he suffered on the way to the cross and as he hung from it on Good Friday until he was dead; his body was put in a tomb, hers hung on a hook for three days. When illness strikes, people do feel betrayed and humiliated by their bodies, and pain is pain whether from a whip or being nailed to a cross or from some source beneath our flesh. In the midst of suffering, many people feel like Jesus, alone and in pain, on the cross crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Just as hanging on the cross was not the end of Jesus's story, hanging on a hook was not the end of Inanna and her myth. She too was brought back to life, significantly transformed. In the language of the soul, death is a major, recurring metaphor. On the spiritual journey, death of the old personality is required for an initiation, transformation, rebirth, or resurrection. On the medical journey, patients often feel like Inanna: the hospital feels like an underworld in which they are stripped and humbled, and then unconscious under anesthesia, they literally become a slab of meat on an operating table. Or after a series of tests and treatments, each of which takes them deeper into an unknown, fearful world, patients feel metaphorically left hanging on a hook awaiting news that they can come back to life.
In the bowels of the hospital, or the receding world that illness creates, or in the fearful half-light of the psychological underworld, patients enter the realm of Ereshkigal, when they reach the point of realizing that their old self and old life are dead, at least for now, perhaps forever. For the soul, this can be a turning point: facing the possibility of disability or death can be reorienting, it can bring about a massive change in priorities and bring to the forefront questions of meaning and meaninglessness about how we are living our lives, about what really matters, and whether we matter. For the ego that had maintained the illusion of control over fate, this is often the lowest point. For the person, if ego turns to soul to lead the way through the underworld, there will be unexpected discoveries. For it's not what happens to us, but how we respond that ultimately matters and shapes who we are from inside out.
Responding to Unchosen Circumstances
Ever since I read Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning,3 I have had an appreciation of a spiritual and psychological reality: that no matter how little control we may have over circumstances, even in the most terrible situation, we have a choice of how we will respond. This insight is empowering. Frankl and all of his relatives were taken into Nazi concentration camps, where every one of his family members perished. In this situation, there was no freedom, no choice about what or whether one would eat or work or be sent to the gas chambers the next day. The prisoners were starved and beaten, their legs became swollen with edema. They were stripped of identity, reduced to a number, and denied basic human dignity. And yet, even here, there were choices to be made at a soul level. Some people just gave up, others acted in the same inhuman way as their captors toward weaker inmates, and still others shared what they had, maintained loyalties, and even sacrificed themselves so other prisoners might survive longer. In this apparently meaningless and inhuman existence, Frankl noted that there remained a choice of attitude to take. He emphasized that the search for meaning is essential, and that the will to live depended upon it. If suffering or dying is the task, doing it well or poorly is a choice.
Many years ago, I met with the nursing staff of the Planetree model unit following two deaths that occurred within days of each other. The nurses were in grief and in guilt and needed help with feelings stirred up by these deaths. Both patients were men who had died of AIDS. One of them was someone that the staff had come to know well and love, over years of multiple hospitalizations. They admired his courage as they helped him through his relapses, and with a post-hospital follow-up program, maintained contact with him during remissions. They were emotionally as well as professionally invested in his struggle. His death was mercifully peaceful and a personal loss to most of them. Their reaction to him grew out of his response to his fate: like a man dealt a bad hand but playing it well, he put his energy into living as fully and as long as he could. The other man was characterized as the most disliked patient any of them could remember. Efforts to help him were met with profanity, kindness was ridiculed and thrown back in their faces sarcastically. He was uncooperative, unappreciative, and full of hate. Bitterness, rage, and resentment were his response to having AIDS. He upset and disturbed other patients. He made it difficult to put in IVs or draw blood, and as he wished AIDS on others, contamination by his blood was a frightening possibility. Nurses came to hate him and dreaded the next incident he would provoke. Some found themselves wishing he would die. Their negative feelings were so at odds with their intellectual grasp of why he was behaving this way and their sense of themselves as good people and professionals, that when he died, alone with no one who mourned him, they were filled with guilt and shame. Both men shaped the last part of their lives by how they responded to having a fatal illness and how they treated the people around them. The legacy of feelings that they left behind grew directly out of these choices.
The choice of how we respond to what happens to us usually remains, no matter how difficult the course. When we lose this choice is difficult to determine, because even when there is mental clouding, character seems to remain and influence response. It is not just circumstance that shapes us, either. Adults who have retained the capacity to love and hope and have faith and did not become like the people who abused them in childhood, somehow drew upon an inner wisdom and chose not to do to others what was done to them, or give up on themselves or on people, or succumb to hopelessness or cynicism and self-pity, choices that others in similar circumstances have made that diminish spirit and soul. Variations of these same choices of how we will respond and what we will become as a result, present themselves over and over to all of us in life. If our character and development of soul is
