I’m thinking about therapy. In between ensuring my rare white fig tree gets enough water, finding more recipes for my glut of speckled sugar beans and planning to get two new dogs.
Therapy is about relationship. It is all about finding a wise woman (or man) with great listening skills and a richly lived understanding of life skills.
I have studied various approaches to psychotherapy, academically and in counselling networks. And I’ve had plenty of insightful therapy myself. But I’ve also wasted time with the flakier practitioners and I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to come away feeling diminished and pathologised and forever dependent on the professional.
Good therapy is like a very piercing and powerful ritual. It is painful and a little disturbing and it works. I learned how to change and stop sabotaging myself or running away from intimacy. I understood the darker motivations that underlay some of my preoccupations. I learned to pay attention to what I was doing and what I was not doing. I learned to listen to what I was telling myself and to believe the script could be changed.
What is broken doesn’t always need to be fixed. Living with ‘broken’ enriches us in that we discover compassion and patience and connect with the deeper places of loss and failure.
Each of us will undertake the journey of the Sumerian goddess Inanna to the underworld, stripping ourselve down unwillingly as we step down into that void.
“From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.”
This is the story of my life as a woman coming into being through confusion and denial and terrible mistakes. It is the myth I lived from my late 20s until my late 40s. It is the myth that cost me everything, but paradoxically it is the myth that gave me my power and ‘knowing’, my strength as well as my woundedness.
Those friends who know me closely know I am not sentimental. I am not one for easy consolations or the answers thrown up in popular culture. I like the questions. I like the paradoxes. I like to live very close to the unknowable. Inanna’s descent to the underworld gave me a taste for the abyss.
This is one version of the story, emphasising the elements that mean something to me:
Inanna’s reason for visiting the underworld is unclear. She is the great Sumeriann high priestess and goddess turning her back on the business of being a goddess above ground, in the world. The reason she gives to the gatekeeper of the underworld is that she wants to attend her brother-in-law Gud-gal-ana’s funeral rites. However, this may be a ruse; Inanna may have been intending to conquer the underworld. Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld and Inanna’s sister, may have suspected this, which could explain her treatment of Inanna.
Erishkegal is my inner self, the smiling but shadowy figure whom I least appreciate. She is cruel and wilful and likely to make the others aspects of me suffer. I can feel her presence more strongly as I age, the dark death-loving Kali of Hindu myth, the cold and malicious Crone of the old Celts. I respect Erishkegal. She is the woman we do not want to become, the Other woman in each of us.
Before she left, Inanna instructed her priestess Ninscurba to plead with the gods Enlil, Nanna and Enki to save her if anything went wrong.
Inanna dresses elaborately for the visit, with a turban, a wig, a lapis lazuli necklace, beads upon her breast, the ‘pala dress’ (the ladyship garment), mascara, pectoral, a golden ring on her hand, and she held a lapis lazuli measuring rod. Perhaps Inanna’s garments, unsuitable for a funeral, along with Inanna’s haughty behaviour make Ereshkigal suspicious.
Following Ereshkigal’s instructions, the gatekeeper tells Inanna she may enter the first gate of the underworld, but she must hand over her lapis lazuli measuring rod. She asks why and is told ‘It is the way of the Underworld’. She obliges and passes through.
Inanna passes through a total of seven gates, at each removing a piece of clothing or jewelry she had been wearing at the start of her journey. She has to be stripped naked, little by little and lose each illusion she holds about herself and her power and the things she holds dear. She has to understand loss and relinquish all the gifts that create her self-esteem. Her clothing and jewels could also be used as an amulet or protective device, so stripping Inanna of each item would leave her more vulnerable to any type of attack.
When she arrives in front of her sister she is naked.
“After she had crouched down and had her clothes removed, they were carried away. Then she made her sister Erishkegal rise from her throne, and instead she sat on her throne. But then the Anna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her. They looked at her — it was the look of death. They spoke to her — it was the speech of anger. They shouted at her — it was the shout of heavy guilt. The afflicted woman Inanna was turned into a corpse by her own sister. And the corpse was hung on a hook.”
Ereškigal’s hatred for Inanna could be referenced in a few other myths. Ereškigal is seen as an accidental ‘black sheep’ of sorts. She can not leave her kingdom of the Underworld to join the other ‘living’ Gods and they can not visit her in the Underworld or else they can never return. Inanna symbolized love (in the sense of eros) and fertility, and was the polar opposite of Ereškigal. She disowned the Erishkegal within, we might say in Jungian terms.
The sister who personifies love is hung on a meathook to rot and turn green by the sister who hates her and who is an outcast, bitter and vengeful.
Inanna is killed and dies, after being stripped naked, despised and tortured. This is what she has descended to the underworld to undergo. It is an initiation into her own death.
Three days and three nights passed and Nincurba, following instructions, went to Enlil, Nanna, and Enki’s temples and demanded they save the Goddess of Love. The first two gods refused, but Enki was deeply troubled and agreed to help. He created two sexless figures (neither male nor female) named gala-tura and the kur-jara. He instructed they were to appease Ereškigal and when asked what they wanted they were to ask for Inanna’s corpse and sprinkle it with the food and water of life.
Things went as Enki said and the androgynous gala-tura and the kur-jara were able to revive Inanna. Demons of Ereškigal’s followed Inanna out of the underworld and she wasn’t free to go until someone took her place. They first came upon Nincurba and asked to take her. Inanna refused, saying the priestess had helped her as she had asked. They next came upon Cara, Inanna’s beautician, still in mourning. The demons said they would take them but Inanna refused for he had been there for her. They next came upon Lulal also in mourning. The demons offered to take him but Inanna refused.
They next came upon Dumuzi, Inanna’s husband. He was sitting in nice clothing and enjoying himself despite his wife supposedly still being missing in the underworld. Inanna was angry and said they could take him.
Dumuzi tried to escape his fate but a fly told Inanna and the demons where he was hiding. It was then decreed that Dumuzi spent half the year in the underworld and Inanna take the other half.
This is code for the love-hate relationship between a man and a woman beyond the romantic fictions. What it costs us to stay together through betrayal and disappointment and indifference. What is there in a marriage once the daydreams stop. To share the hell.
Inanna does not fully emerge from the underworld of death and humiliation. She must keep returning, she must remember always what the Underworld is like. She cannot return to the life she so longed for, except partially. She has to stay very close to the place of death.
This was my journey. It is called alcoholism.
Other women undergo the same journey and it may be called cancer. It may be called divorce. It may be called the loss of a child. It may be called murder. It may be called psychosis or schizophrenia. It may be called writers’ block. It may be called war.
We go to a place we would rather not go and we die there. Even when we recover and rejoin humanity, we are not the same. Part of us stays in that place of suffering and because of that we are able to help others who hang rotting on the meathooks, who are sliding down into madness and losing homes, family, self-respect.
The only healer who can truly help us is one who has undergone her own descent and come back a sadder and wiser person. And these healers will often speak a dark and uncompromising truth we are not eager to hear. They can see what lies ahead and they know there is no way to escape the descent. That is our destiny, and only when we are desperate and have lost everything and lie there green and rotting, only then can the wise ones, the friends and counsellors and healers, help us to make the journey back into the sunlight.
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