But in a weird way, I relish my lessons. They're intense; they're personal; they're a big part of what makes me me. The times I learned them stand out for me. One came within weeks of my nineteenth birthday, a psychotic break following a manic summer of stress. Another was the chilly, alienated year I moved to the country with my boyfriend; everyone envied me, while I missed my friends, my freedom, my espresso stand.
But the period I associate most with the process of embracing darkness is my late twenties, the time I went through therapy, the time when Pluto squared my natal Sun (challenging my identity) and of my Saturn return (when Saturn conjuncted my natal Saturn, redefining personal boundaries and my sense of my adulthood). It was an underground time. My image of it is a river in flood: dangerous, many submerged objects moving quickly. Though I wasn't happy then, I remember that time with nostalgia. Its colors were rich and intense.
In Liz Greene's The Astrology of Fate (a book that confronts the issue of whether astrology can predict the future, and in doing so explores the concept of fate), she connects the planet Pluto as it works in astrology first with Moira, goddess of the natural boundaries of fate, and later with the goddesses who ruled the underworld before the Greeks gave it to a god. For Greene, a Jungian psychologist as well as an astrologer, the force of Pluto, which when transiting a major chart point produces dissolution, breakdown, the shaking of foundations, can be viewed usefully as a female force, allied with the mother and earth principles. She connects Pluto with Ereshkigal, the Sumerian goddess of the underworld, and the process of a Pluto transit with the mythic cycle of death and rebirth found in the myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal.
I tend to analyze my life through the lens of astrology. But even if this symbol system hasn't proved useful to you, we all go through times when our lives are shaken apart and remade, by forces that might seem exterior but have so much resonance you can't help wondering if they're provoked from within. My late twenties was just such a time in my life, and the myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal helped me process the process.
In this myth, Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, the lady of the morning star, a goddess of conscious activity in the world of light, turns her attention to the world below. Her pretext is attending the funeral rites of her sister Ereshkigal's husband, but this seems no more than an excuse; the main point is that "from the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below" (from Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, translated from the Sumerian by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer).
Before she goes, she dresses in seven layers of symbolic finery and gives her servant Ninshubur a list of gods to ask for help if she does not return, the last being Enki, the god of wisdom. Then she goes to the underworld, entering by means of its seven gates.
"When she entered the first gate,
From her head, the shugurra, the crown of the steppe, was removed.
Inanna asked: 'What is this?'
She was told: 'Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.'"
(from Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth)
Likewise, the gatekeepers divest her of her lapis beads, her double-stranded beads, her breastplate, her gold ring, her lapis measuring rod and line and her royal robe. Then:
"Naked and bowed low, Inanna entered the throne room.
Ereshkigal rose from her throne....
The Annuna, the judges of the underworld, surrounded (Inanna).
They passed judgment against her.
Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death....
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat.
And was hung from a hook on the wall."
(from Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth)
Hey, we've all felt like that.
You can look on life as a random series of chances with no meaning, but for me it works best to behave as if there is meaning in my life, if only the meaning I create myself. I believe that the times of your life when you feel like rotting meat hanging on a hook, though horribly painful, are indications for a need for change, or opportunities for change. The greater the opportunity, the greater the pain.
My experience has been that if you try to ignore your growing discomfort, life will work harder and harder to strip you of your armor. One of the reasons that in my late twenties I started therapy (as well as a self-defense course) was because, coming home from the grocery store one evening, I got jumped. My attacker - in cliché fashion, a large, black man - shoved a fist into my armpit, pretending he had a knife, and tried to drag me off into an alley, I assume to rape me. Instead of going along, I tried to scream, though he had his arm around my neck and it came out more as a croak. We were on a busy street; disgustedly he punched me and stalked off. I came away with a black eye and a persistent fear of attack.
I would never say it was "my fault" I got attacked. It was my attacker's fault, and I think rather than my staying home after dark, he and other would-be rapists should stop trying to rape people. But in my life, being attacked functioned as a wake-up call. Interestingly enough, one of the dream and real-life symbols Greene found as a constant in the lives of clients going through Pluto transits was a dangerous black man, often a rapist: a Plutonian shadow figure, expressing rage and mischanneled sexuality.
It's no coincidence that my Pluto transit began with an attempted rape. One of the issues I dealt with in therapy was my sexuality. As a teenager, I'd had sex with the boys I liked without much preamble. But I wanted a partner, and as I came into my twenties I observed that fucking guys at the first encounter did not often lead to an ongoing relationship. Given the mores of our culture, it often led to nasty rumors and humiliation. So I backed off and began approaching men through the labyrinth of dating.
But there are pitfalls involved in letting your conscious mind run your sexuality. Desire comes from below, and too much messing with the fount can jam the tap. Expressing desire had gotten me humiliated; I'd internalized this lesson, which reinforced similar lessons from my parents. Not surprisingly, I had a hard time expressing sexuality in relationship; several pairings had foundered on this problem. I found I needed to reclaim that "bad" girl of former times, my shadow side. In astrological terms, Pluto, representing repressed unconscious urges, squaring my Sun, representing my identity, dredged up the issue of my buried bad girl. But I managed to ignore the issue until, to read the event symbolically, my subconscious sent a big, black man to get my attention.
Ereshkigal herself is a buried bad girl. She has been raped, then exiled by the gods, naked, to the Great Below, "given the underworld for her domain," as Wolkstein and Kramer translate; she didn't choose to rule Hell. "In the underworld," Wolkstein writes in "Interpretations of Inanna's Stories and Hymns," "she eats clay and drinks dirty water.... This underground goddess, whose realm is dry and dark, whose husband Gugulanna is dead, who has no protective or caring mother, father or brother that we know of, who wears no clothes and whose childhood is lost, (is) unloving, unloved, abandoned, instinctual and full of rage, greed and desperate loneliness."
Ereshkigal does possess a rampant sexuality. Wolkstein writes, "Her one great craving is for her own sexual satisfaction. In the later Neo-Assyrian story of 'Nergal and Ereshkigal,' we learn that when Nergal enters the 'kur' (Sumerian for underworld), Ereshkigal copulates with him for six days and six nights; yet when he departs on the seventh day, she still has not had enough." But unlike Inanna, whose sexuality is integrated into her life through the Sacred Marriage, "Ereshkigal's sexuality is compulsive, insatiable and without relationship or offspring." Like herself, her sexuality does not connect to life in the Great Above.
In many ways, as Wolkstein writes, Ereshkigal is the neglected side of Inanna. Inanna, the woman who expresses herself joyously in the outside world, confronts in the Great Below her sister, her double. Ereshkigal is her dark, instinctual side, full of desires, rages and sorrows too unwieldy and uncivilized to express, thus outlawed and repressed. But sometimes we exile too much of ourselves to the shadow side - I did. After time, the exiled part begins to wreak havoc. The damage it causes correlates to the strength of the part gone missing. It turns out the Queen of Heaven needs the Queen of the Underworld.
But once reached, the underworld overwhelms you. All your outside values are stripped away; you hang from the hook bleeding. My strongest memories of my late twenties are sitting in my apartment, staring at the wooden floor, crying and beating up pillows; at night, I dreamed complicated, grotesque dreams. Meanwhile, Ereshkigal moans "with the cries of a woman about to give birth" (from Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth).
When Inanna has hung three days in the underworld, Ninshubur knows her continued absence means trouble. After trying two other gods to no avail, she goes to Enki, the god of wisdom. As a solution, he creates and sends two mourners to Ereshkigal to cry with her over her many wrongs:
"Go to the underworld,
Enter the door like flies.
Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, is moaning....
When she cries, 'Oh! Oh! My inside!'
Cry also, 'Oh! Oh! My inside!'
When she cries, 'Oh! Oh! My outside!'
Cry also, 'Oh! Oh! My outside!'
The queen will be pleased."
(from Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth)
The first step when you reach the underworld is to find the buried pains, resentments and desires and sympathize with your shadow-self over its pain. As Greene writes: "The little mourners neither agree nor disagree, neither do they blame nor rationalize. They simply listen, and accept her grief and bitterness.... The mourners in the Sumerian myth offer an alternative both to repression and to the acting out of spite in externally destructive ways which ultimately do not heal the wound." For myself, I felt a lot of anger about the repression of my sexuality; I felt the world and specifically my parents had forced me to try excising that part of my personality. I could have taken it out on my parents, but better to go back to those feelings, enter them, simply be with my sad, angry self again.
"To put oneself in the stance of the mourners is more difficult than it seems, however," Greene writes. You wouldn't have exiled that lost part of yourself if you hadn't found it distasteful. "Even if one is able to face this vindictive and destructive instinct in oneself, it is irresistible to try to 'transform' it. The ego is fond of wanting to change everything it finds in the psyche according to its own values and standards, and Pluto's poison provokes a predictable response: Now that I have seen my ugliness, I find it despicable, and must cure it.
"But Enki's mourners are not concerned with curing Ereshkigal. They can see both sides of the issue: the necessity of rescuing Inanna, and the legitimacy of Ereshkigal's rage.... I feel that is questionable whether Ereshkigal is truly 'curable' anyway. Certainly she is not likely to respond to the demands of the ego, but only when she herself wishes it, if she ever does at all."
Ereshkigal will never go away. Her lessons are harsh, but she is to be honored, not banned. I think we have to set up lines of communication with our shadow sides, not try to "fix" them. Talking to them is not easy, though, especially after a long time of the silent treatment.
Ritual and guided meditation can help the process. As part of my therapy, I listed the qualities my mother and father had passed on to me, of them the ones I wanted to keep. Those I didn't want to keep, for example the repression of sexuality, I ritually burned. Afterward I felt cleansed, freed. My therapist also had me quite literally confront my demons in guided meditation, especially one figure, Rose, whom I'd first encountered during my breakdown at 19, whom I felt represented a nexus of sexuality and rage. I faced my fear of her, and she and I had a dialogue, during which I came to understand she was a protectress as well as a demon. Demons are often gods misunderstood. You can't necessarily transform them, but you can ask them to present themselves more constructively.
Facing Rose was one of the scariest things I've ever done. It took ten years for me to work up to it, and the process didn't leave me unmarked. Ereshkigal, pleased with her mourners, gives them back Inanna as a gift, but it's not as simple as that:
"The Annuna, the judges of the underworld, seized her.
They said: 'No one ascends from the underworld unmarked.
If Inanna wishes to return from the underworld,
She must provide someone in her place."
I too left hostages in the underworld. Through the time of my Pluto transit, not only did I not date, but I did no writing; my above-world ambitions came to a grinding halt. My relations with my friends changed as well. I broke a good friendship, since cobbled together but never the same. I'd attracted to myself friends with my own issues; when I changed place on those issues, things changed with my friends. For Inanna, two gods go in her place, each for a half-year at a time: Dumuzi, her husband the shepherd-god, and Dumuzi's sister Geshtinanna, the wine-goddess.
We all go to the underworld for different reasons. My issues had to do with sexuality and identity; some people go to dig up old sorrows, some angers. I describe the process as a myth with female protagonists, but it can also be seen in male terms. Odin gave an eye to drink from the Well of Wisdom, hung on the world tree Yggdrasil nine days to learn the runes. Use what myth you like as a pattern; most of us go to the Great Below.
When you do, I recommend getting help. Your counselor can be your priestess or priest, your astrologer, your friend or a professional therapist, but follow Inanna's example and don't go it alone. Without Ninshubur, Enki and the mourners, Inanna would never have returned.
I can't say I "solved" my problems; I'll return to different versions of them forever. But I'm at a different place with them, one that allows me more comfort. And just as there are sacrifices, there are rewards. Pluto, who rules the underworld, is also the god of riches.
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