The Resurrection of Inanna:
A Play in Three Acts

The three acts in this play are monologues, each written by a different feminist. The authors often disagree, including about how to name the story which informs each of the acts, that story most commonly called Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld.

The author of the first act, Deb Dale Jones, is a reader grounded in ancient Near Eastern and folklore scholarship. This monologue explores how knowledge of Inanna was resurrected by archaeologists, and introduces aspects of Sumerian scholarship and difficulties in translating from Sumerian.

The author of the second act, Sharon Mijares, is a depth psychologist inspired by contemporary goddess discourse.

The author of the third act, Cass Dalglish, is a novelist and poet who studied ancient Near Eastern languages in order to find the first women writers in history. This monologue suggests that whenever we retell the story of Inanna, notice phenomena that surround Inanna, and sense the same details appearing in our own external worlds, we bring Inanna back from the Land of NoReturn.

The project began with a question asked by the depth psychologist: How was Inanna transformed after her journey to the Underworld? The play answers this question in several ways while blurring the boundaries of academic disciplines, scholarship, creative writing, prose, and poetry.

Our project began with Sharon Mijares’ question, “How was Inanna transformed by her descent to the Netherworld?” The story of Inanna’s journey comes from the land we now call Iraq, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Inanna was one of the gods in the ancient Sumerian pantheon—a very adventurous god. And her stories are particularly compelling for contemporary women.

That Inanna is a female god is important. It suggests a time when women were powerful. And Inanna was certainly not shy about exercising her power. One of her most audacious acts was to journey to the Land of the Dead, that land from which no one—human or divine—is allowed to return. But she did.

The three authors of this play come from very different backgrounds, have different research interests, and strong opinions that often conflict. Each has reacted to Inanna’s return in different ways and each has written her own act for this play about Inanna. We are excited that our monologues resonate to form a multifaceted whole.

Deb Dale Jones is an independent scholar whose research is grounded in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, and who reads Inanna’s stories in their original Sumerian. Deb Dale sets the stage by telling how knowledge of Inanna was resurrected by archaeologists, and she introduces us to aspects of Sumerian scholarship and difficulties in translating from Sumerian.

Sharon Mijares is a feminist and a depth psychologist and author. Among her published books are Modern Psychology and Ancient Wisdom and A Force Such as the World Has Never Known: Women Creating Change. Her monologue answers the question about Inanna’s journey by focusing on its relevance for modern women, and exploring Inanna’s descent to the Underworld as the ultimate movement towards wholeness for the benefit of all.

Cass Dalglish studied Sumerian as part of her quest to learn more about the earliest women writers. Her studies led to the publication of a novel about these writers, Nin, and a book of jazz riffs, Humming the Blues, inspired by the pictographic signs in Enheduanna’s Hymn to Inanna (Hallo & Van Dijk, 1968). Cass describes Inanna’s rescue plan and suggests we can bring Inanna back by noticing her physical presence in our world.

The only reason we know about Inanna is that there are people who like to dig in the dirt, who like to get their hands dirty, who get dirt under their fingernails, people called archaeologists. And because of the political climate under colonialism, archaeologists were able to excavate in what was called Mesopotamia. They found dirt, a very special, hard dirt with odd markings on it. The archaeologists saved as much of that special dirt as they could, gathered it up to take home with them, put it in museums where they could conserve that dirt and study those odd markings. It was like having an indeterminate number of jigsaw puzzles, each with an indeterminate number of pieces, all jumbled together and then divided among a number of different places around the world.

Of course, I’m talking about clay tablets; clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing. It has taken something like a century for archaeologists and other scholars working with those odd markings to sort through all those jigsaw pieces, written over several hundred years and in over a half dozen languages (none of which anyone could remember), something like a century to separate those fragments by age and by language and then to put them together in stories that were told several millennia ago, stories about all kinds of things but especially stories about Inanna (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983; Walker, 1987).

Somehow those stories about Inanna have really captured our imagination, especially one story in particular in one language in particular. We call that language Sumerian. That story about Inanna tells how she decided to go to the Land of No Return and then had to be rescued. That story tells what happened after she was rescued, since it turned out she couldn’t leave unless she provided a substitute. And now we are telling each other that story just like those ancient people told each other all about Inanna. And we are changing the story as we tell it just like those ancient people did, just like everybody does every time a story gets retold.

There are lots of reasons to tell each other these stories. We might be looking for insights into how to make better sense of our lives or we might be looking for inspiration for our creative expression. I like to think the reason I study Inanna’s stories, and those other stories written in Sumerian on those clay tablets, is to understand something about the ancient ones whose writings we are privileged to have found in the ground, whose stories have literally been resurrected from the Underworld, no substitute required. I like to think.

And I have to admit I get a little cranky when I come across some of these stories we have been telling ourselves that I don’t think are respectful enough of those ancients.

When we read something in translation we like to think we are getting exactly the same thing we would in the original language. We like to think all translators have to do is find the word with the equivalent meaning in our own language, maybe shuffle the words around a bit to match a new word order. Of course we know words don’t necessarily mean the same thing from one language to another. We know rules of grammar differ. And we know sometimes it seems like one language has been designed to carry a very different set of concepts than some other language. But it is easy to forget all this when we are actually reading a translation.

Some of these problems might not be so bad if we are translating from a language and culture relatively similar to our own; but when it comes to translating Sumerian into English, our cultures are separated by a few thousand years. The languages don’t belong to the same family—the languages aren’t related in any way—not even very, very distant shirttail relations.

To complicate matters even more, the writing system was not an alphabet, where theoretically every sound—or at least every word—is represented, albeit with a rather complicated and in many cases archaic system of spelling. The system used to write Sumerian was nothing like that—except for those descriptors “complicated” and “archaic.” The script used to write Sumerian was more like rebus writing. Too bad pictographs can only go so far. How do you indicate concepts, verbs—colors when you can’t use paint? It got very messy very fast, resulting in a writing system I’ve heard linguists call a complex script (Harper and Rindflesch 1980).

The cuneiform character for “mouth” is a really good example of what I mean. The character started out as a stylized drawing of a head and neck with some lines in the area of the mouth—X marks the spot, except that it wasn’t an X but some parallel lines. “Mouth” suggests “to speak,” so the same character was used for that. And, if it is going to be used for “to speak,” it may as well be used for that which is spoken, so “word.” Also, this word for “mouth” was pronounced “ka,” which turned out to be how a really common case ending was pronounced. Or at least scholars think they must have been pronounced the same because the “mouth” character was used to write that case ending. The character was used for some other things as well, but you get my point. I guess if you were a Sumerian you could tell from the context how to read a passage. Anyway, this multiplicity of possible meanings is called “multivalency.”

Add to the problems of reading cuneiform the fact that these tablets were buried for millennia before being dug up and they haven’t exactly survived intact. Is that line on the tablet part of a cuneiform character or just some scratch? Has part of the sign worn away making it look like a totally different sign? What belongs in that hole where the tablet fragments didn’t quite come back together? Is there another fragment we still have to find or is that piece gone forever?

Once she figures out more or less how to read the source text, a translator from Sumerian has to decide what balance to draw between remaining true to the Sumerian versus making it understandable to new readers. The translated name of the story that serves as the inspiration for this triad of papers is a case in point. Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld tells us what we need to know about what this story is about, right? Well… maybe. We—by which I mean English readers—know the Netherworld is the Land of the Dead, which we envision as somehow under the earth. The word the Sumerians used for this realm was the same word they used for where foreigners lived—which in itself might be a poignant comment on how Sumerians felt about themselves and their neighbors. But, let’s think for a moment about the geography of Sumer: in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, at the low end of the valley, just before the rivers flow into the Persian Gulf. It turns out the Sumerian word for where the foreign people live is pretty literal. That word is “mountain.” So this conception of the location of the Land of the Dead is nowhere near where we English speakers envision it to be. Likewise, the verb being translated “descend” just means vertical up or down movement: to descend, but also to ascend. I rather enjoy the confusion this creates for me: As Queen of Heaven, Inanna descends to earth, where she then ascends to the mountains to be among the dead.

I can get lost contemplating this conundrum, just as I can get lost thinking about the arrogance of the notion that people who were not born like me may as well be dead. Or maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong and this wasn’t arrogance at all. Maybe kinship was so much more important to Sumerians than individualism that being away from your family made it seem like you were dead.

The translated name of this story is just one example of how readers can easily be misled by translations that go too far in the direction of making Sumerian texts accessible to English readers, encouraging readers to think there are similarities between the two cultures where similarities do not actually exist. Such translation strategies contribute to insular thinking by allowing us to avoid confronting the inevitable differences between cultures. If everything is translated into terms that are familiar to us, we are encouraged to believe that what is true for us represents some kind of universal truth.

Such translation strategies can certainly be seen as oppressive, since they don’t contribute to understanding between peoples so much as they render invisible certain people and their experiences as expressed in the texts being translated. Paradoxically, not going far enough along the continuum can also be oppressive if the result is that the source culture is represented as somehow “less” than we are. This kind of construction of the “Other” has historically been used as a justification to deny women property and other rights, a justification for slavery, a justification for colonialism.

I said I get cranky when I come across stories that aren’t respectful enough of the ancients. This “under-translation” stuff is what I get the crankiest about, especially when it comes from the very people who know the Sumerian material best. When I was doing my graduate work in the field, all those many years ago, I kept finding comments about how inferior the accomplishments of the Sumerians were, or worse yet, how inferior the Sumerians themselves were. For example, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, published in 1946 and reissued in 1977, compared the ancients to modern savages (Frankfort & Frankfort, 1977, p. 2). I don’t know which is worse, that the ancients were likened to savages or that the “modern savages” being referenced were not the Nazis, never mind the principal author had been born into a Jewish family in The Netherlands.

One Sumerologist, Bendt Alster, has commented:

In Sumerian literary compositions in general we do not find human conflicts of such a profound nature as those of the Old Testament or the classical tragedies, and nobody would claim that the poetic language lives up to the standards of the Homeric epics. (Alster, 1990, p. 61)

Nobody but me.

Well, more than just me. An article from 1963 by Samuel Noah Kramer, who was later to collaborate with Diane Wolkstein on a collection of stories about Inanna, reads like a response to the above-quoted passage from Alster, not published until 1990:

…Sumerian epic tales have a good deal in common with Greek epic poetry…. Stylistically, both Greek and Sumerian epic poetry are fond of static epithet, lengthy repetitions, speeches between characters, and detailed leisurely descriptions… On the other hand, there is little likelihood that the Greeks had developed anything like the vast and highly sophisticated hymnal literature of the Sumerians. (Kramer, pp. 487-488)

In spite of (or perhaps because of) writing extensively about how the characteristics of epic poetry—like static epithets and lengthy repetitions—seem to be features of oral poetry (Alster, 1972), Alster entirely dismisses the possibility of any artistic merit in Sumerian poetry. In a passage where he compares the much later Epic of Gilgamesh, written in the Akkadian language, with the entire corpus of Sumerian literature, Alster asserts “The Akkadian Gilgamesh epic is . . . the first Mesopotamian poem that can be read basically for its literary merits, and not primarily as a document of cultural history” (Alster, 1990, pp. 59-60).

Now, if the scholars studying Sumerian poetry hold such low opinions of the artistic merit of ancient literature, that prejudice is certainly going to be conveyed in their work.

I get cranky.

To be fair, the skill set needed to cope with those jigsaw pieces, including incredible patience and attention to minute details, might not be the skill set needed to notice the subtleties of what emerges.

I still get cranky.

Our text, which I prefer to call Inanna’s Journey, isn’t an example of an epic poem, but it does makes extensive use of repetition. Elsewhere I have considered how repetition is used to make meaning in this text (Jones, 1993). Here let me give a flavor of what I found. Quoting the opening lines as translated in Wolkstein and Kramer’s collaboration (1983):

From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.

From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.

From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below (p. 52).

The next three lines follow much the same pattern, stating two times that Inanna abandoned heaven and earth and went to the “mountains,” and the third telling how she abandoned her holy priests. There follow several lines giving more specifics about the temples Inanna abandons. Each line gives the name of a city and the name of her temple in that city (Wolkstein and Kramer omit these lines).

Our text tells us explicitly that Inanna abandons her temples at the same time that it enacts that abandonment. Repetition is used to create a structure—a rhythm if you will—that is associated with the temples and the order of the cosmos the temples represent. Inanna moves through that structure in a way that is disruptive to this order, just as in the most important action of the text Inanna violates the rules of the cosmos by returning from the Land of No Return.

A different story about Inanna contains a passage about things coming together and moving apart. The form of the verb used for the coming together was something like a participle, with the action of the verb packed into as small a unit as possible. The form of the verb used for the separation phase was more like a complete sentence in itself, using multiple elements to stretch out the form (Jones, 1998).

Clearly, the Sumerians were working from a very different notion of artistic merit than anything Alster would recognize. Frankly I am in awe of how skillfully those ancients used language and their existing literary conventions to amplify the explicit meaning of their stories, to create subtexts that interact with those explicit meanings, to create a multi-layered, multi-dimensional text.

Of course, the thing about poetry, probably the defining thing, is that all aspects of the language are mixed together to make a potent concoction larger than the sum of its ingredients. How do you translate that?

Cass and I have often discussed how the multivalency of the cuneiform writing system was one of the dimensions available to Sumerian poets and their readers, so it came as no surprise to me when she decided to focus on the resonances from that multivalency in her translation of Enheduanna, published as Humming the Blues (Dalglish, 2008). It was a bold choice to abandon the line—the basic unit of Sumerian poetry—in order to explore these nuances.

I find the task of translating Sumerian poetry daunting. This, of course, doesn’t keep me from trying. In the study where I discussed the results of my close reading for repetition, subtext, and other features, I offered two translations of Inanna’s Journey. I wanted to present very different takes on the same text to interfere with that tendency to read translations as though they are an accurate reflection of the source. But I also wanted to be able to highlight different aspects of the original, which I do not think anyone can do in a single translation.

Inanna’s Journey is as multivalent as the cuneiform in which it was written. The more we tell the story, the better chance we will have of capturing all of those layers.

The words “to hear the cry of one’s sister” came to me as I prepared to write my understanding of this ancient Goddess, the story of her descent, and its implications for modern women. The story tells us that upon hearing her sister Ereškigal’s cries of grief, Inanna made the decision to go to Ereškigal, even though Inanna knew she would be risking her own life. But something much deeper than a mission of comfort was taking place. Inanna had willingly entered a process of death and rebirth.

Do we feel a commitment toward our sisters? Do we hear the cries of women throughout the world? For me, Inanna’s descent into the Underworld represents the ultimate journey—a movement towards wholeness for the benefit of all. One can ask, “isn’t a Goddess already whole in herself?” But the story suggests that even the Gods seek greater development. In this world of gender and numerous other conflicts, we all need deeper directions and the descent within is the Way. An integration of some sort will have taken place by entering the depths to be unveiled in the journey.

The Sumerian story proclaims that, “From the Great Above she set her mind to the Great Below” (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983, p. xvi). According to Sumerian scholars Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, the Sumerian equivalent for the English word mind is ear. It also is the word defining wisdom. It is an image of sensing direction as opposed to modern ways of thinking it out. In my understanding, Inanna has set her intention (ear/wisdom/mind) to make the descent and go to her grieving sister, Ereškigal, Queen of the Underworld. Inanna, Queen of Heaven, the first daughter of the moon, is following the wisdom of her senses. She is willing to sacrifice everything, including her life, to take this treacherous journey into the Underworld. It is a sacrifice of the biggest kind. Yet at the same time, the Queen of Heaven did advise her servant Ninšubur that if she didn’t return in three days, to “set up a lament” (p. 53) and to seek help for Inanna’s return as she would be unable to rescue herself.

This story seems to represent what has since become the oft-told story about an archetypal journey into the unknown, shedding the ego’s domination (sacrificing all), to be spiritually reborn. Two thousand years later, this story of death and resurrection would be recreated in a new way with a God who we are told descended from Heaven to Earth to become human for the sake of all humanity. That is the story of Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth who, 33 years after his birth, was crucified. Yeshua then spent three days in the Underworld before rising as Christ. Also, Yeshua was not the first to make this journey in the Judeo-Christian stories. According to the book of Matthew, Yeshua’s time in the Underworld following the crucifixion is equated to an earlier era when the Hebrew prophet Jonas was swallowed by a whale and spent three days in its belly. Matthew 12:40 relates, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so, shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Yeshua has been called both God and Man. Like Inanna he represents Heaven and Earth (God and Human). When stories appear and reappear in other times and cultures, they are representatives of humanity’s universally shared Collective Unconscious. But this ancient story of Inanna’s descent appears to be one of the first defining this archetypal voyage of death and rebirth, and we know by the depictions of her body parts that she is female.

Carl Jung defined archetypal energies as “factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a way that they can be recognized only from the effects they produce” (Jacobi, 1959, p. 32). They exist preconsciously. These Archetypes are psychic structures containing biologically related patterns of behaviors consisting of certain qualities and expressions of being (Mijares, 2012; Mijares, 2022). Thus, from the perspective of depth psychology, Inanna’s descent represents a significant guiding myth in humanity’s awakening to a deeper purpose, or the integration of a needed archetypal force.

Both Jung (1959a, 1959b) and Joseph Campbell (1974) studied religious stories, myths, and legends, finding similar themes manifesting throughout their research evidencing this Collective Unconscious. Inanna (female) and Yeshua (male) both make the sacrificial journey. They entered an Underworld that would change them forever. This is what is meant by a rebirth!

In that the Underworld (inner realms) experience does not take place on a conscious (outer realm) level, we do not have a cognitive map that describes how this psychic death leads to rebirth as it’s not spelled out in either Inanna’s or Yeshua’s three-day journeys. We don’t know their experiences during those three days, but we do know that each begins with sacrifice. This may be because ordinary language cannot define this deep inner experience; unconscious realms are simply not akin to ordinary consciousness. The unconscious is chaos as opposed to order, darkness as opposed to the light of consciousness, and mysterious because it lacks familiar reasoning. These are living stories; they have a life of their own. They offer unique opportunities to take us deeper and deeper into their revelations. How we understand and integrate the meaning is the gift. We can move from what was written in stone, to what is now being understood within the soul.

Meeting with the Shadow: Integrating the Power to Give and to Be

Inanna’s journey can be described as every wise woman’s undertaking. In my projections of this ancient story, Ereškigal is the personification of Inanna’s Shadow. She resides in the dark underbelly. In depth psychology, we recognize this to represent a journey into unconscious realms deep within the human psyche. It could mean death, but this can be an ego death that leads to rebirth. It is an archetypal journey leading to what Jung called Individuation and Self-Realization, and Goldstein (1939) and Maslow (1993) called Self-Actualization. This journey is related in the mystical teachings of ancient times, a journey within to discover that we are Gods (Jung, 2009; Jung, 1959a; Jung, 1959b). Consider Yeshua’s words, “Neither shall they say, lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21). This journey within is not to be taken lightly, for it takes sacrificing what we’ve held dear to initiate the rebirth of the authentic Self. The term “rebirth” is generally used to represent superficial changes, thus sadly missing the depth of a reemergence from death as illustrated below.

Inanna’s sacrifice is depicted as she leaves her loved ones and her own safety behind. She is willing to give up all her sacred possessions to descend through the seven gates to enter Ereškigal’s realm, naked. Inanna’s motivation appears to be unselfish.

At the outer gates to the Underworld, Inanna demands that the first gate be opened saying “I am Inanna, Queen of Heaven, On my way to the East” (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983, p. 55).

Neti, the gatekeeper asks,“If you are truly Inanna, Queen of Heaven, On your way to the East, Why has your heart led you on the road from which no traveler returns” (p. 55)?

Inanna responds, “Because… of my older sister Ereškigal, Her husband, Gugalanna, the Bull of Heaven has died. I have come to witness the funeral rites” (p. 55).

When Inanna asks questions, it is explained that “the ways of the Underworld are perfect” (p. 58). With what can be considered an act of meekness and great courage, Inanna passes through each of the seven gates until she had given up all of her royal possessions, and stands exposed and vulnerable. The story explains that,

Naked and bowed low, Inanna entered the throne room. Ereškigal rose from her throne. Inanna started toward the throne. The Annuna, the judges of the Underworld, surrounded her. They passed judgment upon her. Then Ereškigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death. She spoke against her the word of wrath. She uttered against her the cry of guilt. She struck her. Inanna was turned into a corpse, A piece of rotting meat. And was hung from a hook on the wall. (p. 60)

Inanna has given all she can give. The power for her rebirth is not fully in her own hands.

Three days have passed. Inanna’s servant Ninšubur desperately seeks help for her Queen from the Gods. She finds a listening ear in the God of wisdom and of water, Enki. The story tells us that from “under his fingernail Enki brought forth dirt” (p. 64). Enki transformed the speck of dirt from the fingernail of one hand into a “kurgarra, a creature neither male nor female.” Then from a speck of dirt from the fingernail of the other hand he formed a “galatur, a creature neither male nor female” (p. 64). Thus, there is a transgender element in this story. What is sent to heal and restore Inanna is neither male nor female. It is beyond definitions of gender.

In the Underworld, Inanna hangs lifeless. She is dependent upon the creativity and communication of the kurgarra and the galatur. As noted, Inanna does not have the power to restore herself. In their bargaining with Ereškigal, Queen of the Underworld, the creatures learn that if they are to leave with the body of Inanna, someone must take her place; that’s the agreement—a sacrifice is required.

Following the God Enki’s advice, they resonate with Ereškigal’s grieving. No attempt is made to change her words or experience. In so doing, the sexless beings, the kurgarra and galatur, receive Ereškigal’s respect and trust. In return she gives them the body of Inanna.

Inanna’s previous belongings, symbols of her royal status, are restored at each gate. She has been told that someone must take her place. Kurgarra and the galatur bathe and dress their Queen Inanna, who is then greeted by the previously grieving Ninšubur. Inanna sees her son covered in ashes. She wants to go to her beloved husband-consort Dumuzi. Now at this point one should be asking, “What has changed?” Inanna has returned from the dead and a rebirth is most significant. She had heard the cries of her sister and had sacrificed her life in the response. But what differs after her death and rebirth?

This archetypal reply to the call is also seen in the life of Carl Jung, who was not only a great psychologist, but also a mystic and a prophet (Jung, 1913, p. 163; Kingsley, 2021; Wilson 1988). In 1913, Jung’s own descent led him to ask, “In which Underworld am I? It is dark and black as death. Everything deceives.” He had entered an Underworld experience in his mission toward Individuation. Jung’s life provides a modern example of someone willing to sacrifice his ego-identity for the good of all. It is well known that Jung’s willingness to go into Shadow realms was his response to the terrors and deaths of World War II. He was observing the destructive forces acting through humanity. He was hearing the cries of a threatened humanity, and it led him to make the descent approximately 5,000 years after the Goddess Inanna’s example.

There is another facet of the story of Inanna’s descent that has intrigued me from the time I first heard it. It comes from modern interpretations (McVicker-Edwards, 1991; Mijares, 2012; Starhawk, 1989). It is about Inanna’s use of power and authority upon learning that her throne had been taken over by her husband-consort during her absence.

Heaven and Earth: Weaving Power and Beauty

Following the resurrection of Inanna, it becomes clear that she represents both Queen of Heaven and Queen of Earth. She has taken on the “powers and mysteries of death and rebirth, emerging not only as a sky or moon goddess, but as the Goddess who rules over the sky, the earth, and the underworld” (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983, p. xvi). Something has been gained. She has become Queen of all these realms, and she demands respect! A new authority and power manifests. When Inanna gave up her authority as Queen of Heaven, she also sacrificed the sacred marriage. The Shepherd-King Dumuzi taking over Inanna’s throne could also reflect the emerging patriarchal powers, but Inanna uses her authority to right the disrespect he has shown her. In this act she provides an example for women of the future. When Inanna learns Dumuzi is not grieving the loss of his beloved Queen—instead, he is throwing a royal party—Inanna points at him (similar to Ereškigal’s pointing at Inanna upon killing her). Inanna is not going to be a Queen dripping with the oxytocin of motherly kindness. “Inanna fastened on Dumuzi the eye of death” (p. 71). Dumuzi, the Shepherd-King, will be the one who takes her place in the Underworld. Inanna’s act is akin to the Hindu Goddess Kali Durga demanding death and transformation.

After he is condemned to take Inanna’s place, Dumuzi’s sister, Geštinanna, steps forward to ask if she may share his time in the Underworld. Hence six months for Dumuzi’s stay and six months for Geštinanna. Inanna agrees. While demonstrating a position that demands respect and opposes injustice, Inanna allows for another response by permitting them to share the time in the Underworld. After Inanna (p. 89) “placed Dumuzi in the hands of the eternal,” she exclaimed her praise to the dark Queen of the Underworld;” Holy Ereškigal! Great is your renown! Holy Ereškigal! I sing your praises” (another allusion to the relevance of respect).

My Conclusions

Many women lack a sense of embodied power. For thousands of years women have been told their role was that of serving the male. There are still many women who have never known that in earlier eras women were revered as Gods. The story of the Goddess Inanna’s descent into the Underworld may be one of the first stories related to death and rebirth, and it is a women’s story. (The famous Greek story of Persephone being lured or abducted into the Underworld occurs much later, in 6th or 7th century BCE). Inanna’s journey precedes mystical stories about death and rebirth, including the three days spent in the Underworld by Yeshua following his crucifixion and preceding his resurrection. Her story also reflects the journey inward to know our Shadows, and, thus, to know ourselves at a deeper level. It is a story that goes beyond gender, perhaps this is why the little healing creatures are without gender. It is also about the divine right of women to be respected for who they are and what they do. Patriarchy has been sitting on the throne since the end of the Sumerian culture. The patriarchal ideologies have not respected women. Have they even felt the lack of feminine presence? It is time for women to go deep within to be transformed in ways that command respect as we take back our place on the throne.

Sister

sometimes I think I ought to call you the Queen of the May—the way you toss light, like yellow dandelions out of a basket, here and there; or maybe I should call you god, the way you’ve wrapped the laws of heaven and earth around your waist like a belt, the way you skim over chaos like a quicksilver river. But I call you Sister because you’re like the rest of us, opening like a pale morning, swelling like a storm, clutching the torch of longing to your breast until you feel life at your throat, until you’re all dressed up in flames. Sweet Sister, you know it all. A woman’s desire is deep, and you’re the measure of it.

Riffs on Cuneiform Signs in Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra

from Humming the Blues, Cass Dalglish

 

The first pictographic image in the first signed poem in history—Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra (2350 BCE)—is a Sumerian sign that can be read as sister. This sign carries many other meanings as well, like regent, sovereign, and prince, but Nin-me-šar-ra is a poem written by a woman about a female god, so in this context, sister is a very probable interpretation. When I decided to compose Humming the Blues, a book of 49 riffs on the signs that Enheduanna used in her poetic retelling of the story of Inanna, I chose sister as the English word that best opens this ancient poem to contemporary improvisation and meditation, as it returns “palpability to the world which habit and familiarity otherwise obscure…” Reading this ancient pictograph as sister enables the restoration of “liveliness to life,” a mission Lyn Hejinian has called the task of poetry, the work of art (Hejinian, 1993, p. 301).

Nin-me-šar-ra (Song to Inanna) is Enheduanna’s personal narrative, written as a call to Inanna, the wild, beautiful, powerful, and spontaneous deity, the female god who is undeniably a sister as she journeys beyond the boundaries of her own world and into another, a world from which no one has ever returned.

People have been talking—and writing—about Inanna for thousands of years. Her story is one of the earliest, a story passed from generation to generation, told around campfires, in temples, in places both sacred and profane where humans wondered about being alive. And as we continue to wonder about the liveliness of life, we find ourselves searching for details about Inanna’s journey, for phenomena, gestures, images, all clues left for us in ancient and contemporary tales of Inanna’s Journey to the Land of No Return.

I like to begin Inanna’s story with anecdotes about what she did before she set out for a land she knew that no one, not even another god, had ever been able to escape. She emptied her sanctuaries. She took down the gates to her temples. She made it obvious that she meant to leave her earthly realm. And then she dressed for the ominous journey. She lined her eyes and tinted her lips. She wore her crown, a flowing red robe, a lapis necklace, a carnelian vest. With the ropes of royalty and the secrets of the universe tied to her wrists, she turned her ear to the Great Unknown (Dalglish, 2008, pp. xiv, xv).

This mythic persona was not abducted, she exercised her own agency in traveling to the Netherworld, a place where she knew she would be left for dead. But going to that otherworld was not her only intention. She also planned to return. Before she left the heavenly and earthly spaces that were familiar to her, she strategized a way out. She called her assistant Ninšubur and outlined her rescue plan. It went like this: If she did not return in three days and three nights, her assistant should dress in rags, pour ashes over her head, weep, moan, and cry out for help from the other gods. And only then, after Inanna gave instructions for her rescue, did she approach the gates to the Land of No Return. The first gate, the second gate, more gates—seven gates altogether. At each gate, Inanna lost a badge of her identity as Ruler of Heaven and Earth—the tints on her eyes and lips, her crown, a flowing red robe, her lapis necklace, a carnelian vest, the ropes of royalty, and the secrets of the universe known as the me, until finally she was left naked and powerless in the Netherworld.

Inanna’s rescue plan would turn out to be successful. Ninshubur carried out Inanna’s instructions to the letter: She wailed for help from all of the gods, but only Enki, the god of wisdom who had given the secrets of the universe to Inanna, was willing to help. From the dirt under his fingernails, Enki formed creatures whose gender is not designated in the stories. Tiny, like flies, they could enter the door of Netherworld. They could bring the “food of life” and “water of life” to Inanna (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983, p. 64).

When Inanna was finally on her way out of the Land of No Return, the guards of the Netherworld demanded that someone take Inanna’s place, but Inanna refused to give them her assistant Ninšubur, who was wearing ashes and rags and weeping. Inanna also protected her daughter and her son, who were wearing the called-for rags and ashes, and wailing (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983). The rescue plan devised by Inanna was specific and spectacular, as we will see later when we consider the one person who did not follow the rules.

Yet thinking about Inanna’s rescue has always left me wondering. If Inanna designed a rescue scheme that allowed her assistant to bring her back from the Netherworld, has she remained here with us, or do we need to continue to follow her rescue plan? That seems to be what Enheduanna did when she created her poetic entreaty for Inanna’s return. And now, could we use a similar strategy to find Inanna and bring her into our world once more? I have heard that when we stand in the circle of a mythic persona—where we can see their gestures and sense the phenomena that surround them—we are in the hero’s presence (Chambers and Jeter, 1994). Could that be true? Could we rescue Inanna again, any time we want, by returning to the images and gestures in her rescue plan, by going back to all the palpable phenomena that surrounded her?

I believe we can rescue her again, and there are sources that can help us sort through the abundant traces of Inanna to find the phenomena and images we need. Of course, one of those sources is Enheduanna, the first person in history to claim authorship of her own writing, and in doing so to become the first identifiable authority on Inanna’s journey. It was around 2350 BCE when Poet-Prince-Priest Enheduanna told Inanna’s story in her Song to Inanna. And when Enheduanna wrote about Inanna’s being stripped of her beauty, her royalty, and her godly powers, Inanna’s story was transformed into a central metaphor in Enheduanna’s own personal tale of exile. When Enheduanna tells her own story, she notices phenomena and images in her own environment that link her to Inanna. Enheduanna’s city was under siege. Her cloisters were ransacked. She was raped, stripped of her powers, and left to wander in the hills. Her people lost everything, even their ability to desire. It is in these conditions that Enheduanna—a poet and high priest—called out to Inanna, threading the god’s ancient tale into her own, entreating Inanna to leave the Land of No Return, to return to her temples, and to rescue Enheduanna by restoring the city of Ur to its people.

Enheduanna’s text offered me the imaginative energy I needed to compose a jazz rendition of the Inanna story in Humming the Blues. As I wrote my jazz interpretation of Enheduanna’s poem, I went back to her Sumerian signs, pictographs that carry and express multiple meanings. An example is a sign we see in temple imagery, the cuneiform sign for the gateposts of Inanna’s temple. That sign is also the sign for Inanna’s name. Can language be so sacred that a single character can hold so much? Yes. Inanna is the gate. The gate is Inanna. In that fluidity, I found the moving, interactive nature of images embedded in Enheduanna’s cuneiform to be akin to hypertext and film. Enheduanna’s Song to Inanna progresses like a contemporary film or a braided memoir, with politics and personal narrative rolling through cuneiform signs.

Enheduanna’s and Inanna’s stories are not identical. But Enheduanna gives us Inanna’s story while telling her own, and the double nature of the Song to Inanna is clearly visible. We notice the arcs as both stories ascend into the shared female experience of labor and as they peak in the moment of birth. In Inanna’s story, it is her sister, the ruler of the Netherworld, Ereškigal, who is moaning in labor, and it is Inanna who is reborn. In Enheduanna’s story, the poet moans in labor during the creative act and then gives birth to Nin-me-šar-ra, her Song to Inanna. Details are abundant. The repetition is clear. The echo is audible. There is no need to analyze.

“In good films,” Susan Sontag writes in Against Interpretation, “there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret” (2003, p. 11). It is this kind of directness that Sontag believes is so transparent it allows us to experience “the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” (p. 13). Sontag is talking about how we should approach art, rather than mythology, but art is exactly what we are approaching as we notice the physicality of phenomena in Inanna’s journey. As we go back to Inanna’s story in pursuit of phenomena and gestures like those detailed in her original rescue plan, we will benefit from following Sontag’s advice and, rather than seeking to interpret the meaning of the phenomena in her environment, simply embracing the “sensuous surface” of detail (p. 13) image by image— the grainy feel of ashes, the rough touch of rags, the gasps that accompany weeping, the raspy sound of a call for help, the ache and fear of labor, the relief of birth.

Inanna is an expansive figure, and we can review temple imagery as well as text as we perceive the sensuous details that surround her: the gates, an eight-petaled rose, an eight-pointed star. What she was wearing when she left home: a crown, a red robe, a lapis necklace, a carnelian vest, the ropes of royalty and secrets of the universe tied to her wrists. Her eyes lined with kohl, her lips tinted red. Tiny rescuers that came from the dirt under Enki’s fingernails. The food of life, the water of life.

In reading for Sontag’s “sensuous surface” of images, we will find ourselves exercising a method described by poet and Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen in his discovery of the character of Inanna’s husband, Dumuzi—know in later writings as Tammuz. Jacobsen points out that to know a god, we must be willing to consider the places, the loci, where the god shows up in story and myth. “The approach to a god, if it hopes to be successful, must, as we have suggested, be made through the loci, the phenomena in the external world in which he was thought to be present: the sap in the trees, the date palm and its dates, the grain and the milk” (Jacobsen, 1970, p. 74). Jacobsen is focusing on Dumuzi/Tammuz and telling us to notice how the god and his external phenomena are mingled. Then he also points out that Dumuzi/Tammuz’s phenomena seem to relate exclusively to food and drink: milk, grain, the sap in trees and dates, the lambs that he shepherds. Nourishment is essential. Dumuzi/Tammuz is essential. But Jacobsen is also telling us to examine the phenomena carefully to understand what they are and what they are not. Food does not rescue, it simply pleases. Dumuzi/Tammuz is delicious, but he is not someone who is going to get you out of the Land of No Return. He does not cover himself in ashes. He does not wear rags. He does not cry out to the other gods for help for Inanna. This observation clarifies the literal simplicity of the images Inanna cites in her rescue plan. Dumuzi/Tammuz does not weep for Inanna, he does not even notice she has gone. This “lack of visible signs of sorrow infuriates Inanna” (Jacobsen, 1970, p. 88). On her way out of the Netherworld, “Inanna fastened on Dumuzi the eye of death…” She told the guards of the Otherworld, “Take him! Take Dumuzi away!” (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983, p. 71).

The work of novelist Milan Kundera can also be of help as we continue our pursuit of phenomena and gestures that inform us about our sister, Inanna. Kundera has defined a means of grasping “the existential code” of his fictional characters (Kundera, 1986, p. 29). To find the existential code, the driving force of certain characters in his fiction, he suggests that we consider “key words” that appear in his texts whenever these characters appear. Kundera’s approach is reminiscent of Jacobsen’s, but broader. He points to words that seem to be recurring when the character is near, perhaps on the same page of a novel, and he calls these words “key words,” whether or not they are directly applied to that character. He is advising us to look at the words that float around a character, nouns, verbs, things, actions. (Dalglish, 1996, p. 255).

Here are a few of the phenomena, images, and gestures that I found floating in the cuneiform signs in Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra and in other tellings of Inanna’s story, images that are most compelling to me. Colors: red, flames, a rose-colored evening, lapiz blue, light at the center of the storm, light being tossed, light dancing like quicksilver on a river, light in the pale morning. Sounds: troubled breezes, feet drumming the hills like dragons, rain being played like a harp, sounds of harps sharing the air with rose petals, a voice like a horn, tinged with laughter and with sorrow, moaning, the moment of birth, the moment of death.

When we have a lengthy list of images and phenomena, we have journeyed to a place where we can see, hear, and feel images and gestures and phenomena that surround Inanna. We are in her presence. We can turn our list into a rescue strategy like Ninšubur’s to bring Inanna back from the Land of No Return.

The final step that Ninšubur took was to bring the details of Inanna’s rescue plan into her own world, to act out the prescribed gestures, to ask for help, to carry the food and water of life, to dress in rags, to cover her head in ashes, to weep, to moan. This performance of gestures is work Enheduanna also does in her poem. As she pressed the multi-valent signs into clay, she sent perceivable descriptions of Inanna, she used signs that performed the gestures called for by Inanna.

This is something we can do ourselves whenever we retell the story of Inanna, when we notice phenomena that surround her, and finally, when we perform the rescue plan by noticing those gestures as they appear in our own external worlds. When I see a gate, I see Inanna’s temple gate, Inanna’s name. Inanna is the gate. The gate is Inanna. When I notice a rose-colored evening, Inanna. Breathe in the pale morning light, Inanna. Experience the warm sun. Feel troubled breezes. Hear the feet of dragons in the clouds, Inanna. Survive a storm, Inanna. When I turn my ear toward harps and horns, when I hear weeping and laughter, Inanna. When I dress in velvet and silk, wear rags covered in ash, Inanna. When there is the scent of roses, when I see flower petals in the air, Inanna. When I see the dirt under my finger nails. Inanna. Count the stars. Feel power. Carry a secret. Observe a sigh. Hear a moan. Share a life. Be present during birth. Endure a death. Inanna. She is rescued. When I experience these phenomena, I notice Inanna. She is back again.

Rescuing Inanna is a personal act. We can each bring Inanna back by exercising a personal search. My suggestion is this—think about the story of Inanna. Maybe the story you know comes from ancient texts, maybe from contemporary stories, maybe it’s a story that comes from your own imagination. Then make a list of the images you sense when you hear about Inanna’s journey to the land of no return. They can be images from any medium. Notice the phenomena that are physical and sensuous. Don’t feel that you have to interpret the meaning of the phenomena, simply embrace the detail as though it were part of her rescue plan. Your list might be a litany or a meditation. Carry it with you into your own world and notice when the phenomena appear in your day and in your dreams. Birth. Dawn. Roses. Red sunset. Stars. Thunder. Ashes. Rags. Death. Tears. Laughter. Light. Life. Count the petals on the flowers in your garden. Notice the gate. Open it. Notice the voice of a sister. Remember her song.

When we notice Inanna, she returns. When we notice Inanna, she is here again.