Inanna’s Descent
The myth of Inanna’s descent maps an initiatory progress that narrates the stripping away of illusions into a higher state, without which all power and excess is futile. When Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, voluntarily enters the underworld, surrendering her divine regalia and symbols of authority at each of the seven gates, this disrobing represents a systematic dissolution, the peeling away of status, identity, and power that, while impressive in the material world, hold no weight in the face of truth.
At the core of the underworld, Inanna is judged, killed, and left as a corpse. To Her Adept, this stage is the dark night of the soul, the initiatory abyss where the Adept is stripped bare, confronting their most primal fears, weaknesses, and mortality.
Inanna’s eventual resurrection does not restore her to her former state but instead elevates her. She returns with a newfound connection to the underworld, knowing that sovereignty is built on an intimate understanding of light and shadow, and that power is nothing but this. Without such wisdom, power remains hollow and without meaning. Her ascent is an integration of suffering and surrender. In this way, the myth serves as a guide for initiates.
The Seven Gates in the myth represent the stages of this work. Each gate corresponds to a piece of her regalia, aspects of her status, authority, and self-image. As she passes through, she must surrender a part of herself, shedding light over the Adept’s process of ego death and spiritual infusion.
Upon leaving The Great Crown of Heaven she drops divine authority and spiritual sovereignty and surrenders the illusion of absolute control.
Offering her Earrings she gives away wisdom and perception, as ears are associated with receiving knowledge. Their loss is the loss of preconceived notions and assumptions.
Her necklace represents connection, communication, and personal expression. Its removal marks a loss of voice and identity.
Her Breastplate or Robe (Garments of Royalty) signifies strength, protection, and social status. Without it, Inanna becomes vulnerable and exposed.
Her Golden Bracelets or Rings bear wealth, adornment, and power over the material world. Letting go of these indicates detachment from physical possessions and earthly influence.
The Measuring Rod and Line (or the Lapis Lazuli Staff) are tools of judgment and decree, symbolizing law, order, and the ability to command. Losing them represents the surrender of authority and justice.
Her Loincloth, the final layer of protection and identity, being stripped, signifies complete surrender, reducing her to her pure, essential self.
By the time Inanna reaches the underworld throne of her sister Ereshkigal, she is completely exposed and dies. This journey through the Seven Gates can be seen as a metaphor for the Crossing of the Abyss (Mystical Disintegration), where one must relinquish illusions to reach perennial wisdom.
What is interesting is that when crossing the abyss through the seven gates the Adept is, in bearing the sacrifice of Dumuzi, identifying with and becoming Inanna, this is where the ecstatic union of love occurs. This kind of striptease bears Inanna’s sacrifice, and it is, naturally, an erotic performance that plays with the tension between power, vulnerability, and revelation. The descent is an episode of loss but also of seduction, a dance. Notice that at each gate, she is commanded to undress, much like a performer revealing herself layer by layer. The gates act as a dominant force, dictating the pace of her unveiling: she is not in control of her own disrobing, which heightens the tension. She is the Queen of Heaven, yet she must submit. This surrender is enforced but deliberate in the erotic dynamic of power play.
Each removed item makes her more vulnerable but also more real. There is an undeniable sensuality in the image of a goddess so accustomed to power being progressively stripped until she stands naked before the forces of death. Her power here is in the ritual of unveiling. She is becoming more magnetic, drawing in the gaze of the underworld, of the judges, of Ereshkigal.
Striptease is about controlled revelation. If Inanna is being stripped against her will, she continues forward willingly, knowing she will be undone yet proceeding nonetheless. Yielding becomes its own form of dominance, and even in her nakedness, she exercises her divinity more intensely.
At the seventh gate, she is fully revealed, completely bare before the underworld. This is the peak of seduction and the moment of destruction, where pleasure and annihilation meet. Now, Inanna is reduced and amplified to her eroticism. She is no longer a goddess of indulgence, she is the force that compels desire, compels surrender, compels the gaze even in death.
This is why, when she returns, she is more potent than before. She has not lost her sensuality; she has merged it with the wisdom of the dead, making her even more dangerous and magnetic.
The seven garments can easily be tied without corruption to the seven hermetic planetary spheres that, in turn, were thought by the gnostics to compose the matrix that imprisoned the soul. But since we have given enough attention to the garments, we must now lean over the nature of the gates themselves, which would open before Inanna’s striptease, leading her deeper into the chthonic kingdom.
The first gate is the entrance to the Underworld. Inanna arrives at the outer boundary of the underworld and demands entrance from Neti, the gatekeeper. She claims she is coming for the funeral rites of Ereshkigal’s husband, but secretly seeks power over the underworld, the last place left for the light of Inanna’s star to illuminate.
This Neti, “guide of the self”, cannot but remind me of the Neti-Neti meditation practiced in Advaita Vedanta where the practitioner repeatedly affirms “not this, not this” to negate the identification with everything the mind or senses can perceive in order to transcend the false self and discover the unchanging, infinite consciousness. But I have no way to know if the word has traveled in space and time to India.
In our myth, Neti presents the boundary between the known world and the unknown, between the living and the dead, the first point of no return at which the initiate commits. Inanna is entering total separation from the surface world, a place beyond life where the light of the living no longer shines and everything familiar starts to fade, including identity.
The second gateway is the gate of separation from external markers. In this space, illusion is extinguished through the transitional plane and one is forced to dive deeper beneath the surface to find protection.
The third gate is the gateway of perception, the realm of the unknown, beyond what we can control, where knowledge is no longer valuable. One is forced to step into a deeper state of awareness to reveal a truth that cannot be grasped through intellect.
The fourth gate is the gateway of vulnerability, where the self itself is irrelevant. This is the domain of authentic being, unprotected and unadorned by role.
The fifth gate is the gateway of powerlessness, complete surrender to fate, where the initiate loses all control over actions and outcome. Here, we understand that the inevitable, by being inescapable, has already been accomplished—a place where the initiate cannot control anything and must surrender to the cosmic flow.
The sixth gate is the gateway of the law of the Underworld, leading to the Realm of Divine Judgment. With the surrender of her rod and staff, Inanna enters the domain of absolute law and order, but not the kind of order she knows. The law of the underworld is harsh and impartial. Her initiate faces a divine justice that is not subject to human understanding. In this absolute fairness, where there are no exceptions or mercy, the soul confronts its most profound truths without the ability to influence its fate.
The seventh gate is the gateway of death. Inanna has no identity left. This is the final passage, a space of absolute obliteration and renewal, where she passes into non-being to be recreated.
Inanna enters the throne room of Ereshkigal, where she is judged, executed, and left hanging as a corpse. This final stage is the underworld’s absolute truth, and it is my truth and your truth alike: there is no escape, no negotiation.
The judges are the Anunnaki of the Underworld, a group of chthonic deities who serve Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld. They are described as dark, silent beings who hold absolute authority over the realm of the dead, and are different from the celestial Anunnaki, the high gods of Sumerian mythology who govern the heavens and earth. These underworld Anunnaki are severe and unyielding, enforcing the immutable laws of the dead.
When Inanna stands before them, they judge her with the “eye of death” and the “word of wrath,” which are acts of total condemnation. They sentence her to death, leading to her execution by Ereshkigal’s command. The presence of these judges shows that the underworld is not a place where one can argue, plead, or deceive; it is a realm of absolute truth, where illusions are tore and one must face the consequences of their actions and existence. Their judgment is not about morality in a human sense, it is about cosmic law: the inescapable necessity of descent and death.
Seven are they, rulers each of one of the gateways, as seven are the tablets in the Enuma Elish (the Seven Tablets of Creation) and seven the fixed celestial bodies (Sun and Moon included) of greater importance for Babylonian astrology. In their mathematics, Mesopotamians used a base-60 system in multiples of seven. Seven is thus the number of cosmic order and completion.
This order shows we are not simply in the face of mysticism and psychology. The Descent and Ascent of Inanna through the seven is an ontological initiation, a direct experience of death while still living. To the true adept, this revels the soul’s condition beyond the physical plane. It is an initiation into the awareness that one is already a spirit navigating the afterlife.
Most importantly, the seven gates strip away illusions that keep the soul bound to a single plane of existence and there is nothing personal about it. The journey is not one of Freudian or even Jungian psychology, it is a realization that the self is already moving between worlds, already subjected to the laws of the dead even in the flesh.
The initiate begins by recognizing even gods must kneel before the chthonic forces. The dead do not hear as the living do; they do not perceive in the same way. The initiate must abandon linear understanding and embrace a direct, timeless, non-human perception. In the afterlife, one is not what one claims but what one has become. The body can’t shield us from this, it is already dead, already decaying, already impermanent. No, to be in the flesh is to be in the realm of the dead: only necessity and truth exist, far deeper than morality. One stands as either an empty husk or as a spirit who has integrated the death-realm while still living.
Day to day, the judgment of the Anunnaki of the Underworld is a revelation. Inanna is now different. She carries the underworld within her. She does not fear death, for she has already passed through it. She does not rely, for she has seen what remains when all else is gone. She is no longer only of the heavens or the earth, she is now of the underworld as well, a being who moves through all realms.
One who has truly undergone this initiation sees differently. The desires and fears that once ruled them lose their power. The structures of society appear as shifting sands. Such a person moves upon the world with the certainty of the dead yet with the vitality of the living. They have become something between worlds, an initiate who has seen what lies beyond the veil and carries that knowledge with them. This is why the descent is about becoming a ruler of one’s own soul. Inanna’s adventure is the adventure of all adepts: the recognition that the afterlife is a necessary condition of being. To master this descent is to become sovereign, one who is not bound.
If this is so, what happens to the hunger that drives the Lion Kings of Ishtar? Inanna’s excess, her unbounded passion, desire, ambition, and hunger for power is tainted. The descent does not remove her from her nature; rather, it forces her to confront her limits.
In her celestial form, Inanna is a goddess of life in full intensity: love, war, pleasure, ambition, and dominance. She is hungry without limit, seeks more power, more lovers, more dominion. She desires the underworld not because it is hers by right, but because she cannot bear that there is something she does not possess.
This excessive drive is a divine force, since she is the very essence of expansion, but it is also naive. She enters the underworld as if she can claim it by sheer will, believing that her authority as the Queen of Heaven and Earth is enough to command the dead. But the underworld follows different laws, and she is humiliated and murdered. Her celestial power meant nothing in the underworld. She was strong, beautiful, and radiant, and yet she died.
The Queen of Heaven was only desire, force, and expansion. Now, she understands suffering, stillness, and that power is powerless. She emerges tempered, sharper, more complete. This makes her more sovereign, more dangerous, because she is no longer the subject to the cycles of pleasure and war, she has been freed by what lies beneath them. She desires, loves, seeks, wages war, but now she does so as wise death. This is why, upon her return, she immediately seeks retribution against Dumuzi (Tammuz), who, living in luxury, mourned her not, nor cared for the world in cosmic disruption, who abandoned the people. Before the descent, she may have been excessive in a way that was careless, indulgent, or even childish. But now? Commanding the galla demons of the underworld, She is ruthless. She does not abandon Her nature, She perfects it.
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