Through the Gates of Inanna: birth as feminine initiation
Inanna’s mythical journey into the underworld to meet her sister Ereshkigal is a tale of reclaiming feminine instinctual wisdom. A wisdom that once belonged to the worship of the Goddess as the central axis of human society. Around five thousand years ago, at the time of Inanna’s myth, humanity entered into a slow phasing out of this knowledge eventually leading into a global severance of human’s spiritual relationship with Earth and body. This is the story we live today. One way to begin to return to the chthonic wisdom that lies buried in the living lands, our bones and our blood, is through the timelessness of Inanna’s myth whose story serves as an obsidian mirror upon which we might see our own dark sister reflected, and embodied. This is where symbolic death births new consciousness.
When the rhythms of nature show itself through the underworld tidings, its wisdom tends to speak through the labour of suffering. Women in child labour will often experience that when the process of birth shifts from opening the cervix to moving through it, most of the pain subsides. In mythology, it is the opening of the doors to the underworld that brings the initial suffering. In Inanna’s mythical descent there are seven gates to pass before she completes her descent into the underworld. At each gate the gatekeeper, Neti, beats and strips Inanna of her clothes and jewellery.[i] When she finally arrives at the gloomy queendom of her dark sister Ereshkigal, Inanna crawls on all fours wearing only the dirt on her skin.[ii]
Prima Materia
Inanna’s stripping down at each gate represents the grinding down of the false ego. The mill of the underworld will keep churning; it empties those who knock on its door from all false images to the base ingredient, the prima materia. The prima materia is that which we personally and collectively have repressed; here a primal instinctive animal self which reclaimed provides rich soil for the emergence of a meaningful, diversified consciousness steeped in the immanent.
It seems that this churning is what the contractions do in birth before it moves into the ‘pushing’ phase. Most women experience it as painful, an excruciating gut-wrenching horror at the most, or at least as intense. I have heard women describe it as glass shattering in their backs. My first birth literally floored me.
During the initial stage of contractions the womb is physically opening a gate and it takes as much strength to open a gate as it does to keep one closed. The womb is the strongest muscle in a woman’s body, keeping the cervix shut to safely carry a baby whose average weight at the end of nine months will be 3,3 kg. Add in the placenta and amniotic fluid, the womb holds another 1,5 kg.[iii] By the end of those nine months, the force with which the womb contracts, creates a dynamic change in woman herself. She has now become the vessel for the womb. Some call it true labour, when contractions last up to 90 seconds every four minutes or so. To hold this force of nature, to be a vessel for it, may require all the capacity you can find in yourself.
When I was pregnant in 2014, I did not think of this. I watched and read all these wonderful stories about orgasmic tantric birth and quickly decided that that was the birth for me. I made all the preparations to facilitate a cosmic experience of birthing bliss feeling confident I too would enter womb Walhalla. We ordered a home bath. I had a birthing ceremony. There were candles, incense, wind chimes and Tibetan singing bowls. We did tantric breathing exercises, hypnobirthing, perineal massage, and acupressure. At ten pm my waters broke showing blood. I ended up in hospital and forcefully pushed out my daughter seventeen hours later while being hooked up to an oxytocin drip.
That long night, morning and early afternoon, each contraction pulled on another tightly wrought string of feeling abandoned, scorned, attacked, misunderstood, victimized, and overwhelmed. Throughout most of those seventeen hours, I felt like a wounded animal, and acted like one too. I did not experience bliss, only temporary relief. Just like Inanna who demanded entrance to the underworld, a realm outside her jurisdiction, I too had demanded an experience that wasn’t mine to command. All I could do was endure.
In birth, the increasing strength of contractions is the labour of initiation.
Although I thought I had prepared as well as I could have, no one can fully prepare for initiation. You’re not meant to. It is supposed to overwhelm so it can blast away all the congealed misconceptions. If there remains too much familiarity for the ego to hang onto, it will hold the lid on the unconscious, burying both our trash and our treasure.
The physical pain and exhaustion that we experience during labour push us into the deep. The physiological aspects of labour illustrate how pain and exhaustion wear down our mental capability. We move into our primitive brain and constellate a flight or fight reaction exhibiting emotions of anxiety, panic, stress, and fear. In Jungian terms, you could also define this as an encounter with the shadow. The typical shadow shows itself in our reactions as primitive, instinctive, fitful, irrational, and prone to projection. It is our dark side, that which we do not want to be nor accept about ourselves, but this can be both something we view as negative or positive. During my first birth, what I experienced was the opposite of what I had ‘envisioned’.
Before we continue with Inanna’s journey, we must take into account that Jungian psychology and thought stems from a Western mind raised in a euro-patriarchal landscape. A person having grown up in a differing cultural setting might have a different experience of shadow and what it constitutes. But for psyche to mature in any culture, there will be a ritual, practice or theory in place to serve the need of both being peeled to the core and opened up into new layers of consciousness.
Inanna on clay tablet also known as Ishtar (Mesopotamia c 2500-3000 BC)
Inanna and Ereshkigal: the chthonic feminine
In Inanna’s story, it is her sister Ereshkigal who personifies the shadow. She is the Queen of the Underworld. Inanna had decided to visit Ereshkigal to attend the funeral of her sister's late husband, but Inanna indirectly caused his death at the hands of her own pride. Visiting the underworld brings her literally and symbolically to her knees so she may face Ereshkigal, her own shadow, surrender to the wisdom of soil and reintegrate her instinctual self. This myth arose at a time when polytheistic Goddess worship as the central axis of human society was waning, and monotheistic religion arose with a focus on the one male God. With the dawn of a male God centred belief system, so did the focus shift towards reason and logic, eventually separating the sacred from soil, intuition, sexuality and the chthonic. Inanna represents the feminine turned away from its sacred ground of being. Her story shows us what it takes to find our way back into a holy dialogue with our own body and the way of the natural. She is there to guide us into the depth of birth as rebirth.
When Inanna crawls towards her sister’s throne, Ereshkigal casts Inanna the eye of death and has her lifeless naked body hung on a hook.[iv] Such symbolic death is indispensable for spiritual life and must be understood in relation to what it prepares; birth to a vaster mode of being.[v] As Inanna’s flesh rots away for three days, something remarkable happens. The ego-self represented by Inanna becomes subservient to her shadow sister Ereshikgal, and not without conscious intent. Before Inanna made her descent, she had instructed her consort Ninshubur to call for help if she were to stay away for more than three days. It illustrates a knowing of the underworld tidings and its obscure process of gestation. The killing of Inanna can then be seen as the choice to submit to the organic wisdom of nature. In the rotting of her flesh, Inanna is consumed by the fermenting processes of death. Fermentation converts raw materials into a desirable product that sustains new life. Here Inanna’s body as raw material, or prima materia, is transformed into something useful, into new consciousness. The process requires an active passivity of the ego-self and a submission or acceptance of life ’s circumstances as it is presented in the moment. Instead of fighting whatever comes our way, we heed to the call of the underworld and let it shape us, let it birth us. In this moment of submission, the shadow performs the active role of birthing something anew. As Jung says:
We must…..let things happen in the psyche….This is an art of which most people know nothing. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping correct, negating.” (C.G. Jung 1958, as cited by Lowinsky 2016)
While Inanna’s corpse decays, Ereshkigal goes into labour. She leads the way into new life. This is feminine destruction with the purpose of creation, fundamental to the workings of the crone energy that stands firm at each threshold of feminine initiation. Woodman and Dickins (1996) describe this energy as “the Goddess who gives life is the Goddess who takes life away. . . . we hold the paradox beyond contradictions. She is the flux of life in which creation gives place to destruction, destruction in service to life gives place to creation.’[viii] The crone lends her helping hand and discards us, testing inner faith; a yielding to build endurance, which allows us to know our true strength and from a healthy ego-Self relationship, surrender more.
Death and Rebirth: a mythology of initiation
The psychology of initiation finds its roots in these death-rebirth myths, where the archetypal processes of death and resurrection can be utilised in the task of transformation[ix]. In almost every ancient culture you can find a myth of the dying-and-rising God. Isis and Osiris, Persephone and Inanna, but also that of Buddha and Jesus. The death turns into birth story ‘corresponds to a temporary return to the primordial Chaos out of which the universe was born, while ‘rebirth’ corresponds to the birth of the universe. Out of this symbolic re-enactment of the creation myth, a new individual is born.’ (Eliade, 2017)[x] The rituals that re-enact this great shift in cosmic order as a reflection of a shift in consciousness are mainly lost to us. In the West, we are mostly dependent on nature and life to shock us into maturation. Childbirth presents an opportunity of not only initiation, but also one to enter consciously - to a certain extent. You can either work against the tide or go with it.
Where the tide takes you may neither be relevant nor redundant. One of my clients’ wishes for a natural birth took on a different meaning as we explored her dreams during her pregnancy. While she hoped for a birth without medical interference, she also expressed a need to be in the hospital as it made her feel safe since it was her first child. As we worked with the images of the unconscious, she relaxed into the wisdom of her own body and in the medical knowledge of the hospital. She expressed her wishes as much as she could, and as she did so, dream images of a horse surfaced. In our last session together she was more than a week past her calculated due date. We worked with the image of the horse, feeling its strength, walking and standing as the horse. She experienced its clarity while feeling grounded in her body. Her waters broke as she motioned out of the experience. A week later she recounted her story to me. The birth was long and arduous because the cervix did not dilate. When her gynaecologist asked her if she wanted to continue natural labour, she felt herself connect into a clear mode of thinking, much alike she had experienced while connecting into the horse. She gave in to what her body told her and asked for a caesarean. As they wheeled her into the operating room, she not only felt present in herself, but surrendered into the loving arms of the four women helping her and her partner beside her. She describes the birth of her daughter as miraculous, loving and gracious. She could not have imagined that a caesarean birth would feel so natural. She had surrendered to the tide.
For the birth of my second child, I made similar preparations to my first. We hired a birthing pool, a friend mixed herbals and tinctures. I watched videos with my daughter and reacquainted myself with hypnobirthing. I performed rituals, received massages, and I took the time to ease into my body. But I didn’t do it with a singular idealistic focus in mind. Pain creates muscle memory and endurance builds character.
This time, I merely followed the currents of my instinct and my dreams as they entwined into consciousness.
Looking back, I watched hypnobirthing videos because my mind needed to know what my body was doing so that when I was in pain, I could marvel at the brilliance of nature’s design instead of sliding into victimization. I watched birth videos with my daughter, both the relaxed ones and those of women screaming in pain, because I wanted both of us to be prepared for birth as it is and as it can be. I went to a massage therapist, because I needed to be touched and my husband simply did not have the time to do it. It was on the massage table that I felt my body become Earth, my thighs her hills, my blood her water. My body was hers and the birth of my daughter my gift back to Her. From that moment, it wasn’t just my experience anymore, it was Her experiencing through me. I honoured the Goddess through ritual, but mostly by honouring her dark chthonic, earthy wisdom. By ‘getting out of the way’ just as Inanna had to when her corpse was flung dead on a hook.
It is also here in the story where help from the upper world leads to the rebirth of Inanna. While Ereshkigal endures her labour pains below, Inanna’s consort Ninshubur runs around looking for help above. It is Enki who finally turns up with the goods. Enki is a multifaceted God and holds amongst others the virtues of mischief, magic, wisdom, water, and male virility. Enki is said to be an Earth God, having made a full descent-ascent to the Underworld, and often chooses the path of compassion, forgiveness, and wisdom. At Ninshubur’s plight and with a father’s love for a daughter, Enki scrapes some of the dirt from underneath his fingernails, which become two sexeless beings, or demons, and sends these to Inanna. The beings transform into flies, so they can enter Ereshgikal’s cave unseen carrying both the water and bread of life for Inanna’s revival. The flies on the wall don’t do anything besides groaning when Ereshkigal groans, moaning when she moans.[xi] I have seen this behaviour replicated by my one-year-old daughter in response to her crying elder sister. As the eldest throws herself in primal fits of crying over lost candy or anything she feels a distinct ‘loss’ for, however trivial it might seem to adult eyes, her little sister will come up next to her and echo the sounds while patting her back, until hands reach out for embrace and crying soothes into simmering sobs. In this simple yet unexpected show-up of support, Ereshkigal softens as well and gifts them anything the flies may wish to take. They want the corpse and Inanna finds her way back to the living. It could be argued that in the surrender of the feminine, in the complete softening into Eros, the integrated masculine principle responds. This masculine is in touch with both the earthly and cosmic realms and descends with a clarity of compassion that extracts light from darkness, and paves the way for ascension.
When starting the path down into the initiatory realms of birth for a second time, I passed each gate releasing something. A misplaced ideology, a sense of false ownership, the fear of losing control. But it was in the peak of labour pain that I truly gave in. Giving in not by slumping into self-pity, but by giving into a power much greater than I will ever be able to fathom. The Goddess works in mysterious ways, they say, and the steps that take one from contraction into expansion work differently for each person, for each new descent. She had been leading me, hinting of what was to come, or could be, through a myriad of ways throughout my pregnancy.
I had tiptoed the edge of the inner and outer worlds for months. My brain had become soft and my experience of the world around silenced. This state of being, or birth energy, gradually descends in and around a woman’s body, a serpentine coiling, but with the gentle touch of a cloud. In the last week, my uterus had been kneading the cervix with increasing intensity each day, announcing the onset of labour, but at the last moment subsiding.
“I dream about little elephants walking along a bank. They turn into young children and are accompanied by a sweet but strict elderly woman. Now they stand in the centre of an auditorium shaped spiral. A girl with curly blonde hair runs towards me. We hug each other at the outer rim of the auditorium, so happy to see each other, but it isn’t time yet as the old woman calls her back.”
The next night, our daughter was born.
This is our story.
I tell my husband it could happen tonight. He lays a towel underneath me, just in case. Ten minutes later we hear the muffled sound of a balloon popping. Warm water trickles down my leg. ‘What was that?’ he asks. I giggle as a flood of oxytocin rushes into my bloodstream. “My water broke,’ I reply.
The sequence of events mirrors the first time. Water breaks at ten pm, contractions start immediately. But this time there is no blood.
My husband goes downstairs to set up the birthing pool while I go inside, down into my breath. It feels intense so quickly. I wade in and out of the bath upstairs, finding solace in weightlessness. Nobody records the rhythm of my contractions, only I know, sort of. Although I have learnt to elongate my outbreath to induce calmness, there are moments I want to run away from the pain. I automatically start to groan low tones. It is not something I practiced or read about, it’s what my body wants to do. I remember this from last time and think back to those long seventeen hours while I hear my mother climb up the stairs. She’s been called in to look after our eldest.
My husband welcomes me down two hours later. He feeds me tinctures and warm tea that I hardly notice drinking. The birthing energy amazes me again. How it centres and pools around, creating an even stronger primal instinctual silence as the mind completely fades. The part of me still consciously present condenses into a singular point of focus, I can only just about make out the candlelight and altar. A week before, I received a blessing ceremony here, in this same spot. The drawings of the women hang above the altar, including my painting from a dream experience a year before.
dream image of ‘woman by fire’
Suddenly I am fully aware that I am in another dimension, but not the same as a dream. She is in front of me. A beautiful native elderly woman in a Maria cloak made of fire. She looks powerful in her silence. Not necessarily peaceful, but more of a focused silence, in surrender to this fire. This is necessary, I know, the fire. She is showing me this, that she has to go through this. It all happens very quickly, the thoughts, the experience. The reality of it scares me and I throw myself back into my body. I re-enter through a burning heart, waking up underneath the stars where I am camping out with my daughter.
My husband sits behind me in the pool while I feel hot energy enter my crown. Each time it funnels down into my body, it initiates another big contraction. By watching the videos, I know what my womb is doing, contracting out and up to open the cervix. I don’t do much, rather as little as possible. The wisdom of my body is at work and I am just an observer of something completely magical. Yet every so often the contractions are too much, I cannot bear them all. Especially when my husband pulls away to do the necessary things. Changes, however small, puncture a hole in my bubble. The familiar feelings of abandonment and victimization creep up again. I try to breathe through it, but it has only been three hours. I ask my husband to call our midwife. I want drugs.
With her thirty years of experience, she listens to my moans and concludes I am not yet experiencing any ‘peaks’. “Mindset”, I hear my husband repeat. “Call back in an hour.” Right, no drugs then.
My midwife’s cool and distant words sentence me to the imprisonment of my body. I am bound within its pain and any struggle against it, any notion of being able to cope, now fully disappears. Something in me knows that the only way out is fully in. I have to submit; all of me needs to bow down. Rather than moving or circling, my body wants to be still. I sit myself upright and slide into a heart meditation I have been practicing for the last few years. I feel my husband steady himself behind me, locking into position he won’t move out of until our daughter is born.
My breath sinks into infinity, and almost immediately my perception of pain ebbs away. I fade away. There is only sensation. Energy converting into movement, the opening and closing of my womb while my breath holds me. For thirty minutes I wade into yet another boundlessness that cannot be put into words. Then my body changes gear, she wants to push. In that moment I remember a fleeting image I had of birthing this baby with just us, no midwife present. Having learnt from last time, I had let it go as quickly as it came, but now it seems to be given back to me. I don’t tell my husband about what is happening, I don’t want him to call our midwife. I can do this. We can do this.
The contractions pour through like a waterfall, just as I dreamt a few months before.
“I’m on my way to the hospital to give birth, but the car won’t start. I park and walk outside. A dolphin passes by. She lets me sit on her back. I hold on tight as we plunge down a waterfall. Even though it scares me a little, all I can do is give in.”
I feel her head pushing through. I touch the top of it with my fingers, it feels mushy yet firm. My vagina isn’t ready though, so I let my baby’s head sway back and forth a few times. The force flowing in increases again. I hold onto the bath rail to steady my body so I can allow this torrent to rush through only guiding it down with my breath. With the next push I let her slide to the edge. They call this the ring of fire, the point at which the vulva is stretched the furthest and the longest. I hold her there, waiting, breathing, burning.
The following wave pushes her head into my hand while the next one pushes her body out of mine. I lift her out of the water into the air.
“Huh? Oh, Ohhhh!” my husband gushes. Well, I hadn’t told him…
She lies on me quiet and peaceful. For a moment I worry she is not breathing. My husband notices her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, so I lower her back down into the water, uncoiling the chord. Back on my chest, he gently blows into our daughter’s face, and she exhales her first breath.
~
Bodhi Mae was born at 2:30AM, on the 17th of November 2020.
~
Note: To explore the depth that pregnancy, birth and early motherhood bring, including the darker periods, analysis can be valuable. I specialize in guiding women through these transformative times. Please feel free to contact me to explore your options. You can send me a note at suzanneschreve@gmail.com
Bodhi Art by Lotte Hauss
[i] Inanna’s story, Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess, (Inner City Books, 1981)
[iii] Statistics from babycentre.co.uk
[iv] Brinton Perera (1)
[v] M Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (Spring Publications 2017)
[vi] J Mark, “Innana’s Descent: A Sumerian tale of Injustice” www.worldhistory.org/article/215/inannas-descent-a-sumerian-tale-of-injustice/ (2011)
[vii] Naomi Lowinsky, The Rabbi, The Goddess and Jung (Fisher King Press, 2016)
[viii] Marion Woodman and Eleanor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames, (Shambhala Publications, 1996)
[ix] Eliade (3)
[x] Eliade (3)
[xi] Perera (1)
