Living the Myth of Inanna - This article, published in the Jungian journal Perspectives in 2005, further describes my profound passage through the quadrant of Darkness caused by delayed Anesthesia Awareness. Employing the ancient Sumerian Myth of Inanna to symbolize this descent, it recounts my experience in the underworld in primarily psychological terms; its spiritual significance is discussed in Finding Heaven Here

Living the Myth of Inanna
A Descent into the Netherworld of Surgical Awareness
John C. Robinson, Ph.D., D.Min.

Psychological Perspectives, Vol. 48, Issue 1, 2005.

Introduction

In the summer of 2000, I began an unexpected, extraordinary, and horrifying descent into the underworld. It began in the emergency room with cardiac defibrillation, deepened through a long progression of shattering “body memories”, and eventually consumed my practice, my profession as a clinical psychologist, and my income. What was this descent? It was a journey into the dark netherworld of surgical awareness – it was living the Myth of Inanna.

Surgical awareness happens when anesthesia levels become too light to suppress consciousness but neuromuscular blocking agents prevent any communication of distress (Osterman et. al., 2001). The surgical staff does not know the patient is awake, sentient, and terrified. I was 14 years old undergoing open-heart surgery for correction of a congenital defect when I began to feel the surgeon’s knife cutting through my chest. After the operation, the whole experience was split from consciousness to protect the integrity of my young psyche. Forty years to the month later, I experienced an episode of atrial fibrillation requiring cardiac conversion – stopping and resetting the heart with electrical shock – an event that began an inexorable rip tide sucking me down into the dark and frozen depths of surgical awareness. Now, after two years of psychotherapy, countless nightmares, and a major deconstruction of identity, I think I have endured the worst, and still, whenever I talk about it, I cry.

In the Sumerian Myth of Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and Earth travels to the underworld to attend the funeral of her sister’s husband. Rather than being greeted with honor and appreciation, Inanna is progressively stripped of identity, unceremoniously murdered, and left on a peg to rot. Reading this myth evoked the cold and horrifying shudder of recognition - its similarity to my surgical experience was uncanny – but it also brought new meaning to this soul-shattering event. Living the Myth of Inanna retells the story of Inanna’s descent as an allegory of unfinished adolescent initiation and the potential transformation of the mature masculine.

The Descent of Inanna: A Journey of Surgical Awareness

The Myth of Inanna is retold below in italics. Each section is followed by a commentary on its symbolic significance for my surgical trauma.

Inanna and Ereshkigal are sister goddesses presiding over very different lands. Inanna is Queen of the Heaven and Earth; Ereshkigal is Queen of the Underworld. As the story unfolds, we find Ereshkigal, deep in grief, planning the funeral of her recently killed husband, Gugalanna. But theirs has not been an easy marriage. Gugalanna, formerly known as the “great bull of heaven”, had been banished to the Underworld by the gods for assuming various disguises to repeatedly rape his wife. In her great love for him, Ereshkigal, once a goddess of the grain, gave up her earthly realm to join her husband in the underworld where she now rules.

Commentary. Written in cuneiform script on clay tablets over 5000 years ago, the Myth of Inanna is the earliest recorded story of a culture’s attempt to image, recover, and heal the divided feminine (Baring & Cashford, 1993). Ereshkigal represents that part of the feminine – the archetypal earth goddess - that has been repeatedly raped, devalued, and dismissed by the dominant patriarchy ever since warrior tribes invaded Old Europe some 6300 years ago. Residing deep in the collective unconscious, she bears the rage, humiliation, and suffering of her repeated betrayal. For women, the myth may symbolize and guide the psychotherapeutic journey to recover feminine qualities suppressed by the patriarchy (Perera, 1981). As a story dating to the earliest agrarian civilizations, it is furthermore one of many archetypal depictions of goddess-as-nature in her seasonal round of death and rebirth (Henderson & Oakes, 1990). But, as we will see, the significance of this myth for men in general and the patriarchy in particular is yet another story.

Wishing to attend the funeral of her sister’s husband, Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, dresses in her finest regalia and begins the journey down into the underworld. Recognizing the danger of this descent, she tells her trusted aid, Ninshubur, to seek help from the sky gods if she does not return in three days. And so Inanna’s journey begins.

Commentary. Unlike Inanna, my journey into the netherworld surgical awareness was neither expected nor chosen, nor was there anyone to run for help if I failed to return, and a significant part of me did not return. In fact, my departure has more in common with the rape and abduction of Persephone, but there was no Demeter searching frantically for me. Looking back, it feels as if I had been tricked into attending my own funeral.

Reaching the first gate to the Underworld, Inanna is asked to identify herself by Neti, the chief gatekeeper of the netherworld. After learning of her intentions, Neti returns to Queen Ereshkigal to describe this strange yet powerful visitor and request instructions. Furious, the Queen demands that her younger sister obey all the decrees and rites pertaining to one entering her realm, specifically, she must remove one piece of her formal regalia at each of the seven gates until she is stripped naked. Inanna consents and the ritual of descent proceeds. At each gate, she is told to be silent, reminded that the decrees of the nether world were perfect, and then another part of her upper world identity was removed: crown, lapis beads, sparkling stones, breastplate, gold ring, lapis measuring rod, and royal robe. Arriving naked, Inanna bows low before Ereshkigal seated on her throne. Her welcome, however, is this: she is condemned by the Anunnaki (seven judges), “fastened upon by the eye of death”, murdered, and her corpse hung on a peg to rot.

Commentary. Now begins my descent into the abyss of surgical awareness. The first gate to the underworld was the hospital. There I met numerous gatekeepers who decreed that I would surrender my home, my clothes, my control, and my parents (parents did not room with their children in 1960). No one asked my permission. No one asked if I wanted to proceed. I was psychologically stripped naked at the very first gate. Like the Hindu phrase “Neti, Neti”, I was neither this nor that; I was a patient, I was nothing.

The second gate was manned by various anonymous technician/priests who performed strange and terrifying rituals on my body. They drew seven vials of blood from my arms, shaved my hairless chest and groin, taped wires to my body, and then left me alone. As I write this, the computer tells me the sentence is in the passive voice and should be rewritten, but I refuse because by this point my voice was passive.

The third gate opened that night when I could not sleep and was given medication in place of comfort. The darkness came over me quickly and I do not remember being taken to surgery the next morning.

The fourth gate opened with the return of consciousness in a cave of darkness. Strange things were being done to my chest: movement, swabbing, cutting, pulling, jerking, sawing, tugging, tearing; hands inside my chest, inside my heart. Then horror, helplessness, and panic: What’s happening? I’m not supposed to be feeling this. It is so cold. I can’t move. I can’t see. Why are they doing this to me? I am so scared.

The fifth gate opened into unbearable grief: Oh my God! I am shattered, butchered, broken. My soft 14-year-old body splayed open with cold, hard instruments. They did this to a sweet young boy who did nothing wrong. I am dead. I am beyond nothing. Then finally it is over.

It is not over. The sixth gate opens when I am back in surgery to cauterize a bleeder. I am being opened up all over again. Will this ever end? Where is my mother?

At the seventh gate, I awaken to see my mother’s face pressed against a small window in the door to my room in the ICU. She looks terrified and anguished. I close my eyes. I will not give her the comfort of showing that I am OK. My body feels violated and numb. There is a tube coming out the right side of my ribcage, an IV in my left hand, and a long bandage down my chest. I am not OK. I am Frankenstein cut apart and sewn together in ragged pieces. Why did they do this to me? No one answers. I am Ereshkigal enraged. The whole experience sinks into the dark abyss of forgetting. I have to get “well.” I go home. It is over. In the dark, a corpse is rotting on the peg of a surgeon’s scalpel.

When his queen has not returned after the allotted three days, Ninshubur begins an impassioned and painful lament, tearing at his eyes and mouth, and beseeching Enlil, the highest god of sky and earth, to intercede. Citing Inanna’s decision to descend and the decrees of the underworld, Enlil refuses, as does Inanna’s own father, Nanna, the moon god. Only Enki, god of water and wisdom, responds to Ninshubur’s pleas. Bringing forth dirt from his red-painted fingernail, Enki creates two tiny mourners known as the kalaturru. Genderless creatures, they sneak down into the underworld and find Ereshkigal naked, unkempt, and moaning. Following Enki’s directions, the kalaturru exactly mirror her pain, which now includes both the pain of grief and of labor. Finally, Ereshkigal ceases her moaning and blesses the kalaturru for their compassion, offering them whatever they desire in gratitude. Their request is Inanna’s corpse which they soon restore with food and the water of life. Before Inanna can begin her ascent, however, the Anunnnaki remind her that none who descend to the Underworld leave without providing a substitute to take their place.

Commentary. In my surgical experience, no aid, friend, or parent cried out for help and the corpse of my shattered self was not restored to life. There was, instead, a long, long silence. Forty years of silence. Then one day, a second descent began and I again passed through the seven gates to the underworld:

The quiver of atrial fibrillation in my chest brought me back to the first gate of the hospital. The gatekeeper asked me to identify myself, checked with the medical gods within, and let me pass into the inner sanctum of the ER. Once again, personal identity was erased, replaced with the vacuous title of patient, and I proceeded deeper.

At the second gate, the technician/priests again ministered to my body with IV medicines, x-rays, blood tests, and EKG readings. I was now a body in a soulless land.

At the third gate, the head technician/priest made a pronouncement that filled me with unnatural dread and déjà vu: “We will have to stop and restart your heart with an electrical shock.” Immediately my soul felt pulled down into a dark and menacing hole but there was no choice. Like an Aztec sacrificial ritual, where the man sees his heart lifted from his chest before he dies, I knew something terrible was about to happen. With a fast acting anesthetic in my IV, I entered the dark once again. And somewhere in that darkness a heart shock switched on the body’s memory system.

Waking up, I asked if I’d been converted (the procedure is called cardioversion). The ER doctor quipped, “Yes, you’re Jewish.” Feeling giddy with relief and gratitude, I thought the drama was over. I had dodged the bullet. But it was not over. A fourth gate now opened into weeks of profound fatigue. Something was terribly wrong. I was not the same person. A dark, ominous shadow moved across my life.

The fifth gate opened into bizarre sensations in my chest - rubbery numbness, pressure, pulling, and cutting - that played over and over like a cellular videotape. I sought psychotherapy. My therapist said, “Close your eyes and go into these sensations” and soon the entire surgical experience took over my body and psyche. I was drawn inexorably downward by an undertow of horrific memories, gruesome nightmares, convulsive sobbing, heart palpitations, and depression. Again I felt like Frankenstein - dissociated and dismembered - and this somatic nightmare went on for months. And I was still descending.

At the sixth gate, I surrendered my practice. I could no longer concentrate or hold other peoples’ pain. A high school dream, college major, five years of graduate school, licensure, and nearly three decades of being a psychologist ended. I was stripped of my identity, its story, my community, and my place in the world.

At the seventh gate, my long-term disability carrier sent me for independent medical evaluation. Their consultant concluded none of this could have happened, opining that I just didn’t want to work any longer. My income was terminated. This final “eye of death” ended my life as I knew it. I lay naked at the bottom of the abyss.

 

Working in the Abyss

In my first, surgical descent, I was too young and psychologically unformed to process what had happened in the abyss; instead I instinctively split off the experience in order to survive and continue the developmental tasks of adolescence. I had to grow up. But this second descent was different in ways that allowed me to stay and work in the abyss. As a result, the outcome was also different.

In the second descent, like Inanna, I chose the downward journey. I could have resisted, distancing from my grief and anguish with clinical jargon, viewing it merely as depression of unknown or biochemical origin, and treating it simply with medication. But I didn’t. Inanna’s journey really began when she heard the sorrowful moans of her sister and began searching for their source and significance. She even agreed to the ritual conditions for entering the underworld that led to suffering more than equal to her sister’s. So it was for me: my own feminine consciousness, like a mother searching for her lost and crying child, intentionally journeyed downward into the netherworld. This time, I could bear the pain. I chose this descent.

And, though stripped naked, I was not defenseless the second time. Three decades of experience in depth psychotherapy accompanied me on this journey – I had been to the abyss countless times with those I had guided. I knew there was a way down and a way back, and that people survived the dark passage. In this regard, Ninshubur represented my own observing ego that stayed above ground, knew I needed help, and secured it from the god of water and wisdom, a wonderful metaphor for the psychotherapist. Though I had first consulted the wrong gods – the patriarchal sky gods of clinical medicine – I now entrusted myself to the god of the unconscious depths.

Finally, unlike the first descent when the feminine presence was so profoundly missing from the surgical theater, this time, like Dante’s Beatrice, she accompanied me throughout the underworld journey. My wife remained close to me during the defibrillation procedure, understood and supported my decision to close my practice, and fully stands with me through this time of hardship and transition. The feminine also appeared disguised as my male therapist. Patient and compassionate, he was also the kalaturru who willingly mirrored my unmitigated horror, anguish, and mourning until the corpse was revived. Then there was my mother. As it turned out, her younger brother – my namesake – had died of polio also at the age of 14. At the time of my surgery, she was as paralyzed by fear and unresolved sorrow as I was by anesthetic chemicals, and could not be there for me. In the second descent, long after finally grieving her brother’s death, sitting together in her kitchen, she held my pain in an almost archetypal maternal love. And, lastly, the feminine presence came from myself - my own capacity to listen, love, bear, and nourish my shattered soul.

Inanna’s Return: A Journey of Healing

Inanna returns to the upperworld through the same seven gates, each time reclaiming the parts of her royal regalia she had surrendered. Following her return, she searches for a substitute accompanied by underworld demons who first try to take Ninshubur in her place. Citing his unwavering loyalty and indefatigable efforts on her behalf, Inanna denies them. She also refuses to surrender two other faithful attendants as substitutes. But when she finds her consort, Dumuzi, sitting nobly on his throne, Inanna fastens the eye of death upon him and allows the demons to carry him away. Dumuzi weeps and begs for help from Inanna’s brother Utu who transforms him into a snake to assist his escape. Dumuzi’s sister, Geshtinanna, then offers to take his place in the underworld. In the end, Inanna decrees that Dumuzi and Geshtinanna will alternate this assignment so that each lives half a year above and below.

Commentary. What does it mean to find a substitute for one’s self in the underworld and who should take my place? The myth suggests three fundamentally different criteria for the selection of one’s replacement:

Revenge or retaliation: Inanna’s search for her substitute became a struggle with the demons of revenge and retaliation who were happy to pick the first man they come upon. And Inanna, too, winds up “fastening the eye of death” on a man – her consort – ostensibly because of his regal detachment. Should I fasten the “eye of death” on the aloof patriarchy of clinical medicine that exiled the feminine presence from the operating theater, surgically annihilated my soul, and then left it for dead? Or, shall I blame my mother (or the feminine in general) for abandoning me throughout my surgical experience? But neither medicine nor my mother was aware of betraying me, and revenge, while tempting, yields little emotional growth or benefit; and after all, the surgery saved my life.

Compassion: All three women in this myth – Ereshkigal, Inanna, and Geshtinanna – voluntarily entered the underworld out of concern and compassion for others. In striking contrast, the two men residing in the underworld - Gugalanna and Dumuzi – were sent there as punishment. This distinction marks a powerful difference between feminine and masculine approaches to justice, that is, between compassion and punishment. Perhaps I should ask one of these women to take my place in order to bring comfort and compassion to my inner suffering.

Transformation: The Myth of Inanna is clearly about the descent of the goddess, for this theme is repeated three times. But as Jung suggested, a journey like this holds different meaning for each gender (Jung, CW 9i, p. 183). For women, the story depicts the exile of the feminine to the collective unconscious and encourages them to heal this split by restoring the deep feminine to their lives. But just as importantly, this story challenges men and the patriarchy to welcome the anima-as-goddess into their interior for the sake of personal and social transformation. If the consciousness of the goddess were to join the deep masculine in the male psyche (Bly,1990), what a different world this world be!

Because all the ego’s choices reverberate in the unconscious, and because we must personally bear the karmic consequences for the really big decisions, it is extremely important to make a wise selection of one’s substitute. After much soul searching, I came to this conclusion: I would select my mother, not with the cold, vengeful “eye of death” but with deep respect for her as a symbol of the inner journey. At 86, with her life force dwindling in the twilight descent of congestive heart failure, my mother has become very soft, almost transparent, infused with new and luminous warmth like a Japanese lantern. A near goddess now who knows the powers of descent, unfinished business, and maternal love, she could bring her light into the abyss, transforming my interior with its sacred consciousness. She will move there anyway upon her death.

Conclusions

While the Myth of Inanna contains many archetypal themes, it is most certainly a story of initiation into the mysteries of death and rebirth, for the heroine must die to her identity, authority, and life in order to awaken renewed, perhaps even transformed. For me, open-heart surgery, occurring as it did in adolescence and bringing me to the very edge of death, had been a profound but incomplete initiation. As physically and spiritually challenging as any vision quest, yet there had been no spiritual preparation or community container to guide and bless my descent or welcome me back as a “life bringer.” It was, in short, a rite of passage without the rite. Four decades had to pass before this initiation could be resumed and completed in a second descent ritualized this time in personal story, ancient myth, and community sharing.

Commenting on the theme of initiation in the Myth of Inanna, Campbell explains, “One by one the resistances are broken. (The Hero) must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable (Campbell,1973, p. 108). Surely, like Inanna, my resistances were broken and I “bowed and submitted to the absolutely intolerable.” But as initiation, the journey must also move from death to rebirth. Discussing the “enlargement of personality” effected by psychological rebirth, Jung writes, “When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, ‘One becomes Two,’ and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation” (Jung, CW 9i, p. 120). For me at the summit of 58 years of age, I now sense the awakening of the anima-goddess inside – for she is the substitute I chose – and look forward to the transformation of consciousness that comes when a man invites the goddess into his heart.

FURTHER READING

Baring, Anne & Cashford, Jules. (1993). The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Penguin Books.

Bly, Robert. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

Campbell, Joseph. (1973). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Henderson, Donald & Oakes, Maud. (1990). The Wisdom of the Serpent: The Myths of Death, Rebirth, and Resurrection. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1977). The Collective Works of C. G. Jung. Vol. 9i: Concerning Rebirth. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Murdock, Maureen. (1990). The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Osterman, J.E., Hopper, J., Heron, W. J., Keane, T.M., & van der Kolk, B. (2002). Awareness under anesthesia and the development of posttraumatic stress disorder. General Hospital Psychiatry, 23, 198-294.

Perera, Sylvia. (1981). Descent of the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. Toronto: Inner City Books