Inanna’s descent

The Sumerian descent of Inanna to the nether world is, for Campbell, the paradigmatic feminine katabasis — older than Homer, structurally complete, and psychologically legible. Inanna, Queen of Heaven, elects to descend to the realm of her sister Ereshkigal. She passes through seven gates. At each she is stripped of an article of her ladyship: crown, lapis rod, necklace, breastplate, belt, ankle stones, pala-garment. “Upon her entering the seventh gate, / All the garments of ladyship of her body were removed” (Campbell 2015, citing the Sumerian tablet). She stands naked before the throne. The judges of the nether world fix her with the eye of death. “The sick woman was turned into a corpse, / The corpse was hung from a stake.”

Her messenger Ninshubur — “her carrier of supporting words” — appeals to the gods on her behalf (Campbell 1959, Primitive Mythology). Enlil refuses. Nanna refuses. Enki alone consents, fashioning two beings from the dirt of his fingernails, sending them down with the food of life and the water of life. Inanna is restored and returns.

Campbell reads the movement as the archetypal figure of psychic transformation in feminine form. “Inanna and Ereshkigal, the two sisters, light and dark respectively, together represent, according to the antique manner of symbolization, the one goddess in two aspects; and their confrontation epitomizes the whole sense of the difficult road of trials” (Campbell 1949). The sister above is completed only by the sister below; the katabasis is the form of that completion. The stripping is not loss but the necessary undoing of the persona of ladyship before the lower sister’s throne. Campbell’s formulation — “He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow” (Campbell 1949) — names the structural demand that the Greek Persephone-myth, the Eleusinian initiation, and the alchemical mortificatio each restate. This is the Lineage’s earliest image of the coniunctio of the conscious and the unconscious feminine.

Relationships

• katabasis — the master pattern.
• demeter-persephone — the Greek analog.
• neumann-great-mother, feminine-individuation — the psychology Campbell derives.
• coniunctio — the two-sisters structure read as conjunction of opposites.
• dismemberment — the corpse-on-stake figure.

Primary sources

• campbell-hero-thousand-faces (Campbell 1949; 2015 ed.)
• campbell-primitive-mythology-masks (Campbell 1959)