05/20/2022
Inanna is the power that comes back to us when we accept and integrate our shadow. Inanna was the most prominent female deity in ancient Mesopotamia. At the height of her worship, around the Uruk period 4000-2000 BCE, temples and shrines dedicated to Inanna lined the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Her name is Sumerian for Lady of Heaven. Her temples housed her priestesses and they each would take a man to bed with them on the Spring Equinox to reenact the divine marriage or hieros gamos between Inanna and her consort, Dumuzi. The hieros gamos is an ancient ritual of uniting the opposites from within: the male and female, the light and the dark, and most especially heaven and earth. This theme occurs in accounts of Inanna’s descent into the underworld to find her sister, Ereshkigal. She must take off an article of clothing at each of the seven gates so that, when she finally reaches her sister, she is naked. And when Inanna ascends, she does so with Ereshkigal’s power.
When your soul selects her card:
Inanna goes into the depths of her own unconscious to merge with her twin-sister-self. She becomes more powerful because she is no longer using conscious, psychic energy to keep her shadow, or negative attributes hidden, and deep underground. She courageously descends and faces the aspects of herself that are hard to get to when she’s “fully dressed” or cloaked heavily in the ego. Inanna is an initiation to get naked. She wants us to drop our defenses. She wants us to see how holy and sacred it is to be vulnerable. As above so below: this is an alchemical adage that suggests heaven and earth are not so separate. It suggests that within us, deep down in the dark cages where we place parts of ourselves, the truths that exist there also exist right here on the surface of our everyday life. So if we are denying, and exerting great amounts of energy to keep from seeing our shadow, it is actually playing a large role in our conscious life as well.
When we can face what we think is dark, or negative about us– I mean really embrace it and see it for what it is (a beautiful broken place that’s only at root a call for love) then we can emerge more whole. We can marry the light and dark aspects of our being. We can see the cosmic dust and the thick mud that we’re made of. And in uniting with our twin-sister from the depths, we can stop projecting her onto other women. We can see and own the hot mess we often are and not get sabotaged by it. The light must cast a shadow. And the high priestess is the one who gets called to love them both.
- Meggan Watterson, from “The Divine Feminine Oracle”
Illustrated by Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman, She Who Is
“Inanna”
Mixed Media
2018 '
