Читать книгу Close to the Bone - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 25

As Inanna can symbolize our upper, outer, or in-the-world personality, the part of us who is somebody in the world, so can Ereshkigal represent our unseen aspects and memories that we have kept hidden in the shadow or innerworld. Ereshkigal can be a symbol of the cause of our suffering that we have ignored or depreciated and can only approach, humbled and made vulnerable by adversity. Ereshkigal is unattended when we deny whatever is personally meaningful and authentically true for us and are walled off from this gnosis or felt knowledge. Going through the gates to our feelings and fears occurs when we incrementally go through layers of resistance to accepting the reality of illness.

People also make a descent with Inanna when they have gradually disabling illnesses that chronically worsen mental or physical health, illnesses that fall into a diagnostic limbo between the body and the psyche—environmental allergies, chronic fatigue syndrome, and psychosomatic illnesses—or they have infectious or hereditary diseases that involve multiple systems and are progressive. The descent may take years, with the onset of a new set of symptoms, subsequent tests, and prescriptions and procedures, like other gates to pass through.

Chemotherapy and radiation patients make an Inanna descent. Each treatment is another gate. After the second or third chemotherapy treatment, hair often falls out in clumps. On this descent at this gate, you surrender your head of hair, and even if you were expecting it, this is a shock. For women especially, it is a loss that strikes at identity and femininity. It is often a low point, a depressing time. The face in the mirror is unfamiliar. “Who is this?”

Inanna was naked and bowed low when she entered the underworld. She had been humbled and stripped as she descended, but the ordeal was not yet over. When Inanna came into Ereshkigal's presence, the goddess of the underworld was not happy to see her. Filled with wrath and judgment, Ereshkigal gazed at Inanna with the baleful eyes of death and struck her dead. Then Inanna's body was hung on a hook, where after three days, it began to decompose or turn into a slab of green meat.