Читать книгу Close to the Bone - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 39

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LIKE GREEN MEAT ON A HOOK

When Inanna went down through the seven gates into the Great Below, the proud and powerful goddess entered naked and bowed low, looked into the baleful eyes of death, and was struck down. Her body was hung on a hook to rot. She became a slab of green meat. This is a picture of how it feels to be reduced and humbled, powerless and without illusions, to be vulnerable and rejected, to feel putrid. There are phases of being ill in which people feel like Inanna on the hook, when the infected, dysfunctional, or malignant cellular level of their being permeates the soul, and they feel as if they were dead and rotting. This is what suffering can feel like as well to those who make a psychological descent to uncover sources of chronic depression and anxiety in the depth work I do as a Jungian analyst.

This also powerfully parallels the experience that women and some men have had in abusive relationships that have stripped them of layers of self-esteem and psychological defense. There is physical, emotional, and spiritual battering in abusive relationships, and the most malignant of them can become life-threatening. The need to get away, the difficulty of doing so, and the effort to recover psychological health and not return have many similarities to what it takes to recover from a malignancy.

One who lives with a chronic illness such as diabetes, Crohn's disease, or hypertension when it is out of control and escalates into life-threatening crises and repeated emergency-room admissions, shares similarities—at the soul level—with the person who has repeated, increasingly serious bouts with alcohol. To bottom out, one way or another, is a descent into suffering.

Anyone with a malignancy, a chronic illness, a drug or alcohol addiction, a mental illness, or repeated trauma may identify with Inanna at this low point in the myth. You may have been depressed and anxious before you became ill. You may have been psychologically naked and bowed low before this, and the symptoms of the illness have further reduced your spirit. Sick physically, you may now feel as if the cells of your body are dying and rotting. And the illness may do what psychological distress did not: it may cause you to go down into your own psychological depths, to be with the pain, wounding, and rage that is there—to that place in the psyche where a woman or a man is both suffering Inanna and suffering Ereshkigal.

Seeking to Know What Lies Below

Why did Inanna make this descent, anyway? What made her leave the Great Above where she was Queen of Heaven and Earth to descend into the underworld? When she knocked loudly at the gate to the Great Below and demanded that the door be opened for her, the gatekeeper asked,“Who are you?”and she said,“I am Inanna, Queen of Heaven, on my way to the East.” When he asked, “Why has your heart led you on the road from which no traveler returns?” Inanna replied, “Because of my sister, Ereshkigal.” Once she learned that her sister goddess Ereshkigal was suffering and in mourning, Inanna was compelled to make this descent, to be a witness.

Put in a medical context, Inanna's reason for unknowingly beginning a descent is like learning that something is physically wrong—“Ereshkigal is suffering” may translate into a suspicious finding on a routine physical examination, or noticing something oneself that cannot be ignored—and being compelled to go through the doors into the hospital, clinic, laboratory, or specialist's office to do whatever is required for the diagnosis and treatment.

Inanna's reason for making a descent is also metaphorically the same as why a person enters a psychotherapist's office: a need to know what lies below her usual level of consciousness, to find out what or which aspect of herself is suffering, to delve deeply into the grief and pain that lies in the Great Below. To knock at my office door in order to enter a depth psychological process is to knock at a gate to the underworld. Nightmares; repetitious dreams; unbidden thoughts, images, and impulses; pervasive anxiety; depression; inability to know what one really feels; and deep unhappiness are some of the reasons for making a descent, through which it may be possible to be a witness, to feel, know, remember, and mourn what lies below. However compelling the psychological reasons are for making a descent, people often resist, using addictions to work, relationships, activity, television, alcohol, or other reality-distorting substances to avoid it, as all of these are ways of keeping awareness of pain at bay. Unless psychological symptoms become so disabling that a person cannot function, it is possible to resist. Life-threatening illness, however, takes us out of ordinary life and into the underworld. A descent is then no longer an elective procedure.

Symbolic Death, as in a Chrysalis

Inanna described herself to the gatekeeper as being on her way to the East, which is a strange statement to make when she is seeking entry to the underworld. It makes symbolic sense, however. Dawn comes when the sun rises in the east, and hence the East represents rebirth, new life, vulnerability, innocence, and hope. Descents into the underworld take a person into the realm of death, transformation, and rebirth. In a descent, there are symbolic deaths: death of some part of the old personality or former identity, the end of a particular hope or illusion. In a descent, something that has been buried in the psyche may be unearthed, remembered, and brought to life. There is a possibility of a spiritual or psychological resurrection.

Angry and Rejected Ereshkigal

Women who function well in the world of social and professional life resemble Inanna: they do well in the material world and are well connected to patriarchy, often as wives or daughters of traditional men. Ereshkigal, meanwhile, suffers in the underworld. Ereshkigal— as a contemporary archetype—represents inner or rejected or repressed aspects of an Inanna woman and of women in general. A woman who is more like Ereshkigal than Inanna has qualities and concerns that are introverted and unrelated, devalued and rejected; she is wounded and angry, often is depressed, can be ill, and is not allied with men with power. Ereshkigal is hidden in the underworld: socially invisible and discounted, manifested in public by the crazy or angry woman muttering to herself. Just as we avert our eyes from the street person who is being Ereshkigal, so do “nice women” avert their awareness from the Ereshkigal inside themselves; she is buried in the depressive mood, hidden in the physical symptom, or even camouflaged in their good deeds that have shadowy origins. Nice women try to repress unacceptable hostile feelings, thoughts, and impulses. When they succeed in covering them up, unacceptable emotions and urges become hidden and out of conscious awareness, vague guilt remains, and the women often end up being extra nice to the very people toward whom they feel hostile.

“Nice women” learn to repress anger, especially on behalf of themselves, from an early age, when they are rejected and made to feel shame for having such feelings. As an aftermath, they wear mental blinders that keep them from noticing the demeaning of women in general or themselves in particular. Instead they themselves adopt these same negative attitudes. Thus nice women do not think well of women and do not consider them as worthy as men. For all the status they may have, such women suffer from low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. This prejudicial attitude toward women and thus toward themselves comes as much from their mothers as from fathers and society. A mother with an inner sense of worthlessness passes it on to her daughters; the devaluation is passed down from one generation to the next.

The pain and rage of not being loved and valued for herself is excluded from consciousness, along with the feelings, talents, ambitions, and dreams that were not acceptable for her to have. Whatever was rejected and repressed in the psyche remains alive in the Great Below, in the symbolic figure of Ereshkigal, who suffers.

Ereshkigal harbors hatred toward Inanna, a metaphor for the self-hatred that lies below the surface of Inanna women who have been shaped by the need to do well in order to be acceptable. We all come into the world wanting to be loved, and when we are not, we settle for less: men usually for power and control over others; women for approval from others.

The Inanna-Ereshkigal configuration grows out of childhoods where performance, appearance, and social approval counted and were possible to achieve. Such women find ways to get approval— by the way they look, dress, are socially accepted and marry well, or through work, from good grades to professional success: approval comes from being Inanna. But their experiences of being unloved, of being the recipient of parental neglect or abuse, of not being cherished for themselves, can be condensed into the symbolic figure of Ereshkigal. They look as good as Inanna on the surface, and keep their misery as Ereshkigal hidden in the underworld. Until they make a descent, Ereshkigal may be as hidden from themselves as from the world. (This is true for men as well.)

Illness makes it impossible to go on as Inanna. Going through the gates, stripped of all the accoutrements of Inanna, there is no longer any way to maintain the persona and the illusion and protection that position and accomplishments offered; naked, bowed low, feeling like a slab of green meat on a hook, a woman who can no longer be Inanna finds herself becoming Ereshkigal and discovers the self-hatred, worthlessness, hostility, pain, and rage that she had avoided feeling and knowing, until now. Ereshkigal's fury lashes out at the situation. Rage, terror, and grief rise like waves and go through her. Rage moves from “I don't deserve this!” to “I brought it on myself!” There is rage at the unfairness, rage at oneself, and rage at others who go about their usual lives. There is terror about dying, fear of being in pain or potentially disfigured, and grief that their lives are irrevocably altered. Ereshkigal moans in pain. Once “nice women” feel their gorge rising, blinders drop away—they see how unconcerned or self-concerned others are, and they are angry. But anger and rage are uncomfortable feelings for them to have or express; these feelings are incompatible with being “nice.” They also fear alienating people they are dependent upon, especially now that they are ill and afraid. Consequently, newfound anger is unpredictably expressed or suppressed: one moment a woman is furious, the next occasion she stuffs it, or directs the anger against herself and becomes depressed and feels worthless. In the meantime, there are doctor's appointments, procedures, demands for decisions, life that has to go on, and the aftermath of coping with diagnosis and treatment. No longer able to be Inanna and being an angry, in-pain Ereshkigal, is the low pointin the lives of women with life-threatening illnesses as it is in the myth.