The “Descent of Inanna” is one of the oldest myths of journeying to the underworld where, through death, an initiation takes place and, ultimately a rebirth.
 
Inanna was an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of love, beauty, sex, war, justice, and political power. She was originally worshiped in Sumer and later in Babylon as Ishtar. Inanna/Isthar was the ‘Queen of Heaven and Earth’. Inanna’s possession of the divine powers of ‘me,’ which encompass all aspects of human civilization, made her very powerful. Through shrewd trickery she was given these by Enki, keeper of the ‘me’ and god of creation, water, wisdom, magic and mischief. Enki helped her to return from the underworld, bringing her back to life.
 
This myth of Inanna’s decent concerns the meeting of the Queen of Heaven with the Queen of the Underworld -   Inanna’s sister, the Dark Goddess Ereshkigal.  Individually the sisters symbolize the goddess’s dual aspects and jointly they represent the primordial polarity and full spectrum of the feminine. The underworld is symbolic of the unconscious. This can be seen as a story about an encounter with one’s shadow, necessary in the growth towards wholeness and consciousness.  Jung’s journey of individuation involves an integration of the conscious, upper world aspects with the unconscious, shadowy underworld aspects.  Being from the ‘Great Above’, Inanna’s has only partial awareness and “Until her ear opens to the Great Below, her understanding is necessarily limited.” Wolkstein (1983) wrote that those who return from the Great Below “carry within them the knowledge of rebirth and often return bringing to their culture a new world view.”  
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However this is a perilous journey. Inanna was a queen in the Upper World.  Instead of being treated as such she was stripped of her royal garments and jewels, her outward symbols of power, beauty, and success. Suffering, humiliation and loss are the only powers able to affect the ego’s belief in its invincibility. Stripped of her persona and naked, Inanna is confronted by her shadow, the dark goddesses, and is turned into a corpse, ‘a piece of rotting meat’, hanging on a hook. Sounds like a familiar feeling?
 
Image credit: "Queen of the Night" Relief (left) and color reconstruction (right), 
1800-1750 B.C.E., Old Babylonian, baked straw-tempered clay, 
49 x 37 x 4.8 cm, Southern Iraq and reconstruction
© Trustees of the British Museum

A social media post I wrote for @jungsouthernafrica 
 
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Humanity is in a Dark Night of the Soul, a time of global crisis ushered in by Covid19. People around the world are suffering devastating loss and trauma –the death of loved ones or loss of income as economies threaten collapse.  During this time of uncertainty people may experience feelings of despair, loss of meaning and deep insecurity.

St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic and poet who lived in the 16th century, initiated the term “Dark Night of the Soul”.  Having experienced his own dark time while imprisoned, he wrote about painful experiences as a process of “purification” in the spiritual journey towards connection with the divine.
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An experience of the Dark Night is almost always precipitated by a crisis: a dreadful disappointment; a terrible heartache; a distressing illness; or, the loss of a loved one. What follows is a difficult, but significant transition to a deeper perception of life through a painful shedding of the beliefs and conceptual frameworks we use to give meaning to identity, relationships, career, etc.
 
Jung referred to the Dark Night as the ‘night sea journey’ or ‘nekyia’, believing that our sorrow and suffering serve the individuation journey. As an archetypal pattern or process it involves a basic restructuring of the psyche, transforming our individual or collective values and attitudes. Jung metaphorically compared alchemy (transforming lead into gold) to the psychological process of navigating the Dark Night of the Soul, equating it with Nigredo stage.
 
The Dark Night symbolizes death and initiation. The individuation journey must include a meaningful psychic descent into the underworld, a facing of our shadow aspects. Mythology describes many such descents in the tales of  Inanna, Persephone and others.
 
The Dark Night of the Soul can be a painful, chaotic, frightening, overwhelming and disintegrating life crisis. It can also be a time of transformation, renewal, rebirth and finding deeper meaning in life. Our collective response to the current coronavirus pandemic has the potential to reframe, renew or even completely change our belief systems which may bring a shift in consciousness and alter the future of humanity.
 
A social media post I wrote for @jungsouthernafrica
 
Image credit:  Michal Karcz
 
#jung #carljung #jungpsychology #jungianpsychology #depthpsychology #analyticalpsychology #unconscious #consciousness #innergrowth #archetypes #individuation #shadow #darknightofthesoul #nightseajourney #katabasis #nekyia #nigredo #descent #initiation #death #depression #capetown #capetownlife #capetownliving #southernafrica