The Seven Gates of Inanna: What Her Descent Myth Teaches About Loss and Return

I'm Carissa Andrews, a Reiki Master in the Usui Shiki Ryōhō lineage, and the channel of a frequency I call Aureya. Most of what I write about lives at the intersection of energy work, myth, and the body, the places where an old story turns out to still be telling the truth about something happening right now. This is one of those stories.

Long before anyone wrote a self-help book about starting over, there was a goddess who walked into the underworld and lost everything on the way down.

Who Was Inanna?

Inanna was one of the most powerful deities of ancient Mesopotamia, queen of heaven and earth, goddess of love, war, and fertility. She had crowns, robes, jewelry, and a throne. She had, by every measure available to her civilization, made it.

And then she decided to descend into the underworld to see her sister, Ereshkigal, who ruled the land of the dead.

The myth, drawn from Enheduanna's Hymn to Inanna, doesn't treat this as a simple visit. To enter the underworld at all, Inanna has to pass through seven gates. At each one, a gatekeeper stops her, and at each one, she's told the same thing: to go further, she has to give something up.

The Descent

One gate at a time, Inanna hands over her crown, her jewelry, her breastplate, her royal garments, everything that marked her as who she was in the world above. By the seventh gate, she's naked. Not just undressed, stripped of every symbol of power, status, and protection she'd ever held.

She arrives before Ereshkigal with nothing left to prove who she is. And Ereshkigal, in her grief and her rage, kills her.

Inanna hangs there, dead, until allies from the world above intervene and she's revived, and makes the journey back up through the same seven gates, reclaiming what was hers at each one, in reverse.

That's the myth, in its bones. A queen descends, loses everything that made her legible as powerful, dies, and finds her way back, changed.

If you'd rather feel this than just read it, The First Gate is a free channeled transmission I recorded at that first threshold.

Why This Myth Still Finds Us

You don't have to believe in ancient Sumerian goddesses for this story to land somewhere true. Most of us know some version of this descent already: the divorce, the diagnosis, the burnout, the year everything you built your identity on got taken from you one piece at a time, until you didn't recognize the person left standing there.

The myth doesn't promise that loss like that is meaningless. It promises the opposite, that the stripping down is the point, and that what comes back up isn't the same as what went down. Inanna doesn't just get her crown back. She returns as someone who has been to the underworld and knows what's actually true underneath the crown.

The Seven Gates, and What Each One Costs

Working with this myth for years, both in my own healing and now in building Temple of Mysteries, I've come to see the seven gates as mapping onto the seven chakras, each one asking you to release an old, protective pattern so a different quality can be received in its place.

Read down that list slowly, and see how many of those releases you recognize in your own life already, not as ancient history, but as this year.

Not a Line, a Helix

Here's where I'd push back gently on how this myth usually gets taught. It's easy to read it as a straight line: descend, lose everything, hit bottom, climb back up, done. But that's not how release and reception actually work in the body.

At each gate, the letting go and the receiving happen together, not as two separate trips. You don't fully release the old pattern of a gate and then, later, receive its gift. The releasing is part of what makes room for the receiving, in the same breath. And once you've walked the gates once, you don't get to skip them the next time life asks you to descend again. You walk them again, faster, because the pattern is familiar now. This isn't one-and-done work. It's a spiral you return to.

Where You Already Are

If any of this stirred something while you read it, you're probably already standing at one of these gates, whether you'd have named it that way or not. Maybe it's obvious which one. Maybe it isn't.

I built a free reading to help with exactly that. It's called Which Gate Are You At?, and it takes about five minutes. It won't diagnose you or tell you what to do next. It'll just hold up a mirror to where you already are, and name it clearly enough that you can actually work with it.

Walking It, Not Just Reading It

This myth is the architecture behind Temple of Mysteries, the mystery school I'm building for anyone who wants to walk these seven gates in their own body rather than just read about them from the outside. Inside, that looks like She Who Rises, a self-paced path through each gate's descent and ascent, held together with monthly live circles, myth, discussion, and verbal Reiki activation.

It's also the foundation of a book I'm writing under the same name, She Who Rises, which goes deeper into this myth than a blog post ever could.

If you want to experience a single transmission through all seven gates before committing to anything bigger, She Who Rises: A 7/7 Portal Activation with Inanna is a good place to start.

For now, if you're curious where you stand, start with the gate reading. If you already know, or the reading confirms what you suspected, Temple of Mysteries is where the actual walking happens.

You're already standing at one of the seven gates. This is just the invitation to name it.