InannaQueen of Heaven and the Descent Through the Seven Gates

Who was Inanna?

Inanna was a goddess of ancient Mesopotamia, honored in Sumer as the Queen of Heaven. She was tied to love, to war and to fertility, and her city was Uruk, where her great temple stood. She was also linked to the planet Venus, the morning and evening star, which appears at the edge of night and day.

She is a goddess of thresholds, and the most famous story about her is the one where she crosses the greatest one: she goes down into the underworld, and she comes back.

This page gathers what I have learned about her, how I came to walk with her, and the activations I have recorded in her name.

Enheduanna, the first author known by name

Around 2300 BCE, a woman named Enheduanna served as high priestess at Ur. She was a daughter of Sargon of Akkad, and she is the earliest author in history known by name.

She wrote hymns to Inanna, including the one often called the Exaltation of Inanna, in which Inanna is praised as a goddess of enormous power. Many scholars see her work as one of the reasons Inanna rose so high in the religious life of the region.

The Descent of Inanna is a separate poem, known from clay tablets copied by ancient scribes, and no author is named on them. It matters here because the first named writer in history chose Inanna as the one to write about.

The descent

In the Sumerian poem, Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, turns her attention to the Great Below, where her sister Ereshkigal rules. She prepares herself, dresses in her regalia, and tells her trusted companion Ninshubur what to do if she does not return.

At the first of seven gates, she is stopped. To go further, something is taken from her. The same thing happens at each gate that follows, until she has given up everything that made her recognizable as a queen.

She arrives before Ereshkigal with nothing. She is struck down, and her body hangs on a hook for three days.

What brings her back is not a hero. Two small beings are sent down, and they do nothing but stay with Ereshkigal in her grief and echo it. Because they witness her, she releases Inanna.

Every gate is walked twice

As Inanna comes back up, she moves through the same seven gates, and what she gave up is returned at each one. She is not the same person who went down. She has been to the place underneath the crown.

The myth does not make the return tidy. The beings who escort her up demand that someone take her place below, and she finds that her husband Dumuzi has been sitting on his throne, not grieving her. She does not climb out unchanged or unpaid, and I find that honest. In the end, Dumuzi is granted half the year above, and his sister Geshtinanna takes his place below for the other half.

It is also why I do not read the story as a straight line. Letting go and receiving happen together at a gate, and once you have walked it, life will ask you to walk it again. It is a spiral, and each time you know the way a little better.

How the story came back

For close to four thousand years, the Descent of Inanna lay buried in the ruins of Nippur, one of Sumer's spiritual centers. Its clay tablets were excavated between 1889 and 1900, then divided between museums in Istanbul and Philadelphia.

Scholars had to read the fragments, match them and reassemble the text over about fifty years, with Samuel Noah Kramer playing a key role. The ending, with Dumuzi and Geshtinanna, was one of the last pieces to be found, on a tablet from Ur.

Diane Wolkstein later shaped Kramer's translations into the retelling in her book, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Translations differ in some details, which is why you may see a ring in one version and a bracelet in another.

How I came to Inanna

I went to school to become an archaeologist, and I have loved ancient history, mythology and comparative religion since I was a child. For over a decade I wrote mythology into my novels, and I taught other authors how to publish. Both identities worked, for years.

Somewhere in there, something underneath started trying to come through. It took my businesses cracking, the traction I had built disappearing and the growth stalling out before I stopped trying to fit it inside the old containers. In the middle of that crumbling, I found out I am autistic and ADHD, and it made everything else make sense.

In the summer of 2024, I sat down to meditate on which goddess I was most attached to. Ishtar came up first. She is the later Babylonian version of the Sumerian Inanna, so I started researching, and followed her back to Inanna and the seven gates.

It did not feel like a metaphor I had picked because it was pretty. It felt like a path I was already standing in. My ego death was specific: letting my author and teaching identities crumble, letting the money that came with them fall, and trusting, without proof, that something stronger would be there on the way back up. Inanna gave me the language for what I was already living.

I am not on the other side looking back. I am still returning to gates I thought I had cleared. That is why I build the work gate by gate, the same way I walked it.