Cultural Mythology: Myth, culture, and consciousness

Ninshubur swings into action

Ninshubur (goddess) entreating, 2330-2150 B.C.E. Mesopotamia.

As we pick up the story we find Inanna right where we left her---rotting on a hook in Ershkigal’s throne room. She’s been gone for three days and three nights. Luckily for Inanna, Ninshubur, her right-hand woman (who was a queen in her own right, the Queen of the East), is loyal and tenacious.  When Inanna does not reappear as planned, Ninshubur begins howling and weeping and tearing at her hair and clothing. She laments so loudly and powerfully that in a very short time, everyone knows that the great Goddess of Heaven and Earth is missing.

Now Ninshubur goes to the houses of the gods. She goes first to Enlil, the God of the Air and father to all, just as Inanna had instructed. Ninshubur powerfully entreats him. She says, “Your daughter Inanna is trapped in the Underworld. She needs your help. Surely you will not let your bright silver be covered with dust. Surely you will not let your lapis be broken into small pieces for the stonecutter. Surely you will not let your fragrant boxwood be cut up for use by the woodworker. Inanna, the goddess of Heaven and Earth, needs your help.”

(the silver and lapis and boxwood are very valuable materials used in temples and by the kings—here they are potent metaphors for Inanna).

Enlil listens to Ninshubur politely. When she is finished he replies angrily, “My daughter Inanna, she craved the power of heaven and earth, and she got it. Now Inanna has decided to go to the underworld. Well, there are rules in the underworld. No one who goes there ever returns. Inanna will have to stay where she is.”

As there is no help to be had from Enlil, Ninshubur goes next to the house of Nanna, the Moon god. He is Inanna’s father. Surely Inanna’s own father will be more sympathetic. Again Ninshubur entreats the god. She tells Nanna, “Your daughter Inanna is trapped in the Underworld. She needs your help. Surely you will not let your bright silver be covered with dust. Surely you will not let your lapis be broken into small pieces for the stonecutter. Surely you will not let your fragrant boxwood be cut up for use by the woodworker. Inanna, the goddess of Heaven and Earth, needs your help.”

Nanna listens to Ninshubur. When she is finished he also replies angrily. “My daughter Inanna,” he says, “she craved the power of heaven and earth, and she got it. Now Inanna has decided to go to the underworld. Well, there are rules in the underworld. No one who goes there ever returns. Inanna will have to stay where she is.”

Whoa. The big god, the god of gods, and Inanna’s own father, refuse to help her. Was she wrong to go? These two gods seem to think so. Is she just a rule breaker or might they be jealous of Inanna, or scornful of her ambition? Which raises the question: to what does she aspire? Inanna is a complicated goddess so she may have imagined her descent as a power grab of some sort. But the idea that she “turned her ear to the ground” at the time of life that she did---the "honeymoon," and presumably the phase of life grounded in beauty and sexual potency is over--- suggest something more soulful to me.

The conflict between one’s innate sense of self and one’s family or the culture, is not unusual. How many of us feel that we are misfits in our own families, misunderstood, even actively thwarted by the folks who are supposed (we believe) to support us and foster our development? According to Michael Meade, this kind of tension is a gift not a tragedy. The discomfort inspires and motivates us to go out into the world and find our way. If everything was comfy and cozy contentment at home he says, who would leave? You’d be thirty years old and asking your mom if you could have another cookie. In any event, the story is not yet over.

This paraphrase is from Diane Wolkstein and Noah Kramer's wonderful translation of the myth, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

---Naomi Shibab Nye, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. The painting is Old man and Sorrow by Van Gogh.

Inanna in the Underworld

Installment number two of the myth of Inanna. It's a sign of her wisdom I think, that she makes the plans with Ninshubur. Inanna is doing something very unusual and dangerous and she has respect for the powers she will encounter, something that we would do well to learn. Failure is a possibility. To borrow Rilke again, "what we choose to fight is so tiny!" but we are sometimes too arrogant or ignorant to understand this.

On with Inanna: The journey to the Underworld was quite dangerous and few had the courage or the chutzpah to imagine it. Inanna told her faithful maidservant and loyal warrior Ninshubur of her plans. The goddess asked her to keep watch over the place of her descent and to go to the gods for help if she didn’t return in three days and nights. "Go first to Father Enlil, God of the Air," Inanna instructed, "and then to my father Nanna, God of the Moon, and finally to Enki, God of the Deep and of the Waters. Enki possesses the water and food of life and he won't let me die." Ninshubur agreed.

When Inanna arrived at the outer gates of the underworld she called out and knocked on the gates to rouse the gatekeeper. “Let me in” she demanded. But he shrugged and asked, “Who are you?” Unimpressed with her answer, the guard made Inanna explain the nature of her visit. He kept her waiting outside the gate while he went to the queen Ereshkigal to see what she wanted to do. “Your sister is here at the gate” he reported, “dressed up very fine and anxious to comfort you.”

Ereshkigal bit her lip and thought about this for a moment. “Let her in” she finally said, “but strip her of her finery, piece by piece, at each of my seven gates.”

So Inanna was allowed to pass, but at each gate something was removed: her crown, her string of small lapis beads, her double strand of beads, her breastplate, her gold ring, the lapis rod and line used to weigh and measure, and finally her robe. Each time Inanna protested. At each gate she was told: “Quiet Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

Naked and bowed low, Inanna entered the throne room and knelt in the presence of her sister Ereshkigal. The judges of the underworld murmured and passed judgment upon her and Ereshkigal looked at her with the eye of death. Ereshkigal struck her.

Inanna was a corpse.
Inanna was hung like a piece of rotting meat on a hook on the wall.

Tough going for Inanna, who as you might suspect, is about to undergo a profound transformation.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth

One of my favorite myths is the story of Inanna. The image she portrays of the feminine, dating back to the days of the great mother goddesses, is rich and complex, and the seven surviving hymns that have been translated describe a cycle of life and psychological development that has not changed much. The hymn called the Descent of Inanna is particularly powerful and relevant this time of year as everything moves, metaphorically, underground. I think we need this story today to remind us of the necessity of going down and of the relationship between psychological growth and mature wisdom, and loss. There are people today (the authors of the self-help books that I studied being one, large category) who claim that hardship and suffering are a mistake, that if you are not always happy you simply are not positive enough. But suffering is part of growth. As Rilke wrote, "What we choose to fight is so tiny, what fights with us is so great... what is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us..." These are the words of someone who understands that we are made by life and the world, as we in turn make ourselves through them.

Here is installment number one of the myth cycle of Inanna. I invite you to imagine yourself as Inanna. What are your sources of power and earthly achievement, and how well prepared are you to give them up? This paraphrase is from Diane Wolkstein and Noah Kramer's wonderful translation of the myth, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, which I highly recommend.

Inanna was the Great Queen of Heaven and Earth. Beautiful, wise, and fertile, Inanna made good things happen. She was also canny and clever. Inanna won her powers and the civilizing order she brought to the people from the great father Enki, God of the Deep and of the Waters. They drank beer together and Enki made promises. Inanna drank him under the table.

Inanna married the shepherd Dumuzi and for a while they were very happy together (this may be the origin of our phrase "honeymoon"). But when Inanna made Dumuzi king, his attention turned to affairs of state of the amassing of his own power. One day, Inanna found herself at loose ends. She turned her ear to the ground ("ear" and "mind" are the same word in Sumerian, both meaning receptor of wisdom). Inanna knew that the husband of her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, had recently died, and Inanna thought she would go down to her sister, attend the funeral rites, and cheer her up. Inanna imagined that her sister must be in need of the light and life and sweetness that she, as Queen of Heaven and Earth, could provide.

Inanna assembled the symbols of her power, her crown, her string of small lapis beads, her double strand of beads, her breastplate, her gold ring, and the lapis rod and line used to weigh and measure. She adjusted her hair, put on her makeup, put on the royal robes and the other power objects. Her finery and imposing appearance proclaimed Inanna's importance as the goddess of Heaven and Earth, the royal priestess, the protector of the city, and the goddess of love. She was ready to visit her sister, Queen of the Underworld. Or so she thought.

Stay tuned.

High Desert Mythological RoundTable (R) Group

High Desert Mythological Roundtable

 

Tuesday November 24^th, 7-9PM,

Friendship Hall, Joshua Tree Retreat Center

“The Descent of Inanna: From the Great Above to the Great Below”

 

One of the oldest recorded stories in the world is the Sumerian myth of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Inanna was literally on top of the world until she was drawn down to the Underworld. Come hear the story of the golden Inanna, her loyal maidservant Ninshubur, and shadowy Erishkrigal, Queen of the dark depths.

 

Free. Donation for the room appreciated. Cookies and other goodies gladly shared.

 The High Desert Mythological Round Table meets the last Tuesday of every month at the JTRC.

A new kind of balance

"In many ways ... rationality, this dependency on logic and reason, has freed us from many cruel superstitions, many nameless terrors ... But it's not sufficient. There is a mythic truth, which is an imaginative truth, an emotional truth, a way of understanding the world which is not about the facts and figures, but which is nevertheless valid. And we need to have kind of a balance ... We love to have things in polar opposition, don't we? Black and white; good and evil; male and female. And reason and myth. And somewhere there has to be a way of bringing them together again." ---Jeanette Winterson

Click here to visit the homepage of novelist and poet Jeanette Winterson. 

The image is William Blake's "Adam and Eve," one of the illustrations inspired by John Milton's Paradise Lost. When I look at Blake's images, I always get the sense that he understood the many paradoxes and contradictions that characterize (enrich and plague) human existence. I chose this one for this post because Adam and Eve and their move towards consciousness is one way of understanding, in mythic terms, the origins of the dualistic thinking noted by Winterson. And, it's beautiful.

Serpent Show

recently learning                        

the eye has
no real substance
that eyes are borrowers
who often times
are skins with no in (g) sides
i now consider what happened
in the garden
to be no bigger than
being hungry and
looting the tree
to stay alive i
i know
i have to
to stay alive
i know the tree
is not "mine"
it belongs to the world
&
i know this suddenly &

desperately, an i
with no real substance
knows this

& eye can't say
don't break taboo
& keep on not no-ing
that's as good as
giving permission
as good as taking sides
as good as
meristem, the green invitation,
a blue hint to hunt for
life-giving treasure
eye knows! it can really exist!

& you have to
to stay alive & so
your eye hunts
with no real substance
the golden fruit of this womb

it's not representable
it comes hissing
no real snakes but
the way the tree
might imagine snake
shedding from its bark something silver
snaking along the branch

or is it the branch itself
hissing at you as sap rises
& light bends the bough
where the branch
seems to shimmer
shakes even, in the
night wind the fruit
falls and leaves turn over
shades under show
shower silver colored in serpent red
every single thing belongs to the
likeness -shade, serpent, show-
all of it tells you
this silver is
something sweet
first something sweet
then that bite

sweet bit, sweet bite -it was real!
and now
you know
the perceptible required
the sensible image
the way the myth
required fear

to keep the word

from dying

by -stephanie pope. image of serpent tree by Howard Rhiengold. Visit Stephanie at http://www.mythopoetry.com/index.html

I hope you're not (just) hoping for health care reform

Some months ago I was writing about Prometheus and Pandora and the gift of fire. One of the pieces of that myth that I find so intriguing (and useful) is the contradictory image of "hope." Is hope a panacea or a motivator, a luxury or an existential necessity?

Here's the Greek myth. Prometheus, our divine benefactor, had sealed up all of the evils and suffering in the cosmos in a great clay jar. The first men were living the easy life, free of care, with the fruit falling off the vine. But then Pandora came along. There are some interesting parallels with the Christian myth of Adam and Eve--- man needs woman to be complete but she brings him down (that part is debatable, depending on your estimation of the value of consciousness and human creativity). In any event, Pandora was full of wile and guile and utterly charming. She was also greedy and curious. One day she sidled up to the great jar, pried off the lid, and let out a flock of troubles. Poverty, worry, sickness, hard work, nightmares, competition, bad art, and death, which now took many gruesome forms and no longer came as just a blissful sleep. Pandora slammed the lid back down but it was too late.

Hope was also in that great clay jar. In one version of the story, Hope is trapped under the rim and still flutters alone in the jar. In another version Hope escapes too, which seems probable given how much we hear about hope and talk about hope and pass it back and forth. Hope can bring a little light when times get dark, but is that all? Should we trust Hope? Why was Hope in that great clay jar with all of the other evils of the world? In our current moment, what does it mean to elect a President with a mantra of hope?

Check out Naomi Klein's vocabulary of "Hope"  for a suggestion or two. Stop hoping, she says, and start demanding. Let's start with the public option and move on from there. If you're merely "hoping" and have not contacted your members of Congress to insist that they support the President, I encourage you to do so. The House victory is a start but the Senate will be more difficult and the wrangling is far from over. Isn't dependable health insurance sturdier than the "hope" that you won't get sick?

Guideposts

"These bits of information from ancient times [myths], which have to do with the themes that have supported man's life, built civilizations, informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage. And if you don't know what the guide signs are along the way you have to work it out yourself." ---Joseph Campbell

image and story can be found at mythinglinks.org

The Gift of A Story

I love the story of The Man Without A Story. For one thing, it's fun---the fairy glen, the big wind, the black-haired woman---and mysterious. The man goes to the fairy glen, the edge between the familiar and the unknown where anything can happen. This is always an invitation to adventure, although that's not his conscious motivation. What the man gains is a story, and more then that, a new view of himself. Who knew that he was a priest, a fiddler, a surgeon, (and ultimately a storyteller), in addition to basket weaver?

We tend to privilege myths and big epics over fairy and folktales when we get serious about meaning, but these relatively small tales, concocted by tellers whose names are long forgotten and passed down, mouth to heart to mouth to heart beside countless hearth fires over the centuries, may be the stories that tell us the most about common human experience and longing. The plot may be simple, even formulaic, but there is always more than one way to receive them, more then one message. We came up with quite a few at the myth round table where this story was recently told. What I take from this tale today is twofold: the connection between a good (life)story and a satisfying sense of one's capacities, and the mysterious means by which we are gifted with such a story. I get tired of all the positive thinking, self-made individual rhetoric that ignores the obvious and beautiful fact (to me anyway) that we live in relationship to the unknown and unknowable. I hate the dogmatic certainty about what's true and false, real and imagined, that makes the world so small.

The Man Without A Story is an Irish tale. According to the Irish fairy tradition, this time of year, as we approach the winter solstice (December 21st), the veil between the worlds gets thin. It's a particularly good time to pack your bundle and go in search of rods in the fairy glen. Look for the twinkling lights in the distance and tell us a story when you return.

The image is by Arthur Rackham. Other lovely images and stories can be found at The Journal of Mythic Arts at Endicott Studio.