The centre of the descent

As we read in the previous post, by the time Inanna reaches the depths of the underworld, her inner world has already vastly changed. Everything she might have attached to has been stripped away. Who is she now, without her adornments, without her power and authority?

But Inanna still has to face Ereshkigal, her elder sister and Queen of the Underworld, and the underworld has its own laws and its own order, which we will meet later.

In the early hours of 24 October, Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun at her inferior conjunction, right on the cusp of Scorpio at 0 degrees. We are now at the centre of the 2026 retrograde, the moment where Inanna arrives at the bottom of the underworld, the lowest point of her descent, and it is also where a new Venus cycle of roughly 584 days begins.

Having lost every outward sign of her authority, which identified her as a goddess, she now has to discover her true relationship with power.

Venus appears largest in the sky when the least of her is visible

As Venus approaches the conjunction with the Sun, she draws closer to Earth. Through a telescope, Venus appears larger, while the part lit by the Sun shrinks to a thin crescent. At the time of the conjunction, most of the side of Venus facing us is turned away from the Sun, and she disappears into its glare altogether. So even while she is so very close to us, we have lost physical sight of her.

When the light of the goddess disappears from the heavens we can see this as our separation from the Divine. The Mesopotamians identified Venus with Ishtar, the Akkadian name for Inanna, who embodied love, fertility, sexuality, power and war. In the past, her disappearance was associated with omens of political upheaval and war. Looking at the threats of war in the news over the last few days, whether those in power consciously use astrology to time their threats of war, or are just moving with these cycles without knowing it, the timing is rather unsettling.

In that darkness, we encounter aspects of existence where we cannot yet recognise the presence of the Divine. Yes, war is the opposite polarity of the generative power of Source, for it’s a destructive, chaotic force. The Divine is never separate, but its light can be withdrawn, and war takes us so far from that light it’s hard to ever come back from it. Yet even the underworld belongs to the Divine.

This raises a difficult question, because if the Divine is present everywhere in everything, it can be tempting to conclude that everything that happens is an expression of Divine love. But this is not the case. Death belongs to the natural cycle of life on this planet, and Ereshkigal’s realm is part of that cycle, whereas cruelty and deliberate destruction come from people choosing to deepen the separation. We have to see the difference.

Our own culture avoids death altogether, keeping it out of sight, mind and conversation, and when it does look at it, it treats it as final. Many older traditions see death as a doorway, a passage within life, and recognise that those who die physically are still close to the living, within reach when we open ourselves to them. This is honouring death as a transition. Inanna’s story belongs to this older understanding, and even Ereshkigal, queen of the dead, is described as a mother giving birth. Seen in this way, death belongs to the order of life.

Ereshkigal: a reality beyond our control

In the last post, we met Ereshkigal as the excluded sister, who gives voice to the grief, rage and loss that the upper world refuses to see. Yet she is also Queen of the Underworld, a goddess with her own authority, whose realm Inanna has now entered.

Inanna tells the gatekeeper she has come for the funeral rites of Gugalana, Ereshkigal’s husband. Some scholars identify Gugalana with the Bull of Heaven from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Inanna sent down Gugalana in a rage on the hero’s city, where it killed many people before it was slain, so it’s possible that she has come to mourn a death she helped cause. Yet once through the seven gates and stripped of her royal regalia, Inanna makes her grieving sister Ereshkigal rise from her throne and sits down in her place. She has lost every outward sign of her power, yet she still tries to take charge in a realm that doesn’t belong to her.

We have to remember that it’s not all about Inanna. Ereshkigal represents a much deeper understanding of power and authority, one that comes from having lived through an experience of grief that others can only imagine. Losing a husband or a son, as many did in the wars past, is an Ereshkigal experience, where grief, rage and loss are met head-on. It is not enough to give up our symbols of power. We also have to stop assuming authority over a world we have never inhabited, displacing those whose understanding of it has been earned through suffering.

So there are wider problems here. It’s like those people who run grief workshops when they haven’t truly experienced deep loss. I’ve witnessed grief seminars run by well known teachers where it was clear the teacher knew zero about grief.

We can enter another person’s world believing we understand it, even believing we are there to help, and end up defining their experience for them. The authority of those who have actually lived it gets pushed aside.

So this reaches far beyond death and suffering. We see Inanna dethroning her sister wherever one person with status, assumed knowledge or certainty overrides another person’s lived experience. A doctor who won’t listen to what a patient is telling them about their own body is doing it, and so is the friend who tells us how we should be grieving. The dethroning happens when the upper world assumes it has the right to rule the lower.

Ereshkigal is not outside the Divine; she is a goddess too. This is separation consciousness: Inanna is sitting on a goddess’s throne and still can’t see the goddess in front of her.

Inanna’s attempt to occupy the throne ends in judgement. The seven judges of the underworld condemn her, and she is struck dead. If she did help cause Gugalana’s death, the judges are holding her to account for this, as well as for taking the throne. Her lifeless body hangs on a hook in the underworld, and she can do nothing to save herself. The laws of this realm apply to her regardless of her former authority as Queen of Heaven. There are times in our own lives when nothing we know or have built can get us down off that hook, and we have to wait for help to come.

A beginning hidden in the dark

Around the inferior conjunction, Venus is lost in the Sun’s glare. One synodic cycle ends and another begins, although Venus remains invisible to us. After months as the Evening Star, she will eventually return before dawn as the Morning Star.

The new Venus cycle begins while Inanna hangs suspended between death and the possibility of life again. Whatever happens next lies beyond her former power, knowledge and control.

Inanna had prepared for the possibility that she might not return. She told her minister Ninshubur to raise the alarm if she had not come back after three days and three nights. When the time passes, Ninshubur approaches Enlil and then Nanna, but neither agrees to intervene. Eventually she reaches Enki, the god of wisdom and the life-giving waters, who responds to her appeal.

From the dirt beneath his fingernails, Enki creates two small beings, the gala-tura and the kur-jara. He gives them the plant and water of life and sends them into the underworld.

They find Ereshkigal in great distress, described in the Sumerian text as a mother who has given birth. The two beings leave her power and her laws untouched. When she cries out about her heart, they echo her distress; when she cries out about her liver, they do the same. Each time she speaks her pain, it is heard and returned to her without comment or correction.

In return, Ereshkigal offers them a gift. They decline the river of water and field of grain she offers, asking instead for Inanna’s body. They sprinkle it with the plant and water of life, and Inanna rises reborn.

Inanna attempts to take her sister’s place, and the seven judges answer with death. The encounter has become a struggle over who has the right to rule, rather than a meeting between sisters. Reversing their positions would change nothing, because the struggle would simply pass from one sister to the other. We all find ourselves on either side of the polarity. Within the struggle, neither sister can see the other as a separate being with her own experience.

People become so entangled in the struggle that each side only reacts to the other, pushing back and pushing harder until the roles swap and the fight goes on. Pushed and pulled from every side, both lose contact with their own sovereign being, the Divine presence living through us, which shows itself in our capacity to respond from our own truth.

You can see the same pattern in families and friendships, at work, and between countries. Our entanglement means we get caught up in the fight. Reacting, pushing back and then pushing harder, until the roles swap and it all starts again.

Humility, from the Latin humus meaning earth, and compassion, meaning to suffer with, are qualities of the underworld. They meet suffering at its own level, like Enki’s two beings. Forgiveness belongs there too, though it comes later and cannot be forced. It arrives from Ereshkigal herself, once her pain was witnessed.

Many who journey down the path of Divinity, in all it’s ancient and modern versions, lose touch with these fundamental aspects of the sovereign being. These are the qualities of sovereignty in relationship, which allow someone to meet another person’s suffering while both are whole in their own being. They are rarely learned anywhere, but on the descent down.

Enki’s two beings neither challenge Ereshkigal nor submit to her; they meet her suffering without being swallowed by it, responding freely from their own being. Because of that, Ereshkigal’s pain can be fully heard as they remain themselves, and this is what makes Inanna’s return possible.

We’ve all been on the receiving and giving end of this. Strangely enough, an apology can be one of the ways we take someone’s throne. Let’s say we hurt someone, and before they’ve even had a chance to feel it, we’re explaining ourselves, receiving their reassurance that its all ok, and perhaps even ending up claiming the victimhood as our own. This is the take over. Whereby Enki’s two beings let Ereshkigal’s pain be her own.

What really needs to be seen here is how entitled the upper world is over the lower. It’s the assumption that the light, meaning consciousness, progress, spirituality and power, has the right to enter darkness, define it, and exploit it for its own ends. We do this with grief, with death, with the unconscious, and the earth—wherever suffering can become a resource.

We monetarise death. We make movies out of tragedies and disasters. We mine the shadow to harvest insights and breakthroughs, ultimately to create a better version of ourselves. We treating the depths as a resource to be mined for self-improvement, just like we treat the earth. It rarely gets to speak on its own terms. Just put to work for the conscious self.

The Inanna myth says plainly that the underworld has its own sovereignty and its own laws, and that the light dies there when it tries to rule. Inanna’s story is clear that the underworld has its own laws which the upper world need to answer to. If the light, in its righteousness and entitlement, tries to impose its rule, it is struck down, just as Inanna was. Inanna returns only through what she can’t command into being: through her loyalty, humility, and the recognition of her sister’s pain, of which is also responsible.

We don’t get to walk into darkness just because we want to, whether it’s someone else’s or our own. If we go there at all, we go with care, with lunar consciousness, as if visiting a new country with ways very different to our own. It seems our culture, and many spiritual circles, have lost sight of this.

The limits of power

The one who finally releases Inanna’s body is Ereshkigal. Inanna first approached her sister as someone whose authority could be displaced, yet her return only becomes possible through an acknowledgment of Ereshkigal’s suffering. Ninshubur’s loyalty and Enki’s intervention were just as important, providing what Inanna could never have achieved through her own authority.

Here is a difficult lesson about sovereignty. We need to recognise when our own resources or understanding have reached their limits, while staying open to receive support and insight from others. And sovereignty means knowing when a throne isn’t ours to sit on, however entitled we might feel to it.

Inanna has been given her life back, and we already know how destructively she has used her power before. What she will do with it this time remains to be seen, and perhaps this is where the meaning of her descent will become most apparent. Having met the limits of our own power, and survived, how will we use that power when it is returned to us?