In the first post, we met Venus as she turned retrograde on 3rd Oct in Scorpio at 8°29′. Now we are going to meet the seven gates of Venus retrograde through Inanna’s descent: the Sumerian myth of her journey into the underworld.

The number seven has a fundamental place in the symbolic language of cycles: we have the biblical seven days of creation, the astrological seven traditional planets and the octave’s seven distinct notes.

Seven is at the heart of the Sovereign Being framework. We all know the trinity, but perhaps we know less about how it describes life coming into being: the Father’s initiating spark, the Mother’s love that receives, protects and sustains it, and from that union the birth of innocence: the Divine Child.

The Divine Child, which is us, carries that union into embodied life, where the four living Reeds—Realign, Reclaim, Reawaken and Reroot—hold and nurture life, supporting its return to its essential sovereign nature and its expression in the world.

The relationship between the three and the four (that makes seven) is one way of understanding the seven through origin, embodiment and unfoldment: the Trinity brings life into being, and the Reeds support that life in becoming fully itself. Working together they become the seven, encompassing sacred origin, reconnection and lived expression.

Many traditions bring the remembrance of number seven as symbolic of a whole process. From the moment of potential and the first creative impulse, all the way through to its completion and fulfilment. The descent of Venus during retrograde, reflected in the myth of Inanna’s journey to the underworld, takes us through a process of relinquishment and surrender.

As she descends, she meets seven gates, at each of which she must give up something. In this myth, as the Queen of Heaven, these are her adornments and garments—her royal headdress, lapis-lazuli necklace, twin breast beads, breastplate, gold ring, measuring rod and line, and royal robe.

While these are not objects that we relate to, they represent aspects that we ourselves know within; things that reflect our authority, protection, status and power. Each gate invites us to examine what we have invested in, whether it be authority, protection, status, beauty, worth, love or belonging. Each surrendering up brings her closer to her sister Ereshkigal residing in the underworld, and brings us towards discovering who we are when the things we have relied upon to feel powerful, protected, valued or loved fall away.

It’s reassuring that there is a myth that gives meaning to the loss of things, especially when the world teaches us to value those things. It gives us a way to understand the uncertainty that these kinds of experiences bring, especially when our familiar sense of identity, of who we are, gets surrendered with them.

These gates are guarded thresholds. When Inanna arrives at the entrance to the underworld, the gatekeeper Neti announces her to Ereshkigal, who instructs him to remove an item of Inanna’s adornments at each of the seven gates. Her journey is under the rule of the underworld, and even Inanna the Queen of Heaven must honour the demands of this rite of passage.

As each gate takes Inanna further away from her familiar position of power and authority that she has in the over-world, we can read the gates as stages, where we meet edges within ourselves, uncomfortable truths and aspects we perhaps have never met. When we lose contact with the familiar identity, the everyday self, we may come into contact with forbidden parts of our power, bound up, caged and full of primal feelings.

But these don’t often arrive through direct contact. They more likely emerge through a problem in a current relationship, an assessment of a past relationship, our relationships with women, or some other expectation, fear and personal investment that we are bound up in. Each stage or gate is a point of recognition, where we can take ourselves deeper into our own truth, or seeing of who we truly are, and also questioning how we believe others see us.

As Inanna’s regalia are removed, she questions what is happening. We can recognise something very human in her questioning, even when we ourselves recognise that change is needed. The objects removed belong to an ancient story; the meanings below are a contemporary reading of what their removal can reveal to us in our lives.

In Descent to the Goddess, Sylvia Brinton Perera reads the removal of the adornments as a descent through levels of consciousness: from the crown’s divine awareness down into bodily existence, instinct and vulnerability at the root. In her interpretation, the descent brings consciousness fully into the reality of incarnation.

She connects the removal of the adornments with a descent through the chakras, bringing consciousness towards fuller bodily experience. This gives us a way to consider what happens as spiritual understanding reaches the places where we love, choose, feel, express and belong.

This is also the territory of Sovereign Being: the three originating principles of the Trinity finding expression through the four living Reeds. Read alongside this framework, the gates invite us to explore what prevents that expression, and what each stage asks us to release, recover or receive. The connections below are my contemporary interpretation of the myth, according to my understanding of sovereignty.

In this reading, the sequence runs from chakra seven at the first gate to chakra one at the seventh gate. The adornments’ bodily positions do not necessarily match this chakra sequence. This is my application of the myth and is work in progress.

During this Venus retrograde, one or more of these gates may feel especially familiar to you. Notice where you are clinging, and what you are clinging to: your usefulness, an outcome, safety and familiarity, or something else personal to you.

Sovereignty becomes practical when we start to recognise where we are truly at and speak more honestly about that place in our lives. Return to this space as I follow the gates, releasing one daily below.

First gate: The headdress — releasing control over our lives

At the first gate, Inanna’s headdress is removed, marking her authority as the Queen of Heaven, how she is recognised. These powers have reached their limit. This is like relinquishing our claim to control our lives, allowing the life situations we are in to reveal their intentions. In life, we hit points when we can no longer force things to happen in the same way. We are simply being guided to connect with our spirit’s natural abundance.

This is like connecting with the first impulse: the intention through which creation begins. Are we using force or coming from our spirit? In what do we place our trust? During descent, we go inwards to meet what has happened to that original intention. Our insistence that life must unfold according to our imagined future makes it harder to respond to what is actually happening.

Second gate: The lapis necklace — allowing something to reach us

At the second gate, Inanna’s lapis-lazuli necklace is removed. In my reading, the lapis represents our inner vision and wisdom: our capacity to perceive clearly, be in our senses and intuition, and use our discernment to question the lens through which we interpret it. Are we perceiving freely and clearly, or are we seeing through our beliefs, distorted perceptions and wounded aspects of ourselves? What happens when our perceptions are challenged—are we able to hold the questions gently or do we fall apart?

We need to be receptive and open for impressions and intuitions to reach us. It’s helpful to know what filters—desires, hopes, expectations, needs and wishes—we are seeing our experience through. Can we loosen our investments in a particular picture of reality?

The second gate is about returning to our feeling and knowing, letting go of the superficial layers of experience that distort our reality. Here we need to also open to not knowing what things mean, allowing space for uncertainty and unfoldment of truth.

Over time, our relationship with knowing changes. We sense or intuit before we know for certain. We also resist jumping to conclusions. And yet at the same time, our knowing, when it’s on par, will become stronger. We is not simply about losing touch with ourselves, it’s more about deepening that trust and diving deeper within, and sometimes there’s a journey to get there.

Third gate: The twin breast beads — bringing out our expression

At the third gate, Inanna’s twin beads are removed. These ornaments have associations with sexuality and possibly fertility, suggesting her capacity to attract and bring forth life.

In this reading, the gate corresponds with the fifth chakra, the throat, through which we begin to find our expression in the world. Our voice, laughter, sexuality, courage and creative impulses are all expressive energies, ways in which our inner life reaches into the world.

Our expression, though, is often checked by us; we monitor what we are about to say, how we will be received, and what people will think of us. Our aliveness, playfulness and colourfulness might feel risky to let loose and powerful emotions such as rage, shame or guilt can shut them down. We can become so used to controlling our expression that we lose touch with what we actually feel and our inner, alive beingness. Reaching others during Venus retrograde isn’t quite as easy, and so we can feel this broody, illusive disconnection in our relationships and even with ourselves.

During the descent, we may need to remind ourselves that our vibrancy and aliveness are fundamental to our wellbeing, especially when we are meeting uncomfortable truths. There are many small but potent ways to reconnect with the feeling of life, even in the darkest depth of winter. It’s like going for a swim in the cold, winter sea: it might not come easily, but we can emerge feeling revitalised, returned to life. Remember to breathe in life even when a deep descent is seeping its way into our life.

What we can recover here is a more direct relationship with our own expression. We might temporarily lose some of that feeling of life and lightness during Venus retrograde, but we can gently explore the ways in which we might awaken it again. As we rediscover our playfulness, voice and capacity to show up as we are, we discover how this helps us remain open in our relationship with life. When we live in this way, we bring so much love and honesty into our lives and relationships, even if that’s the honesty of a boundary. Vital life and expression help us nourish our depths, and feel the love within for ourselves and all around us.

Fourth gate: the breast ornament — love and the protected heart

At the fourth gate, Inanna’s breast ornament is removed. Associated with attraction and the power of drawing someone towards us, and the resulting reassurance of being desired. Perhaps it’s also about what protects the heart, and what we need to reconnect to or relinquish in order to open the heart.

Air is the element that rules the heart, and it is breath that gives our feelings room to be, while Air’s awareness helps us bear witness.

And in our efforts to keep love in our lives we can lose contact with our own hearts. Our attention becomes absorbed in other people in so many ways—how they feel, how we can reach them, all the while we stop checking in with our own hearts, and our own true feelings. We have wandered away from ourselves.

The longing to be loved, to be received and felt by another can have a painful underside. And so we keep checking whether the relationship is safe. We need to look deeper into where our safety needs rebirthing. Losing contact with our own heart’s tenderness, needs and pleasure in just being alive can be the journey of Venus retrograde.

As the descent asks us to turn towards our own sadness and disappointment, we come to see the times we have gone against ourselves for a relationship. There may now be a need for time alone to feel and recognise more of our patterns, before we try to build anything new.

As we attend to ourselves, we awaken our own life again: our curiosity about who we are, the pleasure in our own company, and the trust in the Divine, the miracles, and possibility of letting someone meet us more fully.

Our hearts are complex and can hold many feelings altogether: tenderness, grief and protectiveness. Ask first, where is my attention now focused, and what helps me return it to my own heart?

Fifth gate: The gold ring — power and choice

At the fifth gate, the gold ring is removed from Inanna’s hand. Also translated as a bracelet, this precious adornment reflects her queenly authority. It’s removal represents our own sense of power, and whether we feel we have a control or say over our lives.

This gate corresponds with the third chakra, the solar plexus, and the ability to choose and act from our own power. Sometimes, the circumstances in our lives place real limits on that freedom to choose and act. We have all experienced situations that just have to be lived through, however much we want them to be different.

And when all our energy goes into managing a situation, often our own personal needs are ignored. If it extends over time, even wanting something for ourselves brings complex feelings. Fear of change can sit with a fear that nothing will change, and so waiting can become intertwined, as if the power is not in our hands to change matters.

Inanna relinquishing the ring symbolises letting go of this idea that everything has to change, or if that one thing just needs to change, before there is room for us, before we have our life back as we want it. It’s also about noticing that to come back to ourselves, we first need awareness of how we are pushing ourselves aside.

The descent takes us deeper now, into ourselves, beneath our ideas about what should make us feel better, and into contact with what we actually feel and know will bring our freedom back. Our understanding can deepen through self-connection and then as our own needs come back online, we can get to know ourselves again, within the life we are living.

Sixth gate: The measuring rod and line — feeling, desire and creativity

At the sixth gate, Inanna’s measuring rod and line are removed, and these represent the measures we all apply to life. We all have ideas about how life should develop, when we should get married and when we should have children, often long before we have any idea of what is best for us.

This gate corresponds with the sacral chakra and our relationship with sexuality and creativity. We can see the measuring at work in how motherhood gets tangled up with obligation and the fear of getting it wrong, when it’s worth remembering that every human mother is imperfect. With creativity, the questions become whether we have the innate talent, and whether we have the follow-through to bring a creation to life in its full form. Most of the time we measure up what we create far too quickly, often before it has even grown its first feathers.

Putting down the measuring tools, the competition and the comparison leaves room for a more personal question: what do I actually feel about this? Is this really me, and does it truly draw out my creative spirit? Or am I just being a Borg and belonging to the hive mind?

The element of water, connected to the second chakra, helps us get in touch with our true flow and let life move from there. And when we do, our magnetic power radiates out.