Inanna's descent: How we Embrace the Shadow and Integrate Our Wholeness
Nothing can truly prepare us for the initiations that await us on the path of awakening feminine consciousness on planet Earth.
We may glamorize and glorify the names Goddess, Priestess, and Divine Feminine, but any woman who has truly embodied these archetypes knows they only emerge within her once she has courageously journeyed through a very dark night of the soul.
And at some point on the path… that time comes for all of us.
When the ground cracks open beneath us and every structure of stability and safety is shattered. When we witness everything we once held to be true loosen, dismantle, and eventually evaporate into the vast mystery of life. When nothing we once used to “fix” the ache seems to soothe us and we are called to surrender deeper into the ultimate source of our pain and let it be our guru and guide.
When we find ourselves in a cycle of profound death and rebirth, lost in the underworld of our own universe, we may feel that no one can possibly understand us, relate to us, and that we must be doing something wrong to have arrived here.
We may reach for a false sense of control by blaming ourselves and others for plunging us into this dark space.
We may grasp for anyone or anything that claims to have the answers and reach back for the old structures that have already crumbled. We may longingly look backwards to a familiar past that’s already evaporated and cling to something that no longer even exists.
Whether this initiation arrives through birth, death, loss, heartbreak, endings, beginnings, doubt, confusion, upheaval, bizarre symptoms, health scares or a whole myriad of other forms, what we are truly experiencing is an opening into the dark underworld of collective fear, trauma, wounding, and pain, which is paradoxically our direct gateway to source, truth, and light.
The ancients knew this initiation well.
They knew it as the heroic journey into the underworld to meet the soul self. Masked, disguised, and denied in layers of shadow, shame, and distrust, we meet our doppelgänger, our dark side, and in meeting this seeming opposite we see ourselves truly for the first time. Because we will never truly know ourselves until we also meet with the darkest wells of our pain.
In Sumerian Legend they called this Journey The descent of Inanna .
I know Inanna’s Descent well, mythologically and also within the context of my own life, and perhaps you do too. Any woman who has gone through profound ego death and discovered a gateway to Goddess in the process, has taken Inanna’s Descent.
Like many of us do before we fall, Inanna begins on top.
Praised, celebrated, revered, and admired by all, Inanna seems to have “it all.” Power, beauty, riches, and influence. So then, what compels Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, to willingly go to visit her twin sister Erishkigal, The Queen of Hell, in the underworld? Especially since the two have been at odds with one another for many years?
Perhaps we can all inquire within… what has compelled us at times to gaze into our own shadows, to visit our dark side, and to reclaim the parts of ourselves that we may have shamed or denied?
If you know the story, you know that despite Inanna’s will, it isn’t easy to reach Erishkigal. Along the way Inanna is stopped at seven gateways to Hell. At each gateway she is stripped of another layer of clothing, representing our ego, identity, and attachments of self.
InaNna must be naked, raw, and bare before she enters the underworld to even be available, receptive, or humble enough to receive the potent medicine and power that lives there.
We may have seen this ourselves on the path when we cannot possibly imagine how life can become more brutal or how much more we could lose. When we enthusiastically decide to dive into shadow work to achieve more power in our outer world, only to first meet with every demon and be brought down to our absolute knees.
Only when we have been so humbled that our crown, our gown, and our layers of false self worth have disintegrated, can we actually arrive to the holy space of the inner cauldron of death, birth, and transformation within our own bodies, Earth body, and Cosmic body: the womb. The true seat of power and inner strength.
The womb demands reverence, and arrogance and reverence cannot exist in the same space.
The underworld is the Earth womb itself, and it is here in our total vulnerability that we can reclaim the deep, lost, forgotten, denied, shamed, oppressed, repressed, feminine soul and rebirth ourselves back to whole love.
When Inanna finally reaches the underworld and reunites with Erishkigal, it is not a happy meeting. Erishkigal is mourning the death of her husband, which rumor says has been in part caused by the actions of Inanna.
Already exhausted, bare, naked, raw, and in terror, Inanna is hung onto a hook by Erishkigal and left to die.
In a culture that does not offer us context to our own underworld journeys, but may instead offer medications, quick fix solutions, blanket “truths”, “light-washing,” and more layers of projection, judgement, gas-lighting, and misunderstanding, many of us find ourselves doing everything to escape the ego deaths that occur when we meet our shadow selves and the tremendous grief that hides there.
Erishkigal, Inanna’s twin, reminds us that when we meet our deepest pain, we do not need fixing or solutions. At this level of ego death, simple answers, blanket truths, and quick fixes don’t even apply. What we actually need, is more compassion, more presence, more love and the understanding that we are in a holy rebirth process where our doubt and confusion will guide us to Grace if we let it.
And it is this very grace, love, and compassion that brings Inanna back to life,
But first, these virtues must be given to Erishkigal until she has healed. We must nurture, nourish, and tend to our shadows before we can truly expand in our influence, our power, and our ability to wield our gifts in the world.
Inanna’s guides sent down from above spend three nights with Erishkigal, soothing and supporting her as she sobs and mourns the loss of her husband. Once she has been fully comforted, she offers the guides anything that they wish, as a token of her gratitude. They ask for the body of Inanna and Erishkigal agrees.
With the waters of life (the fluids of the menstrual blood) they are able to revive Inanna and she emerges from the underworld totally reborn, taking with her a new found power. A power bestowed to her from Erishkigal herself.
The deeper we dive into Innana’s underworld, and the closer we come to Erishkigal, the more we realize and understand that any demon we may have ever projected outwardly is a mirror of the demons we have yet to embrace within.
Erishkigal holds the key to our liberation. She demands that we face our fears, one by one, and learn to love ourselves through the grief, despair, uncertainty, and anguish that can accompany them. But once we do, we become freer than ever before. We become free because we have nothing left to hide and are finally allowed to totally live.
We embrace the darkness within ourselves and expand our capacity to be with our shadows so that we can face the darkness and the shadows of the world. We become Queens of the void, Queens of the womb, and in this humble devotion we are bestowed with the blessing of the kind of immortal power that would otherwise destroy us.
The fear of the world outside of us has a far looser hold because we have already died a thousand deaths in our inner world.
The more we embrace the shedding of the blood of everything we have ever been, the more willing we are to show up to life knowing that it will one day kill us.
It takes a truly courageous woman willing to step deeper into the fire, to come closer to the serpents, and to surrender more fully to the darkness without a promise of what will meet her on the other side.
But if we can allow the medicine to meet us here, if we can allow the light to dawn within the darkest space, if we can midwife our shadows through the birthing pains of unraveling our own shame, guilt, denial, and delusion of separation, eventually we discover the compassion that makes us truly powerful.
As many of us are being asked to rise in divine feminine leadership and reclaim our title as Queen, Inanna’s descent is here to teach us how we become Queen of ourselves first.
By our willingness to let go of everything and discover the only thing that has actually ever been ours.
Only when we have reclaimed the crown of total self sovereignty will any of us know how to rise up as Queens in our relationships and in our world. It is simply not possible to wear the crown of authentic self empowerment until we have deeply embraced our inner darkness and honored it with the same reverence as our light.
Virgin & Whore
Receive your FREE 40 page guide filled with ritual, magic, ceremony, and feminine embodiment rituals, as gateways to reclaim the wild red river of your powerful womb, your Whore, and the pure white river of your tender heart, your Virgin, weaving yourself as the wholeness you are.
Keep Reading
About the Author
Camille Willemain is a feminine embodiment facilitator, dance meditation teacher, energy healer, medicine woman, and feminine mystic, specializing in feminine spirituality, archetypal psychology, womb wisdom, somatic awareness, and ancient Goddess religions as doorways to women’s pleasure, power, sovereignty, creativity, truth, and love.
She has been facilitating women’s healing work since 2013 and is the founder of Earth Daughters women’s community. In 2019 she birthed Whole Woman Mystery School as a pearl from her own profound death and rebirth journey, and she continues to learn, heal, deepen, expand, and grow as her greatest devotion and contribution to the whole.
Her journey has included living 7 years in the jungle of Costa Rica, writing a lifestyle blog read by millions of people from 2012 to 2018, and trusting her gift of communicating with the spirits of nature through her intuitive travels and self guided pilgrimages in more than 25 countries across the world. It has also included the hugely vital inner journey of healing trauma and learning to feel safe in her own body.
She considers herself above all a Voice for Gaia Sophia and a Keeper of Sacred Space, here to offer transformational doorways and inner sanctuaries of love, safety, and celebration, for women to come home to the truth within, and to trust that truth as medicine for our world.