Return to Inanna is a mythopoeic work in three parts. The first deals with the myth itself and consists of a series of poems telling the story of Inanna’s journey through the eyes of each character in the myth. The poems are based on The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature published on-line by Oxford University’s Faculty of Oriental Studies.

Part Two depicts an imaginary women’s ritual based on the myth of Inanna and highlighting the stories of fourteen contemporary women as they travel through seven  symbolic gates down into the underworld, contemplating at each gate the things which they must let go. To undergird the metaphorical journey, at each threshold the women leave a piece of jewelry or clothing. The journey pauses after the seventh gate, while each woman spends time inside a small black pup tent, representing death.  On the return back through the gates, each woman reclaims  the item she left behind on the descent along with the new power, attitude or teaching it now represents.

The third section discusses the definition of ritual and gives a generic ritual guideline. I offer a directional call and invocation specific to the Inanna myth for women wishing to create their own Inanna ritual. This section also includes an essay on ritual lamentation, a glossary and a bibliography.

The Myths surrounding Inanna, Sumerian goddess of sexual love and war, began to be recorded in cuneiform about 5,000 years ago.  Even then Her stories overlapped and morphed as various scribes took a hand, indicating an even more ancient origin. I first encountered her in 1983 when Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Kramer published Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer.

Since then I have participated several times in rituals based on her descent and return to the underworld through the seven gates of relinquishment and reclamation.  Each time has been powerful and profound for me. As such rituals tend to do, these came at exactly the right times in my life. Each time they initiated change and transformation.  I hope my interpretation will make Inanna’s journey accessible to a new generation of women and that they will find her ancient as relevant to their modern lives as I have to mine.

One of the reasons Diane Wolkstein’s book made such an impact on me and others what that Inanna descends into the underworld, dies, remains dead for three days and then with the help of Her father, is restored to life and returns to the land of the living.  This predates Christian mythology by three thousand years at least.  It demonstrates the power inherent in the story Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey, but here we find, in the very first record of it, that the hero is actually a heroine.  And this is not speculation or theory, the existence of this story at that time is real.  To this day we can hold the evidence in our hands, trace with our fingers the inscriptions carved into clay tablets whose age and provenance is indisputable.

Excerpt from the introduction to Part Two – 

Gestation
 
Readying entails nine weeks of meeting.  We study pray, hammer, paste, and paint.  We cull from the storehouses of the Goddess – dollar stores, donations, dumpsters, attics, basements and stuff stacked free beside the sidewalk.  Like a god who creates life from dirt beneath his nails, we transform our culture’s bleak detritus into a whirling, swirling carnival of color – red, orange, yellow, green, sky blue, indigo, violet – rainbow colors; colors of chakras; atavistic colors, rendered meaningful within the magic cauldron of a woman’s soul.
 
All day long, preparing for the journey, we tell Inanna’s tales, sing her songs, dance to drums and beat our tambourines.  Women channel voices from the mythic past – goddesses, gatekeeper, handmaiden, lover take their places on our stage and strut soliloquies…

Christine Irving, Return to Inanna