I watch myself/or am hung upside down in an unknown place on a peg on the wall. The layers of my head are stripped away piece by piece. I am dimly aware of what is happening. I think to myself, “Perhaps this is the real test. I wonder if I must encounter the true blackness of evil and test my resistance.” I am aware of having read/heard that part of the journey is encountering death.
This is the descent to the goddess, the Descent of Inanna. Strangely, there is no emotion in the dream. I awake feeling “normal,” as if I ever was such a thing. I surely feel dismembered; stripped and bare. It will be years before I can see the many dream symbols related to Inanna. The peg, the pole, the phallus, menstruation, sexual intercourse, becoming a woman, pregnancy and crucifixion. “The Descent myth has reverberations concerning a central mystery of feminine experience, pregnancy…. Certainly, submission to the mystery of bodily experience is one way in which a woman, even the Goddess, is nailed down into incarnated existence—nailed into reality to find her own firm stance.”[1]
I imagine the head as the essence of who I am. The stake penetrates. We have buried the myths that speak to the lives of women and girls. My life at 15 and 16, the becoming-a-woman years, is all there in the early chapters of my story. Completely misunderstood. “Because the receptive yin is by nature empty, there is a danger that women feeling their own emptiness—especially in a patriarchal culture—will seek fulfillment through actual male partners and sons, or serving the collective’s ideals of the animus in prostitution to the fathers.”[2]
Every dream along the way for all these years has taken me deeper. Since the Power of the Unconscious workshop,(October 1992) the mystery has unfolded even more profoundly. There was no way then for me to understand it. Living the myth of Inanna requires transgressing every rule of the patriarchy. I gave permission. I had no idea what I was surrendering to.
[1] Perera, Descent to the Goddess, 38–9.
[2] Perera, Descent to the Goddess, 39.
