Inanna's Descent: The Most Ancient Feminine Initiation Story — and How to Work With It
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The oldest written story in human history about a goddess descending to the underworld belongs to Inanna.
She is Sumerian — from the civilization that arose in ancient Mesopotamia over five thousand years ago, in what is now Iraq. Her story was recorded on clay tablets, some of which still survive. And what she descends through is one of the most precise maps ever created for the experience of loss, grief, depression, and the kind of transformation that comes from being stripped of everything.
The Story of Inanna's Descent
Inanna is the Queen of Heaven and Earth. She is the goddess of love, war, beauty, sex, justice, and political power. She is everything. She holds everything.
And then she decides to descend to the Great Below.
The Great Below is ruled by her sister Ereshkigal — the Queen of the Underworld. The two are opposites: Inanna above in her glory, Ereshkigal below in her grief and rage. The text says Inanna "set her ear to the Great Below" — she heard her sister's pain, and she chose to go.
To pass through each of the seven gates of the underworld, Inanna must surrender one piece of her regalia — one symbol of her power and identity:
- First gate: her crown
- Second gate: her earrings
- Third gate: her necklace
- Fourth gate: her breastplate
- Fifth gate: her gold ring
- Sixth gate: her lapis lazuli measuring rod
- Seventh gate: her royal robe
At each gate, she is told: "Quiet, Inanna. The ways of the underworld are perfect and must not be questioned."
She arrives naked and bowed low before her sister. Ereshkigal fastens the eye of death on her. And Inanna is hung on a hook and becomes a corpse.
She stays there for three days and three nights.
Eventually, help comes. Creatures made of dirt, capable of slipping through the cracks of the underworld gates without triggering the rules, bring the food and water of life. Inanna is restored. She rises. But the underworld requires a replacement — and Inanna, finding her husband Dumuzi celebrating rather than mourning during her absence, hands him over.
She rises from the underworld changed. With knowledge no one above can have. With the authority that comes from having faced death and returned.
What Inanna's Descent Maps
The seven gates are the seven levels of stripping that happen in any true descent. You know this experience. The descent is what happens when life takes things from you — your identity, your role, your certainty, your health, your relationship, your idea of who you are and what your life is.
The descent is depression. It is grief. It is the year your life fell apart. It is the loss that changed everything. It is the moment you arrived at the bottom and did not know how to get up.
The most important thing Inanna's story teaches is this: the descent is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is an initiation. The one who descends and returns comes back with something that cannot be acquired any other way.
Ereshkigal — the sister in the underworld, the shadow side — is not the enemy. She is the part of Inanna that has been left below, unacknowledged, unvisited, screaming in grief. The descent is, in part, an act of integration: Inanna goes to meet the part of herself she has left in the dark.
When You Are in an Inanna Season
You are living an Inanna story when:
- Life has stripped you of something you cannot get back
- You are in a grief or depression that feels bottomless
- You have lost an identity — who you were in a relationship, a job, a community, a body that has changed
- You are being forced through something you did not choose
- You have arrived somewhere you do not recognize
- You feel hung on a hook, suspended, unable to move
An Inanna season is not a failure. It is a descent. And the only way is through.
How to Work With Inanna in Ceremony
Working with Inanna in ritual asks you to name what has been taken from you. To acknowledge each gate you have passed through, each piece of identity you have had to surrender. To honor the descent as real — not to bypass it, not to spiritual-bypass your way out of the grief, but to acknowledge: I have been below. I have been stripped. I have been changed.
And then: to name what you are bringing back. Because Inanna did not just survive the underworld. She returned with the me — the sacred laws, the powers of civilization, the full reinstatement of her authority — intact. The rising is real. And what you rise into is yours.
Her sacred colors are deep purple, lapis lazuli blue, and gold. Her sacred stones are lapis lazuli and carnelian. Her sacred time is the dark moon and the waning moon. Her sacred plant is cedar.
A complete Inanna ceremony — her story, her invitation, the materials, step-by-step ritual instructions, her message, and a closing affirmation — is included in 24 Goddess Rituals: Divine Feminine Ceremonies, alongside 23 other goddesses across all six archetypes. 62 pages of sacred feminine work for every face and season of you.
