We’ve just passed Easter, so this is apt: The oldest resurrection story ever written is actually about a goddess. Her name is Inanna. I want to tell you about her, and why resurrection has been, to me, such a resounding theme since the Covid confinements.
Inanna was ancient Sumer’s Queen of Heaven. We first meet her under the very tree whose fruit marks Eve's downfall—pre-Eden. Inanna sits under that tree, totally naked, and applauds her vulva.
Such a delicious inversion of the Garden of Eden tale.
But this isn’t about that. This is about her descent into the underworld.
The Underworld is ruled by her sister, Ereshkigal. Her husband's just died and Inanna decides to visit her for the funeral. But Ereshkigal doesn’t want to see her, so she instructs her gatekeeper to open each gate of death just a crack. As Inanna passes each threshold, one vestment must be shed.
Seven gates block entry to the underworld. At each, Inanna—fully adorned in her power and beauty, which are functionally the same—must leave something behind.
“Let the holy priestess of heaven enter bowed low,” Ereshkigal whispers in the dark.
At the first gate, Inanna surrenders her crown, the most visible symbol of her rulership. “Why?” she asks. The gatekeeper replies, “Quiet. The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”
Next she removes her lapis lazuli necklace. Lapis lazuli is the stone of queens; it can attract a gaze magnetically from across a room.
“Why?” Inanna asks again, and again the same response: “Quiet. The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”
Progressively, she is deprived even of her dress.
Maybe you recognise each subtraction of confident selfhood—a title, a role, power accumulated with painstaking care.
When Inanna appears before her sister, naked and bowed low, she’s attacked—with wrath, with guilt, with pain. She instantly dies, and is suspended from a hook on the wall.
This story is over 4000 years old and it lives in my skin.
It’s triggering. It’s how I’ve felt … since Covid, really. Since I left Hurrah, got lost in a forest in Devon, and went to study myths. I emerged bleary-eyed from a forest: What happened?
Regime changes, plague, death. I thought, after Covid, we had arrived at similar conclusions about where meaning lies and where it doesn’t—not in timesheets, surely, not all this smug shit about using AI to be more productive. But something got lost. I tried reentering my sector and realised nobody understood what to do with me or what I’m for—things that once seemed evident, like a crown.
People used to try to make me fit any way they could. Is it because I got older? Maybe I disappointed them by failing to see my company through? Maybe it’s because I became a mother. (I can’t really work weekends anymore, or until 2am on weekdays.)
My god. Is it because I stopped coming to ad parties?!
I’m trying to figure myself out. But while I do that, I want to talk about reinvention. People tend to think of it as additive: “I’m going to become.” But Inanna’s story reminds us that before the great rebirth comes a clearing-out, an emptying of space that feels like a direct attack on identity.
What did we take for granted? What did we think was just us, when actually it was only adornment? What gets left behind when you’re stripped down and unable to defend yourself against the scariest thing that can possibly happen?
These questions get asked of us in various ways: What’s a dealbreaker, where’s the line between values and work ethic? And make no mistake: They will strip us down. We eventually all appear naked and vulnerable before chaos moves us to the new order.
In three days, Inanna rises. She has to choose someone to take her place in hell. After evaluating every close person in her life, she chooses her husband—who runs and hides behind his sister, who asks to share his fate. So they exist there in oscillation, one in and one out, forever.
To change, you must pass through the death-world. But you can’t just dip your toes in and say you did it. You can't go halvesies with someone else, dooming you both to arrested development. The submersion has to be total, and it disfigures you, making it impossible to reappear in the world as you were before.
In exchange for what she lost, Inanna gains sharp clarity: Who deserves her loyalty and who doesn’t? That’s a pretty standard-issue post-death realisation—who was there for me, who really cared, when I stopped existing in power?
It happened to the Queen of Heaven. It happens to us all. There’s a gift in this, but you have to take it whole.
Random aside: I wrote more deeply about the Inanna myth in my substack, Midwifing the Mother. I tied it more concretely to matrescence, in that case, but the whole myth is there, if you're interested in the details.
(You also get to find out why Ereshkigal was so mad! It's tea.)
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