Loss of Creative Voice

Inanna's Second Gate

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, descends to the Underworld in an archetypal pattern of egoic death and rebirth.

This post is Part Three of a multi-part series. Part One, Inanna Descends to the Underworld in Real Time, Part Two, Inanna’s Plan B, and Part Three, Inanna’s First Gate, are available in Modern Mythology.

“When she entered the second gate, from her neck, the small lapis beads were removed.” Wolkstein and Kramer

At the second gate, the gatekeeper removes the lapis lazuli beads from Inanna’s throat. Again, she is stunned. Again, she asks, “What is this?” The answer is always the same: “Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

The necklace of precious lapis lazuli symbolizes Inanna’s celestial and earthly power, queenly status, and divine authority. The throat is the seat of voice, creativity, and the power to name a thing and have it done. From here, we express our cleverness and witty retorts, which create our persona.

When I lost my crown at the first gate, I worked as an assistant manager in an apartment complex. Part of my compensation was the furnished apartment I shared with The Love of My Life. But after his betrayal, everything in the building where I worked and lived made me cry. 85% of the easy-listening muzak piped into the lobby office were breakup songs. I sat, exposed to the world, choking back an ocean of grief. Michael McDonald’s I Keep Forgetting was killing me. The office manager, her grief triggered, slammed cabinets in annoyance and told me to get a grip on myself. I was unprofessional.

So, I got my old job back at a locked adolescent psychiatric facility and rented a guesthouse. I was more comfortable in my hospital job anyway. If any adults had been paying attention when I was a teenager, I would have been admitted to just such a place. Since no one was, I ended up working in one instead. Rather than being alarmed by this private irony, I felt relief - like I belonged. Then, the father in the front house, clearly drunk, shouted at his wife, “Just shut up.” It rang through the walls and up and down my spine. In another hour, he slapped her. Then, furniture crashed as he threw her around. She begged him to stop, but he was only getting started. Though it was still daylight, I went to bed fully clothed.

Their teenage son's rickety truck pulled up to the backdoor. He slammed the door in a fury. My second gate squeezed shut, and the legacy of domestic violence swallowed me whole.

Before passing through this gate, I was a water strider, my pontoon feet balancing on the thinnest skim of the water's tension. Like someone had popped my bubble, I dropped into the trauma, the cold waters of grief closing over me with the angry shouting, the challenges to fight, and the echoes of my eldest brother protecting our mom from our dad. I swirled the covers around my nose and sank into myself - a fetal peanut way down, hiding somewhere inside my flesh - such a tiny thing inside my big girl body.

The father banged through the back door and staggered into the shed behind my guesthouse. He clattered the contents of my toolbox on the floor. I crept to the window on all fours, placed my fingers on the sill, and inched my eyes to the glass just in time to see him hide my hammer behind the oak tree. I froze.

He called his son,” Here pussy, pussy, pussy.”

The kid flew through the back door, fists ready, obscenities streaming from his mouth. My throat was ajar. Not a single word could pass through.

The boy stepped off the porch, and something lifted my body off the floor and walked me to my door like a puppet. I threw it open, stretched to my full height, and connected with the boy’s eyes. “I called the police,” with a confidence I didn’t have.

No longer skimming the surface tension of water, I fell in.

The old man crumpled into a sobbing heap of grief in the driveway - so broken I ached to comfort him. The boy and I gazed at each other across an expanse of otherworldly stillness. When the moment popped, and we unfroze, he turned back to his house, quietly latching the door.

Job done. What synchronicity had led me to that childhood replay - perfectly tuned to reopen and drain my wound? The perfection of it staggered my imagination. Within a month, I would lose my job and that guesthouse. Terrified of homelessness, I could only surrender. I’d lost my power to make things happen, my status, and my tenuous sense of safety. Before this moment, I thought I was ‘all that.’ In my late 20s, cute if not pretty, I had moved from the East Coast to Los Angeles to become an actress. I was living my ego dream—the shiny story, the mythologized version of myself. Thank Grace, that didn’t work out.

This is the journey we are on In the larger culture. The American Dream, our mythos, is a sham. The billionaire class grows obscenely wealthy, while the middle class disappears, and the poor become homeless in droves. In 2024, we dropped out of the top 20 in the self-reported happiness index. For Americans under 30, that number fell to 62nd. Fear and depression have risen to unbelievable levels on both sides of the political divide. We are suffering a painful loss of status and authority as we undermine our allies in NATO and Ukraine and contribute to the devastation in Palestine. Climate change devastates us with fire, flood, and temperature extremes, yet our leadership insists climate change is a hoax even as insurance companies cancel policies over it.

With schoolyard bully taunts, our next president lays the groundwork for refusing to send disaster relief to California. Instead, he points an angry finger, for this is what we do to victims of extraction capitalism, which is pathologically incapable of compassion. It’s like my grandmother saying to my mother, “Well, what did you do to provoke him?”

Now, as our throat is laid bare to a second Trump administration, the naked ambitions of this harshest form of capitalism lays waste to swaths of our citizens, east, west, and middle - red and blue. The myth that made us great, the American Dream, becomes a nightmare. Half the people stand outside our national story in horror. The rest of us will soon wake up. We are at the second gate.