Surrendering Personal Power

Inanna’s Fifth Gate

From her wrist, the gold ring was removed. Wolkstein and Kramerption

In ancient Sumerian and Mesopotamian mythology, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, descends through the seven gates to the Underworld in an archetypal pattern of death and rebirth. This post is part seven of a multi-part series, though each part is a separate subject and should stand alone, too. All previous posts are available at Modern Mythology.

When she entered the fifth gate:

From her wrist, the gold ring was removed.

Wolkstein and Kramer

The gold ring represents the egoic tendency to rely on personal power. Perceiving experiences of depth as mere setbacks, it relentlessly pops back to the surface like a cork, claiming, I can do this.

At the fifth gate, there is a deeper surrender, born of the recognition that we can do nothing to stop the descent and the niggling realization that perhaps the descent is good.

When I passed through the fifth gate, I had been living with my re-mother, Phyllis Benbow, for six months, helping her care for Jim and Jean in a live-in elder care situation. Phyllis had snatched me from the jaws of homelessness, adopting me into a middle-class home in the San Gabriel foothills, where I became essentially a 34-year-old teenager. The elders were set up in their master bedroom, where hospice care had installed matching hospital beds. All I had to do was elder-sit two nights a week and help Phyllis change diapers, if needed, at night. Professional aides spent the day shift with Jim and Jean, so I had few responsibilities.

I hiked in the San Gabriels five or six days a week as if it were my day job. I’d head out the front door and down the steep street to a beautiful park. Past the manicured lawns and flower beds, at the bottom of the hill, hidden behind some thick hedges, someone had cut a slit in the rusted chain link anti-deer fencing creating a reddish vagina-shaped portal to the wild world. On one side lived the human-tended world. The other was thick with scrub trees and bracken overarching a skinny deer path. I pushed my way through to a magical world.

Almost immediately, the trail hit bottom and turned up. As I climbed, the scrub gave way to the rounded hilltop. There were no trees, only wild mustard with little yellow flowers and a breathtaking view of the whole range. The path continued down the other side into the thick vegetation at the bottom, where a creek ran three seasons a year. Even in summer, patches of wet and small puddles, fed from below, refused to give up. Vegetation near the water source was so thick that the air was cooler, and little clouds of midgies swarmed. When the trail stopped, I followed the creek bed for miles.

One day, I found a clearing surrounded by live oak and carpeted with their golden-brown leaves. I sat on the earth and focused on my breath. I imagined my spine extending down to the earth's core and up to the heavens because I’d read it in a book. Suddenly tired, I stretched out on the earth and closed my eyes, telling myself it was meditation. I woke to the crunch of someone walking on the leaves, one careful step, then another. I slowly opened my eyes.

Three curious mule deer browsed so near me I could almost touch one. I didn’t dare breathe. One looked directly into my eye. Something wild zinged across, causing a mini-explosion in my gut. She snorted into the leaves, turned, and all three sauntered away.

A little further on lived a dry waterfall I loved to climb. At the top, a natural seat had formed—one boulder beneath me and another supporting my back. The tops of the trees spread for miles. Thus enthroned, I’d sing. It didn’t matter what - popular songs, commercials, or spirituals. They were equally good.

“How many cookies did Andrew eat? Andrew 8-8000. How do you keep your carpet clean? Call Andrew 8-8000.”

I was out of my mind in the best way because it was impossible to tell myself a victim story or indulge my terror of the future while I was singing. When a song naturally ran out, I’d sit in a silence so deep I joined with the landscape - the plants and trees, of course, but the animals too, right down to the insects and the earth. When I became as quiet inside as they were, I belonged. I visited them almost daily since belonging was my deepest wound. Sometimes, the love was so evident, so deep and so loud it echoed. I could feel the forest breathing. Then, the next song bubbled up like spring water from the aquifer.

“Rich relations may give crusts and such. You can help yourself, but don’t take too much. Pappa may have. And Mama may have. But God Bless the Child that’s got his own, that’s got his own.”

Sometimes, the next song was a sudden grief squall, and I dissolved into whole-body sobbing without reason or story. The body cried; the mind was silent. That, too, was an offering. The community surrounded, nurtured, loved, and accepted me in an upswelling of such generosity I couldn’t possibly deserve it. Yet, there they were. It’s a relief to realize I can’t do it. I don’t know how, and when I try, all I do is further complicate the mess. Just stop. What a surprise to find joy at the fifth gate, but there she was.

“I love you. That’s all I can say. I love you. It’s all I can do. I love you. It’s better that way. There, I said it again.”

When we pass through this gate, our worship of all things that cannot be taken to the grave comes to rest. The uninterrupted cycling of thoughts keeps us focused on the superficial. Life without communion has made us crazy. It’s a life without soul. Surrendering the gold ring of personal power is the antidote to our frenetic culture. We enter a time of cleansing, healing, and release - a time of realization.

Some of us are through the fifth gate now; others are still at the fourth gate, clinging to old, outmoded power-over models of reality. But even they are beginning to wake. As we watch our leaders openly engage in election interference in other countries, push toward the destruction of NATO, claim ownership of Gaza, and engage in victim blaming in Ukraine - all for personal gain - we realize our problems are global in scope. Some argue that the Third World War has already begun, but it’s a digital war, not fought in conventional ways. Irreparable harm has already been done. There is no turning back. The way things were is finished - and that’s the good news.

The only way out is through. Old stories of greatness and conquest rise from our shoulders like mist as they evaporate in the sunlight of reality. We become soft, still. Ego falls silent. The ocean of psyche reflects a clear summer morning. Every movement agitates this water. Even prayer makes waves. Once we stop flailing, we must do what arises naturally from the anima mundi, the deep soul of the natural world, and sing the flesh back onto our own bones.

Who are we? And what do we want?

The answer to both questions is love. That connective tissue runs through everything, like mycelium, distributing nutrients and information to the whole forest. What arises from love? Right action.

We must let go of the endless loop of invasive culture and embrace the silence under everything. Silence is the landscape of love. We all belong.