The Rebirth of Compassion

Inanna Rises from the Dead

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—a pattern I believe our culture is experiencing now. This post is part 11 of a multi-part series, though each part is a separate subject and stands alone. All previous posts are available at Modern Mythology.

When we left Inanna, she had been killed by one resounding slap from her sister, Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, and hung on a meat hook to rot. Meanwhile, Ninshubur, a god in her own right, whose name means Queen of the East, has been holding vigil at the entrance to the underworld. After three days, when Inanna does not return, Ninshubur knows something has gone horribly wrong.

Ninshubur represents a numinous aspect of the human psyche that remains unblemished, no matter how bad behavior becomes. She is pure, untouched by the world, the heart of the heart of us, trustworthy and true. This function of the psyche travels to each of the three gods, members of Inanna’s immediate family, to beg them to intercede on their daughter’s behalf and bring Inanna back from the land of the dead. However, Inanna’s behavior is so bad that she doesn’t deserve to be saved. She is already dead, beyond redemption, beyond the beyond.

The first two gods rightly fault Inanna for her arrogance. She brought the whole calamity on herself by scheming for more power. No one asked her to do this. Had they known what she planned to do, they would not have supported it. She went to the underworld to overthrow her sister, aspiring to be the Queen of Everything: Heaven, the Earth, and the Underworld. It was a coup, driven by sheer audacity. Her father, Enlil, and her brother, Nanna, condemn her with the same words.

“My daughter has craved the Great Above.

Inanna craved the Great Below.

She who receives the me of the underworld does not return.

She who goes to the Dark City stays there.”

To hell with her, they might be saying. Inanna got exactly what she deserved. And isn’t this true for all of us? Isn’t the world exacting like that? Whether we are aware of it or not, we have all participated in the patterns of consumption and conquest that have occurred on our watch - and even before we were born. We are complicit. Many terrible things have been done in our name. As individuals and as a culture, grace is so much more than we can ever deserve.

But the third god, Enki, the god of wisdom, responds to Inanna’s plight with compassion, even after all her destructive arrogance. For wisdom knows that love is the only response. He asks, “What has my daughter done?” And when he hears, he is “troubled; ”he is “grieved.” The whole situation moves his heart. He responds, in every sense of the word.

He scrapes some dirt from under the fingernail of his right hand to make the kurgarra and then from his left to create the galatur. These insect-like creatures are made from earth and are described as “neither male nor female.”

Right and left? Neither male nor female? They embody the resolution of opposites, which exist on a spectrum. Things that seem opposite are the same. Inanna and Ereshkigal are opposites, yet they are sisters. The two sides of an argument or a power struggle can seem like opposites, yet they exist within the same issue. The political right and left can be seen as opposites, yet we are all American. Here is an ancient text that celebrates the resolution of opposites as magical grace from the god of wisdom.

The in-betweenness of these otherworldly creatures reminds me of non-binary, transgender, gay, and neurodivergent individuals. All people are simply the way they were made. As such, they are a great gift, carrying profound insights about what it means to be human. Insights we need right now. But our hyper-masculine patriarchy refuses to understand, support, or love these brave souls. If that weren’t enough, they cruelly malign constituents they are sworn to represent for calculated political gain, making them less physically safe in the world. In doing so, those in power reduce us all; they make humanity smaller instead of embracing our complexity. Who better to show us how to be human than those who have suffered? In-betweenness expands our possibilities, while the reductive version of political correctness makes us smaller and meaner. The United States should be a haven for all its citizens - we could be, so easily.

Enki gives the food of life to the kurgarra and the water of life to the galatur. He tells them to fly, undetected, between the cracks in the gates. He tells them that when they arrive in the underworld, Ereshkigal will be suffering her travail as she gives birth to the world anew.

We could use a new world about now. The one we have runs on arrogance. It is polluted, politically toxic, and incapable of supporting us as we are now behaving. It runs on greed, corruption, gangland-style extortion, and intimidation. The wealthiest man in the world said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” But the god of wisdom would disagree. Compassion is the answer.

The genderless insects find Ereshkigal in hard labor. She is naked. “Her hair swirls about her head like leeks.” She moans in agony. The kurgarra and galatur mirror her pain back to her. They match her tone and words precisely, with no additions, no spin, and no advice. They simply bear witness to the depth of her pain.

Ereshkigal was moaning:

Oh! Oh! My insides.

They moaned:

Oh! Oh! Your insides!

She moaned:

Ohhhh! My outsides!

They moaned:

Ohhhh! Your outsides!

Ereshkigal stopped.

She looked at them.

She asked:

Who are you?

And, as Enki predicted, she is grateful. For truly, to be fully seen is to receive compassion - to be heard is to be loved. If we all knew each other’s whole stories, we would have compassion. Listening with your skin rather than your ears is love - as a verb. Having pain recognized like this is sacred. Our full attention is divine because presence sparkles with grace. Presence is the numinous gift of sitting with a wise therapist, one who is so self-realized that they embrace you with their soul, rather than relying on techniques. Presence heals. It isn’t what they say that matters; it’s what they are. That is what the creatures from Enki do for Ereshkigal.

The Queen of the Underworld is so grateful that she offers them several precious gifts, but they decline. They are on a mission from a god. They only want Inanna’s corpse, and Ereshkigal, after one moment’s hesitation, one moment of looking back at all Inanna has done, gives it. The insects fly over the corpse, sprinkling the food of life and the water of life over it. The god’s food is compassion; his water is love. These are the magic of the Father Enki, the god of wisdom.

Inanna rises from the dead.

This is what we must become capable of if we are ever going to love the MAGA cult back into our culture, and we must not turn our backs on them. We must not forget that we are all part of the problem; it’s OUR problem. We must listen to their real complaints, mirror back precisely what we have heard, without argument, addition, judgment, or advice. We have all been lied to and manipulated by arrogance. We have all been raised in a culture that demeans women and demeans men for being womanish - for expressing love and compassion. We have been shamed, and unless that heals, we shame others.

As Vonnegut would say: And so it goes.

Elon Musk and the whole patriarchal worldview are wrong about compassion. The real disease of Western Civilization is arrogance, which breeds the lust for power. Compassion is the antidote and the medicine for the grievous harm we have brought into the world. What we build, once we are reborn, must be tempered by only one thing: the awareness that life is impermanent.

With that wisdom, we will be ready to rise from the dead. The cultural structures we create after we have died and been reborn must be dedicated to alleviating suffering rather than building and protecting grotesque wealth.

Arrogance is the opposite of compassion. Arrogance is the opposite of love. When our arrogance has been dead for three metaphorical days, we will be ready to take back the powers we lost on our descent and use them for good in the world. Stripped of our arrogance, which imagines it can live forever if we can only accumulate enough wealth and power, we can build a new culture and a new government based on a more accurate understanding of the world.

I’d love to know what you think about all this. Please leave a comment below.