Inanna and Erishkigal

by Sophie Juneau

 

Edmund Dulac (1915)

 

This is my take on the story of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess who descended into the Underworld to meet her sister Erishkigal. It’s an outline of a longer piece I’m writing. Apologies to lovers of ancient literature for taking liberties with the original myth.

 

Inanna and Erishkigal

 

Thousands of years ago the Sumerian Queen-Goddess Inanna sat on her throne with her demure servant Ninshubur by her side.

 

Everyone loved Inanna. Her skin was luminous, like honey. Clear-eyed and calm, she was the goddess of love and war, a wise ruler of many cities: independent, beholden to no-one, a Queen in her own right. Her chosen consort was a young musician.

 

Now Inanna had an older sister, Erishkigal, who ruled over the Underworld. Erishkigal had never lived up to her promise. She had been an adventurous child, dark haired, clever and inventive, but she had watched her baby sister soak up all the sunshine from her young life and leave nothing but shadows. Deep underground in Erishkigal’s kingdom, other exiles crowded the tunnels of her subway world, and in the centre of this labyrinth, Erishkigal longed for a daughter. A child who would be just like her, who would have all the things she had missed. Erishkigal cried into her city of caves. And then she began to rage.

 

Sitting by a sheltered pool, Inanna felt the earth tremble. When she put her ear to the ground she heard her sister’s cries. At first the sound was unfamiliar to her. More like thunder than a voice. More like a storm approaching. She raised her head. The caged birds still looked placid, the water was clear and the fountain was soothing. But when she put her ear to the ground one more time, she recognised her older sister’s voice as it echoed into her day.

 

Alone in her library, Inanna could still heard Erishkigal’s tears. Later on, riding through the streets, her sister’s anguish and fury came back to her in the noise of traffic and beggars fighting.

 

Inanna understood. After all this time she would have to visit her sister and make peace with her. Perhaps there would be room for a truce. But she knew Erishkigal was unpredictable. It would take all her powers of persuasion, all her skill as an orator and a counsellor, to win through. But she never doubted her ability to make others feel loved, nor her own loveliness.

 

She told her father of the intended visit. He nodded and wished her well. As did her grandfather. Her husband was concerned but quickly returned to his music. Her servant Ninshubur was less sanguine. She knew that Erishkigal’s Underworld kingdom was reputedly a place of no return, even for a Queen-Goddess like Inanna. If Inanna did not come back within a certain time, Ninshubur would alert the household to the fact and take whatever steps seemed necessary.

 

Inanna prepared for her descent. Self-possessed but troubled, she rehearsed the meeting in her mind. She chose her clothes with care. She wore the ring their mother had given her. She tied her long hair out of sight, packed a small bag of trinkets to offer Erishkigal, and chose food to take with her to share. She put on her most studious looking pair of glasses. But she could not resist her favourite shoes. Her newest handbag. The bright diamond earrings she wore at her coronation.

 

The entrance to the Underworld was unremarkable. And unexpected: up a rickety iron fire escape to a graffiti’d door that said “No Entry”. There was no obvious way to open the door. She looked up to the next landing and saw a blackened hole where another door should have been. “Fire damage”, she thought. Taped across like a crime scene, the empty doorframe looked like the only way in.

 

The dark hallway stretched ahead with more fire doors at the end. There she stepped out onto a rubble-strewn staircase and immediately caught the heel of her right shoe in a deep crevice in the floor. The stem of the heel snapped. Inanna abandoned her fine footwear and crept on in stocking feet. Thankfully the rubble gave way to smooth cold steps down to her sister’s kingdom. By the time she reached the lowest floor, seven levels down, she had folded away her glasses and, feeling very grubby, had removed her mother’s ring for safekeeping. A strand of hair was falling loose from her chignon. One of her fingernails was broken. In the distance she could hear a woman crying.

 

Erishkigal was on her bed, clutching her stomach. She looked older than Inanna remembered. She was obviously in pain. “Where does it hurt?” said Inanna, feeling helpless by her sister’s side. “Everywhere” said Erishkigal. “Inside and out. There isn’t a part of me that doesn’t hurt,” she repeated.

 

“What can I do for you?” said Inanna. Her sister drew her knees up sharply and hid her face: “You can die,” said Erishkigal. “You can leave me alone and let me forget. You did this to me,” said the older woman, twisting in pain.

 

Inanna stepped back, shocked by the depth of her sister’s loathing. All her gifts, all her cleverness, none of it meant anything in this tunnel of despair. Suddenly she fell backwards as invisible hands – demons from Erishkigal’s lands – held her by the arms and stabbed her with a syringe. Darkness and nothing. Erishkigal’s servants had banished her sister to a black narcotic void.

 

Three days passed. Ninshubur knew that something had to be done. She talked to the family but no–one seemed concerned. The efficient bureaucracy of Inanna’s domain made sure that life processed at its usual pace. Laws were observed. Taxes were paid. No-one went hungry.

 

Ninshubur went to the local hospital, to the mortuary, where her twin brothers worked as technicians taking care of the few bodies that had died suddenly or of unnatural causes. They all agreed that the twins would gain entry to the Underworld as porters, supposedly bringing an unidentified corpse to Erishkigal to add to her kingdom. Once in the Underworld, they would see what could be done.

 

The twins packed out an empty shroud with bandages and quietly entered the same fire damaged doorway that Inanna had found. They saw Inanna’s discarded shoes and knew that they had to descend. Seven floors down, they heard Erishkigal crying, still in pain. When they entered her disordered bedroom, the twins were shocked by Erishkigal’s tear-stained face and held her hand, trying to establish her symptoms, questioning and listening with great focus. They lost all sense of their mission, listening to Erishkigal’s agonised voice, watching her twisting, troubled body. Hours passed. They sat with Erishkigal, straightened out her room, changed the bedclothes, all the time noting her physical and mental state, willing her better. At last, Erishkigal fell asleep. In the lamplight, her pale face relaxed into something like peace, something like the freshness of rain after thunder. The twins slept in chairs, taking turns to keep watch over a woman they now cared for.

 

Erishkigal woke and for the first time in years there was no dread, no darkness, no breathlessness or pain. The twins were sitting by her bed. “What can I give you?” she asked them. “You can have anything. Wealth. Love. I can give you it all.” There was a silence. Then one twin said: “We are looking for the most destitute junkie in your kingdom… someone who has lost everything, someone who has fallen from the greatest heights of achievement to the depths. Someone so fractured they don’t know who they are”.

 

Erishkigal knew they could only mean Inanna. “I know someone like that. But she is broken. Destroyed. Are you sure?”

 

And of course, the twins were sure. Erishkigal knew it was time to let go of Inanna.

 

So Inanna, disoriented and unwashed, was led back to her kingdom after three days in the Underworld. The twins sat with her as they had with her sister; Ninshubur brought her mistress food and told stories to remind her of past glories, but Inanna was no longer happy to sit by the pool or read all day in the library. One day, on a whim, she released all the birds from their cages. She paid weekly visits to the twins in their overlit, overcrowded hospital. And in turn, the twins went back to visit Erishkigal in the Underworld – they visited often. As a result, each sister got to hear of the other’s life. Inanna’s hair grew darker over time, while Erishkigal’s acquired tiny streaks of gold. And Ninshubur never doubted that the new order was far, far better than anything that went before.

This is just a first draft, and I’ve taken many liberties with the original story… my hope was to highlight the interplay between the stuff inside us that we own, and the stuff we disown… Sophie Juneau

 

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NOTES

Sophie Juneau (pen-name) 2013, London. Sophie also writes under her birth-name – Danica Ognjenovic)

Image: “But Nicolette One Night Escaped”. From “Edmund Dulac’s picture-book for the French Red Cross”. Hodder and Stoughton (1915). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45907/45907-h/45907-h.htm#Page_82