From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.

From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.

From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.

These are the first lines of the ancient myth of Inanna's Descent to the underworld. Inanna, the Queen of the celestial realms and the goddess life force pulsing through all of earth, knew there was something waiting for her in the depths.

Inanna is associated with the planet Venus, but an older, fuller, fiercer version than we may know her as today, through the lens of western astrology.

The Sumerians worshipped Inanna as the morning and evening star now called Venus, and they said she wore the cloaks of the more ancient gods. In their cosmology, she is the child of the moon god and goddess, sister of the sun, and descended from the primordial sea. Theirs was a polytheistic culture but Inanna was a central deity, a goddess of cosmos and life and following her descent, she possessed knowledge of death and the underworld, too.

So why did Inanna choose to descend?

Why did she open her ear to the great below, where she was to lose her protections and her powers, gate by gate, as she descended to meet her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld?

The underworld comes for us all, but rarely do we make the choice to go there.

The myth of Inanna’s descent speaks to every Venus retrograde, but it feels especially, potently tied to this one.

This October, Venus retrogrades through the sign of Scorpio, meeting the sun for the final time in Scorpio our lifetimes.

Scorpio is an underworld sign, the deepest waters of the zodiac. This final Scorpio cazimi comes at a time when abuses of power are everywhere, flagrant and inescapable. It comes at a time of institutional rot, as our powerful systems push us further and further from right relationship with each other, with our communities, with our life-sustaining planet. At a time when abusers of all kinds are protected as their victims cry for justice. This Scorpio cazimi comes at a time when many of us who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s are aware that the aesthetics and feminine trappings we were indoctrinated into were determined for us by these same abusers. This Scorpio cazimi comes at a time when our rage at the horror of these systems and their ongoing, ever-present transgressions could possibly, finally, bubble over.

I wonder if this final Venus cazimi in Scorpio is inviting us to meet the parts of us who have been buried. Parts of self that are unable and unwilling to conform to these systems. Parts who are ready to finally step forward.

Maybe they are parts that have been sequestered because our young selves knew they wouldn't be attractive or palatable to the male gaze.

The protections Inanna adorned herself with to descend were gifted to her by male gods and the culture and society she presided over. They represent, at least in part, adaptations made in response to larger systems. And she sheds them, one by one. After Inanna lost all her powers, she stands naked in front of her sister, and she stands defiant. Her defiance meets her sister’s wrath. And from here the story gets grisly.

It's a scary thing to descend, to meet the fear, rage, and grief that await us down there. It's a terrifying prospect, knowing that we cannot fathom who we might be on the other side, but we might choose to descend anyway.

The myth of Inanna’s descent may have been written at a time when empire was taking shape, many hymns about her were. This was a time when the cultures of domination and conquest were only just beginning to suppress the goddess-centered, partnership cultures that came before. And in this and many other ways, the myth of Inanna’s descent holds wisdom for those of us who have generations and generations of domination woven into our bones and blood.

It may even be able to help us remember… but the outcome is not the point.

Our daytime selves desire to cohere every aspect of our being into a presentable and digestible self, but the promise of the depths are not to make us more optimized or successful. The descent is not a journey from which we can extract what we need to achieve our goals.

It's something else. It's more mysterious. It's a fuller exploration of our entire psyche, individual and collective, including the parts that have been exiled, abandoned, and forced aside.

It isn't a one and done kind of excursion, it's a constant spiraling, planned and unplanned, that lasts a lifetime.

But cosmically speaking, the invitation is here, now.

Can you join us?