🌑 Inanna: The Descent and the Desire

Series: The Sacred and the Sensual
by Rosalind Green

“She stripped herself of power, crown, and name — and found truth waiting naked at the bottom of the world.”

Queen of Heaven and Earth

Before the gods of Greece, before the prophets of desert faiths, there was Inanna.
She was the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility, war, and the morning star.
Her temples were among the first places where art, music, and sacred sexuality intertwined. To worship her was to learn the rhythm of life itself — seed, bloom, decay, rebirth.

Her hymns speak of desire without shame:

“My vulva, the horn, the Boat of Heaven —
is full of eagerness like the young moon.”

For Inanna, eroticism was not a sin but a current of creation — a way to taste divinity through the body.

The Sacred Marriage

Each year, Inanna’s priestess united with the king in the hieros gamos — the sacred marriage — to renew the fertility of the land. The ritual fused political power, sexual energy, and divine blessing. The body was the temple; pleasure was invocation.

Inanna’s power was not passive. She initiated, she invited, she commanded joy. Her priestesses, the qadishtu, carried her knowledge: to bring life forth through ecstasy, to balance chaos with tenderness.
Through her, sexuality became the bridge between heaven and earth — the act that makes existence possible.

The Descent

But Inanna’s most powerful story begins when she walks away from all of it.
She descends into the underworld, stripping away her crown, jewels, and garments at each gate until she stands naked before her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead.
There she is struck down, hung lifeless on a hook, left to rot.

It is the oldest written myth of transformation — an initiation through surrender.
To die before rebirth. To face shadow before light. To find power again, not through dominance, but through having lost everything that once defined you.

Her return to the world is not triumphant but changed. Desire, once external, becomes inward knowing. She becomes the archetype of integration — both light and dark, both lover and mourner.The Language of Descent

Artists and mystics have carried her story for millennia:

For Jungians, she is the map of the subconscious.

For feminists, the first woman who owns her descent.

For poets, the voice that refuses to romanticize awakening.

Inanna teaches that spiritual and sexual journeys mirror each other: both require shedding, both require vulnerability, both end in deeper selfhood.

The descent is not punishment; it’s practice.

The Modern Pulse

To remember Inanna is to remember that power is cyclical — you rise, you fall, you rise again.
Pleasure and grief are sisters.
Ecstasy and loss, parts of one rhythm.

Inanna’s story lives in anyone who has remade themselves after devastation — in those who love again after heartbreak, create again after ruin, trust again after fear.

She whispers the same lesson each time:
You are not broken. You are becoming.

Rose Meow™ by Rosalind Green
A study of art, cannabis, sex, and spirit — written without flinching.

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