July 1, 2019

{Goddess Journey} Part Three


The third and final part of the "Goddess Journey" chapter of my book-in-slow-progress, A Memory of Love: The Spiritual Mission of a Princess.
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Glorious Inanna
The Sumerians were one of the world’s first known civilizations, taking form in the fourth millennium BCE, and, according to Joseph Campbell, its mythology was the source of Babylonian, Assyrian, Phoenician, and Biblical traditions. The glorious Inanna, Sumer’s primary deity, was the goddess of love, sensuality, fertility, procreation, war, and rebirth. Throughout the centuries, as the world’s centers of power changed, she was worshiped in ancient Babylon as Ishtar, then identified with the Greek Goddess Aphrodite and, because she was seen as the morning and evening’s bright star Venus, Inanna also later became associated with the celebrated Roman Goddess.

Inanna has a rich, multi-dimensional legacy, celebrated as the Queen of Heaven and Earth. “She embodies the Divine Feminine in all its splendor: a sensuous courtesan and a timid virgin, a life-giving mother and an eternal child, merciful and wicked, wild, passionate, untamed,” wrote Lana Adler in “7 Goddess Archetypes of Empowerment.” “In other words, everything (with the exception of the mother, perhaps) patriarchy aimed to demonize and destroy.” (You only have to look as far as the Bible to see evidence of this.)

Inanna is synonymous with transformation. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell wrote that “the oldest recorded account of the passage through the gates of metamorphosis is the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna’s descent to the nether world.” Abandoning heaven and earth, she “abandoned lordship, abandoned ladyship,” this goddess “from the ‘great above’ she set her mind toward the ‘great below’”—the hero’s journey. Her courageous descent and transformative return, the ultimate rite of passage, is legendary, her story told for thousands of years—with many faces and in many incarnations. “As we are told by the Vedas: ‘Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.’”

The legend of Inanna, encompassing a mythological journey, intersected with Diana’s life, even beyond its end. Well-known British astrologer and author Nicholas Campion made some profound royal observations following Diana’s death. But first, a little background: “After the second world war,” Campion explained, “Carl Jung [founder of analytical psychology] wrote that the phenomenon of Nazism could be partly explained by the eruption of the archetype Wotan, the Teutonic god, into the German collective unconscious.” After watching the funeral service for Princess Diana, Campion made this declaration: “I would say that what we have just witnessed was the eruption of the archetype of Inanna, the archaic Venus, into the contemporary collective unconscious.”

Campion, also a historian of cultural astronomy, believed there were people who would doubt him and found it “astonishing” that it had not been realized before, but it was his “contention that monarchy has never lost its magical, mystical functions, merely that the steady creation of a constitutional monarchy with a determinedly ordinary royal family, has concealed it.” During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Campion saw that “from the moment Diana appeared she constellated the archetype of Inanna. She was connected far less to the contemporary royal family of good works and middle class values than to the ancient magical monarchy of ancient cosmology of life and fertility; sacrifice and resurrection. Her life and death were unique in our lifetime, though perhaps not in British history.”

“As an archetype,” Lana Adler added, “Inanna symbolizes the powerful seductress who uses her considerable female persuasion to her advantage.” However, we’re reminded that “sensuality is a gift; but it can also be a powerful weapon. When we trade on it or use it to control others, we give away a part of ourselves.” Women don’t have to look to history to know how easy it is to give away our power, whether we’re being manipulated or we are the manipulator. And when it’s through our sensuality, through sex, Adler believes that it can be seen as a “symptom of deep self esteem issues and subconscious fears.” I sensed that Diana was waking up to this awareness at the very end of her life, perhaps in the last hours. Frustrated with being in the throes of a superficial affair, she was unhappy and ready to be home with her children, to get back to her newfound passion for her work in service to others; to restore her inner power and, with divine guidance, find love within. But her bigger mission took over, and her life moved into legend. ~