INANNA: PRIMORDIAL CREATION

INANNA

Primordial Creation
When history begins to speak, it speaks as a Tree, represented as the progenitor of the human race. The very first written story from Sumeria -- the world's oldest poetry -- is a creation story about Inanna and the sacred Tree of Life -- a World Tree with instinctual DNA knowledge living in it. This Tree of Life is the first legend and the link between the transcendental and phenomenal worlds. Our kinship bonds and genealogical ancestry are expressed through the sacred tree archetype.

Joseph Campbell (1965) said Inanna was the Tree herself, the "cosmic tree of life and death" (p. 64). She is the ineffable totality of what is -- the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge which are one and the same as the Tree of Truth.

Jung reminds us, "In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams." (Psychological Reflections, 76).

Vision Tree

The tree is our vegetative self, involuntary action and life in the body. Such experiences are closely related to death, which is a permanent resident of the psyche. The creatures that live in the tree, including the serpent, are our instincts. Your body is your subconscious mind. Mind and body are the same because mind is distributed.

We are all interdependent. The problem is we have isolated ourselves from each other, from animals, plants, and the inorganic ground of cosmos. We have forgotten our origins and embody a myth of loneliness. Our emotional and intuitive mind naturally engages with and is interactive with nature.

Mindell (1982) likens the dreambody ("subtle body") to a tree. Half is above the ground and can be described medically or biologically as the 'real' body and half is below ground as roots we can sense when we focus our attention on subtle signals in psychophysical reality. Dreambody appears in body images, rituals, and physical therapies.

Jung is very clear that, "...there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them." (CW 8, Pages 399-403). 

The root is a deeper, universal description of matter, symptoms, and experiential realms where experiences are a matter of life and death. It's the hidden dimension, the "dark matter" of our existence. Mindell says, "The trunk of the tree is a dream symbol that bridges the world between deep sentient experiences and symbols."

We can amplify that somatic process by combining instincts, dreams (or trance), and images. The connection depends on unfolding subtle sensations of psyche-matter interactions of psychophysical reality. Somatic rhythms include pulsation, form, flow, construction and deconstruction, and oscillating polarities.

All of our cells are intelligent entities. The autonomic system is loaded with all kinds of receptors modulated by peptides stored in the spine all the way down. They can be emotionally expressed through movement and body-centered work.

There are receptors for chemical messengers on every cell of the body, and this is where memories are stored. Memory is how much the receptors have been stimulated or not. All the history is there. Emotions are universal. They arise at the cellular level from molecular information -- the remote smart key that fits the subconscious lock.

We have receptors in the central nervous system, gastric, endocrine, cardio, circulatory, immune, and skin systems. Peptide receptors are found in all organs, particularly the heart, which has all receptor types for information molecules on it. Our feelings are filtered by these molecules. Chakra regions are like mini-brains. Each is a nerve plexus of receptors that push the body state to do what needs to be done through the wisdom of the body -- Soma Sophia.

The Sumerian goddess takes the sacred tree home to her garden where she nurtures and cares for it. The tree mirrors Inanna herself -- the mirror of divine realities which has all the information of the universe. She comes to terms with all the creatures, including the serpent, that live in that tree, representing the duality of the goddess.

The snake is a personification of the unconscious, for, as early as the Gnostics, it was used as a symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, where the vegetative psyche is localized. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.

This serpent does not represent "reason" or anything approaching it, but rather symbolizes a peculiar autonomous mind which can possess one completely,
a spirit of revelation which gives us "Intuitionen" (intuitions). 
~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215. 

Psyche symbolically unites the lower instinctual urges with the higher spiritual instincts and expresses them in the clear vision of modified and integrated images. The soul creates symbols that anticipates future alterations of consciousness, presaging uniting the opposites in wholeness -- upper and lower worlds.

Later she turns her tree into her throne and bed used in the "Sacred Marriage." She also makes the first recorded initiatory descent into the realm of the dead -- the realm of metatruths. Jung reminds us, "We don't attain any "ultimate truths" at all, but on the way to them we discover a whole lot of astonishing partial truths. (Letters Vol. II, 504-506)

Scholars (Wolkstein & Kramer 1983:51-89) link the cutting of the World Tree to the destruction of a cyclical view of life, death, and renewal to a linear view of life and death with the underworld as its end.

Descent & Renewal
The underworld is a dreamland of soul where we can retreat to interact with other psyches. We can explore the ancestral underworld through myths, folklore and visionary journeying, as a place of ageless wisdom and regenerative power. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

The underworld and its powers of transformation and rebirth are the roots of the tree, essential to anyone on a spiritual path. Death is not the psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that holds away death prevents life. When the physical form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds things in their form is the secret of death.

There is nothing to be done when we are emptied of certainty, doing, and being. Imaginal images don't require validation from external events. Hades means invisible -- unseen yet absolutely present. The invisible, whether we call them archetypes, gods or whatever, are only visible as metaphors which speak for themselves. 

Metaphorical death, our morbidity is an enactment of that fantasy -- a way of mythologizing -- a disheartening mortification.  In alchemy, mortificatio is the process of death, destruction and decomposition. It is a death-sentence for the ego. But if we remain paralyzed too long, we suffer the consequences. When we look for the cryptic key we ask what this particular image has do with my death.

Our deep nature is primordial wildness, aliveness, and intensity of images which automatically free the butterfly of the soul. As Hillman says, the revelations of fantasy expose the divine. Resemblance is a bridge to events. We can't be just objective observers because we participate in, are subjected to, wounded by, and suffer our images. The abysmal reality is that all changes and life demand sacrifices.

Even if we are fearful, we can repeat Inanna's journey to the underworld, the psyche with its radically altered view of life. This bed-rock of reality is devoid of feeling and empty of meaning.  She makes an initiatory descent to reclaim the neglected side of life for the sake of making soul. The underworld and its dreams are not to be exploited to help to fix up our daytime life. We should not mine our dreams for images, ideas, and information that can help us be more productive and functional in mundane life.

Hillman (1979) cautions that, "It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn."

In her dark descent, Inanna reclaims the unloving, unloved, abandoned, instinctual, raging, greedy, desirous, unfulfilled, and desperately lonely parts by attending to the depths, by giving it attention, by valuing it, by expressing it. She renews the relationship with her dark ancestress-sister and queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal. The creative energy of the primordial beginning feeds us and heals the suffering heart and soul. Instinctual life informs and powers our work. The creative process is renewed.

The Threshold
In the poem, Inanna moves inward and abandons the mundane world, the physical world, for her adventure into chaos by following her uncertainty. She deals with matters affecting her deeper soul -- imaginative possibilities in our nature -- and connects to her own power. The constructed notion of self is challenged and dies. For this to work for ourselves we must understand that medication, impatience, and fear of death are obstacles. Our pathologizing is a way of seeing and part of our wholeness.

The Sumerian word for ear and wisdom are the same. Inanna opens her ear to the Great Below, she "tunes in" or "listens up" to natural wisdom, the harmonization of thinking and feeling. She enters through the "seven gates" - the chakras or central nervous system. She is depressed, grieves and mourns the existence of suffering and pain in the world.

The myth speaks to anyone who undergoes a transformation. We must release or at least challenge our values or perspectives, and become vulnerable to the frightening possibility of change. The conscious part of the psyche witnesses the events below. Mourners rescue Inanna and bring her back to life. She is regenerated, resurrected by moving from a dissociated state to the detached observer self, to an associated state.

In our genealogy work, we mourn and resurrect our ancestors. We associate with them. Our family tree, our family system or ancestral field of information and energy is like a torus whose branches reconnect with their roots -- a hyperdimensional labyrinth that is the model of our universe.

When we visit the underworld, we visit our roots that fund our being. Flow emerges from awareness. Campbell likened the successful adventure to unlocking and releasing the flow of life into the body of the world. The living tree is our living web of interactions, including habits (trunk), our senses (branches), situation awareness (tip of branches), reasoning (emergent guidance), and resource flow (nurturance). Connecting those fields is flow.

Into the Labyrinth
Feeling is the entry point of this epic journey which may seem like a foreign country with a language you don't yet know. Subtle signals can be aroused within the genealogical exploratory process that we can use for deepening our connections, while we hold onto the red thread that maintains our connection to the present.

A journal or sketch-book may help. Attention can be directed to all manner of processes where something new is being formed -- in creative process, learning, thinking, and decision making. What's familiar is what was there first. What was there first is family and the first remembered experiences between 0-5 years old -- what feels good and what feels bad.

You can make a somatic bridge -- a channel to a subliminal or subjective feeling in your body that reflects your internal states so you can change the structure of the experience. States have two components: increasing absorption and a continually narrowing focus of attention. That is a trance. It communicates primally in spatial location, proximity, direction, size, movement, and feeling. We can locate where it is in the body by a first impression. The information is there when we know how to ask for it.

We may not be sure which direction we're going or how far we've gone. The path may twist or slowly turn into an experience that’s about being lost, both literally and metaphorically. The maze starts to feel more like a forest. It starts to feel like it’s changing as you 'walk' the labyrinth. Voices may start telling stories about experiences that threw their world out of order or made them feel more complete.

Feeling our way into the dark may sharpen other senses in the absence of sight and hearing. We may wonder if there are walls to the labyrinth, or just empty space. We have to reach far enough to find out. We have to focus right where we are as we continue stepping forward into nothing. It may feel bigger than we expected.

Genealogy is our map of the unconscious. When we enter the dark door, the Red Thread shows us the way, igniting the imagination, awakening the soul. You link your Tree to the World Tree, your history to world history and mythology.

Immersion is virtual reality, like actually "being there." We learn certain well-worn pathways from the present into the past. Focusing means holding a kind of open, non-judging attention to an internal knowing which is directly experienced but is not yet in words. We can use focusing to become clear on what we feel or want , to obtain new insights about our situation, and to stimulate change or healing of the situation.

The World Tree maintains the cycles of life and death. The old cyclical understanding of death as merely one stage in the eternal round of birth, death, and renewal, symbolized by the tree, was replaced by a linear perception of life with death and the underworld as the end.

Walking the Labyrinth of our ancestral lines is a deeply meditative process that arouses spirit, intuition and gnosis from a deep sleep. It is a way of soul retrieval, uniting our personal and collective unconscious. It is a process of digging through the past, overturning old notions. Nothing lives as long as deep memory. Emotional states reveal and change what we pay attention to. Our nervous system filters our experience before it becomes conscious.