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Opening Invocation

The gates creak open. One by one, the jewels and garments fall away. The Queen of Heaven descends, not as ornamented sovereign, but as stripped-bare soul. Inanna walks downward into shadow, into silence, into her sister’s domain — and in that descent, we too recognize the price of transformation: everything we once thought was ours to keep.

Myth & Mirror

Inanna’s Descent is not a tale of loss for its own sake, but a map of surrender. Seven gates. Seven offerings stripped from her body. Her crown, her beads, her robe, her very skin of identity. Before her sister Ereshkigal — the grief-ridden, rage-soaked keeper of the underworld — Inanna stands naked, unadorned, emptied.

This myth mirrors our own unravelings. How many times have we been called down into the depths — through grief, betrayal, illness, exile, or the collapse of what once seemed certain? The descent always feels like failure at first. Yet in truth, it is initiation. For in the stripping comes the knowing: you were never just the crown, or the robe, or the adornment. You are the pulse that beats beneath them.

The Jungian Lens 🔎

Jung named this work katabasis — the descent into the unconscious. Inanna’s stripping at each gate reflects the peeling away of the ego’s identifications, the personas we wear in order to survive the world. What she meets in the underworld is not only her sister Ereshkigal, but the Shadow itself: the banished grief, rage, and unloved aspects of the psyche.

Ereshkigal’s wailing is the voice of the rejected feminine within us — the part that has been silenced, repressed, and demonized. Jung would say this is where individuation requires us to linger. To encounter Ereshkigal is to face the unbearable — our unacknowledged pain, our mortality, our unmet sorrow.

Yet descent is never the end. From Jung’s perspective, Inanna’s resurrection reveals the Self — the wholeness that arises not by bypassing shadow, but by integrating it. The ego descends, dies, and is reborn in service to something greater. We, too, are asked: what within me must die so that the deeper Self may live?

The Soul Thread

For those walking with Pluto, with Lilith, with the eclipses looming — Inanna’s story is not a distant relic, but a living activation. Each gate is a transit. Each removal a revelation.

In your chart, the underworld lives in Leo’s 12th house and in the Scorpio–Taurus axis — where Ereshkigal’s territory has already been knocking. Inanna whispers: Do not resist the gates. They are thresholds, not punishments. To descend is not to be defeated. It is to be remade.

The Gene Keys echo the same: the Shadow stripped, the Gift revealed, the Siddhi shining only when we surrender the false layers. Human Design’s gates of intimacy and mutation carry the same call: be undone, so the true frequency may emerge.

Ritual Nudge ✨

This week, create your own “Seven Gates” ritual:

1. Choose seven small tokens — jewelry, scarf, stone, herb, written word — that symbolize aspects of your identity, role, or armor.
2. One by one, lay them aside. With each release, whisper: This too may fall away, but I remain.
3. Sit in stillness, bare-handed, bare-hearted. Breathe into the quiet knowing that cannot be taken.

Optional: journal what felt most tender to release. That is your living gate.

Closing Blessing

May you walk the descent without fear.
May you stand naked in the dark and remember your own unbreakable pulse.
And may you rise — not as who you were, but as who you truly are.

Until Next Time

The Inspired Imaginative | The Devoted Mystic

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