3.4 What It Takes To Resurrect

Inanna's Path. An archetypal journey of descent, shedding, facing, transforming, and returning.

Ereshkigal gave the kurgarra and the galatur permission to take Inanna’s body, though it still swung from the hook on her wall. Nothing more than a Queen who was. But Ereshkigal had changed, too. Her belly felt easily full… content really. The resentment and pain that had consumed her every waking moment had ebbed away, now a dull ache tapping against the backside of her pelvis. She could live with it. Or maybe eventually she wouldn’t need to.

The liminal beings bowed to the Queen of the Dead. She understood that they too felt the change that had happened in her body. They saw the sheen of sweat turning to an inner glow. They noticed the way her body unfurled like a split seed, a new posture and fluidity taking the place of an ancient rigidity.

“Holy Ereshkigal!” the kurgarra and the galatur sang, “Great is your renown! And then they left her to her couch, still far from the body of her sister. She watched as they flew to Inanna’s corpse, the smell of death and decay making even the servants of Enki gag. But they, like Ninshubur, did not relent.

The kurgarra sprinkled the food of life on the body, the bread of communion. The galatur sprinkled the water of life on the body, the wine of communion.

Somewhere in the in-between a great whale unhinged its mighty jaw, a thick temple veil split, a crack in the universe widened, and as Ereshkigal crossed the throne room to lift her sister’s body from the hook, Inanna arose.