Inanna was the most powerful goddess in ancient Sumer. Queen of Heaven and Earth. Goddess of love, war, fertility, and basically everything that mattered. She had it all: power, prestige, worship, respect.
And then she decided to walk into hell.
Not because she was forced. Not because she lost a bet or got cursed or had no other choice. She chose it. She put on her finest jewelry, her most powerful symbols of authority, and walked straight into the underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal, the dark goddess of the dead.
At each of the seven gates, the gatekeeper stripped her of one piece. First her crown. Then her necklace. Her breastplate. Her hip ornaments. Her golden rings. Her measuring rod and line. Finally, her royal robe.
By the time she reached the throne room, she was naked. Powerless. Just a vulnerable body standing before her sister's rage.
And then Ereshkigal killed her. Turned her into a corpse and hung her on a hook for three days.
This is the oldest recorded story of descent into the underworld. And it's the perfect map for shadow work. Because shadow work isn't about understanding your darkness intellectually. It's about descending into it consciously, getting stripped of everything you use to protect yourself, dying to who you thought you were, and discovering what remains when all your defenses are gone.
Let's talk about why you need to go to hell and what happens when you get there.
Why Inanna Went Down (And Why You Might Need To)
The myth doesn't explain Inanna's motivation clearly. Different translations offer different reasons. Some say she wanted to attend a funeral. Others suggest she wanted to expand her power into the underworld too. Some versions hint she was curious, drawn, called.
But here's what matters: she went voluntarily. With intention. She prepared. She told her assistant what to do if she didn't return. She dressed in her full power. She knew this was dangerous.
She went anyway.
This is the first lesson about real shadow work: you have to choose it. Nobody can drag you into your own underworld. You have to walk in yourself.
People usually descend for one of a few reasons:
Life forces you down. Something breaks. Someone dies. You lose the job, the relationship, the identity you built your whole life around. You don't choose this descent. It chooses you. But you can choose whether to engage with it consciously or fight it the whole way.
You're called. Something in you knows you can't grow anymore without facing what you've been avoiding. You keep bumping into the same patterns. The same triggers. The same failures. And some part of you recognizes that the way out is through. The way forward is down.
You're curious about what you're missing. You've built a good life. You're successful by external measures. But something feels hollow. Like you're living from only half of yourself. Like there's a whole other kingdom of experience you've locked away because it wasn't acceptable or safe or pretty enough.
Inanna had everything above ground. She still went below. Because wholeness requires both worlds. You can't be the Queen of Heaven and Earth if you've never visited the earth's depths.
You can't be whole if you only claim the parts of yourself that look good in daylight.
The Seven Gates: What Gets Stripped Away
Each gate represents something you use to protect yourself. Something you hide behind. Some identity or defense or way of being that keeps you from being truly vulnerable, truly real, truly seen.
The magic of the myth is that Inanna doesn't fight the stripping. She doesn't argue with the gatekeeper. She doesn't try to sneak through wearing her crown. She submits to the process.
This is the second lesson: you have to let the descent strip you. You can't white-knuckle your way through shadow work while clinging to all your defenses.
Let's look at what the seven gates might represent in modern psychological terms:
Gate One: The Crown (Your Public Identity)
The first thing to go is who you pretend to be. Your public persona. Your carefully curated self-image. The version of you that looks good on social media, in job interviews, at family gatherings.
This is the ego's favorite costume. The story you tell about who you are. Successful. Together. Competent. Nice. Strong. Whatever your particular brand is.
Shadow work requires you to take off the crown. To admit that beneath the public story, you're messy. Contradictory. Full of things that don't match your brand.
You're not always nice. You're not always strong. You're not as together as you look. And pretending otherwise is exhausting.
The first gate asks: who are you when nobody's watching? When there's no audience to perform for?
Gate Two: The Necklace (Your Charm and Likability)
Next goes your ability to charm your way through difficulty. Your social smoothness. The way you use likability, humor, agreeability to avoid conflict or discomfort.
Lots of people use charm as armor. If everyone likes you, they won't hurt you. If you're always pleasant, you won't have to deal with anger, rejection, confrontation.
But charm is a defense. It keeps people at a distance while seeming to let them close. It controls how you're perceived and what you have to feel.
The second gate strips that away. You can't nice your way through the underworld. You can't joke your way past your shadow. At some point you have to stop performing and start being real.
Even if real isn't charming. Even if real is angry, scared, petty, hurt.
Gate Three: The Breastplate (Your Emotional Armor)
The third gate takes your protection against feeling. The ways you defend your heart. The walls you've built so you don't get hurt again.
Some people armor with anger (don't get close or I'll attack). Some with coldness (I don't need anyone). Some with cynicism (nothing matters anyway). Some with busy-ness (I don't have time to feel).
Whatever your particular armor looks like, it has to come off. Because you can't do shadow work from behind walls. You can't integrate what you can't feel.
This gate is often where people want to turn back. Because taking off emotional armor means you're going to feel things. Old pain. Current fear. Grief you've been postponing. Rage you've been swallowing.
The third gate says: you have to feel it to heal it. No more numbing. No more bypassing. No more protecting yourself from your own heart.
Gate Four: The Hip Ornaments (Your Sexuality and Creative Power)
The fourth gate strips away how you present your life force energy. Your sexuality, creativity, desire, passion. The parts of you that want, that create, that generate.
For lots of people, this energy got shamed early. Too much. Too sexual. Too weird. Too intense. So you learned to hide it, control it, make it acceptable.
Maybe you became overly sexual as a defense. Maybe you shut down your sexuality entirely. Maybe you channel all your creative energy into work because that's acceptable but art or play or actual passion isn't.
The fourth gate requires you to look at your relationship with your own aliveness. What parts of your vital energy have you been suppressing? What desires have you deemed inappropriate? What creative impulses have you ignored because they seemed impractical or selfish?
Your shadow includes all the life force you couldn't safely express.
Gate Five: The Golden Rings (Your Relationships and Connections)
Fifth gate: your relationships as identity. Wife. Mother. Daughter. Friend. The roles you play for other people. The ways you define yourself through connection.
This is tricky because relationships matter. But when you use relationships to avoid being alone with yourself, when you need them to tell you who you are, they become another defense.
The fifth gate asks: who are you when you're not someone's something? When you're not performing a role or fulfilling an expectation? When there's nobody to take care of, nobody to please, nobody whose needs you can focus on instead of your own?
Shadow work requires temporary solitude. Not forever. But long enough to meet yourself without the distraction of your relational identities.
Gate Six: The Measuring Rod and Line (Your Need for Control)
Sixth gate removes your tools of measurement, judgment, and control. Your ability to measure up, figure it out, maintain order.
These are the defenses of the mind. If I can understand it, I can control it. If I can analyze it, I don't have to feel it. If I can organize it, I won't be overwhelmed by it.
Lots of smart people use intelligence as a defense against chaos. They live in their heads because the head feels safer than the body. They analyze their feelings instead of feeling them. They need to understand before they can surrender.
The sixth gate strips that away. You enter the territory where your intellect can't save you. Where there's nothing to figure out, only something to experience. Where you have to let go of control and see what happens.
This is terrifying for people whose primary defense is mental. Welcome to the terror. That means you're at the right gate.
Gate Seven: The Royal Robe (Your Last Protection)
The final gate takes the last covering. Whatever you've been using to maintain dignity, respectability, appropriateness.
You arrive in the underworld completely exposed. No status. No role. No defense. No way to hide.
Just you. Naked. Vulnerable. Real.
This is the point of the descent. To strip away every false identity, every defense, every way you've been hiding from yourself. To see what remains when there's nothing left to hide behind.
Most people spend their whole lives avoiding this moment. Because this level of vulnerability feels like death.
It is death. That's the point.
The Hanging: Why You Have to Die
Inanna arrives naked in the underworld throne room and faces her sister Ereshkigal, who is not happy to see her. Ereshkigal kills her. Turns her into a corpse. Hangs her on a hook like a piece of meat.
For three days, Inanna is dead.
This is the part of shadow work nobody wants to hear about. At some point, something in you has to die. Not metaphorically. Actually.
The version of yourself you've been. The story you've been telling. The way you've been coping. The identity you built. It has to die so something new can be born.
This is the liminal space. The in-between. The cocoon stage where you're neither caterpillar nor butterfly, just goo. The underworld time where you're neither who you were nor who you're becoming.
You're just dead. Hanging. Waiting.
People hate this part. They want transformation to be faster. Cleaner. Less uncomfortable. They want to skip from insight to rebirth without the death in between.
But there's no shortcut through the underworld. You have to hang there. In the unknowing. In the discomfort. In the space where your old self is gone but your new self hasn't emerged yet.
This is liminality. The threshold space. You're neither here nor there. You don't know who you are anymore. You can't go back, but you can't see forward. You're just suspended in the dark, waiting for whatever happens next.
How long does this take? The myth says three days. In real life? Could be three weeks. Three months. Three years. Depends on what's dying and how hard you fight it.
What Saves Inanna (And What Might Save You)
Inanna told her assistant before she descended: if I don't come back in three days, get help. The assistant does. She mourns. She goes to the other gods for help.
Most of them refuse. They say Inanna knew what she was doing. She chose this. Let her deal with it.
But Enki, the god of wisdom and water, has compassion. He creates two small creatures from the dirt under his fingernails. He instructs them to go into the underworld, find Ereshkigal (who is in her own pain, her own labor), and mirror her grief.
They do. They witness Ereshkigal's pain without trying to fix it. They just reflect it back: "You're suffering. That sounds so hard. We see you."
This softens something in Ereshkigal. In gratitude, she offers them a gift. They ask for the corpse on the hook. She gives it. They sprinkle it with the food and water of life.
Inanna revives.
Here's the psychological gold in this part of the story: what brings you back from the underworld isn't someone rescuing you from your pain. It's someone witnessing it.
You don't need someone to fix you. You need someone who can sit with you in the dark without trying to turn on the lights. Someone who can see your shadow without being scared of it. Someone who can reflect your pain back without trying to make it smaller or prettier or more comfortable.
This is why shadow work often requires a witness. A therapist. A trusted friend. A guide. Someone who's been to the underworld themselves and knows the territory.
Not to save you. Not to do the work for you. Just to see you in it and not flinch.
Most people need this at some point. The descent is too disorienting to do entirely alone. You need someone who remembers you're in the underworld when you forget there's anything else. Someone who believes you'll come back when you're convinced you're dead forever.
The witness doesn't bring you back. But their presence creates the conditions where you can return.
The Return: Coming Back Changed
Inanna doesn't just pop back up to the surface world unchanged. The underworld has rules. You can't leave unless someone takes your place.
She returns to find her husband Dumuzi sitting on her throne, not mourning her at all. He hasn't missed her. He's enjoying her absence.
She sends him to the underworld in her place.
There's a lot to unpack here, but the core is this: when you return from the underworld, you see everything differently. You can't go back to the life you had before because you're not the person you were before.
Things that mattered before don't matter anymore. Things you tolerated before are suddenly intolerable. Relationships that seemed fine before reveal themselves as hollow or harmful.
You've been to the underworld. You've faced your shadow. You've died and come back. You can't pretend you haven't.
This is why shadow work is so disruptive. People think it's just about feeling better, having more self-awareness, being more whole. And it is those things. But it's also about becoming someone who can no longer participate in their old life.
Some relationships won't survive your transformation. Some jobs won't fit anymore. Some ways of being in the world will feel impossible to maintain.
This isn't failure. This is what it means to integrate the underworld. You bring back the knowledge of death, shadow, darkness. You can't unknow it. You can't unsee it.
You're changed. And your life has to change to accommodate who you've become.
How to Descend Consciously
So how do you actually work with this myth? How do you use Inanna's descent as a map for your own shadow work?
First, recognize when you're being called to descend. Life might be forcing you through loss, transition, breakdown. Or you might just feel the pull. Either way, the first step is choosing to engage consciously rather than fighting the whole way down.
Second, identify your gates. What are the seven (or however many) defenses you use to avoid vulnerability? What do you hide behind? What keeps you from being fully real?
Write them down. Name them. Because you can't release what you can't see.
Third, practice stripping. Not all at once. This isn't about trauma or forcing yourself into vulnerability before you're ready. This is about gradually, consciously choosing to let go of one defense at a time.
Maybe you practice taking off your public persona by being honest about something you usually hide. Maybe you practice removing your charm armor by having a conversation where you're not trying to be liked. Maybe you practice releasing control by letting something be messy without fixing it.
One gate at a time. With support. With intention.
Fourth, prepare to hang in the liminal space. This is the hardest part. The time between death and rebirth. When you don't know who you are anymore but you're not yet who you're becoming.
You can't rush this. You can only endure it. The practices that help: meditation, journaling, time in nature, creative expression, therapy. Anything that helps you be present with discomfort without numbing or escaping.
Fifth, find your witnesses. The people who can sit with you in the dark. Who won't try to fix you or rush you or make you feel better before you're ready to feel better.
These are rare people. Choose carefully. Not everyone can hold this kind of space. Not everyone should.
Sixth, prepare for the return. Recognize that coming back means coming back changed. Some parts of your old life won't fit anymore. Some relationships will need to shift or end. Some ways of being will no longer be possible.
This isn't a bug. This is the feature. You descended to transform. Transformation means becoming someone new. Someone new needs a different life.
The Gift of the Underworld
Here's what Inanna gains from her descent: knowledge of both worlds. She's the only goddess who has walked in heaven and hell. Who knows light and dark. Who has experienced power and powerlessness, life and death.
This makes her whole in a way she wasn't before. More real. More integrated. More capable of holding the full spectrum of human experience.
This is what shadow work offers you. Not happiness. Not constant light. Not the elimination of darkness.
Wholeness.
The ability to be real. To hold all of yourself, not just the acceptable parts. To be present with both joy and grief, power and vulnerability, light and shadow.
Most people spend their lives trying to be only light. Only good. Only acceptable. They exile huge parts of themselves to the shadow realm and then wonder why they feel incomplete, hollow, like they're performing their lives rather than living them.
The descent integrates what's been split off. It brings the shadow into consciousness. It makes you whole by making you face all of you, not just the parts you wish you were.
This is painful. Disruptive. Often lonely.
And it's the only way to become fully human.
Your Descent Starts Now
You're already in some version of this journey. Maybe you're being stripped at one of the gates right now. Maybe you're hanging in the liminal space wondering if you'll ever feel normal again. Maybe you're returning and realizing your old life doesn't fit anymore.
Wherever you are in the cycle, the myth gives you a map. You're not lost. You're not broken. You're not doing it wrong.
You're just in the underworld. Like every hero before you. Like every transformer throughout history.
This is what the journey looks like. Descent. Stripping. Death. Hanging. Witness. Rebirth. Return.
You can't skip steps. You can't rush it. You can only walk through it consciously, with as much courage and support as you can muster.
Inanna walked willingly into hell and came back a queen of both worlds.
You can too.
But first, you have to descend. Put on your finest and walk toward the gates. Let each one strip something away. Let yourself die to who you've been so you can discover who you're becoming.
The underworld is waiting. Your shadow is waiting. Your wholeness is waiting on the other side of your willingness to face the dark.
So walk through the gates. Let yourself be stripped. Hang in the unknowing. Trust the process even when it feels like dying.
Because it is dying.
And that's exactly what transformation requires.
This article is part of our Archetypes collection. Read our comprehensive Shadow Work and Archetypes to explore shadow work, Carl Jung's psychology, and practical transformation through consciousness integration.
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