This Retreat Was Held in Pennsylvania in 2007. Please note, not all of the links are still active.

Inanna’s descent is the archetypical path of feminine initiation. Her myths were written in a time and a culture (Sumeria around 3500 BC and many think far earlier) where the patriarchal values had not yet overthrown the feminine. Women were not daughters of their father but daughters of their mother, in particular, the Great Mother, the goddess energy that symbolized the eternal cycles of life, death and rebirth. The image of divine feminine was one of wholeness and integration. Thus Inanna was not only goddess of heaven and earth, she was goddess of war and fertility. She flaunted her sexual prowess and delighted in the erotic depths of life.

This archetype of the feminine is being reclaimed today, but she is still outside the mainstream. As Adrienne Rich wrote: “The woman I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.”

This is not a judgment of our biological mothers, but rather an powerful, unsettling expression of what has happened to the image of woman in western culture for the past two thousand plus years. The dynamic feminine that is creator (soul/wisdom/Sophia) and destroyer (the transforming divine that calls us to the darkest depths) has been relegated to mother/bitch.

This demeaning of the essential soul nature of the dark feminine has cut women and society off from honoring our instinctive feminine knowing and its connection to the divine. Inanna’s journey gives us an opportunity to reclaim these lost gifts.

Next: Banished, starved and ignored, the Dark Feminine becomes toxic...

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