I feel it in myself, and I hear it everywhere — in late- night conversations, in messages from women I’ve known for decades and women I’ve never met, in the collective tightening and trembling that says: something buried is no longer willing to stay buried. On a mythic level, this is what happens when the underworld is ignored for too long. What is buried does not disappear. It accumulates pressure. It begins to scream. Ereshkigal is not monstrous. She is out of her mind with rage and anguish because she has been left alone with it all for so long. THE UNDERWORLD SPEAKS In the ancient Sumerian myth, Ereshkigal rules the underworld, the realm of grief, trauma, rage, death, and all that has been exiled from the upper world of appearances and order. She is not the opposite of life; she is what life refuses to look at. When Inanna, Queen of the Heavens, descends, she is stripped at each gate of all her worldly status, until she stands naked before her sister, without protection. Ereshkigal does not welcome her. She does not soften. She turns her gaze on her and screams wildly in such intensity that it kills Inanna. While Inanna hangs lifeless on the hook, Ereshkigal goes into violent labor, screaming, convulsing, raging with a pain that has no witness and no release. This is where the myth stops being ancient and becomes uncomfortably and potently current. Because nothing can calm Ereshkigal’s rage, not denial, not control, not avoidance. The only thing that can make any difference is the arrival of a witnessing presence.
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