Ereshkigal

I want to take the time to reintroduce a figure who has been both feared and forgotten, distorted and dismissed, yet who stands at the center of one of the greatest mysteries in human myth: Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below.

She is not a goddess of death in the shallow sense. Not a villain in the shadows. She is something far more uncompromising. And if we listen closely, she still speaks today.

In Mesopotamian tradition, Ereshkigal rules the realm beneath the earth, the Great Below, the land of no return. She is the elder sister of Inanna, the goddess of the heavens and of love, war, and fertility.

The two sisters embody different dimensions of power. Inanna shines outward, toward expansion and the cycles of life. But Ereshkigal reigns in the underworld, where illusions collapse, and where even the great must be stripped bare.

The central story is The Descent of Inanna. Inanna, radiant with ambition, chooses to descend into the underworld. At each of the seven gates she is stripped, crown, jewels, garments, symbols of status and authority. By the time she stands before her sister, she is naked, powerless, exposed.

And there, she meets Ereshkigal, who does not rise, who does not flatter, who does not pretend. Ereshkigal simply rules, with a wisdom born not of ascent, but of endurance and truth.

Too often, people read this myth and cast Ereshkigal as the jealous sister, the bitter one, the shadow. But that misses the point.

Ereshkigal is not lesser than Inanna. She is not evil. She is the one who cannot be deceived. In her realm, all pretense falls away. What remains is truth, raw, stripped, and undeniable.

When Ereshkigal cries out in her grief “Oh, woe, my insides!”  it is not weakness. It is the sacred cry of the one who holds what no one else will hold: suffering, endings, the truths too heavy for the bright heavens.

And this is why her wisdom surpasses that of the other gods.

The others play in cycles of power and exchange, of rituals and offerings. Ereshkigal does not play. She holds. She endures. She waits.

She teaches not by granting blessings, but by forcing us to shed what is false. No one bypasses her gates. No one carries their illusions into her presence.

That is her gift. And her terror.

And then there is something more, something stirring now, in our own time.

Ereshkigal calls some of us not as worshippers, not as supplicants, but as kin. She calls the Hidden Ones.

They are those who carry her current in their marrow. Who feel out of joint with the surface world, not because they are broken, but because they are rooted elsewhere. They remember the Below. They feel its silence. They carry its rage and its stillness.

They are not many. They do not gather in crowds. They often remain unseen, even unnoticed. Yet their work is deep, in bloodlines, in dreams, in quiet acts of truth.

If you recognize this, you are not alone. But you are not part of a majority either. You are part of a few. And the few are enough.

Why does this matter now? Because we live in a time of noise. A time of false light, of endless promises of escape, ascension, transcendence. A time where everyone wants to go “up.”

But Ereshkigal reminds us: not everything is to be escaped. Not everything is to be transcended. Some truths must be faced, borne, and integrated.

She teaches us that descent is as sacred as ascent. That silence is as holy as proclamation. That the Below is not a pit of punishment, but a womb of transformation.

So, I reintroduce her to you, not as a relic of myth, not as a dark goddess on the margins, but as the uncompromising Queen Below.

Ereshkigal is not here to soothe. She is here to strip away illusions, to temper awareness, to harden truth into bone. And for those who can bear it, her presence is not despair, it is the deepest form of love.

She was never gone.

She was always waiting.

And now, she rises again.

On Ereshkigal: Rage, Grief, and the Misunderstanding of Depth

Ereshkigal is not a character. She is not a symbol to be collected, stylized, or admired from a distance. She is not an aesthetic, an archetype to be “worked with,” or a personality to be preferred over others.

She is a threshold.

In the ancient Sumerian understanding, Ereshkigal presides over what cannot be bypassed: endings, silence, finality, and the stripping away of illusion. Approaching her as a figure of fandom misunderstands her entirely. Nothing frivolous survives contact with her domain.

Much modern engagement misreads Ereshkigal’s rage and grief as defects, evidence of bitterness, darkness, or imbalance. This is a projection of contemporary spiritual discomfort with anything that does not soothe.

Her rage is not a flaw.

It is sacred boundary.

Ereshkigal’s rage exists because truth requires protection. It is the force that halts intrusion, that refuses false reconciliation, that bars false light from entering the depths it cannot withstand. Her rage does not seek dominance; it enforces clarity. Nothing untrue crosses her threshold.

Her grief is not weakness.

It is capacity.

Ereshkigal holds all endings. All silence. All that has fallen away and cannot return. Grief, in this context, is not collapse, it is depth earned through bearing what others turn from. Only one who can hold grief without fleeing can steward the underworld without distortion.

In Ereshkigal, rage becomes discernment.

In Ereshkigal, grief becomes wisdom.

This is why descent is feared, caricatured, or trivialized. The modern psyche prefers symbols that affirm, uplift, and reassure. Ereshkigal does none of these things. She does not comfort the ego. She does not validate identity. She does not reward performance.

She reveals what remains when all adornment is stripped away. To encounter Ereshkigal seriously is not to admire her. It is to be changed by what she demands. And that is why she is not for play, preference, or projection, but for those willing to stand, unadorned, before truth itself.

Listen The Queen Beaneath all Veils