Gate I: Silence: The Descent Begins
The breath before contact.
The Queen requires the unlearning of speech and reaction.
“Silence first.”
Symbol: the open threshold.
“Before you can hear, you must stop echoing.”
Gate II Bearing: The Weight Accepted
Here, descent becomes real: the first contact with the gravity of the Below.
You no longer study suffering; you carry it.
Symbol: the Stone.
“To bear the Stone is to agree to density.”
Gate III Witness: The Naming
The Queen opens your sight. The false and true are made visible.
You learn to name without claiming.
Symbol: the Mirror.
“Speak without hunger, and the world speaks truly back.”
Gate IV Cutting: The Release
Here the blade descends. Everything unnecessary: pride, fear, identity is stripped away.
Symbol: the Blade.
“Nothing false can pass the Fourth Gate.”
Gate V Preservation within Change: The Keeper
What survives the cutting must be tended.
You become a steward, not a seeker.
Symbol: the Still Flame.
Gate VI Dissolution: The End of the Seeker
At the Sixth Gate, what remains of seeking itself is undone.
Up to this point, something in you has still been oriented toward outcome, meaning, or arrival. Here, that orientation collapses. There is no longer a question driving the descent.
You do not lose identity here, you lose orientation toward becoming.
What dissolves is the inner posture that asks:
What comes next?
What does this make me?
Symbol: the Empty Vessel.
“The vessel is not destroyed.
It is emptied of expectation.”
This gate ends spiritual ambition.
Nothing is gained beyond this point.
Gate VII Standing Before the Queen
The Seventh Gate is not a trial.
It is not a lesson.
It is not a reward.
You stand with nothing to offer and nothing to request.
All symbols have fallen away.
All movement has ceased.
There is no witness now, only presence.
Ereshkigal does not evaluate you.
She does not instruct you.
She does not transform you.
She receives what remains.
Symbol: the Bare Stone.
“You are not judged here.
You are seen without distortion.”
This is not death as annihilation,
but death as irreversibility.
After this gate, you do not return as a seeker.
You return altered by contact, not by knowledge.
The Completion of the First Cycle
The first five gates strip and prepare.
The sixth dissolves orientation.
The seventh ends negotiation.
Nothing is carried forward except what cannot be removed.
What emerges later is not ascent, is continuation after finality.
”I do not build temples. I keep what breathes.”
