On Inanna

Ancient Akkadian cylinder seal showing Inanna with one leg up on a lion and her favored attendant at hand. Credit: Sailko/Wikimedia Commons

It’s amusing to me that it’s taken this long to finally give a backstory on Inanna...

Since launching Inanna Designs, I have been wanting to produce something that explains who or what “Inanna” of Inanna Designs is and why I’ve chosen this name. This story lends itself most naturally to video, but I lack the time and animation skills to complete—or, well, start—the task. Somehow, more half a year has flown by and the story remains locked in my brain. So it’s time for me to let it out before it dislodges and becomes lost, adrift in a sea of half-formed ideas and memory detritus.

Impermanence

Originally, Inanna Designs was going to be called something along the lines of “Impermanence,” referencing the Buddhist concept that all things in life change. Lives end, jobs shift, relationships grow—nothing in life remains the same forever, and suffering arises when we forget or outright reject this undeniable fact. I could go on and on about what this all means, or what it all means to me, but I’ll save it for now.

2023, the year before I created Inanna Designs, was a hard but much needed lesson on Impermanence:

• My dad died early in the year. His health had been in a steady decline for a long time, yet suddenly I had to confront our unsteady relationship and my jumbled mess of emotions and memories involving him.

• A couple months later, a romantic relationship that I truly thought would go the distance ended. We tried to make it work after the initial tumultuous breakup, but during that period of separation we had grown in opposite directions.

• In the 3rd quarter of the year, I learned I would be losing my job of 8.5 years come 2024, when the government eliminated my team’s contract for budgetary reasons. I had been feeling stagnant for a while, but I did overall enjoy my career and thought this was a position I’d have for many more years.

• At some point in the midst of all this, I suffered burnout, my brain finally buckling as its foundations were swept away, bit by bit. I spent a full month building myself back up again, assembling the pieces in new ways to create a version of Joey more resilient—and more able to sway with life’s dynamic waves—than the last.

Inanna Designs would not have sprung into being—the idea blooming while I listened to the Hawaiʻi Symphony Orchestra expertly play a piece by Mozart—without these life-changing events, which I had to accept and embrace to end my suffering and move on to better things. So Impermanence seemed like such an appropriate name and ideal to instill into the business. And I like to think that the clothing I choose to wear and create, the kind that flow and move with you, are themselves the embodiment of impermanence.

Finding Inanna

Let’s face it, “Impermanence” is a mouthful and it’s not exactly elegant. I tried out other similar terms, some in other languages, but none struck a cord in me. The magical music wasn’t there and I needed to find a new muse.

Part of my journey of healing and self-discovery in 2023 involved coming to terms with the fluidity of my gender. I say “fluidity,” but it’s not really that I felt my identity was gliding freely in an ocean of gender possibilities. It was more like I was floating on top of it—touching it but still apart from it—and the water, once familiar, was now a foreign, opaque entity I could not peer through or understand. The idea of applying any gender, even one like “non-binary,” to my identity felt and still feels so very wrong. Gender’s siren song seems so alluring to me at first listen, but it’s ultimately confusing and untrustworthy, promising me a connection that’s really a veiled, confining trap. So I prefer saying I’m agender or gender-nonconforming, and pronouns truly don’t matter to me—they’re just tools other people can use to try to make sense of me. I am Joey: he, she, they, it, whatever.

Point is: my gender was not what I long held it to be, and my exploration of clothing and style were crucial to realizing this. So it was important for me to incorporate gender-nonconformity into the business and name, which also makes sense because I don’t have a particular gender in mind when I create something.

After many hours searching for inspiration, I came across Inanna.

Illustration of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld, taken from Lewis Spence's Myths and Legends of Babylonia and Assyria (1916).

The Queen of Heaven

I fell in love with Inanna immediately.

Inanna was a powerful Mesopotamian goddess who became known as the“Queen of Heaven.” She was worshiped as Inanna by the Sumerians some 5,000+ years ago, and later as Ishtar by the Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians (for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to stick to using the Sumerian names for Inanna and others here).

Deities were, and often still are, thought of as fixed beings—the domains they rule over, their personalities and character traits, and their roles and powers typically do not change. Unlike other deities in the pantheon, however, Inanna was dynamic. She actively sought more power—and got it—forever trying to become a better version of herself. Or maybe she was just a power-hungry warlord. In any case, she was, one could say, uniquely impermanent.

While she was generally considered a “She,” Inanna’s mix of feminine and masculine traits implied a more ambiguous gender identity. Love, fertility, sensuality, and beauty fell under her watchful eyes, as did more typically masculine domains like war, political power, and divine law. Some imagery depicts her as being the epitome of femininity in soft, flowing garments, while others showed Inanna’s battle-ready side. Some stories say she had the power to change another being’s gender, and her temples were safe havens for those who fell outside the gender binary (people who also played significant roles in her cult).

And if all this wasn’t enough, one epic poem about her sealed the deal.

Inanna’s Descent

Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld, or the Descent of Inanna, tells of the goddess’s journey into the underworld. There are a couple versions of this story and different interpretations of it, as well as other possibly contradictory tales of some of the characters, so it’s difficult to relay the story exactly. But it goes something like this.

Dressed her in royal garments (crown, lapis beads, breastplate, etc.), Inanna heads into the Underworld, a realm ruled by her sister Ereshkigal. Inanna may have sought to save her deceased husband Dumuzid, a god associated with agriculture, as some earlier interpretations suggest. Or she may have gone to somehow seize control over the realm, using the funeral of Ereshkigal’s husband as an excuse for the journey.

Pottery relief or sculpture of the marriage of Inanna (left) and Dumuzid (right). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Whatever the case, Ereshkigal learns of Inanna’s arrival and tells her gatekeeper to keep the seven gates of the Underworld closed unless Inanna removes one article of clothing at each gate. So Inanna arrives at each gate, one by one, and removes her royal garments, one by one. By the time Inanna passes the 7th gate, she is naked—and she is also powerless, as her royal garments were, in fact, artifacts of divine power (an idea I absolutely love).

Inanna is strung up like a corpse, tortured, and inflicted with the world’s 60 diseases. Ereshkigal decrees that no being, male or female, will be allowed to pass through the gates of the Underworld to save Inanna.

While Inanna is rotting in the Underworld, the world above falls into disarray because everything stops procreating—even bees stop pollinating. Inanna’s chosen attendants, as previously instructed, go to various gods to plea for their help; none come to Inanna’s rescue. But Enki, the god of wisdom, creates a being named Asu-shu-namir that is neither male nor female, and he sends them to rescue Inanna (in one version of the story, he actually creates two separate beings).

Asu-shu-namir is allowed to pass through all seven gates, and they meet Ereshkigal. In some interpretations of the story, the Queen of the Underworld becomes enamored with Asu-shu-namir and offers them a singular gift, which they choose to be the waters of life. In others, Asu-shu-namir invokes the names of the great Gods to demand the waters of life from Ereshkigal. They use the waters to revive Inanna, and the pair leave the the Underworld, with Inanna collecting her powerful garments at each gate.

Enraged, Ereshkigal curses Asu-shu-namir and all beings like them (those who were non-binary, transgender, intersex, etc.) to forever be ostracized by society. Thanks, Ereshkigal. Unable to remove another god’s curse, Inanna instead offers her savior a boon, decreeing that Asu-shu-namir and all beings like them will be welcomed and honored in her temples.

——

So, with Inanna’s ties to impermanence, the power of clothing, and gender-nonconformity, I had found my patron muse, a wellspring of inspiration to which I could always turn.

The end.

Be well,

Joey

P.S. A few side notes on Inanna’s Descent:

• I wonder sometimes why Inanna would have risked the journey through the Underworld after learning the price she’d have to pay (her clothing of power). She would have had no hope of defeating her sister and claiming the Underworld, so I prefer the interpretation that she wanted to save her husband at any cost (and I’m a hopeless romantic, so there’s that). But in one version of the story, Dumuzid died after Inanna’s descent because the Underworld needed a life in trade for Inanna’s release—and Inanna chose him over her attendants because he didn’t mourn her at all when she was in the Underworld. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Such is the way with myths and stories of deities.

• Inanna, like all dieties, was not a beacon on innocence and Ereshkigal had reason to behave the way she did—some stories say that it was because of Inanna that her husband died.

• I’ve read somewhere that Asu-shu-namir may have also received the powers of healing and/or divination from Inanna. This fascinates me because a number of cultures throughout history have attributed queer folks with such powers.