When the Soul Is Ready, the Myth Will Come

From childhood enactments to Inanna’s seven gates: a lifetime of exploring what happens when we enter the story with our bodies

I have been stepping inside stories and flipping scripts for as long as I can remember.

I grew up in the Balkan Diaspora of Chicago with one foot in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the other in the Seventh-day Adventist. I was a deeply spiritual, theatrical child, equally enchanted by Orthodox incense, candles and chanting, and by the Bible stories I heard in Sabbath school. As the teacher told the story, I could see it happening, and naturally, I wanted in.

I recruited other children, raided my mother’s scarves and jewelry and staged Bible stories at home and school. I especially loved being the Queen of Sheba making her grand entrance before King Solomon—although my versions rarely stayed faithful to the Bible. In one, the Queen danced Solomon into such a trance that time stood still while she quietly took over his kingdom. By the time he woke up, she was on the throne.

So perhaps my life’s work began there. I had discovered very early that I didn’t want simply to hear the great stories. I wanted to enter them, move with them, play with them, feel what happened when they came through my living body.

That impulse followed me through fifteen years teaching physical theatre in secondary school, into dance ritual and eventually to Delphi in 2005. There, while studying Isadora Duncan dance, something cracked wide open. Movement, myth, archetype, sacred landscape and the body suddenly belonged to the same conversation. I knew I wanted to create experiences connected to what I think of as the great wells of sacred memory— ancient stories that have been mapping the arc of the human evolution for thousands of years.

For nearly thirty years now, that fascination has taken me deep into myth, archetype and depth psychology, and into the creation of mytho-somatic experiences for people around the world.

I am particularly drawn to myths that map transformation, and few do that as powerfully as the ancient Mesopotamian story of the Descent and Return of Inanna.

I was captivated by her sovereign choice to descend—and by the seven gates that carry her through a complete cycle of transformation and integration. I began exploring those gates through curated landscapes of music, breath, imagery and movement, and discovered something that has informed my work ever since:

There are movements we can make in the body that mirror and support the movements we are longing to make in the soul.

That is where myth becomes something very different for me.

To read a myth is one thing.
To understand it is another.

But to enter it—to give it your breath, bones, and stories, to move through its archetypal landscapes and chapters, and experience its cycle in sacred time and space—is to meet the story from deep inside your soul. This change of perspective is immensely healing because it gives hope and courage, inspiring trust in the processes of the soul.

Myths like the Descent and Return of Inanna are healing narratives in which we recognize ourselves, our patterns, passions, wounds and healing. This is what Carl Jung called “participation mystique”—that state where our own story meets the mythic tale or legend. We identify directly with the narrative and join our own inner mythos to it, allowing the cycle to carry us across a threshold of completion, wherever we may be in life.

Inanna has taken me and many groups of women through that territory over the years—in retreats, workshops, Prayerformance immersions and mytho-somatic enactments around the world. Her story maps out the stages of self-reflection we engage with again and again as we cycle through the evolutionary processes of our souls. It shows us that the Sovereign Goddess Herself not only survives cycles of change, but emerges empowered, whole, and integrated as a new version of Herself. Again and again, as do we.

At every gate is a question, an invitation to participate. “How do the roles I play in life affect my true personhood?” “How have I silenced myself?” “What armor must I lay down in order to live authentically?”

It’s deep work, yet in a ceremonial context of sacred theater, the enactments become moments of poetry, sharing, witnessing, shifting, and support. We move, breathe, micro-journal, declare and perform gestures that signal to the psyche that deep soul-level change has taken root.

Our ancestors knew about the power of transformative ritual enactments and performed them seasonally. The Eleusinian Mysteries were the great initiatory rites at Eleusis centered on Demeter and Persephone. Their mythic architecture is profoundly concerned with loss, descent, grief, search, return and regeneration. Initiates didn’t simply hear the myth; they underwent a secret ritual experience directly related to it.

What has always fascinated me about Inanna is just how deep her roots go. Her stories come to us from a sacred and literary Mesopotamian tradition nearly four thousand years old. And among the earliest voices carrying Inanna into written history is Enheduanna, the Sumerian high priestess who lived around 2300 BCE, recognized as the earliest named author in recorded history. Her passionate hymns to Inanna give us one of humanity’s earliest known female literary voices speaking directly to the power of a sovereign female divinity.

Inanna’s great cycle of descent, transformation and return gives us one of the oldest surviving expressions of a pattern that reverberates through sacred stories for millennia—in Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, and eventually in the Christian story of Christ’s death and resurrection.

It also profoundly mirrors what would later be articulated through alchemy: the old form breaking down, the dissolution, and the emergence and integration of something new and whole. Solve et Coagula.

But what grips me most about Inanna is her sovereignty. She chooses to turn toward the Great Below. The descent begins with an act of will, as do many of the descent-return cycles of our lives. Something inside us knows we need change. Something needs to be shed, transformed, and re-integrated.

Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera recognized the psychological potency of this ancient story in Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women, approaching Inanna’s journey as a powerful template for the inevitable descents and returns of a human life, and for the transformation and integration that can emerge through them.

That is why I have returned to this myth again and again. Inanna gives us an ancient map for conscious participation in the alchemy of our own becoming.

And like any living myth, Inanna has a way of circling back, because one of the first places I ever brought this work with Inanna was Australia, and one of the women who entered that mythic landscape with me there was Natalie Diggins.

Natalie and I have continued our mytho-somatic explorations over the years, both live and online. She has become a dear soul sister and friend, a fellow theatrical creature and irreverent funny girl who shares my love of embodied practice, deep mystery, and a good dose of healthy play and fun.

And now, all these years later, Natalie has invited me back to Australia. Next March, we will enter the myth of Inanna together again. There is something about this circling that moves me deeply. Because I have come to believe that when the soul is ready, the right story rises from the well of sacred memory to meet it. And the story we thought we already knew comes to inspire and support us at another threshold, asking us to enter as we are and leave as the woman we become.