Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

The Experiment 119
From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.
From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.
From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below. 113
“All that is above, Also is below,” I recited. 114
“Who’s Inanna?” asked Norman.
“A celebrated moon goddess of the ancient world,” said Rachel,
“two thousand years before Christ.”
Brillig read:
Female deities were worshipped and adored all through Sumerian
history. . . . but the goddess who outweighed, overshadowed, and
outlasted them all was a deity known to the Sumerians by the name
of Inanna, “Queen of Heaven,” and to the Semites who lived in
Sumer by the name of Ishtar. Inanna played a greater role in myth,
epic, and hymn than any other deity, male or female. 115
“The Great Below . . .” mused Rachel.
“. . . might refer to the unconscious,” said Arnold.
“And the Great Above could be a metaphor for ego-consciousness,”
I suggested.
Brillig pursed his lips and put his palms together, as if praying.
“It’s as plain as the nose on Sunny’s face,” he said. “What is
here is also there. What is up is down. That is the essence of the
psyche. The alchemists knew it, and so, apparently, did the Sumerians.
But that’s not the whole story. I should like to read you what
René Daumal says about mountain climbing, which is his basic
metaphor for the pursuit of self-knowledge. Norman?” He was
right there. Brillig thanked him and read:
What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not
know what is above. . . . There is an art of conducting oneself in the
lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one
can no longer see, one can at least still know. 116
113 “The Descent of Inanna,” ibid., p. 52.
114 See above, p. 9.
115 Samuel Noah Kramer, From the Poetry of Sumer, p. 71 (cited in Wolkstein
and Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, p. xv). For a psychological
interpretation of the Inanna myth, see Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess:
A Process of Initiation for Women.
116 Mount Analogue, p. 103.