WHY INANNA?
 
Inanna is a Sumerian goddess of love, fertility, war, and transformation — one of the oldest known goddesses in human history. Her story of descent and return, written on clay tablets over 4,000 years ago, is the earliest known myth of this kind.

In the poem, Inanna chooses to descend into the underworld, the realm of her sister Erishkigal, Queen of the Great Below. At each of the seven gates she passes through, she is judged and stripped of her garments — the symbols of her power — until she arrives naked before her sister, who kills her and hangs her body on a hook. After three days, when Inanna fails to return, the god Enki creates two tiny mourners carrying the food and water of life into the underworld. They join Erishkigal in her grief, and moved by their empathy, she restores Inanna back to life. Yet her transformation is bound by the laws of the underworld: she must send someone else in her place. When she returns, she finds her husband Dumuzi celebrating on his throne. Now possessing the “eye of death”, she fixes her gaze on him and he is taken to the underworld. His sister sacrifices herself to take his place half of the year, creating the cycle of the seasons.

I first encountered this myth in the midst of a painful transition, though I didn’t yet recognise it as such. After years abroad, I had returned to Belgium unable to answer even the simplest question: What do you do? I felt an overwhelming sense of loss — of love, home, belonging, identity, and creativity. The hardest part was my creative block. Life felt suspended and foggy. I searched for help in many places — ceremonies, traditional medicine, silent retreats, pilgrimages — but the message was always the same: go within. I didn’t know how deep, or when it would be “enough.” I wanted meaning, and I wanted a way out.

Reading Inanna’s descent story was like finding a map for my inner landscape. It showed me that I was not simply lost, but inside a process of transformation. In the underworld, stripped bare, I began to understand that emptiness is also a place of potential. Slowly, I learned to trust the rhythms of descent and return. I started to write, using Inanna’s journey as a structure for my own, and through writing, slowly, I began to emerge.

This is why I named my project Stories for Inanna. Each quilt honours the thresholds we cross — the liminal spaces where we are stripped of who we were, and invited to discover what else might be possible. Moments when life shows its full depth, when the world around us feels unequipped to carry us. These are not detours but the deep, cyclical work of life. Storytelling, like quilting, can help make meaning of these passages. I believe our textiles carry memories worth honouring — threads of love, grief, and becoming — and I listen to them with the same empathy as Enki’s tiny mourners, created from the dirt under his fingernails, who listened until transformation was possible.