Interview with Janet Munin, author of “Queen of the Great Below: An Anthology in Honor of Ereshkigal.”

October, it seems, has been an interesting month for devotional work. This week has seen the release of the first devotional devoted entirely to Ereshkigal: the Sumerian Goddess of the Underworld. Janet Munin’s book, titled ‘Queen of the Great Below: An Anthology in Honor of Ereshkigal’ is an intense and beautifully written work of devotion, desire, and service in honor of a Goddess often overlooked by contemporary Pagans. To my knowledge, this is only the second contemporary devotional to any of the Sumerian Deities (the first being my own “Into the Great Below”) and it is the first entirely for Ereshkigal.

The author, Janet Munin was kind enough to sit down with me this month and answer a few questions about her work, her service to this Goddess, and the impetus behind this ground breaking devotional.

This interview took place throughout the week of October 20, 2010.

Galina: To begin with, please tell me a little bit about your spiritual background.

Janet: Spirituality has been very important to me since I was a little girl. I was raised non-denominational Protestant, and church was a very important part of my life. I self-identified as a Good Christian Girl until my sophomore year of college when I had an existential crisis and became an atheist. Despite what might be expected, this did not make spirituality, or the question of God, any less important to me. I spent many hours wrestling with the fundamental questions of existence and trying to work out what my ethics should be in a cosmos without a god. Eventually, based on the powerful spiritual experiences I’d had in my youth, I became an agnostic.

The next big turning point came during the spring of my senior year (1988) when I took a course called “Women in Greco-Roman Antiquity” and was introduced to the presence of the Feminine Divine in the Western religious tradition. My spiritual paradigm turned upside down. I bought The Spiral Dance and Z. Budapest’s Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, and plunged into Goddess worship.

In the years since then, it’s been a winding path. I’m an introvert and not particularly “earth centered” so I never felt entirely comfortable in most Pagan circles. The story of the Descent of Inanna helped me heal after I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, and I worked with Inanna for several years. I was delighted when I found the Ordo Arcanorum Gradalis, a Christo-Pagan Grail Fellowship, and spent several years studying for and earning ordination with them. I earned a Masters degree in Comparative Religion and wrote my thesis on sacred prostitution in the ancient and modern worlds.

Through all of this, I continued to experience a deep yearning for the Divine, but never found a community or tradition which felt “right” to me.  It was only after the death of my partner LM and being introduced to the underworld path, ritual magic and Qabalah that I felt at home.

Galina: For those who may not know, who is Ereshkigal and how does She fit into the Sumerian pantheon?

Janet: Ereshkigal is the Queen of the underworld, where She rules with Her second consort Nergal, god of pestilence, and is supported by the Annunaki, the underworld judges. She is considered holy and given praise, but She is also feared. She is unable to rise to the surface of the world or enter heaven because She is ritually unclean due to Her constant exposure to the dead.

She appears in three mythic stories. Her “origin story” is a brief passage in “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld,” which says that when the sky god and the sea god received their realms, Ereshkigal was either kidnapped to the underworld or received it as a gift. (There’s some scholarly dispute about the nuance of the passage, which I discuss in the Introduction to the devotional.) The second story is the famous Descent of Inanna. The third is “The Marriage of Ereshkigal and Nergal.”

The Descent has very strong seasonal motifs, but the Marriage doesn’t seem to have any overt ties to actual religious practices. It could explain the subordination of a previously independent ruling goddess to a male god, consistent with a pattern seen throughout the Ancient Near East, but that’s speculation.

There is actually very little information available today about Her or Her worship. Most of what I’ve been able to find, in both scholarly and popular literature, simply references Her role in The Descent and treats Her as little more than a foil to the beautiful, daring Inanna.

Galina: How did you come to be claimed by Ereshkigal and what exactly does that entail?

Janet: The whole story is rather long, and I tell the whole thing in the devotional, but I can give you the concise version.

My partner died on May 31, 2007. His death devastated me, but it also turned out to be one of the most powerful initiatory experiences of my life. A day or so after his passing, I found out that a relatively new friend was an underworld priestess. She was incredibly supportive, and her experience and insights gave me more comfort than anything or anyone else during the first weeks and months of my grieving. As I learned more about her path I started to feel like I’d finally found a tradition I could be at home in. In July of that year I formally became her student. She told me that I would also need a patron deity to oversee my training, but weeks passed, then months, and I didn’t really connect with anyone.

In November of that year I was doing a ritual with my late lover that took an unexpected turn. I found myself on the floor in front of Ereshkigal’s throne with Her looking down at me. She told me that She would be my patron and teacher if I consented to submit to Her authority. I agreed.

Galina: How did your religious upbringing prepare you (or not) for service to Ereshkigal? And yes, I use the word service because I’m familiar with some of your other writings. I know that in my community certainly that concept can be a point of contention. Is it the same in Sumerian Paganism?

Janet: First of all, I really need to clarify that what I practice is not Sumerian Paganism. I don’t have any connection to the other deities of that pantheon, and I don’t make any attempt to re-create traditional rites or follow the Sumerian calendar.

As far as service goes: I grew up with the belief that God/Jehovah was the King of the Universe, and that while there was definitely mutual love in His relationship with humanity, there was no question that He was the final authority and humanity’s job was to obey. I didn’t experience this as an oppressive situation, however; my congregation stressed love, justice, and joy. So from that perspective my upbringing did prepare me to serve Ereshkigal.

But your question goes beyond that to a relationship that has the overtones a dominance and submission or master/slave dynamic. Yes, that has been part of my relationship with Ereshkigal. Ereshkigal’s stories involve ordeal, boundaries, and power dynamic. My personal sexuality has had a strong element of submissiveness in it for as long as I can remember. I believe that one of the reasons I ended up working for Her is that these elements of our personalities complement each other and give us both pleasure and satisfaction.  However I do not personally identify as a god-slave. The power dynamic is just one aspect of a more complex relationship.

Galina: Rather than God-slave, you refer to yourself several times as an underworld priestess. Can you clarity what you mean by that?

Janet: I heard the term for the first time from the woman who became my priestess teacher. It refers to a spiritual path, a priestess path, which is defined by working with the deities of death and the underworld, and the spiritual forces of the underworld: not just death, but also sex and transformation. She works with the souls of the dead, but I don’t have her gifts in that regard. My path takes me more toward the forging and tempering experiences of life: pain, loss, grief, anger. I’m drawn to the ordeal path and shadow work. The important thing to remember is that a person can’t walk the underworld path without also working with balancing energies. You can’t spend too much time in the darkness and shadow or it becomes unhealthy. There has to be light as well.

Galina: What factors prompted you to write a devotional to Ereshkigal?

Janet: The fundamental reason was that in the course of working with Ereshkigal I had learned a lot of unexpected things about Her, things I didn’t see reflected in any of the literature. Most of the references portray Her as little more than the villain of the Descent, the antagonist to Inanna’s heroine. She is characterized as jealous, angry, bitter, and mean, and left at that. What I had discovered was that Ereshkigal is a goddess of boundaries. Her rages are always in response to trespass or transgression on the part of another. She is scary but She’s trustworthy. She isn’t cuddly, but She can be compassionate. She can be strict and demanding, but She is not without understanding. She will hang you up on a peg – and She will enjoy it – but it will always be for your greater good, not just Her pleasure.

I wanted other people to see these different aspects of Her, to do something to restore Her dignity in modern consciousness. I also wanted to find and connect with other people who worshipped Her and find out if anyone else experienced Her the way I did, to test the validity of my gnosis.

Galina: and did you?

Janet: Yes, I did find several elements of my personal gnosis born out! It was fascinating.

The most striking element confirmed by others was Ereshkigal’s association with blades, both as a blade or blade-wielder Herself (think Queen of Swords, and/or a surgeon’s blade), and in terms of Her tempering people, as a blade is tempered in the forge. Different people who had visions of Her share similar descriptions of Her edged smile. Her aspect as Goddess of Boundaries is affirmed by others as well. None of these aspects are explicitly described in the ancient texts.

The other aspect I found interesting is that everyone who contributed to the book described their relationship with Her as being relatively short-term. Even I have been given cause to step back from my relationship with Her. I’m still Her priestess, but – as I mentioned elsewhere – balance is necessary. One can not spend too much time focused entirely on Her. Most of the people who contributed to the devotional had relatively brief but intense encounters. I didn’t meet anyone else who described themselves a Priest/ess of Ereshkigal. I’m not saying there are not such people out there, only that I did not meet any in the course of this project. In fact, despite my posting to a couple of Sumerian Pagan lists, I never received any contributions from Sumerian Pagans.

Galina: In your book, you refer to Ereshkigal as “the Goddess of the Holy No.” What exactly does that mean? Can you elaborate?

Janet: I came up with the idea of “Holy Yes” in the years after my existential crisis, when I was creating a new ethic that didn’t start and end with “Thou Shalt Not.” Inanna was my role model of “saying yes” to the beauty of life and “yes” to experience, especially in the pursuit of wisdom. “Holy Yes” was my affirmation that it was possible to be virtuous and not uphold the old rules. So that was the background.

The more I studied the ancient stories about Ereshkigal, the more I became aware of the issues of boundaries in them. Inanna does not belong in the underworld. Nergal insults Her messenger, and by extension Herself. They end up in bed together, but He rises before dawn and deserts Her. When She cries out for justice, she threatens to allow the dead to cross over into upper world and consume the living. She is intimately aware of the demands of right relationship, of right boundaries being maintained. We hold our boundaries by saying “No.” Ereshkigal embodies the “Holy No” of appropriate boundaries.

Galina: What do you think the reader will take away from your book?

Janet: I would hope that a reader would have a deeper and richer perspective on Ereshkigal than they did before. I would hope that some will feel inspired to call on Her and work with Her on issues relating to boundaries, to shadow work, and ordeal path rituals.

Galina: What would you consider to be the primary challenges facing practitioners of contemporary Sumerian Paganism?

Janet: Again, I’m not a Sumerian Pagan, so I can’t answer that.

As an underworld priestess, the greatest challenge is balancing the energies of Below and Above. I was initiated into this path through the death of my beloved, and I have wanted very much to just sink into the Underworld to be with him and never return – but I am a living being yet, and I still have work to do in the material world. When in balance, the underworld energies provide a very rich grounding: we touch eternity there, and the roots of things. The underworld is place of transformation. I talk about Ereshkigal as one of the deities of the spiritual forges who test and temper us to bring us to full strength. That’s underworld work. But unless we take that strength and do something with it in our lives, it remains potential rather than actual. The underworld can also be a place of rest, where we receive deep healing from the trials of everyday life.

Galina: What advice would you give someone entering into a devotional relationship with Ereshkigal?

Janet: It’s not something to do on a whim. If you’re thinking about getting to know Her, meditate about it first and decide if you’re truly willing to accept the consequences. She is the Mistress of the Descent, and if you invoke Her you need to be prepared for a stripping down; it will come sooner rather than later. It will be for your own good, but it is unlikely to be fun.

Ereshkigal demands absolute honesty with yourself. She has no patience with evasions, excuses, or self-delusion. She can deal with mistakes and failures, but you have to take responsibility for them. You can cry, scream, or rage at Her, but don’t whine.

She respects boundaries, and it’s okay to put them in place when you begin a relationship with Her. For example, when I accepted Her invitation to be her priestess, I had two caveats: that it could not interfere with my ability to materially or emotionally support my child, nor would I give up or compromise my relationship with LM. She accepted that and has stood by Her word.

For all that She is demanding, stern, and merciless, She is also faithful, caring, and passionate. You probably won’t see that side right away; I think it has to be earned through devotion. But it’s beautiful, and well worth the challenges and the discipline.

Galina: My thanks to Janet Munin for allowing herself to be interviewed. “Queen of the Great Below: An Anthology in Honor of Ereshkigal” is currently available at: https://www.createspace.com/3491305. It should be formally available at http://www.amazon.com within the next few days. I highly recommend it.