3 | Spiritual Emergence / Emergency: Rite of Passage

Myth of Inanna

It seemed that every time I went into my therapist’s office, she told me the Sumerian myth of Inanna. There are many versions of the myth, and here is one:

Inanna was a great queen of the overworld, rich and vibrant and happy. One twilight, she notices entrancing music emanating from a hole in the earth. She approaches the opening, and:

From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear [also translated as heart] to the Great Below

My lady abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.1

Inanna’s Willing Descent Into the Underworld

Inanna was not dragged into the underworld against her will. Rather, she hears (or feels in her heart) something that she longs for, and she willingly descends. Inanna descends into a dark and dangerous, but enchanting, place. She walks carefully and curiously, feeling the damp earth beneath her feet and the craggy walls around her. She comes across a gate with a large, armored gatekeeper, who doesn’t let her pass. 

Inanna has never been stopped before, and she is suddenly afraid, but says firmly, “You must not know who I am – I am queen of heaven and earth.”

“All that means nothing here,” the gatekeeper replies, “and it won’t help you pass through the underworld.”

Inanna is shocked. “Then how can I proceed?” 

“You must make a sacrifice.” 

Inanna cries, having never been denied before, and hating the idea of parting with any of her precious possessions. But she is determined to go deeper – to find the source of the sound that she heard calling to her heart. Inanna sacrifices her jewelry, and is allowed to pass. She walks on, until she meets a second gatekeeper. After a similar interchange, she sacrifices her hair. 

Deeper and deeper she reaches further gatekeepers and sacrifices parts of herself – her clothes, her body, her queenship – until all she has left are her memories, and those too she must surrender. But rather than turn back, Inanna continues to sacrifice until she is unrecognizable to herself, until she is left with nothing. 

At the bottom of this tunnel, humbled and naked, Inanna encounters her sister Ereshkigal, ruler of the underworld, who strikes her dead. Ereshkigal hangs Inanna by a meathook for three days. Her friends and servants from the overworld come to find her, and eventually persuade Ereshkigal to bring her back to life. She must leave one more sacrifice behind – this time, she chooses her husband.

She walks on, not knowing what’s in store, when she sees the light of day shining into her tunnel. She emerges awkwardly back into the light. Her vision begins to adjust, and she looks back to where she has come from, with feelings of mystery and longing and sadness and triumph. She feels both smaller and larger than before. The world, which she had ruled over for so long, looks transformed – everything in one way is mundanely as it was, and in another, is completely new. She takes a step forward. Everything she has surrendered is scattered about her, and she begins the discernment process of what to leave behind and what to carry forward into her new life.

Rites of Passage as a Structure for Transformation

This myth was helpful to me, reflecting and exaggerating my inner process. It helped me to feel meaning and connection in my darkness and groundlessness. Where I felt structureless and unbounded, the story has a clear structure – one that I would call a rite of passage.

According to contemporary scholar Catherine Bell, there is a three-stage process to rites of passage – “a ‘before,’ a period of training that is ‘betwixt and between,’ and finally an ‘after’ in which the transformation of the person is complete.” She points to Arnold van Gennep’s model of separation, liminality, and reincorporation, as well as Bruce Lincoln’s pattern of female transformation – enclosure, metamorphosis, and emergence. In all of these models, the framing of beginning, middle and end seem to help us find meaning in chaotic experience.

Death, Liminality, and Rebirth

We may see rites of passage as a death, bardo, and rebirth, or a birth, abiding, and death. Bell connects rites of passage and ritual explicitly to the experience of birth, saying, “Birth and birth rituals appear to provide some of the most basic models and metaphors for all sorts of ritual processes, as well as religious experience in general.” This metaphorical birth is clearly displayed in the myth of Inanna.

For Inanna, the beginning of her process was leaving the world she knew, the world above ground and under heaven. The middle was full of confusion, fear, sadness, and sacrifice, though with some sense of directionality and determination. The end is a rebirth through a tunnel, a return to her old world, now with more ability to choose what kind of person she wants to be.

The Hero’s Journey and the Shape of Change

These stages are famously explicated by Joseph Campbell, in his idea of the monomyth, or hero’s story. He frames the journey as initiation, separation, and return. Within these three categories are 17 sub-stages: call to adventure, refusal of call, supernatural aid, crossing the first threshold, belly of the whale, road of trials, meeting with the goddess, temptation, atonement with the father, apostasies, the ultimate boon, refusal of return, magic flight, rescue from without, crossing the return threshold, master of two worlds, and the freedom to live.

It is not within the scope of these essays to further explore Campbell’s analysis, but I provide the outline because his is a cornerstone of this type of work.

Spiritual Emergence/y as Soul Initiation

I believe that framing a spiritual emergence/y as a rite of passage can be very clarifying, and can help us understand that what feels chaotic and negative may turn out to be a process of positive change. In fact, I believe that some people's spiritual emergencies are made more extreme and confusing due to frustrated natural rites of passage in our lives. In my own life, I was making the delicate transition from late adolescence to early adulthood, and my transition was ritualized only by a college graduation, which to me didn’t feel personal or spiritual enough to hold the weight of the internal transition. 

Psychologist Bill Plotkin would call this the transition from the Wanderer in the Cocoon (which is about “leaving home and exploring the mysteries”), to the Apprentice at the Wellspring (which focuses on “learning delivery systems for embodying soul in culture,” in other words, manifesting one’s purpose in the world, being of benefit to the community). According to Plotkin, this transition, and all transitions, requires a Soul Initiation: 

Through psychospiritual adventure, the adolescent comes to know what she was born to do, what gift she possesses to bring to the world, what sacred quality lives in her heart, and how she might arrive at her own unique way of loving and belonging. Entry into the life of the soul demands a steep price, an ordeal, a psychological form of dying. The uninitiated adolescent does not easily give up her claim on “the good life.” Grasping this, we must invent, or reinvent, forms and methods for soul initiation.

Believing that, in our culture, many of us never successfully transcend adolescence, Plotkin adds: “A deeper understanding of adolescence is where our hope lies.” Only through successfully navigating adolescence can we reach the later stages of adulthood and elderhood, leading to feelings of a full and complete life journey. The disorientation and conflicting emotions many of us associate with adolescence are actually a good model for all transitions, though as we get older, we may try, self-destructively, to disavow these childlike feelings. 

The Consequences of Missing Rites of Passage

I believe that when we are denied a proper soul initiation, many of us will try, perhaps unconsciously, to find one for ourselves. Without the proper guidance or container, such an auto-initiation can easily go awry, as such expressions of death and rebirth are easily embodied through actions such as compulsive behaviors, having children, joining the army, self-harm, violence, and risk-taking in general. Author Kurt Vonnegut, in a speech to a graduating college class, put it like this:

I suggest to you that the withholding of a puberty ceremony from young males in our society is a scheme, devised cunningly but subconsciously, to make those males eager to go to war, no matter how terrible or unjust a war may be…

And when does a female stop being a little girl and become a woman?... We all know the answer in our bones: When she has a baby in wedlock, of course… What could be simpler or more natural and more obvious that that – or, in these days and in this society, at least, more unjust, irrelevant, and just plain stupid?

I think we had better, for our own safety, reinstate puberty ceremonies.

Ritual, Recognition, and the Mature Self

I believe that when we feel chaotic, overwhelmed, and shifting, we want our outer experience to reflect it; we want to go through something, outwardly, and then we want to be recognized by our communities as initiates. Bell refers to this desire for our outer world to match our inner world, and for others who have experienced similar ordeals, saying:

Psychologists and mythologists like Otto Rank, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell have used the model of van Gennep’s three-stage process of initiation, with its echoes of older myth and ritual theories of the dying and rising god[/dess], to analyze the structure of hero myths and, by extension, the process of human individuation that leads to the achievement of a mature sense of self.

What’s at stake is not so much our physicality as our psychological process of individuation and sense of self – without the supports of ritual and meaning-making, many of us are in danger of being psychologically stunted human beings, perpetual adolescents. As a pastoral care provider, or a helper in any capacity, knowing the three-stage nature of a rite of passage can be a powerful tool, allowing us to frame experience and create appropriate ritual.

The Ending: Letting the Old Self Fall Away

Contemporary author William Bridges offers a model of transitions: an ending, the neutral zone, and a new beginning. His paradigm is helpful because it makes clear that the beginning of a rite of passage is an ending of something else, and is often a time of grief and confusion. It is easy to believe that we are moving in the wrong direction when a beginning feels so much like an ending, and is so uncomfortable. We want beginnings to be happy and exciting.

However, Bridges reassures us that the beginning inevitably “involves a symbolic death.” He tells the story of a woman who had recently had her first child, a seemingly joyous life event:

When the new mother in the seminar shouted, “I am falling apart!” she was telling the truth – the “she” that she had hitherto identified with was disintegrating. Because of her view that disintegration meant malfunction, she assumed that what she needed was a way to repair her life; but she quickly came to see that no mere fixing up of things would suffice… Her real need then was to find out how to let the person-that-had-been die and go through a renewal process.

Even a seemingly positive change like having a child is still a rite of passage, and will involve discomfort and confusion.

Unfortunately, many of us correlate feelings of disintegration or groundlessness with malfunction or dysfunction, with something needing to be fixed in us or in our situation.

Without assistance, our rite of passage can be aborted here, leaving us feeling that we’ve gone awry.

Bridges points particularly to what he called “the five aspects of the natural ending experience”: disengagement, dismantling, disidentification, disenchantment, and disorientation. I would suggest that these five activities are actually skills that can be developed, and that we can help others to develop. We can practice disengagement, dismantling, disidentification, disenchantment, and disorientation – through spiritual practices like meditation, which force us to confront groundlessness, or simply through recognizing and welcoming these feelings when they come up (which may be surprisingly often once we start looking for them), either on our own or with the help of a teacher or therapist.

The Neutral Zone: Learning to Sit With Uncertainty

Bridges’ second phase, the Neutral Zone, is a time of gestation, of quiet, of solitude. He points out that this stage also is not celebrated by our culture, and is seen by most of us as a problem. If we are not being productive, if we don’t know which direction we’re going in, if we want to be quiet and alone, we can easily be seen as depressed, or at best, wasting our time. Bridges writes:

One of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. For us, “emptiness” represents only the absence of something. So when what’s missing is something as important as relatedness and purpose and reality, we try to find ways of replacing these missing elements as quickly as possible.

Like Inanna, we have to devote some time and energy to being underground, doing work that cannot be appreciated by the outer world. And conversely, like Innana, all the work we have accomplished in the overworld won’t necessarily help us in the descent. We have to learn to sit with a gap, trusting that this time is worthwhile. We may have to sacrifice many of our crutches, many of the things that make us feel comfortable and safe and valuable. As we learn to withstand discomfort, we build new psychological, physiological, emotional, and spiritual muscles, which will help us every day, and every moment. With this sort of meaning infused into our experience, I believe it is possible to see deep significance and joy in such a journey.

The New Beginning: Listening for Inner Signals

Bridges’ third stage is the new beginning. We often are so excited to start a new beginning that we rush into it, cutting our time in the Neutral Zone short, or simply not appreciating what we have gone through to get here. Do we take the moment at the end of the journey to look backwards from where we have emerged, or do we want to forget that time as quickly as possible? Do we take a moment to go through the possessions of our old self, discerning which we want to keep, and which we can leave behind? Bridges suggests that we listen carefully to our inner signals, waiting until we are truly ready for a new beginning:

Much as we long for external signs that point the way to the future, we must settle for inner signals that alert us to the proximity of new beginnings. The most important of these signals begins as a faint intimation of something different, a new theme in the music, a strange fragrance on the breeze. Because the signal is very subtle, it is difficult to perceive when other stimuli are strong – and that is why we naturally, if unconsciously, seek emptiness and quietness in times of life transition. This first hint may take the form of either an inner idea or of an external opportunity, its hallmark being not a logical sign of validity but the “resonance” it sets up in us.

Bridges' main point here seems to be that we cannot rush our transitions. They gestate in their own time, and we are birthed into the overworld again not by our own will, but through natural development.

My Own Journey Through Transition

In terms of my own story, I feel this three-fold structure very much. I set forth from my old life by venturing into spiritual practice, causing disengagement and disorientation. Then there was a period of gap, of betwixt-and-betweenness, where I couldn’t quite get my feet on the ground, either in my old life or in the one yet to come. There was a reorientation and reintegration once I made the final surrender, and the new beginning of moving to Boulder was in fact quite intuitive and synchronistic, coming from inner signals of resonance.

I see now how the process of transition is perhaps the only way to learn, with our hearts, such lessons as impermanence, selflessness, nonattachment, surrender, resilience, confidence and strength. Not all transitions are so dramatic, but perhaps there is a special knowing that comes with the deeper ones. Each rite of passage in our lives can deepen our insight and renew our purpose. In this sense, a spiritual emergence/y can become our friend and our teacher.

Like Inanna, we can choose to keep moving forward, sacrificing until we have nothing left – and see what happens.

This is the third in a series of six posts on spiritual emergence/y. To follow the full journey, read Part 1 and Part 2 of the Spiritual Emergence/y series.

Would you like to learn more about our approach to spiritual emergency?

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1 Diane Wolkstein and S N Kramer, Innana: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 52.

2 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95.

3 See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

4 See Bruce Lincoln, Emerging From the Chrysalis: Rituals of Women’s Initiation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

⁷ Bell, 95.

⁸ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Novato: New World Library, 2008).

⁹ Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (Novato: New World Library, 2010), 61.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid., 12, emphasis mine. For more on initiation, see chapter 5.

¹² Ibid.

 ¹³ Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? Advice For the Young (New York: RosettaBooks, 2013), 29-30.

 ¹⁴ Bell, 101-2.

 ¹⁵ William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2004), 109.

 ¹⁶ Ibid.

 ¹⁷ Ibid.

 ¹⁸ Ibid., 133.

 ¹⁹ Ibid., 160.

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Emma Sartwell, MDiv, CYT | Emma is a registered psychotherapist and adjunct professor at Naropa University, where she earned her Master of Divinity degree. She combines Somatic Experiencing, parts work, holistic healing, and mindfulness into her sessions, which focus on nervous system regulation, trauma integration, attachment patterning, inner critics and inner children, and ancestral healing. Her deepest joy is helping people feel more integrated, authentic, and connected.