Kin Inanna was an ancient festival celebrated to honor Inanna in the city of Nippur, dating to the third dynasty of Ur. I’ve decided to do a series of public rituals for this festival as part of my ordination project. What better way to begin my pagan ministry work than with helping to revive an ancient celebration of Inanna! I hope this will be interesting to the Mesopotamian polytheist community and even people on other pagan paths.
I’m planning out a series of public (online) rituals to celebrate Kin Inanna. I’m thinking Thursday, September 19th for the first, either the 21st or 22nd for the second, and the 24th for the third. It will probably be around 7 or 7:30 pm on Facebook Live. I have to rehearse and put the finishing touches on my rituals to see how long I’ll need for set up and for the actual rituals. I’ll put up a Facebook event when I get it all sorted out in the next couple of days. I believe Live videos can be re-watched later, so if you wanted to participate, but can’t make it, you can still participate asynchronously (unless I mess up too bad and decide to remove it!)
I finally got around to making videos of my experiences with the Threshold and Foundation sections of Rod and Ring. These videos are pretty brief. I’ve already shared more about the Foundation rituals earlier in this blog. (I don’t think I did blog posts about Threshold. That might have been before I started writing openly about my spiritual explorations).
I discuss the myth of Enki and Ninmah, where Enki finds a place in society for Ninmah’s “deformed” creations and share my interpretation of how this myth applies to the value of people who are considered disable based on my personal experiences.
One of my assignments for my Pagan Clergy Training class last week was a series of journal prompts. One of the questions, “How did you come to paganism?” ended up with me writing a lengthy several page answer, so I thought that would make a good video for my channel. I suspect a lot of pagans have similar long winding journeys that eventually brought them to their current spiritual paths.
I recently finished the third part of Descent in Rod and Ring and will be beginning Ascent this week! Here is a video I made talking about my experiences working through the Descent rituals. I’m planning on going back to do videos on the Foundation and Threshold sections, which I did before I started making videos. Hopefully before I finish the last parts of my initiation in September.
I did the last Descent ritual from Rod and Ring in July, right after returning home from an amazing cruise vacation. I’ll try to remember to make a separate blog post about that! It was a month ago, and I still haven’t even gone through all of my photos and videos yet! I did spend a lot of time on my vacation reflecting on my spiritual journey and my relationship with the gods in preparation for the ritual. As always, I set up a travel shrine on my nightstand in the cabin.
My travel altar for Inanna. I got the shrine from an artist at a local event last year, and I made the clay charms featuring Inanna’s name in cuneiform and Her star symbol, and the crescent mini altar cloth. The prayer beads are from Etsy.
But this post is about my ritual work.
In House of Dust, the supplicant comes face to face with the deities of the underworld after having already crossed the river Hubur and descended past the seven gates. It begins with reflecting upon the seven gifts from the gods that you received in Foundation and have given up in the previous Descent rituals.
I spent some time in meditation reflecting on how these gifts relate to experiences in my own life and what it means to give them up. I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about that here, as it is a personal experience for everyone.
Then I had to vow to return to the underworld at my appointed time when the gods decree. I took this to mean that I am vowing to accept my mortality when it is time. I shouldn’t try to fight the inevitable. I will return to the underworld to stand before Ereshkigal and the other underworld powers, and not try to hold onto the world of the living as a ghost or whatever.
After completing the ritual and taking my leave from the underworld, I still had to send a replacement to take my place in the underworld. For this, I had to make a clay effigy, which I ritually brought to life with the Bringing Clay to Life ritual. This was based on the mythology that the gods created humans from clay mixed with their own blood. I used air dry clay made from natural ingredients so that it wouldn’t harm the environment and I buried it in the critter grave yard area of my garden. It had to be buried in a cemetery if possible. I consider this to technically be a cemetery, and it is a location that I can tend to every day to add more incense and flowers. I did my whole funerary ritual for this effigy and continued burning incense there for a week, and occasionally after.
In preparation of the temple dedication ceremony I’ll be doing as part of the Ascent portion of my initiation in September, I am rebuilding my shrines to honor all of the deities I have encountered on this journey. I already had a shrine to Ereshkigal, but I added a tablet with the names of all seven of the powers of the underworld. I also made a special icon for Gula since I do find myself praying to Her a lot. For Gula, who is a goddess of medicine and healing, and is associated with dogs, I made a clay dog with her name inscribed and a spot to hold this old-timey medicine bottle I found while digging in my garden a few years ago. (I also made similar icons for all of the deities of the Earth using items that represent Them. I’ll show them in a future post and/or video).
My current shrine to Ereshkigal and the powers of Kur.
In this video I show a couple cuneiform tablets that I made for Inanna, and then I show how I make my tablets. I also talk a little bit about the Sumerian language and my relationship with Inanna.
This video is inspired by the Ishtarfest 2024 presentation “Become your own (s)hero like Ishtar with transformational stories” by Lori Angel Nagel. I used her transformational story template to tell my story of how my breast cancer journey brought me closer to Inanna.
I originally posted this to Instagram before I realized that normal landscape videos and are frowned upon there.
This is an improv exercise I came up with to practice between classes. I draw a tarot card and then perform a short scene based on the card. The card for this one is the 6 of Arrows from the Babylonian Tarot. I played an old-timey doctor who is attempting to treat a patient who presented with an arrow to their shoulder. (I literally just acted out the scene pictured on the card. I need to get better at “A to C” thinking).
It’s not great acting by any means, but I really like how I was able to combine three of my biggest interests: Mesopotamian religion, tarot, and improv!
