The enlightenment picture

The foundational picture of enlightenment orienting our modern sociopolitical orders involves an unwavering commitment to ascending from darkness toward pure luminosity, whether that light comes from transcendent sources (God, the Platonic Good), is gradually discerned as immanent (through Baconian scientific method or dialectical materialism, public reason), or is created (by brilliant poet-philosophers, Nietzschean will to power, or individual self-actualization). Ludwig Wittgenstein sharply articulated this repetition compulsion in a related context: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein and Anscombie1968: 48). Despite their differences, each version articulates its ascent by distancing and disassociating from its underworlds. These underworlds typically include proponents of now-superseded versions of enlightenment, “unenlightened” peoples around the planet, and the earth itself. Each iteration of the picture of enlightenment systematically forecloses receptive and empathetic relations that might attune us to the shifting darkness, to the other-than-human world, to all that our luminous systems cast out as underworld. Each critique of a specific picture of enlightenment strengthens our attachment to the basic picture of ascent from the cavernous toward luminosity that holds us captive. Briefly consider a few key versions of this picture to illustrate this point.

Plato’s allegory of the cave established the archetypal pattern. His cave-dwellers, bound since infancy to watch shadows on a wall, are so thoroughly shaped by illusion that they cannot free themselves. Their souls have become attached to the perverse scenes. If they were freed to turn and witness the manipulators behind their backs casting the images, they would dismiss their new experience as false and return to gaze at the shadows they take to be true. Liberation requires their being dragged up toward the light, a long ascent to the mouth of the cave—away from their entranced cohort, away from all earthly becoming—to adjust to the light of the real world and the unchanging source of it all–the Sun. From this transcendent vantage point, it is clear that those attached to the underworld can do nothing together to free themselves of their enthrallment. There is nothing that those outside the cavernous situation can do in relation to those within except rule over them according to a permanent, unchanging Good and Truth.

At the very heart of Plato’s allegory is a portrayal of Earth itself as a cavernous, wretched underworld of becoming. Therefore, everything hinges upon the whole soul being “turned from the world of becoming into that of being” (Plato Reference Jowett1888: 518) which is the “brightest” and “best.” All earthly becoming—including all the earthly knowledge, pleasures, and desires that we develop in relation to this becoming—is figured as chains and illusions. Earth, along with all its cyclical, oscillating, contingent transfigurations, is pictured as underworld. Enlightenment always overpopulates the cave it would escape.

Writing between the Renaissance and modern Enlightenment, Francis Bacon returns again to the picture of the threatening cave. He casts Nature herself as the new cave—a dangerous feminine force concealing valuable knowledge—the light of God—in her dark interior (Bacon Reference Bacon1902: 9–10 ). These secrets “still locked in nature’s bosom” (Bacon Reference Bacon1902: 86) could only be extracted through the forcible and one-directional interrogation of the experimental process: science often “tortures” nature as miners search “into the bowels of nature” and smiths shape “nature as on an anvil” (Merchant Reference Merchant2008: 753).

Not only nature but all previous traditions as well as most of his contemporaries are also construed as hopeless cave dwellers enthralled to the delusions and corrupting forces that he calls the Idols of the Cave, including corporeal passions, bogus traditions, and confused experiences (Bacon Reference Bacon1902). The Idols of the Cave generate and are amplified by bad philosophizing and miscommunication, including that of Plato, who formulated the very images of a cave and ascent that orient Bacon’s own aspirations. He imagines hauling Plato and myriad other “sham philosophers” to the bar that divides the courtroom. There they would face one-way interrogation and prosecution as harsh as his interrogation of Nature, for their “false coinage,” “vague inductions,” and “bogus cures” (Merchant Reference Merchant2008: 754). Bacon’s New Atlantis (Reference Bacon2020) envisions the result: a luminous utopia of technological mastery in which a governing elite would eradicate the Idols of the Cave with no space for democratic participation, dissent, or undomesticated earth.

Kant refined this dream of enlightenment disassociation and ascent to its philosophical apex. He begins his Critique of Pure Reason with a quote from Bacon’s The Great Instauration about bringing an “end to infinite errors” (Kant Reference Kant and Kemp-Smith1929). Beyond the cave of illusion and infinite errors, awakened by Hume from his dogmatic slumber, Kant concluded that if consciousness was receptively engaged with the world of things, we would drown in wild seas of contingency, illusion, and uncertainty. Driven by this fear and a conviction that we have access to universal laws of understanding governing experience, Kant argued that we cannot receive any trace of otherness from the world of things. Therefore, consciousness must give the law to nature rather than receive anything from it (Kant Reference Kant and Kemp-Smith1929: 173). Similarly, in The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant concluded that if our determination of morality involved pain, pleasure, habit, tradition, specificity, perception, desire, or custom in any way, it would succumb to an abyss of contingency and uncertainty. Therefore, one must not receive any of these things if one is to emerge from the cave of illusion. Rather, one must give oneself the moral law from the unconditioned, universal characteristics of one’s own consciousness (Kant Reference Kant and Gregor2015). Any receptivity to otherness threatens to pull us back into the cave (Coles Reference Coles1997).

This pattern repeats itself endlessly: in liberal public reason that excludes the particularities of comprehensive doctrines; in dialectical materialism’s dictatorship over those mired in false consciousness; in well-meaning progressives who believe defeating fascism requires simply “getting out the message” to uninformed masses rather than risking vulnerable engagement across difficult differences. Each new version critiques its predecessors’ specific errors while recommitting even more strongly to the general picture of enlightened ascent and condemnation.

Reflection on the repetitive motifs in this organizing picture would be indispensable to loosening our enthrallment to it. Yet therein lies a certain trickiness to this picture: For hundreds of years, the currently enlightened ones repeatedly prosecute the previous version of enlightenment in new one-directional, dismissive interrogations that establish a new version of ascent as right and good, above and beyond others. Such criticism elevates its renewed ascent above the previous fray. In this way, each new ascent remains wholly inside the more general enlightenment picture and the aspirations it generates. Thus, the picture’s hold remains unslackened—perhaps even tightened—and we remain captive.

Toward earth democracy: an alternative mythos

Our current political and ecological crises require a different picture and different way of being in relationship with the earth, with suffering and with darkness in our ways of creating, disrupting, and changing sociopolitical life. Rather than struggling to hold fast to increasingly implausible narratives of enlightened mastery and transcendent progress, we might receive these darkening times as a paradoxical opportunity to reimagine sociopolitical life through cycles of intentional descent, empathetic receptivity toward the underworld, and co-creative rebirth.

With this aspiration, we explore possibilities for an alternative picture that offers a different orientation and different energies for fostering earth democracy—democratic practices grounded in the more cyclical, transformative patterns of descent, decomposition, and regeneration that characterize the ecosystems and life forms that constitute our living planet. A new mythos or “picture” could help us begin to sense, feel, orient ourselves, move, aspire, and rebuild the commons in more promising ways. It could offer what Merleau-Ponty theorizes as a disclosive aesthetic structure that orients and animates future experiences and engagements (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty, Lawlor and Massey2010).

Our effort moves in relations of resonance and mutual supplementation with a growing constellation of recent work on myths, stories, and cosmologies intended to orient, inform, and inspire thought and action in times of ecological and political crises. These works include the following: Aslam et al.’s (Reference Aslam, McIvor and Schlosser2024) call for myths that reorient our attention, imagination and co-creativity toward “earthborn(e) democracy” in ways that help attune us to a multitude of eco-democratic modes of life across time, in order to regenerate novel entanglements between the planetary and the political; Connolly’s (Reference Connolly2024) critique of the cosmological inheritance that has been integral to the advance of political-planetary catastrophe and the diminishment of our capacities to perceive and respond well—and the alternatives he explores; as well as Haraway’s (Reference Haraway2016) and Tsing’s (Reference Tsing2015) efforts to add to the carrier bag full of stories that have always been indispensable for the highest possibilities of human evolution.

Integral to the alternative mythos we explore is receptive, empathetic descent into the underworlds of every order as an indispensable condition for any worthy ascent, any reimagined understanding of progress that does not proceed through destruction and obliteration. Descent and ascent become dynamic conditions of each other’s possibility, just as they are in earth’s own daily, seasonal, and ecological cycles. With this understanding of cyclical relationships, contemporary ecological, social, and political collapse might be engaged as an occasion to cultivate receptive generosity in empathic relationships with decline and devastation as elemental conditions for regenerating democracy and ecological resilience.

Receptive resonance is a vital theme that informs our inquiry in numerous ways. Empathetic relationality is disclosed in the myths we explore as an extraordinary, cosmos-transformative power—which is why subjugative formations are so persistently oriented toward stifling or managing it. At one level, empathetic relationality is intersomatic—it happens in the resonance between bodies through cellular mirror neurons, senses, nervous systems, and energies coursing within and among us. Yet vast assemblages of power are also importantly engendered and maintained through what Connolly (Reference Connolly2008) calls “resonance machines,” such as the Christianity–Capitalism resonance machine in the contemporary United States, or the early-Sumerian resonance machine formed by the architectural apartheid of the cosmos and the affective flows among the gods invested in it. Yet the Sumerian myth we explore also discloses how empathic relationality may transform this cosmos in ways that engender vast assemblages of receptive resonance across separations to form dynamic, processual architectures better characterized as earth democracies. Together, these modes of receptive corporeal and lifeway resonance pictured in the myth help cultivate dispositions favorable to receptive resonance with these themes as they have been articulated across time and place throughout the ages. We admire how Aslam et al.’s (Reference Aslam, McIvor and Schlosser2024) work with the theory of morphic resonance, though with them we are uncertain about the veracity of this idea. The position we formulate below orients us toward cultivating a receptive orientation toward possibilities of morphic resonance. The latter might importantly amplify aspirations for earth democracy, yet we doubt that morphic resonance is indispensable for this project. In the Sumerian myth we examine, both regenerative earth democracies and patterns of suffering and subjugation appear to generate morphic resonance that calls for attention and learning (as Toni Morrison suggested).

To develop an alternative mythos, we turn to two texts that illuminate both the problem and the possibility. First, Ursula Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” incisively discloses the conundrum of a society that values only the light and maintains their luminosity by foreclosing empathetic, receptive relationships with their constitutive underworlds. Le Guin reveals how the management of descent—keeping the sensing of suffering sealed off from transformative engagement—becomes the perverse condition for creating and justifying the epitome of enlightenment aspirations. Reading with attention to this theme, we ourselves are pulled to walk away from Omelas, releasing ourselves from captivity to the enlightenment picture it simultaneously articulates and interrogates.

Thus freed, we can turn to our second text: the Sumerian myth of Inanna. This ancient story offers a vastly different understanding of both the practices and possibilities for descent, showing how these become indispensable to responding transformatively to the problems illustrated in Omelas. The myth of Inanna’s descent provides an alternative framework for earth democracy: showing how empathetic, receptive descent into darkness becomes indispensable for transformation rather than something to be managed or escaped. As such, the myth of Inanna differs mightily from the dominant myths that followed it historically in both its relationship to the earth and to the underworld. It also calls for a very different approach to governance and sociopolitical order that is far more cyclical, oscillating between ascent and descent, decomposition and recomposition, light and dark. This alternative picture suggests that our worthiest ascents might be those that intentionally orient us toward further cycles of receptive, empathetic descent into the underlands of our orders rather than oblivious, extractive marches of enlightenment.

Omelas: the foreclosure of descent

On the brightest day of summer, in the most enlightened city, a child suffers in darkness. This is the heart of Ursula Le Guin’s story of Omelas. By staging that stark contrast, Le Guin sets up a story through which she asks us to consider how the most luminous achievements of the picture of enlightenment depend on managing and, ultimately severing empathetic connections to the underworld that might transform them.

Le Guin presents Omelas as the enlightenment picture perfected. The people celebrate the joyous reign of light—the first day of summer, their “bright-towered” architecture, and their luminous victory “not against some outer enemy but in the communion of the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere” (Le Guin Reference Le Guin and leguin2004: 98). They have achieved every chosen technological perfection, sustainable environments, loved and happy children. These “mature, intelligent, passionate adults” live without kings, secret police, slaves, stock markets or bombs, and need very few rules and laws. They inhabit the “world’s summer,” grounded in a “just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive” (Le Guin Reference Le Guin and leguin2004: 98). Like the solstice sun, Omelasians stand at the apex of human ascent from the barbarous caverns.

Yet, this summit depends on a basement, an underworld, and the flourishing of Omelas requires a sacrificial relationship to that basement—in the basement of each citizen. Omelasian flourishing requires the condensation of all wretchedness into the body of a single child locked in darkness—solitary in its excrement, festering with sores, repeatedly humiliated. Every Omelasian knows of it. Many have seen it. They have all experienced tremendous sorrow and rage as their bodies resonated with this child’s horrific suffering and hungered to save it.

But, Le Guin emphasizes, all who witnessed the child followed the “strict and absolute” injunction to silence even the faintest expression of their trembling compassion (2004: 99). Here lies the crucial mechanism—not that Omelasians fail to perceive suffering, but that they must sever perception from action, feeling from empathic engagement. Their bodies must take in and fully register the child’s misery, yet they must stifle all outward manifestations and responsive action.

Le Guin brilliantly discloses how this blockage between receptive awareness and expressive agency sustains their order as enlightened by engendering the appearance of its necessity. Thus, she discloses not just the shadow side of utilitarian morality of maximizing the greatest good for the greatest number, following William James (Reference James1891) and Dostoevsky (Reference Dostoevsky and Garnett2003). She shows how this “necessity” is produced through paradoxical micropractices of relational severance. When we block the flow from perception to expression, from empathetically feeling suffering to acting on it, we create a world that then appears fixed and unchangeable. The injunction against outward-coursing empathic energies profoundly shapes the world that each Omelasian then senses in the next instant. The child’s pain becomes—and is then sensed as—a phenomenon increasingly isolated, insofar as each has silenced any outward expression of the empathy or solidarity that began to course between them. Through this proscriptive practice the child’s body and pain are constructed and sensed more atomistically—separated from any involvement—in ways that powerfully influence the “enlightened” assessment of what is at stake, what an emerging “we” might do, what energies and powers we might muster to do it, and what might be (un)necessary.

The initial stifling of empathetic expression—this peculiar agency turned against emergent relational agency—engenders the gradual displacement of inner torment with a guilt-free recognition that this “bitter injustice” is indeed the necessary “terrible justice” upon which their world rests. The sacrificial logic becomes implacable and overpowering: if the child’s misery was alleviated, the entire radiance of their city, science, friendships, arts, child-rearing—even their “abundant harvests and the kindly weather of their skies”—would crumble. And so, they come to “the acceptance of their helplessness,” knowing that “they, like the child, are not free” (Le Guin Reference Le Guin and leguin2004: 99).

The deepest underworld of Omelas is not only that basement room. It is the damaged sensibility—the numbed perception, the truncated agency—that every Omelasian develops through practicing this disconnection. Each citizen’s body becomes a site of blockage, where natural empathetic responses are systematically shut down before they can flow into action. This self-imposed paralysis is the seminal darkness at the heart of their enlightened order. As the Omelasians know, any whisper of how their bodies registered the insanity of their relationship with the child would not only slightly diminish the child’s infinite suffering, but also unleash a potentially contagious, unsettling wave of resonant call and response energies, opening an uncertain yet fertile horizon in which new questions, cravings, and powers for change might germinate. Confronting this underworld of Omelas prepares us to reflect far more powerfully upon the ethicopolitical powers that emerge when ascent and empathetic descent are understood—and cultivated—in immanent relationship with each other.

Theorizing contemporary “economies of abandonment” through the Omelas lens, anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli sharply articulates how the ongoing corporeal suffering of the child in the basement and the mature joyfulness of the citizens of Omelas are “co-substantial”. The former is an “organ” in a relation of mutual “enfleshment” with the Omelasians (Povenelli Reference Povenelli2012: 4). Yet Omelasian rationality presents itself as emerging from a “view from nowhere” (Nagel Reference Nagel1986) precisely because it has severed the relational flows that would reveal their specific entanglements and uncertain potentials. The Omelasian injunction that blocks all outward responsiveness to the perception of suffering initiates an unending spiral of disenfleshment, the relation of nonrelation. Thus, the Omelasians can judge their assessment as “mature” (insofar as each does corporeally register and recognize the misery that enables their utopian joy), while simultaneously ensconcing themselves in a somnambulistic, disenfleshed sacrificial logic.

Except, perhaps, in the bodies of “the ones who walk away from Omelas.” They refuse to live according to the “necessity” of Omelasian logic. Is their refusal a turn toward another aspiration, maybe a genuinely better mode of life that somehow escapes sacrificial logic—and perhaps rescues the child? Or, is it merely another form of abandonment—this one due to their own unending misery in relation to micropractices that have become quite comfortable for nearly everyone else? We don’t know. Le Guin does not say. She ends the story by stating that she cannot describe the alternative they seek, “but they seem to know where they are going” (Le Guin Reference Le Guin and leguin2004: 99).

Omelas provides a sharp negative image of what we would need to generate more genuinely democratic and ecologically resilient orders. Where earth democracy would require cycles of receptive descent and transformative engagement with suffering, Omelas shows us a society that maintains itself enthralled to the light of summer by forever blocking those cycles. Understanding that the deepest darkness at the heart of Omelas lies in each citizen’s body—where natural empathetic responses are shut down before they flow into expression and action—prepares us to recognize what the alternative might require. Earth democracy might begin with cultivating the capacity for empathetic, receptive descent as a condition for regenerative ascent, learning to be transformed by what we encounter in darkness and building a capacity for cycling between these different interconnected movements. It would refuse the bargain of perpetual summer, valuing descents into the harsh realities and darkness of its winters and the cave as zones in which transformative decomposition and regenerative composition occur.

In imagining our way toward another picture of our collective possibility, we are interested in those who leave their radiant cities of abandonment yet don’t quite know where they are going, those willing to enter the uncertain space of descent, to maintain the flow between empathetic perception and action even when it leads into darkness. Not-knowing and uncertainty themselves form the fearsome darkness so insistently conjured up and away by the enlightenment picture. We are interested in those who work their ways into the underworlds; underworlds from which they will not become free except insofar as they are enveloped by undomesticated, unexpected energies of empathy, flowing inward and outward, working loose relationships and imaginations, to generate surprising possibilities beyond the necessities that previously seemed cosmically ordained. For understanding this different way of leaving Omelas—and potentially returning to transform it—the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna’s journey is richly suggestive.

Inanna: an alternative mythos of descent

Any genuine alternative to the enlightenment picture cannot simply be a repetition of that same underlying movement of critique, dismissal, and supersession of the “previous.” We must forge our path differently. To do so, we turn backward instead of positing some new illumination. We venture down into the forgotten caves of history, beyond the Greeks and the forms of governance that would shape modernity. To reconfigure our relationship to darkness, nature, and all that the myth of enlightenment casts out as inferior, we turn to the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna, a story that itself remained physically buried for 4000 years, literally abandoned underground as historical formations entangled with cosmologies of light-obsessed ascent gained power.

The myth of Inanna emerges from early Sumerian civilization. Inscribed on cuneiform tablets as some of the earliest known writing in human civilization and passed down through oral tradition long before, these stories shaped the religious, political, and ethical imagination of ancient Mesopotamia. From around 4000 BC, Inanna was the most prominent deity in Uruk, presiding as the “goddess of heaven and earth.” Inanna’s Sumeria gave birth to loose, distributed patterns of broadly participatory democracy (gradually supplanted by kingship many centuries later) alongside remarkable innovations in astronomy, agriculture, architecture writing, codified law, formal education, and religious thought expressed through poetry, hymns, and myths (Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen1943; Kramer Reference Kramer, Wolkstein and Kramer1971, Reference Kramer, Wolkstein and Kramer1983; Isakhan Reference Isakhan2007).

The myth of Inanna both comes from the forgotten underworld and restores the importance of the underworld. This ancient story envisions descent into the underworld as a necessary practice for regenerating both cosmic order and earthly governance. Unlike the enlightenment picture’s insistence on perpetual ascent, the myth of Inanna envisions cycles of descent and return as fundamental to justice, creativity, and renewal. Inanna does not merely walk away from Omelas. Her journey into the underworld catalyzes a process that enables a cosmos-transforming return.

The tablets recording Inanna’s story include several myths that together provide an overview of Sumerian cosmology. The first three myths elaborate a creation story and tell how Uruk became a majestic and prosperous earthly city. Through a combination of guile, defense, and generosity, Inanna acquires all the knowledges, powers, and arts (known as me [pronounced: may] in the myths) for flourishing in countless forms and bestows them upon the people of her city. As a flourishing city of manifold virtues and powers, the mythic Uruk had a utopian quality similar to Omelas. Yet beneath this surface prosperity lies a foundational injustice that will propel the transformative events of the fourth myth.

The creation story reveals that this earthly flourishing is built upon a cosmic basement of unjust suffering. The myth begins with apparent perfection: “In the first days … in the first nights … in the first years … everything needed was brought into being … and properly nourished” (Wolkstein and Kramer Reference Kramer, Wolkstein and Kramer1983: 4). Yet this claim of proper nourishment—a cosmic gaslighting—masks the violent divisions that structure the universe:

The grammar reveals the injustice: An and Enlil actively “carry off” their luminous domains, exercising agency in claiming heaven and earth. Ereshkigal, by contrast, “was given” the underworld—a passive construction indicating her consignment rather than choice (Wolkstein Reference Wolkstein, Wolkstein and Kramer1983:139). She is condemned to rule a realm of demons, death, darkness, decay, dust, and agony. This is resonant with countless narratives legitimating unequal distributions of power and suffering. The luminosity of the cosmos hinges both upon Ereshkigal’s absorption of all rejected darkness and gaslighting this fact to avoid acknowledging rot at the heart of the order.

Young Inanna herself initially participates in this underworlding. In one of the earliest myths in the cycle, liminal figures—a lion-faced bird, a serpent, and “the dark maid Lilith” refuse to leave a tree she tends for her “shining throne” and “shining bed.” She calls upon her brother Gilgamesh to rid her throne of these figures. His violent intervention with his axe causes these boundary-crossing beings to “flee to the wild, uninhabited places” (9).

Lilith’s refusal to leave the tree represents an early disruption of Inanna’s aspirations for a luminous sovereignty and domesticity. As a figure who will not be incorporated into the structures of power, Lilith embodies what feminist scholars have long recognized: the necessary exile of undomesticated feminine power from patriarchal orders. That Inanna initially participates in this casting out—calling upon masculine violence to drive Lilith away—makes her later descent more significant. She must eventually confront not only what the cosmic order has underworlded, but her own complicity in that underworlding of the dark, untamed feminine who later returns in the form of Ereshkigal.

Enki, the god of both Wisdom and Water, refuses to accept the rigid divisions from the start. The myth introduces him as “He whose ears are wide open; he who knows the me, the holy laws of heaven and earth[ly flourishing]; he who knows the heart of the gods” (12). Receptivity to acoustic, affective, and morphic resonance is vital to his character and offering. Perhaps most of all, Enki is one who listens attentively to the heart of things, which makes him uncomfortable with hierarchical silencing. In Sumerian, ear and wisdom are the same word (Wolkstein Reference Wolkstein, Wolkstein and Kramer1983). Enki’s nature as Water God is essential to understanding both his wisdom and his way of moving. Water refuses rigid boundaries—it seeps, flows, finds cracks, and transforms from one state to another. Unlike the fixed assignments of An (sky) and Enlil (earth), water moves between realms, connecting heaven’s rain, earth’s rivers, and the underground aquifers. The Abzu where Enki dwells is itself a liminal space between earth and underworld. His wisdom-as-listening suggests knowledge that comes not from transcendent distance but from fluid attention to what resonates and moves beyond established categories. Water wisdom attends to what crystalline hierarchies exclude.

While other deities settle into their assigned domains, Enki attempts the first transgression of the order to reconnect with the underworld: “The Father set sail, Enki, the God of Wisdom, set sail for the underworld” (4). The cosmos violently rejects his boundary-crossing. Windstones, hailstones, and crashing waves destroy his boat. Driven back, Enki is unable to get to the underworld. His boat, for all its magical properties, cannot withstand the violence that maintains separation. What becomes clear is that crossing the established order requires more than good intentions or even divine power. It demands a different kind of approach that Inanna will undertake.

The wisdom of Enki’s way of sailing for the underworld nevertheless has a contagious resonance. While young Inanna is drawn to Enki in the earlier myths to gain his abundant powers (me) for Uruk’s flourishing, by the fourth myth it is evident that it is the energies of his open-eared, heartfelt movement that will animate her deepest, highest aspirations.

We meet Inanna at the outset of the fourth myth, no longer reveling in Uruk’s glory but preparing to walk away, oriented toward a descent into the darkened underworld of her order in ways that will ultimately give rise to a mythos most contrapuntal to the picture of enlightenment ascent:

Opened her ear. This phrase announces an epistemology utterly distinct from enlightenment’s “view from nowhere.” Where enlightenment seeks truth through distanced observation, through the penetrating gaze that masters its objects, the open ear receptively resonates with what comes. To open rather than direct suggests a fundamental receptivity based in one’s vulnerability to being changed by what one encounters. Sound enters us, vibrates through our bodies, whether we will it or not. The Sumerian connection between ear and wisdom suggests that genuine knowledge comes not from transcendent distance but from resonant attention and allowing oneself to be changed by otherness.

Inanna responds to the call of the Great Below by abandoning her temples in city after city, walking away and releasing her claims to power in every site where she previously operated, preparing for transformation. Perhaps she already has an inkling that her journey will enable a difficult wisdom, far more critical to the genuine flourishing of the earthly cities than all the extravagant powers she has previously received and bestowed.

Believing she knows something about how to prepare for her descent, she gathers her seven most vital powers. She places a crown on her head, symbolizing the power of hierarchical authority. She adorns herself with valuable lapis beads that symbolize wealth and prosperity. She daubs her eyes with ointment called “Let him come, let him come” and puts on a breastplate called, “Come, man, come” upon her chest, both referring to her sexual power and erotic magnetism. She also “took the lapis measuring rod and line in her hand,” a powerful symbol in Sumeria of the power to judge, evaluate and determine worth (53).

Dressing herself in these seven me symbols betrays Inanna’s misunderstanding of the conditions of descent. She thinks she can descend while maintaining the instruments of mastery and superiority as Goddess of Heaven and Earth intact. The measuring rod particularly foreshadows enlightenment’s fantasy that one can engage darkness while preserving rational distance, maintaining the ability to measure and assess from a superior position. Like Omelasians who believe they can manage suffering while remaining untouched by it, Inanna imagines descent as doing rather than undergoing. She prepares as if the underworld were simply another realm to be navigated with familiar strategies, not recognizing that genuine descent requires the complete dissolution of the frameworks that maintain separation between above and below.

Nevertheless, while she wagers that these powers will enable a successful journey, Inanna intuits that her preparations may prove inadequate. She instructs her aide Ninshubur that if she fails to return, Ninshubur must dress as a beggar, wail before the father Gods, “tear at your eyes, at your mouth, at your thighs” (53). Ninshubur’s only hope, and it is slim, is to become abject and performatively manifest the very destitution and grief that the cosmic order ignores. Only through wailing—that primal expression of grief that pierces through rational discourse—might the powers above be moved to act. The beggar’s supplication acknowledges what Inanna’s seven powers deny: descent into the underworld strips one of all standing in the economies of power.

Inanna thus stands at the threshold between two incompatible understandings of descent. She has opened her ear to the Great Below and abandoned her earthly positions, yet she still carries the very instruments that maintain hierarchy and separation. She has heard the call but not yet understood that answering it will require surrendering every power that distinguishes her from those who suffer in darkness. Her journey will teach what Enki’s failed sailing first suggested: the underworld cannot be encountered from above but involves a radical vulnerability.

That the journey of descent will require capacities and courage far different from what she anticipates becomes clear as soon as she arrives at the outer gates of the underworld. In possession of her me, Inanna “knocked loudly” and “cried out in a fierce voice: Open the door, gatekeeper!” (54–55). Her commanding approach reveals she still imagines herself as powerful even at the threshold of darkness.

When the gatekeeper informs Ereshkigal that Inanna demands to enter the underworld, towering, strong, and draped in her seven powers, Ereshkigal “slap[s] her thigh and bit[es] her lip” at Inanna’s hubris (56). She tells the gatekeeper to allow Inanna entrance only if she relinquishes one of her powers at each of the seven locked gates into the underworld. She cannot bring her powers to the underworld but must allow herself to be stripped of them, becoming vulnerable to the very forces she earlier helped cast out. This vulnerability becomes the condition for cosmic transformation. Thus begins the systematic undoing of everything that maintains Inanna’s position and power above. She progressively relinquishes her crown (sovereignty); her lapis beads (wealth); her erotic adornments, ointments, and breastplate (signifying her sexual power); her golden bracelet (binding her to others). At the sixth gate, most crucially, she loses her lapis measuring rod and line symbolizing the power to judge and measure truth from above, to calculate its necessity, to assess its meaning while remaining separate from it. Finally, at the seventh gate, her royal robe itself is stripped away—the last covering that distinguishes her from vulnerability and mere flesh.

She enters the underworld “naked and bowed low” (60). This phrase captures the complete antithesis of enlightenment’s approach to darkness. Where enlightenment arms itself with reason, maintains evaluative distance, and seeks to illuminate darkness from above, Inanna arrives with nothing—no tools, no protection, no position from which to analyze, assess, or give laws.

Stripped and profoundly vulnerable is not a condition to be romanticized. The moment Inanna enters the underworld, the wrathful Ereshkigal gives Inanna the “eye of death,” strikes her dead, and hangs her corpse on a hook to rot. The corpse on the hook completes the reversal. Inanna becomes meat—objectified, suspended, rotting. She who distributed the me of civilization is reduced to dead flesh, unable to speak, act, or even decompose into earth.

The “eye of death” inverts every power of seeing that Inanna once possessed. Where Inanna’s eye once surveyed from above, bestowing favor or commanding obedience, now Ereshkigal’s eye reveals what those above truly bring to those below: death. This is not merely personal vengeance from a bitter sister but the structural response of the systematically wounded. Ereshkigal sees through Inanna’s voluntary descent to the involuntary history it cannot erase—all the times the underworld has been created and maintained by those who rule in light. The eye of death names what sovereignty actually is from the perspective of those condemned to darkness: a killing force that maintains itself through the slow or sudden death of others.

Meanwhile, in the world above, Ninshubar wails and begs the gods for help. An and Enlil furiously deny her request. An, who “carried off” the heavens, knows that his luminous domain exists only in separation from the darkness below. Enlil, who “carried off” the earth, understands that earthly order requires the permanent exclusion of chaos, suffering, and death to the underworld. Inanna’s descent threatens the cosmic architecture of their power. If the Queen of Heaven can descend and return, if the boundaries between above and below prove permeable, then their own positions become questionable. The powers of grieving are insufficient to move those most entrenched, but harbor significant effect in relation to those who are less so.

Only Enki is grieved and responds with questions and an empathetic wisdom. Yet he knows that instrumental powers, fixed identities, and reified modes of judgment will be worthless for aiding Inanna in the underworld. Nor will any bundle of extant gifts possibly tip the sacrificial scales to sway the shadowy, suffering, and wrathful Ereshkigal to return Inanna. After all, Ereshkigal’s suffering is not a wound that can be healed with offerings but a structural position that would require the complete transformation of the cosmic order to address. Any gift that leaves the fundamental divisions intact would be merely another insult—charity from those who maintain the very system that condemns her. Neither force nor exchange, neither command nor gift-giving will move Ereshkigal. Something entirely different is required—a form of engagement that doesn’t originate from above at all, that doesn’t maintain the distinction between giver and receiver, helper and helped.

Enki formulates a plan that, paradoxically, continues and greatly amplifies the trajectory of Inanna’s descending journey. From underneath his godly fingernail, he removes dirt, an indeterminate substance that defies the purities of order (Douglass Reference Douglass2002). From this dirt, Enki fashions a kugarra and a galatur, tiny beings “neither male nor female” whose radical indeterminacy seems integral to their powers to relate in new ways through darkness of the underworld and back up again to earth and light. This indeterminacy also appears to be vital to their capacities for radical empathy and movement beyond fixed ways of relating. To be definitely male or female, divine or mortal, all-powerful or powerless, is to be swept up in predetermined patterns of response. The kugarra and galatur, being neither/nor, are not constrained by the hierarchical relations that structure the cosmos. They cannot dominate or be dominated in conventional ways. They are fashioned from dirt to be dirty—to contaminate the clean boundaries between self and other, helper and helped, witness and sufferer.

Enki instructs these beings to travel to Ereshkigal, whom he says they will find naked and moaning in the agony of giving birth. Their entire focus will be to mimetically register and echo her cries of suffering—moaning in response to her moans, groaning with her groans, sighing with sighs in the very depths of their being. They slip through the cracks in the gates and echo her moans: when she cries ‘Oh! My inside!’ they respond ‘Oh! Your inside! And, so forth in response to all her pain (64–65). In this way they share—and so begin to diminish and alter—her suffering, her submergence, and isolation.

This mimetic echoing marks the crucial difference from Omelasian perception. The Omelasians also register the child’s suffering, but they are forbidden from expressing these feelings, commanded to sever perception from response. The kugarra and galatur do precisely what Omelasians must not: they complete the circuit from perception to expression. They don’t just feel but also voice Ereshkigal’s agony, amplifying rather than silencing the resonance between bodies. The kugarra and galatur embody empathetic expression as action, as natality, that midwifes the natality of Ereshkigal, already in the agony of birthing.

Expression diminishes suffering not by removing it but by ending the isolation that compounds it. Ereshkigal has been condemned to suffer alone in darkness, her agony unheard by those above who claim everything is “properly nourished.” This isolation is not incidental but constitutive of her underworlding—to be cast out is to be placed beyond the range of response. When the kugarra and galatur echo her moans, they break this isolation. Their empathy doesn’t seek to fix, save, or even understand. It simply stays with, resonates with, refuses to abandon. Her suffering becomes shared suffering, creating what was impossible before: relationship. The expression of empathy transforms suffering from a state that isolates to an experience that connects. This, in turn, generates an entirely unexpected relational pleasure in Ereshkigal. She responds by birthing a newfound, abundant, and transformative generosity.

Ereshkigal stops moaning and offers them the abundance of “the fields of harvest,” “the river in its fullness”, to which they respond, “we do not wish it”. The kurgarra and galatur say they only want “the corpse which hangs from a hook on the wall” (66–67). She grants it, with a newfound generosity as unfathomable as the wrath that initially made Inanna a rotting corpse. Through radical empathy, the kugarra and galatur have transformed not only Ereshkigal’s isolation but the very conditions of death itself—creating the relational ground from which new life can emerge.

The kugarra and galatur sprinkle the water and food of life on Inanna and she rises. But the judges of the underworld will allow no one to ascend unmarked and demand that Inanna choose a sacrificial person to replace her. Ascending up to Earth, accompanied by demons awaiting her choice of someone to send down to the underworld, Inanna repeatedly refuses to sacrifice the friends and family members who have been deeply mourning her loss. Their grief saves them. Those who mourn show they have not accepted the separation between life and death, light and darkness, as necessary or final. Their weeping maintains the painful connection to loss, refusing the emotional severance that would make Inanna’s death simply a fact to accept. They cannot be consigned to the underworld because they already carry it within them—the darkness of loss has entered their hearts. Their mourning is itself a form of descent.

Yet fulfilling the horrific sacrificial demand suddenly becomes easy for her as she fills with wrath at the sight of her narcissistic husband, Dumuzi, sitting upon his magnificent throne by the big apple tree, dressed in his shiny garments, reveling in his power. He utterly failed to grieve the loss of Inanna and is totally unmoved by her reappearance. Seated in unchanging light, adorned with the me of regal power and civilization, he cannot register loss because loss would require recognizing that something essential has changed. His narcissism isn’t merely personal failing but the logical endpoint of sovereignty that never descends—complete inability to perceive anything beyond his own radiance. Where others wept, acknowledging the darkness that Inanna’s death brought into the world, Dumuzi continues celebrating as if nothing has been lost.

As Ereshkigal did to her, Inanna casts her eye of death upon Dumuzi and tells the demons to sacrifice her husband to the underworld, which they begin to do by beating him and gashing him with axes. Inanna now wields the eye of death she once received—she has gained the capacity to see from below—to recognize sovereignty as the death-dealing force it appears to be from the underworld’s perspective. Her wrath isn’t merely personal vengeance but structural recognition: she sees in Dumuzi the same unseeing that condemned Ereshkigal to isolation, the same willful blindness that maintains itself through others’ suffering.

Later, Inanna finds her husband weeping, having been beaten to near death by the demons. She is filled with regret and begins weeping herself. She sees his sister Geshtinanna weeping for her brother and offering to go with him to the underworld and share forever his unending fate—further amplifying the radical empathy of the kugarra and galatur. These resonant currents move through Inanna, engendering unanticipated—cosmos-transformative—creativity. She devises a plan whereby Dumuzi will spend only half of each year in the underworld, cyclically alternating with Geshtinanna, who will reside there during the other half. And so it becomes.

One might interpret Dumuzi’s fate as evidence of the arbitrariness of wrath and sacrificial logic. We find it more interesting to read his consignment to the underworld less as a punishment than as a gift to him, the Sumerian people, the political order, and the cosmos. When Innana assigns Dumuzi to move cyclically between Earth and Underworld, she forces him to become vulnerable to the anger of those on the undersides of his rule. By regularly going under, he cannot set up an unchanging realm of delight for long without (re)learning the arts of shedding powers accumulated in Earthly governance and being undone by the darkness. Moreover, in anticipation of repeated comingling with those in the underworld he is likely to think hard and hesitate to impose suffering upon those to whom he will be vulnerable half of the time. In these ways, he might become ethically disposed toward responding to those on the undersides of power in more empathetic and just ways.

This cyclical solution revolutionizes the cosmic order such that it can never again affirm a stuck, tormented and isolated underworld as “properly nourished.” Rather than fixed positions of above and below, light and dark, powerful and powerless, the cosmos becomes fluid. Descent and ascent become rhythmic rather than permanent states. No one remains forever in light or darkness but moves between them, carrying knowledge from each realm to the other. This isn’t compromise but fundamental restructuring. The underworld is no longer a basement but a necessary phase in an eternal circulation. Every ascent becomes temporary, every descent transformative and regenerative. Moreover, every ascent comes to be significantly oriented toward better enabling future descents, while every descent comes to be significantly oriented toward decomposing and regenerating in ways that enhance flourishing upon return. The rigid divisions of the cosmic order are ventilated and opened in a breathing rhythm that mirrors earth’s own cycles.

Earth democracy

We are already descending. Ecological collapse, democratic decay, rising fascism, and systemic violence ensure that the underworld is already rising to meet us whether we will it or not. The question is whether we descend as Dumuzi first did, dragged by demons, unwilling and uncomprehending, or whether we learn Inanna-Enki’s way, opening our ears and hearts to what calls in the darkness, surrendering the powers that separate us from collective and ecological pain, allowing ourselves to be transformed rather than merely destroyed. The cyclical cosmos Inanna creates, in which descent and return become rhythmic and disrupt fixed states, suggests a radically different, dynamically processual architecture for sociopolitical life. No longer would the underworld be a basement to be managed or escaped, but a necessary phase—among finite beings with shadows—in an ongoing circulation that transforms both those who descend and the orders to which they return. Every ascent could become temporary, every descent regenerative. This breathing rhythm, so different from enlightenment’s perpetual ascent, opens possibilities for reconceiving democracy itself.

Early Sumerian practices, along with many other ethicopolitical cultures across time, offer glimpses of how such cosmic restructuring might manifest in earthly governance. The evidence suggests that early Sumerian cities were governed by a rich and plural array of democratic forums, each of which both exercised agency and had to submit to the agency of others: There were city-wide bicameral assemblies, town councils, and neighborhood wards in which all adult free men—and sometimes women—could participate. Democratic bodies governed local projects, public works, resources, trade, courts of law, and taxation, as well as military security and action. They also appear to have governed manufacturing that occurred in religious temples (Graeber and Wengrow Reference Graeber and Wengrow2021; Isakhan Reference Isakhan2007; Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen1943; Kramer Reference Kramer, Wolkstein and Kramer1983).

In starkest contrast with the basement in Omelas, at the summit of the Sumerian acropolis stood Eanna, the House of Heaven dedicated to Inanna, which served as sanctuary in which society’s most vulnerable—widows, debtors, orphans, the disabled, runaways, and exiles—were actively engaged (Graeber and Wengrow Reference Graeber and Wengrow2021). Democracies that breathe with seasonal rhythms, sanctuaries at the summits rather than basements below, authorities that regularly undergo their own undoing. As our contemporary orders collapse into their own underworlds, these ancient experiments in cyclical governance offer not nostalgia but urgent wisdom for what we might yet become. In this context, it is easy to imagine how “going under” would have been conceived as time of processes and relationships that were integral to regenerating and transfiguring the sociopolitical patterns. An agricultural people tuned to processes of regenerative decomposition in dormant seasons would have likely understood that this cyclical relation of the seasons could inform ethical sensibilities and aspirations of governance as well.

In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow discuss many societies that created more fluid, cyclical sociopolitical modes, significantly informed and inspired by the seasonal fluctuations, opportunities, and risks of the ecological regions they called home. Drawing on archeological findings from myriad Ice Age and Paleolithic sites and cultures, they show that seasonal oscillations between dispersed and concentrated patterns of life, were likely accompanied by cyclical sociopolitical structures that similarly “allowed people to see social arrangements as not merely ‘given’ but at least partially open to intervention” (Graeber and Wengrow Reference Graeber and Wengrow2021: 106). In rhythmic attunement with the earth’s cycles, these communities oscillated between hierarchical and egalitarian structures, rotating authority so those who ruled one season or one year became subject the next. In such sociopolitical contexts, from long ago through the present, people were less likely to abuse power, because they would soon be subject to those they abused. With rich historical analysis, they contend that “through most of human history, fluidity has been prominent,” along with corresponding Earth-born reflective and creative dispositions and capacities (Graeber and Wengrow Reference Graeber and Wengrow2021: 116).

While such precedents might richly inform creative institutional designs for earth democracy today, the present sociopolitical dynamics make implementing them nearly impossible any time soon. Rather, the greatest promise for earth democracy inspired by the alternative mythos of Inanna lies in the grassroots democratic social movements.

While recent grassroots social movements have striven to disrupt the consolidating orders of inequality, earth-destruction, and injustice, they are repeatedly overpowered and fall apart without significantly changing the course of the current systemic death march. Too often social movements themselves follow trajectories oriented by the enlightenment picture that has held us captive.

Contemporary social movements often exhaust themselves in their own versions of perpetual ascent—always mobilizing, always fighting upward, always seeking the next peak of awareness or action. What is more common than movements that come to proclaim themselves as the most awake, most enlightened, highest along the ascent of liberation, etc.? What is more common than movements which develop orientations toward simply calling out, disassociating from, and striving to govern all those whose efforts are reduced to “sham”? What is more common than the ways in which the warmth of empathy is supplanted by animosities that turn us cold and harsh? In true enlightenment form, again and again, judgments concerning the purity with which we are deemed to attach ourselves to the correct luminosity, distance and disassociate us from each other. Movements fragment not from external pressure alone but from their own inability to undergo the vulnerability that might transform their righteous certainty into regenerative possibility. And so, our efforts fracture, disempower, and exhaust us, while the rampage of fascistic ecocidal underworlding accelerates.

Earth democracy requires movements that can breathe, that understand descent not as failure but as necessary for regeneration. Earth democracy in social movements would require learning to incorporate rhythms of descent and empathic opening to engender unlikely co-creative assemblages that can foster sociopolitical regeneration. While the forms this might take would need to be collaboratively imagined and experimented with in movements themselves, we posit several possibilities for future exploration of how we might imagine grassroots democracy in relationship to the alternative mythos of Inanna and earth democracy.

First, movements might incorporate strategic pauses for decomposition and regeneration, and approach these pauses as crucial to the work of transformation itself. These might be intentional, reflective periods where movements deliberately step back from public action to undergo their own stripping at the seven gates. What powers and identities have we accumulated that now prevent us from hearing those we claim to serve and others? What measuring rods of judgment have we wielded that must be surrendered to explore new possibilities for relationship and democratic power?Footnote ¹ These pauses are not retreat but the kind of descent that allows movements to shed calcified strategies, decompose failed approaches, and regenerate from the soil of shared vulnerability.

Second, we might experiment with practices of disruptive sanctuary that help bring society’s underworlded to the summit rather than managing them in basements.Footnote ² Today’s movements might create spaces where those cast out by our orders—the undocumented, unhoused, abortion-banned, incarcerated, and dispossessed—are not objects of advocacy but co-creators of transformation. Sanctuary practices would not only provide safe harbor for those threatened by the order. These sanctuaries could be places in which we seek to open our ears and hearts across differences to listen to many different ways of experiencing the atrocities and to dialogically explore different ways of seeing them as a practice of generating new, manifest, and disruptive forms of ascent that emerge with those whom and that which we empathetically receive.

Third, in the darkest moments when resistance is being violently suppressed, we might cultivate underworld communities like those that were once created in the Underground Railroad. These communities might experiment with diverse ways of being together, with being with our grief and pain, spaces where we practice the kugarra and galatur’s radical empathy, where we learn to echo each other’s moans without immediately rushing to fix or save. These communities would cultivate what the utopia of Omelas forbade: the completion of the circuit from perception to expression, creating the “relational pleasure” that transforms even ancient rage into energetic, generative possibility.

Fourth, as the ubiquitously underworlded Earth furiously burns, floods, and howls—as billions of creatures die or near extinction along with our human homes and communities—environmental movements might do well to move into the agony and devastation, tarry there, feel deeply and bear witness with every fiber of empathic expressivity in our bodies. Rather than rush to “solutions” or avert our senses and conversations to “avoid overwhelming despair,” we might foster new depths of shared, empathetic grieving. With Enki, we believe that these forms of wild and resonant empathy are teeming with energies, information, and novel relational possibilities that are indispensable for developing transformative movements. They break through our various forms of numbness to sense and feel what is most real in, around and among us. In so doing, they may open new fields of creative, responsive, contagious action. Just as empathic expression was integral to the relation with Ereshkigal that engendered a transformative tipping point, we wager that kindred forms of empathetic expression will be key to forming human and multispecies assemblages that can effectively resist the unfurling catastrophe and regenerate possibilities for earth democracy.

This is not an exhaustive list or set of prescriptions. The invitation is to explore how practices inspired by the alternative mythos of Inanna and earth democracy might radically reorient and give new life to contemporary social movements at a time when we most need to find ways of renewing their creative energies. Imagining possibilities and strategies in relationship to a mythos of cyclical descent and ascent might continually render us more supple where we have become rigamortic, more connected where we have begun to fall apart, more energized where we are becoming exhausted, more forgiving where understandable rage has taken us over, more co-creative and powerful where we otherwise tend to become reactive and impotent.