Inanna Remembered: The First Remembering
The mythic ancestor of the Feminine Mysteries and the woman who surrendered every identity until only truth remained.
THE PRIESTESS PATH: Every Sunday, in the liminal space between one week and the next, The Priestess Path explores the emotional architecture beneath identity and invites you to pause, reflect, and remember.
Remembrance Astrology: The Symbolic Architecture of Remembrance - Remembrance Astrology is a symbolic approach to astrology that explores the deeper patterns of remembrance beneath identity. Every planet, sign, temple, and Feminine Mystery reveals a different aspect of the self seeking to return from beneath conditioning, survival, and inherited identity. Each essay explores one archetype through three questions: What is trying to be remembered? What has been forgotten? What is now ready to return? Together, they guide us through the symbolic journey of Descent → Revelation → Return – recovering ancient meanings that may have been diminished, forgotten or obscured over time.
When we look at the planets in Remembrance Astrology, we are exploring the great functions of the soul.
Venus remembers desire.
The Moon remembers feeling.
Mercury remembers knowing.
Saturn remembers devotion.
Each planet reveals something essential that is seeking conscious expression through a human life.
The Feminine Mysteries ask a different question: What part of the feminine soul is trying to remember itself?
Where the planets reveal universal movements of consciousness, the Feminine Mysteries reveal forgotten faces of womanhood.
They are not simply myths, and nor are they merely asteroids scattered through the heavens.
They are living archetypes.
Ancient mirrors.
Pathways of initiation.
Each carries a particular medicine.
Each guards a particular wound.
Each reveals a part of womanhood that has too often been hidden, exiled, diminished, sanitised, or made impossible.
Some remember wisdom.
Some remember grief.
Some remember rage.
Some remember sovereignty.
Some remember devotion.
Together they form what I have come to think of as a living library of feminine remembrance.
Within Remembrance Astrology, they sit alongside the planets, the signs, the temples, and the lunar nodes. And yet. they also feel different.
If the planets describe the architecture of remembrance, the Feminine Mysteries reveal its hidden chambers. They are the rooms where the deeper stories wait.
And every one of those stories begins with a descent.
That is why the Feminine Mysteries begin with Inanna - because she reveals the pattern beneath every other mystery.
Long before we meet Lilith’s refusal, Sedna’s abandonment, Juno’s reciprocity, or Kali’s fierce liberation, we find ourselves standing before the seven gates of Inanna’s descent.
Inanna’s story is not merely one myth among many; it is the blueprint of remembrance itself.
Inanna descends into the underworld to meet her sister, Ereshkigal. At each of the seven gates she is required to surrender something she carries: her crown, her jewellery, her robes, her symbols of power, her identity. By the time she reaches the underworld, nothing remains except the woman herself - no title, no role, no status.
Only truth.
This is initiation.
The Descent asks us to discover what cannot be taken away.
Perhaps that is why Inanna feels so profoundly relevant today.
Most women do not begin their remembrance journey by studying mythology. They begin because something no longer fits.
The life that once seemed certain begins to feel too small. The roles they faithfully inhabited begin to feel heavy. The identity that once protected them begins to feel like a prison. People-pleasing. Perfectionism. Over-responsibility. Self-abandonment. Fear of visibility. The exhaustion of being everything for everyone except themselves.
Almost every woman who finds herself asking, “Who am I beneath all of this?” is already standing somewhere inside Inanna’s story.
She has reached one of the gates. The descent has already begun.
This is why I see Inanna as the mythic ancestor of the Feminine Mysteries.
She is not simply another archetype within Remembrance Astrology; she is the pattern beneath the entire journey - every descent, every revelation, every return.
Every act of remembrance echoes her footsteps into the underworld.
She reminds us that what falls away is rarely who we truly are. It is often who we believed we had to become.
The Descent strips away what survival built.
The Revelation uncovers what has always remained.
The Return restores the woman who was waiting beneath every borrowed identity.
That is why the journey begins here - because there is no remembrance without first being willing to lay down everything that was never truly ours to carry.
Before we meet the Feminine Mysteries of exile, devotion, wisdom, sovereignty, righteous anger, grief, restoration, and liberation, we first meet the Mystery of Descent.
Before we encounter Sedna, Lilith, Juno, Ceres, Isis, Kali, or the others who will guide us through the many faces of feminine remembrance, we first encounter Inanna.
She is not simply the first Mystery. She is the pattern beneath them all.
Every Mystery that follows is, in some way, an echo of her descent. Every act of remembrance begins where Inanna began: with the courage to surrender everything that was never truly ours, so that the woman beneath every borrowed identity can finally remember herself.
With love & stardust,
Alyssa