From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below;
From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below;
From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below;

The Descent of Inanna

Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, seminal work of modern economics, on the premise man is a self-interested being whose discontent owes to unreason. Karl Marx went markedly further in his magnum opus, Das Kapital, arguing the human condition is rooted in material alienation. That goods and services possess an intrinsic value. That value, like energy, is property of matter. That matter is subject to the laws of nature. That nature neither creates nor destroys, but only transforms. That transformation demands labor. And by that logic, declaring profit the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation—the eventuality of an anomaly that if left unchecked threatens the very fabric of society. History though speaks else. History embarrasses the field of economics. Empiricists having discerned in the interim the action of atoms and bits and the course of weather fronts but failed time and again to predict the ebb and flow of the Market. “1637, 1797, 1819, 37, 57, 84, 1901, 07, 1929, 37, 73, and 1987…, 92, 97, 2000…They’re just the same thing over and over. We can’t help ourselves, and you and I can’t control it, stop it, slow it, or even ever so slightly alter it…We just react.” But to what?

“All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.” To react to the Market is to respond to a State of affairs whose causes proceed from the deep recesses of the unconscious and whose outcomes reverberate in consciousness. That it becomes soon apparent, the State is not separate from, but a projection of, the theater of the mind—where the ego lives out the fantasy of control: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth—but before ego eimi, there was Time. Before Difference & Repetition was Non-Difference. There was then only Potential.

In the beginning was the [Potential, & the Potential] was with [Non-Difference], and [the Potential] was [Non-Difference]. The same was in the beginning with [Non-Difference]. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darknesse, and the darknesse comprehended it not.

John 1.1-5

That it becomes evident, when we speak of the State, we speak of a psychological reality that is at once in contact with, and divorced from, the Real, operating according human laws than the laws of nature. The Market is a creation of the ego. And the ego—ahamkāra, what speaks, I am, aham, the creator, kāra, is neither perfect nor rational, at least not as concerns the gross body. To that end, the Market operates to satisfy the excesses of the ego in the way the Cell operates to answer the demands of the Nucleus. They exist in each instance against the outer reality that operates by an altogether different principle. The psychological reality of the ego circumscribed by an alchemical reality of nature, which is itself delimited by a metaphysical reali ty of deepe space. Each level of reality operating according to its own economy. And it is here the psychological reality confronts the Real. The laws of nature foreclose the possibility of perpetual motion machines, to say nothing of the compounding variety, rendering any notion of “profit” a practical impossibility. The alchemical reality negotiating the problem of cost—of sacrifice by the cold equation. That is whereas populations may initially compound, they invariably crash, the biosphere settling on an equilibrium state.

The Market exhibits the same—though the reactions, that is the transformation of raw materials into products and services, proceed along more abstract pathways: the sublimation of impulses and idealization transformed by systems of beliefs, practices, and traditions. The ego, the catalyst for these reactions, lives by a different criteria than that of Heauen, and the Earth. The ego, whiles it exists within the Mind-Body complex, sees itself as neither mind nor body. The ego sees only self. And seeing nothing but self comes to believe I am all that eyes see. In the way a person might look in the mirror and see neither a mind nor a body but an image of self. And if exhorted to speak on the matter, talk of my body and my mind. The ego struggles to define itself outside itself—defaulting to tautology: I Am That I Am. The ego stutters to say I Am That. Which is to say neither is the ego static. Each age of man is yoked by a development of the ego. What begins as infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms, is not the same that appears on the Death Bed. As the Body grows, the Mind sharpens, the ego develops—or is open to development. And what the ego sees, the State becomes and the Market reflects. The ego lives in a world of appearances, of images. And is enamored by them. And convulsed by them: sent into fits of rage or else bouts of passion by the mere sight of things. The ego cannot abide the body turn away from it, nor the mind look elsewhere. The ego feels itself threatened by graven things because for the ego the turn away is Death. Its desires are rooted in oneness: a pursuit of happiness that sends jīva down the Aśvattha Tree to partake the fruit thereof. Concordantly, Market’s perturbations cannot be understood without confronting the way of fate and the problem of pain.

In that vein—Inanna, Goddess of Heauen and Earth, does not descend to the Underworld, the the putative subconscious, for insufficiencies of material conditions. Inanna pleads the noblest of intentions, to mourn the passing of Gud-gal-ana, but her altruism is never presented as anything but misdirection for her pleonectic aims: to expand her realm. Her intentions betrayed by her attire—obscene beyond doubt. So bold in its Declaration that one detects in them a pathos and feels obliged to look past the inconsistencies. Inanna wagering she can triumph over the Real. The gamble though falling short—in Inanna’s case seven fold, reflected by the divestment of her honorifics at each of the seven gates. A shocking outcome, not at all what Inanna intended. Because the Gambler never sees their wager as a gamble, they feels they sees what others cannot—have taken everything into account. The Gambler acknowledges—nay believes, others live in a world of uncertainty, a world that is uncertain at the level of quantum waves and atomic particles, but they themself possesses a divine dṛṣṭi. They never suspects a quite hubris has crept in, that tilts the scale. They casts the die, loses once, but they feels it is an error. They try once more, and they lose twice and now they feels cheated. They casts the die again, and loses a third time and they forgets themself. They goes back again and again even if they possesseth Heauen and Earth. Inanna, not for the last time, suffering unceremonious defeat at the hands of her erstwhile twin Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. Her body turned into a corpse, a piece of rotting meat, hung from a hook on the wall, left out to dry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

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