The womb is the strongest muscle in a woman’s body, keeping the cervix shut to safely carry a baby whose average weight at the end of nine months will be 3,3 kg. My first birth literally floored me.ĭuring the initial stage of contractions the womb is physically opening a gate and it takes as much strength to open a gate as it does to keep one closed. Most women experience it as painful, an excruciating gut-wrenching horror at the most, or at least as intense. I have heard women describe it as glass shattering in their backs. It seems that this churning is what the contractions do in birth before it moves into the ‘pushing’ phase. The prima materia is that which we personally and collectively have repressed here a primal instinctive animal self which reclaimed provides rich soil for the emergence of a meaningful, diversified consciousness steeped in the immanent. The mill of the underworld will keep churning it empties those who knock on its door from all false images to the base ingredient, the prima materia. Inanna’s stripping down at each gate represents the grinding down of the false ego. When she finally arrives at the gloomy queendom of her dark sister Ereshkigal, Inanna crawls on all fours wearing only the dirt on her skin.

At each gate the gatekeeper, Neti, beats and strips Inanna of her clothes and jewellery. In Inanna’s mythical descent there are seven gates to pass before she completes her descent into the underworld. In mythology, it is the opening of the doors to the underworld that brings the initial suffering. Women in child labour will often experience that when the process of birth shifts from opening the cervix to moving through it, most of the pain subsides. When the rhythms of nature show itself through the underworld tidings, its wisdom tends to speak through the labour of suffering.

By Pain of Death by Suzanne Clay