Right now Homer’s epic poem is everywhere: from Uberto Pasolini’s The Return and Jorge Rivera-Herrans’s EPIC: The Musical to Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey (2026) and literary retellings like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. This isn’t new. Fascination with Homer’s homecoming epic is centuries—millennia!—old, and its influence so vast it’s impossible to list.

Dating back at least four millennia, the Sumerian/Akkadian myth of the “Descent of Inanna” tells the story of how Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, descends to the Underworld realm of her sister Ereshkigal to attend the funeral of Ereshkigal’s husband. Inanna is stripped of her clothing and jewelry—all the trappings of her status—as she passes through the gates to the underworld, until she stands naked before her sister. Ereshkigal looks at her with the “eyes of death,” and Inanna

The Sumerian deity Inanna is becoming one of the goddess zeitgeists of our current moment. She was buried underground in what is modern day Iraq for nearly 4,000 years. But now Her rediscovery and reawakening in the popular imagination foretells of Inanna’s myth becoming reality: Her descent into the Underworld and eventual rebirth mirror our current historical moment. I agree with Sylvia Bretton Perera’s assessment that the timing of Inanna’s return from the literal undergro

The image catapulted me into the myth of the minotaur; a beast born from revenge, a princess (Ariadne) who sacrifices everything for a hero

The heroine invites us to let go of fear, blame, and right/wrong thinking. She invites us to believe that change can come into being easily