ponsible for the death of nature, whereas Zeus and Hades, who conspired and hatched the plot of the lure and rape of Persephone, appear reasonable men with whom one can negotiate Persephone's return. Ecofeminism sees the interconnectedness between the death of nature and the rape of women. The Demeter-Persephone myth shows how the fates of women and nature are entwined within patriarchal ideology and praxis. Goddess worship is part of the major movements for political and social change. Inanna is the queen of the land and its fertility; she symbolizes consciousness of transitions and borders, places of intersections and crossing over. She combines earth and sky, matter and spirit. Inanna's descend into the underworld of death to meet her sister Ereshkigal presages a renewal of life. Ereshkigal represents Inanna's other side, death, nonbeing, annihilation, and emptiness. She symbolizes the great Round of nature, grain above and growing, and seed below and dying to sprout again, she is the continuum in which different states are experienced as transformations of one energy. The underworld is a place where potential life lies motionless but in the pangs of birth, the state entails rot, decay, and gestation. Patriarchy has repressed life energies; the return of the goddess onto Western culture is necessary earth's life and renewal. Contrary to western dualism life is not the opposed to life. Inanna's descend represents the cycle of nature; life, death and rebirth; she maintains the balance of life. Nothing changes or grows without the food of some other sacrifice (Perera 1981, p.54). We are all part of nature and our destiny is to participate fully in the cycles that characterize life on earth. Goddess worship entail rituals, they bring her power into our lives. Inanna descends to witness the death of the bull of heaven, the masculine primordial energy, the fertilizing power of nature. She becomes a sacrifice to replenish the lost source, w...
