Olivia Pope and the descent of Inanna
This article doesn’t retell any episodes, but it hints at storylines from the first three seasons and at how some characters are connected.
If you want to stay completely unspoiled, watch seasons one to three first.
In Scandal, Olivia Pope runs a crisis management firm in Washington, D.C. Powerful people bring her their worst secrets, and her team makes the problem go away before the public finds out. They call themselves gladiators in suits. Olivia’s signature is a white hat, the western symbol for the good guy. As the show goes on, it starts to mean something less simple.
I keep thinking about this show because of what happens to someone who starts out with good intentions and spends every day working inside secrets. Olivia decides to enter a world or walk a path that will take from her the more she walks through it.
The more I watched Olivia Pope, the more she reminded me of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess who went down to the underworld. This piece takes a brief look at the common ground between them.
The eye of the storm
Something I only noticed after a while: so many of the scandals in this show lead back to Olivia. They come from three places, and she stands where they meet.
The first is her own family, where the secrets are closest to home. The second is the White House, the seat of power her life is tied to in more ways than one. The third is the clients who walk into Olivia Pope & Associates, each carrying a problem someone wants buried. These three worlds should be separate, but in her they overlap. When something goes wrong in one of them, it tends to reach the others, and she is often the one it reaches first.
That makes her the eye of the storm. Everything swirls around her, and she is often the calmest person in the room. But she isn’t watching the scandals from a distance. She is the point so many of them are connected through, and she can’t step aside without everything shifting.
A goddess who chooses the descent
In ancient Mesopotamia, about 4,000 years ago, there was a story about Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth. She was the goddess of love and of war. Not love on some days and war on others, but both at once, as one power. She was known as Lady of all the ‘me’ (pronounced ‘may’). The ‘me’ are the divine powers that make the world work the way it does. Like Olivia, she sits at the center of her own story, and everything in it passes through her.
One day she turns toward the underworld, the land of the dead, ruled by her older sister Ereshkigal. Nobody who went down had ever come back. Nobody forces her. She goes of her own free will.
Before she leaves, she dresses for it. She puts on everything that makes her a queen, including her crown, a double row of beads across her chest, a breastplate, a blue measuring stick and her royal robe. These are her ‘me’, her powers in a form she can wear. She also tells her loyal servant Ninshubur to go and get help if she isn’t back in three days.
To enter, she has to pass through seven gates. Her sister orders the gatekeeper to open each one only a little and to take something at every gate, so that Inanna has to bend low to pass. Each time she asks what is being done, and each time the answer is the same: this is how things are done here, and you may not ask about it. By the last gate she has nothing left.
I think that mirrors Olivia’s story. Olivia dresses for the dark too: the coat, the composure, the white hat. She carries both of Inanna’s faces, a woman who runs a firm of gladiators and whose great love is the one thing she can’t control. The choice to enter the underworld is hers, or she believes it is. Her team comes with her. Her clients bring their own darkness into her office. The people she loves are pulled in as well. Some follow because they trust her, some because they need her, and some because they don’t really have a say in it.
And like Inanna, she doesn’t come out with everything she went in with. The myth has seven gates. Here are the five that matter most to her. Not in the order of the myth, but in the order of her story.
The crown: the white hat
Inanna’s crown is the first thing taken, and it is the sign of who she is. Olivia’s version is the white hat.
Olivia’s white hat stands for honesty, and she treats it as the one thing that is fully hers. Her clients have to tell her everything, or she can’t help them. And often the truth is how she solves the problem. Yet her work is also deciding which version of events the public gets to believe. She guards the truth hard and spends her days managing who gets to see it. The white hat is her crown, and like a crown, it is the first thing to start slipping.
The measuring stick: her gut
Inanna carries a measuring stick, the tool she uses to take the measure of things. Olivia’s is her gut.
Early in the series we learn that Olivia trusts her gut completely. It’s what her whole business runs on. She walks into a room, reads it, knows what’s happening, and acts before anyone else has caught up. Her team follows her because that instinct has never failed her. If the hat is her honesty toward the world, her gut is her honesty toward herself. But there is one person who makes her doubt it.
The breastplate: her team
A breastplate is armor, the thing you wear so that nothing reaches you. Olivia’s armor is her team. They stand around her, take the hits with her, and would go over a cliff for her. They follow her into the dark by choice, and she carries that as a worry, because every one of them is in this because of her.
And they rarely go in alone. The darkness is shared, so leaving means walking away from the people who went in with you, and from the only ones who know what you’ve done. The team is a dysfunctional family built on shared secrets, and the secrets are what hold it together.
Part of what she has to give up is the idea that it is all hers to carry. They chose this too, and she can’t shield everyone, however much she wants to. Letting go of that worry is a loss like any other, because it was what made her feel in control.
The beads: the person she loves
The beads lie across Inanna’s chest, over the heart. For Olivia, the heart has a name.
He is the love of her life. Around him, the gut she trusts everywhere else goes quiet, or she hears it and talks herself out of it. The woman who can read anyone in seconds can’t read her own situation when he is involved.
She also can’t love him openly. The one thing she wants most is the one thing she has to hide, and it belongs to the same world she works in. So love doesn’t pull her out of the dark. Every secret she keeps for him needs another one, and the relationship that should be the most honest thing in her life turns into something else she has to manage.
She knows she has to let him go, and not only for her own sake. The love is dangerous, and it threatens something much bigger than the two of them.
The robe: where she comes from
The last thing taken is Inanna’s royal robe, the one closest to the body: her whole story of who she is. In Olivia’s case, that story comes from her family.
In the myth, the ruler of the underworld is Inanna’s sister, a dark counterpart who is family. In Scandal the dark is also close to home. Someone in her family holds far more control over her world than she knows, and she has questions that are not answered. She can’t be sure what is really going on in her own family, and that makes her wonder how many of her choices were truly hers.
Ereshkigal is not a monster waiting at the bottom. She is a queen with her own throne, her own rules and her own pain. Inanna arrives bent low and stripped of everything, and still she goes straight for her sister’s throne. The goddess of war is still in her. But this is not her world. Ereshkigal fixes the eye of death on her, and Inanna dies. Your old powers don’t work in the dark. Olivia learns that too, and she meets her own Ereshkigal in more than one person.
“It’s handled”
When a problem is “handled,” nobody asks how. The phrase works like a door closing. Once it’s said, what was actually done doesn’t have to be felt by anyone.
In the myth, Inanna asks at every gate what is being taken from her, and every time she gets the same answer: this is how things are done here, and you may not ask about it. The word for “how things are done” is the same as the word for her powers, ‘me’ (pronounced ‘may’). Down here, other rules apply, and the powers from up there stop working. “It’s handled” is that same answer.
Who pays
This is where the myth turns around. Inanna’s journey is never only hers. Someone has to go in her place, and she chooses her own husband. In the old story, the one who pays is the one who didn’t grieve for her.
In Scandal, it’s the opposite. The ones who pay are the ones who care most. Olivia makes her choices alone, and the cost falls on her team and the people she loves. She isn’t acting out of malice; she believes she’s wearing the white hat. But everybody close to her pays for it.
And like Inanna, Olivia pays too. At each gate she loses something: her belief in the white hat, the gut she could always trust, the idea that she can protect the people she loves.
And not all of them stay. Some are pulled deeper into the dark. Some are angry enough to walk away, and some walk back after a while. Some are lost along the way. The cost for the people she loves looks different for each of them, but nobody close to her goes untouched.
Nobody thinks they’re the villain
Everyone in Olivia’s world is protecting something: a person, a cause, a family, a country. That’s how they end up there. Someone they care about needs help, or something they believe in needs one small favor, and they say yes.
The motives are never pure either. Whatever someone does “for the country” also keeps them safe, or close to power. After a while they can’t tell which reason came first.
The first compromise is small and easy to defend. The next one needs a slightly better story. But then, a character does something they have refused at the start, and believe their reasons are valid. The show lets you watch people pass through one gate after another, losing something along the way.
Wanting the sun
At one point Olivia says she wants to stand in the sun and feel the light, and that she feels more and more darkness around her. For me this is the key to her. She knows what’s missing. She isn’t at peace with where she stands. But she can’t just walk out, because the work and the people and the man she loves are all in there with her. What she wants and what she’s committed to point in opposite directions.
I also read the sun as the life she can’t have openly. Standing in the light would mean being able to say who she is and who she loves without hiding either.
And then?
Then the story goes quiet. It never tells us how Inanna got her crown and her robe back, or what it felt like to climb up through the seven gates. What it does tell us is that she doesn’t come back alone. The demons of the underworld follow her up and won’t leave until someone else takes her place. She returns alive, but her price isn’t fully paid yet. Nobody comes out of that place as the woman who went in.
The sky tells the rest. Venus, her planet, disappears behind the sun for a while and comes back on the other side. She is no longer the evening star but the morning star. It’s the same light, but now it comes before the day instead of after it.
Maybe that’s the closest thing to an answer the myth gives us. Inanna doesn’t return to who she was. She returns to her place in the sky, and she shines from a different side. Both the goddess Inanna and Olivia Pope choose to go down. Inanna goes openly, and she makes sure someone will come for her if she doesn’t return. Olivia struggles and says no first, but says yes in the end, to go down a path she believes is a single choice she can control. She doesn’t see yet that it is the first gate where she loses something of herself. But what the descent does to them is the same. They come back knowing loss, death and their own darkness, and like Inanna, Olivia can’t go back to who she was. She can only find out where she shines now.
Love,
Gloria
