The Mythic Blueprint of Killing Eve, Part 1: Enchantment and the Goddess of Sex and War

Killing Eve is rebellious, seductive, and shrewdly on-trend. Seasons 1–3 also retell an ancient myth about wild feminine power and subversion.

Pop Archetype is a series that explores the way timeless myths and archetypes bubble up through the cracks in pop culture. The plot of the myth takes new twists, and the heroines play under different guises, but the essence of the story remains the same. We look at what gets lost, what’s given new life, and how the medium changes the message.

Part 1

The moment Villanelle first sees Eve, she’s exiting a hospital toilet stall and shaking out her dense, wavy hair. Eve releases the elastic from a tight bun, and her hair explodes into its natural startling fulness. This kind of hair — dark, abundant and kinked — is an acute sexual trigger for Villanelle, whose face empties out at the sight. She gives Eve a look of shy, helpless longing that collapses into a cold stare. “Are you alright?” Eve asks, as their eyes meet.

Villanelle, a young assassin working for The Twelve, a mysterious Russian group, has come to kill the girlfriend and accidental witness of one of her hits. Eve, an American employed at the British Secret Intelligence Service, is there to protect the witness. She also intends to pump the girl for more details and prove a hunch to her bosses at the agency: the killer is a woman, and one with a flair for stagey, self-pleasuring kills.

The pull of this chase has been irresistible; Eve breaks protocols to gather proof, transgressions that have brought a chastising threat of “trouble” from her boss, Bill. Eve’s bitter, muttered response, “Trouble isn’t interested in me,” comes as the verbal coda to a scene in which she offers Bill the plastic box of cold shepherd’s pie her “nice” husband has packed for her lunch.

Yet here is Big Trouble, in the form of the rococo Russian hit-woman Eve intuited all along, disguised in a nurse’s uniform of flat, primary blue. Villanelle is about to leave the bathroom and with the speed and precision of a mongoose dispatching a cobra, slit the witness’s throat and lay waste to her four attendants. But before, she will pause at the door and look back at Eve, who is still fretting with her wild hair.

“Wear it down,” she says.

Eve’s hair turns her on, and Villanelle will not, even as she prepares for slaughter, deny herself the image of Eve’s unbound hair.

Moments later, Eve is screaming in Villanelle’s bloody wake. Yet the true climax of that night, what Eve will return to again and again, is their shared gaze. In that look a delicious, tormented dynamic is born. Like a devotee gazing into the eyes of an idol and imbuing it with ineffable powers, Villanelle and Eve take one look and begin to make, elude, and need each other to fully exist. They each recognise in the other a part of themselves invisible to the world, cloaked by a rewarded but false self — a part they have heretofore let others tame or use for their own purposes.

A brief detour into the power of fascination in myth…

To be rapt, to gaze and gaze, is an act of surrender. The rest of the world fades to black, our bodies disappear, we disappear into a single point of focus. The ancients used the word fascinare to denote occult powers of irresistible attraction, the ability to hex or enchant, or to “make the evil eye.” Overwhelming sexual attraction progresses towards la petite morte, the small death of climax; folkloric belief tells us that a pregnant woman transfixed by the evil eye will miscarry. To fascinate is to kill.

Its constellation of synonyms, “captivate” and “catch” “mesmerise”, “spellbind”, and “enthral” describe states of confinement and enslavement, a loss of psychic sovereignty, a total abandonment of discernment and self. To fascinate is to bind. In full bloom, it is the de facto offline-ing of the prefrontal cortex, a connection to the body, a sense of future consequence, sometimes even the will to live. The seemingly innocuous french synonym, ‘touché,’ or ‘touched’ evokes trespass, a moment when a weightless but powerful element (image, lyric, fantasy, memory) can penetrate and take us captive, or when we allow our attention to fixate on another, to return again and again for a hit of envy, arousal, or hope.

This is not to be confused with the loss of self and time that characterises the state of ‘flow.’ The flow state has the integrative power of sensing into the object of attention. Flow can be felt as a sudden and transformative intimacy with the unknown, absent of desire and fear. More is possible; attention narrows and simultaneously, awareness dilates. Random, disconnected pin-points of focus become nodes where streams of awareness intersect. We might expand in our capacities and skills. Fascination takes them away.

To fascinate is to capture our unconscious attention — that which grabs us, wipes our discernment, and brings us into trance. We hang from one small point of enchantment like a fish on a hook, and the mind and ego work overtime manufacturing meaning to justify the intensity of the pull.

And therein lies the danger: Fascination is not about the thing itself, but our fantasy of it. We project a depth or potency into its object that might not exist, and create a story that supplants a deeper inquiry about why we’re so transfixed and whether or not it serves us.

Myth is threaded with stories that warn us about allowing our attention to stray from the path. Joseph Campbell describes an episode in The Odyssey when Odysseus and his crew, nearing the end of their journey, reach the Aisle of Helios, where the cattle are sacred. Before Odysseus can see the Sun God, a symbol of ultimate power, he falls asleep, and his men kill and eat the cows. Zeus punishes him by destroying his ship with a thunderbolt and Odysseus is then“swept back along the path he has just traveled.”

His ‘sleep’ is the strayed attention that might sever the hero from their intent. “When you have come to this point of high concentration and are about to have a breakthrough to the ultimate realisation, all the mere earthly impulses have been held back. But if the concentration breaks, they sweep you back again.”

This movement toward ‘breakthrough’ is the mystical drive, an instinct to be what Campbell calls, “ravished out of your skin” by a vision of the divine, or to take the journey that will actualise your potential. A “sweeping back along the path” represents the necessary journey back home, where the sublime vision or achievement can land in the body and ordinary life — an integration that some might call wisdom. It is why Odysseus straps himself to the mast before his ship enters the waters where he will hear the ravishing voices of the sirens: he wants to be annihilated by their song, but not leap into the water and be lost forever. He wants to experience the ravishing and return home.

The hallmark of fascination — as Eve will soon learn — is its recursive nature: you end up where you began, but unlike the mythic hero’s return, nothing has been transformed. Perhaps on this go-round the colours were a little brighter, the rooms a little bigger, the highs a little higher, but there’s no internal progression. You’ve just exhausted an impulse that leads to a greater unraveling. Or as Campbell writes: “Distraction. Now if you let a little bit go, a lot’s going to go.”

Back to Eve…

For fascinated Eve, a lot’s going to go. She’s fired for the hospital debacle (and for calling her boss a “dick swab”) and secretly hired by an M-I6 operative, the comically canny and sphinx-like Carolyn Martens, who heads the Russia desk and also suspects the killer is a woman.

When Eve, now leading a rag-tag crew assembled to catch the female assassin, realises the identity of the staring stranger in the bathroom, her unconscious fascination is made flesh. Villanelle is suddenly specific and real, and Eve is free to gaze and gaze. In one scene, she describes Villanelle’s face to a police composite artist, and Eve’s gut-fascination coalesces into a kind of devotional poem:

“Her eyes are cat-like, wide, but alert. Her lips are full. She has a long neck, high cheek bones. Her skin…is smooth and bright. She had a lost look in her eye that was direct, and also chilling. She’s totally focussed, yet almost entirely inaccessible.”

Eve says this with a drag in her voice, a savouring quality. Her eyes glaze over, and she loses herself in the telling. In painting the beloved, the one whose eyes were “direct and chilling,” she will soon learn that she is describing Villanelle’s own fascination with her.

The radical embrace of unconscious desire, even as it leads toward chaos and death, drives the action in Killing Eve. And while it ornaments itself with au courant millennial obsessions, (A short list: fashion, travel, food, economic freedom won through the exploitation of both trauma and uniqueness, and a near constant kiss-off of any form of masculine authority) the show is a direct descendant of a revelatory myth about a woman following her deepest instinct toward total embodied power.

In The Descent of Inanna, a myth from ancient Sumer composed roughly 4,000 years ago, a Venusian fertility goddess at the height of her powers “opens her ear to the great below” and follows an intuitive urge all the way down to Hell — though she knows return is forbidden. There, her dark sister Ereshkigal reigns as Queen of the Underworld, and kills Inanna with a look “of death,” then hangs her carcass on a peg to rot. Through a little divine intervention from the wisdom god Enki, Inanna receives the “waters of life” and is able to ascend back to heaven. Inanna self-initiates by defying her father-gods through a confrontation with death, a process in which she is literally “ravished out” of her skin.

Stories and hymns about Inanna that lead up to the Descent portray her as a robust, earthy maiden who ruled the realms of sex, love, agriculture, poetry, and war. She expressed a primal, sex-and-death archetypal force and was also ‘created’ as an agent of cultural unity between Akkad and Sumer. A native Sumerian fertility goddess and a more bellicose Akkadian one, Ishtar, were syncretised into the figure of Inanna, “the Queen of Heaven,” an intact feminine with all her facets, dark and light, expressed in the body of one. Inanna was lustful and benevolent, generous and bloodthirsty, and pursued her desire without apology or censure.

When Dumuzi, the man Inanna freely chose to be her consort and king, comes to court her, she stands before him and hypes her own vulva as “the boat of heaven” before asking, Whose gonna plow it?

“Who will plow my wet ground?” she asks. “Who will station the ox there?”

Dumuzi assures her that he will definitely plow her vulva.

“Then plow my vulva, man of my heart!” she shoots back. “Plow my vulva!”

After a few poetic agricultural references to “sprouting” and “burgeoning,” Dumuzi apparently successfully stations his ox, inspiring Inanna to drop the queenly hauteur and gush, “My honey-man, my honey-man…the one my womb loves best.”

So much to unpack here! Apparently what characterised the Queen of Heaven, and merited countless sprawling temple complexes, maintained by a horde of priestesses and minions, was a woman of honest sexual desire and sovereignty. A woman who claimed her desire, and made the one and only qualifier to both her celestial kingdom and her heart a man’s ability to plow her vulva right.

Inanna is also, like Eve, transgressive in her ambition, breaking rules and boundaries to get what she wants. Following her marriage, Inanna demands from her fathers a greater portion of the ‘me,’ or the cultural knowledge and powers of Sumer. Their steward Enki refuses, so Inanna shows up at his shrine and plies him with beer until he drunkenly surrenders them. After collecting the powers of the eighty me, which include, “the kissing of the phallus, the art of the hero, the perceptive ear, and the art of power,” Inanna comes in to her full queenship.

It is at this stage of life where we find the goddess — before she makes her descent. In this full-flower phase she has children, but isn’t strictly identified with the receptive and tender qualities of the maternal. Rather, she sustains through marriage and child-bearing her innate saltiness, and the imprint of the virgin archetype, or the sovereign feminine who is “one-in-herself.” As Karl Kerenyi writes, Inanna exists eternally at the “border region between motherhood, maidenhood joie de vivre, and a lust for murder, fecundity and animality.”

At the very beginning of the Descent there are two elements that set Inanna up to, like Odysseus, ensure both her “ravishing” and her return. The first is her “ear,” or the place from which her decision to descend is made. The Descent begins with these incantatory lines:

“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 tot he Great Below.”

Diane Wolkstein, a folklorist who worked with Sumerian scholars to interpret the Descent into poetry and performance, breaks down the significance of Inanna’s “ear” as an instrument of intuition:

“Inanna is queen of heaven and earth, but she does not know the underworld. Until her ear opens to the Great Below, her understanding is necessarily limited. In Sumerian the word for ear and wisdom is the same. The ear, which is located mostly internally and is coiled like a spiral or labyrinth, takes in sound and begins to transform the imperceptible into meaning. In order to fully appreciate or know what is said or meant, a great understanding is needed — an understanding of all things.”

Having sated her external ambitions and desires, Inanna is suddenly “open” to an “understanding” that was previously unavailable, a lawless directive muted by the voices of her rage, passion and greed. This “understanding” is not the urgent demand of ambition, or unconscious fascination. This voice emerges from silence, defies reason, and promises no certain outcome.

Yet Inanna heeds the call, and enacts the second instinctive strategy that will ensure her return: she informs her “faithful servant,” Ninshubur. Inanna says that if she doesn’t return, then Ninshubur should go to her father-gods Enlil, Nanna, and Enki, and implore them to save her. “Tear at your eyes,” Inanna says, “your mouth, at your thighs.”

Ninshubur is a formidable figure in her own right. She is the “Queen of the East,” a priestess and warrior who fended off the giants and sea-creatures that roared down their backs when she and Inanna made off with the me. Inanna calls out Ninshubur’s virtues whenever she addresses her, “Ninshubur, my constant support,/ My sukkal who gives me wise advice, / My warrior who fights by my side…”

The two women share a primal, devotional bond. Sylvia Brinton-Perera, who unpacked the myth through a depth-psychological lens in Descent of the Goddess, sees Ninshubur as the part of the psyche that is able to stay relational, grounded and watchful as we ‘descend’ or risk journeys of transformation:

“[She] is the remarkable, strong, humble, functioning consciousness that can permit life to continue […] that can persist in its journey to find what is necessary. […] She simply carries out precisely what the goddess asks of her.”

Her servant’s “integrity and reverence and capacity for action” allow Inanna to risk greatly and go into free-fall. Ninshubur is an administrator of the soul, an aspect of the self who can stay in communication with reality. She knows when to block critical voices, or ask for help, and provides the means to stay the course. She ensures that the higher creative faculties — the goddess — can be fully realised, through processes that might appear from the outside to be destructive, ugly, crazy, or futile.

It is Inanna’s command to Ninshubur, to bear witness and rescue her if necessary, that makes the revelation of the myth possible. Ninshubur is her anchor point; she embodies Inanna’s intent to take the wisdom of the underworld and then return, like Odysseus, after her metamorphosis.

Inanna suits up for the journey, adorning herself with symbols of her power, the me. She dons a crown, a lapis bead necklace, a royal robe, a breastplate, a gold ring, and lapis measuring rod, daubs a magical ointment on her eyes, and arranges her “dark locks” of hair.

At the entrance to the underworld, a gatekeeper asks Inanna why she is descending, “Why has your heart led you on the road from which no traveler returns?”

Inanna begins by saying, “Because…of my older sister Ereshkigal,” but then hedges and says that her sister’s husband has died and she has come to “witness” the funeral rites.

The gatekeeper informs Ereshkigal that Inanna, “a maid as tall as heaven,” and bedecked lavishly in the me, wants entrance into hell. Ereshkigal, enraged by her sister’s coolness and arrogance, orders him to bolt the gates and demand that Inanna remove one of the me at each portal.

“Let the holy priestess of heaven enter bowed low,” she says.

When Inanna questions the keeper, he says, “Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

She relents, and at the seven successive gates, Inanna is stripped naked and divested of all her powers. She enters her sister’s domain utterly exposed, and is met by the judges of the Underworld. Ereshkigal sees her sister, rises from her throne, and gives her the killing gaze:

“Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.

Inanna was turned into a corpse,

A piece of rotting meat,

And was hung from a hook on the wall.”

Inanna’s rotting corpse hangs for three days and nights. Ninshubur begs Inanna’s fathers Enlil, the Lord of the Wind and Nanna, the God of the Moon, for help, but they both rebuke Inanna for attempting to bypass the laws of the Underworld:

“My daughter craved the Great Above,

Inanna craved the Great Below.

She who receives the me of the Underworld does not return.

She who goes to the Dark City stays there.”

Inanna has dared to confront the unrevealed potentials of chaos and death, an act her father-gods have not risked and will not condone. A return from those depths has the whiff of a phenomenon more caustic, more insurgent, than the merely miraculous. Inanna has bypassed law and custom, and in so doing, she has assimilated the void. What new potent creature would be born of this knowledge?

Ninshubur goes last to the shrine of Enki, the god of water, wisdom, mischief, crafts and art, who is “troubled” and “grieved” to hear of his daughter’s state. He also possesses the “waters of life.” Enki fashions two creatures “neither male nor female” from the dirt under the fingernails of both hands. He tells them to slip through the doors of the underworld “like flies,” and find Ereshkigal, who will moan “with the cries of a woman about to give birth.”

When these two magical androgyne creatures descend and empathically mimic the strange cries and groans of Ereshkigal as she writhes on the floor, Ereshkigal softens and grants them a boon. The little flies ask for the corpse of Inanna, and give to it the food and waters of life, after which Inanna is miraculously restored. But there is a price to be paid: the judges of the underworld remind her:

“No one ascends from the underworld unmarked.

If Inanna wishes to return from the underworld,

She must provide someone in her place.”

To ensure the exchange of bodies, demons or “galla” follow Inanna on her ascent. For a deeply tribal culture, the ‘demon’ is a mercenary, detached from bonds of family:

“[Those] who know no food, who know no drink.

Who accept no gifts, who enjoy no lovemaking.

They have no sweet children to kiss.

They tear the wife from the husband’s arms.

They tear the child from the father’s knees.”

These ruthless and implacable ghosts “cling” to Inanna as she enters the realm of heaven. There she first comes across abject Ninshubur who wears a “soiled sack cloth,” a dress of mourning, and who immediately throws herself “in the dust” at Inanna’s feet.

The demons say, “Walk on Inanna, We will take Ninshubur in your place.”

But Inanna stops them, saying, “She did not forget my words. […] Because of her, my life was saved. I will never give Ninshubur to you.”

Twice more Inanna enacts this refusal with the galla, to save her sons Shara and Lulal, who are also both dressed in humble sack cloths and, upon seeing their mother, throw themselves at her feet.

Inanna and the galla arrive at her native city of Uruk, where she finds her husband, Dumuzi sitting on her throne. He is not in mourning dress, nor does he throw himself at his wife’s feet. Embodying Inanna’s own electric rage, the demons grow restless and smash things.

Inanna is then seized, and performs the power she has learned, the hell-gaze of Ereshkigal:

“Inanna fastened on Dumuzi the eye of death.

She spoke against him the word of wrath.

She uttered against him the cry of guilt:

Take him! Take Dumuzi away!”

The demons beat Dumuzi savagely, “gash” him with axes, and attempt to take him. Later, Inanna cuts a deal for Dumuzi and his grieving sister: each will trade places and spend only half the year in the underworld and half the year in heaven.

The brother-sister duo, united in their fate, represent and become surrogates for Inanna’s fully realised self, the one who knows heaven and hell, death and rebirth, passion and discernment, ruthlessness and receptivity. Inanna places Dumuzi, “in the hands of the eternal,” and the story concludes with her cry:

“Holy Ereshkigal! Great is your renown! Holy Ereshkigal! I sing your praises!”

This doesn’t have to be the end. Want to explore the fates of Inanna and Eve?

Head to: The Mythic Blueprint of Killing Eve, Part 2: Desire as Power