Underworld

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It’s Good Friday…what better time to finally write about a meditative journey to the Underworld!

I’ve been thinking back over the myths we have worked with in the Wood Sisters Days, many of which centre around a death and resurrection experience:

In the story of Ceridwen, Taliesin’s taste of spiritual reality, the Druidic Awen brewed in the cauldron of the goddess, propels him into the Otherworld. Here he is driven through a series of challenges and transformations until finally surrendering to the Goddess and passing through gestation, first in Ceridwen’s womb and then in the ‘skin bag’ before being reborn into the everyday world at the salmon weir of Elffin.

For Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven, there’s an unambiguous journey of descent into the underworld kingdom of her dark sister Ereshkigal. A process that strips her of all her status and wealth. She has to face the Underworld judges and their words of anger and shame and even give up her physical body to be hung on a hook…and the process of re emergence isn’t easy either!

Facing the dark twin and passing through death and transformation are also central to the story of the Egyptian Osiris, and his queen the goddess Isis also suffers her own journey of loss and profound grief and suffering. Is all this starting to sound just a little familiar now on God’s Friday? Myth as a vessel for spiritual truth may change its forms….the characters belong to shifting times and places and cultures but the core principles continue.

In Kabbalah there’s an idea that every human soul is given at least one perfect taste of divinity, of awakening to the bigger picture. It’s not earned through being good or practising deep meditation or whatever, but simply and freely given…one pure glimpse of what we may be. It can awaken in the soul a longing to return to its Source, a longing for depth, for Mystery, for we know not what…. This is the deeper meaning of ‘conversion’ in the Christian tradition, which means ‘to turn’. We turn our gaze away from our everyday preoccupations and towards another way of seeing, little realising at first what the cost to the ego may be on the journey of waking up to Spirit… ‘costing not less than everything’ as TS Eliot says in the Four Quartets….as Taliesin, Inanna, Osiris and Jesus all discovered.

Golden spring celandines guarding an entrance to the Underworld

Often this longing of the soul for its source is couched in terms of a love story. We know this ourselves from every time we’ve fallen in love and longed for union and completion with that mysterious ‘other’. This theme is very much present in all the mythic stories above, perhaps especially in Isis and Osiris and in our most recent story of Persephone and Hades. For Persephone that beautiful god given glimpse is initially the golden flower sent by Zeus, which she pulls at only to discover that it cracks open the Underworld. (Just like falling in love in fact!) Perhaps later it’s the mysterious otherworld allure and love of Hades himself that draws her to taste the pomegranate that will change her self and life for ever, while for Hades it’s Persephone that is the otherworldly source of longing and love.

Working with this in meditation, I wondered for myself and others…what draws us?  I found myself imagining it like Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’…that call from the wild, deep core of ourselves….that strange pull of otherness and wilderness mixed with a paradoxical sense of homecoming. So the meditation that arose for the Wood Sisters Day had a shamanic feel as we travelled in imagination along an inner path until our attention was drawn aside by some small or vast wild creature and we were led onto a hidden path and to a dark opening into the earth.

Within those dark depths of each person was the invitation to surrender, to let go of our carefully constructed daylight selves and discover the dark fullness of who we are. Last night I dreamt of being cruel…of every part of myself that I push into the shadows…those plutonic treasures loved and reclaimed. It’s interesting how we think we want to let go of our pain and perceived ugliness and hold on to all that is bright and beautiful. But the soul’s longing is quite different…like the Celts, it’s willing to sacrifice its brightest and best treasures to the Gods , to give freely what has been freely received and to love the darkness back to life.

I can’t comment on what each woman discovered in her own dark Underworld Meditation place…what she let go of to be composted and what she let fall like a seed ready to grow. But for myself I realised again that I don’t have to be afraid of either the best or the worst of what I can be. That I can tell myself the truth about the full range of life that flows through me and be open and vulnerable enough to show it to others too.