Ascent/Return
The stories of Inanna and Ceridwen continue to circle around in my mind. My thoughts, as in my last journal entry, were initially very focused on ‘descent’, perhaps because I’ve been so aware of the ‘descent’ experiences of hurt and loss and letting go in my own life. But recently I’ve started to think more about the journey of coming back to life, more about the ‘ascent’ from the underworld.
A Golden Yew that I photographed in Kent recently ...it seems like a fitting symbol of death and rebirth
I find it interesting that in Inanna’s story, she returns not as a beautiful Queen of Heaven but surrounded by merciless demons seeking a substitute to dwell in her place in the underworld. Although she refuses to let the demons take her helper Ninshubur or her sons, she vents her rage on her husband Dumuzi and decrees that he is beaten, bound and taken away. This has a rather disturbingly familiar ring… isn’t it often the case that we only show the darkest and most unmediated parts of ourselves to those we are closest to? As Sylvia Brinton Perera says in her Jungian study of the Inanna myth…”Often enough, in the modern world, a close family member or a therapist is chosen to bear the eruption of untamed energies when an initiate returns reborn, and initially demonic, from the underworld.”
It seems that the process of return and rebirth is at least as arduous, if not more so, than the initial process of death and descent. While the descent includes surrender, the loss of control and suffering humiliation, judgement and ‘death’, the ascent is a much more dynamic but still challenging process. Later in the Inanna story, Dumuzi is ‘driven’ through his own series of transformations, which are very similar to the shamanic animal transformations that Gwion is hounded through by Ceridwen. I don’t think I’m alone as a woman (or as a human being) in sometimes actually finding it almost easier somehow to understand and affirm the rather passive and collapsed ‘loss and suffering’ stage, than to engage with the pressing challenges of coming back to life. The hope is that we are transforming into a new creative self, just as the hunted Gwion is transformed by his trials into the bard ‘Taliesin’ – Shining Brow. But the process of turning rage into passion, or suffering into creativity involves a lot of effort and courage. Somehow we do have to find and keep affirming an inner drive for creative living.
Wood Sister Sarah carved a lantern with two faces...the other side scowls while this side smiles...
Today in the Circle it was wonderful to hear one of us describing just such a turning point. After months of plumbing the depths of grief and despair, a new sense of empowerment is unfolding and an awareness of really choosing to work on creating a happy life. In our meditation I too received images that I found similarly affirming. The meditation includes facing an inner obstacle. Mine was a bog of thick, black mud that seemed to threaten to engulf me, a feeling just like that I’ve had recently as I’ve slogged through the book keeping for our beleaguered finances! To make it through the mud without sinking, I had to lie down and roll across it – a counter intuitive act of surrender or ‘descent’. Later, as we came to the central part of the meditation symbolising an encounter with the divine, I saw the image of a consuming fire. This engulfed my ‘muddy’ self and baked me into a hard shell that at first seemed entombing. But as I realised that the divine fire was within as well as without, the clay vessel shattered. Looking down I saw the broken pieces scattered around me and how each looked like a sumerian clay tablet marked on the inside with stories. The power of meditative experience is such this had a quality of reality that really helped me. I have seen my own mythic journey of return and it gives me strength and hope.