Our Sacred Journey
Over the course of our six week temple together, we will journey with the most famous mythical underworld Queens, Inanna of Sumeria the Queen of Heaven who chooses to descend to Hell to meet her sister, and Persephone of Greece the naive young maiden who is dragged down to the underworld by Hades.
We will look into the mirrors of these Goddesses as doorways into our own innermost depths, to bring healing, empowerment, forgiveness, reclamation, and wholeness to everything that we have lived.
We will repair the fractures and fragments inherited through a world that has forgotten Goddess, as we become the living breathing embodiment of the true benevolent Queen: the one who has come to embrace all parts of herself as whole and holy.
This will be our empowered journey together…
Doorway One: Wise Preparations
Creating Space for the Journey, Making Preparations, Mapping our Rebirth
As we will see in the stories of both Inanna and Persephone, we do not dive into the underworld naively. We make wise preparations before we descend, resourcing ourselves in the upperworld and in the middleworld, while preparing a map to find our way back out.
In our first doorway, we create space to welcome in the magic of our journey and to explore how we can best support ourselves for the deep dive that is yet to come. We will also open into the whole stories of Persephone and Inanna to give us an overall view and map of the journey we are about to take. In this sense, the entire journey moves back in time to meet us at the beginning as we move forward in time to meet the doorway of completion and final integration.
Doorway Two:
The Descent
Reopening the Doorway of the Past, Stripping Away Layers of Falsity, Becoming Naked
Now our journey truly begins, as we open the doorway into our past, into the world that exists beneath the surface, with Persephone and Inanna as our guides. We will explore the profound difference between Persephone’s Descent, one without preparations or guidance initiated by the dark masculine, and Inanna’s Descent, made strategically with preparations and sovereignly chosen by herself.
Just as Inanna passes through seven gateways to the underworld and is stripped of various layers of her outer power at each one, we will offer seven pieces of our identity to the altar of our practice, as we go deeper into the core of who we truly are. With Persephone we will also bring forth that which we have already lost, and that which we feel was taken from us or sacrificed, to open into greater healing, clarity, and empowerment with our past.
Doorway Three: Skeleton Woman
Meeting the Inner Demon and Eating the Fruits of the Underworld
We arrive now into the womb of the underworld, where we are met with the guardian of this domain: our own darker nature.
In the story of Inanna, she arrives to the underworld to be met with the wrath of her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of Hell. Ereshkigal is grieving the death of her husband, caused by unconscious actions of Inanna. In a rage Ereshkigal kills Inanna and hangs her onto a hook to die. Fully stripped of our ego, we meet Skeleton Woman, the dark side, and listen to her messages to uncover what we have been oppressing and repressing in our own shadow realms.
As Persephone enters the underworld, she is fed the pomegranate seeds of Hades, which cause her to fall in love with him. We consider the treasures and blood diamonds we have retrieved through our underworld descents, and also the devils we have tied ourselves to through confusing our own pure primal power with whatever we ate out of their hands.
Doorway Four: Death & Rebirth
Grieving the Loss of Our Innocence, Receiving the Nourishment of Life
Our Queens have fully died now to the domain of the underworld, as Persephone has become Hades’ Skeleton Queen and Inanna is hanging on the hook. But there is a force that refuses to allow these Queens to stay in the underworld forever, and this force ensures they too shall rebirth on the other side.
Wise to the likelihood of her death in the underworld, Inanna has arranged for her closest guides to grieve and lament her absence, and for angelic deities to come rescue her in case the plan goes awry. Unable to resurrect her, the angels appeal to Ereshkigal by holding her as she grieves all three nights. Ereshkigal now healed through compassion, agrees to remove Inanna from the hook and the angels bestow Inanna with the same nectar of new life. Together we offer our own “victim” archetype the nectar of radical compassion and we also grieve and lament the death of our identity as Queen of Heaven to bring ourselves back to life.
Persephone has not made these preparations, but her mother Demeter in the upperworld has been grieving and lamenting her death. The Earth has turned to winter and desperate for spring to come again the Gods agree that Persephone will spend half of the year in the upperworld with her mother and the other half in the underworld with Hades. With Persephone we grieve the part of ourselves that we will never “get back” through our awakening out of naivete, and we cross the threshold into our own inner mother as we embrace womanhood.
Doorway Five: The Ressurection
Returning to the Light, Emerging Out of the Underworld, Returning as a New Woman
With the newfound power of our integrated shadow, it is time to rise back up from the underworld.
Just as Inanna returns to her throne as Queen of Heaven and Earth, we will meet the seven aspects of our identity that we placed onto the altar at the beginning of our journey and decide which still fit, which we desire to transform through another cycle, and which are ready to fall away. We will cultivate clarity for what we want to birth in the world through our new power and how we want to live now on the other side of death. We will explore our new relationship with the underworld, and as Inanna’s consort Dumuzi goes to take her place, we will consider how we stay connected to the darkness while rising into the light.
With Persephone we will emerge through the nectar of our grief as the water that blossoms spring back into the wastelands of our lives that have wintered through our loss of innocence. We will explore the difference between the light that has never descended and the light that has been deepened and refined in the dark.
Doorway Six: Whole Integration
Grounding at the Center, Bringing the Wisdom Forth Into Our Lives
We now stand fully at the center, at middleworld, back into the wholeness of our lives. Who are we now that we have returned? How do we weave and bring this wisdom into our relationships, into our service, into our daily activities and ways of being?
There can be a temptation after the underworld descent to wish to stay in the otherworld, in the highs of heaven and the lows of hell. Here we bring ourselves back into our bodies and into the physical matter of this lifetime to make a difference through what we have learned.
We will also reflect on how we can choose in an empowered way to descend when necessary, and how to know when it is the time to descend. This is part of our cyclical nature, through the winters we endure each month with menstruation and the black moon, the night of each day, and the winter season of each year.
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