Before our journey begins, we will open into the wisdom of the underworld, Persephone, Inanna, and a woman’s rite to descend, to invite organic reflections upon our own initiatory journeys in this lifetime so far.

We arrive to the temple in reverence, through weaving the sacred energy transmission of the journey with our personal intentions, bringing them into form in our devotional altar, and making space in our schedule to descend.

We will also open into the whole stories of both Persephone and Inanna, through famous translations of the original poems of their descents, 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 at the end.

This module will be available on November 6th, to give you time to prepare before we begin, so the sooner you register, the sooner you will receive.

How prepared were you for your first menstrual bleed? For your first sexual experience? For your emotional/psychic/spiritual deaths and rebirths? For meeting your shadow? For giving birth? For becoming a mother? For transitioning into menopause?

Were you honored with rites of passage, with sacred ceremonies, and with wise support from those who had walked before you?

Most of us, like Persephone, were plunged into these initiations naively, within a culture that does not respect nor revere them, and we may have consequently acquired injuries, shame, and even trauma in spaces that are in fact innately designed to bring us into more of our power.

As we begin our journey, we take great care in preparing ourselves for the initiatory terrain that comes with the underworld, with the darker nature, with the womb.

Just as Inanna cloaks herself in her finest possessions and informs her advisor how to lament her death and ensure her ressurrection before she descends, so do we prepare for the mystery of the unknown.

It can feel like a great paradox at times, that to feel safe in our own bodies and free to live our truth in the world, we will be called to return to the places of greatest distortion and dishonor. These places are the wastelands of our world where the feminine has been demonized, violated, or at the very least been neglected.

Descent is not only a process in the psyche, meeting our darker nature, it is also a process in the body, meeting the tenderness of our flesh and in particular our sexual anatomy. Fertility requires that we re-nourish the soil, through resting into the bottom of our beings, in the shadow yes, but also in the felt experience of our pelvis, our womb, and in the naturally descending gift of menstrual blood.

Descent does require a “getting naked” with ourselves, just as Inanna is stripped of layers of her ego and outer power in the world in order to be humble enough to enter the underworld. With Inanna and Persephone as our guides, we descend into the sensitivity of our bodies and we set aside our external identities to allow us the space to touch into the core of our being as our own fertile ground.

A long forgotten and utterly essential wisdom for a woman’s rite to walk safely and freely through this world, is the innerstanding that the feminine was the original gatekeeper to Hell. She was the Devil.

As the guardian of the womb, she was the keeper of the mysteries, and the one who would initiate us into our own power through the wild waves of our emotions, the currents of our sexual desires, and in the cyclical nature of our bodies to create life.

Through patriarchy, women were gaslighted into distrusting these powers as separate from God, and were exiled from the temples, forgetting that God and the temple itself were already inside of her own own body. This allowed patriarchy to overtake the underworld, and to utilize the dark magic of this domain for its own agenda.

With Persephone we meet this dark masculine agenda eye to eye through the Hades figures we ourselves have been victimized by, and with Inanna we reclaim the true Devil within us, as our own Skeleton Woman, our shadow, our own dark side, She who is our true soul mate and twin flame.

The underworld is truly a place of regeneration and rejuvenation for new life, and this is Skeleton Woman’s one and only agenda: to strip us fully enough that we surrender to life inside of ourselves, which is our only real power, so that we can be reborn in the truth of who and what we are.

In the underworld we meet with the depths of our own alchemical magic, which requires the embrace of our grief and rage, the water and fire of life. It is indeed through feeling it all and becoming the safe hands of Goddess that can honor and hold it all, that we receive the blessed nectar of our authentic medicine and receive our truest treasure.

To truly receive ourselves, we must forgive ourselves, but before we can forgive ourselves we need to die to the parts of ourselves that have long been neglected and oppressed. As these parts have the space to be felt and seen, they slowly reveal their hidden gold. With Inanna we hold, honor, and nourish our dark side and as she is fed, she bestows us with new life. With Persephone we grieve the young parts of ourselves that have died through the initiatory terrain, as we learn to trust ourselves into a new chapter of womanhood.

Once we surrender to the underworld and receive her magical rejuvenating powers, the blessed compassion and unconditional love of the womb of life, we may not want to return. We may wish to stay bundled up in our cocoon forever.

Yet, there is an innate impulse, the impulse of life, the seed that is destined to crack open and burst forth from deep within the dark fertile soil. Just as menstruation does not last forever, neither does the descent, and eventually we are called to slowly rise back up into the light.

As we do, we meet once again with the layers of our identities we have shed and stripped away in our descent, and we have the opportunity to either release what no longer fits, or to redefine how we wear these layers in a way that serves us now.

With Inanna, we rise back to the Queendom of Heaven, with this newfound power of the darkness, ruling from a deep intimacy with our most loving truth. With Persephone we feel the difference between the light that has never descended and the light that has been deepened and refined in the dark.

Wisdom is the path of knowing through not knowing, and it is through our descents into the unknown that we come to know ourselves and we come to know life. This is not something that happens one time, though there certainly are cycles or seasons of particularly intense initiations and rebirths. Rather, it is a journey we return to over and over again through the movement of the wheel of life.

The feminine nature, the true keeper of the wisdom of life and of death, is cyclical. She reveals that there are no beginnings and there are no ends. Through our descents and resurrections we come to realize that we are continually spiraling through life and death as we become more whole.

Persephone rises from the underworld in the spring, and she descends again in the autumn. Our wombs bleed into the ground, and then we become fertile and ripe, until we cycle that path enough times that we become the keeper of the wisdom ourselves, the crone who no longer bleeds. We die and return to the Earth and the seeds that we planted become new life. All is eternal. This is the loving power of life.