Descent as Woman’s Rite of Passage to Rebirth

The dark, the shadow, Hell, the underword, were once all revered as sacred gateways into the mysteries.

“Hell” was in fact the womb gateway, bringing us into the void of all creation where we could reconnect with Source and rebirth ourselves through the fertile darkness, to shed our layers of no-longer-truth, and emerge more authentically aligned with the truest essence of our nature.

All feminine shamanic spiritual systems knew that one must descend before she could ascend, and that this voyage into the fertile underworld was in fact a doorway into the upperworld of cosmic light.

As our feminine mysteries went into hiding during the inquisitions and patriarchal takeover, over many generations most of us forgot these rites of passage once essential for a woman’s full embodiment as a spiritual and sensual being. A part of our wholeness was fragmented, the shadow became demonic, and an aspect of our nature became repressed, forgotten, but never truly lost.

There is no coincidence that during this time of great change many of us have been called to reconnect with divine feminine consciousness and re-member our Goddesses who represent sensuality, fertility, abundance, and beauty through the star of Venus. But Venus herself emerges in radiant light through her time in the underworld.

This journey was mapped in many of our ancient mythologies, most notably the story of Inanna’s Descent, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven, who descends to Hell to meet her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, and of the story of Persephone’s Descent, the magical maiden of Greek mythos, who is dragged down to the underworld by her father’s brother Hades.

As Inanna descends we are invited to follow her lead, to dive into the inner waters of our own wild emotional depths, to dance with the shadow side and our skeleton woman, and to retrieve the treasure that hides down in the underworld. With Persephone we retrace the distortions we have inherited about a woman’s descent in the hands of patriarchy, and we reclaim a new mythology that empowers us as sovereign beings in the here and now.

Together we will rebirth and resurrect, in and through the dark, as one who not only rises but who sources herself within the depths. We reclaim our thrones as Queens of our own selves.

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