they say you lurk here still, perhaps
in the depths of the earth or on
some sacred mountain, they say
you walk (still) among men, writing signs
in the air, in the sand, warning warning weaving
the crooked shape of our deliverance, anxious
not hasty. Careful. You step among cups, step out of
crystal, heal with the holy glow of your
dark eyes, they say you unveil
a green face in the jungle, wear blue
in the snows, attend on
births, dance on our dead, croon, fuck, embrace
our weariness, you lurk here still, mutter
in caves, warn, warn and weave
warp of our hope, link hands against
the evil in the stars, o rain
poison upon us, acid which eats clean
wake us like children from a nightmare, give the slip
to the devourers whom I cannot name
the metal men who walk
on all our substance, crushing flesh
to swamp
Diane Di Prima, “Prayer to the Mothers”
Women’s Initiation
The descent is characterized as a journey to the underworld, the dark night of the soul, the belly of the whale, the meeting of the dark goddess, or simply as depression. It is usually precipitated by a life-changing loss. … ….
The journey to the underworld is filled with confusion and grief, alienation and disillusion, rage and despair. A woman may feel naked and exposed, dry and brittle, or raw and turned inside-out. I felt this way while fighting advanced cervical dysplasia, during the dissolution of my marriage, and when I lost confidence in myself as an artist. Each time I had to face truths about myself and my world that I wished not to see. And each time I was chastened and cleansed by the fires of transformation.
In the underworld there is no sense of time, time is endless and you cannot rush your stay. There is no morning, day, or night. It is densely dark and unforgiving. This all-pervasive blackness is moist, cold, and bone-chilling. There are no easy answers in the underworld; there is no quick way out. Silence pervades when the wailing ceases. One is naked and walks on the bones of the dead.
To the outside world a woman who has begun her descent is preoccupied, sad, and inaccessible. Her tears often have no name but they are ever-present, whether she cries or not. She cannot be comforted; she feels abandoned. She forgets things; she chooses not to see friends. She curls up in a ball on the couch or refuses to come out of her room. She digs in the earth or walks in the woods. The mud and the trees become her companions. She enters a period of voluntary isolation, seen by her family and friends as a loss of her senses.
We find our way back to ourselves not by moving up and out into the light, but by moving down into the depths of the ground of their being. The metaphor of digging the earth to find your way back to yourself expresses a woman’s initiation process. The spiritual experience for women is one of moving more deeply into self rather than out of self.
A woman moves down into the depths to reclaim the parts of herself that split off when she rejected the mother and shattered the mirror of the feminine. To make this journey a woman puts aside her fascination with the intellect and games of the cultural mind, and acquaints herself, perhaps for the first time, with her body, her emotion, her sexuality, her intuition, her images, her values, and her mind. This is what she finds in the depths.
I write with trepidation about the descent because I have great respect for the process and do not want to trivialize it. It is a sacred journey. In our culture, however, it is usually categorized as depression which must be medicated and eliminated as quickly as possible. No one likes to be around someone who is depressed. If we choose, however, to honor the descent as sacred and as a necessary aspect of the quest to fully know ourselves, fewer women would lose their way in depression, alcohol, abusive relationships, or drugs. They could experience their feelings without shame, reveal their pain without apathy.
When a woman makes her descent she may feel stripped bare, dismembered, or devoured by rage. She experiences a loss of identity, a falling away of the perimeters of a known role, and the fear that accompanies loss. She may feel dried up, raw, and devoid of sexuality or experience the gut-wrenching pain of being turned inside-out. And she may spend a long time there in the dark, waiting while life goes on up above.
She may meet Ereshkigal, the ancient Sumerian goddess who hung her sister Ishtar, goddess of heaven and earth, on a peg to rot and die. Every time a woman makes the descent she fears the dark goddess and what this part of her self will do to her. “I am afraid that she will grind me down, pulverize me, eat me up, and spit me out. I know that every time this happens I become more of myself than when I began, but it is an excruciating experience.”
The descent is a compulsion, we all try to avoid it but at some point in our lives we journey to our depths. It is not a glamorous journey, but it invariably strengthens a woman and clarifies her sense of self. Some women today talk about their descent in terms of meeting the dark goddess in their dreams. They may experiences the wrathful, devouring Hindu goddess Kali, filled with rage because of the original betrayal of her in ancient civilizations when her power and glory were turned over to male deities.
The creatrix principle of Kali and other female deities was usurped by the father gods. The biblical Yahweh, who called himself Father, made his children out of clay with his hands, copying the ancient magic of the Sumerian and Babylonian Mother Goddess, who had such titles as Nana, Ninhursag, and Mami. “Hindus said there was a sea of ocean of blood at the beginning of the world; this ocean was the essence of the Oldest of the Old, who existed in the beginning of time. “She was the Goddess from whom all becoming arose.” The symbol of the feminine deity as the fertile creator of earth was eradicated during Christianity’s successful attempt to eliminate the Mother archetype, replacing her with Father as Creator and Son as redeemer.
Looking for Lost Pieces of Myself
I prepare myself to meet her
Knowing not what to say
It has not been only men
who have betrayed her
I have betrayed her as well
I have been a father’s daughter
rejecting my mother
I have always been afraid of
moving down into the darkness
I might lose
consciousness
I might lose
my voice
my vision
my equilibrium
How much of it is really mine?
My words are encased in others’ language
My images are derivative of others’ art
What is me?
I look for the lost pieces of myself. Somehow I feel that I must find them before I meet her. What did I lose being a father’s daughter, trying to please and achieve? What did I lose taking his side? I lost an element of truth, of seeing the whole picture: the ugly, the crazy, the denied, the disappeared.
I look around and I see the blind heads of the mothers – mine, my ex-husband’s, my mother’s best friend. Julia, Kathleen, Betty. What are they trying to say to me? “Pull us out and reunite us with our bodies. Bury us properly. We have been left here alone in the mud. We have no ability to move, we cannot see.”
“Take back the dark,” they whisper.
What else lies buried with them? The ability to dream dreams – my dreams, my fantasies. My imagination is somewhere here, strewn on this earthen floor, fairy tales and tree houses and fantastical creatures I gather. Those are parts of me that I take back. I reclaim them as mine. I take back the feeling I once had that I could do anything I wanted to do, bring anything I imaged into form. I knew it once and it was magical. I used to sit by the side of the house and watch the roses grow. I could be so still, I could feel life pulsing, smelling and sounding. I know the swamp; this isn’t new. I’ve been here before and have felt protected. The swamp, the woods: they are my mother. I felt connected to the tree, to the mud, to the grasses and leaves. I never felt alone. I take back that connection. It runs deep.
I sink down now into the strata. There are bones in the mud – white, beautiful, porcelain bones. I hold my own skeletal arms and ribs. The bones are the framework. I am excavating deeper and deeper for the lost parts of myself. I mourn them deeply. Where have they gone?
As I pick up these bones I see glimpses of the Mother Goddess under the earthen floor. She embraces a daughter. She is not whom I expected to see; she is not wrathful nor old nor ugly but a young woman with light brown hair. She soothes and embraces. She sits and listens and protects. She laughs and sings, her voice like bells.
But I am not there yet. I ask my guide to take me down.
He takes me down deeper than we have gone before, and I am truly afraid that I will drown. I sputter and swallow too much water as we descend below the swamp. He holds my hand and tells me not to be afraid. He leads me down into a cave. There I see a huge whale-like form encased by a scaffolding built by little Lilliputian men.
They are holding her down.
She can still move her enormous black tail. It swings back and forth in a strong, graceful rhythm. But the rest of her body is held motionless, spilling over the bars of this underwater holdfast. Nothing about her is menacing, I feel her deep sense of sadness. He brings me close to her, and I am terrified by her power.
“You can help me,” she says. I pull back.
“No, I can’t.”
“Of course you can,” she booms.
“By your presence they can no longer hold me. As each of my daughters comes to me of her own free will I am released.”
As she says this the scaffolding falls away. The strength of the bars was illusory. Now she arches her back, and her mighty tail sends a tidal wave which undulates across the ocean floor. She swims and we swim with her. She loses her enormous size; she is no longer bloated and grotesque. She is graceful and free. She moves through the water with the grace of a mermaid.
The Lilliputian men go on building their cage; somehow, they have not realized that they hold her no more. We leave the cave, and the waters change. They become warm and milky. She stops and turns to face me, and she has long beautiful golden hair.
“When my daughters come to me, not only are they healed, but they release me from bondage,” she says. She is the fish-tailed Aphrodite-Mari, the Mother of the Sea. She is the Great Fish who gave birth to the gods.
She no longer scares me. Like most women, this woman of the depths is only frightening when her energy is shackled, contained, and denied expression. When she can move freely, all the creatures of the earth and sea come to her. We are refreshed and renewed in he presence. Women, and men too, have to remember how to find her.
No comments:
Post a Comment