It’s Not What You Think

Art Virgin of Consolation William-Adolphe Bouguereau

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK.

In Shamanic cosmology The Underworld is the realm of the Feminine. Of the Mother, of the Soul.

We travel to the Underworld for deep nourishment. Once there, we allow ourselves to lay down in the soil, and receive Her nutrients.

In the Underworld we are “fertilized” by our worldly experiences and they are then transmuted into a “new thing”.

“One Thing Becomes Another In The Mother”

The Underworld is a realm of “soul retrieval”… a homecoming for our exiled parts. Where they can be reintegrated with love.

It’s a realm of rest and digestion.

The Underworld is the Inner World.

While the “Underworld” carries certain negative connotations in our over-materialized, culture, this is simply another manifestation of our collective “Mother wound” that darkly colors our perception of the lower worlds.

A genuine Underworld experience, re-introduces us, body and soul, to the living source of love that pulsates from the center of the Earth. And reminds us that we are never separate from it.

It offers us an ecstatic encounter with life.

In the Underworld, there is a welcome release of what is weighing us down. There is room for our lament.

Imagine the way a child runs to its Mother, when things feel too big to carry alone. This is what the Underworld offers us. An opportunity hand off our excess baggage to the Mother.

In the Underworld, She holds and embraces us as we give over the parts of ourselves that we’ve found difficult to love.

And with the eyes of love, she cherishes us.

It is here we are reintroduced to the interconnected web of life, and we find a different kind of belonging.

Yes, the “work” of the Underworld is deep and profound. But it is NOT a trip to the Hell Realms as our myths and culture might have us believe.

It is a trip to the realms of our very own nature. Deep in the soil, connected to the roots.

The Myth of Inanna is Star Story, a Venus Star story to be exact.

If you remember in Inanna’s myth, she descends through Seven Gates and arrives in the Underworld to meet her Dark Sister Erishkagel.

Erishkagel is the mythic representation of Inanna’s exiled parts.

When we meet Erishkagel, she is on the floor giving birth. At the very same time she slays Inanna. Thus, the story is telling us, there is a simultaneous death and birth.

As this drama plays out, two of Inanna’s helpers from the Upper World come down and deeply empathize with Erishkagel as she writhes on the floor in labor. They mirror her pain back to her through the eyes of love. Repeating after Her as she moans.

Then they move onto Inanna and sprinkle her with the bread and water of life and she is revived.

This clues us into a two important things. First, the motif of the “Mother” as being a central character in the story.

Secondly, the metaphorical, simultaneous, death and rebirth, is a symbolic clue of transmutation, or becoming a new thing through the medium of love and compassion.

Said another way, it is through meeting ourselves in the metaphorical dark, with the love of the Mother, we become a new thing. Fully transformed.

This is the central “Drama” of the Venus Story. This is why the Underworld is experience is central to our Venus work.

We know when children are well loved and well attached, they go on to do amazing things. In essence, the Underworld gives us the opportunity to be born again. Well loved, and reconnected to this living source of love… This is how we can be our most vital and creative.

There are often Challenge Gates we must navigate through to enter the Underworld. We must confront our own cultural misconceptions of the Dark, and how they are alive in us. How like our own culture has exiled what seems to live in the shadows, this is mirrored in our own relationship to our inner world.

For an expanded Mythic Conversation of the Underworld, see short video transmission in the comments.

To join us for Underworld, see link.