Rose Gate of Immersion
Artist Stefano Bonzzi
Venus Builds her Temple in the Underworld.
Opening scene for the month…
I post quite a bit about the Venus Cycle. If you are following this journey, this post is for you...
In the Myth of Inanna, after her Descent as Morning Star, Venus/Inanna meets her Sister Ereshikigal/Eris in the underworld where we find her in the throws of giving birth. Naked, and clawing at the ground, writhing in pain.
Here at the Immersion Gate, as Venus is coming into her Superior Conjunction, we are asked to surrender our identity. To surrender ALL attachments, to break the patterns that fragment our wholeness in exchange for security, how we identify, and the foundations we believed supported us. At this point in the story, Ereshkigal has just had her sister, Inanna, Goddess of Heaven and Light, hung on a meat hook. Here she stays for three days and three nights, the universal symbol of rebirth and regeneration. In Goddess mythology, the light and the dark goddesses are one in the same. Two faces of the same woman. One representing the “Good, nurturing, kind, woman” and one representing the “angry, dark, and vengeful woman”. In his seminal work, “The Light of Venus” Adam Gainsburg calls this period the Transumational Phase.
From an astronomical perspective, the story of Inanna’s descent into the underworld is the story of Venus’ alchemical journey across the night sky below the horizon. Each month as she conjuncts the moon she crosses another gateway represented by each of our body's energy centers. The first gateway in this cycle was January at the Crown Chakra. This month, when Venus was conjunct the moon she will have moved through all of the centers and is now at the Rose “Gate of The Immersion”. From here she will enter Erishkagel’s throne room, and will spend almost 70 days in the underworld behind the beams of the sun.
This is happening right as we stepped across the threshold of the High Holy Day Celebration of Mabon. The fall equinox itself is a threshold moment that brings us face to face with the dying of the light.
As we are held in the underground sanctuary, nestled in the warm waters of the Great Mother, steeped in imaginal cells, connected to the collective unconscious, what are you allowing to die? As we await the moment of death, being slayed, hung on a meat hook, and ultimately resurrected, ritual, drumming, dancing, journaling, anointing, and bathing are all things that can help us navigate the unconscious realms of the underworld.
Here the intention is to contact the unconscious. To reclaim the inner gold we have abandoned. That which was given to others, or laid waste from non-attention. Here we face our projections, throw off our comparisons, naked and bowed low.
At this Venus Rose Gate of the Immersion that happened on September 24th, Venus at 24 Virgo is making an opposition to Neptune in Pisces, and a trine to Pluto at 25 Capricorn, making clear that the themes of truth and illusion are on deck for us to examine as we make our way to the scared meeting with our dark sister.
Venus, distilled to her most rarefied form represents our longing for the Goddess, and the multitude of ways that manifests on both the inner and outer plane of our being. There is a subtle beauty to meeting the Goddess in the Wasteland beside Pluto’s boggy forgotten landscape. Pluto can excavate our greatest fears, unearth our insecurities, and reflect issues of unworthiness. What does it look like when we bring the abiding love and beauty of Venus to encounters with Pluto? As I meditate on this question I am reminded of a quote I read recently by Mark Nepo...
“The messy miracle called life is fragile and resilient, ever present and never guaranteed. Love moves us toward the miracle while fear moves us towards the mess. Fear gets its power from not looking, we are called, no matter our circumstance, to enlist the strength of heart to look through our fear with the eyes of love.” These words perfectly encapsulate a meeting between these two archetypal guru’s.
I like the Buddhist practice of Chod as an orientation to the underworld. When we are facing the deepest truths inside us, and it brings up all of our unconscious fears, and the illusions we have invested in are revealed, preparing our bodies as an offering for our inner demons to feast on can be awfully empowering.
It is from this totally open, naked, and surrendered place that we paradoxically find our greatest power.
In other words an underworld encounter is an empowerment.
Pluto is the ruler of my sun sign, and I also have Venus in Scorpio. So I am no stranger to the fears that can arise when something or someone I love feels threatened. This year has been an initiation in feeling everything I love and hold dear is in some kind of danger. As I read my morning devotional on one particularly fearful morning earlier in this year, I found this proverb almost instantaneously calmed me….
"There is an old Buddhist proverb in which An aging master grew tired of his apprentice’s forebodings. One morning, he sent him to get some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master told him to mix a handful of salt in a glass of water and then drink it.
“How does it taste?” the master asked.
“Bitter,” said the apprentice.
The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said,
“Now drink from the lake.”
As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the master asked, “How does it taste?”
“Fresh,” remarked the apprentice.
“Do you taste the salt?” asked the master.
“No,” said the young man. At this the master sat beside this serious young man, and explained softly,
“The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things. Stop being a glass. Become a lake.”
Venus can help us bring the feeling of expansiveness, presence, and beauty back into a life that feels contracted by the blackness of fear. By zoom lensing out, and getting a more meta view, we are able to more fully perceive our situation by bringing light to it. We are able to tap into the paradox of both the small fears of our human self, and seeing our limitless potential as a spirit self. Giving permission for it all to exist.
The earth is always in some state of fallenness, dissolution, and decay. Everything in time ends, everything is subject to entropy. Every form that has been manifest, eventually disappears. And because of this everything is subject to distortion. All things are in a state of flux. Nothing is static. So when we create a life that has the external as the state of its orientation. We have a difficult time with the concept of change and impermanence.
Death and decay are a normal, and healthy part of evolution. With a healthy embodied approach we see our place and role in the cosmos in a more truthful light. We know we are here to do our piece of the work, in our corner of the world. To contribute to the evolution of a much greater story, and cycle.
So at this Rose Gate of Immersion, where Venus connects again with Pluto, we remember how he behaves as the expiration date of all things. He says if you try to hold on to something after it’s sell-by date he will allow it to spoil. He then purges it from our life through a process of primal, regenerative, purification, so that we can experience a restoration of health, vitality, strength, and power. He is the pruner of untruth. As a vessel of Venus, I am here for it.
