Venus, Black Sheep & The Underworld Trickster Gods

Art By Paula Rego

As a youngster, I had an innate way of discharging excess energy from rupture, upset, and being unsupported.

I would roar, shake, dance, keen, get lost somewhere, etc, in an effort to process my emotions.

At a certain point though, these practices became unacceptable.

My fathers motto was “children should be seen and not heard”. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that growing up. My whole being rejected it. Hated the cruelty and unfairness of it.

In his own humanity, he just had a very low threshold for outward displays of emotion. He didn’t know how to comfort or cope with my feral side. Which was clearly at odds with my process.

So I was punished and shut away when I expressed anything but stoicism to something unpleasant. Something my body couldn’t swallow.

After years of being shut away in my room for shedding tears, a silent scream began to build. My body curled in on itself. And it all got locked inside.

It was as if each unexpressed rupture had put down roots, grew shoots of ghost pipe, and a complex network of multilayered trauma sprouted where I should have been.

This left me exiled from my body, writhing in physical pain, struggling to paint on a smile each morning.

It was as if I existed in a state of suspension, hovering just above the gates of the underworld. Too afraid to drop down, paralyzed by the fear of the great below, but likewise, I had no idea how to stand up again.

Finally, the bough that held me broke. I knew I had no choice but to just let go, drop to the bottom. And let the monsters feed on the outer shell that imprisoned me.

What I’ve learned in my evolving relationship to that persistent lament is that every rupture, every emotion with depth, has a sound and a shape.

I’ve met mythological monsters, and creatures that leapt from the pages of our comic books along my inner sojourn.

Somewhere along the River Styx, I remembered how to animate, to give voice and expression, to all of the silent screams, and beasts of burden that lived on the inside.

While I love writing, and do my best to use my pen to illuminate what lives in the veiled recesses of our experience. It doesn’t quite capture, in full poetic justice, the landscape of psyche.

The concepts resist getting pinned down with words. Words just seem to make what I’m pointing too, smaller. More flat, and two dimensional.

Anyone who has braved the wilderness of soul can attest to what I mean.

Psyche lives and expresses itself in a world that exists beyond language.

In a training workshop in my twenties, the leader asked us to create collages that didn’t include words.

Instead we were to capture the frequency of what stalked us. Of what lived in the cracks and crevices, beyond the rational mind. She asked us to find representations for flying monkeys that populated our field.

It was at that workshop I was first introduced to the creatures that haunted, and imprisoned me. Where I first looked them in the eye. Was able to personify them. And thus able to build a connection to them.

I’ve found, it’s The myth of normality, the pressure to conform, can both literally and/or metaphorically devour us.

And The work that allows us to animate the more than human feelings that lurk in the dark, that assists us connecting, relating, and befriending our demons and what grows in the shadows, is the journey to the Underworld and back again.

This journey takes all of our vestments of worldly power. Our attachments, and coping strategies that appeared to keep us safe, but in reality imprisons us.

Removes every worldly possession of false power, until we are naked and bowed low, before the trickster deity of “living death”. Her name is Mother of Paradox.

She targets our ossifications, ravages where we are crystallized, feasts on our “petty tricks”. She strips us of our notions around purity and perfection. Until there is no card of strategy left to play.

She leaves us to revel in her cosmic joke, that all of the power and control structures we’ve invested in, all of the ideas of safety, and security, that we thought gave us power to play like the God’s, have in actuality, incarcerated us.

That authentic empowerment comes when we surrender fully to the truth of the moment. When we open and allow evolutionary eros, the power of the big gods, to move through us.

After we are annihilated and spit out from the mouth of the devourer, we are ready to rise again.

What is described here is an Underworld Journey of Epic proportions.

It’s an attempt to reclaim the exiled self.

Why do I mention this now?

All of this comes up as Venus is just about to dip below the Horizon, making her own Underworld journey through December 2nd. She embarks on her own sojourn to meet her Trickster Sister Eris (Erishkagal) in the Underworld. It is a time when love feels distant. And trauma triggers blare their signal, begging to be explored.

It helps to have a guide. To travel with someone who can see in the dark.

Because while parts of the Underworld journey sound univiting, there are specific energetics to the cycle that can make the journey *a little less* unpleasant, and definitely more profound.

I have been passionate about guiding the top to bottom cycle in the form of Venus/Inanna’s Myth for the last decade.

So…

Come on a journey with me to the Underworld…

You are going anyways as Venus vanishes on the far side of the sun. Might as well not go it alone…

More details to come, sign up for updates on UNDERWORLD below.

I incarnated for this work.

All “black sheeps” do to some extent.

We tend to absorb the most trauma from our family systems, yet are the least tolerant of it.

The black sheep carries trickster medicine.

Trickster medicine breaks up crystallization & ossification in the mind, body, & systems. 

If one feels entombed by society’s expectations, it’s time to bring our inner trickster archetype online.