Here in the US, it is the time of year when people fill their yards with Halloween decorations, skeletons with scythes, werewolves, cauldrons, crows, ravens and of course, witches are everywhere. The leaves are reaching their peak beauty, before descending to the ground, to decay and become the fertile nourishment needed for the next cycle of life. There is no greater metaphor to remind us that we are approaching the season of death, the season that invites us to transform.
Harvest time, where we gather all that has reached it’s ripeness, is the end of the growth cycle. Just like the bounty of nature, we stand in our glory, radiance and beauty and begin to reflect back all the parts of self and lay a fertile bed for a new cycle to begin. As the veils thin we also come back to our roots, both our human ancestors and cosmic lineages.
The introspection of this time, inviting a settling in our bones, prepares us to be more sensitive to the messages that will come from beyond the veil. As we pay homage to our ancestors, we can open to a line of communication, that offers insight into what needs to be healed within our lineages, what we inherited, what wisdom we lost touch with and what gifts still hide away that were forced into suppression generations ago.
The thinning of the veils to the ‘OtherWorld’, leaves promise that we can tap into the Galactic origins of our nature as well. As we die to the preconceived idea that we can never know who and what we truly are, what comes forward are the parts of our being that are ‘Beyond Human.’ The higher dimensional aspects of Self and the Cosmic Beings who reside on the other side are available to access.
When we surrender to the darkness we can access ourselves as beings of dancing light, bound to matter only through breath. We can open up to the communication that comes from beyond the Beyond and receive information that could never come from the books and educational processes we study. We get to harvest those gifts and bring them into the slumber of hibernation in the long winter nights to be birthed into action of spring.
So the ‘season of death’ really is about renewal and teaching us embrace the unknown transition states through surrender and curiosity, in order to be reborn as something new. For those who are courageously prepared, we accept this with the anticipation that in that surrender comes to potential for this ‘otherworldly knowledge’.
This season directs us towards what is hidden, as we direct our attention to what what lies beyond and beneath the surface. We tap into the mysteries that lead us to wisdom. This invitation is where we ask for light to be cast upon the darkness and bring forth the shadows.
When we neglect to honor this time of year as a time to confront shadows, we are more susceptible to spiritual bypassing. This happens when we limit our spiritual practices to those that fear the darkness and overemphasize light, when we forsake the archetypal and physical realms and seek only to extend our energy out, we miss the balance. To uncover what is hidden we become a greater vessel to hold the revelation of the great mysteries. The vital process of bringing the unconscious into consciousness that is the yoking of light and dark; the union of opposites and alchemy itself.
This dark portal is exactly where we meet the Goddess; and this is exactly why she has been so misunderstood and repressed within our civilizations in the first place. When the ‘great mysteries’ and ‘the journey of descent’ were suppressed in our cultures, we moved from civilizations that celebrated the direct access of wisdom, to cultures that over emphasized rational linear thinking and transcendence as the supreme spiritual path only accessible by a few. The Mysteries became synonymous with blind faith, rather than intimate union. Wisdom became synonymous with the one who had the power to decipher the texts and not an ‘embodied knowing.’
The Goddess, still correlated with night and the moon, has always been about the mysteries that are only revealed through darkness. This is the season where ‘She” is the embodiment of ‘the dark goddess’, enticing us to go into the deepest, darkest shadow layers of self, in order to bring forward the re-awakening and renewal. She calls out from the underworld, from the depths of our psyche and the far reaches of her cosmic womb space, to retrieve the hidden treasures and vows to support us as we find our way navigating ‘the cave of darkness’.
This season is also the territory of the Elders and the Crone, before she was subjugated to the evil witch, scary, ugly, gnarly hag, shriveled and weak. In ancient times the Crone held a status of deep respect and honor, one that guides us into the darkness and out into the light.
The Crone draws her power from ‘direct experience’. She will illuminate and guide the way if we are humble enough to lay at her feet, let go of our adolescent tendencies, and confront the unknown. She holds the totality of the triple Goddess, as she has already gone through the initiations of Maiden and Mother, so she pushes us with authority, to confront any wounds within ourselves. She teaches through symbols and lessons, rather than telling us what to do. The Crone will not undergo the challenge for us, she will chaperone and hold the torch as we take the steps.
This time of year is also correlated with the Eleusinian Mysteries, the rites of Demeter and Persephone. It is considered one of the greatest mystery cults of ancient Greece and the West. Demeter is the Goddess of Harvest and September is when the ancient ritual was reenacted and Persephone takes initiation of descent into the depths. Those who participated in the ‘secret rites’ of the mysteries considered this time of ‘Descent’ as the greater esoteric initiation, while the time of her ascent, celebrated in spring, was the preparation for the deep journey she undergoes in autumn.
Many of you who have followed my work tracing the Goddess might remember that while the famous story of the ‘abduction of Persephone’ is most commonly understood, when we trace the Goddess back, we begin to see that Persephone was never raped or abducted…she went willingly (Spretnak, 1992).
The call of the ‘Souls’ trapped in the Underworld was too powerful and moving, she just couldn’t ignore it. In earlier versions, she laid upon a rock in the late summer sun with Demeter stroking her hair, reveling in connection and pleasure. She knew she had to answer the calling. So she proclaims to her Mother that she must go and that she will indeed return in the spring (1992).
As righteous and courageous as this is, it is important to emphasize that there are certain alliances that ‘the maiden’ had intact in order to make this journey successfully. Besides the embodied love and connection to her mother, Demeter, she also had the Crone. Hecate guided her on this journey, ushering her through the darkness, so she could make this great transition. With that support and resiliency, Persephone was able to die to herself as Kore (daughter) and be reborn as Queen of the Underworld.
While Persephone is most associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries, this Queen of the Underworld has ushered souls for generations prior, as one who will take your hand tenderly and lead you through the dark night where we can access Wisdom (Kingsley,1999).
Traveling further back on the timeline we can find the roots of this myth and these initiations in the foundations of the venerable ancient Egypt as well. Nut, the Mother of the Gods, who’s body is the Milky Way itself, swallows Ra the sun god every night. At night, Ra surrenders to the darkness and primordial abyss of the divine feminine powers and magic and is offered renewal and regeneration.
We know the distortion fields imposed upon humanity and the great rift of the Divine God and Goddess have left us starved for this Gnosis and there is a great surge in ‘spiritual awakening,’ paths to ascension, and creating the ‘New Earth.’ Yet we cannot truly begin to bring humanity into a a new ‘golden age’ while bypassing the essential restorative process of ‘descending into the darkness’.
By calling in a more numinous connection to the Crone, to the Dark Goddess and the Decent into the Underworld, we not only open to an opportunity to heal ourselves on a neurophysiological level, psychological and archetypal level, but on a cosmological level. We take part in the evolution of the living mythos that yearns for renewal and reconciliation through the alchemical process of joining opposite polarities together. We don’t evolve without bringing darkness and light together.
In the collective consciousness the imprint of guilt, fear, shame, inferiority, subordination and insignificance to name a few, still exist. Many of us still struggle to claim our worthiness. There is an element of fear, defeat and people-pleasing that left in our shadows creates a confusion in regards to how we express and embody the ‘Totality of the Feminine’. There is a shadow in our Masculine that still pervades many aspects of our lives, including our spiritual teachings.
The revisioning and retrieval of these myths and symbols through our inner work and collective participation reminds us that like Persephone, we must strike out on our own path, stop defining ourselves by our comforts, confront our fear of the unknown, leave our familiarity, and answer the calling that resides deep in our heart so we too can embody and serve our ‘Soul Mission’.
Let’s face it, on a collective level we still have a stigmas lying in the nuances of our psyche. We are afraid of aging, we fear surrender, we still refer to a mean woman as ‘a witch,’ we still limit Persephone to the goddess of sexual liberation, and we still define ‘spirituality’ as ascension without acknowledging the vital importance and ancient understanding of ‘the descent’.
When I first began to understand descent, I saw this only in association to trauma. Yes, clearing trauma truly is about reclaiming oneself from the depths of the Underworld. Yet as my research and guidance progressed, what I was led to understand is that in ancient times the journey of Descent was a ritualistic, esoteric rite that one prepared for and undergone voluntarily, some utilizing plant medicines, incubation chambers, ritual dance and movement, and the darkness of the holy cave space.
This was a fabric of all feminine-based societies and is essentially where Philosophy derived from. The Love of Sophia, ‘Wisdom’, meant preparing oneself for initiation into ‘the Cave Space’ of Darkness. For instance, holding the hand of Persephone and going through the death and rebirth portal, guided by the chariot, one was given direct access of wisdom. These ‘Dark Places of Wisdom’ are what our Western Civilization, as well as modern medicine and politics were built upon (Peter Kingsley, 1999).
This season can open a conversation and intention to retrace these ancestral lineages, to gain more understanding of how we too can tap into the benevolent truth of the Cosmic Covenants that were and will be the fabric of our enlightened societies.
So let us use this as a ‘Call’ to Reclaim the Dark Goddess and reinstate her to rightful Glory and Guidance. Let us explore and embrace the deeper aspects of our spiritual nature and ‘Soul Embodiment.’ Most importantly, as we all witness the deterioration of our political systems, let us begin to consider this understanding of descent and darkness as an opportunity to thread us back to the places we need to seed and contemplate, in order to retrieve the wisdom needed to build and revive the great societies we envision.