Eating Patriarchal Evil with Kali

on The Duty of Withdrawing Projections in Times of War and Conflict

In the myth of Kali, the dark Hindu goddess of death and transformation, the patriarchal demons have gone mad, drunk on power and destruction. None of the goddess forms is able to stop them, they have grown so large and out of control that they are indeed set to destroy the entire creation. It is at this moment that Kali is born out of the already powerful Durga; this crone goddess, dark as coal appears with a lolling tongue, eyes wide and a sickle in the hand she starts to slaughter and behead the demons. But, this seems to only make matters worse as for every blood drop that is shed, a thousand demons emerge once it hits the soil. The demonic patriarchal powers multiply beyond control. The only solution is to "eat the blood" before it hits the ground. And so, Kali does exactly that. As she beheads, she eats the evil, takes it inside herself to save creation from total destruction. 

This moment in the myth, the image of the blood drops, creating a thousand more demons every time it hits the soil, has come to my mind many times as I watch the news and horror of destruction and war, suffering and killing in the Middle East. The blood spilled for the sake of revenge, power or total annihilation of a perceived enemy. And every time this blood is spilled, a seed of hatred is sown into the world soul. The demons only multiply and multiply during war. No enemy is eliminated, no villain is killed with the shedding of blood.  

kali’s wisdom

What then, does this moment in the myth teach us? After 6 years of working with the Kali myth in-depth with my colleague Gauri Raje, and seeing the myth expand and flesh out in our psyches as well as the women we have worked with, we come to a moment in history where more than ever the myth is played out on a global stage. Psychologically, it does not matter on whose "side" you stand in the Middle Eastern war (even though it will matter very much politically and socially). But for the psychological burden on each of us, it does not change; on either side there is a perceived demon, an enemy that needs to be destroyed and eliminated. The Kali myth teaches us that eliminating evil, killing evil only breeds more evil. The spilling of blood makes fertile ground for bitter seeds of hatred to grow in the human heart that, over time turn the tree of life into a tree of death. What Kali teaches us then, is that we must take it in. We must eat the blood of the demon. We cannot project evil to the other and "eliminate" it. We must take back the projection and take it in, become part of its ecology, so to say. Herein then lies the great capacity for compassion; for only when we have tasted our own shadow and evil, can we contribute to the healing of the world soul from the destructive and tyrannical powers of revenge, oppression and destruction. Kali as goddess and archetypal force wields a sword; she kills what is destructive and evil. But much like a bodhisattva, she then takes it in, she eats evil in order to contain it in the black void of her body. This comes with a price as she then becomes totally drunk on her own power, or perhaps this mad power she swallowed now takes possession of her. After a furious dance battle with Shiva, it is only—and finally—the force of compassion and mercy—her impetus for tenderness and nurturance—for a Shiva-turned-infant that can calm her down and bring her, and the world soul, back into balance. 

The crone goddess Kali eats the Asura demons with her lolling tongue

Psychologically, this means that there is a great burden on us all as we witness the unfurling of a world in conflict and war. Each of us who has the consciousness and ability has to take in one droplet of this evil, has to swallow it and make it our own; that is, to take back the projections we have cast on the "other" and weave ourselves back into the ecology of what has become rejected and evil within ourselves. By this great act of compassion, we begin the task of ceasing the destructive powers of a droplet of blood. This is no easy task as the average wo/man will find it difficult to imagine that the evil they witness on the world stage is part of us, and is living in the dark basements of our own psyche. This is why Jung said as he did in this now famous quote: "The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.” Unless we take back the projections of the "barbaric other", the world soul will continue to suffer alone, and this great time of transition will be lost to modern wo/man's vanity and ignorance.

““The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our own shadow onto others.””

— Carl Jung

Numinous Experiences of the Feminine: in Conversation with Anne Baring

by Anne Baring & Faranak Mirjalili

This dialogue between Anne Baring and Faranak Mirjalili dives deep into the mysticism of the Feminine, and what the importance is of experiencing the Godhead as ‘She’ in a time when the emergence of the feminine principle is of vital importance.

Books mentioned and recommended in the talk:

Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God Vol. 3, by Joseph Campbell (1964)
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy by Victor Watts (trans.) (2000)
Sophia: Aspects of the Divine Feminine Past and Present, by Susanne Schaup (2004)

TRANSCRIPT

Faranak:  Dear Anne, let’s dive right in and start with definitions. How would you define a spiritual or as Jung would say a ‘numinous’ experience?

Anne: It is something that happens unexpectedly, unusually, out of the blue. It may happen in a dream. It might be a visionary dream or it might be something that just happens to people as they're walking along the street or cooking their lunch or whatever.
A sudden insight comes, a sudden opening of the door into another dimension. And then they may hear a voice or they may even speak with that voice, whatever it might be, or it may be a message, a direct message telling them to do this or that. I can't really define it because it's very broad. There are many kinds of spiritual experiences that people have had. 
Many people have them when they go out into nature, in the woods. Like David Attenborough, he says, "go and just sit in nature and you will hear and see things that you didn't hear or know before." So on many levels, you get this experience of a deepening consciousness or an opening consciousness to another reality or a deeper reality than the one we're living in or seeing deeper into this reality, perhaps.

Faranak:  In your book The Dream of the Cosmos, you share your dream of the cosmic woman as a profound dream and guiding experience for your life's journey and research. Would you say this was a numinous, or sacred experience? Can you tell us a little bit more about this?

 Anne:  Yes, absolutely, no question about it because it was. I've never had a dream like that before or since. It was definitely something coming to me from the universe, which I took as a message telling me what I needed to do. And it had nothing to do whatsoever with the religion, with Christianity which I was brought up in.
It was a vision of a cosmic woman, possibly the way people in the past have had a vision like Apuleius had the vision of Isis, for example. It was that kind of experience completely out of the ordinary, completely revelatory, and visionary. It was a vision.

Faranak:  What would you say gave this experience a numinous feeling, compared to other dreams or experiences of a feminine figure that may have inspired you? Could you define the difference?

Anne:  The difference is that it was a vision of a woman that I couldn't associate with any specific goddess. I thought; is this Demeter, is it Aphrodite? Is it Isis? But none of those fitted what I was seeing. So it came absolutely unexpectedly out of the blue. And eventually, I associated it with the feminine aspect of God, not in the Christian tradition but in Kabbalah.
Because I was led to that tradition and the Shekinah of Kabbalah was the only image or the only word that fitted the power of that experience. It wasn't a goddess. It was something far beyond a goddess, it was the universe itself speaking in feminine mode.

 Faranak:  So it did in a way eventually lead you to a lost or hidden religious tradition one could say?

Anne:  Well, it isn't really lost but it's one that isn't very well known in the West. In the West, we're more familiar with Christianity. I think Jewish people know of it possibly if they're interested, if they're drawn to the mystical aspect of their own religion, they will know about it. And it's taught all over the world. And I had a teacher in England called Warren Kenton years ago, whom I studied with. So it's not something that's unknown but it's something that isn't well known, put it that way.

Faranak: In your book, you show the reader throughout the book how the loss of the lunar ‘participation mystique’ and this shamanic connection to nature and the feminine has damaged the very fabric of life and the World's Soul. Do you think that this disrespect and violence against the feminine and nature has also distorted and ruined the inner images of feminine deity and our ability to experience Her in these more numinous or divine images?

 Anne:  Well, I think that Christians have the Virgin Mary to fulfil a certain aspect of the divine feminine but they certainly have lost the feminine aspect of deity; all the patriarchal religions have lost that. And it was that that connected us to nature, because the ancient goddesses, particularly goddesses like Isis and Artemis of Ephesus, represented not only nature but the whole of the cosmos. And this is something we completely lost.
We have no connection with the cosmos. We may have a connection through the Virgin Mary with an image but she is not a deity and she's not the feminine aspect of the divine as far as I can understand. Although she has been raised to that in the Catholic religion in 1950 and 1954; she was raised to the level of the male deity but people don't know about that.
They don't know about the Papal Bull in 1950 and the Encyclical of 1954 which made her "Queen of Heaven." So she has had restored to her the ancient title that Isis held; Queen of Heaven and also Inanna before her was Queen of Heaven. So that does help but still, a big thing is missing which is the connection to nature. And also the sacredness of nature that has gone completely and needs to be brought back.

 Faranak:  Because in the Christian thought there's still the elevation of the heavens above nature. So when she is put up into the heavens the question is, is she then detached from earth and seen as above it?

Anne:  Well, she was taken up body and soul so the body was included there, but not the whole of nature. So you'd really have to go into the theology of it I think to understand it better. But on the other hand, Pope Francis in his Encyclical of 2015, absolutely rescued nature from the oblivion in which it has existed for a very long time. He restored it to its sacredness and that was a tremendous thing to do.
And I'm really tremendously grateful to him for doing that. It's a long Encyclical but it's full of wisdom and full of reproach that we have neglected our relationship with nature and haven't treated it properly. So he understands at a deep level what's happened.

Faranak:  What I wonder is if I look at the experience that you had and other experiences of contemporary women, like the ones I've had with the Persian Goddess Anahita is; do we need these documentations so that we are able to even perceive Her? Let me ask it in this way: if all the images have been wiped out, where does our imagination find space to receive these images of Her? Has the wiping out of her sacred texts and her temples also damaged our imagination and ability to perceive Her in the imaginal realm?

Anne:  Yes. I think I would absolutely agree with that. It has damaged the imagination. That's a very good phrase because we have no image that we can connect with which brings nature and the cosmos into one figure, one divine figure. So we haven't got anything that we can start with as it were. We have to go just finding as I have with these ancient descriptions of visions that people had, that have been a great help.
And I put them into my book, The Divine Feminine, I brought the vision of Apuleius of Isis. And of course, people did have visions and many more visionary experiences. The Egyptians certainly did, the Greeks certainly did, the Sumerians did. So really we're a culture that is bereft of visionary experience. It's missing. So there isn't anyone who can say, "Oh, so-and-so had a vision of something the other day, we can all discuss this and share it and pass it around through the internet."
There is in Marion Woodman's work, there are dreams that she brings of the Black Madonna that people have had. So that was something Jungians would know about for instance, but nobody outside the Jungian circles would know that people were having these visions of the Black Madonna. And if I hadn't put my vision into my book, nobody would know of my vision. It is a tremendous vision that changed my life, absolutely.

Faranak:  So these images of the feminine that are retrieved and restored and shared, they actually can start to heal the damaged imagination.

Anne:  They could and possibly if we listen to children who might have visions of the Virgin Mary which indeed they've had, they have been paid attention to, and the visions of Fatima in Portugal and Medjugorje in Yugoslavia they've been recorded. So there has been something but it hasn't spread beyond the Catholic population.

 Faranak:  This brings us to the second part of the interview which I've divided into three parts. It's about the importance of experiencing God or deity as feminine. So firstly, what do you think the importance is for a woman to experience God as feminine?

Anne:  Well, I think it's very important because then she can understand, as I did, that she is made in the image of the divine feminine. She can see her body as a manifestation of the divine feminine in this material dimension of experience. So I think it would be a tremendous help if she had one as I did, or other women have had them, perhaps we don't know. It's a tremendous anchor in a world where we really don't know what we're doing, why we're here.

Faranak:  Yeah. And what do you think the importance is for a man to experience this feminine side of deity?

 Anne:  I think it's equally important for a man because men have been brought up with the monotheistic image of God for nearly 3000 years or two and a half thousand years if you include the Judaic tradition, that's a long time to be imprinted with the image of only a male God or the male aspect of deity. So I think it's absolutely essential that men also have this experience with the feminine aspect of deity and that it is numinous for them.
It will be almost shocking that this is something that they've neglected and they haven't realized that they carry this feminine aspect of life within their own nature, what Jung called the anima, they have the anima within their nature.

 Faranak:  So when you say shocking, why do you say shocking?

Anne:  Well, it would be a shock to many men to discover that this is a sacred image and they had never thought of it before in that way, possibly. And so it's shocking in the sense that it's unusual, strange, different.

Faranak:  That it evokes something.

Anne:  And it will stir something in them or get them to ask questions possibly, or make a relationship with this image and ask that image what it wants of them, why is it appearing to them.

Faranak:  There have been men in the past, as you shared with me before that have had these experiences. Would you like to talk about one of them in particular that has touched you?

Anne:  Well, they've all touched me really. First of all, there's a very ancient one, 2000 BC of a King in Sumeria who had a dream. And he went to the temple of the goddess and asked the goddess to give him the explanation of the dream. And she gave it to him and she told him that he was to build a temple. And in the dream, he had an image of a donkey carrying material for building and she said the donkey is you. You're carrying the material and you have to go and build a temple to my brother, the God Ningirsu.
So that was a lovely dream to come down all this time. And that's recorded in Joseph Campbell's book; Occidental Mythology. He's a fantastic chronicler of history so one always finds something there. And then there was Apuleius' vision of Isis and Apuleius was an Egyptian that was living in the second century of the Christian era. Who lived, I think in Rome, who was is an initiate the Mysteries of Isis. And he writes this, such a beautiful description.

 He writes: "The apparition of a woman began to rise from the middle of the sea with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it. First the head, then the whole shining body gradually emerged and stood before me poised on the surface of the waves. Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brows, shone a round-disc like a mirror or like the bright face of the moon which told me who she was.
Vipers rising from the left hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disc, with ears of corn bristling beside them. Her many-coloured robe was of the finest linen; part was glistening white, part crocus yellow and part glowing red. And along the entire hem, a woven bordure of flowers and fruit clung swaying in the breeze. But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black lustre of her mantle.
She wore it slung across our body from the right hip to the left shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield. But part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hand and everywhere else and in the middle, beamed a full and fiery moon. On her divine feet were slippers of palm leaves, the emblem of victory. And these are the words that she spoke to him.”

 "I am nature, the universal mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My nod governs the starry heights of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes and the dreadful silence of the world below. Though I am worshipped in many aspects and known by countless names and propitiated with all manner of different rights yet the whole round earth venerates me."
Now that was something, if you had a vision like that, what would you do?

Faranak:  I know…this is mind blowing on so many levels.

Anne:  Yes. And she speaks as a cosmic…

Faranak:  Authority, really.

Anne:  Authority, total authority, "the whole round earth venerates me." She's no mean little tiny goddess there.

Faranak:  And she's not bound to the earth. She is the axis of the entire creation here.

Anne:  Exactly, she is. She speaks from the divine centre of the universe. And what it did to him, it's very funny what she told him to do because he was in the form of an ass at this time when he had the vision. And he was very worried that he'd never go back to his human form. And she told him to go and stand in the procession and to watch the high priest who would be carrying a garland of roses. I think he had the vision after he had been changed back from an ass into a man, not before, so this paragraph needs changing a bit.
And Apuleius was to rush up to the priest and take a big bite out of the garland of roses. And if he did that, he would be changed back into his mortal form. So he did this and of course, he changed back into a completely naked man. And he had to be covered with a cloak but he describes the bliss of chewing these rose petals and feeling himself changed back from an ass into a human being, into a man.
I mean, that was so thrilling and so exciting and described so beautifully in his book that one can't help laughing because it must've been a very funny spectacle. The high priest was horrified and shocked and then amazed at what was happening in front of him. And all the people in the crowd were stunned….what an experience for everybody!

Faranak:  The sense of humour says something about the nature of the goddess…

Anne:  It's very grounded, absolutely grounded.

Faranak:  I was also wondering what you thought about the description of the goddess; ‘the finest linen, the glistening white, the crocus yellow’ it's all very sensuous.

Anne:  It is, and very vivid and you could almost touch it. You can feel the quality of the robe in the finest linen of the robe and then her black over mantle.

Faranak:  Exactly and that really, this evokes the senses really. It brings the senses and the imaginations to life when one reads a vision like that. It does something to the senses internally as if flowers are popping out of one's imagination.

Anne:  Yes, I think absolutely. And with the vipers supporting this disc above the head and everything, and that's very brilliant imagery, very careful description really. And it's exciting for the body to be included because it's about the bodily form of the flowers and nature, everything is included there. Nothing is left out and she's even got glittering stars on the hem.

Faranak:  I think that if we speak of loss of images and the damage that is done to our imagination if the senses, the body and the earth have always been condemned as a place of evil, whereas if you read this, there's nothing evil about this.

Anne:  No, there is nothing fallen, nothing sinful, nothing bad about this at all. This is glorious!

Faranak:  Exactly.

Anne:  And that really excites the imagination because the imagination is part of all of this  — to be able to describe what is coming from this man's imagination. And he's seeing it with his imagination if you like. And I think there's a wonderful alchemical saying; “Imagination is the star in man”— a beautiful saying. 
It really is our starry body possibly, the imagination.

Faranak:  Yes, beautiful. Let’s continue with the next historical experience you wanted to share with us.

Anne:  The next one is quite different. It comes from a wonderful scholar called Boethius, who lived at the beginning of the sixth century of the Christian era. And he had been taken prisoner by a barbarian emperor called Theodoric. And he was waiting in the cell for his execution. He was very depressed as you would be if you were waiting for your execution and he was crying I think, and mourning that his life was coming to an end. 
And then suddenly he says this in the manuscript that was called The Consolation of Philosophy. And God knows how it got out of that prison cell intact because it's five whole books of writing…it's a lot of writing. Anyways he says this, "while I was quietly thinking these thoughts over to myself and giving vent to my sorrow with the help of my pen, I became aware of a woman standing over me.
She was of an awe-inspiring appearance, her eyes burning and keen beyond the usual power of men. She was so full of years that I could hardly think of her as my own generation. And yet she possessed a vivid colour and undiminished vigour. It was difficult to be sure of her height. For some time, she was of average human size while at other times she seemed to touch the sky with the top of her head. And when she lifted herself even higher, she pierced it and is lost to human sight.
Her clothes were made of perishable material of the finest thread woven with the most delicate skill. And later she told me that she had made them with her own hands. Their colour was obscured, however, by a kind of film as if with long neglect like statues covered in dust. On the bottom hem, could be read the embroidered Greek letter Pi and on the top hem, the Greek letter Theta. Between the two, a ladder of steps rose from lower to the higher letter.
Her dress had been torn by the hands of marauders who had each carried off such pieces as they could get. And there were some books in her right hand and in her left hand, she held a sceptre. Tears had partly blinded me and I could not make out who this woman of such imperious authority was. I could only fix my eyes on the ground, overcome with surprise and wait in silence for what she would do next.
She came closer and sat down on the edge of my bed and I felt her eyes resting on my face, which was downcast and lined with grief.” And she began to speak to him at great length explaining things that were perplexing him really going deep into philosophy, and explaining why evil exists, for example. 

I can't go into it, it's too long because there are five books but this book had a tremendous influence on the  so-called dark ages. And his book was particularly valued by Charlemagne, in Charlamagne's court. So this is another visionary experience just when he perhaps expected nothing, except the jailer coming to fetch him for execution.
And he had this marvellous vision, which was so powerful that it influenced 300 or 400 years of people who were searching for wisdom themselves. And she was called ‘Philosophia' but really she is Sophia or Divine Wisdom—that's who she was speaking to him.

Faranak:  Extraordinary vision, again, amazing images.

Anne:  A very powerful vision. And again, it says that her dress had been torn by the hands of marauders. So his time, nobody really bothered anymore with Wisdom.

Faranak:  Covered in dust.

Anne:  Covered in dust, like statues covered in dust and yet her robe was woven with the most delicate skill. So there again, you get the imagination working and you'll get the physical image on the touch of the material almost like you did in Apuleius' vision. It's very real, very present. And many artists did pictures of it which got into the Books of Hours and things like that.
I've always loved that. I've known about that since I was 20 and I've looked over my bookshelves for it, for the book. And it's a very small penguin book that looks like this.

Faranak:  That's an image of the vision. Yes. Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.

Anne: . I found it on one of my shelves finally, after about two hours of looking because I hadn't looked at it for many years until you asked me to bring up these visions.

Faranak:  Thank you. It’s extraordinary. I think I was wondering what you thought of what he meant by the fact that “she made her garment with her own hands”…that was so touching. 

Anne:  Well, she would do if she is 'Divine Wisdom', she would be making the fabric of life including her own robe. Yes, she would be doing that.

Faranak:  I like that because if we think of the idea of God as a male ‘creator deity’ who created the creation including the feminine—this vision goes against that as she says “I created it with my own hands".

Anne:  Yes, exactly.

Faranak:  It does go counter to that idea of God, the creator, here we see the goddess as the creatrix, even of her own robe.

Anne:  Of her own robe. Yes. That's very clever that you should pick that up.

These are tremendous visions and they lasted for a very long time. I think Boethius had his about 300 years after Apuleius, not very long really. And then we have a great gap really. And right away we have Hildegard of Bingen in the Christian tradition. And we have the people like the Beguines; people who had withdrawn from society and were really mystics.
And we have Jacob Boehme who was an incredible visionary and whose work I learned from.

Anne:  Yes. I didn't know until I listened to the Embassy of the Free Mind, to a very brilliant woman who I think is in charge of the books explaining what happened to Boehme’s works, that they were rescued by a man in the Netherlands who copied the manuscript's word for word and manuscript by manuscript and saved all his work, which would have been destroyed. So it was thanks to a man in the Netherlands. I can't remember his name, I think it began with a B who rescued Boehme’s great works. And imagine him copying them day after day, month after month. 

Faranak:  That's kind of ‘taking the dust off the forgotten images’, isn't it?

Anne:  Absolutely. Yes, and he had a vision of Sophia. That was the great focus of his writing, again the feminine aspect of divinity, although he may not have called her that. I really don't know enough about Boehme to say that.

Faranak:  I wanted us for a moment to look at these images and experiences your shared in a historical framework, perhaps in a more playful way as these are obviously not the experiences humanity has had of the Feminine deity but they are interesting that you’ve chosen to share with us also because of these specific historical moments. For example the last one we just discussed of Boethius is where her image is already in decline, it’s in the dust so to say, there is a grief that comes over him. We could say that this is where the Feminine, Sophia was in decline, she was already ‘fallen’ so to say. When we go back to Apuleius and the vision of Isis, she is in her full glory really, there is nothing sinful or fallen about her. This also goes for the first one you shared of this great King which shows the authority of the goddess; it wasn’t out of the ordinary to receive a vision of the goddess. It wasn’t for everyone, but it was also not something to question I can imagine.

 Anne: Yes. It was expected and anticipated that people would have these visions and that he would be told to build a temple in the dream.

Faranak:  Later with Apuleius she's really in one of her most glorified images. And that might've been around the tipping point…what era is that again?

Anne:  It was about the second century of the Christian era, probably around 180, something like that. 

Faranak:  So that would be the time that the image of the feminine deity starts to decline, really?

 Anne:  Well, probably because it began to be covered up by the Roman gods and goddesses and also by Christianity.

Faranak:  I would like to continue the interview with a next question: What do you think that the importance of experiencing this feminine side of the deity is on culture as a whole or on a specific era?

Anne:  Well, for instance, I'm thinking about the Cathars of the Southwest of France in the 12th and 13th century, their guiding image was Sophia. I don't know whether they had any visions of her but the church was called The Church of the Holy Spirit which is the church of Sophia. And the Troubadours took that teaching all over Europe in the 12th century to every country in Europe because, at the beginning of the 12th century, nobody had heard of the Grail for instance.

And at the end of the century, nobody existed who didn't know about the Grail. So they took the Grail which was a symbol of The Church of the Holy Spirit which gave out love to everyone, gave out the food that was needed by everybody to everybody. So that was a small cultural phenomenon if you like because it was wiped out by the Catholic Church and by the Inquisition.
And the Catholic Church had such power right away from then until the 20th century really, or the 19th century, that it was able to keep this tradition of Sophia absolutely underground. Because it came up again with Boehme, it came up again with the Rosicrucian Enlightenment in the 17th century. You can follow the thread right away from the 13th century up to the 18th or 19th century but the whole thing was underground because of the Inquisition.
It couldn't be brought up into the full consciousness of the culture. So Christian culture has been missing the divine feminine from the point of view of the Godhead, right the way through and that I think is an utter tragedy and is responsible for the mess that we're in now.

 Faranak:  Yes, and we might oversee the importance of keeping alive the existence of the feminine deity that these hidden traditions did. It really is almost like an underground museum keeping the images alive, even if it were a few people who still would be part of the movement. I think that is also really important.

Anne:  Yes, and also the alchemists were part of this whole underground movement because their guiding divinity was Sophia also. So they took that on from the Cathar Church and it carried on right the way through European history. And that came out later on in what came in Hildegard of Bingen for instance, but she couldn't speak the full truth because it would have been heresy to say what she might've seen in her vision but she couldn't actually speak about it. She had to keep it to herself.
But we have the great vision of wisdom that she had there in the Scivias . And then we come on to the Russian Sophiologists which are very interesting, which I really didn't know about until I read this book called Sophia, by someone who's become a friend of mine: Susanne Schaup.

Anne:  Yes. She wrote this marvellous book which I recommend to everybody. And she brings the Russian visionaries which I didn't know about before, who were quite extraordinary really. And one of them, here again, it's coming back. The Russian church has always worshipped Sophia, has always had an image in the great churches and in the icons of Sophia, as a great angel in some of the churches. She's shown as the angel of the apocalypse.
And  this man; Solovyov who lived from 1853 to 1900 had a vision of Sophia at the age of 9. And again, at the age of 20 in the British Library when he was looking at books, he suddenly had this vision of her again. And a final one in Egypt where he went out into the night distress looking for her and fell asleep or fell unconscious and had a vision of her while he was lying there.
And she revealed to him, he says “the abundance of the Godhead, the eternal one” and that vision was never to leave him. And later he described his three visions of Sophia in a long poem, and he paid homage to her as his Eternal Friend, the Mistress of the Earth. It's a lovely title, Mistress of the Earth, the Woman of the Apocalypse and the Queen of Heaven. But then you have a trilogy of marvellous images of Sophia and I wish we could bring Sophia back into our lives really as guiding us now in our return to nature and our return to respect for the life of the planet.

Faranak:  She's also connected there, interestingly to the apocalypse.

Anne:  Yes. She's the woman with the sun with a circle of stars around her head.

Faranak:  What a powerful Trinity; Mistress of the earth, the Woman of the Apocalypse and the Queen of Heaven. 

Anne:   He saw her really as Apuleius saw Isis; as the feminine principle guiding the whole cosmos. She is present within the whole cosmos as the life of the cosmos.

Faranak:  Here, again, the importance of being brought up with images as he has been, in Russian churches, seeing ‘angel Sophia’. We see how important it is that she is represented, even if it's marginal.

Anne:  Yes, I agree. Yes, absolutely because every church he went into, he would have seen her and he would have had perhaps sung hymns to her and things like that, with the priests and with beautiful music.

Faranak:  Exactly. Even if it serves as even a small anchor for these visions to sort of find us or hit the note within us when we do receive her guidance. Because I think that a great loss of these images also creates— instead of revelations of the goddess—perhaps creates neuroses and psychosis for many people instead of being able to receive her.

Anne:  Yes because it's completely shut out. And this ghastly scientific belief that has been guiding Western culture for 300 years says that the whole thing is without any meaning, that the universe has no meaning, no consciousness and that everything starts with our physical brain that has been a disaster for the imagination. It really has, although we've had marvellous images of the cosmos from the Hubble telescope. We have that, thank God which has stimulated the imagination and put us in touch with the cosmos again but we have no image of deity connected with that. And that is a tragedy really. And also we have no image of deity connected with the earth, with mother earth, as the Indigenous people have always retained the image of mother earth. And they pray to her and speak to her as a feminine image.

Faranak:  So there's a question that relates to that and I had written down is; what do you think the influence on the psyche is and cultures when God is referred to as "He" with capital 'H' and perhaps only as "She" with capital 'S' when it's spoken as earth or nature. Because in your vision, you experienced the cosmic woman in the starry cosmos, in the heavens, and the heavens have traditionally been this place of Him, the bearded man sitting on a cloud.
I know in my own experience, as well as the women in my practice that when they have a vision of the feminine in the cosmos, the feminine being—the "She" with capital 'S' in the sky—it makes a huge impact on them to have the heavens not occupied by a Father but by a Mother image. It’s a huge difference for the psyche.

Anne:  Yeah, well, it's very interesting that the "Our Father" prayer was originally an Aramaic one and Jesus or Yeshua as he was called in Aramaic would have spoken the words which were to the Mother-Father of the cosmos, not the Father. In Aramaic, the word used to address the deity was Mother-Father. And of course, Mother got lost.

So we've come down to "Our Father which art in heaven" instead of our Mother-Father or our Father-Mother whichever way you would want to put it. We've lost that feminine element right there in the very biggest, most important prayer. And in Aramaic, it would have been utterly different because the feeling would have been different and the imagination would have been different. The image would have been utterly different.

The Aramaic language is very rich and it goes on for much longer than the Lord's Prayer, — the actual prayer in Aramaic. And it's full of the imagery of nature and the cosmos and everything else really, it included everything. And it worries me a bit that earth is associated with the mother as earth only, instead of the cosmos.

Faranak:  Exactly.

 Anne:  Because it excludes the All and the entirety of the All and this is what Solovyov understood that she revealed to him the Eternal One, which has both male and female. And this is what we have to get back somehow. Susanne Schaup in her book makes this important conclusion in regards to this problem:

  "As long as the feminine is not located in the Godhead itself, as long as it is subservient to God, the creator Sophia cannot act from divine empowerment in her own right. The sacred wedding has to take place within the deity as Hildegard saw but dared not say."

So there we have it really, that is the key to everything. We have to restore the image of both deities to deity.

 Faranak:  Otherwise, she will still remain submissive to 'He' as the ultimate Godhead and 'She' is just creation or just the earth.

Anne:  Exactly, yeah. Going to be associated with the created world but not with the invisible world, the divine world.

Faranak:  Yes. And I think that is really disempowering for the feminine.

Anne:  It is, you're right. Absolutely, dead right, it's disempowering. In my work, it has been to bring back the feminine and yours is as well. So, you know, we're working together on this same goal as it were. Actually, I had a dream last night.
It was about a man and woman who had come to stay bringing a baby with them and they were in a sort of guest suite. And they got up earlier than when I was ready to receive them. And then they were in a car later on, the father had gone off shopping. I was there with the mother and the baby and the woman handed me the baby which was wrapped in swaddling clothes almost completely covered and put it on my left arm.
And I looked down at the baby, it was a little girl. And I said to it, "what a beautiful baby you are." So maybe this is the feminine coming back, it's still infant, you know, it wasn't more than a month old.

Faranak:  Oh, that's sweet image.

Anne:  And she left me for a minute, she'd gone out as well and said, "can you hold the baby while I just go and do something, I'll be back in a minute." And I was worried that I would be left holding the baby and she wouldn't come back for it. That ties in with today's talk without question so it's a lovely dream.
A baby girl and dressed in white with lots of coverings, several layers of white coverings with just her little head buried in the coverings so to speak like a hood.

Faranak:  It's almost like a cocoon.

Anne:  Yes, exactly like a cocoon. That's right. That's the image to go with our talk today.

Faranak:  So going back to our problem and where I wanted to go with my previous question. If humanity is needed in this process, let’s say the final stage of Rubedo; ‘redeeming the cosmos ’, or redeeming the Godhead itself. So humanity needs the Godhead but the Godhead also needs humanity to experience itself, to know itself….

Anne: That’s right, this is what Jung said. The human being needs the god-head but the god-head needs the human being to know itself. Jung understood that God needs man’s help to understand who He/She is.

Faranak:  So perhaps if the Godhead can experience itself as Her, then maybe that will as your friend Susanne writes in her book Sophia, maybe that can restore the incredible imbalance that we have and are experiencing. Because it's the Godhead itself that is missing this experience or that has lost the experience. 

Anne:  Yes. I think that you put your finger on a very, very important point. And I hope this comes through because if that's missing—if a the Godhead doesn't know herself and himself to be the wholeness that we hope He-She could be, how on earth are we going to change anything on the planet?

Faranak:  Exactly, yes. So it brings us back again to this idea—it’s what I live by, as we say in Sufism: “it’s not for us, it's for the sake of the beloved”. So for the sake of the beloved which is also the sake of this world and everything in it, we retrieve this experience of the Godhead itself as feminine so that everything may come into balance. 

Anne:  Yeah, it's important to restore the balance. That's the most important thing and Jung saw this as enantiodromia: when the pendulum has swung too far one way, it's got to come back to the middle. This is what we need to do, bring it back to the focus of the centre.

Faranak:  Yes. So maybe we should be calling the divine feminine not Goddess per se, but God as Her, the divine as Her - to bring back this language that has been one-sided.

Anne: Well, it’s difficult because in other languages you would have the ending of ‘naan’, which in English we don’t have. In French you would say ‘la déesse’ which is a feminine noun.

Faranak:  Yes, we’ll see how the language will want to shift. But I do think it is important because I know personally when I read a book and God is constantly referred to as ‘He’, I get annoyed…it can get under my skin.

Anne: Yes, it’s a habit. It’s a 2000 year-old habit and it can be changed. Because it was changed before into what we have now. We can do the sacred unity, the sacred marriage which is the most important idea to hang on to.

Faranak:  Yes, Him-Her. Well…I think we have come to the end of our interview.

Anne:  Okay. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's been most interesting for me to have somebody to share my thoughts with and to listen to your thoughts. Thank you so much. 

Faranak:  Thank you so much. And I'm sure this is going to be of help to many men and women who are in search of this balance in their experience of the sacred. Thank you so much.

END INTERVIEW

The Tear of Ereshkigal

This poem is a collective effort in the myth-cycle of Inanna-Ereshkigal of our core course Reclaiming the Mythical Feminine - class of 2022. Poem recital by Kate Alderton.

The Tear of Ereshkigal

Listen
from the Great Above
she opens the ear to the Great Below

Open
from the Great Above
whispers
of mist call
to the sorrow of the Great Below

Feel
where sorrow and agony crack
hearts
into unknown depths

Ache
what does the Queen of Death birth?
her barren womb
bears the seed of all life

Surrender
She, the one who knows sacrifice
is sacrificed
is sacrifice,
demands
pulls
longs
deserves
justice of the heart

Tear of Ereshkigal
great is your praise!

Bathe
Drench
Moisten
The salt sharp crystals of life.
Holy Ereshkigal

great is your praise!

The Presence of Story

 by Gauri Raje

The first Indian story I told in public was born out of laziness. For a long time, I resisted telling Indian stories anywhere. I told myself that it felt disingenuous. I was beginning a new life in the UK, a new land. The circumstances of leaving the land of my birth were sad, and I had been unready to leave. But I was not ready to stay back either. Telling stories from India felt untruthful. I lived in that limbo state or a long while.

 Then at a storytelling workshop, after a good lunch, I was given two hours to prepare and tell a new story. I can’t say whether it was the effects of that nourishing lunch or just the warmth of an English afternoon, but my laziness led me to the library and to a section on stories of women. That laziness led me to stretch out my arm and pick a compilation of stories from around the world where women were the central protagonists. I picked them, not because of any idealogical fervour; laziness was seeping through my veins. I picked them because I identified myself as a woman, and so gave myself the entitlement to tell a story of a woman. Not the most auspicious of beginnings.

The story I told that afternoon was nothing like the story of the page of the book I had picked up in the library lazily. It surprised even me - where did those images arrive from? Perhaps the only link might have been that the book stated the story to be from central Maharashtra - the region of my father’s ancestry. I had never visited this place; nor had my father after his childhood and nobody in the family knew if the village still existed or was swallowed up by the urban conglomeration of Mumbai and Pune. There were no images of our ancestral region spoken about in family gupshups. The story I told resonated in my body as I told it. It’s rhythms were easy when I spoke it - and very different from the story I had read. It was a story that grew, shapeshifted and fell back into the story I had told the very first time. Something like a song; a raga - a base skeleton that was fleshed or changed form with every telling. Few stories I had told until that time had such arrivals, growing and departures while staying the same story all the time.

Of course, I was pleased and ego-boosted.

Four years later, I embarked on a journey of finding out more about my family. Most of those from my father’s generation, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles had passed on; I had just my youngest aunt, all of 85 years young, to speak to about any memories she might have had about her parents’ village. She had been 4-5 years old when they visited the ancestral place for the last time, and remembered very little. Personal memories are a very specific reservoir; so I began to enquire about a larger pool of collective memories of the family, stories told in the village as she was growing up.

She did remember a story—something told as a story to her as a child, an anecdote that had happened to her aunt & uncle, my grand-aunt & uncle, and was perhaps a few sibling/cousin lines removed. As she began to tell the story, the contours of a very familiar story arc emerged and magnificently, so did the details of the landscape, chillingly close to my naive descriptions in the story that I had been telling for the past four years in the UK. A family story that had entered collective memory, and then egged on, no doubt by a medium of a colonial pen, found itself into an anthology of English-language stories of women.

My journey with this story raised some interesting questions regarding my relationship with this story. It is well-known that fragments of ancestral memory travel down generations. While there is enough and more literature, and studies available on the transmission of traumatic memories; there is not as much material on the movement of other memories over generations.

Over the many years of storytelling, I have begun to sense a difference between a story told because it fascinates the teller and a story that springs out of the depths of their being. The latter often takes even the teller by surprise. How did they know to say that particular detail? Why does a particular story obsess or haunt a teller, even when they may not like it? Fascination with a story may only be a tip of the memory; at times, it feels too wilful as if breaking into a horse to ride it. I am not sure how much it allows the teller to move with the story, rather than making the story do the teller’s bidding. Through the above example I look at the full circle that a story may make through personal and more historical elements, wherein a personal story enters into collective memory to return to the familial lineage down the generational line.

The story arc about outwitting dacoits is not new. It was a constant and everyday part of the life of those who lived in dacoit-infested regions. Walter Benjamin speaks about the storyteller as one that relies on a bedrock of the ability to share experiences, rather than pass information (1. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’). In other words, a story like the one I mentioned was grounded in not just the sharing of one experience of outwitting dacoits, but multiple such moments. Whether it was multiple incidents that constellated into a story as it passed over many tongues through ages; or there was a seminal incident that created a template for a story to pass over generations is a matter of speculation. It is a matter of storyfy-ing, in a way.

Walter Benjamin also says something really prescient about the assimilation and remembering of stories by individuals and collectives. “This process of assimilation (of story), which takes place deep inside us, requires a state of relaxation....If sleep is the height of physical relaxation, then boredom is that of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience...The more self-forgetful the listener, the deeper what is heard is inscribed in him”. In a world that conditioned to ‘preparing’ and/or ‘rehearsing’, this may seem counter-intuitive. However, there is some truth that Benjamin touched upon—it is often when one is not looking for a story that a story arrives that lodges itself in one’s remembering. This state of boredom becomes the ground for remembering and recognition that is deeply intuitive.

Benjamin’s description also brings to mind the re-membering which is part of the great myth of Osiris & Isis. The myth of Osiris is the archetypal myth of transformation and becoming. It has been known in different oral traditions that during our lifetimes, that which is important may be forgotten; but it never completely disappears. The mind may forget but body memory is not to be taken lightly. Osiris is regarded as the spirit of the soil that animates and regenerates it through creating an awareness of the body. It is through attuning into the body’s rhythms that it is possible to create space for re-membering. Dreamwork, body and art work are ways of moving from everyday rhythms and ordinary time into a deep time and imaginal space that allows tuning into to what might be called inner stories—a realm of forgetting. It allows one to be deeply in a moment rather than in the consciousness of being embodied.

In the myth of Isis & Osiris, the death and dissolution of Osiris repeats a few times. Death is not just a moment, nor is regeneration. Accompanying the passage of Osiris into the underworld is the journey of Isis—his beloved, his sister and wife. Hers is a journey from shock and abandonment into a persistent tending to the search, protection and care of the body of her love, brother and husband. She becomes the mediator between and curator of both the world of the living and the world of the dead. She journeys along the life-blood of Egypt; along the Nile river to recover the dis-membered parts of her husband’s body; and she re-members those parts along with Nephthys, her sister and the Goddess of mourning rituals. It is her labour through mourning and then embalming her husband’s body that curates his journey through to becoming the God of the Underworld. This is her service to death. In the meantime, she also brings up her and Osiris’s child to make him a worthy king of the lands of Egypt, and of the world of the living. This upbringing would have also included re-membering or curating the memory of his father, Osiris to become a young warrior taking on his uncle Seth in battle and defeating him, thereby avenging his father who had been killed by Seth. The circle is now complete, and Osiris can move into his Underworld domain to fulfil his own destiny as Lord of the Underworld.

The myth of Isis & Osiris always reminds me of an important aspect to tending to mythic journeys - the necessity to submit. Isis’s journey of re-membering plays out not only due to her determination; but equally her submission to what cannot be recovered from, literally and metaphorically, the river of time and being. Not all parts of Osiris are recoverable—his phallus is swallowed by the fish of the Nile. Isis re-members Osiris by refashioning his phallus from wood or clay (the versions differ on this). They need to be re-fashioned.

Here is the relationship between forgetting and remembering spelt out—there will be aspects that cannot be recovered with story or storied journeys. Submitting to the forgetting and/or re-fashioning is part of the life of the story.

Re-fashioning can very easily fall into the understanding of innovation in our progress and uniqueness obsessed world. As I worked as a rookie apprentice storyteller, I too cogitated and puffed up my chest in anticipation of how wonderfully I could innovate, and suffered crushing disappointments when I could not. Over time, working on my great-aunt’s story and later, the Osiris & Isis myth, another understanding of re-fashioning began to be, well, re-fashioned.

 Re-fashioning is also the work of maintainance. The maintainance of ritual, like Isis, and the maintainance of the story itself, like my great-aunt’s story. For those of us who have worked with rituals, either grand rituals like marriage, death or making ceremonies or everyday rituals, like doing your yoga practice every morning will know that these are not about the exact replication of actions or processes. As is the way of time, things get lost, go missing, get broken—maintainance, even in ritual, is about finding the elements that will allow the larger sequence of events and the larger narrative to carry on. This is what Isis is doing in re-fashioning the missing phallus. A creation that is a maintainance, that is in service of. This is what happens each time I work with my great-aunt’s story.

Working on a story is, more often that not, traveling with a story as it finds different forms, different layers and facets to the characters within a story. With the story that I mentioned in this essay, it was an experience of working with the story. As the time I spent with the story grew, and the number of times I told it, there were different facets to it that became prominent. Through it, I was learning about relationships within the socio-cultural milieu of the place of the story and its ecology. Knowing that the story was from the Deccan, additionally allowed me to not only research the story but work with the fragments of memory of the place that I had gathered through my father’s and his siblings’ stories and reminiscences. Since that family was no longer living, moments of ‘doing nothing’ allowed fragmented memories to float up. Research follows that bubbling up—initially for verification; later to understand the place and a network of other stories from the place. The story then becomes a portal into meeting a place and people. It is then, as part of this research that my conversations with family about family stories and memories began. 

The telling of this story and getting familiar with the potent moments in the story has been a long journey into understanding the social, ecological and cultural landscape of the story. It gave me a sense of the width and breath of the different characters that inhabited the story. Hence, it was not just about creating the character of a particular type of woman or man or bandit. That arrived as I got to know the different characters of men, women, farmer, bandits or market places that cropped up in the story. Enough to know the ecology of the relationships between characters so that a certain character of a woman or man would not be present in that particular ecological landscape. This is how the story began to arrive for me after the first telling. It then, was a delight to find it recounted as a familial story; however, in its telling it had also become a story of the many people who lived alongside bandits in these villages.

The overlaps between my description of a village I had never visited and my aunts description of our ancestral village is a mystery that continues to remind me that often a story does not have to be worked on, but let it lie within oneself to begin to reveal itself.

References: 

1.Benjamin, Walter. 2019. The Storyteller Essays. New York: New York Review Books.

2. Cavalli, Thom. 2010. Embodying Osiris: The Secrets of Alchemical Transformation. Wheaton: Quest Books.

Through the Gates of Inanna: Birh as Feminine Initiation

by Suzanne Schreve

A year before, almost to the date, a child died in my womb. Now one is being born. I feel the energy in my body change. My uterine muscles no longer contract upwards but ripple down. It catches me by surprise. There comes the second wave. It has started; my womb is pushing the baby out. I feel relief.

When the process of birth shifts from opening the cervix to moving through it, the pain subsides. In mythology, it is the opening of the doors to the underworld that brings the initial suffering. In the myth of Inanna there are seven gates to pass before she completes her descent into the underworld. At each gate the gatekeeper, Neti, beats and strips Inanna of her clothes and jewellery.[i] When she finally arrives at the gloomy queendom of her dark sister Ereshkigal, Inanna crawls on all fours wearing only the dirt on her skin.[ii]

Prima Materia

The mill of the underworld keeps churning until you’re nothing more than husk. It empties those who knock on its door from all false images to the base ingredient, the prima materia, a primal instinctive animal self. Inanna’s stripping down at each gate represents this grinding down of the ego: her earthly persona, any sense of self-identification, any false attachments. It seems that this is what the contractions do in birth before it moves into the ‘pushing’ phase. Most women experience it as painful, an excruciating gut-wrenching horror at the most, or at least as intense. I have heard women describe it as glass shattering in their backs. My first birth literally floored me.

During that first stage of contractions the womb is physically opening a gate and it takes as much strength to open a gate as it does to keep one closed. The womb is the strongest muscle in our body, keeping the cervix shut to safely carry a baby whose average weight at the end of nine months will be 3,3 kg. Add in the placenta and amniotic fluid, the womb holds another 1,5 kg.[iii] By the end of those nine months, the force with which the womb contracts, creates a dynamic change in the woman herself. She has now become the vessel for the womb. Some call it true labour, when contractions last up to 90 seconds every four minutes or so. To hold this force of nature, to be a vessel for it, may require all the capacity you can find in yourself.

When I was pregnant seven years ago, I did not think of this. I watched and read all these wonderful stories about orgasmic tantric birth and quickly decided that that was the birth for me. I made all the preparations to facilitate a cosmic experience of birthing bliss feeling confident I too would enter womb Walhalla. We ordered a home bath. I had a birthing ceremony. There were candles, incense, wind chimes and Tibetan singing bowls. We did tantric breathing exercises, hypnobirthing, perineal massage, and acupressure. At ten pm my waters broke showing blood. I ended up in hospital and forcefully pushed out my daughter seventeen hours later while being hooked up to an oxytocin drip.  

That long night, morning and early afternoon, each contraction pulled on another tightly wrought string of feeling abandoned, scorned, attacked, misunderstood, victimized, and overwhelmed. Throughout most of those seventeen hours, I felt like a wounded animal, and acted like one too. I did not experience bliss, only temporary relief. Just like Inanna who demanded entrance to the underworld, a realm outside her jurisdiction, I too had demanded an experience that wasn’t mine to command. All I could do was endure.

In birth, the increasing strength of contractions­ is the labour of initiation.

Although I thought I had prepared as well as I could have, no one can fully prepare for initiation. You’re not meant to. It is supposed to overwhelm so it can blast away all the congealed misconceptions. If there remains too much familiarity for the ego to hang onto, it will hold the lid on the unconscious, burying both our trash and our treasures.

Door to the Underworld. Clay plaque, Mesopotamia. Isin-Larsa-Old Babylonian period, 2000-1600 B.C. Paris, Louvre.

The physical pain and exhaustion that we experience during labour push us into the deep. The physiological aspects of labour illustrate how physical pain and exhaustion wears down our mental capability. We move into our primitive brain and constellate a flight or fight reaction exhibiting emotions of anxiety, panic, stress, and fear. In Jungian terms, you could also define this as an encounter with the shadow. The typical shadow shows itself in our reactions as primitive, instinctive, fitful, irrational, and prone to projection. It is our dark side, that which we do not want to be nor accept about ourselves, but this can be both something we view as negative or positive. During my first birth, what I experienced was the opposite of what I had ‘envisioned’.

­­­­­­In Inanna’s story, it is her sister Ereshkigal who personifies the shadow. She is the Queen of the Underworld. When Inanna arrives crawling at her sister’s throne, Ereshkigal casts Inanna the eye of death and has her lifeless naked body hung on a hook.[iv] Such symbolic death is indispensable for spiritual life and must be understood in relation to what it prepares; birth to a higher mode of being.[v] Earlier in the story, Inanna had caused the death of Ereshkigal’s husband through an act of inflated egocentric greed and play for power.[vi] Ereshkigal, pregnant and now without her child’s father, acts to remind her arrogant sister of the grounds of earthly being; of grief and loss, of pain and humility.  

While Inanna’s flesh rots away for three days, something remarkable happens. The ego-self represented by Inanna becomes subservient to her shadow sister Ereshikgal, and not without conscious intent. Before Inanna made her descent, she had instructed her consort Ninshubur to call for help if she were to stay away for more than three days. It illustrates a knowing of the underworld tidings and its obscure process of gestation. The killing of Inanna can then be seen as the choice to submit to the organic wisdom of nature. In the rotting of her flesh, Inanna is consumed by the fermenting processes of death. Fermentation converts raw materials into a desirable product that sustains new life. Here Inanna’s body as raw material, or prima materia, is transformed into something useful, into new consciousness. The process requires an active passivity of the ego-self and a submission or acceptance of life ’s circumstances as it is presented in the moment. Instead of fighting whatever comes our way, we heed to the call of the underworld and let it shape us, let it birth us. In this moment of submission, whether made consciously or not, the shadow, which normally acts passively in one’s consciousness, now has the active role of birthing something anew. As Jung says:

“We must…..let things happen in the psyche….This is an art of which most people know nothing. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping correct, negating.”

— C.G. Jung 1958, as cited by Lowinsky 2016)

 While Inanna’s corpse decays, Ereshkigal goes into labour. She leads the way into new life. This is feminine destruction with the purpose of creation, fundamental to the workings of the crone energy that stands firm at each threshold of feminine initiation. Woodman and Dickins (1996) describe this energy as

“the Goddess who gives life is the Goddess who takes life away. . . . we hold the paradox beyond contradictions. She is the flux of life in which creation gives place to destruction, destruction in service to life gives place to creation.” [viii] The crone lends her helping hand only to discard us, testing inner faith; a yielding to build endurance, which allows us to give in even more.

Death and Rebirth

The psychology of initiation finds its roots in these death-rebirth myths, where the archetypal processes of death and resurrection can be utilised in the task of transformation and growth[ix]. In almost every ancient culture you can find a myth of the dying-and-rising God. Isis and Osiris, Persephone and Inanna, but also that of Buddha and Jesus. The death turns into birth story ‘corresponds to a temporary return to the primordial Chaos out of which the universe was born, while ‘rebirth’ corresponds to the birth of the universe. Out of this symbolic re-enactment of the creation myth, a new individual is born.’ (Eliade, 2017)[x] The rituals that re-enact this great shift in cosmic order as a reflection of a shift in consciousness are mainly lost to us. In the West, we are mostly dependent on nature and life to shock us into maturation. Childbirth presents an opportunity of not only initiation, but also one to enter consciously - to a certain extent. You can either work against the tide or go with it.

Where the tide takes you may neither be relevant nor redundant. One of my clients’ wishes for a natural birth took on a different meaning as we explored her dreams during her pregnancy. While she hoped for a birth without medical interference, she also expressed a need to be in the hospital as it made her feel safe since it was her first child. As we worked with the images of the unconscious, she relaxed into the wisdom of her own body and in the medical knowledge of the hospital. She expressed her wishes as much as she could, and as she did so, dream images of power animals, such as lions and horses, became regular visitors. In our last session together before she birthed her baby, she moved into the image of the horse, feeling its strength, walking and standing as the horse, experiencing its clarity while feeling grounded in her body. Her waters broke as she motioned out of the experience. A week later she recounted her story to me. The birth was long and arduous because the cervix did not dilate. When her gynaecologist asked her if she wanted to continue natural labour, she felt herself connect into a clear mode of thinking, much alike she had experienced while ‘being’ the horse. She gave in to what her body told her and asked for a caesarean. As they wheeled her into the operating room, she not only felt present in herself, but surrendered into the loving arms of the four women helping her. She describes the birth of her daughter as miraculous, loving and gracious. She could not have imagined that a caesarean birth would feel so natural. She had surrendered to the tide.

For the birth of my second child, I made similar preparations to my first. We hired a birthing pool, a friend mixed herbals and tinctures. I watched videos with my daughter and reacquainted myself with hypnobirthing. I performed rituals, I received massages, and I took the time to ease into my body. But I didn’t do it with a singular idealistic focus in mind. Pain creates muscle memory and endurance builds character.

This time, I merely followed the currents of my instinct and my dreams as they entwined into consciousness.

Looking back, I watched hypnobirthing videos because my mind needed to know what my body was doing so that when I was in pain, I could marvel at the brilliance of nature’s design instead of sliding into victimization. I watched birth videos with my daughter, both the relaxed ones and those of women screaming in pain, because I wanted both of us to be prepared for birth as it is and as it can be. I went to a massage therapist, because I needed to be touched and my husband simply did not have the time to do it. It was on the massage table that I felt my body become Earth, my thighs her hills, my blood her water. My body was hers and the birth of my daughter my gift back to Her. From that moment, it wasn’t just my experience anymore. I honoured the Goddess through ritual, but mostly by honouring her dark chthonic, earthy wisdom. By ‘getting out of the way’ just as Inanna had to when her corpse was flung dead on a hook.

It is also here in the story where help from the upper world leads to the rebirth of Inanna. While Ereshkigal endures her labour pains below, Inanna’s consort Ninshubur runs around looking for help above. It is Enki who finally turns up with the goods. Enki is a multifaceted God and holds amongst others the virtues of mischief, magic, wisdom, water, and male virility. Enki is said to be an Earth God, having made a full descent-ascent to the Underworld, and often chooses the path of compassion, forgiveness, and wisdom. At Ninshubur’s plight and with a father’s love for a daughter, Enki scrapes some of the dirt from underneath his fingernails, which become two sexeless beings, or demons, and sends these to Inanna. The beings transform into flies, so they can enter Ereshgikal’s cave unseen carrying both the water and bread of life for Inanna’s revival. The flies on the wall don’t do anything besides groaning when Ereshkigal groans, moaning when she moans.[xi] I have seen this behaviour replicated by my one-year-old daughter in response to her crying elder sister. As the eldest throws herself in primal fits of crying over lost candy or anything she feels a distinct ‘loss’ for, however trivial it might seem to adult eyes, her little sister will come up next to her and echo the sounds while patting her back, until hands reach out for embrace and crying soothes into simmering sobs. In this simple yet unexpected show-up of support, Ereshkigal softens as well and gifts them anything the flies may wish to take. Of course, they want the corpse, and Inanna finds her way back to the living. It could be argued that in the surrender of the feminine, in the complete softening into Eros, the integrated masculine principle responds. This masculine is in touch with both the earthly and cosmic realms and descends with a clarity of compassion that extracts light from darkness, and paves the way for ascension.

When starting the path down into the initiatory realms of birth for a second time, I passed each gate releasing something. A misplaced ideology, a sense of false ownership, the fear of losing control. But it was in the peak of labour pain that I truly gave in. Giving in not by slumping into self-pity, but by giving into a power much greater than I will ever be able to fathom. The Goddess works in mysterious ways, they say, and the steps that take one from contraction into expansion work differently for each person, for each new descent. She had been leading me, hinting of what was to come, or could be, through a myriad of ways throughout my pregnancy.

I had tiptoed the edge of the inner and outer worlds for months. My brain had become soft and my experience of the world around silenced. This state of being, or birth energy, gradually descends in and around a woman’s body, a serpentine coiling, but with the gentle touch of a cloud. In the last week, my uterus had been kneading the cervix with increasing intensity each day, announcing the onset of labour, but at the last moment subsiding.

“I dream about little elephants walking along a bank. They turn into young children and are accompanied by a sweet but strict elderly woman. Now they stand in the centre of an auditorium shaped spiral. A girl with curly blonde hair runs towards me. We hug each other at the outer rim of the auditorium, so happy to see each other, but it isn’t time yet as the old woman calls her back.”

The next day our daughter was born.  

THIS IS OUR STORY.

I tell my husband it could happen tonight. He lays a towel underneath me, just in case. Ten minutes later we hear the muffled sound of a balloon popping. Warm water trickles down my leg. ‘What was that?’ he asks. I giggle as a flood of oxytocin rushes into my bloodstream. “My water broke,’ I reply.

The sequence of events mirrors the first time. Water breaks at ten pm, contractions start immediately. But this time there is no blood.

My husband goes downstairs to set up the birthing pool while I go inside, down into my breath. It feels intense so quickly. I wade in and out of the bath upstairs, finding solace in weightlessness. Nobody records the rhythm of my contractions, only I know, sort of. Although I have learnt to elongate my outbreath to induce calmness, there are moments I want to run away from the pain. I automatically start to groan low tones. It is not something I practiced or read about, it’s what my body wants to do. I remember this from last time and think back to those long seventeen hours while I hear my mother climb up the stairs. She’s been called in to look after our eldest.

 dream image of ‘woman by fire’

My husband welcomes me down two hours later. He feeds me tinctures and warm tea that I hardly notice drinking. The birthing energy amazes me again. How it centres and pools around, creating an even stronger primal instinctual silence as the mind completely fades. The part of me still consciously present condenses into a singular point of focus, I can only just about make out the candlelight and altar. A week before, I received a blessing ceremony here, in this same spot. The drawings of the women hang above the altar, including my painting from a dream experience a year before.

 Suddenly I am fully aware that I am in another dimension, but not the same as a dream. She is in front of me. A beautiful native elderly woman in a Maria cloak made of fire. She looks powerful in her silence. Not necessarily peaceful, but more of a focused silence, in surrender to this fire. This is necessary, I know, the fire. She is showing me this, that she has to go through this. It all happens very quickly, the thoughts, the experience. The reality of it scares me and I throw myself back into my body. I re-enter through a burning heart, waking up underneath the stars where I am camping out with my daughter. I hear the words Anima Mundi .....

My husband sits behind me in the pool while I feel hot energy enter my crown. Each time it funnels down into my body, it initiates another big contraction. By watching the videos, I know what my womb is doing, contracting out and up to open the cervix. I don’t do much, rather as little as possible. The wisdom of my body, of the Anima Mundi, is at work and I am just an observer of something completely magical.

Yet every so often, the contractions feel too much, that I cannot bear them all.

Especially when my husband pulls away to do the necessary things. Changes, however small, puncture a hole in my bubble. The familiar feelings of abandonment and victimization creep up again. I try to breathe through it, but it has only been three hours. I ask my husband to call our midwife. I want drugs.

With her thirty years of experience, she listens to my moans and concludes I am not yet experiencing any ‘peaks’. “Mindset”, I hear my husband repeat. “Call back in an hour.” Right, no drugs then.

My midwife’s cool and distant words sentence me to the imprisonment of my body. I am bound within its pain and any struggle against it, any notion of being able to cope, now fully disappears. Something in me knows that the only way out is fully in. I can only submit; all of me needs to bow down.

I steady myself upright and slide into a heart meditation I have been practicing for the last few years. I feel my husband steady himself behind me, locking into position he won’t move out of until our daughter is born. My breath sinks into infinity, and almost immediately my perception of pain ebbs away. I fade away. There is only sensation. Energy converting into movement, the opening and closing of my womb while my breath holds me, folding me over into rolling waves, in and out. For fifteen minutes I wade into yet another boundlessness that cannot be put into words. Then my body changes gear, she wants to push. In that moment I remember a fleeting image I had of birthing this baby with just us, no midwife present. Having learnt from last time, I had let it go as quickly as it came, but now it seems to be given back to me. I don’t tell my husband about what is happening, I don’t want him to call our midwife. I can do this. We can do this.

 The contractions pour through like a waterfall, just as I dreamt a few months before.

“I’m on my way to the hospital to give birth, but the car won’t start. I stay parked and walk outside. A dolphin passes by. She lets me sit on her back. I hold on tight as we plunge down a waterfall. Even though it scares me a little, all I can do is give in.”

 I feel her head pushing through. I touch the top of it with my fingers, it feels mushy yet firm. My vagina isn’t ready though, so I let my baby’s head sway back and forth a few times. The force flowing in increases again. I hold onto the bath rail to steady my body so I can allow this torrent to rush through only guiding it down with my breath. With the next push I let her slide to the outer rim of my vagina. They call this the ring of fire, the point at which the vagina opening is stretched the furthest and the longest. I hold her there, waiting, breathing, burning.

 The following wave pushes her head into my hand while the next one pushes her body out of mine. I lift her out of the water into the air.

 “Huh? Oh, Ohhhh!” my husband gushes. Well, I hadn’t told him, had I?

 She lies on me quiet and peaceful. For a moment I worry she is not breathing. My husband notices her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, so I lower her back down into the water and unroll her.  Back on my chest, he blows softly into our daughter’s face, and she exhales her first breath.

Bodhi Mae was born at 2:30 am, 17th of November 2020.  

Magnolia by Wilhelm List

[i] Inanna’s story, Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess, (Inner City Books, 1981)

[ii] Image from Inanna storytelling by Faranak Mirjalili

[iii] Statistics from babycentre.co.uk

[iv] Brinton Perera (1)

[v] M Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (Spring Publications 2017)

[vi] J Mark, “Innana’s Descent: A Sumerian tale of Injustice”: www.worldhistory.org/article/215/inannas-descent-a-sumerian-tale-of-injustice/

[vii] Naomi Lowinsky, The Rabbi, The Goddess and Jung (Fisher King Press, 2016)

[viii] Marion Woodman and Eleanor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames, (Shambhala Publications, 1996)

[ix] Eliade (3)

[x] Eliade (3)

[xi] Perera (1)

When Belonging Finds You: Ancestral Memory and the Body

by Faranak Mirjalili

It had been a couple of weeks that I felt a palpable feminine presence with and around me. She would be there when I was in meditation or prayer, or just before sleeping or upon waking up. I didn’t know who or what she was. She did feel familiar, as if she could’ve been family or maybe even the feminine being of Persia itself as I felt the vastness of my ancestral soil enveloping  me one day during meditation. My mother had passed away about five months before, and I was deeply mourning the loss of the most important woman in my life. Then one night it happened. She finally revealed herself in the most unexpected of ways.

On this night I was toiling in bed, I was falling in and out of sleep as if something was keeping me on the edge of waking and sleep, sweating heavily all night feeling quite uncomfortable. In one of these liminal states, what is called a hypnagogic sleep state—where you are between sleeping and waking—I heard my heart talk to me as if it were being, with an actual voice. I don’t remember all of the conversations, as can be the case when we are in altered states of consciousness. All I remember is that I was very surprised that my heart could speak; that it had a voice and autonomy of its own and that I can apparently dialogue with it as if I would converse with a human being. I also noticed that this presence in my heart was feminine and recognised her as the feminine presence that was with me over the past weeks. So I asked her the initiatory question, which we can find ourselves asking when we encounter these figures in dreams or fairytales; I asked her “who are you?” The voice answered “Anahita”. That’s a female Persian name, I thought in my half conscious state. Then she went on to teach me and show me different images. She conveyed to me that there was a time when my vocal cords were made of gold and showed me an image of two golden rings, intertwined into each other. She went on to show me what had happened: a horrendous image of a male figure attacking me from behind ripping my neck open and grabbing the vocal cords with his bare hands. I screamed in the dream with an agony I did not know existed for having lost what was most precious to me so brutally and violently. I awoke shaking with the trembling terror of this experience. When I caught my breath and was finally calm I quickly picked up my phone and looked up Anahita. To my surprise I immediately found out that she was an ancient Persian Moon goddess of fertility and that she was venerated before and during the Zoroastrian era of ancient Persia.

It was perhaps one of my most important moments of experiencing the inner worlds. Not because of its intensity, I’ve had far more intense dreams and experiences after this one. It was more the stamp of a moment in time that marked a turning point, after which my life would completely change in every way possible. Once we are claimed by something larger than life, we come to know we can actually be claimed by life itself. It is here where the roles reverse; we are no longer living our little life but are being lived by life. And goodness…that is terrifying! It is often said that people are not afraid of death, but of life and I think in many ways this is true. For if life were to really come alive in us; out goes control, will, predictability, comfort and the safe contours of ‘the known’. In comes surrender, the unknown, mystery, unpredictability and the joy of being. There is a joy in this belonging that belongs to both sorrow and happiness. This joy is like a nectar that flows from the flexible, fluid centre of the psyche, the Self—the only place from where we can hold, and live with, the many paradoxes of being human.

When Anahita first came to me, I had been an analysis for a couple of months and I had just started to give energy and focus to the images from my own inner well. Not anyone else’s or any guru or teaching outside of me, but images that intimately belonged to my psyche and culture.  I had for a while felt a pull toward Sufism, and since my mother’s deathbed had adopted some of the Sufi practices of the heart, which started to open many doors within me. But I was unfamiliar with the feminine spiritual tradition of ancient Persia, which was held in the being of Anahita.

I have always felt the Persian culture and Iranian women to be incredibly feminine, even though my home country has been suppressed by an authoritarian regime and political structures. I often felt Persian women to be gifted with a specific feminine aura that I couldn’t recognise in many other cultures, certainly not in the lowlands of The Netherlands, where I grew up most my life. This feminine presence can also be found in Persian men who can ooze out a refined form of femininity, especially when they are reciting poetry or sway with their shoulders and arms on the dance floor of the always-over-crowded Persian weddings.

Femininity mesmerised me and as a child I was obsessed with the images of the feminine. I had the holy insight that I absolutely needed breasts at age 6 while admiring my sexy, Aphrodite-like aunt with her tiny waist, the most voluptuous set of breasts, high heels, red lipstick and glorious, thick, shining black hair. She was my idol and my goddess. My search for femininity has been a red thread that was woven throughout my whole life and it took on many different forms. But what I didn’t know is that there was an archaic memory in my own body and psyche that held a feminine being, powerful and glorious beyond imagination.

Taq-e-Bostan, rock reliefs of Anahita in an ancient initiatory cave, Iran

And on that specific night, five months after losing my mother, was She. From the ashes of my heart rose this Great Mother figure of ancient Persia. And She could speak, show me images, guide, touch and heal me. She could rid me of the grip of my own negative inner patriarch so I was able to start to build an exciting, thrilling, terrifying and exuberant relationship with Her. I felt for the first time that I was claimed and it wasn’t long after this dream that I began to receive Anahita in my heart very physically through lucid experiences where the physical heart would open into a vibrational field that presented itself as Anahita. Back then I didn’t know what was happening to me and the forces were too powerful for me to resist or question. I could only surrender and allow this relationship to swamp me with its immense currents and alter the very fabric of my being, body and life. Sometimes we do not have a choice, sometimes we are taken. If the ego is strong enough or if the Soul has enough memory of what it means to surrender, we can allow ourselves to be taken into this vast, mysterious, terrifying place of complete metamorphosis. I was re-assured by the unconscious, dream after dream, that my Soul knew this place of surrender well, so I could let go one breath at a time into the terrifying and mysterious depths of Anahita’s currents.

Now, five years later I have come to know that she is not just a historical figure or an archetype to have encountered in a fleeting moment, She is a living presence that is incredibly invested in my life and destiny but also of those around me as well as the world and troubled modern civilisation that we now live in. And here is perhaps where we find the crucial difference between a transcendent, distant, masculine God and an immanent, immediate, caring feminine Goddess. This doesn‘t make her into a fairy godmother that grants wishes from a bucketlist, far from that. It makes her into a fiercely loving mother and companion who can be confronting and shocking at times; generous, full of humor and magic at others. The exciting part about this, as I learned over the years, is that there is no opposition between these states, one flows effortlessly into the other when we learn to listen to Her song.

Ruins of Kangavar Temple to Anahita, Iran

I have done a good amount of research to try to find pre-Zoroastrian literature about Anahita and Her mythology. But unfortunately everything has been wiped out, or perhaps barely recorded as is the case with oral traditions.  All that is left are the remaining footsteps in the Zoroastrian scriptures, where this ancient Goddess wasn’t exiled but incorporated into the Zoroastrian cosmology and angelology. She is known as an angelic being, a yazata, a being ‘worthy of worship’. She was even known to have given Zoroaster his powers and the prophetic light (Farnah, Xvarnah) that guided him into his prophetic destiny. It was also Anahita that gave the Zoroastrian priests their authority and powers. We find that this monotheistic religion—which was the world’s first in the history of religion—didn’t completely exile and destroy the images of the goddess but gave her an important position in the hierarchy of the divine. (1)

When the time came for me to tell Anahita’s story, I almost backed out. What was I to relate when I had no myth to read, engage with and research? There were so many different readings, translations and versions of Persephone, Inanna, Isis & Osiris, all stories I had been working with. They are relatively easy to study and research. But how are you going to tell a story that is wiped out, almost non-existent according to the books? How could I do her justice with the paltry information I had about her? I thought it was impossible and so after an evening of toiling with it, I had decided that I wouldn’t tell the story and I would go for another story instead. That night, I was moving a Mary statue I had upstairs and the statue fell on the floor and broke her neck. A couple of minutes later I slipped down the stairs and almost broke mine. I was on my own at home and I was howling from pain lying immovably on the floor. When I eventually could get myself up again I realised that I had just slightly passed a potentially  horrendous accident. That’s when I knew never to reject a great ancestor or goddess that has claimed their presence in your life, and your body.

It took me 3 years until I could tell her story in a way that I felt was starting to do this great Angel-Goddess justice. I started out with the bones of what I could find in Zoroastrian scriptures, then images that had emerged from my own dreams. I wove stories, part fact, part imagination into a single thread that would give a felt sense of this feminine mystery to my audience. As I was working with this, dreams emerged, not only my own dreams but also from my clients, as well as family members or friends who did not even know about my inner explorations. It was as if I were holding a magic magnet that was pulling the images and symbols of Anahita to my awareness. One dream or synchronicity would lead to the next and it brought with it an exploration of different folk stories, fairytales or creation myths where I would find traces of Anahita. Sometimes it would come through another cultural heritage, like when I decided to co-tell the story with my colleague Gauri Raje, where we combined the river sisters Anahita & the Indian Saraswati. This was the moment where she really came alive in the telling in her more magnificent form. It was as if an ancient Indo-Iranian river that connected the two cultures was flowing again.

No matter how small or big, it would be as if She were re-creating Her own story through the little crumbs that I gathered. It is very difficult to explain the way this evolved, it would be like trying to ask a bee what flowers it had pollinated after a day of buzzing around with intense focus in a blossoming field. Instead of telling stories and myths directly about Her, I was telling stories around Her. It is as if one is circling around the house of God, or the Ka’ba, never entering the full glory of but strengthening Her image and presence by the circumambulation.

Perhaps this is a way of honouring a goddess that will forever be veiled. Now and then, we have a glimpse of her beautiful ankle, mesmerising kohl lined eyes, or the shining waves of her black hair… This seductive play is what keeps a mystery alive, magnetic and completely dynamic. It is what keeps the heart of the human devotee flamed with a desire to come a little bit closer while knowing that Her full essence will always remain a mystery, even to Herself.

Footnotes

1) For my academic publication on Anahita and a textual analysis of the Zoroastrian scriptures see: Mirjalili, Faranak. 2021. "Goddess of the Orient: Exploring the Relationship between the Persian Goddess Anahita and the Sufi Journey to Mount Qaf" Religions 12, no. 9: 704.

Anima

by Wanda Tuerlinckx

““The collective life force that unifies air, fire, earth and water, and reveals herself as a luminous feminine primordial being from the invisible dimensions.”
”

— Wanda Tuerlinckx

Collage art by Wanda Tuerlinckx

Uranus 2021

by Wanda Tuerlinckx

collage art by Wanda Tuerlinckx

“A being of force descends like an electric spark. The reborn face of freedom provides structure and opens a way to justice to authentically empower our vast potential. The guidance of the gods shows us the free path where expansion and growth go hand in hand with limitation and responsibility.”

— Wanda Tuerlinckx

The Octopus Woman

Dreamwork story by Laurie Kemp

'You have neglected me,' she says as she clutches my stomach with two of her arms, sending sharp bolts of pain up and down my spine. My body cramps but does nothing to resist her; the flu has weakened me. I've been bedridden for days.
I'd do anything to stay awake but know that the only way through is to meet her. To relieve myself of this pain, I must go where the water flows. As I close my eyes, she beckons me to follow her into the night's silent darkness. 
We move through murky waters, wild rivers and crashing tides. Sucked in by the currents, I have no choice but to let go. As we descend into deeper waters, green algae stain our views. I remember why I dislike it here: life is dim, misty, acidic, slow. I'd do anything to go back home.

'You have forgotten me,' the octopus says as we arrive at a kelp forest, shifting shapes and colors, orange to red. 

She's right. I prefer the desert, its sun, the heat. 

'I'm so sorry,' I say, unconvincingly. 'I will do better. Just tell me why I'm here.'

'Follow me,' she says as she swirls around me. 'I want to show you something. Before we go in, I need you to take off your clothes.'

'Why?'

'It'll help you move and get used to the cold.' 

She is right, I think. As we enter the thick black kelp forest, I feel my body getting used to the cold. I want to tell her I need to go back up to grasp air, but before I speak, she releases ink, allowing me to breathe down here. 

The deeper we go, the more animals appear: red corals, curious seahorses, large schools of fish that gently touch my legs and feet as they swim by. 

'Who are you?' I ask, as I try to feel my way forward in the dark. It's difficult to see down here. 'What's your name?' 

'Don't you know?' she asks begrudgingly.

The sudden softness of her voice disarms me. 'No, I don't. I'm so cold. Can I have my clothes back?' I start crying.

 'Finally,' she says, as she leaves me be. While tears turn into ocean drops, the dark, muddy waters start clearing up. 

She smiles, pointing to huge rocks, covered in dirt, on our right side a small opening. 'We're here.' 

We enter a cave, kelp giving way to ancient stones. The cave is decorated with thousands of oysters, clams and stones. 

'I want to go back up.' 

'Don't worry, there is nothing to fear,' she says sweetly now. Before I can respond, my sister, my mother, aunts, grandmothers and other ancestors appear. 

I try to touch my grandmother, but every time I get close my ancestors transform into lifeless shells and stones. I yell my mother's name, but she just stares at me, stoically. I realise the women cannot move. They've lost their limbs.

by Laurie Kemp

'Why did you bring me here?', I ask the octopus, as the undercurrents push us back and forth. The octopus takes my hand and pulls me back into the kelp forest. 

'It's time you stop carrying their heavy bones.'  

'Take me back to my family,' I scream. 'I do not want to leave them here.' 

'Swallow them, then,' she says as we re-enter the cave. Somehow, her suckers can grab hold of them. I start crying again, as she feeds them to me piece by piece. 

Once she's done feeding me, I'm succumbed by pain once more. My hips crack and bleed as my womb pushes, retreats, contracts and then lets go. God knows what I'm giving birth to. I cut my fingers into a nearby rock as I continue to scream and moan. 

'Please, just make it stop.'

More blood and contractions, to the point of fainting. 

The octopus shakes me awake. 'You need to push.'

'Make it stop,' I weep while my body cramps uncontrollably. Sharp, aching pains, moving from my back to my thighs. A thousand cuts in my uterus, then intense, soaring pain in my lower back. I need to push this thing out, whatever it is.

'Don't just float there, help me please.' 

Then a sudden release. A pearl-colored egg drops as I throb myself onto the ocean floor. Instinct takes over. I have to find a way to leave this place. 

She reaches out to me, caressing my cheek and stomach, touching and holding me tenderly. With arms extended, she covers my entire torso. 

I panic. Isn't this how she hunts her prey? 

'What are you doing? Why am I here?'

'You're not a little girl anymore. You knew that once you were here, you'd belong to me.'

I try to swim back to the cave, but it's too late. The current too strong, the octopus too fast. She releases more ink, this time blinding me.

'Every time I tried gently, you wouldn't listen to me,' she swirls around me. 'I've lived in the shadows way too long. It's time the world remembers me.' 
Her tentacles grab hold of my body, sucking the life out of me bit by bit as the world goes back to black.
My stomach twists and turns as I'm spit out by the water, washed up on the ocean shore. For a moment I wonder if I'm Venus reborn, produced from shiny pearls and sweet ocean foam? 

I'm not sure. My body feels too heavy. It's as if I've forgotten to walk or breathe up here. At least the octopus is nowhere to be seen. How long have I been away for? 

The piercing light cuts like honey on my skin, as I move towards the dunes. I fall seven times before I realise what has happened to me. 
I have become the octopus woman, my legs turn into tentacles and back again, skin shedding, falling into the sand to, creating room for new toes, fingers and hair to grow. A thick dark pelt appears where the octopus' suckers once were. 
'What have you done to me?' I scream, though all I hear are moans and roars.  Long, dark curls keeps growing and flowing from my head, as if trying to reach back into the water. 
I pick up the trident that has washed up next to me. As I hold it up and push it back into the ground, the earth quivers and trembles, shockwaves sent across far-away ocean shores. What to do? There's too much strength. Wild, untamable power coiling and being unleashed inside of me. 

The world falls silent as I start howling an ancient song:

"I am the one you've been waiting for,
I will not bend nor bow to you anymore."

The earth continues to shake, as I suddenly find myself back at home in Amsterdam. White bedsheets stick to my body, stained with sweat, tears, and dirt. They barely cover my trembling bones. Hazily, I exit the bedroom and walk down the glassy stairs, careful not to slip or fall.  

As my morning coffee brews, its thick black mud dripping like drops of ink, I am reminded of a long-forgotten poem a childhood nanny used to whisper in my ear. I feel its words coming alive inside of me, wrestling their way up, emerging from a place deep within my bowels:  

"To be a woman
Does not mean
To Wear
A shroud,

The feminine
Is not
Dead
Nor is she
Sleeping.

Angry, yes,
Seething, yes.
Biding her time;

Yes.
Yes."

We meet again, my sweet, wild soul.

Poem: To be a Woman by Alice Walker

The Ambiguity of the Witch Motif

by Gauri Raje

If there is one distinguishing moment, and a character in Cinderella stories, it is the figure of the witch. She comes in many forms and shades - from the benign twinkly-eyed fairy godmother of the Disney version to the mighty Baba Yaga of the world of the East. She is in the form of a fish, a serpent, a cow or a hag from whose hair cockroaches must be combed out. One version of the Cinderella (an old gypsy version) has a passing trace of the haunting of witchcraft - the Cinderella is suspected of being a witch to be burnt at stake.

So, powerful women and women coming into their sense of self and power is at the heart of the initiation in Cinderella stories. Vasilisa the Beautiful (the Russian fairy tale) encapsulates the moves of the persecuted feminine to the period of wilderness initiation and her return back to her community and village. An elliptical circularity of maturation of the feminine. The journey to maturation is loaded with symbolic moments, some of which are potent in revealing a specific cultural look at the notion of powerful women.

A theme that also commonly plays out in Cinderella stories is that of the intentionality of Cinderella’s step-mother and step-sisters to destroy the qualities that would enable Cinderella to grow into a beautiful adult. Too much and relentless work to ‘destroy’ her beauty in the sun, roughen up her hands and hide her from the world are some of the many attempts to stunt Cinderella’s growth. As Marie Louis Von Franz puts it:

‘The desire to prevent other people from becoming conscious because one does not want to wake up oneself is real destructiveness.’

She adds:

‘...having the possibility of becoming conscious and not taking it is about the worst thing possible.’

In all the versions of Cinderella, what one finds is the over-worked girl carrying through her tasks patiently and meticulously. It is through this diligence to the tasks being given to her that new possibilities arise.

What is interesting about the Cinderella stories is the presence of both these energies or narratives: the one narrative that coincides with historical and cultural moments of the fear of ‘witches’, and another narrative that begins to ask the question ‘what is a witch?’ Rather than ‘who is a witch?’

In this article though, I will discuss one particular variant of the Cinderella archetype - the Russian story of Vasilisa the Beautiful. In this version, both these archetypes meet through the character of Cinderella and instead of being discrete categories, Vasilisa’s stepmother and Baba Yaga seem to carry different shades of the historical, cultural and archetypal energies of what is a witch.

Artwork during Anima Mundi School’s Fairytale Kitchen
by Laura Krusemark

There is no fairy godmother in this variant. Vasilisa, who is motherless and relentlessly put to work by her step-mother and sisters, finds her refuge in a doll given to her by her dying mother. The doll stays in Vasilisa’s pocket through her years of loneliness and torment by her step-kin. Through the entire story, the doll stays hidden in Vasilisa’s pocket, known only to her and fed by her with whatever morsels Vasilisa has saved up from the sparse meals given to her by her family. 

When Vasilisa continues to blossom into adulthood, instead of withering like her step-sisters, the step-mother contrives to kill her by sending her to Baba Yaga, the epitome of the terrifying crone, who is regarded to eat human flesh, especially the tender morsels of the young ones. Unlike other Cinderellas, there is no saviour/ redemptive prince that arrives and Vasilisa must rely on herself, her sensibilities and her mother’s blessings in the form of the doll to meet this new challenge. 

Baba Yaga, as a cultural archetype and a presence in the story is curious and formidable. I will discuss her significance later in the article. For now, it is sufficient to say that the time spent with her is an intensifying of Vasilisa’s initiation and Baba Yaga’s gift at the end to Vasilisa renders Baba Yaga a stranger fairy godmother than in other Cinderellas. It is also a moment where the ideation of a witch expands further than the connotations associated with witches in European fairy tales and their modern renderings. In other cultures, which may not have experienced the genocidal violence of the Middle Ages against women deemed witches, the notion of the witch indicates to different notions of what constitutes evil that is non-redemptive. 

To carry on with the story, the gift that Vasilisa brings back from Baba Yaga is a skull that emits light and/ or fire, as circumstances require. In this case, the fire from the skull burns the step-mother and step-sisters out of Vasilisa’s life and story. With their destruction through the great power of this skull, Vasilisa buries the skull rather than carry it with her, and returns to her village community closing her step-mother’s house that stood at the edge of the village and the forest.

Back in the village community, she seeks sanctuary in the house of an old woman initially awaiting her absent father. This is a time spent gathering the skills, learnings and memories of her time of initiation and distilling them into a fine and unique expression (of cloth) that is far above any of the other traditional skills present already in the village community. It catches the eye of the prince of the people leading to a marriage with Vasilisa. The marriage is not the end - it is yet another moment of weaving wherein the absent father returns and is invited by the prince to live in the palace with them while Vasilisa invites the old woman in the village to do the same. She lives out the rest of her life with her doll in her pocket.

The Witch

Who is a witch? In English, the word ‘witch’ is said to find its root in the word ‘wit’ or wise/ wisdom indicating the direction of a witch to be a wise woman. There is a gender specificity too in the word and in many of the well-known tales. A witch refers to a woman in many of the narratives.

I would contend that this is a particular cultural understanding, and possibly, time-specific as well. Anthropological studies of bewitching in France in the contemporary period speak about modes of bewitching that seek to ‘address the imagination of evil that sucks away at the vital force...’ (Faavret-Saada, 2009).

There are other cultures and societies wherein a witch is not specifically a woman. A witch is a person of either gender capable of intentionally and deliberately sucking at the generative/ vital force of an individual or a community. Rehabilitation is arrived at through the desire of a person capable of using witchcraft to want to give it up. In my area of fieldwork in western India, a witch was a half-baked shaman - someone who sought to accrue more power than they were capable of handling at the stage of their training into shamanism. To this extent, shamanism and witchcraft were interlinked. The only person who could rehabilitate the witch was a shaman - not through community ritual and spectacle that we associate with the witch-burnings of Europe but through ritual practice between the shaman and the witch - a process of cure, rather than destruction of the practitioner of witchcraft.

Looked at through this lens, in the story of Vasilisa the Beautiful, Baba Yaga refers to Vasilisa’s step-mother as someone she knows, and in other versions as her kinswoman. Baba Yaga, who is said in some versions, to have emerged out of a cauldron which the devil spat in, is not necessarily a woman requiring redemption. She knows dark shades well. Vasilisa’s step-mother in her cruel intentions towards her step-daughter is a much darker presence in this particular story. While Vasilisa’s step-mother lives on the edges of the wild; Baba Yaga knows the deep wild intimately. Its inhabitants including the riders of dawn, night and sun are her own. The mysteries of the ‘other-world’ - the hut with chicken legs, her servants - the body-less hands - are protected within her home. She is the mistress of birds - ravens, owls and crows inhabit her courtyard and are under her protection. She inhabits her full being. In doing so, she provides clarity that comes with deep intimate knowledge. She can mentor in a way the that step-mother can only compare and destroy one for the benefit of the other, in this case, attempt to destroy Vasilisa in favour of her own daughters. 

There is a critical moment in the story where Baba Yaga throws Vasilisa out of her hut on learning that Vasilisa is a ‘blessed’ young woman. At a glance, it seems like a rude and abrupt end to a period of initiation. Baba Yaga, of ancient and primordial mysteries, threatened by a saintly ‘blessing’ of a young girl. Looking at it through a different cultural lens, on the role and work of a teacher, a mentor and initiator, there might be more to this moment than seems apparent.

There is a moment in the traditional practice of Indian classical music, when the teacher recognised that their student had arrived at a form of maturity in their art. The teacher would mark this moment in a ritual which would be a public recognition that the new musician was indeed their student. It was a moment of great honour for the student to be given permission to be publicly accepted into a lineage of music. However, there were instances when the student would have become particularly accomplished in a facet of music - and if the teacher wished they could ask for a donation from the student. It was incumbent on the student to agree, although there might have been rare challenges. At times the teacher would ask the student to not ever include within his/ her repertoire that which they were extremely proficient in. One the one hand, this could be looked at negatively. On the other, it pushed the student not to merely rely on what they had achieved but to push themselves further in the mastery of the facets of the musical tradition as well. To be pushing themselves into the service of music, rather than that particular facet of musical arts that they were proficient in. To begin to learn the art of honouring (in this case Music), rather than become a skilled master of a small facet within a musical tradition.

Could Baba Yaga be that mentor who sees the proficiency that Vasilisa has achieved outside of her training, and recognises that the only way for Vasilisa to grow is to push her outside of Baba Yaga’s training, which she is clearly quite proficient in. Every task that Baba Yaga has set Vasilisa so far has been achieved. It is time for Vasilisa to be challeged not by tasks outside her world, but within her home itself - challenging the source of her stultifying existence - her step-mother and step-sisters.

Baba Yaga is a wise crone. She does not need to be reclaimed from the dangerous qualities associated with being a witch, but because she knows the dark so intimately that she can see with clarity when in her wards the darkness might consume them, and when they are ‘blessed’ or have enough generative resources within to take on the challenges on returning from the encounters with the wild, and to live in the world honouring energies of life rather than energies of annihilation.

The initiate

Artwork by Anca Sira

Vasilisa is the steady point in all the tumult that the fairytale passes through. There is an innocence, rather than a naïveté, that holds her in herself and in each moment she finds herself in. She carries out her unrelenting tasks that her step-family asks of her; she does not run away when she meets Baba Yaga although the fairytale mentions how terrified she is. Indeed, she speaks to her as though she is in the presence of an older woman, and not an ancient primordial being. 

There could be much written about Vasilisa’s doll - the gift from her dying mother and the young girl’s companion through her trials and tribulations. But, I am more interested in the moments where the doll does not impart any advice to Vasilisa, rather she acts on her own intuitive sense that turn out to be generative of her journey into her own individuation. 

A seminal moment here is when she returns from Baba Yaga’s domain with the skull that emits light and fire - the task that had been set to her by her step-sisters. With the skull, Vasilisa finds great power literally in her grasp. It shines light to find her path out of the forest; and it also emits fire to burn her tormentors to their death. The gift of the skull gives her direction and freedom. And yet, after the death of her step-family, Vasilisa does not carry this gift from the other-world into the village. She buries it, where a crimson rose bush grows out of the ground - turning ferocity into blooming life and beauty. Clarissa Pinkola Estes discusses this as the moment of burying revengeful anger by Vasilisa, and realising the feelings of revenge carried along after is more destructive. Again, Vasilisa’s generative instincts are at fore here. For me, it is the moment that Vasilisa tempers her possibility of hoarding power and risk turning into a figure akin to her step-mother. This is where the sense that Baba Yaga has of the uniqueness of Vasilisa comes to the fore. 

The gifts from the wild can have their moment in all their potency; but over time Vasilisa must learn to temper them to find and create a new community, family and love. This is the moment when Vasilisa steps into her name: ‘Vasilisa’ in Russian means princess. 

Baba Yaga
by Sitie Djarkasie

Sea-Change

visual poetry film by Kate Genevieve

She's Made of Dirt

collective poem for Innana—Ereshkigal
by Class of 2020 in Reclaiming the Mythical Feminine

---

She’s made of dirt 
Soil coils
toils in her deep belly
Nurtures death into life
In her serpentine way

In here
some fear
the gnawing of decay
when it sounds the forgotten, 
the want-to-be-forgotten
and the must-be-forgotten

The cold eye of death

Where those who dwell
in darkness
is its own blessing
and a tight clasp of colours
blends into black

Who will plow her heart
Lady of Dirt
Lady of Soil
Turn me back
to the dark loamy moistness

Rest 

Turn me over and over
Leave me fallow
Soften me with your pain,
your tears,  your gaze

Your gaze

---

The Sieve of Initiation

sifting patriarchal attitudes in inner work

by Faranak Mirjalili

One of the great losses that many cultures face through Western civilisation is the experience and the wisdom of initiation. Thousands of years of patriarchy has wiped out all the depth initiatory rites that stemmed directly out of the Goddess traditions and have left us with shadowy ghost-like replicas like the famous Dutch ‘ontgroening’ [hazing]: a torturous and often dangerous initiatory experience for juniors wanting to enter University student clubs. 

There are no more temples, authentic priestesses and Magi to initiate us through ceremony and ritual, but we can be plunged into an initiatory process in our confrontation with the unconscious, as pioneered by Carl Jung. These ancient initiatory rites are still alive and it is in the depths of the inner world that we can be led into an authentic initiatory experience. What does it mean to be initiated? Who can initiate us and what is the role of life’s thresholds and difficulties in finding the initiatory thrusts of life? 

Real initiation matures the ego, keeps us grounded, it guards us against inflation and teaches us the small and hidden lessons that are told in the dark places of wisdom. Being initiated cannot be taught or learned through methods and books, it can only be learnt in the empty spaces between words. It is given to us it is a gift of life, of the archetypal world or, in a real esoteric lineage, as a gift and test from a spiritual master.

THE STORY 

In a Persian Cinderella tale called ‘Mah Pishooni’ [The Girl with the Moon Forehead]  we find a story that teaches us about initiation and about the wisdom of walking into the unconscious with an attitude of humility and service and, in some well timed moments; the right kind of trickery.  

Mah Pishooni by Mohadeseh Pilehvarian

Little Mah loses her mother like in all Cinderella tales but in this story the mother dies as part of the grand evil plan by the future stepmother, Mah’s schoolteacher Mollahbaji (a religious title for Islamic educated female authorities). Mollahbaji, finding out about the good financial situation of the father, decides to manipulate Mah to push her own mother in a jar of vinegar and so makes an empty place that can then be filled with a stepmother. Little Mah is soon, after Mollahbaji’s gives birth to her half-sister, treated horrendously and is being given a series a very difficult tasks by Mollahbaji. Little Mah accepts them much like Psyche does in the story of Psyche and Eros, in which Aphrodite is  the initiatory figure. The heroine in the story quietly suffers them, often weeping in despair upon which unexpected forces in the form of animals come in to help her. The most important animal is a yellow cow that after some time, appears in the jar of vinegar where her personal mother once was shoved into. 

Cow Mother by Mohadeseh Pilehvarian

During one of her initiatory tasks she is given a sack of cotton to thread and spin while she takes the yellow cow to pasture. The wind blows her cotton balls into the well upon which she is guided by the benevolent cow mother to go into the well and find her cotton in the house of an old hag in the hidden forest at the bottom of the well. She is told by the yellow cow to greet the old woman and to do what she says or, in some versions to do the opposite of what she says. The wisdom of the cow mother gives little Mah not only the courage to go on into this terrifying darkness of the underworld but also have the right attitude towards the figures she encounters there. 

When she arrives at the old hag’s house she greets her politely. In some versions the old hag is somewhat fierce and crazy and asked her very unusual tasks like throwing a rock at her head. Her cow mother has warned her that she must do the opposite so she starts combing the old woman's hair upon which cockroaches come out from it, but she perseveres and gives the old lady the care and disentangling she needs. The tasks continue and little Mah finds herself cleaning a very dirty house and courtyard, and even praising the old woman for being much cleaner and more beautiful than her stepmother. The old woman then directs her into the room next door to find her cotton. When she enters the room, she sees it is filled with wonderful jewels and golden coins, but she only takes her cotton balls and goes back. The old hag sends her off into the first, second and third garden that leads onto a magnificent river. She is told to bathe in the river and wash her face with it. After she does that, she is astonished by the beauty of her own face in the reflection of the water, where she sees that she now has a glowing crescent moon on her forehead and a star on her chin. 

She is sure to hide it well when she travels back home and carries on with her chores. The stepmother eventually finds out and demands that Mah takes her half-sister to ‘get one of those too’. 

But the half sister fails miserably as she does not have the guidance from the yellow cow nor does she have the humility, patience and devotional attitude that Mah has. She enters the house of the hag with demands, impatience and rudeness. She insults the dirty old woman and, being focused on her goal only,  doesn’t want to clean the hair of the hag and her house as thoroughly as little Mah and insults the old woman for being disgusting. When she is directed into the room next to find her cotton, she is mesmerised by all the sparkles and grabs the jewels and coins, almost forgetting about the cotton. When she then bathes in the same river, she finds in her reflection the most horrendous sight; a donkey’s penis is growing out of her forehead and a scorpio’s tail out of her chin. 

MIRROR, MIRROR IN THE RIVER

“The unconscious shows us the face we show it.”

— Carl Jung

In the story we find the opposite of Mah Pishooni’s humility and simplicity  in her half-sister that goes into initiation for all the wrong reasons. Firstly she demands the initiation, not even from her own will but from her mother's. She is completely in the grip and in compliance with the archetypal Death Mother, who is a shadowy aspect of the dark feminine, the devouring witch archetype that is sucking the life energy out of her children through her toxicity, manipulation and unconscious power-drive. Secondly the stepsister goes into initiation not because she is given it through life's difficulties and her accepted suffering, but out of sheer greed, lust and desire for the glorious beauty that her sister has been given through her noble efforts. We can already sense in the story that trouble is about to happen when one sets foot in the dark well of the inner worlds from the ego’s desires and wants. 

Even if her desires are not rooted in an obvious greed and power hunger, but in a lack of true mother love to which she has fallen victim to, we see the relentless and severity of testing that the archetypal mother puts us through as to test and torture the ego into maturity that contains a submission and service that stretches beyond the individualised and egoistic patriarchal patterning we can carry with us. We cannot enter the realm of the dark feminine without both a spiritual and ego maturity. This comes with our efforts to separate and heal from our parental complexes and doing the most difficult thing of rejecting the old patterns that gripped our personal mother. Mah Pishooni is first rooted in her relationship to the archetypal mother, imaged as the benevolent cow mother, who is the one that helps guide her in her encounters with the unconscious in the ways that are both unknown and invisible to her half-sister. 

What is interesting in this story is that the benevolent cow mother did not come from Mah Pishooni’s innocence or goodness only,  it came from her own magnetic pull towards the dark feminine, first in the shadow form of Mollahbaji, who is the one that prompts her to put her own mother to death by shoving her into a jar of vinegar. Mah Pishooni is therefor the one that helps to bring the dark feminine into her own house and life. I like this version of Cinderella as she is not just the innocent little girl who has fallen victim to a dark mother, but has a role in it. It illustrates how psyche is always seeking wholeness and how we are prompted in life to engage and even devote ourselves to shadowy figures as they could be holding the key to the start of our individuation journey. Mah Pishooni cannot find her own authentic, direct connection to the Mother archetype if she first does not symbolically reject her personal mother. It is only when she is suffering at the hands of her stepmother that her unconscious symbioses with the personal mother is being transmuted (inside the jar of vinegar) into a relationship to the archetypal Mother,  symbolised by the yellow cow. Vinegar is one of the major catalysts and symbols in this story. Besides having its importance to the Persian cuisine and culture, it is an alchemical symbol of death and rebirth into new life through an acidic immersion into the vessel of alchemy. It is in vinegar only that we can separate the impurity of the lesser metals in gold into a pure gold, which is imaged in the yellow cow of wisdom. 

From a cultural perspective, this story offers a compensation to the overly loyal parental relationship that is dominant in Persian culture. Children, no matter how old, are very loyal towards their parents and this is amplified even more in the relationships between mothers and daughters. It is remarkable that such a counter-intuitive motif, of killing one’s own mother, has found itself in the Persian folktales; it really demonstrates the compensatory function of fairytales for the collective psyche of a culture.

PATIENCE, DEVOTION & SERVICE IN INITIATION 

There are different initiatory levels to be found in this story. The first one is the catalyst of the individuation journey by the rejection/killing of the personal mother. Though this is still a very unconscious act, it nevertheless counts the initiatory spark set in motion. We can see this reflected in the difference between Mah and her half-sister, who is completely loyal and thus in the grip of her mother and therefor fails the tests miserably. 

The old hag being combed thoroughly by Mah Pishooni. Drawing by Laura Krusemark

The second layer of initiation, which is still a preparation for the real initiation by the Underworld, is the acceptance of the suffering that comes out of the act of going against the collective thought (i.e. loyalty towards parents, society etc). One could say that little Mah is being punished by life for rejecting and killing her own mother, but when we look at the whole story we see that she is actually being taught the right attitude to enter the Underworld. Through accepting and suffering her fate, she is being readied into a relationship to the Otherworld. 

When she finally arrives at the final and most important initiatory moment in her encounter with the hag, the old woman in the well, she showcases all the virtues of spiritual maturity that are needed in such an encounter: humility, patience, service and the right kind of trickery. 

It is this patience that is required of us when we go down into the underworld. We will find in those depths figures that are like the old hag, cast out into the unconscious who might even turn out to be a little mad. It is our attitude towards these figures that is decisive of whether or not we are initiated into the next step of our journey. The old hag tests the girl by giving her unusual tasks and watching her actions and reactions. When she finally completes all of the tasks which results in having cleansed not only the disgusting hair but also the entire house, the old woman sends the girl into the room next door to find her cotton. Then the next initiatory test takes place as the room is filled with jewels, gold coins and all kinds of wonderful distracting sparkles a girl might like. What will the girl do? Will she be distracted or will she grab only that for which she came and return to the ordinariness of her [very difficult] life?

THE CORRUPTION IN NEW AGE SPIRITUALITY

Let us spend some time in this part of the story to really marinate in it, and reflect these images into our current culture and the attitude in spirituality that has started to ruin the very fabric of mystical and spiritual life in the West.

We are too often distracted by the sparkles we find in the inner worlds and any supernatural or spiritual experiences and dreams we are given. The ego wants to take hold of them, even monitoring these experiences by making it into a commodity. Sometimes seekers are distracted by the sparkles as it makes them forget or transcend their problems and forget the ordinary life imaged here by the cotton balls. It is exactly this problem, the danger of inflation and ego-hijacking, that this story warns us against, as does this famous Zen Koan. 

“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” 

Mah Pishooni

In the story little Mah is not distracted and only takes what she came for;  those little cotton balls that a symbol of her simplicity and her ordinary human life. The old woman is pleased and as she has passed this final test she is given the guidance to go and find the magic river and is told the she can always call upon her help in case she needs it. It is only in this final test that she proves to be worthy of a constant and direct relationship to her divine feminine nature. Truth is, it is far too dangerous to enter the sacred river if we are not ready! 

The reflection of this river gives Mah her beautiful and authentic feminine nature. She has polished the mirror of her heart through her sufferings and has shown real service and a mature attitude towards the depths of the unknown; for this she is rewarded with a beautiful crescent moon (a symbol of the Persian moon Goddess Anahita) shining on her forehead and in some versions a star on her chin. She rejected being distracted by the sparkles of ego-inflating promises and was therefore given the real spark that belongs to the depths of her Soul.

Mah Pishooni’s half sister receiving a scorpio tail and a donkey’s penis as a reflection of her own shadow. Drawing by Laura Krusemark

On the contrary, the half-sister not only rejects the tasks that she is given by the old lady but complains and even offends her. We might fall into the pitfall to think that we do not have such an obviously grotesque attitude. But fairytales are an amplification of patterns present in the psyche of humanity and this motif specifically speaks to one of the biggest problems in the encounter with the unconscious.  The attitude the sister has towards the unconscious is one of control, greed and superiority; all the traits of an unhealthy and weak ego. She also does not show the devotion and patience to the figures of the unconscious that are necessary for an authentic relationship to the depth of her own feminine nature. I see this in my practice when people start off enthusiastically or are given a boost of energy and awe by an archetypal dream in the beginning of their analytical process. But they then fail to carry through the difficult part of ‘combing the old hags hair’ and ‘cleaning her house thoroughly’. They lack the dedication and humility to sit down with their images and the contents of the unconscious everyday and work with them. These are traits of Mah Pishooni’s shadow sister; spiritual laziness and capitalist entitlement, now turned toward the unconscious and the Feminine which is, in my experience, far worse than material greed.

Unfortunately in New Age spirituality this narrative has become a dominant factor to the horrifying extend that it has become normalised, making it very difficult to discern for the seeker. Perhaps this started with the famous bestseller self-help book The Secret, where the reader is being taught the ancient ways of the imagination, for the benefit of the ego and its multitude of desires. This horrifying book set the tone for an era of plundering spirituality where we are now not only using the Earth’s recourses for our own wealth and wellbeing but also the invisible Otherworld. 

Marie Louise von Franz calls this the famous PPFF problem: Power, Prestige, Fame and Fortune. These are the dominating narratives of our culture and we are, whether we like it or not, ruled by these principles. With the emergence and dominance of technology, social media and instant ‘insta-fame' we are, as a culture, even more in the invisible grips of this problem. The problem of PPFF has now also gripped spirituality and polluted it with its toxic tentacles.

Therefor when we enter the unconscious, the dangers of bringing these attitudes into our inner work and encounter with the spirit of the depths is evident and something we need to be on the watch for constantly. The story gives us a visceral image of what the consequences are of such an attitude toward the unconscious: the half-sister is forever doomed with a phallic forehead as a symbol for her patriarchal attitude and a poisonous tail on her chin, representing the poison in her speech and tongue. Every doctor in town tells the horrified Mollahbaji that her daughter cannot be healed as the root of the penis [in some versions the serpent] and scorpio tail are deep in the girls heart. All that she can do is cut them every other day and sprinkle some salt over it. 

THE FINAL SACRIFICE

The story continues with Mah Pishooni going into even more initiatory cycles of losing her yellow cow mother and being left with her bones, getting to the famous ball after completing yet another set of impossible tasks [separating a sack of various seeds and filling the fountain in the courtyard with her tears]. When she pleas for help and turns to the old lady in the well, now her fairy god mother, she is helped miraculously by the hens and chickens in the courtyard and given her beautiful red embroidered dress and golden sandals to wear at the feast where she finally meets, loses and re-unites with the Prince. 

But the story still does not end here as Mah Pishooni stands before her final task of resurrecting her dead cow mother through her sorrow to then perform the excruciating sacrificial act of having to skin her alive, as instructed by her cow-mother, who finally reveals her new human form. It is this final refined act of skinning with a cold, sharp blade, a symbol of her new found masculinity that she can bring the new feminine into consciousness. The reborn mother is, from a Jungian perspective, not simply the return of the old personal mother but the personified mother that comes out of the archetypal mother cow. In some ways this is a refined continuation of her initial, still unconscious, act of throwing her mother into the vessel (and womb) of transformation who was reborn as the archetypal mother and now is again being brought into a new level of consciousness by the act of skinning (which is another death-rebirth cycle).  The double motif of the death-rebirth of the Mother archetype makes this version of Mah Pishooni one of the most complete Persian fairytales I’ve encountered.

There is even a version of this tale where Mah Pishooni has to destroy the projection (romantic ideals) she holds on her newly wed Prince by shitting in his bed and making him believe it was him. The old hag, whose hair she combed earlier, here is the Wisdom guide giving her this advice that helps her in an impossible situation where she risks being cast out of the castle through a final trap the evil stepmother had created. The absurdity of these motifs really shows the wisdom of psyche from her most intimate depths, teaching the initiate, who has the ears to hear, not only how to find her true feminine essence and beauty, but also how to actually live it in this world. That practical and immediate intelligence is what makes Wisdom not only a theory or an ethereal magical being, but a reality and a companion that comes alive in the ordinariness of our everyday lives. 

Storyline artwork by Laura Krusemark, made during our Fairytale Kitchen storytelling event “Cinderella Around the World”

Sophia of the Stars

Dreamwork art & music by Laura Krusemark

Chalk pastel on paper by Laura Krusemark

I am in a dark space and watching a powerful wise woman. She is sewing images in the space that streamed to and from her hands while she speaks words of wisdom into the stars that appear all around and behind her.

“I’m sewing all the worlds and universes with a golden thread that weaves them all together.”

She had such a compelling profile like that of a Greek statue— beautiful and strong, like white marble. I was in awe of her work and admiring her courage to speak so powerful and freely with complete wisdom. I then realized that she was the younger version of the one who will be well known in the future, and that I was given the amazing opportunity to witness her in the younger age. She gives me instructions on what kind of art she likes, and I wake up.

— Dream Autumn 2020, Laura Krusemark

Rosa Mystica

a symbolic quest from the West and the East

by Anne Baring

In this essay, Anne Baring will take you through a visual and historical journey of the symbol of the rose, from religious West to the Middle East from where we travel back to the West with the troubadours.

There is a line in a poem by Walter de la Mare that goes: “Oh no man knows through what wild centuries roves back the rose”. I first read that poem when I was at university and it haunted me until I began to write my book The Dream of the Cosmos.

Rose Window of Chartres

I did not know then that the rose was the primary symbol of the Feminine Archetype, the Great Goddess and the soul. Nor that it was dear to the Sufi poets. 

Now, I know that the rose is the greatest mystic symbol of the West, just as the lotus is of the East. Like the thousand-petaled lotus or the jewel in the heart of the lotus of the Eastern traditions, the rose came to symbolize not only the radiant love of the Divine Ground but the awakened soul that has been re-united with it.

In the Christian tradition, the rose was associated with the Virgin Mary and, in the gnostic and alchemical tradition, with Sophia, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit. As an initiatory path, the Sacred Way of the Rose symbolizes the hidden feminine Wisdom Tradition and the Way of the Heart. The rose represents love, creation, fertility, wisdom, beauty, and also mystery. Its exquisite beauty, its fragrance, the soft velvety feel and symmetrical disposition of its many petals, and its golden centre made it a symbol of perfection, not only earthly perfection, but heavenly perfection. Drawing on ancient Mystery Traditions originating in Egypt and Persia, the rose was a central symbol in both European and Islamic alchemy: a symbol of the opening of the heart to the revelation and experience of Divine Love. It was immortalized as the white rose at the end of the Divine Comedy in Dante’s great vision of Paradise. The sublimely beautiful rose windows of Chartres could be seen as a vision of Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit, holding at their heart Christ and the Virgin Mary. 

Labyrinth at Chartres

There is a six-petalled rose at the centre of the labyrinth of Chartres. Whoever has walked or will walk the path of the labyrinth is treading the Sacred Way of the Rose from circumference to centre and the return journey from centre to circumference, taking with him or her, the experience of the central circle which is the direct communion with the energy and frequency of Divine Love.

Red Rose

The rose is one of the oldest symbols of Divine Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, radiating love to our world from the invisible ground of the cosmos. Its Christian origins and its association with an enclosed garden or sacred temenos go back to the words of the bridegroom in the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my bride: a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.’ (4:12). But there is also the Persian image of roses within an enclosed garden representing paradise; the very word ‘paradise’ comes from the Persian word ‘paradis’. Imagine what the gardens of the magnificent city of Persepolis, filled with roses, might have looked like before it was burned to the ground by Alexander the Great.

Orbital Pattern of Earth and Venus around sun

The origins of the sacredness of the rose can be traced to the beautiful eight-year orbital pattern made by the planet Venus. Eight was the number associated with Venus in Sumer, addressed as ‘The Radiant Star and ‘The Great Light’ in a Sumerian poem. Astronomers and mathematicians noticed the geometric connection between the orbit of Venus and the distribution of the petals of the rose with its hidden golden centre. The outer rim of the picture on the left is the earth’s orbit round the sun and the inner circle with its 5-petalled rose pattern is the orbit of Venus. From ancient times Venus as the bright morning and evening star was associated with the Great Goddesses of the ancient world, particularly with Isis and Inanna, but also the Greek Goddess Aphrodite and the Roman Venus. 

Griffons in throne room at Knossos

Now I would like to take you back in historical time to earlier ages. Homer wrote of the rosy-fingered dawn but the image of the rose goes much further back to the temple and palace gardens of Egypt, Crete, Sumer and Babylon. I will show you a few images from that ancient past.

The rose was always associated with the Goddess in the ancient world. This is why the two griffons guarding the throne room in the palace of Knossos have stylized roses placed at their heart. Look carefully at these griffons. For the people of Crete, they symbolized the triple domains of the Great Goddess: sky, earth and underworld, represented here by the bird, the lion, and the serpent as the curved tail of the lion.  Friezes of roses also adorned the frescoed walls of the Mycenean palaces built near the coasts of Greece, but this throne room was a sacred place where a priestess presided over the shamanic rites of the Goddess.

Throne Room, Knossos

Phaestos Disk

Phaestos Disk

An eight-petalled rose is at the centre of this four-thousand-year-old disk from the palace of Phaestos, in Crete, whose meaning has only recently been tentatively deciphered. The disk is covered with a total of 241 “picture” segments created from 45 individual symbols and is thought to be a prayer or invocation to the Cretan Mother Goddess. It may also represent the labyrinthine path connecting this world with the other, invisible one, the path souls took as they journeyed from one to the other, into and out of the womb of the Goddess.

Apuleius & Pink Rose

It is beyond doubt that wherever the rose grew in the ancient world, it was associated with the Great Mother or Great Goddess. Roses may not have looked like our roses today but maybe ancient temple gardeners knew how to grow different and more beautiful varieties to adorn her statues, decorate her shrines, and strew on the processional way of the great ceremonies in her honour, such as the annual celebration of the sacred marriage. 

We know that roses were associated with the Goddess Isis through a dream that a man called Lucius Apuleius, an initiate of the Mysteries of Isis, recounts in The Golden Ass. It is a fascinating story of metamorphosis, brought about by the process of awakening or, in Jungian terminology, individuation. Apuleius tells the story of his transformation into the form of an ass – a punishment for profaning the Mysteries of the Goddess Isis – and how, after much suffering and remorse, the Goddess came to him in a dream and told him to attend a public ceremony held in her honour. She would send the high priest a dream instructing him to carry a garland of roses in her procession. She told Apuleius, in his ass form, that he was to push through to the front of the crowd, come up to the high priest as if he wished to kiss his hand, then pluck the roses from his garland into his mouth and eat them. He would then be transformed from an ass back into a man. Apuleius found himself watching the procession until he saw the high-priest approaching, holding up the promised garland. Carefully, he wriggled his way through to the front of the crowd until he came level with the high-priest. “My heart trembled,” said Apuleius, “and my heart pounded as I ate those roses with loving relish; and no sooner had I swallowed them then I found that the promise had been no deceit.” To his amazement and joy as well as the astonishment of the high-priest and the bemused crowd, he found himself miraculously changed back into his human form, covering his private parts in embarrassment until a cloak was thrown over him. Later he had an extraordinary vision of the Goddess where she spoke to him, revealing who she was. It is well worth reading this story in the original text and translation by Robert Graves. The apparition of the goddess in his vision of her is so vividly described that we could be seeing it ourselves.

White Rose

In Greece, we know that the rose was sacred to Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, and that her priestesses wore wreathes of white roses in their hair and that these same white roses were strewn over the approach to her temples. When, in Roman times, Aphrodite was transformed into Venus, roses were still sacred to her and would have embellished her shrines and been worn by her priestesses. We also know that in Rome, the statues of the Goddess Cybele were adorned with roses and that once a year her effigy as the Great Mother was covered with roses and carried through the streets on a chariot. As Jules and I wrote in The Myth of the Goddess, it may be at this time when her Mysteries were celebrated in Rome, that the rose began to evolve as an image of resurrection, and the rose garden as the sacred world or hidden dimension of the Goddess.

Shiraz

Turning to the East, to Persia, whose beautiful gardens were the earthly symbol of Paradise, the ancient and marvellous city of Shiraz was called ‘The City of the Rose’. The most famous poem of Sa’adi, the great Persian poet who lived in Shiraz, was called “The Garden of Roses”. Shiraz was saved from the terrible massacres that befell other Persian cities as the Mongols invaded Persia because its governor opened the gates of the city and invited the Mongol general to a banquet in his honour. No doubt roses adorned the tables laid out for the welcoming feast.

Rose and Sufism

In Islam the rose symbolizes the Prophet Muhammad and is known as the flower of heaven. The famous Sufi poet Rumi (1207–73) wrote many beautiful verses about the rose such as these:

“That which God said to the rose
and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty,
God said to my heart
and made it a hundred times
more beautiful.”

“I’m created from the ecstasy of love
and when I die my essence
will be released like the scent of
crushed rose petals.”

“Love is the infinite rose garden;
Eternal life the least of its blooms.”

Rose and Nightingale

I found these words of a scientist and physicist called Suresh Emri, who must surely be a Sufi. Because his words give such an exquisite rendering of the significance of the Rose in Sufism, I will quote them at some length:

“Rose symbolism in Rumi’s poetry is breath-taking. Rumi used the ‘rose and nightingale’ symbolism of Persian literature to explain the central theme of Sufism: Divine Love. In Persian literature the rose symbolizes beauty and the nightingale is the lover of beauty. The Sufi loves God as a nightingale loves a rose. The lover wants to be one with the Beloved. The soul yearns for the ultimate union with God.”

“For me [the] rose is the symbol of the soul. The seat of the soul is the heart which is not the organ but the subtle center of our being. [The] Rose symbolizes the life-giving core of our being – the soul. The source of love is the Divine Center. There are many other names for the Divine Center: Cosmic Soul, Cosmic Consciousness, Parama Purusha, Self, One, Source, Atman. Our soul has this amazing capacity to reflect the infinite love emanating from the Divine Center. This reflection causes an irresistible attraction. This is Divine Love. [The] Rose symbolizes the Divine Love indirectly because [the] rose is the symbol of the heart which is the soul.”

“Cosmic Consciousness is at the core of each entity in its entirety. Entities owe their existence to this core – the soul. We can say it and perhaps partially understand it intellectually but the full realization of this secret is the subject of spiritual practice. We can talk about it but the secret remains secret. [The] Rose symbolizes the correct path to attain the secret. The correct path is the path of Divine Love.”

In Islam, the fragrance of a rose represents the sacredness of people’s souls. The Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), wrote this: “Just as the rose consists of many petals held together, so the person who attains to the unfoldment of the soul begins to show many different qualities. These emit fragrance in the form of a spiritual personality. The rose has a beautiful structure, and the personality which shows the unfoldment of the soul also has a fine structure, in the manner of relating to others, in speech, in action. The atmosphere of a spiritual being pervades the air like the perfume of a rose.”

The Alhambra

This brings me to the Rose Garden which has a long history, going back to the temple courtyards of the Goddesses of the ancient world, then becoming central in Persia with the idea of the paradise garden reflected in exquisite floral designs on carpets as well as walled gardens with crystal water flowing through channels from the fountain at their centre. After the Arab conquest of Persia, North Africa and Spain, the rose garden found its way to the courtyard gardens of the Alhambra and other Moorish cities and thence to the monastery gardens of Europe. When I was fifteen, on my first visit to Spain, I was fortunate enough to sit alone for hours in the courtyards of the Alhambra when there were as yet no crowds of tourists.

Virgin Mary in Rose Garden

We return to the West. The twelfth century was the century of the Crusades when thousands of men from all over Europe were leaving for the Holy Land. It was the century of Pilgrimage when tens of thousands of pilgrims set out on long journeys to sacred sites, like Vezelay or Compostela or the many shrines of the Black Madonna, such as Le Puy. It was the century which saw the dissemination of the Grail legends throughout Europe. And it was also the century which saw the rise of rose-symbolism and the association of the rose and the rose garden with the Virgin Mary as the Rosa Mystica and the hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden. But it was also the century which saw the rose associated with the exalted ‘Lady’ of the troubadours who may well have been Mary Magdalene. Because of all these events, Europe was in a turmoil of excitement and creativity. In 1969 a most wonderful book was published called The Rose-Garden Game by Eithne Wilkins. This beautiful painting called ‘The Little Paradise Garden’ by a painter of the same name is on its cover. The book is about the profound symbolism of the Rosary and the Rose. She writes that at this time, it was difficult to distinguish between sacred love and profane love because both are suffused with erotic undertones. “The troubadour and the monk are barely distinguishable from one another, each dedicated to his Lady, composing songs for her, aspiring to be crowned with roses at her hands, or kneeling to offer her roses.” It was at this time that the rose-garden and the rosary began to assume mystic significance — always connected with the heart. Mary was described as the walled rose-garden — ‘a garden enclosed’ as the Song of Songs described the Beloved and the Bride. 

Mary in a Rose-Arbour

Mary in a Rose-Arbour

Mary is the Rose without a thorn, the Peerless Rose, identified with the Rose of Sharon in the Song of Songs that had become the text for contemplation during this period. That is why roses adorn many paintings of the Annunciation and the Assumption. Mary is the rose and she also bears the rose, her son Christ. She sits in a rose-arbour, surrounded by angels. The rose is also a symbol of the Garden of Paradise where the souls of the dead reside, and is therefore associated with the idea of Resurrection. The sepulchre garden where Mary Magdalene met the resurrected Christ and took him to be the gardener, was seen as a reflection of the Creator walking in the garden of Paradise, among the souls of those who have left this world for another, better one. 

The Mysteries of the Rosary (words)

Mary is also the Rosary and the Rosary itself is an enclosed Garden. The Rosary, which means “crown of roses,” involves offering a group of prayers to Mary as a spiritual bouquet, sometimes a series of Ave Marias or Hail Mary’s, sometimes the Pater Noster or Lord’s Prayer as well. There are usually 50 beads but the number can vary. The Rosary helps people to remember, to get in touch with the Virgin Mary, with the beads helping to remember how many prayers one has said. Other cultures, such as the Buddhist, Hindu, Tibetan and Islamic, also have strings of beads and use the beads in the same way, to focus their minds on prayer and their connection to spirit. 

Red Rose

Now we move to a different role for the rose and the rose-garden, for the Rose Garden was also the meeting place of lovers and the rose itself was the gift from  a lover to the lady of his heart. The exquisite texture, form and colour of the red rose as well as its delicious scent made it the supreme image of Love and Beauty. Obviously, in many cultures, it was associated with the beauty of woman. No young man of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance would have dreamed of courting his beloved without presenting her with a rose, the supreme symbol of his love. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Roman de La Rose

Dante & Beatrice

Spiritual love was closely intertwined with erotic love at this time. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish whether the ‘Lady’ addressed by a devotee is the Virgin Mary or a beloved woman, as when Dante (1265-1321), speaks of Beatrice. 

“Lady, you are so great, so powerful,

that who seeks grace without recourse to you

would have his wish fly upward without wings.”

There are many other texts where the exalted Lady becomes, as in Dante’s description of Beatrice, a spiritual guide, who is symbolized by a rose. This Lady is always beautiful and supremely wise – Madonna Intelligenza – imparting a spiritual teaching to her lover. Love is exalted as the desire of the lover’s whole being to be united with this feminine being who is essential to his completion. And that feminine being, who is variously addressed as Queen and as Divine Wisdom, Sophia or Sapientia, is symbolized by the rose and, in religious texts, associated with Mary and the Bride of the Song of Songs. The erotic tone of these texts is striking and all-pervasive.

Man presenting his heart to his Lady

I wish I could convey to you how these Courts of Love, inspired by Eleanor of Aquitaine, changed the relationship between man and woman from one of contempt and control to one of respect and admiration, even adoration. They initiated a code of chivalry, encouraging men to develop empathic skills, to learn to write poetry, to behave with grace and courtesy and respect towards women, to follow a different path from that of the warrior. This new concept of courtly love between man and woman was most highly developed in the most civilized place in the Europe of that time — the courts of the Languedoc, namely, Foix, Toulouse and Carcassonne.  The Grail legends, carried all over Europe by the troubadours, with their hidden message about the Church of the Holy Spirit, had the same effect. Woman was elevated to a position she has never before or since enjoyed in Christian culture. 

Man and Woman Embracing 

This is illustration is from one of these books.

In thirteenth century France, there was one famous illustrated book, an allegory of courtly love, written by two authors, called Le Roman de La Rose. It told the story of a young man who dreamt of a beautiful rose. When he awoke from his dream, his longing to find it sent him on a quest and led him to a rose garden where his beloved rose was held captive. Ultimately, after many encounters with different people, and many trials, he is reunited with his beloved rose. This was a book about the spiritual journey, disguised in elaborate symbolism.

Rose poem by Abelard

The rose inspired this exquisite poem by Abelard (1079-1142), the pre-eminent  philosopher and theologian of the twelfth century, whose forbidden love for Heloise, his brilliant pupil, came to a tragic end when she became pregnant and their love was discovered:

“Take thou this Rose, O Rose,

Since thine own flower it is

And by that Rose, thy lover captive is.

I suffer, yea I die,

But this mine agony I count all bliss

Since death is life again upon thy lips.”

Alchemy & The Rose

In the final stage of Alchemy – the Rubedo – the heart opens like a rose to reveal a fountain of Light which overflows with Love and Compassion towards all living beings. 

“And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”

— T.S. Eliot

Ruby's Garden

a fairytale about mothers & daughters
by Jennifer Stewart

Her garden was more lethal than pretty… 

by Jennifer Stewart

What once was a cornucopia of vibrant blossoms and sensual scents of lavender and rose is now a tangle of twisted thorns and wilted, fallen petals. I sometimes still come down to rest in the nest of the old cherry tree, (the one she use to sing to everyday). Days like today, circling far above the garden, I can see some things more clearly. The intricate patterns of empty branches stretch across the now colorless ground. But, to know the patterns of the human spirit one must come in closer…nearer to the ground, nearer to the feeling of the heart beating, nearer to the sound of a voice singing. I land upon the tombstone that is her body, recovering the dried fruits that have collected on what was once the warmth of her outstretched hand. A hand that once held out seeds to me and delighted in my company as I delighted in hers.

She, now a stone mistress gazing timelessly over her garden, she whose curves and flowing hair like a garden statue, a decoration in the flowerless garden. Many a season ago, her given name was Ruby - given for the rosy tint of her life filled cheeks. Her garden hadn’t always been unwelcoming and neither had she. 

…But, I am getting ahead of myself here…lets go back. Back to the beginning.

Ruby was a beautifully sensitive and expressive young girl and her mother loved her enthusiastic and bubbly nature.  Ruby and her mother were very close. Her father had fallen in a deep hole when Ruby was very young, so young she could hardly remember him. His absence simply made her mother that much more important to her.  Ruby’s mother seemed to be far away at times and her skin didn’t feel as warm as it use to be. It seemed her mother had fallen into a hole of a different kind.  Ruby became set on making her mother happy again. She would perform songs for her while her mother sat in her rolling chair in the garden. Her mother loved it so much that her eyes began to have stars in them again, her smile began to carve lovely lines in her soft face again, her heart began to blossom again  - literally! Blossoms started emerging in the garden as Ruby sang and her mother’s heart overflowed with joy. Each note, a seed, each song a new flower. Her mother’s skin began to glow as her gaze became fixed on Ruby and the world she was creating for them. The garden began to burst with blossoms of every color…buzzing bees and dancing dragonflies…brightly colored birds all delighted in the flowerful feast! Ruby had a special affection for all the creatures in her garden. She loved to sing to us as she collected fruits for their breakfast and we loved to be near her. 

For many years, Ruby and her mother were happily wrapped up in the comfort and beauty of the garden. Each morning Ruby would roll her mother’s chair out into the garden and each night she would place her in bed to rest. Ruby would excitedly announce the morning with her song and we would all chime in with ours, happily collecting the worms as Ruby delightedly sang the garden into blooms. 

Ten years passed quickly.

Ruby’s mother, still ever excited and encouraging of Ruby’s gifts, gushing about how beautiful her voice was, how perfectly smart she was. But, Ruby was changing. She had started to wonder, she started to notice new feelings inside her, she began to have strange and wonderful dreams, new insights. With a sense of excitement, she shared with her mother, all that was changing in her. 

Her mother’s face seemed to turn to ash, ”leave those things, they will only bring us trouble.”  Ruby wanted to make her mother happy, but her curiosity for the life outside the garden had been ignited.  The more her mother forbade it, the more it seemed to grow in her. Something hot took hold inside her belly, like a fiery coal burning inside her…an ember that seemed to burn up her chest, singeing her throat. It became painful to sing, her burning vocal chords charred by the ember in her belly.  The ember now growing and burning down into her legs, into her feet, the earth below her charring with the heat. She closed her eyes, and wished to push all of this fire, all of this heat, all of her dreams and desires down deep into the ground.

To her surprise the earth broke open. She slipped down deep into a cavern below the garden surface under the cherry tree.  What a thrill she felt!  A perfect place for her to dream and to hide this new found life inside her. Perhaps she couldn’t go out and explore the world, but she could imagine it, and she could hide it from her mother.  Each evening, after sunset, she would take all of her daytime desires, her dreams and her ideas and push them into the hole, and then lower herself down into the earthen cave. Contentedly she would ruminate to herself.  The more she filled the underground nook with life, the bigger it got and the more she didn’t want to return to the surface with her mother.  Of course, there were challenges to this hidden life, when she returned to the surface, her throat would be full of the dirt from her den. Day by day, a bit more dirt settled making it increasingly painful to speak and impossible to sing. The scratchy sounds like sand paper turning the flowers to brown. Her voice inspiring thorns to grow in tight spirals around the garden, surrounding Ruby and her mother. 

With just a straw sized opening, Ruby breathed in and out, but could hardly speak, and could not sing at all. Ruby’s mother came to her concerned “ Ruby, Ruby, the flowers, they are wilting! The thorns seem to be getting bigger, the colors seem to be fading, what could be happening? Please Ruby, you have to sing, you have to fix the garden!” Reluctantly, Ruby opened her mouth to sing, but nothing came, just the thin whistle of the wind as it passed along her stony throat…the flowers began to crumple and fall from the vine. “My dearest daughter, What is wrong?” Just then, Ruby felt as though her throat was closing and Ruby’s mother watched as her daughter struggled to breathe. Ruby grabbed for her neck, her mother watching, eyes wide open. The stone, it spread from her throat to her chest, down into her belly and all the way down to her toes, it spread across her face, freezing her lips, her father’s nose and her amber flecked eyes. Her entire body was turned to stone and with it her song became silent. 

Her garden blooms went dormant. 

The thorns and weeds claiming what was left. Her garden cave now vacant, holding the precious seeds of her unlived life. Ruby’s mother fell into a darkness she’d known before, though this time, there seemed no way out. Strewn across the ground, she sobbed at her daughter’s feet. 

Many weeks passed, each day just like the last and it seemed Ruby and her mother would forever be frozen together in the thorn garden. That was until a visitor landed outside the garden gate. There was an unexpected knock, Ruby’s mother peered up through the twisted thorns that surrounded them. 

She saw a dark beard, mysteriously reaching toward the ground, a coat made of the finest feathers, dark like the night sky, with hints of violet and indigo branching through it like blood filled veins.  Feeling a bit tentative and yet curious, she crawled toward the gate, as close as she could. The thorns did not allow her to see clearly. He spoke though she never saw his mouth moving. 

by Jennifer Stewart

Descend Ruby’s

Earthen cave

Under the cherry tree roof

Collect her dreams

Lay them in the sun 

Encircle her graven form 

She couldn’t be certain, but she thought he might have flown away as he disappeared as quickly as he appeared, leaving behind a single feather on the ground where he had stood.  

She hadn’t used her legs in so long! She unsuccessfully tried to crawl across the garden, pulling her body along the ground toward the cherry tree. She took a few deep breaths and grabbed a hold of a nearby tree, pulling herself up to her feet for the first time in ten years. Her legs wobbled and she was unsteady, but the feeling of the warm, damp earth enlivened her. She had forgotten what it felt like to be on her feet, and it seemed to even change the way her heart beat. She lifted her right foot and stomped it back onto the ground, and then the left foot. Stomping her feet, her blood began to pump more strongly through her body…her chest and face flushing with the blood of her pumping heart. Her body began to warm and with a new coordination, she hurried to the cherry tree. Looking down into Ruby’s dark underground den, she felt hesitant. Just then there was a tickle that started at the top of her foot, a single ant crawled up her leg, over her belly, across her chest, atop her shoulder, down her arm and onto her right index finger.  She looked down to see a river of ants, just before they hoisted her up on their backs, and with one big push, threw her down into the bottom of the hole. 

As her eyes adjusted, she took in the sight of the colors, the images, the sound of Ruby’s songs. Her dreams ran down the sides of the cave like trickles of water. She gathered the dreams in a tall glass bottle. The ants worked together to empty the hole, together she and the ants carried everything to the surface and laid her treasures out around her in a circle in the sun. The ants circled Ruby’s stony form, her mother’s now warm hands caressing her sunlit face. We don’t really know how this happened, but a small crack started to form at the base of Ruby’s throat. As if he was on cue, a brightly chirping cardinal bravely pecked at that opening and the tiny crack shattered into a large opening and Ruby’s form became more fluid, her body more supple. Her hands feeling over her body with wonder, her mother embracing her in tears. All of Ruby’s dreams and desires surrounded them, here in the sunlight. Smiling at each other, feeling a new sense of possibility.  A life full of their own dreams, free to be in the light of day.

In the midst of all that was cracking open and coming to life, the ants quietly receded…surely to carry others where they need to go. 

And I returned to my nest at the top of the cherry tree, where the sun shone brightly and cast a violet hue across my feathers. 

by Jennifer Stewart

Documentary: Dismantling Patriarchy Within with Anne Baring

an interview documentary with Faranak Mirjalili and Anne Baring

“The era of patriarchy is over.” A sentence we are hearing more and more in the last decade. But what does this really mean psychologically for the individual psyche and more specifically for women’s psychology? Are we doing enough as women when we stand up against outer patriarchal structures and is there a pathway to follow for those called to inner work? How can we recognise patriarchy within our own psyche and dreams? 

In this interview with Anne Baring, we speak about the cornerstones of Jungian psychology and look at a couple of dreams where the dreamer is confronted with these negative masculine patterns within her own psyche. 

The Fall of an Image

uprooting racial injustice

by Faranak Mirjalili

Artwork above: Laura Krusemark for the Anima Mundi School

“They thought they killed a man, but they awakened a giant.” 
— Sonia Guajajara

These are the powerful words of an indigenous woman who spoke about the death of George Floyd and the spark that has lit the fire of justice in peoples hearts around the world.

What we have been witnessing across the globe is the awakening of a giant, as the Sonia Guajajara shares in her plea. With this awakening comes the loss of the numinosity of an image that has had the world in its grip for a long time: the elevated status of the white male. We have to understand that this, in its deepest roots has to do with the evolution (or regression) of consciousness within humanities deep psyche. 

The archetype of the white male reflects the monotheistic image of an enlightened bearded god in the heavens, up in the clouds of a perfected mind, looking down on the dirt of soil and body — looking down on the darkness of life on Earth. The white male has been a reflection of this ‘priestly’ image that has held a numinosity for thousands of years. It is this image that colonised the indigenous people, it is this image that killed the witches, wise women and men, the pagans and the druids. It killed its own mothers and daughters for a guaranteed seat in the white, impeccable heavens. It is this image that took the horror of rape and pillage across the world, colonizing land, people, and culture across the globe. It is this image that called the native and indigenous man ‘primitive’ and ‘of the devil’, which gave Europeans from the 15th century onward the license to kill and take innocent lives, land and severe ancient spiritual roots across the globe. This virus is a very old one and has contaminated the whole world, paralyzing the very roots of our human existence. 

Inner and outer

I was listening to a podcast-discussion about the Black Lives Matter protests. The discussion was covering some significant matters with the voice of an African-American Jungian Analyst present (something that is unfortunately very rare in the somewhat elitist bubble of the Jungian community). One of the Analysts brought up her concern about the possible risks of the coronavirus spreading due to the protests, and wondering if the lockdown had been part of why the protests have been so huge around the world. I had listened to the discussion with a neutral feeling, up until that point—I sensed a sadness about how the ignorance of our everyday consciousness misinterprets the deep movements of the inner worlds and the signs of the spirit of the depths speaking to us. Imprisoned by rationale and the idea that we are the ones that are conscious and intelligent, we mistrust the deep sea of the feminine—the dark waters of yin and chaos that Jung called ‘the unconscious’  and forget that we might actually be the ones that are unconscious of its vast intelligence. 

Perhaps one needs to have a lived experience in one’s blood and bones of the kind of oppression minorities have suffered to understand that the invisible and dangerous virus is not per se the physical one, but a much deeper one of authoritarian superiority and supremacy, colonizing the breath of life itself. 

The realm of the primal forces of creation, that used to be revered as deity in the Lunar era, has become something that even in the science of it, like Jungian psychology, is often misunderstood and mistrusted. Perhaps, from the perspective of the unconscious, it is not important that we ‘stay safe’ in the comforts of our homes when there is so much injustice and cruelty in the world that is destroying the very fabric of creation. How comfortable have we become in ‘father’s house’ to question such a great moment in history? Yes, many lives are being lost due to the pandemic and yet, the urgency of the voices that are now welling up in this momentum, speak the voices of ancestors and lineages that have suffered for hundreds of years. Racial injustice is the tip of the iceberg that roots down to how the Western mind has learned to suffocate life on Earth. Colonial cruelty and genocide cost many lives, vast parts of land, forests, waters and left species plundered, children killed, women raped and cultures lost. What value do these lives, does life, hold? How do we value not only the lives of the living, but also those of the dead?

Mundus Imaginalis

Even amongst Jungians, who claim to be experts and specialists in understanding the ‘collective unconscious’, the trap of forgetting that the collective unconscious is a deity to relate to, instead of mere contents to examine, is a great one. It is for this reason that I have learned to lean more towards the mystical tradition and heritage to which I belong —Persian mysticism and Sufism—in trying to understand and comprehend my relationship to the spirit of the depths. When we are not rooted in a tradition or in a living pulsating ancestry, it is easy for concepts like the collective unconscious to become dangerously ungrounded.

On the Sufi path, we are taught to be a witness, a spy for the Beloved as Sufis call it. In being a witness, we are not detached because we learn to witness with the eye of the heart, not just the awareness of the mind. There is feeling, even deep suffering in becoming a witness for the Beloved. This has been part of the work of Sufis across different lineages and times.
To be watchful to the signs of God has been one of our main practices. In his books ‘Signs of God’, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee writes about these changing signs of God, and how the symbols are showing us that a change is happening on the deep level in the inner worlds, a sign that our very spiritual images are changing. By witnessing these changing symbols, we can contribute to the transformation of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul. And that is exactly what is happening at this time.

Bristol, UK

Columbus in Boston, USA

Old Father’s ashes

 We have to understand that the image of the enlightened Father in Heaven has lived on as a ghost in our modern desacralized era, and it is the ghost of this same white male god that is being worshipped in science, economy, politics as well as technology today. When the Church Fathers severed the connection between spirit and matter by declaring matter, the Earth and the body of woman, sinful and possessed by evil, they laid the foundations of the way our science and technology would develop. Matter became devoid of life and man could do whatever it wanted to the natural world. At the same time, the image of evil and the rejected shadow of their own primordial nature was projected onto the darker skinned people of the world.

James Hillman speaks in his lectures on Alchemical Psychology about the origin of the word ‘black’ used by the white people for the first time when they discovered black skinned people during early colonization. The color black was perceived as ‘dirty, stained, soiled, evil’ due to the Church’s original sin doctrine which had been dominating the West. This Christian shadow was projected onto the black people of our world. The so-called ‘primitive’ man became the scapegoat of the white elite, and a deep racial injustice was born.

The Persian prophet Mani once said in his writings that the notion of ‘evil’ is not static, but dynamic. Evil in itself changes throughout time and thus what is evil, is our inability to change and move with the consciousness of the cosmos. When we get fixed on one image, idea or era and refuse to listen, preventing the dynamic being of the universe to take us into a next image and era, we are conspiring in the manifestation of evil. Therefore, what once was ‘good’ can now be ‘evil’. And what once was considered ‘sinful’ can now be experienced as ‘holy’. 

There is a tremendous idea in the statement above, the idea that there is evil, and that we all have this dynamism inherently within us. Not because of a dreadful devil sitting on our shoulder, but because of our inability to change, our inability to transform and move with the currents of life. This puts an enormous responsibility on the human being — the burden of becoming conscious. This has always been the real essence of any mystical tradition. 

When Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’ he, perhaps unconsciously, meant that an image had died; the old god image was no longer in tune with the dynamic movement of creation. That image had died and as a result, the Divine felt no longer present amongst man. By (consciously or) unconsciously refusing the death and transformation of this old god within,  its energy moved into our modern, globalised era. We became co-conspirators, fuelling this image with our life force at the cost of the lives of many, humans, animals, and nature; at the cost of the Soul of the World. 

 It is this image that is now finally dying. The old father has fallen from his pedestal; the old king lay beheaded. 

The killing of George Floyd was a tipping point from where the already collapsed structure in the inner worlds shows its decay in the outer. We are witnessing the very fall of patriarchy symbolised by the colonial man. 

Artwork made through a synthesis of dream-images of our women’s collective in February 2020, while working with Isis & Osiris.

Artwork is part of our research center’s work with the objective psyche; the archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious.

The death of the old king symbolised by the man in colonial attire. The tree of life behind him is barren and bleeding soul blood. The pangolin tail hints at the pandemic and being ‘boxed in’. But another creature is in leading this process: the black raven who in Alchemy oversees the stage of Nigredo—a phase of suffering and chaos necessary for transformation. The raven is wearing a red cape that symbolises the planet Pluto and points with its beak to his object of transformation: the white male ruler. 

Just like Osiris, he is an old king who has to die and dissolve into the currents of the river, making way for a new consciousness. Behind him, we see the Nile that leads onto the light of a new era. 

Force of Nature: Few Thoughts on Kali

by Gauri Raje

Kali stems from the root word ‘Kaal’ (Time). Kali, the mistress of time; time herself. Over time, the popular association of the colour black is identified with the work Kali - she who is black. But I prefer the root word association.

Kali is nature. Kali is bloodlust and fury on the battlegrounds. Kali is crone. Kali is the force of destruction and unabounding love. She is contrast and contradiction. 

Like many other Gods and Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon, the divine goddess we know of as Kali has many names and many iconic representations across the Indian sub-continent. In the East of the country, she is known in the form that is visually most-known - dark with large beautiful eyes and a lolling red tongue. In the west of the country, one of the forms the Kali/ Devi Shakti is known by is Chamundi - the killer of the demons Chanda and Munda, with a shriveled hag-like form and dried garland of skulls adorning her neck. While in the east, the Durga puja festival time in October celebrates the divine feminine; in the west of the country, this honouring of the divine feminine is through the festival of Navratri - the festival of the nine nights. Both these festivals are where women are forefronted - not only in terms of the goddesses they honour; but the festivals are a time when women lead in the puja and the singing, dancing, and celebrations. At Navratri (festival of nine nights), a different manifestation of the divine goddess is celebrated each night with dances and songs. Before Diwali, and the darkest nights of the year, time is carved out to remember the feminine energy that births, sustains, and in its own mysterious ways, destroys what must be dissolved.

Kali bringing heads of the demons Chanda and Munda to Durga.

The goddess emerges in the Hindu pantheon around 1000BCE, and as with other goddesses of Hindu antiquity carries a multiplicity of contrasting characteristics. She is the embodiment of Shakti, divine feminine power. She is also an embodiment of nature in its rawest form. To this extent, she carries the nurturing and the most destructive power of nature. She is not an angry goddess, yet is the embodiment of fury. It is difficult to characterise her as a wild goddess, but she rejects all constraints of culture. Kali is the wilderness of nature. She calls, very simply, to be and all the freedom that rests within that phrase. To this extent, her very presence harks to apocalypse and to the nurturance of nature. 

Kali is the one goddess in the pantheon of Hindu mythology where there no stories of a childhood and a growing up of the goddess. The goddess emerges from another goddess (Parvati or Durga - there are different versions) either as an adult or as a crone. She has no consort she lives with. She lives with her devotees in forests. When she chooses, there are stories of dances or encounters with Shiva, also known as Kaal (Time). Kali is a force unto herself.

‘Her with no-image’

With these huge energies of the mistress of time and destruction, Kali in contrast is also the bearer of love and compassion. Praises to Kali are filled with honouring her as the mother, the bearer of compassion and motherly love. ‘She is the foremost among the Dasa Mahavidyas, the Ten Great Wisdoms, in her form of Dakshinakali or the Divine Mother, especially in the eastern part of India - Bengal. In her archetypal form, she is not necessarily presented in an iconographic form, but as a stone block or a mound. The worship of Kali, as Divine Mother, is characterised by sel-surrender. By Ramakrishna, one of her greatest devotees, she is described not as presence in image, but Her with no image; she is all consciousness. She guides her devotees according to each one’s needs, nature and circumstances. In this she is impartial. In her form as Smashankali, the Lady of the Dead, death is a moment of transformation rather than annihilation. The flames of the funeral pyre are the flames of compassion.

Although the form and stories around Kali in her terrifying form dominate her narrative, Kali is also the goddess who can match Shiva step for step in the dance of the cosmos. Her joy of dance is not led by music from the outside; the music is within her. She dances to her own rhythm. It is the dance of Kali that draws my attention in our times full of fire, anger, and pandemics. 

Jo'Artis Ratti and dancer Samantha Donohue at the Santa Monica protest. (Jeremy Hartman)

In these days of raging forest fires, the coronavirus pandemic and calling out of racism articulated through the Black Lives Matter movements and marches across the world, Kali seems to be playing out across the world in street corners, cities and countries. Not just as a goddess of death, but as the energy that brings together the force of destruction with the emerging beauty of creation. The one moment that struck me was of a protester; the dancer Jo’Artis Ratti dancing agitatedly right upto the line of riot gear laden police facing him. This wasn’t a dance of joy or celebration.  A journalist who witnessed the dance called ‘krumping’ described it as, ’What’s initially striking in the videos is the brawny look of Ratti’s body language. He lifts his arms and thrusts a fist, but it hits nothing, breaks nothing and isn’t meant to. The pantomime of head-butting and jabbing, with moments when his whole body crumples as if in grief, lasts mere seconds. Every gesture is sharp but evanescenscent, vanishing quickly as it takes shape. This is a man palpably bearing his pain, anger and rebelliousness, and holding his peace.’

This is Kali - bearing witness, taking apart, and creating compassion simultaneously. That which we fear, and look on in awe.

The Song of Silence

Poem by Faranak Mirjalili
Painting by Ann Korijn

The world fell still
The noise of conquer
the hunter and the gatherer 
revealed an Achillies heel

Silence
Still 
unmoving waves of rest
rushing through my veins

A world of blinding speed 
finally could see
stillness dancing
the song of silence.