Samhain was extra special this year thanks to the wonderful Wood Sisters. Twenty of us gathered to celebrate this ancient turning of the year and to make our own new beginning as a women’s mystery school.

We started with Sue’s spirited telling of the mythic story of Inanna’s descent to the underworld realm of her sister Ereshkigal. I was struck by how much the great Queen of Heaven had to let go of as she descended through the seven gates of the underworld and all her powers and adornments were stripped from her. Those of us who have been through illness, bereavement, divorce or suchlike could certainly relate to the image of Inanna standing naked before the underworld judges as they spoke their words of anger and guilt. How difficult it was to hear that it was her sister who struck the mortal blow and hung Inanna’s body on a hook! But at the same time I found it deeply helpful to have the reality of suffering and loss acknowledged. Our culture has so little tolerance for difficulty and death, which doesn’t help us as individual’s to witness our own and others suffering in a way that genuinely enables healing.

Another aspect that struck me this time in listening to the story, was that not only was there this dissolution of the ego and external achievements but there was also the presence of love and compassion. Inanna couldn’t ‘come back to life’ alone and by her own powers. She has a community of support whose healing power takes the form of strange little beings created from dirt from the fingernails of the God Enki. These basic beings listen compassionately to the sufferings of Ereshkigal in labour and in return are given Inanna’s body which they bring back to life. This acknowledgement of the life giving power of compassionate witness seems so true to me and I experience again and again in my own life the transformations that follow from cultivating this for the darkest and most challenging aspects of myself and others.

Miriam’s shrine to Inanna and her dark sister

While there remains much more of the story to be explored, for now I want to stay with this first stage or ‘descent’, the acknowledgement of the depth, power and meaning of ‘underworld’ experience and the importance of our capacity to engage consciously and compassionately with it. In this vein, I’ll fast forward to where the story ends with a hymn to Erishkigal. It feeds my soul to hear the dark sister praised… as it did also to hear the poems, songs and stories that some of the group then shared (before I had to nip off and stir a few soup cauldrons in the kitchen.) After a resplendent feast of a bring and share lunch, we shot forward in time from ancient Sumeria to Welsh myth with a telling of the story of Ceridwen and her cauldron. I’m working on some further thoughts on this in another journal entry. The day concluded with quiet reflective time, which for some of us took the form of a silent walk to the ancient yew in the old graveyard on the Dartington estate. Walking silently through the rain with my sisters, surrounded by the rich autumn colours shining out in a dull day, was quietly inspirational for me and perfectly summed up by Ronnie saying afterwards….. “how beautiful dying can be…”