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.
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