Meeting Erishkegal

The archetypal journey of the Goddess as depicted in the ancient myth, The Descent of Inanna is one powerful way to express and embody the natural feminine process of psychological maturation. It provides a guide to the birth-death-rebirth cycle in order to facilitate awareness, personal growth and healing.

Erishkegal, the Queen of the Underworld, holds many characteristics attributed to the negative feminine - selfish, cruel, murderous, hateful, abusive, terrifying, rageful, sexually unethical and insatiable, greedy and murderous.

Uniting various aspects of the Goddess into wholeness, each one is collected in a totality called The Great Mother. The Great Mother Goddess unites all the characteristics that live in the collective unconscious and are related to our ideas of the feminine. All parts of the Goddess are required to fulfill the full expression of the Great Goddess. Similarly, on a path to wholeness, it is important to claim all aspects of the self, and accept that we are all creatures of paradox.

To know and accept the Dark Goddess in my own being gives me a freedom to move out of the personal realm of wounding and into the Archetypal, where I can see that we are all connected, and we all have shadow and light, and claiming that shadow is a lifelong process of peeling the layers of the unconscious through work with the archetypes expressed through mythology, both modern and ancient.