The Call

from Goddess Speak : Art in The Underworld by Claudine Jeanrenaud PhD (for my Baba Yaga)

"I propose that we voluntarily turn the tables around and temporarily sacrifice our Saint-Augustine-consciousness and the Solar Myth in the service of the Dark Goddess of the nonrational. We could rebuild 'the sacred temple' where the Dark Goddess once enjoyed respect and invite her back into consciousness. She contains the unconscious, the visionary, dreaming, emotion, and spiritual development. She let's go, but she is stubborn. She is gentle, but she is fierce. She is the Source represented by the cave, or the ocean. Embodied as She is in the images of Baba Yaga, Mother Kali, and the blue ayahuasca mother of the Amazons. She stands for all instincts, and as Robert Bly puts it, 'everything we know but we're never taught in school.' She is shadow energy, She is Death and Birth, Love and Hate, She terrorizes and She likes playfulness! She is irrational and chaotic. What comes from this source is moved by the forces of the 'underworld' and the part of the psyche that is nonrational, Dionysian, an image-maker. There are many models of voluntary descent or sacrifice. Bly calls them 'healthy descents', others 'initiation ordeals' such as vision quests or analysis."