Uncursing the Dark
Excerpt from Uncursing the Dark - Betty de Shong Meador
“Holy Ereshkigal, sweet is your praise!”
“The myth of Inanna’s descent sketches a pattern of woman’s passage into the underworld, away from cultural adaptations and into an encounter with her essential nature. The descent strips the woman of all her possessions, all her ‘power,’ everything which registered in her psyche as a familiar article belonging to her former life. Her dependable habits, her daily neurosis, her aesthetic presentations, the objects she’s attached to, all are gone. She is stripped down to zero. At this point when she has nothing from before, Ereshkigal appears. She operates as the impersonal, unnameable “it.” The stripping takes place in increments. Once at the bottom of it all, she can be transformed by an elusive “sweet presence” who leads into another order of the world. Ereshkigal, in this story, reveals her two sides, the destructive impersonal ‘it’ and the transforming ‘sweet presence.’ This myth makes explicit that the goddess in her power destroys and also transforms. Ereshkigal, sometimes known as Hekate, holds the ultimate power in this transformation. She must be the goddess of “you don’t get your way.” She must be the goddess of death, of the inevitable turning of the earth on its axis in the psyche. Ereshkigal delivers the goddess back to her bare self.”
Books mentioned:
Uncursing the Dark by Betty de Shong Meador
