Switching Roles
As always, my session with my spiritual director was a stimulating experience. I'm deep in territory that's beyond even my past borders of "unusual" but he continues to stay with me, ask good, helpful questions, and support and affirm me.
Ever since my existential crisis, my path has been a hard one to talk about casually, and the longer I'm on it, the less simple it is to talk about. Not only am I dealing with deities and concepts which frequently require me to educate my conversation partner, there's a lot of Unverified Personal Gnosis experiences that I always expect to strain the boundaries of credulity for others. Of course, one of the reasons my life is rich right now is that because I dare to talk about them I keep running into people who have similar -- or at least resonant -- experiences.
It took a while to explain to my director how working with Ereshkigal complements the work I did with Inanna for many years, and it took even longer to explain how I expect the work to bear fruit in priestess and spiritual director work. One of those ways is as an "ordeal master" (a phrase I picked up from Raven Kaldera's Dark Moon Rising). There are voluntary descents and ordeals as well as involuntary ones. The Sun Dance and the Bell Dance are both examples of physically extreme spiritual rituals. Such rituals don't just need participants, they need priests/masters/presiders to prepare, guide, stand watch, and then help the participants recover and integrate afterward. If Inanna is a patron of those who go to the edge for knowledge, for depth, for understanding, for self discovery, Ereshkigal is a patron of those who make such journeys possible, who hold the space and wield the knife and help make sense of things after.
Presiding over such rituals demands a lot of education and preparation that I don't have yet -- but it's a path that is open to me, should I desire to take it.
Driving home I had a new realization: my personal mythology is full of ordeals that my alter ego must experience in order to grow. In addition to being my lover, my daemon was almost always my ordeal master, the one who challenged and supported the crises and voluntary descents that were catalysts to growth.
It was an unexpected and satisfying moment to understand that I am beginning to take that role for myself.
Ever since my existential crisis, my path has been a hard one to talk about casually, and the longer I'm on it, the less simple it is to talk about. Not only am I dealing with deities and concepts which frequently require me to educate my conversation partner, there's a lot of Unverified Personal Gnosis experiences that I always expect to strain the boundaries of credulity for others. Of course, one of the reasons my life is rich right now is that because I dare to talk about them I keep running into people who have similar -- or at least resonant -- experiences.
It took a while to explain to my director how working with Ereshkigal complements the work I did with Inanna for many years, and it took even longer to explain how I expect the work to bear fruit in priestess and spiritual director work. One of those ways is as an "ordeal master" (a phrase I picked up from Raven Kaldera's Dark Moon Rising). There are voluntary descents and ordeals as well as involuntary ones. The Sun Dance and the Bell Dance are both examples of physically extreme spiritual rituals. Such rituals don't just need participants, they need priests/masters/presiders to prepare, guide, stand watch, and then help the participants recover and integrate afterward. If Inanna is a patron of those who go to the edge for knowledge, for depth, for understanding, for self discovery, Ereshkigal is a patron of those who make such journeys possible, who hold the space and wield the knife and help make sense of things after.
Presiding over such rituals demands a lot of education and preparation that I don't have yet -- but it's a path that is open to me, should I desire to take it.
Driving home I had a new realization: my personal mythology is full of ordeals that my alter ego must experience in order to grow. In addition to being my lover, my daemon was almost always my ordeal master, the one who challenged and supported the crises and voluntary descents that were catalysts to growth.
It was an unexpected and satisfying moment to understand that I am beginning to take that role for myself.