Vigil, Part 2: Inanna
When I came back after my break, Inanna was there.
To my surprise, she appeared as an adolescent girl with long black hair, a big smile, and a white dress. She was high-spirited, taking my hand and urging me to go with her.
Her appearance completely boggled me. Inanna has always been a highly sexual goddess, and to see her as a girl who I considered far too young to be actively sexual threw me off balance. I resisted and resisted until she got irritated with me and showed me a glimpse of the vastness of her full self behind the adolescent form.
Only then could I perceive the resonance her chosen form had to something deep within myself: my memories of being twelve and thirteen years old, when my own passions were starting to break free. I was sexually aware, starting to have vivid fantasies, although I was still years from even my first kiss. I was passionate about everything: my faith, my creativity, my fantasies, my activities. . . I felt deeply, intensely. . .
. . . In ways I have not felt for the past several years.
I longed for the ability to feel so fiercely again, and as I did I realized that the lower two-thirds of my torso was empty. My heart was still there, but everything below it was gone.
Inanna waited patiently as I went within to get a closer look. What I saw was that in the intensity of my grief over LM's death I essentially ripped out my own guts. Part of it was an act of mourning. Part of it was my yearning to be in the otherworld with him rather than alone in this one. I could see and feel myself putting a sharp knife just under my own breastbone and slitting myself open down to my sex, then pulling out everything in that space -- including my first and second chakras.
How can there be passion, fire, in my life when my guts and my primal fire has been pulled out and thrown away?
Inanna continued to wait as I called out to my missing guts, asking them to come back, telling them that I needed them and would take care of them. I had a sense of putting them inside, closing the skin over them, and then hugging myself, promising my guts and my fire that I would take care of them and nurture them back to full health.
I need my passion back. One of the reasons my progress on my goals has been so slow is that I can't get excited about anything, even my most cherished goals. It has felt like LM took all my energy, all my desire, with him to the otherworld. I have plans to do a soul retrieval with a friend, which will probably also help, but I evidently needed to do this part myself.
Inanna also took up the message of "dropping preconceived notions", in relation to my own sexuality, pleasure, and the concept of the hierodule (with which I deeply identify, although in sometimes non-typical ways). While I haven't struggled overtly with this over the past few months (since a different breakthrough), the experience of getting my guts back and yearning for more passion in my life brought this topic up again.
Although usually equated with "sacred prostitute", hierodule, in my own usage, is simply about serving the gods with your body, your passion, your love. It does not demand a particular form of service, and it particularly does not require having sex with multiple partners in a specific ritual context. Inanna said to me, "You yourself showed there's no historical template. [My Master's thesis was on this topic.] How you do it is up to you. There's no 'should.' You've no more sought lovers for the sake of having lovers than you sought a husband because you thought you needed one. What you've wanted is a man who loved and appreciated you who you could love and appreciate in return, each as an individual. That's how you've always done it in the past. That's how it will -- or will not -- happen in the future."
Even if I don't have a romantic or sexual relationship with another person, I want passion, pleasure, and sensuality in my life. All of these can be experienced in a variety of ways -- but when I contemplate them, I still feel an aching emptiness inside, or as if my passions were a limb that has atrophied after long disuse. I'm not so much afraid of hurting again if I love, I'm afraid that any feelings of what should or could be pleasure will actually end up hurting. That's what the last two years have been like. Even when I wasn't actively grieving about LM's loss, what should have been fun experiences were often intensely painful because I was too acutely aware of him not being there to share them with me.
The other revelation during my time with Inanna was that I needed to affirm on a deep level that I do believe in myself as a magic-worker. Some of this relates to the resistance I wrote about in the previous entry. Some of it is in counter to what Michael and LM called my "rationality filter," which speaks in the voice of my father. It strenuously rejects "weird stuff" and "silliness" and "delusions" like magic. I know magic is real. My life has been deeply touched by it -- but I've continued to feel like the ability to fully, truly connect with it has been out of reach.
The word Witch kept coming up, in contrast with both magician (my teacher's usual word) and priestess (my primary self-identification). Since the vigil I've realized that this isn't about Wicca, nor about learning a different style of magic than what I've been focused on, but claiming the associations I have with that word as a self-definition and affirmation of myself as a magic-worker. (I'd elaborate, but most of it is too subtle and complex to write out here.)
To my surprise, she appeared as an adolescent girl with long black hair, a big smile, and a white dress. She was high-spirited, taking my hand and urging me to go with her.
Her appearance completely boggled me. Inanna has always been a highly sexual goddess, and to see her as a girl who I considered far too young to be actively sexual threw me off balance. I resisted and resisted until she got irritated with me and showed me a glimpse of the vastness of her full self behind the adolescent form.
Only then could I perceive the resonance her chosen form had to something deep within myself: my memories of being twelve and thirteen years old, when my own passions were starting to break free. I was sexually aware, starting to have vivid fantasies, although I was still years from even my first kiss. I was passionate about everything: my faith, my creativity, my fantasies, my activities. . . I felt deeply, intensely. . .
. . . In ways I have not felt for the past several years.
I longed for the ability to feel so fiercely again, and as I did I realized that the lower two-thirds of my torso was empty. My heart was still there, but everything below it was gone.
Inanna waited patiently as I went within to get a closer look. What I saw was that in the intensity of my grief over LM's death I essentially ripped out my own guts. Part of it was an act of mourning. Part of it was my yearning to be in the otherworld with him rather than alone in this one. I could see and feel myself putting a sharp knife just under my own breastbone and slitting myself open down to my sex, then pulling out everything in that space -- including my first and second chakras.
How can there be passion, fire, in my life when my guts and my primal fire has been pulled out and thrown away?
Inanna continued to wait as I called out to my missing guts, asking them to come back, telling them that I needed them and would take care of them. I had a sense of putting them inside, closing the skin over them, and then hugging myself, promising my guts and my fire that I would take care of them and nurture them back to full health.
I need my passion back. One of the reasons my progress on my goals has been so slow is that I can't get excited about anything, even my most cherished goals. It has felt like LM took all my energy, all my desire, with him to the otherworld. I have plans to do a soul retrieval with a friend, which will probably also help, but I evidently needed to do this part myself.
Inanna also took up the message of "dropping preconceived notions", in relation to my own sexuality, pleasure, and the concept of the hierodule (with which I deeply identify, although in sometimes non-typical ways). While I haven't struggled overtly with this over the past few months (since a different breakthrough), the experience of getting my guts back and yearning for more passion in my life brought this topic up again.
Although usually equated with "sacred prostitute", hierodule, in my own usage, is simply about serving the gods with your body, your passion, your love. It does not demand a particular form of service, and it particularly does not require having sex with multiple partners in a specific ritual context. Inanna said to me, "You yourself showed there's no historical template. [My Master's thesis was on this topic.] How you do it is up to you. There's no 'should.' You've no more sought lovers for the sake of having lovers than you sought a husband because you thought you needed one. What you've wanted is a man who loved and appreciated you who you could love and appreciate in return, each as an individual. That's how you've always done it in the past. That's how it will -- or will not -- happen in the future."
Even if I don't have a romantic or sexual relationship with another person, I want passion, pleasure, and sensuality in my life. All of these can be experienced in a variety of ways -- but when I contemplate them, I still feel an aching emptiness inside, or as if my passions were a limb that has atrophied after long disuse. I'm not so much afraid of hurting again if I love, I'm afraid that any feelings of what should or could be pleasure will actually end up hurting. That's what the last two years have been like. Even when I wasn't actively grieving about LM's loss, what should have been fun experiences were often intensely painful because I was too acutely aware of him not being there to share them with me.
The other revelation during my time with Inanna was that I needed to affirm on a deep level that I do believe in myself as a magic-worker. Some of this relates to the resistance I wrote about in the previous entry. Some of it is in counter to what Michael and LM called my "rationality filter," which speaks in the voice of my father. It strenuously rejects "weird stuff" and "silliness" and "delusions" like magic. I know magic is real. My life has been deeply touched by it -- but I've continued to feel like the ability to fully, truly connect with it has been out of reach.
The word Witch kept coming up, in contrast with both magician (my teacher's usual word) and priestess (my primary self-identification). Since the vigil I've realized that this isn't about Wicca, nor about learning a different style of magic than what I've been focused on, but claiming the associations I have with that word as a self-definition and affirmation of myself as a magic-worker. (I'd elaborate, but most of it is too subtle and complex to write out here.)