GO DEEPER
The Scholarship Behind the Dance of Venus
This container is woven from five threads… like the petals of the Venus rose, one motion told five ways:
The Venus Cycle — Venus is a mirror that rotates East to West, opposite from Earth. Over 8 years, Venus orbits the Sun 13 times, while drawing a 5-petaled rose across the sky. The petals, formed by her emergence from and disappearance into the Sun's light — the metamorphic death/rebirth between morning and evening star — slowly rotate through the zodiac, such that the cycle imbibes the zodiac with the purified Feminine archetype. Five, 8, 13 are Fibonacci numbers: Venus's orbit, in relationship to the Sun, traces sacred orbital geometry in the sky! Check out this cool animator to see the flowering of the Venus rose.
The Descent of Inanna — the Wolkstein and Kramer retelling of the 4,000-year-old Sumerian myth, pressed into clay tablets in cuneiform. Seven gates, seven surrendered vestments, the shaman's death and the reclamation.
The Heroine's Journey — Maureen Murdock's map of a woman's descent: separating from the borrowed self, meeting the trials, dying to the false, all the way down to the Goddess. Full essay below ↓
The Way of Initiation — Sylvia Brinton Perera's Descent to the Goddess: meeting Ereshkigal through the “terrible empathy” that frees us. Full essay below ↓
The Goddesses and Zodiacal Archetypes — A pantheon presides, a Venusian goddess at each gate. As Venus traverses the zodiac, she expresses the full spectrum of the Feminine... from Aries to Pisces, from Aphrodite to Kali.
MAUREEN MURDOCK
The Heroine's Journey
The hero climbs; the heroine must first descend.
Maureen Murdock drew The Heroine's Journey from the women she sat with in practice: women who had taken the hero's road to success and status, and arrived empty. The heroine's journey does not open with a call to adventure, but with a wound: the separation from the Feminine, the daughter turning away from the mother, from the body, from the devalued "women's realm," and an identification with the Masculine, the reach for the father's approval and his tools. The heroine gathers her allies, meets her trials, earns the treasure.
And the treasure turns to ash.
What follows is spiritual death, a dissolution of the false ego: the borrowed Self has achieved everything it was taught to desire; none of it is satisfying. Ego death is a portal into the descent. To go on, she must go through. To go through, she must go down — beneath the achievements and the persona — into the darkness of the exiled Feminine to meet the Goddess she was taught to fear, resent, repress. There, she unbecomes. And in that unbecoming, she begins to long for the Feminine she once abandoned, to heal the split between mother and daughter, to gather up what was cast off as weakness and wield it as power.
This is the arc these nine months of the Dance of Venus walks. The rising Feminine, the healing of the inner Masculine, and the sacred marriage that unites them await on the far side of the Sun, in the Work That Follows. Venus writes this descent and rise in the heavens: Her crowned height is the borrowed Self at its zenith. Her long fall is the descent. Her disappearance behind the Sun is the death and the meeting with the Goddess. And her rising as Evening Star is the return.
The heroine does not go up and out. She goes down and in.
SYLVIA BRINTON PERERA
The Way of Initiation
Her wholeness cannot be climbed toward. It can only be descended to.
Where Murdock maps the arc, the Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera names the medicine. In Descent to the Goddess, Perera reads Inanna's fall as an initiation for the modern woman, the "daughter of the patriarchy," capable and admired in the father's world, while cut off from her own instinctual ground.
"From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below." The Descent of Inanna
At each gate, the Goddess surrenders her divine powers and connection to the heavens. As the gatekeeper strips away another vestment, Inanna protests. The gatekeeper answers her with the refrain at the heart of Perera's mythological reading:
"Quiet, Inanna. The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned." The Gatekeeper's Refrain
To be initiated is to be brought low: the underworld bows her, strips her, forces her to yield what the ego will not willingly release, and forbids her to demand that what is happening make sense. "Naked and bowed low," Ereshkigal turns Inanna to a corpse and hangs her upon a peg.
The former, conditioned Self must die, rot, and compost before something new can emerge.
At the bottom of the Great Below waits Ereshkigal … not evil, but the repressed life-force itself: the primal, Dark Feminine, rage and raw generative power, everything the upper world exiled as "too much." Meeting her, Perera says, grounds a woman; returns her to instinct, to the body, to her own affect, her own desire, anger and grief. What frees her, meeting Ereshkigal, is not strength but empathy, the being-with that witnesses and mirrors Ereshkigal's suffering instead of needing to fix or flee it, and so consecrates and delivers her from the grief, rather than curing it.
No one rises from the Great Below unchanged, and no one rises for free. The woman who returns is one who can move between the worlds, carrying the dark wisdom of the depths back up into the light, answering to no father now, but a sovereign being, an authority unto herself.