Entering the Underworld
The first time I walked through a vagina dentata (vagina with teeth) I had no idea of the significance or the symbolism of what it was I was walking through. The vagina dentata in question was the entrance tunnel to the Indian Sculpture Park just outside the small village of Roundwood in the foothills of the Wicklow mountains. The tunnel was a few meters long with spikes sticking inwards from its sides. It opened into a large open field surrounded by woods which had paths peeping out from between the trees. I strolled around the park admiring the thirty or so sculptures that had been carved in India and then transported to Ireland. It was the park owner, white-haired Victor Langheld who told me with cheeky blue eyes that the entrance I had walked through was a vagina dentata.
Victor explained that the entrances to many temples and other religious spaces around the world are through doorways that symbolise the vagina. He said the sharp teeth indicate it is a dangerous gate to go through because it involves going back to the source. That source is the underworld. It is the womb. It can be dark in the underworld but it is also the origin of creation.
Once when I was in a dungeon underworld, I was told a prophecy about the end of the world. It was 2007. I was visiting Clonegal Castle in the lush countryside of north County Wexford in the south east of Ireland in order to interview the castle owner, ninety year old Lady Olivia Robertson, about paganism. I was making a series of radio programmes at the time for Newstalk which is one of Ireland’s national radio stations.
I drove around to the back of the castle to the crisp gravel parking area. Lady Olivia welcomed me at the back door and invited me inside. She had long scraggly dyed-black hair and she was so cross-eyed it looked like she could almost see east and west at the same time. She was friendly and open and the texture of her voice had a bell-like musicality. She laughed easily and spoke in a posh Anglo-Irish accent. She led me into the heart of the castle and then we went down the echoey stone steps into the castle dungeon.
As we stepped onto the dungeon floor, Lady Olivia said in a lilting voice ‘we are now entering the Temple of Isis’. The space was filled with colourful shrines to different goddesses. Each altar was adorned with things like sculptures, statues, paintings, mirrors with elaborate decorative frames, velvety red cushions, pale wax candles. The tables were draped with vivid purple silks, dark fabrics decorated with moons and stars, or surrounded by wall hangings featuring pharaoh-like figures from Egyptian art.
Lady Olivia pointed to a large circular opening in the ground at one side of the room. She explained that this was an ancient holy well. She invited me to look into it. I nervously peered over the side, half expecting to be met by some mystical vision playing out in front of me on the water’s surface, but all I saw was black. The water was so still that there were no ripples to catch any light. Lady Olivia picked up a little silvery bowl that was filled with water from the well and said ‘we call this the Holy Grail, would you like some?’ I answered ‘yes please’ and she sprinkled me generously.
We walked around the room and chatted easily. Lady Olivia told me about her sex life which she said was non-existent. She explained that she had never been interested in sex and had never had a sexual encounter in her whole life. At one of the shrines she said that a man from a Native American tribe had told her many years ago that the world was going to end in 2012. Lady Olivia wasn’t concerned by the prophecy. She said that she lived most of her life in the spirit world so it didn’t bother her. And we moved on.
I finished the radio programmes and thought nothing more of Lady Olivia’s prophecy until 2012 came around and my world did end. I was in Jerusalem on a Holocaust study trip when my husband said over the phone one evening ‘the spark is gone’. My life went into freefall over the coming months as our marriage fell apart and we negotiated splitting our possessions, selling our home, relocating to separate places, and coming to an agreement about custody of our little boy.
Dealing with the breakdown of my world led me into a different kind of underworld. It can be a dark place to be in when the story of who we think we are is ripped apart and doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s only natural that, as we attempt to make sense of what brought us to that point, we try to trace back our footsteps.
In the years running up to the breakdown of our marriage I had micromanaged everything in our little family. I liked control. I liked planning things. We had just bought our own house after years of scrimping and scringing every penny. I used to envy women who went to cafés to sip cappuccinos. I organised our budget and allocated a weekly amount on which we had to survive in order for us to save for our own home. We didn’t go on holidays, we didn’t go out for meals, we turned down wedding invitations. But still the banks wouldn’t even look at us. Eventually when we were just about to give up, we went to a mortgage broker who helped us, and we managed to buy a fairly dilapidated (but lovely and bright) house in the Dublin suburb of Ballinteer.
There were broken wee-stained cork tiles from the 1970s on the bathroom floor. We couldn’t afford to replace them. And we were stuck with the old bockety presses with broken hinges in the kitchen too. But it was our home. We moved in just before our boy turned one. We cleared the house and ripped out the moth infested carpet in the sitting-room. We stripped the mottled wallpaper in the dining room and painted the room white. We slowly got the house into shape. But within a year of moving in, our marriage was over.
The Jungian analyst and writer Marion Woodman writes about the Death Mother archetype which she says is a part of the psyche of a person who is afraid of abandonment. She explains that if this archetype is present in a person, it wields a corruptive, damaging power. The Death Mother is afraid of love and also afraid of not being loved and so, when she is present, she sabotages relationships and is self-destructive. The Death Mother becomes possessive and clingy and controlling.
In hindsight I can recognise the Death Mother archetype alive inside of me and as contributing to the end of my marriage. Abandonment was my worst fear and now it had come into being — I had been abandoned. I was thrown into the underworld.
To be clear — I’m not accepting all the responsibility for the breakdown of my marriage. Anyone who knows anything about co-dependency will know that it takes two people to sustain an unhealthy co-dependent relationship. But I did have to recognise my own role in that dance of destruction. My husband had his own journey of discovery to make too.
I cried almost every day during the early years after separation. Sometimes I got through the days as though in a trance, bewildered by this different world that I now found myself in with a new home in a different city, trying to sort out bills, childcare, juggling my job with parenting and all the basic daily chores of life. I started writing poetry which became a lifeline, and on weekends when my son was with his dad I’d often get into the car and just drive, with a suitcase in the boot and no destination in mind.
One weekend early the following summer I ended up in a small town called Ennistymon near the west coast of Ireland. When I arrived, I managed to get a last-minute room in a beautiful old hotel perched on a little hill in the centre of the town. After I booked in, I found out that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas had stayed in the building many times as his wife’s family had owned the house before it became the Falls Hotel. It felt serendipitous to have landed here. And there was a small poetry festival on in the town that weekend so I busied myself making plans to attend some of the readings.
The following evening I walked to a busy nearby pub for food and propped myself up at a counter facing the wall, conscious that I was the only person there on my own. I took out my phone for company and scrolled through Facebook. I came across a recently posted video of my son and my husband who, by now, was in a new relationship. They were all in my husband’s garden having a barbeque along with my husband’s wider family and the family of the new woman in his life. I felt like a ghost looking at the living. Tears dribbled silently down my face and I could barely eat as my throat almost closed with grief. I managed to pay my bill and quickly left the pub, barely managing to keep it together until I made it to my cosy hotel room under the eaves where I collapsed into tears.
Woodman says that the female figure of the Baba Yaga in Eastern European fairy tales eats people who are naïve and who think life should only bring happiness. Her prey are the uninitiated. She says that if the Death Mother archetype results in our descent into the underworld we then have a chance at initiation but if we then cling to a view of ourselves as victim and point the finger of blame, we fail the initiation and we can end up languishing in pain. To become initiated involves relinquishing control and surrendering to life as it unfolds.
My path of initiation didn’t happen easily. I’m not sure what was the red thread that helped me find my way out of the underworld. Probably there were many threads. Some were definitely in the form of books. The ones that stand out are ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and also the ‘Tao Te Ching’ translated by Stephen Mitchell. Writing poetry was another thread, and the new group of friends I built up through writing poetry. Meditation helped in the first few years. Old friends and family made a difference too. Emergence however, wasn’t a smooth process and I sputtered many times. There were times I had to leave poetry functions and family gatherings because I was caught up in paroxysms of insecurity, fear, and of feeling like a failure.
The brightest thread, and the one that helped me most, was the process of Jungian analysis. I found a wonderful American analyst who had weekly sessions with me over video link. She used fairytales and stories and she looked at my dreams too in order for me to find the treasures and the shadows I held inside. She helped me learn how to cope better when I was thrown into those tumultuous places of pain and fear. Somehow everything also knocked the naïve out of me. It was a process of toughening up too.
It can be easier to have Utopian dreams of both the past and the future rather than acknowledge the flawed, messy, always changing, often challenging, nature of our worlds and of ourselves. We need both the light and the dark, the above ground and the underworld. And we need to be able to traverse between them. The path out of the underworld involves looking inwards and reclaiming our lives. It also involves letting go of the quest to control which, for me, was one of the hardest things to do. The path is certainly not all fairy wings and bright things. It can involve lots of stumbling and scabby knees. But ultimately it is life giving. The dark seat of creation is the womb of the underworld.
Further information & links:
An interview by Daniela Sieff with Marion Woodman about the Death Mother: https://www.danielasieff.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Sieff-D-2009-Confronting-Death-Mother-an-interivew-with-Marion-Woodman.pdf
Information on the Fellowship of Isis which was founded by Lady Olivia Robertson along with her brother Lawrence and Lawrence’s wife Pamela in 1976: http://www.fellowshipofisis.com/
The Falls Hotel, Co. Claire: https://www.fallshotel.ie/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw16KFBhCgARIsALB0g8JrOlURgfqWwBP33slxfmE8c6hRuvkraV73IH22-S3nQ1HxKvR1-bcaAk9EEALw_wcB
The Indian Sculpture Park: http://victorsway.eu/
Article by Ewan Morrison ‘The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions’: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/word-less/201904/the-road-hell-is-paved-good-intentions
